BRATISLAVA AND THE SLOVAK COUNTRYSIDE NEVER CEASE TO ENCHANT ME. I GO TO VISIT CACHTICE CASTLE TOMORROW, HOME OF THE INFAMOUS COUNTESS BATHORY.
I WILL SEND YOU A POSTCARD, DARLING.
Betsy closed her eyes. She stifled a sob, biting her fist. How could her mother be so nonchalant, so callous? Enchant her? It was not a decade ago that Betsy’s father had died in a car accident in Slovakia. How could her mother bear to go back?
Enchanting? What the f**k was wrong with her mother?
Betsy drew a breath. Her mother, a historian and professor, had loved Eastern Europe long before she married the handsome Slovak-born Jungian psychiatrist. No doubt the Bratislava she spoke of was the Bratislava of seventeenth-century Habsburg Hungary, the heart of her research. The death of Betsy’s father had not stained that image. Dr. Grace Path’s eyes and ears would not see her husband’s blood streaking the rocky ground. His widow would see only the Court of Matthias II, Holy Roman Emperor.
Grace’s research was what she had left. Who was Betsy to deny her that?
There was a knock on the door and then the sound of retreating steps. Through the window, Betsy could see a well-dressed, shapely woman in her midforties—only a few years older than Betsy herself. Jane Hart, Daisy’s mother. And her coming to the door—even if only to knock—was a significant event. In the weeks Daisy had been coming to Carbondale, Jane had never visited the office, as if afraid of some kind of contamination. She would drop her daughter off, then pick her up again when the session was finished, never leaving her car. She’s afraid of infection, thought Betsy. As if she’d pick up a mental illness by crossing the threshold.
Betsy quietly moved closer to the window to listen in as Jane argued fiercely with her daughter. Discourse between a mother and a patient was a powerful tool in analysis. Besides, this was the first time she had ever heard her patient speak more than monosyllables. Daisy fingered a gold cross around her neck as she shook her head stubbornly.
“I don’t need to see a shrink,” she said. “I’m not crazy. I’m tired of this shit!”
“I’m not saying you’re crazy. But you have a problem, and it’s damned lucky you didn’t choke to death last weekend.”
“Would that have made you happy?”
Jane ignored that. “And look how you’re dressed! And that crap on your lips. It looks like smeared chocolate.”
Daisy tossed her jet-black hair in defiance, the scowl on her matte-black lips setting deep creases in her white makeup.
“You think I should wear some kind of peachy-fake, come-fuck-me lipstick like yours?”
Jane’s body went rigid, her hands curled into bony fists.
“I’m calling your father,” she snapped. She pulled a ruby-red cell phone from her purse.
“Dad has nothing to do with this!”
Betsy noticed the crack in the girl’s voice, registering a jolt of fear.
Her mother pressed speed dial. “I want him to know exactly how you are behaving.”
Daisy snatched the phone from her mother’s hand and threw it into the street. “Fuck it, Mother. I’ll go, OK? Just leave Dad out of this!”
The girl stalked toward the front door, leaving her mother to scramble after the phone and then follow.
“Bitch!” Daisy muttered.
Betsy straightened the papers on her desk and prepared to greet her patient.
“Betsy,” began Jane, brushing past her daughter into the little Victorian house, “things have gotten worse, not better since Daisy started with you!”
Betsy did not answer at once. She caught Daisy, still poised on the threshold—not in, not out, that was Daisy all right—watching from the corner of her eye. Now that her analyst was the object of Daisy’s mother’s anger, she was worthy of interest.
“How are you helping her?” Jane demanded. “And look at all the papers and clutter in your office! I don’t get the impression you are professional—”
“How have things gotten worse?” Betsy finally said, answering Jane’s question with one of her own.
Betsy watched mother and daughter stare at each other, fury in their eyes. Neither one of them blinked.
“What happened?” Betsy asked.
Again neither answered. The autumn air was suddenly filled with an animated conversation in Spanish from the Mexican grocery next door to the office.
“¿Quiere algo más, Señora?” said a singsong voice.
Betsy beckoned Daisy to step into the office, closing the door quietly behind her. The cheerful Mexican voices were shut out, the resulting silence ominous.
“Well? What do you think, Daisy? How have I failed?” Betsy asked.
Daisy shook her dark hair, obscuring her eyes.
The psychologist turned. “Jane?
Jane began picking at her manicured nails. Betsy caught a whiff of expensive perfume.
“I don’t know why she won’t tell you,” she said. “It happened again, damn it!”
“What happened?”
Jane looked at the door, as if contemplating a quick exit. Then she set her lips firmly deciding to answer.
“She almost choked to death over the weekend. She was strangling on her own spit—”
“That’s NOT what the doctor said!” interrupted Daisy. “You always get everything so freaking wrong!”
Betsy kept her expression neutral. Something had finally provoked her patient to speak with true emotion. “Why didn’t you call me?”
Jane looked at Betsy, exasperated, but with a flash of terror in her eyes. The psychologist interpreted it as real fear, not an affectation.
“I had to take her to the emergency room. They gave her a muscle relaxant so she would stop choking. She couldn’t breathe!”
“What was the drug?”
“I don’t remember. I can find out.”
Betsy turned to Daisy.
“Did it work?”
The girl snorted in derision.
“And they found no obstruction in your throat?” Betsy wanted to provoke an answer. Anything. “Any irritant? Hot peppers or vinegar? Any cleaning fluids? Ammonia?”
Daisy just stared, playing ferociously with the charm bracelet on her wrist.
“Daisy—don’t be rude. Answer her! There was nothing,” said Jane. “You know that. That’s what this is all about.”
“So what did they decide was the cause?” Betsy asked.
Jane looked down at her nails again. This time she managed to chip off a fleck of the polish.
“Nerves, they said. A psychological problem. That’s why we’re here, isn’t it?”
“Oh, bullshit Mother!” shouted Daisy, stomping her heavy boot on the wood floor. “The only reason we’re here is because you think I’m weird. You hate me and you hate the Goth world.”
This girl could talk, thought Betsy. And what a mouth.
Jane sucked in a breath and expelled it, her finely chiseled nostrils flaring. She glared at Daisy and turned to Betsy.
“Before we moved to Aspen, she was a perfectly normal child. She was an accomplished equestrian, red-cheeked and healthy. Absolutely normal. And lots of friends. Of her same…social class.”
Betsy looked back at Daisy’s mother. “Jane, what do you define as normal?”
“Not—not this! Look at her! The black lipstick, the shredded dress, the white makeup as if she’s a corpse. She should have color from hiking in the mountains, be out with friends—normal friends.”
“Mother!”
“She shouldn’t look like a freaking vampire! There, I’ve said it!”
“I am NOT a freaking vampire. I’m Goth!”
“Whatever. Vampire, Goth…in Aspen, of all places. It’s weird. And so—so outré!”
Daisy’s eyes burned. Betsy heard the slight tinkle of the silver bracelet as the charms trembled on her wrist.
“Damn it, I should be able to take her out to lunch without cringing!”
“All right,” Betsy took over. “We have established that Jane thinks you have a problem. And what about you, Daisy? This therapy is about you, no one else. What do you want to accomplish here?”
Daisy looked at her mother and then again at her analyst. She pushed her hair behind her ears.
Betsy was ready for Daisy to tell her that this was all a waste of time, that she didn’t want to accomplish anything, that there was nothing to “accomplish,” that she was happy the way she was, maybe tell her to go to hell. And after that, Betsy expected the girl never to utter another syllable in her presence.
But she was wrong.
Daisy’s gaze settled on her analyst. The doctor and patient looked each other in the shifting, golden light of the low autumnal sun.
Then the girl closed her eyes tight and swallowed.
“The choking freaked me out.”
The psychologist saw the one misaligned canine tooth glint and disappear as she spoke. The girl opened her eyes and looked down at her pale hands. When she raised her gaze again, there were long black smudges under her eyes. Betsy had to strain to hear what Daisy said next.
“I don’t want to die,” Daisy whispered. “Help me.”
When the sound of Jane’s Audi had faded away, Betsy noticed how Daisy’s shoulders relaxed.
“I want you to get a notebook,” Betsy said, “and keep it beside your bed. So you can write down your dreams.” Her patient was talking, now it was time to move ahead.
“What for?”
“Dreams are the bridge to your unconscious mind. Your strongest urges, hopes, and fears often make an appearance while your conscious mind sleeps. I mentioned this at our first session, but…”
“But what?”
“You were so—nonresponsive. Now it’s time to start working in earnest. The progress we make starts with your wanting to communicate. You’re ready now.”
The girl shrugged her bony shoulders and studied the toe of her boot.