LITMIR.BIZ

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ran away from her face. “That was the last time I drove here with my family. I can’t believe they’re all gone now. I can’t believe I actually could have…” She trailed off and shook her head.

      From the backseat, Jessie leaned forward and patted Amelia on the shoulder.

      Karen glanced at her on the passenger side. Amelia had her head down. She absently twirled a strand of her hair around her finger—the same nervous tic Haley had had.

      Karen remembered Amelia doing that during their very first session.

      Someone from Student Health Services at the University of Washington had referred the 19-year-old to Karen. Karen didn’t have much information on her potential new client, except that her track record with therapists hadn’t been too marvelous. She’d been having problems with alcohol and joined this campus group, Booze Busters. That had worked for a while, but she’d fallen off the wagon when her kid brother had drowned three weeks before.

      When Karen answered her door for their first session that warm Friday afternoon, she was surprised at how beautiful Amelia was. The soft-spoken, polite girl had wavy black hair and blue eyes. She wore a pink oxford-cloth shirt, khaki shorts, and sandals. She said, “Yes, thank you,” to a bottle of water, and sat at one end of the sofa in Karen’s study. “So—what do you know about me?” she asked.

      Karen settled in her easy chair with a notebook and pen. “Not very much, just what they told me at the U’s Student Health Services. Do you know anything about me?”

      “Not very much,” Amelia echoed her, a tiny smile flickering on her face. “But I Googled you. Under ‘Karen Carlisle, Counselor, Seattle,’ there were a few links. I found out that you’re thirty-six years old. You graduated with honors from UCLA. You have a master’s in Social Work from the U, and you were a counselor at Group Health for five years before you started counseling on your own. Your name kept coming up in articles about that girl who got killed last month, Haley Something. Was she a client of yours?”

      “She was a friend,” Karen answered carefully. “But we’re not here to talk about her.”

      “I guess you’re right. This is my hour.” Amelia sipped her water. “Well, I suppose you know I’ve been through a lot of therapists. I’m like a one-session wonder with them.”

      Karen shifted a bit in her chair. “Why is that?”

      Amelia shrugged. “They were all dorks.”

      “Dorks,” Karen repeated.

      Amelia nodded. “For example, my Aunt Ina recommended this Dr. Racine, absolutely raved about her. And she turned out to be awful. The whole time I was talking to her, she sat there and stroked this ugly cat in her lap. I don’t think she was even listening. Every once in a while, she just said something like, ‘You own that,’ or ‘That’s valid.’ I mean, spare me.”

      “Okay, so that’s one crummy therapist,” Karen said. “What about the others?”

      Amelia rolled her eyes. “Well, there was this hippie, who seemed very promising until the end of our first session, when he gave me a homework assignment. He wanted me to go home, get some magazines, and clip out pictures and words that made me feel happy—and pictures and words that made me sad. And then I was supposed to make two posters: a happy collage and a sad collage. So I went home, got some magazines, and found this picture of a little girl waving at someone from a car window. I think it was an auto insurance ad or something. I clipped that out, and cut out the word Good-bye. Then I made a little poster of that and mailed it to him.”

      Karen nodded. She was trying to figure out this young woman, who had come across as so vulnerable and sweet when they’d met just ten minutes ago. But she had a smartass streak, too. Karen wondered just how much of what Amelia said was true.

      “Then there was this Arab guy—not that it makes any difference. I just couldn’t understand him half the time because his English was terrible. He tried to hypnotize me, and kept screaming at me in his thick accent that I was reseesting. And I wasn’t, I swear. Honest to God, I was trying to be a good subject.”

      “Why was he hypnotizing you?”

      Amelia sipped her water. She brushed a piece of lint off the sofa arm. Her focus seemed intent on that. “He was trying to get me to remember stuff about my childhood, before the Faradays adopted me. Didn’t Student Health Services tell you that I was adopted when I was four?”

      Karen shook her head. She made a quick note: Adopted @ 4 yrs old. “Do you know what happened to your biological parents?” she asked.

      “Nope. One of my first therapists was all hot on finding out about them. So my dad tried to get in touch with the adoption agency in Spokane. Turned out the place burned down after the Faradays adopted me. All their records went up in smoke. My folks thought about hiring a private detective to look into it further. I’m sure it couldn’t be too tough tracking down state or county records. I mean, the information’s there, somewhere. Am I right?”

      “I suppose,” Karen allowed. “So did they hire a private detective?”

      “Nope. They dropped the idea when I dropped the therapist.” She cocked her head to one side and squinted at Karen. “I have a feeling my folks would rather I not know about my biological parents.”

      “If that’s true, it’s certainly understandable,” Karen said. “How do you feel? Do you want to know more about your birth parents?”

      Amelia started to fiddle with her hair, and wrapped a strand around her finger. “I guess I’m curious.”

      Karen stared at her, and remembered Haley. She felt a little pang in her heart. “Well, that’s normal enough,” she said, smiling. “So, Amelia, what do you hope to get out of these sessions with me?”

      “Well, I’d like to have more control in my life. I’m tired of being so screwed up.”

      “In what way do you feel screwed up?”

      “I drink. I have blackouts. I don’t remember doing certain things.”

      “What kind of things?” Karen asked.

      “For example, I started seeing this really sweet guy, Shane, about two months ago. Well, one afternoon last week, he saw me at a stoplight in the University District in a beat-up Cadillac with some goony-looking urban-grunge type. He said I was all over this guy.” Amelia shook her head. “I swear to God, I didn’t remember any of it. But after Shane described the guy and his car to me, I had this vague impression that it really happened. I can’t help thinking I might have had sex with this other guy. I went and got tested just to make sure I didn’t pick up any STDs from this—this stranger.”

      “So how did the tests turn out?” Karen asked with concern.

      “Negative—all around. I begged Shane to forgive me, and he did, thank God. He knows I didn’t do it consciously.” She gave a pitiful shrug. “Anyway, see what I mean about being screwed-up and not having any control?”

      With a sigh, Karen leaned back in her chair. “Well, you know, Amelia, I don’t mean to preach at you. But blackouts, memory loss, and erratic behavior generally come with the territory when people drink excessively.”

      “I wasn’t drinking that afternoon. I was napping all day at a friend’s house—at least I thought I was napping.”

      “Were you sick?”

      “No. Hungover,” she murmured. Her eyes wrestled with Karen’s for a moment. “Listen, I was having blackouts when I was in Booze Busters and totally off the sauce. So it’s not just connected to the drinking. I’ve always had this problem with—with lost time, ever since I was a kid. I was pretty screwed up back then, too, having nightmares all the time, along with these pains. My mom used to call them phantom pains. But they were real to me, they hurt like hell. I remember one in particular when I was six. I was playing in the backyard, by our dock, and out of nowhere, I suddenly got this terrible burning

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