Sydney watched me closely, but said nothing. Her silence was the kind that made me want to fill it up with words, so I added, “It was awful. I couldn’t stop shaking. That’s what made me decide to see a therapist. It felt like the final straw.”
“That’s an interesting way to put it,” Sydney said. “You hadn’t thought you needed it before then?”
“No. I thought I was coping well with everything I’ve endured. I guess not.”
Sydney again looked at me, long and considering. Her eyes were dark blue with stubby blonde lashes; she wore no mascara, no makeup of any kind, but her skin was translucent the way some blondes’ are, and it gave her an almost luminous look. “Have you been sleeping well?” she asked.
“Mostly.”
“Only mostly?”
I looked down at my clenched hands. “Sometimes I have bad dreams. And sometimes I have trouble falling asleep, so even if I don’t dream, I don’t wake rested.”
“What kind of dreams?”
I really wished she hadn’t asked that question. “Dreams of my husband dying. He was almost killed during the attack on the Montana node, and in my dreams I see him battered the way he was when I found him, only I can’t reach him in time, and he…” I wiped my eyes again. “That’s probably normal, right?”
“I’ve found that ‘normal’ isn’t a good guideline. It generally just means ‘most common,’ and we don’t always aspire to be common.” Sydney’s eyes narrowed. “That’s not the only thing you dream about.”
She was too damned perceptive. This was something I really didn’t want to talk about. Which probably meant I should. I looked directly at her and said, “I shot a man. To death. I dream about it sometimes.”
Sydney didn’t look shocked, or concerned, or judgmental. She said, “What happened?”
I swallowed, seeing once more Santiago’s stunned, uncomprehending expression as the first bullet hit him. “I was in the Montana node with Malcolm. He couldn’t move—they’d paralyzed him. We were waiting for someone to pick us up. Mr. Santiago, the Mercy leader…I think he came to make sure all the captured Wardens were dead.” I closed my hands more tightly to still their shaking. “They were gassed. I couldn’t save them because the gas nearly killed me and Malcolm, too. I wanted to save them.” I heard the pleading note in my voice and shut my mouth.
Sydney just said, “And this Mr. Santiago—what did he do when he arrived?”
“We talked. Then he threw—threw Malcolm off the platform.” Tears choked me, and I took another tissue. “I attacked him, but it didn’t…he was so much stronger than me. He was going to kill me the way he’d killed Malcolm—I mean, I only thought Malcolm was dead—anyway. So I shot him.”
“And killed him.”
I nodded. “Seventeen times,” I added. My fingers felt numb. “I didn’t count. That’s just how many bullets my gun holds. Actually, it was sixteen times, because I shot at him once before that and only injured him. But that’s a lot, don’t you think? I didn’t need to shoot him so many times. Just once was enough.”
“Do you think you were wrong to shoot him that many times? Or wrong to shoot him at all?”
“It’s not wrong to fight for your life, is it? When the Mercy attacked the store, some of their people died, and I was indirectly responsible. But this—” My voice sounded ragged, and I cleared my throat. It didn’t help. “I killed him. I killed him. I never thought—”
A sob racked my body, and I cried as I hadn’t ever before, not in all the times I’d suffered terror and pain as a result of being Abernathy’s custodian. It hurt, a dull throbbing ache centered on my chest that spread throughout my body with every gasp and every tear. I covered my face and waited for Sydney to put her arms around me, and hoped she wouldn’t.
She didn’t. She sat quietly until I cried myself out into a shuddering mess. Then she said, “I think you never let yourself grieve that loss until now.”
I blew my nose. “What loss?”
“Loss of innocence. For all you’ve been at the center of a lot of turmoil as Abernathy’s custodian, you’ve probably never done anything to counter your image of yourself as a gentle person who would never hurt anyone. And now you’ve taken a life. It doesn’t matter whether you were justified or not, or even whether ‘justified’ is the right word. What matters is that you’re not the same person you used to be, and that other person was ripped away from you in the most horrific way possible. You have a right to grieve for her, just as you would any death.”
Her words struck me to the heart. I had never considered, in all the suppressing I’d done over shooting Santiago, that I’d hurt myself as well as him in pulling that trigger. I’d tried so hard to convince myself that I’d done the right thing, and that meant I wasn’t entitled to feel pain, that I’d hurt myself all over again. “I never thought of it like that.”
“I know.” Sydney shifted her position slightly, making the folds of her dress ripple. “It sounds to me like you’ve been telling yourself that because you survived the things that have happened to you, they haven’t affected you at all. But that’s not true. We’re all marked, every one of us, by our experiences good or bad. Imagine your wedding day. It was happy, wasn’t it?”
I remembered all the near-disasters that had threatened to ruin it, and how I’d sailed through them without a single worry. “It was.”
“You wouldn’t dream of telling yourself you shouldn’t hold that memory dear, or that you should forget about it now that it’s past, would you?”
“Of course not!”
“The same thing is true of our painful experiences. I’m not saying you should cling to your pain, because that’s harmful in a different way. But it’s important to accept that they happened and that they changed you. And to accept, also, that you’re not going to stay the same woman you were at twenty. Let yourself be changed.”
I nodded. “That makes sense. I…I didn’t want to remember killing Mr. Santiago, because I was angry and I thought Malcolm was dead and I wanted Mr. Santiago to suffer like I had. So I felt like…maybe like I’d shot him for revenge or out of anger instead of to save my own life. And that mattered, because I could still think of myself as a good person if I killed him out of desperation. But I killed him because I wanted him to die painfully, and I never knew I was the kind of person who could feel that way.”
“And now you have to learn who you are after that moment,” Sydney said. “It’s something we can work on in the weeks to come.”
“Weeks?” I flushed with embarrassment at how shocked I’d sounded, like the possibility of weeks of therapy was abhorrent. “I mean—I don’t know how long this is supposed to take.”
“It depends on how willing you are to work,” Sydney said. “I’d like to meet with you weekly, if you can manage it. We’ll talk, and I’ll teach you some techniques for managing your thoughts and behaviors that will, over time, help you to heal.” She stood, and I rose quickly after her. “For next time, though,” she added, “I’d like you to make a list of all the bad things that have happened to you since you became Abernathy’s custodian, and bring it with you. I think it will be revelatory.”