Page 39 of Senseless
"You promised to come back if you ever had to leave," Mari called after me.
Turn around, some voice told me.Turn around and keep your fucking promise to the woman you love.
I didn't turn around. I clenched my fists and kept walking.
I foundDoc a few hours later, tinkering with one of the laundry machines that had started leaking.
"Hey, Doc." I approached him, carefully stepping over his tools laid out on the floor.
"Ivan, what can I do for ya?" He barely looked up, elbow-deep in the guts of the machine. "We don't have a session for a couple of days."
"It's not that. I, uh, could use a favor."
He paused in his work, shoving his glasses up the bridge of his nose as he looked at me. "I'm listening."
"Mariposa, the woman who got in last night," I said.
"Uh huh?"
"She could use a lift back home, to Four Corners."
"Clear across the country?" Doc scoffed. "Why don't you take her? Your joints are much younger than mine."
Damn it. I knew he would ask that.
"It...wouldn't be a good idea," I said. "She and I have some...history."
"Uh huh." Doc leaned back, saying nothing else, as if waiting for me to elaborate. When I didn't, he remarked, "She calls you Shadow, I heard."
"Yeah," I sighed. "It doesn't really matter, but maybe you can arrange someone from town to give her a lift?"
"She's who you're running from." Doc clasped his hands together, a smile pulling at his face from the small epiphany. "Your past has caught up to you, son."
"No," I shook my head. "She has nothing to do with...what I've been seeing you about."
"I never said she did." He continued to observe me in that quiet, curious way that he had since the first night I walked into the service center. "Does she know about it?"
Since talking to her that morning, I felt like I'd been keeping everything bound up tightly with string, and Doc's questions were slowly beginning to unravel it all.
"Not everything," I admitted. "She's a medic and gave me sleeping pills for my nightmares."
Doc nodded sagely as he continued to unravel the thread. "But that's not all, is it?"
I shook my head. "No. We...we got close. Really close." I swallowed. "I hurt her, Doc. Badly."
"I see." A small acknowledgment to the biggest regret of my life.
"She's safest when she's far away from me," I explained. "That's why I left. So please, help me find a way to send her back home."
"You must mean a lot to her," Doc remarked, wiping his hands on a rag. "For her to come all this way."
"Doc," I pleaded, sucking in a breath. "You know my mind better than anyone. You're the only one who knows how fucked up I am to the core. Youmustsee that she's not safe here."
"If she's not, then neither are any of the other women." He stroked his goatee. "Are you telling me you're really no better than the camps that Jen and the others escaped from?"
I blinked, taken aback by the comparison he was making. "No, that's different—"
"Listen, son." Doc took his glasses off and wiped the lenses on his shirt. "I've been providing hypnotherapy to trauma victims for over thirty years, and I'll be honest—your case is one of the longest and most extreme I've seen in my whole career."
