Chapter 1
The midafternoon light dimmed through the glass, running for the horizon. The thick clouds concealed the sun’s retreat as if it couldn’t wait to get away from this part of the world. The room resisted the early nights with its false glow, outshining nature.
I felt mesmerized by the swaying tree outside the window. Settling in for a cold, long winter, the last leaf was plucked from its branches by the gusts, twisting and turning in its final throes of death before hitting the frozen ground. It hadn’t snowed yet, but winter sniffed at the edges only one day after Thanksgiving, ready to fully consume autumn. Change was coming, colors switching from oranges and browns to the festive lights and decorations of red and green.
Normally I loved this time of year.
Normally.
“Dinah?” A woman’s voice spoke softly behind me, but it felt distant, as if she were calling me from another room. My head was lost in the flashes of dreams, voices, and moments that hadn’t happened but felt as genuine and vibrant as reality. Fear iced down my spine.
For two years, I’d felt more and more like an outsider—with my family, my boyfriend, and especially myself.
“Dinah, don’t you want to sit down?” The woman’s voice was smooth and calming, but it only brushed the wrong way up my neck. “Talk about why you are here?”
Why I was here? I snorted. Because I feel I’m going crazy? Something’s wrong with my brain, and I’m going to become like my sister?
Though she was well now, flourishing in New York with her business and boyfriend, our parents had to put Alice into a facility for her mental health two Christmases ago. The episode in my bedroom where she flipped out, thinking gremlins were attacking her, still haunted me.
“Please have a seat.” Dr. Bell motioned at the sofa across from her. She was probably in her early sixties, pretty, with short white hair, sharp blue eyes, and a pert nose. Her bright lipstick and thick-rimmed black glasses made her seem a little funky, while her ill-fitted beige suit and brown shoes contradicted it, blending into the same-colored furniture. “Don’t think of me as a therapist, but as a friend you can confide in.”
I took in the space, not moving. The room was simple, clean, and comfortable with lots of pillows on the sofa and books on the shelves. It was designed to make the patient feel at home. The office was outside downtown Hartford in a newly restored older building, half of it still empty, waiting for tenants.
I had found Dr. Bell from a flyer hung up at the university. It wasn’t the best way to find a therapist, but the offering of the first session free was too good to pass up on my budget. I had researched her, and she had all the credentials and high praise.
Dr. Bell sighed, opening up her folder. “It says your sister went into an institution two years ago.” She frowned, adjusting her glasses. “It doesn’t have the facility name. Do you know?” Her blue eyes lifted to mine in hopes I could tell her.
My brain searched for the name, but nothing came to me. “I-I don’t remember.” It was instant, the pounding in my head, the feeling of exhaustion, like I was trying to grab fog, push against an unseen force until I was limp and defeated. I rubbed my temple, running my hands through the silky brown locks I had let grow way past my shoulders.
In the last two years, lots of things had changed, but I couldn’t pinpoint exactly when or why. Ever since Alice returned from the ward, something had been off. As if I didn’t exactly fit into the picture anymore. With an analytical brain like mine, I could go mad just trying to find the piece that landed me in the office of a therapist here in Hartford.
All I understood was pre-Alice’s episode, as my mother liked to call it; everything had been perfect. My plan for my future set. Everything in line. My sister had always been impulsive, passionate, artsy, and flighty, but one day things abruptly shifted, and she was seeing make-believe monsters in the dark and hearing Christmas icons talking to her.
Full psychotic breakdown, they called it.
Like the ones you are hearing and seeing? A voice whispered in the back of my head, whipping me back around to the window, my throat bobbing as I stuffed it back. No, this wasn’t the same.
Alice was happy now—disgustingly happy—with hugely successful café/hat shops in the city that kept her busy nonstop, and with the sexiest man I had ever seen in my life for a boyfriend, screwing each other relentlessly like horny rabbits.
Jealous? I felt the voice tug at me, flashing a chiseled face with icy blue eyes and a cruel mouth through my mind.
I folded my arms, shaking the image from my head. He’s not even real. Just some figment of my imagination.
I didn’t even care about pretty faces. Scott wasn’t even in the same hemisphere as Matt Hatter, but he was kind, faithful, and loved me. We met in debate club at school and had been dating since we were fifteen. Now we lived together in a tiny apartment while we attended the university where my father worked.
“I know you didn’t come here to stare out my window.” Dr. Bell’s voice broke into my reverie, my attention sliding back to her. With an exhale, I sat my five-foot-six-inch frame on the sofa, the pillows almost swallowing me up. I inherited my mother’s petite frame, but while she and Alice had curves, my addiction to running kept mine nonexistent.
Dr. Bell let the silence sit in the space, waiting for me to fill it. Twisting my hands in my lap, I took a deep breath. “I feel…” My throat tightened. This went against my nature, talking about my feelings. I wanted to solve and cure everything with logic and strategy and wanted her to tell me why I was having these dreams and visions.
“What do you feel, Dinah?”
Lost. Scared. Unsure.
“Um.” I tugged my hair behind my ear, glancing up at the light, then over to the shelf. “Unsettled.”
“Unsettled?” Dr. Bell’s eyebrows curved up. “Peculiar word choice. Why unsettled?”
“I don’t know. Having strange dreams. Ones I used to have as a child, but they’re different now. I-I just feel off. Like something’s not right. Sometimes I feel I’m being watched, but no one’s there.” I squirmed on the sofa, dying to get up and move. “You know those times when you feel you’ve forgotten something, but you can’t remember exactly what?”
“Yes.”
“It’s how I feel.” I rubbed my sweaty palms on my jeans. “All the time.”
“When did this feeling start?”
“Uhhh…about two years ago.”
“Two years, huh?” Dr. Bell replied, her tone leading.
“Yeah.”
“Around the same time your sister went into a mental facility? It must have been quite traumatic for your family.”
I licked my lip, staring down at my hands. Traumatic? Yeah, you could say that.
I remembered sirens wailing, my sister screaming, flashes of blue and red lights reflecting off the houses, neighbors milling about in the street. I remembered Alice pinned to the ground, shouting and crying nonsense. And I remembered her talking to Mom and Dad, pleading for them to believe her, that she wasn’t crazy, someone was doing this to her. For the life of me, I couldn’t recall parts of that night, while others were crystal clear, making the night disjointed like a badly edited movie.