The Night Bird

13

Frankie parked by the Promenade Trail on the bay.

The Golden Gate Bridge loomed immediately to the west, but the bridge was enveloped in a ridge of fog and almost invisible. San Francisco near the Presidio was often like a different city. Even when it was sunny and warm downtown, the temperature could be twenty degrees colder close to the ocean, where a damp cloud laid its chilly fingers across the coast.

She stretched in the parking lot, finished the morning coffee she’d brought with her, and took off running toward Crissy Field and the bridge. She liked to push herself hard on her Saturday-morning workouts. Jason ran more often than she did, but when she ran, she ran fast and easily outpaced him. It annoyed him, and as a result, they no longer ran together. She felt good running again, because she’d missed the last two weekends. She let her long legs stretch out on the dirt path, passing most of the other runners, ignoring the cold bay wind that whistled into her face. Her arms pumped. Her cheeks pinked up, and sweat gathered under her headband.

Normally, she cleared her head when she ran, but the overnight threat lingered in her brain.

I’m going to watch you die.

She’d hardly slept. She kept telling herself that the e-mail was no more than a variation on the same kind of hate mail she received every day. Sometimes the work she did made her enemies. She’d forwarded the e-mail to a private security firm she’d used in the past and asked them to look into it. End of story.

Even so, thinking about it made her shiver.

Frankie ran full speed with the beach beside her. Whitecaps broke on the surface of the bay. She tasted salt on her tongue. At Torpedo Wharf, she continued around the bluff, following the paved road all the way to Fort Point below the bridge. She could see the webbed red metal of the Golden Gate here, behind the ghosts of fog. At the fort, she stopped long enough to catch her breath. She bent over, with her hands on her knees. She always thought of Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo in this spot, rescuing Kim Novak from a fake suicide attempt in the frigid bay waters. She’d watched the movie over and over as a teenager, trying to understand Stewart’s dangerous obsession. That was when she’d begun to think of mental health as a career.

She remembered telling her father about her plans to be a psychiatrist. He was appalled. To him, psychiatry wasn’t science. It was nothing more than astrology with a prescription pad. For years, she’d endured his nasty jokes.

What’s the difference between physics and psychiatry?

One’s full of quarks, and the other’s full of quacks.

And then he’d laughed. He had the meanest laugh of anyone she’d ever met. If he were still alive, he’d be laughing at her now. Blaming her for what happened to Brynn and Monica. “Psychiatrists are like children pushing buttons on a machine they don’t understand,” he would say. “And now look at what you’ve done. These women trusted you, and you killed them.”

Except it wasn’t Marvin’s voice in her head, blaming her for what happened. It was her own.

Frankie started running back toward the city skyline. She ran even faster, so that the noise of her breathing blocked out other sounds. If she couldn’t hear, she couldn’t think, and she didn’t want to think right now. She focused on the domed roof of the Palace of Fine Arts, and beyond it, the hilltop skyscrapers, including the pyramid of the Transamerica building. Beside her, the beach sand was wet and brown, and the morning was gray. She wove through the Saturday crowd, trying not to slow down.

She ran so fast that she sprinted right by the man on the bench.

Among the blur of faces, someone was watching her. By the time she passed him, she realized that his face was familiar. It took her brain a moment to catch up, and then she knew who it was. She stopped and reversed her tracks, walking back toward the bench, breathing hard. He waited for her.

Frankie put on a neutral smile. “Todd.”

“Hello, Dr. Stein.”

She was going to comment on what a surprise this was, but she didn’t think it was a surprise. You could always run into someone you knew in San Francisco, but she saw in his face that he’d been expecting her. She felt paranoid, but it was only because of the strange e-mails she’d received. Looking at Todd, she couldn’t remember now whether he was one of the patients with whom she’d shared her personal e-mail address.

Frankie sat down next to him. “It’s been a while.”

“Five months.”

“And how are you?” she asked.

“Honestly? Not so good.”

Frankie didn’t say anything immediately. She let her breathing return to normal. The pedestrians came and went on the trail, ignoring them, but she spoke softly. “I’m sorry to hear that. Why don’t you call and make an appointment next week, and we’ll talk.”

“No, I can’t do that,” Todd said. “I can’t go to your office.”

“Why not?”

“Because you take notes. You have to do that legally, right? But I don’t want anything written down.”

Frankie leaned forward with her hands on her knees. She stared at her sneakers. “So this isn’t an accident. Did you follow me?”

“No, I—”

“Because I have to be honest with you, Todd. I don’t like being stalked, and that’s what this feels like.”

He shook his head. “I’m sorry, Dr. Stein. I didn’t follow you. I just remembered that you told me how much you liked running this trail on the weekends. And I thought I would take my chances.”

Her instinct was to get up and walk away. Todd wasn’t the first patient to cross the line between personal and professional. She’d had patients show up at her home, and invite her to Thanksgiving, and make clumsy passes at her. The thing to do was to shut them down calmly and politely. Even so, she didn’t. There was something in Todd’s voice that made her stay.

His full name was Todd Ferris. He was in his late twenties, tall and bony. He had a wistful face, with faraway eyes, a feminine mouth, and a soft-spoken way of talking that made her lean in to hear him better. A gathering of longer hairs along his chin line pretended to be a beard. He wore a navy wool cap, a gray Boomtown Casino sweatshirt, and jeans. A small loop earring hugged one ear, and a silver cross dangled on a chain around his neck.

He wasn’t one of her success stories. He’d come to her months earlier, troubled by memories of bullying he’d suffered as a child. The emotional trauma had worsened since he’d taken a new job at one of the large gaming companies, with a demanding and intimidating boss. He’d been unable to sleep or work. He’d started drinking heavily.

As a patient, Todd was hard to draw out. He was vague about whether the past abuse was sexual, which made her suspect that it was. He was reluctant to share details about his family and whether anyone else knew what his cousin had done to him. He’d grown up in a Nevada small town, and it was obvious that he still carried a stigma about therapy. Many people were like that. If you went to a psychiatrist, you were crazy or weak. She’d tried several approaches with Todd, but he was resistant to hypnosis, and he’d declined drugs to improve his suggestibility.

In the end, he’d thanked her and walked away. She didn’t think she’d helped him at all.

“So what’s going on, Todd?”

He stared off at the dark waters of the bay. His face twitched, as if his brain and mouth were struggling with what to say. “Something really weird is happening to me.”

“What is it?”

“I’m having strange memories,” he told her.

“Of your cousin?” she asked. “Of what he did to you?”

“No, this is completely different. I’m remembering things that never happened. And yet it’s like they did.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Yeah, me neither. I mean, it’s like waking up from a dream where you have flashbacks of what was in your head, but you can’t really put them together. I see things — I remember things — but only fragments. They’re disconnected. Like somebody snipped pieces out of a video. I’d swear they were dreams, but it doesn’t feel that way. It feels like I’m remembering something that really happened. I can’t explain it.”

Frankie was silent as she processed what Todd was saying. He went on in a voice that was so soft she struggled to hear him: “I was just wondering if this could be a side effect of what we did.”

“You mean the therapy?”

“Uh-huh.”

“No, I’m sure this is something else, Todd.”

“You mean I can’t remember false things? Because online, they talk about recovered memories that aren’t true. People will remember things that never actually happened to them.”

“I really don’t think that’s what this is.”

He nodded, but he looked doubtful. “Okay, whatever you say, but I’m scared. I don’t like what’s going on in my head.”

“How long have you felt this way?”

Todd rubbed a hand across his face. He blinked and looked lost. “The first time was two months ago. And then it stopped, so I figured it was some weird one-time thing. But this week — this week it happened again—”

“What exactly do you remember?” Frankie asked him.

“Torture.”

Frankie recoiled. “What?”

“That’s what I remember, Dr. Stein. Horrible shit. The pictures in my head, they’re graphic and violent.”

Her mind was in a whirl. “Did this happen to you? Were you suffering some kind of physical or mental abuse?”

“No, I saw it. I was watching it. It’s like I was a witness, you know?”

“Who was being tortured?” Frankie asked.

“A woman. Women, actually. It’s happened more than once.”

“What happened to them? Who was doing this?”

“I’m not sure I can describe it. It’s all bits and pieces. There’s this white room, and the woman is on a bed or chaise or something. She’s like — I don’t know, she looks drugged. Tied up, too, so she can’t move. And I remember some guy in a creepy-ass mask. He’s the one torturing her.”

“A mask?”

“Yeah. Some weird grinning mask with bug eyes. Scary as shit. I mean, it’s so bizarre, it can’t be real, right? But I feel like it happened.”

“Have you told anyone else about this?” Frankie asked.

“Are you kidding? No way. Like I said — no notes, right? I don’t want anybody thinking I’m nuts. You can’t tell anyone about this, can you? Doctor — patient privilege or whatever?”

“That’s right,” she said.

Todd exhaled in relief. “Good.”

Frankie hesitated. This wasn’t the kind of question she usually asked a patient. You didn’t challenge their hallucinations. “Listen, Todd, can you tell me one other thing? You said this felt like a dream, and yet you seem convinced that it really happened. Why?”

He slid closer to her on the bench. She was uncomfortable with the lack of personal space between them. He eyed the Bay Trail to make sure that no one else was within earshot. He looked frightened now.

“When this first happened two months ago, I thought it was a dream, too,” he said, “but then I realized it couldn’t be.”

“Why not?”

“Because the women I saw are real. I saw them on TV. That chick who threw herself off the bridge this week? She was one of the women in the white room. I mean, I don’t know her, I’ve never met her, I don’t know who she is. But I remember her.”