The Admirer's Secret (22 page)

Chapter 44

S
he’d never liked how she looked in white, yet Haley would be stuck wearing it for the next few months, at least. A white linen gown was the standard attire for the mental institution the courts and her mother had committed her to. It was this or jail time. At least here she was allowed to write. And even pee in private.

“What are you thinking about, Haley?” Dr. Rosin, her psychiatrist, had been nice from day one, always smiling at her as he sat in his metal chair across from hers, his butt squeaking against the firm seat every time he
shifted, which seemed to be a lot. The office where they met was impersonal; metal chairs and a folding table. Not a drop of color in the whole room. Apparently they hadn’t read Nellie Bly’s
Ten Days in a Mad-House
, or else they would have at least considered a picture on the wall, or maybe a cushioned place to rest their buns. She hoped they’d upgrade her to something a little less impersonal eventually.

Over the past week Haley couldn’t help but feel insulted that Dr. Rosin expected Haley to trust him and confide in him simply because he was a PhD. Trust was earned, not handed out freely. Didn’t they teach that at psychiatry school?

But that’s not what Haley was thinking about.

She wanted to know if any of this would help. If the treatments and meds and counseling and lectures would actually fix her warped brain.

They wanted her to recover, whatever that meant. And Haley wanted to recover, but it seemed near impossible. “Recovery” wasn’t a magic word where a pill a day would keep the crazy away. No, it ran a lot deeper than a few loose screws in her head. They wanted to mentally undo everything that had happened in the past few weeks, including her mother’s testimony against her, Marc breaking her heart, and her own crazy beliefs that he’d in fact broken her heart.

Oh yes,
the good doctor had asked her a question. And she aimed to answer it.

“I’m thinking about how to get better. I want to get better,” Haley finally replied.

“Do you really?”

“Of course.” More than anything Haley wanted to make the thoughts go away. She wanted to be normal, not delusional. How could she never have seen it coming?

“Getting better is going to take some work, Haley. Are you willing to work at it?”

“Yes.”

“Then I’m going to need for you to open up to me. Trust me.”

Trust
. That five-letter word again.

“I’ll try.”

“Okay. Can you tell me what you are thinking when you write your letters, Haley?”

“I’m not really thinking anything. I don’t even remember writing the letters most of the time.”

“So you black out during those moments?”

Haley nodded.

“Do you remember anything before or after you write the letters?”

“Sometimes, I guess. I’ll remember being at my desk, then everything goes black—
like I’m doing things in the dark, but I don’t really see what I’m doing. It’s like I become a different person when I’m writing, and my mind just tells me what to write and I write it. My heart just tells me what to feel and I feel it. My brain just tells me what to believe and I believe it. So when I’m writing, the words take on their own life and I follow.”

Dr. Rosin nodded then wrote something down. Haley wondered what he wrote. She suspected it was bad.

“Your mother shared with me that this started a long time ago. Is that true?”

Correction: H
er mother shared with the
court
that it started a long time ago. It was one of the more tragic moments in Haley’s life—hearing her own mother tell the judge about what happened after Jake’s suicide. How young, innocent Haley found Jake’s body and hadn’t taken it so well and started writing herself letters from Jake as if he’d been alive. Her mother let it go, assuming it was a coping mechanism to deal with what Haley saw. No child should witness death like that, especially one so young. Jake’s lifeless form dangling from an attic beam, his dad’s bungee cord wrapped around his thin neck, his eyes vacantly staring into space. Bruises where the rope squeezed the life from him. It must have taken a long time for him to die that way.

Haley shouldn’t have been there. In the attic. She didn’t know Jake had been depressed, but when he went missing, she had a feeling where to find him. Their secret place. And sure enough, he was there. Dead.

No matter how many times she tried to rid the memory, it kept sticking. It wouldn’t leave. And that’s when all this started.

That’s when she pretended Jake
was alive.

Simple as that.

That’s when she started writing herself letters—after Jake’s death, and right before her father’s. It wasn’t difficult to write in a new valediction as it suited her—
Love Jake
,
Love Daddy
, and now
Love Marc
.

But then
her mom found one.

Gabrielle never told anyone about Haley’s letters, including Frank. It was
Gabrielle’s darkest secret—keeping her daughter’s mental demise from her own husband—a secret that had been chasing Haley down since then. A secret that imprisoned Gabrielle, for with Frank’s passing went any chance to open the floodgates of truth. Guilt lingered since. And that secret finally caught up with both Gabrielle and Haley now. 

“Yes, I was eleven years old. It was my way of self-therapy, I guess.”

“But it didn’t fix the problem, did it?”

“No. But it offered temporary relief. For those moments as I read the letters I felt like Jake was back in my life and everything was alright again.”

“So why Marc? You had no previous history with him. Why did you decide to target Marc?”

Target
. That meant Marc was a victim, and she was a… she shivered at the conclusion of that sentence.

It was a question even Haley didn’t know the answer to. Then she remember
ed his warm touch, his soul-searching eyes. Familiar. He felt familiar. He felt… safe.

“I suppose it was because he reminded me of my dad,” she said as she thought it out. His hands, his genuine kindness. Yes, he was a lot like her dad. “And I just really wanted to love someone. Be in love. Be loved back. I don’t know why him, except that something about him intrigued me from the first time I met him.
He was so sweet to me, and flirted with me. It could have been a glance or the way he said something. I wish I could psychoanalyze and cure myself, but I don’t always understand what I’m doing. And it terrifies me.” Haley paused. It was the truth. She scared herself. And yet she was stuck with herself always.

“Why’s that scare you?” the doctor prodded.

“Because I don’t even know what’s real and what’s not. If you woke up and found out that everything you thought to be true wasn’t, how would you feel? Could you ever trust yourself again? I can’t even trust myself, so how can I ever trust another? That inevitably leads to a very lonely life, Dr. Rosin.”

The doctor looked thoughtful a moment, though he said nothing.

“Doctor, I want Marc and Julie to have their happily ever after. But let me ask you this: When will I ever get mine? Especially with a mental illness like this?” 

And just as Haley expected, the doctor had no answer.

While Haley was delusional about the substance of her reality, she knew full well the implications of her mental illness. Her insanity was her sanity. Her obsession with love gave her false hope. She was in love with love. But if that hope was taken from her, she’d have nothing to fall back on when facing the harsh reality of loss, death, and pain. In the world of mental illness, the voices offer comfort, silencing pain’s screams. Would waking from that world she had created lead to a culture shock far worse than false hope?

After a long pause, the doctor finally spoke what they both had been thinking: “It boils down to this. Life is a series of ups and downs. You can’t have the ups without the downs. So first you have to accept that
, Haley.”

It sounded so elementary, but it was true. Yet why did it seem to her that she had plenty of the downs but no ups? Where were her ups? She had to create them, for heaven’s sake!

Haley chewed on her lower lip as the doctor continued, keeping her debate to herself.

“Secondly, Haley, you can choose not to act on your impulses, making a conscious effort to live within reality—both enduring the pains we all must suffer and embracing the joys of happily ever after. Or you can cling to a delusion of only the joys, but still never actually obtain love, never live out the real experience. Ultimately, Haley, you are your own worst enemy. You have the power to choose happiness in whatever circumstance you’re in, or you can choose to be miserable. You can either build yourself up or tear yourself down. Each one of us has the choice to be a villain against our own flesh, doing things that eventually hurt ourselves. Your fantasy is your prison, Haley. Reality is your freedom. Which is it that you want?”

The matrix of life. Reality or fantasy? Which was better?

Was it really so bad to live in denial? Everyone did it in some form or another; hers was just a little more blatant. As long as she was chained to her imagination, reality would cease to exist.  

There were only two choices. And she had to pick one. Why did it seem like there was always a choice to make?

Chapter 45

A
fter Julie had stormed out of the house, Marc was left with nothing but a bottle of Jack Daniels and the television remote. While mindlessly flipping through channel after channel of garbage, something gave him pause. It was an interview with a teenaged girl named Amber, and she was crying. Marc could totally sympathize with those tears.

Taking a swig of good ol’ Jack, Marc watched as the story unfolded before him. The girl had been sitting at a lunch table with several friends at school in some
never-to-be-forgotten city, gabbing over half-eaten peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and bags of BBQ chips when a classmate approached them from behind, with his hands shoved in his Marilyn Manson pullover sweatshirt. A moment later a gunshot went off, and a girl seated next to Amber fell over. Dead. Amber screamed and turned around, finding the barrel of a revolver pressed against her head. The boy holding the gun trembled, eyes avoiding hers as he watched the cafeteria erupt with panicked high schoolers. He pulled back the hammer, aimed, then… nothing. Something must have changed his mind or scared him, for the kid took off running, slipping into the flow of fleeing kids.

At least that’s how Amber remembered it. Some details were a little hazy, she admitted to the camera, but that was the gist of what happened. Then the interview continued:

“So what ended up happening to your friend who was shot?”

Amber’s cheek flushed, a sign of more impending tears. “She died on the spot. Bullet wound to the head.”

The interviewer grew quiet, then softly soothed, “Did they end up catching the boy who did it?”

Amber nodded.

“Do you know why he did it?”

This was where the story got interesting. As Amber recounted the details that followed the day of the shooting, Marc found himself absorbed in the story, compelled by the sheer courage this teenaged girl had that he, in his thirty-plus years of life, still lacked. For the girl who got shot was Amber’s best friend—friend
s since kindergarten. And there was no rhyme or reason to why the boy chose to shoot her. Simply because she was there, she was accessible. But Amber, even amidst her mourning, sought out her best friend’s killer to give him a piece of her mind. Rather, a
peace
of her mind.     

After the murder, the boy had been sent to prison, looking at a life sentence. But despite the iron bars that kept them apart, Amber wrote a letter. She wrote a letter to honor the blood spilled by her best friend. And that letter offered forgiveness.

“So you wrote him to tell him that you forgave him for what he did?” the interviewer asked in apparent shock.

“Yes, I had to let him know that despite what he did, I forgave him for taking my best friend.”

“How could you forgive him after that?” the interviewer probed.

“You see, I look at it this way. I could hold a grudge, but it won’t bring Becca back. All it will do is make me bitter and angry—a person I don’t want to be. And it will hold that kid back from ever finding release from whatever it was that tormented him enough to take another person’s life. The kid obviously needs love, not judgment. I’m not saying he shouldn’t do jail time, for we all have to suffer the consequences of our actions, but the jail time won’t fix what’s broken inside. Why do people hurt others, take innocent lives, do cruel things? Why do people steal and gossip? Because somewhere deep down they aren’t fulfilled. And a lack of fulfillment ultimately points to a lack of love. Love in a bigger sense. It’s being loved for who you really are, not for who everyone wants you to be or for what you have.”

Amber’s voice grew soft as she continued, “What’s the ultimate way of loving someone? When they do something horrible like murdering your best friend and yet you still forgive them. That’s called unconditional love. And that’s what everyone wants and few find. So that’s what I gave him. Unconditional love in the form of forgiveness.”

Marc was glad that the interviewer chose this moment to say nothing, for he needed a minute to let the words sink in. Forgi
veness. The definition was life-changing. Amber’s story and words were life-changing.

Then the interviewer spoke again. “What ended up happening with that boy?”

“He’s doing okay, and we’re actually friends now. Pen pals. Of course he’ll still face his sentence, but he has a hope that no matter what happens in this life, his conscious is clear now. And mine is too. The burden of grief has been removed with that one simple act of forgiveness, of love. And we both can live whatever time we have left under that freedom.”

Swiping at an errant tear, t
here was no disputing it anymore. As Marc clicked off the television and sat the half-empty bottle of liquor down, he knew that he couldn’t compete with Amber’s story… or her logic. Brood over what Haley had done to him and lose everything in the vicious cycle of bitterness, or forgive and live under that freedom.

The choice was simple. And
the decision was a lot easier than he thought.