Brian Freeman - The Night Bird

He thought about Francesca Stein as he followed her. She was strange, complicated, and beautiful, like a puzzle box for which there was no key. He liked her, but he didn’t particularly like the way she made him feel. She was out of his league.

Frankie parked in the underground garage of her building in the Tenderloin. It was late, and she was alone. She walked to the elevator with her head down and her hands tightly gripping her elbows, as if she could hold herself up that way. When she got home, her condominium was dark. She uncorked an open bottle of wine in the refrigerator and poured herself a glass, which she carried up the stairs to their bedroom. Jason was asleep. She stood at the end of the bed and drank her wine and stared at her husband. When the wine was gone, which didn’t take long, she cupped the glass in her palm.

Eventually, as he shifted, he became aware of her presence. He pushed himself up in bed. “Frankie?”

“Yes.”

Silence lingered between them.

“Are you coming to bed?” he asked.

She didn’t answer, and he leaned over to turn on the lamp on his nightstand. A yellow glow illuminated them.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

Frankie turned away and went to the windows. She put the toe of her heels against the wall and rested her forehead and palms on the glass. It was like flying. The long fall to the street stretched out below her. “Something happened to me tonight,” she said.

Jason got out of bed. “What is it? Was it Newman? Did he do something to you?”

“No, it’s not that,” she said.

“Then what?”

“I had what I’m pretty sure was a psychogenic seizure.”

Jason folded his arms on his chest. He looked clinical. “How bad?”

“Bad enough. Muscle spasms. Panic. Sweating.”

“Has this ever happened to you before? Have there been previous episodes?”

“No, this was the first.”

He sat back down on the bed. “We should have you tested to make sure there wasn’t a physical cause.”

“That’s not necessary,” Frankie replied. “I know what this was.”

They stared at each other. She could see the truth in his face. He knew where this conversation was going. She should have guessed it much earlier, but she’d written off the mental clues to stress and grief. Doctors made the worst patients.

She turned around and leaned back against the window. Part of her hoped it would give way and let her fall.

“We both know what caused this, don’t we?” she asked him.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Do you remember the patient I told you about three years ago?” Frankie asked. “He was involved in an attempted mugging in Los Angeles. He had a concealed handgun, which he used to shoot the assailant. Then he tried to give CPR, but the mugger died of the gunshot wound. The man was tormented by what he’d done, regardless of the justification. He came to me because he wanted his memory of the event completely erased.”

“I remember,” Jason said.

“Two months after our treatment, he began to have seizures. The doctors thought it was epilepsy, but there were no abnormalities in his EEG. They sent him back to me, and I realized his brain was rebelling against what we’d done. The actual memory of the event was gone, but the underlying trauma was still there. It took a much longer series of traditional treatments to work his way through it.”

Jason didn’t ask why she was telling him this.

“Heights have never bothered me before,” she went on, “but do you know what I see when I look down now?”

“What?”

“I see my father at the base of the cliff. That’s strange because I wasn’t there. I was at our campsite when he went hiking. I never saw my father’s body. I was never on the cliff, and I never looked over the edge. The rangers found him. And yet I can see it in my head, Jason. I can see him lying there.”

“What do you want me to say?” her husband asked.

“I want you to admit what you did to me. You changed my memory of that weekend, didn’t you? All along, I thought that I’d blocked it out. All I could see were images. Snapshots. But they were images you planted there, right? You erased what really happened. You erased what I saw.”

Jason stood in front of her, his face a mask. “Yes, I did.”

“Why?”

“Because you asked me to,” he said.

Frankie closed her eyes. He wasn’t lying. She’d already realized what the truth had to be. This was something she’d chosen .

“Was any of it real?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean. Did he really say he was proud of me?”

Jason didn’t answer immediately. Then he said, “Why go down this road, Frankie? There’s a reason you wanted to forget it.”

“I want to know,” she snapped. “Tell me.”

“No, your father never said that.”

“You lied to me. You planted a lie in my head.”

“A lie? Get over yourself. It’s no different than what you do with patients every day. You take away bad memories, and you replace them with better memories. Don’t blame me if you don’t like your own medicine.”

He was right about that, too. She looked into a mirror, and she didn’t like what she saw. What Jason had done to her was exactly what she did to her own patients. She left her fingerprints inside their brains. She played God. Now, for the first time, she knew what it felt like to be on the receiving end. She wondered how many of the people she’d tried to help found themselves riddled with doubts after it was over. How many of them felt as if they were staring into a well where they couldn’t see the bottom? How many wished they could know the truth again, after the truth had been swept away?

“What really happened out there?” she asked quietly.

He shook his head. “It’s wrong for me to tell you. You didn’t want to remember.”

“Look, if you don’t tell me, I’ll just go downstairs and ask Pam. She knows what you did, right?”

“Yes.”

“So tell me,” Frankie said.

“What do you remember?” Jason asked.

“Nothing. I remember nothing. Just the image of him where he fell. How his body looked. His blood on the rocks.” She stopped, because the image began to get clearer in her brain. The blood was a new detail. She hadn’t seen it before in her flashbacks.

“If I tell you, it might make it worse,” he pointed out. “Sometimes the memories come back more intensely and more painful than before.”

“I’ll take that risk. Right now, I have to know.”

Jason laced his fingers on top of his head, and he grimaced, as if he were on a jury, deciding someone’s guilt or innocence. “Your father didn’t fall. He jumped.”

Frankie’s knees quivered. She felt dizzy, and she pitched forward, and Jason caught her. He helped her to the bed, and then he went to the bathroom and prepared a warm, damp towel, which he dabbed against her face. He sat down next to her, their legs touching.

“I saw it?” she asked.

“You went hiking with him that morning, the way you usually did. He was ahead of you on the cliff trail. You saw what he was about to do, and you shouted for him to stop, but he simply fell. And then you ran to the edge and saw him on the beach below. You couldn’t deal with it. You went back to the campsite. You stayed in your tent for hours, and then finally, you went to find the rangers, and you told them your father was missing.”

She shook her head in disbelief. “For God’s sake, why did he do it? Did I say something? Did we argue?”

“You know he had bouts of depression. He’d talked about suicide before.”

“Yes, but he was the supreme narcissist. It was just talk. I can’t believe he actually did it.”