Young Writers Society

Chapter One

Ellen Traum watched the woman walk into her office, carefully taking stock. She was in her mid- twenties, probably, and she wore baggy jeans and a man’s button-down shirt. Her eyes were downcast, but then again, almost every patient that Dr. Traum saw came into the office with their eyes on the carpet. Ellen smiled at the woman and invited her to sit on the soft, welcoming sofa. The woman sat stiffly, her hands in her lap.

“You must be Margaret,” Ellen said softly.

The woman tilted her hair. “Maggie. I’m Maggie.”

Ellen smiled. “Maggie. Tell me, Maggie, why do you feel that you need therapy?”

Maggie entwined her fingers and bit her lip. When she spoke, her voice was soft and uncertain. “I think. . .I think I’m going crazy. I just want someone to. . .I don’t know, see what’s wrong with me.”

“I can tell right now that there’s nothing wrong with you, Maggie.”

“You don’t have to say my name all the time.”

“Why don’t you tell me what you’re feeling, and I’ll just listen. Talk as long as you want. I’ve got all day, and tomorrow if you need it.”

Maggie didn’t take the joke, not even cracking a smile. She glanced up into Ellen’s eyes, but only for a split second and then once more her gaze slipped down into her lap. “Well, I guess it started seven years ago. I was nineteen.”

I was nineteen years old, and in love. His name was Shen and he was everything. He used to write me these little love notes and stick them in this old metal Snoopy lunch-box that he bought on Ebay and every morning I’d check it. They were always funny and sweet, just little notes to cheer me up. He used to cook these. . .weird meals too. He’d say, “go lie down, Maggie, have a cigarette, and I’ll make palak paneer.” Spinach and cheese.

We lived in this tiny apartment above a print shop. I dropped out of school when I was seventeen and we moved in together, paying rent with his paycheck from working at a fast food place. I was so happy with him, just a simple life, you know? No frills.

On three days before Easter he told me he had cancer. I’m not a Christian or anything, but Shen wanted to have an Easter egg hunt in the apartment. He was always doing crazy stuff like that. When he told me I just cried thinking about how we wouldn’t get to find each other’s eggs, that we might never have another Easter. But then he started crying and I was crying and I told him I’d love him forever but I wondered because forever is a long time, you know? Forever.

I’m saying thing all wrong. I loved Shen. Nobody really took the time to fall in love with me, because I was always kind of quiet I guess, but Shen did. He cared about me and when he died I just cried and cried because I knew that in my whole life I would never have anyone as special as Shen. No one would ever love me like he did.

The night he died I went back to the apartment and I just sat there on his bed, remembering. Two years we had lived there together. I lay there crying, feeling the curled up into a little ball as if somehow I could keep out the sorrow that was drowning me, drowning me. When I was done crying I got the phone from the dresser across the room and, very slowly, stopping to think about what I was doing between each number, I dialed my mother.

It picked up after one ring. “Hello Maggie.” Her voice was stiff. We hadn’t spoken since the night I told her I was moving out, two years before.

“How’d you know it was me?”

“Doesn’t your phone have caller ID?”

“It’s a really old phone here, Mom.”

An uncomfortable silence fell between us and I could hear her breathing on the other end, and the clang of pots and pans. Dad was cooking something. In those unbearable two seconds I remembered how it used to be. We fought every night, over the littlest things. She hated that I was failing school and that I wasn’t as brilliant as my sister Haley and I wasn’t going to Harvard. But I remembered the good things too, things that hurt so much more than the bad things. I remembered the was she used to sing when she cooked dinner, old Irish songs that sometimes made me cry. I remembered playing cards by the fire, and always, always, losing.

Finally I spoke. I knew how pathetic I sounded. “Mom I don’t really know why I’m calling, but I don’t have anyone else to call.”

She wasn’t a bad mother; she knew when her baby was in pain. “Oh, honey, what’s wrong.”

A new round of tears started and more than anything I wanted her to wrap her loving Mom-arms around me and smother me in forgiveness. “Shen died.” The words were small and sharp in my mouth, like iron and salt, like blood. I didn’t want Mom. I wanted Shen.

She drew in a small breath. “I’m so sorry, Mags.” No one every called me Mags, except my mother. “Honey do you want to move in with your father and I? Until you work something out?”

I was sobbing, tears streaking down my cheeks and dripping off my chin to fall into my lap and soak into my jeans. I wanted Shen to wipe them away, to kiss me and tell me that we were going to be together forever. “Okay.”

I lowered the phone from my ear and pressed the OFF button. I lay back into the sheets, letting myself be swallowed by the warmth of the bed that had held me and Shen for so many nights. I curled over onto my side, staring at the strip of three pictures taken at a mall. Shen and me side by side, smiling. Shen and me kissing, with me turning away from the camera. Shen and me smiling while he made bunny-ears behind my head.

The phone rang beside my chest. I started to pick it up, then changed my mind and curled my arm under my head, too tired even to answer the call. The machine took over, in Shen’s voice. “Hey. You’ve reached Shen and Maggie. If you’re a telemarketer, we don’t care about you so hang up. If you’re not a telemarketer, leave your name and number and we’ll call you back. Thanks.” A beep, and Shen’s vice continued.

The hair stood up on my spine. Only three hours earlier I had closed his eyelids over his vacant, leering, dead eyes and now here he was on the answering machine. “Hey Magpie it’s Shen, just callin’ to tell you I love you forever. Give me a call.” And there was a number, with an area code of 666.

“He left me a message,” Maggie said disbelievingly.

Ellen furrowed her brows, intently listening to her patient’s story. All her college education, all her degrees and her PhD’s were telling her to analyze this woman and find some way to help her understand that this was her mind playing tricks n her, that Shen was dead and she was only wishing for his return. But another side of her yearned for the rest of Maggie’s story, the sheer fiction of it. “Do you think that the massage could have been your mind’s way of bring him back?” she asked carefully.

“I knew you wouldn’t believe me,” Maggie said. She reached into her purse and pulled out a cassette tape, on which was written, Shen, December 2000. “I know everybody listens to CDs and iPods now but do you have a cassette player?”

It took a few minutes, but Ellen found one. She placed it on the coffee table between her own recliner and the patient’s sofa, where she put her glass of water, a little electric waterfall and a bouquet of real flowers. She loaded the tape, not sure what to expect, and pressed play.

“Hey Magpie it’s Shen, just calling to tell you I love you forever. Give me a call.” And, just as Maggie had said, a phone number with the area code 666. Ellen pressed the stop button

For a moment, the Christian in Ellen sent shivers up and down her spine but then the therapist in her took over and she shook herself free of the superstitions. “Maggie, I had a friend in college whose home area code was 666. It’s Jackson, Kentucky. And do you think it could have been someone playing a prank call?”

From her little blue purse, Maggie pulled, one by one, six more tapes. Softly she said, “Every dead person I’ve ever known is living in Jackson, Kentucky. Please don’t be offended if I take my business elsewhere.” She paused and watched Ellen, then smiled as she saw the therapist’s worried look. “I’m joking. I do that sometimes.”

One by one, Ellen played the tapes. Her sister, Haley, killed in a car accident a year beforeshe should have graduated from Harvard. Her grandfather, saying she ought to do something with her life instead of eating her parents out of house and home with her slothful lifestyle. Another brief, loving message from Shen, one from a kindergarten teacher, a great-aunt, an old classmate. Each message followed by the same phone number with the same area code. The number of the Beast.

Ellen was shaking, her hands trembling as she held them folded in her lap like any other therapist. She smiled at the young woman who sat on the sofa, gently crying. “Why don’t you tell me what happened after you moved in with your mother?”

She convinced me to go to get a job. She wanted me to go to college but I dropped out of high school in my junior year so that was out of the question. I worked at a coffee place in town, sweeping floors and stuff. Every night I came home to Mom and Dad sitting down to a nice solid dinner and the routine was getting into my head. I could feel the spontaneity seeping out of me and I hated it. I needed to get out somehow.

I turned twenty-one and I had no one to go out and drink with because my only friend was dead and buried. I had nowhere to go, I just sat at home and watched TV or played solitaire. It was torture. It didn’t help me get over Shen. I just missed him more and more, as if his absence was a tumor like the one that killed him.

I was never close with my sister. She was always talented at everything, sports and people and school. After she went away to Harvard she and I sort of forgot about each other. When she died I barely even cried, but I did cry when I got her message. You heard it, Ellen, you know what she said.

“Hi Sis. It’s Haley. Um, I’m just calling because we haven’t talked for a while and I think we need to. Sister to sister. About your future. Okay, bye. Oh, wait, here’s my number.”

Do you know what it’s like to doubt your sanity? Every day after that phone call I lived in that shadow, wondering what was real and what was some crazy thing my mind thought up. My boss fired me from the coffee house and I didn’t tell my mom, I just kind of wandered through the streets during the day. I needed someone to trust, someone to hold me and love me. I had this hole in me and during those days I needed more than ever to fill it.

Ellen listened intently as Maggie spoke. In all her nineteen years of practicing, she had never heard someone speak with such immediacy, such passion and emotion. She glanced subtly at the clock, a habit that came from sneaking glances during her client’s long rants. She had ten minutes before she was supposed to be done for the day, half an hour until her husband expected her home. She shook the thought from her head and spoke into the silence.

“Tell me more about Shen. It had been years since his death. How did you handle it in those years with your parents?”

Ellen’s office phone rang and she ignored it, as was protocol. One does not interrupt a patient for a call, no matter what. She leaned forward and listened to Maggie’s tale of love and loss.

Maggie left the office twenty minutes after the session officially ended, shuffling slowly out after she collected her cassette tapes back into her blue purse and uttered a hurried thanks. Ellen methodically cleaned the office for the next day’s patients, dusting the table and vacuuming the floor. She checked her e-mail on the laptop hidden inside her desk and turned off the lights to leave before she remembered the phone call during her session. She accessed messages and listened.

“Hello Ellen this is Shen. I’m calling for a patient of yours, Maggie. If you could have her call me that would be great. She knows my number.”

A great weight pressed firmly into Ellen’s chest and she flopped loosely into the chair. This was no disturbed woman’s fantasy. Ellen’s mind raced furiously in aimless circles, never landing on a solution, rapidly becoming entangled in its own tail-strings. Her heart hammering, blood pumping, she listened once more to the dead man’s message.

Maggie left Ellen Traum’s office and collapsed into the driver’s seat of her mother’s Saab, leaning her head back and wiping her hands along her face. Her mind churned with the secrets she had revealed. No one would ever truly know how hard it was to tell someone-anyone-the truth, to spill her festering secrets with a stranger and hope that it was safe. She started the ignition, feeling that familiar vibration as the car started its treble rumble, but she did not pull out of the parking spot. She sat there with her hands on the wheel and her foot resting lightly on the “go” pedal, staring at the licence plate of the truck in front of her.

“I’m twenty-six years old,” she told herself sternly. “I need a life.” She drew in a huge breath of air and smiled as her lungs expanded, oxygen became carbon dioxide. She turned on the radio, found a station playing oldies and pulled out of the parking lot. She didn’t turn onto the street that lead to her parent’s house, but onto a street that would lead her out of the city and into the world beyond. Against Elvis’s chorus of Ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog, cryin’ all the time, she told herself, “It’s a new beginning.” Louder, fiercer. “It’s a new beginning!”