Lucy was paralyzed. Crippled by fear. Back and forth went the bridge. Hundreds of feet down, a green glacial lake fed a river. The glacier itself wriggled through the mountain pass. Craggy gray cliffs rose above her head. She wanted to grab the cables to steady herself, but her arms hung at her side, leaden, unmoving. She wanted to close her eyes, but her eyelids were taped open so that all she could do was see. Her legs could barely hold her. Her body shook, buffeted by the wind. She stood alone over the chasm.
“Can you fly? Can you fly? Will you die? Will you die?”
She wanted to throw herself into the gorge. Anything to make the fear stop. Anything so that it would be over. Her limbs disintegrated into shivers. Her brain rebelled and escaped. Make it stop, make it stop, make it stop.
“Listen to me, do you want to be free?”
“Yes, yes, yes, make it stop,” she tried to say, but she was voiceless, and she cried dry tears. Her heart rocketed as if it would beat its way through her chest to get away. “Let me jump, let me die, I can’t take anymore, I can’t, I can’t.”
“It’s up to you, you know what to do.”
Something appeared in front of her. Like a hologram, spinning. It was shiny, it was bright. It was a dagger, with a black handle. The edges were honed to razor-sharp blades, and it ended with a cutting point. All she had to do was reach out and grab it. She knew that was what the voice wanted. She had to take it in her grasp, but she couldn’t.
“Luuuucy. Luuuucy. It’s up to you, you know what to do.”
The knife twirled and glinted in the light, as if suspended on a thread that danced in the wind. She could take one step, she could reach out her hand, and she would have it. The knife made the bridge go away, but once she had it, she knew what the voice wanted her to do.
The wind got louder, fighting with the music.
She didn’t want to take the knife, but she couldn’t stay here, not one second longer. The blade dangled only inches away. Sharp and deadly. As if it were already dripping blood.
Lucy screamed soundlessly; then she leaped for the knife and curled the handle in her fist. She clenched it so tightly she would never let go. Immediately, the panorama around her dissolved. The bridge disappeared. The mountains and the glacier faded to whiteness. She was in a dazzling white room. Her feet were on solid ground. But the music kept playing, and the knife was in her hand now. There was only one way to stop the music once and for all. One way to keep the bridge from coming back.
The voice whispered in her ear.
“The knife is the key. Set yourself free.”
29
Darren Newman.
Frankie hated that what she remembered most about Newman was his looks. He was ridiculously handsome, and he knew it. He was tall, with the sleek, strong build of a tennis player. He had LA-blond hair, short and layered, with tight curls above his forehead. His eyebrows angled sharply, and his dark eyes seemed to be laughing at a joke inside his head. He didn’t show teeth when he smiled; his lips simply nudged upward. He dressed to impress, always in a suit, with pastel-colored shirts and wild Jerry Garcia ties. He was young — only in his late twenties. She never should have been attracted to someone like that, but she was.
He first came into Frankie’s life a year ago because of his mother. Alana Newman came to Frankie after her son had been arrested for rape, and she offered a lot of money for her to talk to him. Her instinct, seeing that many zeroes on a check, was to say no. She wasn’t a hired gun. But Alana was as smooth as her son. She told a good story, and she cried the right amount of tears. She didn’t claim that Darren was guiltless in his life, but she claimed that he was a victim of his past. He’d been abused in school. He’d never learned how to respect women. He’d made mistakes, but he wasn’t a rapist. The case was a he-said, she-said between her son and an SF State senior he’d met at a party. The prosecutors were trying to make an example of him.
If Frankie could have gone back in time, she would have torn the check in half. Instead, she agreed to meet Darren. To talk. To judge him for herself, face-to-face. That was her mistake. She had enough arrogance as a therapist to believe that no man could manipulate her, but she hadn’t counted on a man like Darren Newman.
He knew that the best lies started with the truth. The first story he told her was a true story from his childhood. He’d spent his first eighteen years in Wisconsin, in a small town outside Green Bay. At age seven, he’d built a snow fort in his front yard during a Thanksgiving Day blizzard. He’d burrowed into its tunnels and stayed there while the family was inside, but as the snow continued to fall, the fort collapsed on top of him.
It was half an hour before anyone noticed. He spent that time trapped in a cave of white, slowly suffocating, his air leaching away breath by breath. He couldn’t move or free himself. All he could do was stare at the white snow from inside his tomb. By the time they dug him out, he was unconscious, and the doctors said another five minutes would have killed him.
He still had vivid flashbacks of that near-death experience, he told her. He didn’t cry about it, though. He softened his voice and stared into space, as if the trapped child were still inside the man. He looked at her with those magnetic eyes, which said, I need you to help me.
She was hooked.
It was also the last true story Darren told her.
He described losing his virginity to a ninth-grade math teacher, whose after-school tutoring sessions became evening seductions at her home. Looking embarrassed, he explained in explicit physical detail what she did to him and what she made him do to her. How she made him dominate her. Humiliate her. Live out her submissive fantasies. He had this way of shaking his head, as if he couldn’t really believe any of it himself. That was how I learned about women, Frankie. Is it any wonder I turned out the way I did?
Months later, she found out that Darren’s ninth-grade math teacher was a fifty-six-year-old married man, not a woman at all. There was no relationship. No virgin seduction. He’d fabricated everything. By then, it was too late.
Frankie had already given him what he wanted. She submitted an affidavit to the court that in her professional opinion, Darren would be better served by treatment for his childhood issues rather than imprisonment. The prosecution, already on shaky ground on the rape charge, accepted a plea of misdemeanor assault, rather than risk an outright loss in court. Darren did community service at a local homeless shelter, and he began therapy sessions with Frankie every week.
She blamed herself for letting him twist her around his finger. She was slow to realize that he had an answer for everything. An excuse. A reason. An explanation. His parents moved to Colorado when he was eighteen, and he went to college in Boulder. Frankie grilled him about two accusations of rape in the college dorms, and he dismissed them as the result of alcohol and morning-after regrets. She asked about cases of stalking and revenge porn, and he put the blame on his roommate. No matter what happened, he found someone else to take the fall, some way to deflect guilt away from himself. That should have been a red flag.
Despite everything he told her, despite the lies she discovered as the months wore on, she also found herself intensely attracted to him. She dressed differently on days when she knew he’d be with her. She obsessed over every detail of his face. She let herself fantasize about him. Once, in therapy, he put a hand high on her thigh, and she left it there and didn’t break away until it was obvious they were about to cross a physical line from which there was no going back.