The Downward Spiral of Adam Keir | Chapter 20

“How are you feeling?”
            The patient didn’t answer, but this wasn’t surprising to Dr. Frost. He looked down at the notebook in his hands and raised his pen to make a note, but realized that there wasn’t anything to make note of. The patient had hardly said a word during the near-15 minutes that he’d been sitting in front of him.
            Discouraged but not defeated, Dr. Frost sighed and stood up. He began to pace behind his own chair. There had to be something to break the patient’s silence, something that would force a reply.
            “Would you like to talk about what happened?”
            Again, no response.
            “It’s all right if you don’t want to yet. Baby steps are best.” Dr. Frost rubbed his hands together; it was chilly in his office. Snow had fallen that morning, surprising a lot of people. Due to the deluge of rain the day before, the roads were slippery. Frost could only hope his patient had switched to winter tires early. This gave him an idea: to use small talk.
            “Cold, isn’t it? It shouldn’t have snowed until later this month.” But of course, this garnered no response either. Mimicking the silence, Dr. Frost stepped over to the window behind his desk. Frost had begun to form on it corners. Outside was a winter wonderland so white that it was almost blinding. All of a sudden, he wished he’d taken Dana’s old advice of getting blinds made for the window. Knowing that he was near-silhouetted by the light outside, he turned and faced his patient.
            “I do hope you realize now that I’m trying to help you, Adam. You always seemed to think that I had no interest in doing that.”
            Sitting on the chaise longue, feet planted firm against the floor, Adam Keir shot Dr. Frost a sidelong glare. Then he resumed staring off into space.
            “To be honest, you were my most interesting patient. You were the one that I worried about most of all.” Dr. Frost paced back to his chair and stood behind it with his arms crossed. “It surprised me when I heard that you’d married and were leading a normal life. I almost thought you’d recovered from your trauma.”
            “Don’t say that,” Adam grumbled.
            His main priority to keep Adam talking, Frost asked, “Don’t say what?”
            “That.”
            “And what about what I said bothered you, Adam?”
            There was again no answer. Adam had always been reluctant to answer questions, but how to make him speak without further upsetting him was Dr. Frost’s dilemma. It was a good thing, then, that he enjoyed problem-solving.
            “Do you remember much of our previous interactions?” he asked his patient. “How many years ago were they?” He paused, waiting for Adam to answer, but gave up after half a minute. “Let’s see, I was . . . I must’ve been about 24. So it’s been 23 years.” Realizing the date, he added, “And it’s the anniversary of the first time we met, isn’t it?”
            Adam, as expected, kept silent. Dr. Frost picked up his notepad off of the arm of the chair and changed the subject.
            “Do you know why you’re here, Adam?” As he asked the question, he eyed Adam carefully. Sure enough, his answer came in the form of the man discreetly looking off to the side. “You’re here because you left your place of work. Where do you work?”
            “A pawn shop,” Adam murmured.
            “Which one?”
            “Waller’s . . . Waller’s Pawn Shop.”
            “Who do you work with?”
            “Jesse.”
            Dr. Frost examined the information that Adam’s wife had given him. It all checked out, so he nodded to himself before turning his eyes back up to his patient. “When you walked out, Jesse called your wife. What’s her name, Adam?”
            “Larisa,” he hissed, sounding more hostile. He glared up at the psychologist and said, “I don’t have memory problems, Dr. Frost. I remember where I work, who my wife is, where I live, and all that. Stop asking.”
            “Then do you remember Larisa finding you lying down on the train tracks?”
            “I wasn’t lying down.”
            “Your wife said you were. And that you didn’t say anything to her for the rest of the night.”
            Adam brought a leg up, foot on the couch cushion, and hugged it. “I didn’t wake up,” he mumbled.
            Dr. Frost paused for a beat and wrote that down before asking, “What do you mean?”
            “The train hit me. It was supposed to wake me up, or at least kill me. But now I’m here . . .”
            “There was no train.”
            Adam finally looked Dr. Frost in the eyes. “What?”
            “Your wife didn’t mention a train. She found you unharmed, but lying down. There wasn’t an immediate threat, as the train was miles off.”
            “But . . . I saw it. I . . .”
            “Yes?”
            Adam lowered his head. “I see. That wasn’t real, either.”
            Dr. Frost gazed at Adam for a long moment, perplexed. He’d seen the man in bad shape 23 years prior, but now he felt genuine concern for him. Something had seriously warped his sense of reality.
            “So when you went to the train tracks, you did so with intent to take your own life.” Dr. Frost examined Adam’s wording. “But you say that the train was supposed to ‘wake you up’ rather than kill you. What does that mean, Adam? Do you believe you’re trapped within a dream right now?”
            “Whatever it is,” said Adam, “it isn’t reality.”
            “What makes you think that?”
            For a few beats, Adam didn’t say anything. But right as Dr. Frost was about to move on, he confessed, “Things that I have a vivid recollection of . . . Well, a lot of them never happened. But I remember them happening. There’s even a person who . . . doesn’t seem to exist anymore.”
            Dr. Frost jotted that down. “Who is that?”
            Another pause, but Adam did answer after it. “A girl I met last month. Her name was Evangeline, Evangeline Thompson.”
            “And where did you meet Evangeline, Adam?”
            “Online. She followed me on Twitter and every other social media platform that I’m on.” Dr. Frost was about to assume that Adam had been catfished, but then he added, “I met her for coffee at a café, though, so I know she’s real. But then I met her at a motel a few days ago . . .”
            “Which motel?”
            “Motel 6. In, uh . . . Villa Park, I think.”
            “And what happened there?”
            “I spent a few hours with her . . .”
            Dr. Frost raised a brow. Larisa had mentioned that Adam disappeared for an entire night. “A few hours?” he questioned.
            Adam frowned. “Okay, maybe ‘a few hours’ was a lie . . .”
            “You spent the night.”
            “Yeah.” He fell silent again, a guilty look on his face as he bobbed his other leg.
            “I won’t judge you. That’s not why I’m listening. Go on.”
            “Well, I stepped out in the morning, but then I went back inside because I . . . uh, forgot something. And she was gone. None of her things were there. It was like . . .” He shook his head. “Like she was never there. But she was. I’d talked to her less than thirty seconds before.”
            “Who made the reservations?”
            “She did.”
            “Are you sure?”
            “I mean . . . She told me she invited me. I would’ve picked a closer motel.”
            Dr. Frost put his notebook down again. “I don’t think so,” he admitted.
            “Why not?”
            The psychologist looked Adam in the eyes. “Because you were staying at the Motel 6 in Villa Park with your mother when you and I first met.”
            Adam stared at him, eyes wide with surprise.
            “Do you remember that, Adam?”
            “Y�" . . . Yeah . . .”
            “And do you remember why?”
            Adam slouched forward, allowing his raised leg to slide back down. “Um, yeah. Something about a fire.”
            “Where?”
            “My house, I suppose.”
            “What do you remember about the fire, Adam?”
            The man lowered his head. A small smile spread across his face, but his eyes seemed sad. “Well, I remember that it was terrifying. The heat was overwhelming. It was hard to breathe because of the smoke.”
            “And yet you remained inside, didn’t you?”
            “I don’t remember leaving, not until my mother dragged me out.”
            “Why?”
            “Something . . . Someone was still in there. I didn’t want to leave her behind, but she was trapped . . .”
            Now they were getting somewhere, somewhere that they hadn’t been able to get to 23 years ago. Dr. Frost leaned forward as well, mimicking Adam’s slouch. “Who was she, Adam?”
            “I don’t remember. But Evangeline . . . She looked just like her.”
            Dr. Frost leaned back again. He placed his hands together, fingertips touching. “Adam, I have an opinion.”
            “Don’t say it. I don’t care about your opinion, Dr. Frost.”
            But he said it anyway. “I don’t think that Evangeline ever existed.”
            “She did.” Adam glared at him. “In reality, she exists. Not here, though.”
            “Adam, this is reality. Evangeline never existed. The world where she did was the dream world.”
            “And what makes you think that?” he growled.
            “She exists as a means of overcoming your guilt. You feel responsible for the death of that girl, so you created an older version of her�"someone who looks like her but isn’t�"so that you can cope and find a way to make it up to her.”
            “If I felt that bad about the girl, you’d think I’d remember who she is.”
            “Not at all. You repressed your memories of her existence to protect yourself. It was your subconscious that created Evangeline in her image.”
            “Who is she?”
            Dr. Frost crossed one leg over the other. “You repressed her for a reason, Adam. While you have to remember her to move on, telling you outright would do more harm than good. You have to let yourself remember on your own, at your own pace.”
            “I’m ready to know now.”
            “You’re not ready until you remember her without my intervention.”
            Adam lowered his head and grabbed tufts of his quiff-like bangs in his hands. “Who was she . . . ? D****t, who was she?”
            “Don’t force it, Adam. That’ll only push the memories further away.”
            Adam sighed and let his hands drop.
            “Do you know if this is the real world now?”
            “What happened to you and Dana?”
            This question took Dr. Frost by surprise. “We’re here to talk about you right now, Adam, not me.”
            “She pawned the ring you gave her to Jesse and me.”
            Dr. Frost put his leg down and sighed as well. “Figured as much. Convenient that she’d pawn it to you, though. Will it make you feel better if I tell you why she did?”
            “I don’t know.”
            “We separated three months ago.”
            Adam seemed sympathetic, or at least empathetic, with his brows furrowed somewhat. “Why?”
            Dr. Frost shrugged. “Somewhere along the road, our feelings for one another changed. We figured it was for the best that we move on. Spend a few years away from each other, and if our feelings change, we can consider coming back to our marriage. Hence why we didn’t divorce outright. We’ll do that if one of us meets someone else.”
            “But her wedding ring . . .”
            “We’d renew our vows with new rings if we returned to one another. I figure she sold the ring because it made her feel like I was still with her.”
            Adam paused, then said, “I still have it, if you want it.”
            The offer also came as a surprise. His expectation would’ve been that Adam would want the ring sold away as soon as possible, but he’d kept it instead. But then again, he supposed it was more because of a concern for Dana than for him; he’d always liked her more.
            “That’s thoughtful of you. But no thank you. It’s for the best that she sold it.”
            The man gave a small nod in response. “Well, if you ever change your mind . . .”
            “Thank you.” Dr. Frost picked his notebook back up. “Speaking of, how is your relationship with Larisa, if you don’t mind me asking?”
            Judging by the way Adam looked away, the question seemed to trouble him. “I’m not sure,” was his answer.
            “Not sure?” repeated the psychologist.
            “As I said, a lot of the things that I remember never happened here. So I don’t know.”
            This answer was followed by the beeping of Dr. Frost’s wristwatch, indicating that their hour was up. It hadn’t felt like an hour, and he was considering asking Adam to stay a while longer, but before he could, the man stood up.
            “Adam?”
            “Time’s up, doctor. I’m leaving now.”
            “Well . . . Wait a moment. I’ve got some time before my next client arrives.”
            “I’m not going to say anything more to you, Dr. Frost.” Adam seemed dead-set on leaving, what with his stern tone and glare. So Dr. Frost reclined in his chair again.
            “If you insist . . .”
            Less than a minute later, Adam was out the door, leaving the psychologist alone to ponder their brief discussion. Though the man had been silent for most of their hour, he’d at least been able to make some progress. His only concern was Adam’s obvious disconnect from reality. While he didn’t want to worry Larisa Keir by telling her to put her husband on some sort of suicide watch, he could only hope that Adam was at least on the fence now about whether this was the real world.
            He opened his notebook and looked at his notes on the case. Out of everything he’d heard, it was the concept of Evangeline Thompson that troubled him most. Adam had to be made aware that she was no more than a figment of his troubled imagination, but he couldn’t be sure that he’d done a good job of convincing him. For what felt like the first time in his career, worry led him to not want to wait a week to see how this story progressed. But unfortunately, beyond their designated hours together, the life of Adam Keir was none of his business.