The Children of Red Peak Page 9

Now she was Dr. Harris, if you please.

  Yes, you’re quite an overachiever, aren’t you. I mean, you “earn it” a lot.

  Always her mother’s voice slipping into her mind in the still moments of the day to try to knock her down.

  Beth sipped her wine and said nothing. The vintage went down like silk. She had earned it. A little medicine to steady the nerves. In a few hours, she had to catch a commuter flight to San Francisco for a conference. Over the weekend, she’d buried a childhood friend, a girl she once believed held the best chance out of them all to enjoy a normal life.

  And then there was Deacon.

  Her mind flashed to a group of children exploring the baptismal stream to see where the water would take them. Beth could smell the moist earth, mineral-rich water, chlorophyll. Wyatt turned over a rock and called out he’d found a salamander. The boy wondered if you pulled off its tail whether it would grow back. Deacon stomped over in helpless rage, demanding Wyatt leave it alone.

  The day she fell in love with Deacon. She left the memory with a gasp. So sudden and real, like she’d accidentally discovered a form of time travel. Abreaction, she thought, a term in her field used to describe reliving an experience to express repressed emotions.

  She reached for her glass, which was almost empty. She didn’t remember drinking it. She swirled the remains and took a deep breath. Soon, the alcohol would take the edge off, and then bye-bye, abreaction. At least for a while.

  When they were kids, Deacon cared about every living thing, even plants and bugs. He used to care about Beth most of all. Now he didn’t seem to give a crap about anything. Beth wondered if this was a self-defense mechanism.

  Yeah? What’s yours, Dr. Harris?

  “Physician, heal thyself.”

  Her motto, dedicated to a life of mental surgery to fix her scars. She swilled the last of her wine with a bitter swallow.

  There was a time when she’d loved him and believed she always would, forever and ever, amen. The childish fantasies of a young girl. Now he seemed to want to return to her life. Or maybe he didn’t want her at all. She didn’t know what he wanted. She didn’t really know him anymore. Worse, maybe she did. Perhaps she knew him too well.

  The last time she’d given him her heart, he’d tossed it like trash. Maybe David was right and the smart move was to leave the past alone.

  That kiss, though.

  She thought about pouring another glass and getting mellow, numbing the past. Giving the kindling a thorough soak so it could never light.

  You know that won’t do.

  At the airport lounge, then. A nice reward to help her sleep on the plane.

  Beth brought the bottle and empty wineglass into the kitchen. She washed out the glass and put it in the sink. She killed the music and out of habit touched the little metal cross dangling from her throat, where for fifteen years she’d kept her memories of the Family close to her heart but separate from herself. Then she grabbed the handle of her suitcase while reflexively popping an Altoids mint to mask the alcohol on her breath.

  At the conference, she’d learn about trauma and how to treat it.

  This made Beth chuckle all the way to the curb, where her taxi waited.

  She checked into the hotel, dumped her bag in her room, and took the elevator down to the second floor, which was crowded with suited conference goers. She registered and received a program and badge with a little speaker ribbon attached.

  Her panel was scheduled for tomorrow morning, giving her the afternoon to explore the other sessions. She went to the hotel bar and browsed the program while sipping a high-priced Cabernet, enjoying its clean, antiseptic scent.

  Many of the sessions dealt with cognitive behavioral therapy, which had proven effective in treating post-traumatic stress disorder either through exposure therapy, which helped people to confront their trauma, or cognitive restructuring, which helped the patient understand the event and make sense of their feelings. A San Diego–based psychologist was presenting on the latest thinking in stress inoculation training, another on the need to update the ethics of hypnosis.

  Beth gazed across the massive hotel lobby saturated with daylight streaming through large windows. Through this light, guests came and went, their voices absorbed by the cavernous space. Soothing piano music trilled from the bar speakers. She liked upscale hotels, the sound-absorbing carpets, the grand spaces, the chandeliers and general elegance. Everything under control, in its proper place, the guests doing their part to act distinguished and civilized.

  An act she saw through. A spectrum disorder, indeed.

  Humans were walking bags of base instincts and magical thinking, the latter being the more dangerous. From good luck charms to soul mates, delusion was a survival trait providing emotional comfort and even sanity, but it could be destructive. Every woman who prayed over a dying child instead of taking him to the doctor, every man who gambled away his kids’ college funds in Las Vegas, they weren’t as deluded as the paranoid schizophrenic believing the CIA was remotely studying his brain, but they lived on the same basic spectrum.

  You think you’re better, but you’re—

  “I envy them,” she murmured. “Now shut up and let me read.”

  She returned to her program. A game designer was giving a talk on using virtual reality to re-create fear-inducing environments, which sounded interesting.

  The next session on the list made her burst out in a loud guffaw. Beth rarely laughed, but when she did, it sprang unbridled from the belly. Across the bar, heads turned in annoyance or curious amusement.

  “Rockefeller Ballroom,” she said, committing the name to memory. Third floor.

  She checked her watch. Just enough time to catch the end. She drained her wineglass and shouldered her purse.

  Crushing an Altoids mint between her teeth, she beelined to the elevators.

  Beth entered the darkened ballroom and settled in a folding chair in the back. The speaker was wrapping things up in front of a projection screen loaded with bullet points under the headline, CALL TO ACTION.

  The speaker was David Young, here to talk about cults.

  “There may be as many as five thousand cultic groups operating in the USA alone,” he said. “In the last forty years, over two million Americans joined cults.”

  The man in the next chair leaned toward her. “Could that dude be any hotter?”

  Beth tilted her head and murmured, “Bad luck. He’s married.”

  “And I’m straight. I’m just saying he’s an attractive guy.”

  She turned and took in a smiling, youthful face, kind of handsome himself in a roguish sort of way. “He gets his looks from his mother,” she told him. “You should see his sister. She was a real knockout back in the day.”

  “Can you introduce me?”

  “She’s a police detective with aggression issues.”

  The man chuckled. “Maybe not, then.”

  “Most people,” David said, “do not wake up one day and decide to sign up for a cult. They are vulnerable. Searching for a home, hoping to make sense of a confusing world. There’s nothing wrong with joining a group that provides truth and belonging. Even the word cult, which simply means a ritualistic devotion to a person, doctrine, deity, whatever, is not necessarily bad. What is wrong, what makes a cult the bad kind of cult, is if the group uses mind control, exploitation, blind obedience, and manipulated dependency against its members.”

  In other words, religious groups were a spectrum disorder as much as humanity was, Beth understood. Whether groups or people required intervention or treatment depended on the level of harm.

  David wore a blue open-collared dress shirt and slacks, exuding confidence and passion as he hammered his presentation’s major points. Beth smiled. I knew that kid when he tripped over his own feet and was scared of going into the woods alone. He seemed to glow in the light of the projection screen.

  Her neighbor leaned toward her again. “I’m Carl, by the way.”

  �
��Beth.”

  “Are you in the field?”

  “Yes. Let me guess.” She took in his expensive suit. “You’re a drug dealer.”

  He chuckled again. “Pharmaceutical sales, yup. We’ve got a hell of an antipsychotic for schizophrenics coming out this year. Works like a charm.”

  “Sounds wonderful, but I’m not a psychiatrist.”

  Clinical psychologists primarily dealt in psychotherapy, while as medical doctors, psychiatrists focused on serious mental illness and prescribed medications.

  “You refer patients, though, right?”

  “Of course.” The two professions often collaborated for optimal treatment, depending on the patient.

  “Then I find you incredibly interesting.” Carl grinned. He struck Beth as the type of jerk whose principal charm resided in calling attention to what a jerk he was. “So, Dr. Beth, are you going to the Fab party?”

  “I didn’t know that still existed,” she whispered. “Anyway, it’s not my thing.”

  “Don’t like to lose control, huh?”

  “It’s a terrible survival strategy.”

  “You should come. You and your friend.”

  David said, “While we don’t know for sure how many leave cults each year, the good news is they do. My job is to help them think for themselves and make the decision to get out. The hard part comes after, when they return to the real world. By itself, just leaving the group is a traumatic experience. Many feel depressed, grieving, guilty, isolated, disconnected, and without purpose.”

  Hey, who does that remind you of?

  Beth shrugged off her inner voice and listened. David had seen firsthand what magical thinking could do to people. The Family had taken its monopoly on truth to its logical dark extreme. She wondered if he’d replaced his own wishful thinking with a healthier alternative or had become a depressive realist, denying himself any comforting delusions at all. Then she remembered what he’d said about his family. Yes, they were his religion now.

  “That’s where you come in,” David went on. “The more people leave cults, the greater the demand for therapy specifically aligned with their needs. We need a stronger relationship between our communities. A deeper exchange of information, dedicated treatments, more robust referral networks, data collection.”

  Beth found herself nodding.

  People leaving cults often complained about the abuse they’d received, but blamed themselves and otherwise did not understand how thoroughly they’d been manipulated. They needed therapists who were more active and less reflective and who could differentiate between the individual’s core issues and those stemming from long-term manipulation.

  “Working together, we can help people escape cults and make sure they stay out to lead independent, healthy lives,” David finished. “Thank you.”

  The audience broke into applause. Hands shot up for the Q&A while a steady stream of conference goers headed to the exits. After the last question, a throng gathered around David, some of them female admirers.

  Carl gave Beth his card. He worked for Hippocratic Pharmaceuticals and was based in Los Angeles. He’d written a hotel suite number on the back of the card. “I’ll see you tonight?”

  She stood. “Maybe. Nice to meet you, Carl.”

  The crowd at the front of the room had thinned, and David was packing up his laptop and presentation notes.

  She approached and waited until he noticed her. “We should so work together.”

  “Hey!” He laughed. “I should have guessed you’d come to this conference.”

  “You did great. I only caught the end, but what I heard was compelling.”

  “Thanks. I hate public speaking.” He thrust his hands in his pockets and offered a lopsided grin. “Did you bring your flask?”

  “How about we get a proper drink this time?”

  Returned to the elegant comfort of the bar, Beth sat across from David. After fifteen years, she was seeing her old friend for a second time in just several days. She didn’t put any stock in the notion of fate, but if she did, she’d believe the gods were trying to tell her something.

  She sipped her wine and said, “You’ve come a long way, David.”

  He studied his scotch sweating on the table in front of him. “The work is meaningful. I care about it a lot. I feel like I’m making a difference.”

  So his family wasn’t his sole religion. He’d filled the void left by the Family’s destruction with a calling to save others from a similar fate.

  One thing Beth missed about the Family was its sense of purpose. She admired that David had found something to replace it. Beth enjoyed helping people through their traumas, delusions, and addictions, but in the end, Deacon was probably right. To a large extent, she’d entered the field to learn how to fix herself.

  “I couldn’t do your job,” she said. “Exit counseling sounds like pulling teeth.”

  “I couldn’t be a therapist. I like that I only have a few days to make my case, and then they either make the decision to leave or they don’t. Otherwise, I’d get too invested and go back to kidnapping people and deprogramming them. Being a shrink seems like getting paid to watch a hamster wheel go around.”

  “Ha,” she said. “Therapy can sometimes feel like that, though you ask the hamster questions and bark at it every once in a while.”

  He smiled. “Well, I guess we can both agree it’s better than being a musician.”

  Beth thought about Deacon tracing a lazy circle on her knee during the funeral service. A little jolt of excitement shot through her.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “He makes it look appealing. He lives free. I’m just not sure what he’s living for. What about you? How are you, really?”

  “Uh-oh.” He fidgeted with his wedding ring the way he had at Emily’s funeral, apparently a nervous habit.

  “What did I do?”

  “I can never tell if it’s personal or professional with you.”

  “It’s always personal for me. Because I care about you.”

  “I’ll make you a deal. I’ll give you an honest answer, and then you drop it.” When she nodded, he took a drink of his scotch as if to steel himself. “I’m all right, Beth, I really am. Before Emily’s funeral, I hadn’t had a panic attack since 2010. The nightmares are mostly gone too. The flashbacks still come and go, but I’m working on the triggers. Sometimes, I just get a feeling, a terrible feeling. I’ve learned to roll with it, one day at a time.”

  “As long as you’re handling it and it’s not handling you. What about Angela?”

  David turned away with a grimace. “She seems to be okay. I think even now, for some weird reason, she still blames me for what happened to Mom. Since she’s trained on the use of lethal force, I usually leave her alone.”

  “Any plans on how you’re going to deal with the fifteenth anniversary?”

  “Kiss my wife and hug my kids,” David answered. “Otherwise, I’m going to try not to think about it.” He produced his wallet and pulled out a photo. “This is them.”

  Beth smiled. The photo had been taken in bright sunshine at a park. David’s wife was beautiful and elegant, his grinning children flushed and beaming with youth and horseplay. “You have a gorgeous family.”

  “That’s Claire, my wife. This is Alyssa, and that’s Dexter.”

  “Alyssa looks a lot like your mom.”

  David’s own smile turned into a grimace. Too late, Beth realized her mistake in bringing up how his mother looked.

  “They keep me busy,” he said. “They’re my purpose. It’s hard being away so much, but that’s the job.”

  “So about the fifteenth anniversary, Deacon and I were talking, and we were thinking it might be interesting—” His sigh interrupted her. “What?”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be rude. I just don’t want to talk about the Family anymore. Emily’s death brought back a lot of bad stuff.”

  “Hang on.” Beth leaned on her elbows. “Hear me out. Exposure therapy is ve
ry effective in treating PTSD. One form of it is called in vivo, where a therapist guides you in a visit to the place that scares you so you can safely confront your fears.”

  His eyes widened. “You want to go back to Red Peak?”

  “Deacon and I were thinking we should all go. It’s been a very long time.”

  “What good could that possibly do?” His hand shook as he raised his glass to gulp the last of his scotch.

  “Look, we’re all functioning because we found a way to put what happened to us in a cage. I think we should try to purge it. You said you were working on your triggers. This is one way to do it.”

  He became thoughtful. “You want to go.”

  She smiled. “Why do you think I’d want to go?”

  Beth had been trained to keep conversation directed away from herself and onto the other person. She could play this game all day, though she had a feeling it would get frustrating: David was an avoider, and she didn’t know how to let things go.

  He was right, however. Well, almost. She didn’t want to go to Red Peak. She’d begun to believe they might need to go. All of them together. Whatever drove Emily to suicide possibly was inside them, waiting like a time bomb.

  “I think you want me to be a part of some therapeutic experiment on yourself.” He winced at his candor. “Sorry, I don’t mean that to sound so harsh.”

  “David, let me be clear. I’ve gone through more therapy than you can imagine.” Ego state therapy, abreactive hypnosis, rewind technique, emotional freedom tapping, eye movement desensitization reprocessing. Over time, all of it had calmed her brain’s amygdala to a nagging inner critic. “I’m fine. I’ll tell you why I want to go. You have your way of giving back. This is mine.”

  And the Academy Award goes to…

  David said, “It was really nice to bump into you here, Beth.”

  He was shutting down, refusing to play the game. “I’m sorry if I—”

  “I mean it,” he added. “I’m proud of you. We should all be proud of ourselves. A bunch of major overachievers. Whatever made Emily choose to end her life, the rest of us can look in the mirror and say we did more than survive, we made something of ourselves, and at a young age.”