The Amulet—Chapter 2
Shaking her head, as if the motion could shake loose her own painful memories of that day, Elspeth decided that she couldn’t stand to read her daughter’s faithful recounting of the commands she had issued to those poor students and skipped ahead several pages.
When I finished with my list, I felt a bit like an orchestra conductor just before the music starts. When the bell rang, the whole class would suddenly forget that anything unusual had happened during class and would run off to complete the second part of the command I had given each of them. I watched the second hand on the clock ... ten seconds ... five seconds.
The bell rang and the class erupted in chaos. Everybody was yelling at me and calling me horrible names. Instead of running out to buy dresses and begging the chess team to fuck them as I had commanded them to do, a couple of the football players grabbed me and slammed me against the wall so hard my teeth rattled. I grabbed for my amulet. It was gone.
“Don’t hurt her!” Ms Carter yelled from somewhere behind the crowd. “She’s sick and doesn’t know what she is saying!”
I saw her grab Billy Barker and the Anderson twins and send him off to do something. Then she started working her way through the crowd saying, “It’s called schizophrenia. She doesn’t know what she is doing. Just go to your next class and tell the next class coming in to wait in the hall.”
They weren’t saying “as you command”, but they were obeying her. Ms. Carter had to be wearing my amulet! I howled, twisted my body hard and kneed one of the footballers in the crotch. The other one loosened his grip enough for me to yank my arm free and I rushed at Ms. Carter, claws first. Instead of standing there looking surprised or frightened, she calmly grabbed my wrist, stepped toward me and twisted her body so that most of my weight rolled up on her hip.
My last thought as I sailed though the air was “I didn’t know Ms. Carter knew judo” before I hit the tiled concrete floor and my breath was knocked out of me. I started to get back up when she said, in a voice that sounded surprisingly like my mother’s, “You were just knocked out,” and the world went away.
Elspeth sat aside to book and took another sip of tea. She had interviewed several people and knew what happened next.
When Patricia Gardner was admitted to the hospital psychiatric unit, the young psychiatrist assigned to her expected acute schizophrenia. He was relieved to see that she was coherent (if a bit hostile) and could carry on an intelligible conversation. She, however, showed no remorse for her actions at the school and instead seemed fixated on contacting her mother.
After considerable coaxing, she opened up enough to explain that she believed her mother was out of town for several days at an unknown location and was unaware of what had occurred at the school or that Patricia had been admitted to the hospital. Patricia refused to believe that her mother had signed the admission papers, even when shown the signature, and seemed bent on shifting the blame for both her actions and the consequences of her actions onto the teacher present when Patricia had her breakdown.
The psychiatrist recommended Patricia be kept overnight for observation and set an appointment to meet with both Patricia and her mother together the following morning. He withheld the decision to transfer Patricia to a long-term mental health facility until after that meeting.
Reading, Elspeth realized Patricia had skipped over all of this.
I wasn’t really worried until they told me that I had a meeting with Mother in the morning. Armed with the amulet, I knew Ms Carter could make anybody believe almost anything, including accepting a forged signature as real. It hadn’t occurred to me until they told me about the meeting that Ms Carter may have found Mother and used the amulet on her. In the morning, I could be meeting a puppet of the amulet instead of the mother I remembered.
I tried to escape, honestly I did. But I didn’t have anything sharp or hard and had no idea how to pick a lock even if I had something like that. I spent the better part of the night pacing back and forth trying to figure out a way to escape, but that had taken away almost everything I had. I wasn’t even allowed to keep my shoelaces!
When it came time to write in my diary, I didn’t have the diary or anything to write with. I had never been in a situation like this—commanded to do something but unable to do it. It was like an itch that I couldn’t scratch ... an itch behind my eyeballs. I started getting tired pacing so much, so sat down and started rocking. Sitting still was simply not an option when every part of me screamed to move.
I noticed a hangnail and started chewing on it. Once I started, the urge to move kept me at it until I noticed a spot of blood on my finger. I started writing on the walls in my own blood. I had to chew quite a bit more to get enough to write with, but I managed to get a paragraph into it before somebody noticed me on a security camera and stopped me. I tried to explain to them that I just needed my diary and a pen but they bandaged my hands and strapped me down instead.
By the next morning, the urge to write in my diary had passed. I tried to convince the nurse I was better when he came to fetch me for breakfast. He didn’t look very convinced and frowned when I tried flirting when other things didn’t work. But he did let me up and I almost made it to breakfast before something else happened.
Every day for the last several years I have gotten up and made breakfast for mother and I. I didn’t even think about it, it was just something I did. I even made breakfast for two on the morning after she left. I had never considered it was a command until the one morning I couldn’t do it and tried to walk by a locked door leading to a kitchen when I should have been cooking.
The nurse had two other people helping him pull me away from that door when mother’s voice rang out. “Patricia Ann Gardner! Stop making a spectacle of yourself and come here!”
Mother hadn’t commanded the nurses to do anything but they let me go anyway upon hearing Mother’s voice. Hearing myself say “as you command” was suddenly not a burden any more—it was one of the sweetest sounds I had ever heard.
I tried to keep myself from grinning when I walked up to mother. I didn’t need to see the amulet under her blouse to know she had it again. With a few commands from her, nobody would even remember that I had ever been here.
“I’d like to go home how, please,” I said in my nicest voice. It was then that I looked up into Mother’s eyes.
I expected to see sternness or amusement or even thoughtfulness in her eyes. Instead, she simply looked tired. She also looked like she had been crying.
“We are due at a meeting,” she said quietly. Then she turned and walked away. In her hand, I noticed she carried my diary—not the fake one that she had been reading for years but the real one she had commanded me to make. I followed with a growing feeling of dread.
The psychiatrist stood with a faintly smitten look on his face when Mother entered the room. She didn’t wait for him to speak.
“You will do everything in your power to make sure my daughter becomes a good, well adjusted woman,” she commanded. She didn’t wait to hear the usual reply before she turned to me. “You are released from every command I have ever given you and are free to become your own woman.”
A weight I didn’t know I had been carrying my entire life lifted from me. How many commands had I been accumulating for the last sixteen years?
“This meeting is over,” she said before anybody had even sat down. I considered what we would do when we got home. Maybe I would have Mother buy me some sexy clothing that I hadn’t considered wearing for years. When we reached the door, it didn’t open automatically for us and I almost bumped into her. She stopped, leaned her head against the door and sobbed—once.
Not knowing what else to do, I looked back at the psychiatrist. I assumed he had some way of opening the door. The psychiatrist was still standing at the meeting room table, leafing through my diary. Mother had left it right next to him. He must have felt my eyes on him because he looked up and saw us waiting to leave. Mother was still leaning against the door.
“This really is the best thing. I’ll do everything I can for her,” he said.
“I know you will,” Mother replied. “I ... Patricia, sit down at the table for a little bit for me.”
My thoughts were whirling when I said “as you command” and sat down.
“So I need to convince this guy that I’m well adjusted before you let me leave?” I asked Mother. “I can do that.”
“I don’t need you to convince anybody of anything,” Mother replied. “I want you to be well adjusted: a credit to society and a woman I can respect. I don’t know what I did wrong but I don’t think you are that now.”
I hung my head with my hands in my lap. “I’ll do everything I can for you, Mommy,” I said in what I called my pitiful little-girl voice. “I love you.”
“Don’t ever lie to me or the doctor ever again,” she said. The door buzzed, opened, and she walked out of my life.
I was still shouting curses at her when the doctor injected me with something and the only life I had ever known simply faded away.
This is my third attempt to write what happened. The doctor keeps asking me if this is the whole truth and I’ve had to tell him no. Maybe after reading this I won’t have to write any more diaries. I don’t like it.
Hospital privacy laws being what they were, it would have been difficult for anyone else to have gotten the book. But not everything that was difficult for others was difficult for Elspeth Gardner. The young doctor had read the diary and hadn’t asked Patricia to write any more of them.
Elspeth had taken the diary out of a file cabinet. Nobody would miss it. Finishing her tea, she tossed the book in the fire.