The Final Confession of Mabel Stark: A Novel (An Evergreen book) by Robert Hough Read Free Book Online

quake my stomach, and my heart would start charging along again until it missed the
next beat, the whole thing repeating itself over and over and over.

    It's hard to say how long this torture went on. Inside a completely dark place, time has a habit of looping around and doubling in on
itself and playing tricks. So I can't say. Maybe it was ten minutes,
maybe it was longer. Felt like longer. Felt like forever, if you must
know, and that's a traumatic thing: finding out what an eternity feels
like. What happens is the body exhausts itself, and you go completely
still, and you feel cold and your fingers tingle and your bladder drains
and your mind goes blank. Lying there, I reckoned this was the calming
effect Miss Galt had promised, though it was the sort of calm you get
nightmares about later on.
    So I lay there, vegetabilized and chilled, maybe dead, maybe not,
having completely stopped considering the possibility I might ever get
out of that tub. The door to the room opened. Miss Galt opened the
gaslight. I clamped my eyes against the glare.
    "How are we feeling?"
    I, defenceless as an old woman, weakly muttered, "Good." She
let me out and I tried to dress, though I was so shaky she had to help
me. We went back down the hydrotherapy wing, her walking and me
shuffling, past the front desk and through the wards strung along
women's wing A. She led me to my bed, and it seemed to me the ward
was quieter than usual. Perhaps some of the women were having their
tubbings, I don't know. Linda and Joan were there, and they hustled
over and sat beside me, though neither one of them touched me.
    Linda said, "Don't worry, Mary-first time's the worst."
    Joan added in a softer voice, "Yes ... first time ... the worst," and
all I could do was sit, nerves firing, glad they were there with me.

    I had tubbings the following day, three days after that, and then
the day after that, the scheduling of our hydrotherapy being something
understood by the staff and the staff only .
    The day after that I met my psychiatrist.
    He came by late on a walk morning, just after we'd been led back in. I
was in the day room attached to the ward, wishing I could knit something, feeling low and a little jumpy.
    "Good morning," he said, "I'm Dr. Levine."
    I smiled shyly, sizing him up.
    "I thought maybe we should meet. Is that all right, Mrs.
Aganosticus?"
    He was a short, doughy young man, just shy of thirty, with thin
dark hair pushed to one side of his forehead. As for his face, the nose
was the primary liability, for it was oddly bulbous in shape and it flared
at the sides, like a radish cut open to garnish a salad. As he was not the
most attractive of men, he made up for it by projecting warmth and
sympathy and a general all-round niceness. Immediately I figured him
for being lonely, niceness being something women don't generally care
for in men, and the thought in my head was, Good.
    "Yes," I told him, "that'd be fine."
    He sat looking at me. I wasn't sure whether this meeting would
take place in the future, or whether we were having it now. As Dr.
Levine was just sitting there, I figured the latter was the case, and that
I better say something interesting to get it going. Problem was, I'd
trained myself to be so cautious I couldn't think of anything to say. The
pause lasted long enough I worried he might get bored and leave, so
finally I figured I might as well up and out with it.
    "I don't like being tubbed."
    He smiled slightly, and I worried I'd made a mistake by complaining. My concern disappeared when he said, "Is it the darkness?
The feeling of being trapped? The boredom? Yours is a common complaint, Mrs. Aganosticus. Sometimes I question the value of
hydrotherapy myself. Particularly in light of some of the more progressive treatments coming out of Europe. Perhaps I can ask around,
and see what I can do. Would that be all right?"

    I was stunned.
    "Yes," I peeped, "that'd be fine."
    We talked a little bit