The Night Bird

4

Water.

Dr. Francesca Stein poured water into a glass and stared through the observation window at a patient alone in the therapy room. Her name was Jillian Clark. She was fourteen years old. She had long nut-brown hair, freckles, and a sweet smile. Her body had the gangly awkwardness of a growing teenager, but she could run like the wind on the soccer field. Jillian got straight As in school. She wanted to be an eye doctor, because her mother was an eye doctor, and Jillian idolized her mother.

Jillian lay on a white chaise in the middle of the therapy room. When Frankie pushed the intercom button, she could hear piano music playing softly inside. Jillian’s eyes were open, but she was already under hypnosis. The curved wall in front of her served as a movie screen, playing a slow-motion track of flowers and plants growing. Typically, Frankie used a video of ocean waves to relax her patients — but not for Jillian.

Water was Jillian’s problem.

When Frankie first met the girl a month earlier, they’d chatted in Frankie’s office, which adjoined the therapy room. They talked about boys. School. Music. The ordinary parts of a teenager’s life.

And then, with a glance at Jillian’s mother, Frankie poured a glass of water.

The reaction was even worse than she expected.

Jillian gasped for air. A choking noise belched from her open mouth, and redness rose in her face. Her chest seized. The episode continued until Frankie poured the water out in the sink, and once the water was gone, Jillian became her typical young self almost immediately. She laughed and joked about Taylor Swift. She talked about her last vacation with her parents to Disneyland. Neither her mind nor her body showed ill effects of the trauma.

It was the most extreme case of aquaphobia that Frankie had ever seen.

“Three months ago, I took Jillian kayaking in the bay near the San Mateo Bridge,” her mother had explained. “We ran into unstable currents, and her kayak flipped. She couldn’t right herself. I paddled like crazy to get to her, but it was nearly a minute before I could reach her and get her out of the water. She nearly died. The doctors said there was no physiological damage, but a few days later, I noticed that — well, I noticed that Jillian was starting to smell. And I realized she hadn’t showered since that trip to the bay.”

“I can’t stand to have water touching me,” Jillian added. “As soon as I get wet, I’m back there under the bay. The whole thing comes to life for me again. It’s not just that I remember it. I’m there.”

“Since then, it’s gotten worse,” her mother went on. “The very sight of water can trigger an episode. We’ve gone to doctors and therapists, and no one has been able to help. We’re desperate, Dr. Stein.”

Jillian leaned across the desk and took Frankie’s hand. Her young eyes had pleaded with her. “I read an article that called you the master of memory. You help people forget bad things, right? Please, can you help me forget what happened in the bay?”

Frankie squeezed the girl’s hand. “I’ll do everything I can to help you, but this won’t be easy, Jillian. You can’t change your memory without reliving it. That’s how it works. So before you forget anything, what I really need you to do is remember.”

As Frankie stared at Jillian through the window of the therapy room, she caught a glimpse of her own reflection. It was strange how you could live inside your skin and still see someone you didn’t know in the mirror. For months, she’d felt like a stranger in her own life. People told her that was how it was when you lost your father. You became a shell, empty, stranded on the sand.

At least you have your memories, people told her in the sympathy cards they sent. Which, to Frankie, was a cruel joke. She of all people knew that memory was unreliable. Memories played tricks on the brain.

She was nearly forty years old. Her brown hair was short, with a few loose strands dangling past her ears. Her face and nose were long and narrow, with a sharply defined chin. She dressed more like a CEO than a psychiatrist or scientist, in dark pantsuits. She was very thin and tall, and she wore high heels to make herself even taller. Her pencil shape attracted notice. In college and medical school, she’d endured whispers of anorexia. They weren’t true. She had skinny genes; her parents were tall and thin, like her. Genetics were funny, though. Her sister, Pam, had an almost identical face, despite being four years younger, but her body had luxurious curves that Frankie envied.

Men’s eyes followed Pam, and she welcomed it. Frankie, who was just as pretty, had spent most of her life shutting men down. They looked at her and knew she had little time for anything or anyone outside her brain. Her cool dark eyes cut people down to size. Her husband, Jason, was the only one who’d ever stood up to her, in the lab or the bedroom, but their relationship was more a meeting of minds than a passionate love match. Frankie reserved most of her passion for helping her patients, which didn’t make for a happy marriage.

In her therapy practice, she worked with kids like Jillian who’d developed crippling phobias. She worked with soldiers returning from overseas who’d seen the worst horrors of war. She worked with victims of physical and emotional abuse — and sometimes, she worked with the abusers, too. The criminals. The sociopaths. Regardless of who they were, they all had one thing in common.

They were haunted by memories, and they wanted to exorcise their ghosts.

Frankie let herself quietly into the therapy room with Jillian. This place, more than anywhere else, was her home. It was lushly carpeted to reduce extraneous noise, and sound baffles were built into the walls. She kept the temperature at a consistent seventy-two degrees, day or night. Built-in speakers allowed her to communicate from outside the room, depending on the patient — but with kids, like Jillian, she preferred to be seated next to them. The wrap-around floor-to-ceiling screen, almost like an IMAX theater, created a 4K high-definition world in which to shape what the patient’s brain saw and remembered.

She customized the visuals on the screen to each person’s needs. Jillian watched the video that Frankie had made for her. Flowers sprouted and blossomed. Tree leaves unfurled. What the girl didn’t know was that, every few seconds, an isolated image of water appeared and disappeared on the screen too quickly for her eyes to perceive. But her brain saw it. At the very first session, Frankie had seen the girl’s hands tightly clasp the arms of the chair as the water images made their way into her mind. Subliminally, her tension grew, but she didn’t choke or gasp. The images of water that her brain saw were happy images. Swimmers. Surfers. Laughter on the beach. And then herself — in a pool, at the ocean, on a kayak. Safe.

“Hello, Jillian,” Frankie said in a honey tone.

“Hi.”

The girl’s eyes were immersed in the images on the screen. She was highly susceptible to hypnosis, which was good. With many of her adult patients, Frankie used a sedative to loosen their consciousness and make them open to suggestion. She rarely did so with children.

“How do you feel?”

“Good. Good.”

“Are you comfortable?”

“Yes.”

“Excellent. It’s time to remember now. Are you ready to remember?”

“Sure.”

“You know how we do this. You’re looking at your memories through your own eyes. You’re telling me in detail everything you see and everything you hear. It’s as if you’re there, and it’s happening all over again. But it’s not really happening to you. You’re just an observer. You’re detached. Do you understand?”

“Yeah.”

“If there’s a little detail you don’t get right, I’ll correct it for you, because I want you to remember exactly how it was. And whatever I tell you is the truth of what happened. It’s important that you remember it that way. Okay?”

“Okay.”

They’d repeated this exercise multiple times in each session and in multiple sessions over the past month. With each session, Frankie slowly changed the details of what Jillian remembered from her day at the bay. People thought memories were fixed, but nothing could be further from the truth. Every time you pulled a memory off the shelf and put it back, you changed it. Therapists had a name for the process. Reconsolidation. Her husband, Jason, was a neuroscientist who could describe how it worked in terms of proteins synthesized in the brain. What it really meant was that every recalled memory was like soft clay. While it was out there, in your hands, it could be molded and shaped into something new.

“Are you ready?” Frankie asked.

“Yes.”

Frankie pushed a button on the remote control, and the video screen dissolved into a new loop. She’d filmed it at the bay herself, near the San Mateo Bridge, from a kayak, using actors. It showed the water and the waves. It showed gloved hands paddling and the sleek craft slicing through the water. The day was perfect, with sun and blue sky. Music played — the same music that had been humming from the overhead speakers. The same music she’d played at every one of Jillian’s sessions. Music had power over the mind.

“Tell me about that day,” she told the girl.

Jillian did. She went over the details of that trip with her mother, the way she had done dozens of times before. The first time, weeks ago, she’d begun to reexperience the trauma of drowning when Frankie stopped and focused her solely on relaxing images of water. The next week, she’d let Jillian remember the accident, but she’d guided her to believe that her mother had been beside her almost immediately, righting the kayak. There was no danger.

Now she wanted to disassociate Jillian from the accident altogether. That was the last stage of the treatment she’d developed for the girl.

“I feel a current,” Jillian said, her voice quavering. “Where did that come from? I’m losing control.”

“Don’t worry. You’ve got this.”

“No, it’s going over. I’m scared. I can’t get out. Mom!”

“It’s not you, Jillian,” Frankie told her. “It’s someone else.”

“I’m going into the water!”

“No, it’s not you. Look closely. There’s another kayak near you. Do you see it? She’s in trouble, but you’re safe.”

Frankie pointed at the video on the screen, where another kayaker paddled a few feet away. She’d reconstructed a completely different version of the accident for Jillian to see and remember. The new kayak — the fictitious one — wobbled unsteadily in the waves. The San Mateo Bridge loomed beyond them, tall and silver.

“See? It’s not you, Jillian. It’s someone else. You’re fine. You’re in control.”

“She’s going to tip!”

“Yes, but your mother is right there to help her.”

“I see her!”

“Yes, she’s right there. She’s helping. Everything’s okay. See, that other girl is already right-side up again.”

“Yes.”

“Everyone is safe now.”

“Everyone’s fine,” Jillian said.

“You’re fine, aren’t you, Jillian?”

“I’m fine.”

“Okay. Why don’t you relax for a few minutes, and then we’ll do it again.”

“Sure.”

Over the next hour, they repeated the entire recollection four times. By the third time, Frankie didn’t need to prompt her. Jillian told the story from beginning to end, and in her telling, she didn’t topple under the weight of the current. She kept control. Another kayaker fell, just for a moment, and her mother helped her get free.

That was her reality now. That was what she remembered.

The terrible irony for Frankie was that her patients forgot the past, but she kept their secrets in her own head. She could still feel Jillian’s panic as she suffocated under the water. Thinking about it made her own chest heavy, and she had to struggle to breathe. The same thing happened with every patient, whether it was a soldier or a child. She heard the vibration of every bomb, saw the torn limbs of every victim, winced under the touch of every abuser. It was as if their memories became hers.

When the session was over, Frankie left Jillian in the therapy room to sleep before being brought out of hypnosis. She kept the music on and the video of flowers playing on the screen. Outside, the girl’s mother was waiting. Her face was anxious, and there was a question in her eyes. Frankie smiled.

“I think we’re there,” she said. “We’ll know soon.”

Ten minutes later, Frankie used the speakers to awaken the girl and let her come back to full consciousness. Not long after, the door to the therapy room opened, and Jillian walked out on her own. She stretched her arms over her head, gave a bleary yawn, and beamed at her mother.

“Hey,” the girl said. “You been waiting long?”

“No, not long at all,” her mother replied. The woman got up and hugged her daughter.

“Would you like a drink, Jillian?” Frankie asked. “I poured you some water.”

Frankie pointed at a glass of water on the bookshelf by the door. She could see Jillian’s mother wince and hold her breath. Jillian’s eyes shot to the water glass. Her head jerked once. A sharp inhalation swelled her chest, and confusion blew like a fast-moving cloud across her face.

Then she relaxed and grinned. Her freckles danced.

“Wow, yeah, thanks. I’m really thirsty.”

Jillian picked up the glass and drank the whole thing.