Delphine twirled without another word and took long strides toward the backstage entrance. Her shoulders started to quake as she went.
“Wait,” Cairn tried to say, but the word disintegrated on her lips.
The door slammed shut behind Delphine, and the damning sound it made could have been a judge’s gavel coming down.
Therapy
The next morning, Cairn drove to the seaside village of Marblehead Neck, following directions to Dr. Themis’s address. A pair of tall white gates across the gravel driveway blocked her passage, and she leaned out the window to address the intercom. The black lens of a camera gazed back at her.
Cairn cleared her throat. “Cairn Delacroix, here for my seven-a.m. appointment with—”
Before she could finish her sentence, the gates abruptly buzzed and parted.
Cairn whistled as she drove onto the compound. She had expected Dr. Themis to work out of an office park, but apparently, the psychiatrist practiced right from her home.
Her colossal French Provincial mansion.
The estate’s countless windows glowed tangerine against the morning sky. Above the white stucco walls and black-shingled dormers, an imposing windmill turned slowly, fueled by the briny wind blowing in off the bay beyond.
“Maybe I should major in psychology,” Cairn mumbled as she parked in the porte cochere.
She had just raised a finger to the doorbell when the manor door swung open. A tanned boy in his twenties greeted her. He had an angular nose and a buzzcut as short as his beard stubble. “I am Dr. Themis’s assistant, Vulcan.” He waved an arm into the house. “Won’t you come in, Ms. Delacroix?”
As she followed Vulcan into the palatial foyer, she noticed the young man sported an elaborate metal brace around one of his knees. The hydraulics hissed faintly with each step.
They passed an ornate indoor fountain, a kinetic sculpture of the scales of justice. The water would pour into one pan until it sank into the rocky basin below. Then the process would repeat on the other side, a hypnotic, elegant seesaw tipping back and forth.
“How do you do it?” she asked Vulcan.
He raised an eyebrow. “Do what?”
“Work someplace this hideous.”
“Ah.” Vulcan smiled. “The doctor won the lottery, a long time ago.”
Cairn caught a whiff of chlorine from an indoor pool beyond one of the closed doors. “How many times?”
Vulcan’s hoarse laughter echoed down the halls.
After navigating the labyrinthine mansion to the north wing, he opened a door uniform to all the others. “Have a seat,” he said. “Dr. Themis will join you momentarily.”
Unlike the spartan, cavernous halls, the doctor’s office was surprisingly cluttered, somewhere between a museum storage room and a hoarder’s paradise. Tomes overflowed the bookshelves. Artifacts from around the world gathered dust—marble busts of Classical figures, clay pots hand-painted with mythical creatures, tattered maps to obscure islands she doubted you’d find in any official atlas.
Cairn settled into the chaise and ran her hands over the leather. How many times had her mother sat in this very spot, spilling her guts to this psychiatrist, this interloper, offering a window into her bleakest thoughts, the fragile mental state that would send her spiraling into self-destruction?
Cairn fully anticipated the psychiatrist would claim doctor-patient confidentiality, but she wasn’t leaving this room until she learned something, even the most tentative of threads for her to grasp onto as she desperately pieced together an answer to the question that kept eluding her:
Why?
The door opened.
Dr. Themis was a woman of perhaps sixty, though the aviator sunglasses concealing her eyes made it difficult to accurately estimate her age. Her sun-kissed skin had an energetic glow, and her graying hair exploded in a messy bun at the back of her head. She traversed the room with a deliberate slowness and settled into the chair opposite Cairn.
In that moment, Cairn was overwhelmed by the tsunami of rage she felt toward this stranger. How many dollars, how many hours, had Ahna Delacroix wasted on this woman, hoping to find a cure for the demons inside her, only to ultimately take that final one-way plunge into the Atlantic? How could the doctor have been so powerless to prevent her mother from resorting to the most severe measure to end her unhappiness?
Cairn waited for the doctor to formally introduce herself. Instead, Dr. Themis crossed her legs and folded her hands in her lap. “So,” she said. “Should we skip all the bullshit and address the elephant in the room?”
Cairn was flabbergasted. “Wow. That’s what you open our session with? Granted, I’ve never been to a shrink before, but from what I’ve seen in the movies, I figured you’d have me draw a picture of my family in crayon, or ask what I see in a series of inkblots, or poll me on what my favorite gelato flavor was, and use all that data to deconstruct my angsty, complicated feelings on mortality and the meaning of life.” She pointed to the diplomas on the wall. “Years of medical practice and your master plan to get me to dish is to refer to my dead mother as ‘the elephant in the room?’ You are either the world’s laziest therapist or the most incompetent.”
Dr. Themis, who had remained stoic throughout the tirade, gently cleared her throat and leaned to the left, indicating something in the back of the room. Cairn looked over her shoulder, following the woman’s gaze.
Among the cluttered assortment of old artifacts, one stood out from the rest: a giant statue of a wooly mammoth, its tusks raised in the air.
Despite everything, Cairn found herself laughing for the first time in recent memory. She held up her hands in defeat. “You win this round.”
Dr. Themis shrugged, the ghost of a smile tugging at her lips. “Shameless icebreaker—forgive me. Now that we’ve warmed up …” She leaned across the desk. “… Tell me why you’re so angry with your mother.”
Just like that, Cairn’s walls went right back up. “Look, I’m not here for therapy. I’m here to find out what was haunting my mom when she decided to step off the back of a boat hugging an anchor. So you can give me that dead stare all you like but …”
Cairn trailed off because the doctor had removed her sunglasses. Two milky gray eyes gazed off into oblivion, fixed on a point not quite centered on Cairn’s face.
“Your rage consumes you,” the blind woman said. “How am I supposed to help you when you can’t even help yourself?”
“I’m doing just fine on my own.”
“Fine?” Dr. Themis echoed. “You deferred your college admission just so you could sulk around your house like an invalid. You’ve sabotaged your relationships and pushed away everyone close to you. Your healing process will never begin if your self-destructive tendencies obliterate you first. This is not what Ahna would have wanted for you.”
Cairn’s grip on the armrests tightened, fingernails digging into the leather. How did this woman know about the deferral? About the more personal conflicts? “You don’t get to tell me what my mother would have wanted.”
The doctor laughed darkly. “First, you demand that I violate her privacy and share with you her deepest secrets. Now you tell me not to talk about her. Make up your damn mind.” The doctor formed a steeple with her fingers. “I’ll cut you a deal: if you can survive one session with me, then I’ll answer any question you ask about Ahna. At least the parts I know.”