He appeared pleased with her decision. “I think a good place for us to start is with that first panic attack you had during the break-in. Take me back to that night, when you were hiding in the closet. I believe you said the 9-1-1 operator told you that help was on the way, and then you suddenly began to feel ‘off.’”
“That’s right.”
“What were you thinking about? Walk me through that moment.”
“Well, I heard a gunshot downstairs, and the guy who’d been raiding my closet ran out. Then I started to talk to the 9-1-1 operator, and . . . she said something that triggered a flashback.”
Dr. Metzel sat up in his chair, looking particularly interested in this new, unexpected information. “A flashback to what?”
So. Here they were.
Victoria had been hoping not to get sidetracked with things from her past that had been long since resolved—happily, she might add. But seeing how her only other choice was to lie to her therapist, she figured she’d just get it out there so they could move on to the business at hand. “To the 9-1-1 call I made when I found my mother after her suicide attempt.”
Clearly not having expected that, Dr. Metzel simply looked at her a moment. “Oh.”
Victoria pointed to the pen and notepad on his lap. “I’ll wait while you go to town with that one.”
* * *
HER PARENTS’ DIVORCE had started off like so many cases she’d handled over the years. Her father, an American Airlines pilot, had an affair with a flight attendant eleven years his junior, and had decided to leave Victoria’s mother when his mistress discovered she was pregnant. Worried about supporting two families at the same time, her father—to put it bluntly—had turned into a cheap son of a bitch during the divorce proceedings, challenging her mother and her mother’s less-than-stellar lawyer over everything. Suddenly, Renee Slade had found herself looking for a job for the first time in ten years, while simultaneously having to fight for every alimony and child support payment to which she was entitled.
Eventually, the fight had just left her.
Her mom had struggled with depression for years—Victoria could remember several occasions on which she’d come home from school to find her mother still in bed, with the shades drawn. The “bad times,” as Victoria had thought of them when she was a child, would last anywhere from a couple of days to a week or two, but then they’d go away, and things would be normal for a while.
She’d known that something was off leading up to That Day, six months after the divorce had been finalized, when she was ten years old. She’d noticed that her mom had started taking a lot of days off of work, had heard her crying in her bedroom when she thought Victoria was asleep, and had seen the bills piling up on the kitchen counter, along with the letters from the bank warning her mother that she was delinquent on her mortgage payments. She’d tried talking to her dad about it during their decreasingly frequent phone calls, but by then his second wife’s baby—also a daughter—had been born, and he always seemed preoccupied with his new family.
Still, despite it all, Victoria had been in a good mood when she’d arrived home from school on that particular afternoon. She’d been invited to her first slumber party, at Denise Russo’s house, and had raced excitedly into her mother’s bedroom to tell her the news. At first, finding the shades drawn, she’d just assumed her mother was sleeping again.
But when she’d seen the empty bottle of sleeping pills tipped over on the nightstand, she knew instantly that something was very wrong.
Hang in there, Victoria. Help is coming, I promise.
The voice, from all those years ago, faded away as she looked at Dr. Metzel, feeling the need to set the record straight.
“Before we go down some unnecessary path, you should know that I had a lot of therapy after my mother swallowed those pills. Two years of it, in fact. So I think I’m good there. A-OK on that front.”
“Yet you just had a flashback to that day a little over a month ago, triggering your first panic attack.”
Well, that. “That’s just because of the similarity in the 9-1-1 calls. It’s not like I’m thinking about my mother’s suicide attempt when these other panic issues have popped up on the subway or during my exercise class.”
He considered that. “Okay, what are you thinking about during those moments, then?”
“Mostly that I don’t want to faint or have another episode in public.”
“We touched on that before. Your concern about what other people might think if you had a panic attack in front of them. To not look ‘weird,’ as you put it. Is that something you’ve always been focused on?”
She considered this. “I suppose it’s something I’ve paid attention to for a while.”
“Where do you think that comes from?”
She had a sneaking suspicion where he was going with this and decided to cut to the chase. “Are you asking if it’s something that started after my mother’s suicide attempt?”
“I think it’s possible there’s a connection. But I’d like to know what you think.”
She sighed. So much for not going down this path. “Suicide is unsettling. It’s morbid. People don’t know what to do or say when they hear about something like that. And believe me, everyone knew what had happened with my mom: the neighbors, all the kids and teachers at school, even the parents. Some kids teased me, others went out of their way to be extra nice, and some just looked at me weird and ignored me. But no one simply acted normal. So I acted normal, hoping that, eventually, everyone else would do the same.”
“And now, as an adult? Why do you think you still feel that same desire to appear ‘normal,’ as you put it?”
She shrugged. “I like the way people see me. They see a strong, confident person. What’s so bad about that?”
“Nothing. But there’s a difference between wanting people to perceive you as a strong, confident person, and being fixated on it to the point that it manifests itself in a panic disorder.”
Victoria fell quiet, not quite sure what to say in response.
“Maybe we should switch gears for a moment,” Dr. Metzel said after a pause, likely sensing her unease. “Let’s talk about your personal relationships.”
Any topic of conversation that didn’t involve the words fixate or manifest or disorder was just fine with her. “Okay. What do you want to know?”