Title: Charlotte's Web (Chapter 56)
Rating: M for graphic violence and language
Fandom: The Mentalist
Summary: Patrick Jane has lived his life obsessed with the capture of Red John ever since finding his beloved wife and daughter slain by the maniac's hand. Now, 10 years to the day after that horrific night, a young woman appears in Patrick's life, someone who threatens to destroy everything his life has become in the interim… if not his sanity, itself.
Author's Note: I need to finish this story. I am procrastinating waaaay too much, and for that, I am sorry. -Lex
'It starts with blood...'
'Blood?'
'Yeah, the image of it. Trickling down the back of my eyelids. The trickle becomes a stream and then a flood. It fills me up. All my empty spaces. But then the blood isn't red anymore...'
'What is it?'
'It's black. Pressing. It feels like my head is going to explode. The only way to relieve the pressure is to open the floodgates, let it spill out..."
-Dexter explaining his need to kill to his sister Deb on the TV show "Dexter"
His kid had been out of school 2 and a half weeks and Jane was going nuts. The school needed her to see a shrink before she would be re-admitted and Charlotte was stone-walling. Of course, it would have been easy enough for Jane to simply make something up, pull some strings, manipulate some hired psychiatrist, or as a last resort, manipulate Charlotte into going along with the shrink appointment... but he was worried about her, too. And, if he was honest with himself, he was pretty sure he couldn't manipulate her- not without her knowing and digging her heels in harder, or figuring out his tactics later and losing trust in him. She was a special case.
His usual methods of operation wouldn't work well, here, and being straight up with people when there was a pressing need wasn't a tactic he had much interest in or skill in executing.
He studied her. He couldn't help but study her. It was what he did. He studied her while she ate her cereal and played with the dog and watched HBO and netflix and played video games and napped on the couch in the apartment's living room with her headphones on and her sleep-deprived, swollen eyes closed as she listened to her music and tried to escape her reality.
All that studying bugged her, Jane knew, but he couldn't stop it. And he couldn't hide it from the teen... she was too well trained.
Each of them were who they were- well trained in mentalism and manipulation in their own rights, traumatized severely and both trying to come together, at this late date, to make up some remnant of a family. It was awkward, and they both had their guards up.
Charlotte retreated to her attic space a lot more, now, and tuned him out, lost in whatever dark thoughts were haunting her, and even as the bruises from her collision with the tree began to fade, the bags under her eyes were more pronounced and darker than ever.
She did shower and leave her sanctuary in the attic sometimes, of course. He'd riffled throught it during those times, not bothering to be stealthy, not caring if he was caught, knowing that in order to survive she had become vigilant and extremely in tune with her enviornment. Her bedroom- messy as usual, with its clothes scattered about, random balled up pieces of paper, errant tubes of chapstick... were highly organized in their own right. Looks could be decieving. The best way to make someone think you weren't paying attention to your environment was to be messy. It created an illusion of chaotic indifference. Who, in their right mind, would notice a troll doll placed a quarter of an inch to the left or right on the shelf in a room which looked like a tornado had hit it? Charlotte would. So he didn't bother trying to be stealthy, and she didn't bother pretending she didn't know her father was going through her shit.
He'd found and disposed of her collection of Monster energy drinks more than once. She'd also picked herself up an electronic cigarette and a large variety of nicotine "juices" for them which he left in their original spot, if for no other reason than energy drinks were easy to replace, but replacing the vape, as a minor, would be a lot harder. He wanted to protect her, let her know he cared... not aggravate her. That would do no one any good. A delicate balance had to be struck between protective father figure and allowing her to have some degree of the freedom she'd grown up with. Some element of control. His kid had had her control in almost all forms stolen from her before she could read much more than picture books, and that theft had left her hypervigilant to percieved risks to her personal autonomy.
But he still had to check her stuff, and check it regularly. Why? He wasn't really certain. He didn't think his kid would harm herself in any straightforward way, and he didn't think she'd leave anything out for him to analyze that she hadn't already shared with him upfront. But still, it made him feel better to check, to at least reassure himself that all was (mostly) secure and safe when it came to her bedroom and the attic hidey-hole.
Charlote had the crossbow and the arrows for it prominently displayed in the attic, on her computer desk. Lisbon had just about given birth to a two-headed red heifer when she saw the gift, but his kid had been impressed. She needed it. She needed a sense of safety, a weapon, something that could do damage. It was physically impossible for her to shoot herself with the thing, though, and Jane knew she wouldn't shoot him with it. No way in hell would he let her have access to a gun, even though, he suspected, a gun would have made the most logical sense to her.
Jane's eyes scanned over the crossbow and the bolts for it, took in a series of little plastic monster toys, hand-painted with model paints. They looked like they were the type which might be used in a role playing board game like Dungeons and Dragons, even though he knew Charlotte didn't play those games. Apparently just having the little collection of monsters on her desk fulfilled some need in her, and he was careful not to knock them over or damage them.
There was the usual collection of teenage posters on the walls. His hands gently palmed over them, feeling for anything which might be taped on the underside of each one, but there was nothing but Metallica and AC/DC pin-ups and other bands that had been big a good 20 years or 30 years earlier and Charlotte's pencil drawings of nightmare creatures coloured with watercolours.
He kept looking. It was his daily routine every time she got in the shower...
He'd found no hard drugs (to his relief), but a huge bottle of motrin, in the waste paper basket in the corner... hidden in a collection of crumpled paper drawings. Like it was something shameful, something that had to be hidden in the trash, those painkillers.
In Charlotte's mind, of course, admitting to any sort of pain was shameful, so it fit with Jane's understanding of her psychology. The mere reality of experiencing pain of any kind and being in need of relief from it was, in Charlie's mind, an indication of a character flaw, a weakness which could be exploited at a later date. Still, the bottle was evidence that whatever stress she was under was causing her physical pain often enough that the bottle had been purchased in the first place. Worrisome. He left the motrin where it was and moved to the floor-board.
Under a loose floorboard near her computer desk he'd found an old coffee tin containing a large selection of what appeared to be stolen credit cards. That had been the day after the night she'd pulled the cord that let one into the attic up, so no one else could get up there. He'd been both amused and a little anxious by their presence. Now, he pulled the tin out, flipping again through the cards, to see if there were any more of them today.
She came back from a shower, then, dressed but still drying her hair with a towel, came back into the attic and stared as her father made no move to hide his rummaging.
It wasn't the first time she'd caught him going through her things, and both of them knew it wouldn't be the last. She huffed out an annoyed sigh as she came up into the attic.
"What are you doing in here?" Charlotte finally said, sounding annoyed but not at all surprised at the invasion of her privacy. Jane ignored the question. In his mind, it was a rhetorical question. Still, he offered an answer that he hoped would act as peace offering.
"It's not good for you to hole up in here so much. Quite troubling to me, actually. Looks like the beginning of depression."
"So that's why you're invading my privacy?" His kid's tone of voice was bored, a little annoyed. Nothing he couldn't handle or make right. Part of him delighted in how ordinary that tone of voice was. Pretty much all teenagers who weren't raised in destructively authoritarian households got that snotty tone of voice with mom or dad at least once a week.
"I'm invading your privacy because I'm your father, and I'm concerned about you," Jane said in an absent-minded tone and clicked the internet browser on her laptop open. Charlotte came over to the computer with another annoyed sigh, took the mouse from Jane's tanned hand and closed the browser with an extra exhausted huff for emphasis. Gave him a look that said he was going too far and he held up his hands in a 'don't shoot' gesture and tried on a smile. She relaxed, but only a little.
Jane wandered over to the beanbag in the corner of the attic, sat down with a huff of his own, still holding her coffee can of credit cards. None of which were in her name.
"I know, you'd rather I be back at school," Charlotte said tiredly, when her computer was back under her control. She approached Jane, who was still sitting on the oversized beanbag in day-glo colours in the corner of the attic hidey-hole, sitting like he had all the time in the world with her coffee can of stolen credit cards and grabbed the tin from his hands with a tired expression on her face. He made no move to stop her.
"Care to explain where those came from?" Jane asked, trying to keep the amusement out of his voice. He'd never be a stereotypical father, but he could at least attempt to use the right tone of voice when he caught his kid, red-handed, in possession of stolen property.
"Survival," Charlotte said with a wave of the hand. It wasn't an answer to his question, of course, but it was an explanation for why she was stealing them in the first place.
"I get that, but where'd you get them from?"
"Various Red John associates who were easy to pick pocket and too scared of Red John to ever mention the thefts, if they even noticed them. Most of them haven't even been cancelled yet."
She put the lid back on the coffee can, put the coffee can back under the loose floorboard. Funny, really, hiding it like that, when they both knew where it was, and what was in it. Jane suspected that as soon as he was out of the attic, she'd move the coffee can somewhere else.
"Don't give me that look, Patrick. Like you've never picked a pocket in your life."
"Of course I have," Jane acknowledged. "But I haven't picked a pocket with the intention to actually steal the contents in a very long time. Besides, don't you think it might be dangerous to keep these?"
Charlotte shrugged. "They enable me to have some measure of financial independence."
"If you need money, you can always ask me. Or, you know, get an after-school job at an ice cream parlour or something."
"Yeah, but this way is much easier." She was grinning, that damned mischevious grin that Jane suspected he had worn one time too many around Lisbon. Well, at least he knew what that felt like, now.
It wasn't quite as endearing as he'd always assumed.
He stared at his daughter, kept his tone light, but his eyes were sharp and alert.
"Planning on a little trip, maybe?" Jane pressed. The idea had been nagging at him lately, the idea that Charlotte might bolt. She was too tightly wound, too nervous. She felt like a sitting duck waiting for Red John to reappear, Jane knew. The temptation to run away, even for a weekend, would be over-powering.
Of course, running away wouldn't make her any safer, and would probably make her a hell of a lot less safe. But anxiety didn't always work in logical ways.
In one way or another, she'd been running for the past decade. Why stop now?
"Is there something you want, Patrick?" Such a stereotypical teenage reply, but the context was all wrong.
"I'm going to cut up those credit cards, you know. I'd be neglecting my parental responsibilities if I let you keep them," Jane said mildly.
"I'm not seeing a shrink, Patrick, so you can stop trying to win me over by going through my shit and threatening to destroy my personal items."
"Technically, I don't think those credit cards qualify as your personal items, since, you know, they don't actually belong to you," Jane taunted, softening his words with a little smile. Charlotte sighed again.
"Patrick..."
"Why're you so scared to see a shrink, anyway?" Jane asked, tone deceivingly light. He sounded relaxed, his body language was relaxed, but there was no light in his eyes.
"I'm not scared to see a shrink. I've just got better things to do."
"You can't go back to school without a shrink's recommendation," Jane continued, not falling for the bait.
"Then make me up some fake-o note and problem solved," Charlotte shot back. "It's not like you lack the ability to do something like that."
She went over to her computer desk, tugged open the top drawer. Inside was a small plastic pencil box with her vape and extra batteries and nicotine juices in a variety of flavours. She opened this, pulled out the vape, took a few long drags, not even caring that Jane was watching her with his most formidable look of disapproval. The first time she had done so in front of him, actually, puffing away like a regular Puff the Magic Dragon and he knew his expression was shifting into naked disapproval.
He raised his eyebrows, caught a whiff of something sweet in the vapor- cookies? Custard? Something like that...
With Charlotte, he'd been off his A game since the beginning, since she'd come back into his life, back from the proverbial dead. There was too much pain here, and too much distrust and trauma for him to manipulate her freely. Plus, she'd been trained.
But enough was enough. His kid couldn't keep going like this. Her hands were shaking. Adrenaline and cortisol overload. She'd collapse, soon, if he didn't do anything.
"You're addicted to caffeine. And you're addicted to nicotine. You're not sleeping and you're seeing things which I don't believe exist in our physical world," Jane kept his words in the same easy and light rhythym he'd used since the beginning of this talk. Charlotte's cheeks went red, though, and he knew his words had cut her. He didn't have to actually say much. Any sort of mention of any perceived weakness or short-coming on her part threw her off balance, was enough to make her wince in shame. It was hard for Jane to see, and he hated this part of confronting her, but he was out of ideas.
Normally Jane didn't want to throw her off balance, but she'd had her guard up so consistently since the episode at school that he didn't think he'd get much honest information out of her unless she was off balance. She'd spoken to him that first day, that first night, when she was still drowsy from the concussion, but then... then she'd closed up, walled herself off.
He couldn't read her well, not half as well as he wanted to, but it looked almost like despair to him, if what he was guessing was accurate. Severe, scary-as-hell lack of meaning and faith in the world. That sort of extended nihilism after a lifetime of terror could spell tragedy, and it set Jane's teeth on edge, if he was honest with himself.
She was staying up, if the dark circles under her eyes were any indication 2, 3, 4 days and then dropping, sleeping extended periods, 16, 20 hours at a time. Not mania or a drug high, but sheer paranoia and anxiety. She was afraid to go to sleep. And she was depressed. And who on God's green earth could blame her?
The signs were clear and becoming clearer all the time. Agitation and insomnia paired with severe trauma and grief. A scary combination.
The first time she'd let herself go to sleep after the first, drowsy night home after the concussion, she'd fallen asleep in the attic after pulling the pull cord up behind her so Jane couldn't get up into her space. At least, not without getting a ladder and prying the small trap door off its hinges. Something she'd correctly guessed he wasn't willing to do.
He'd tried to talk to her about the guarded sleeping arrangements when she woke and came down for food, but she was shut off, pulled into herself, eyes shuttered and unreadable, expression pinched and strained, the face of a child seconds from wounded tears. Jane just sat at the kitchen table, drank his tea, worked suduko puzzles and watched her like a hawk.
Later that day he'd gotten Van Pelt to hack into his kid's internet activity and read him a list of what she was looking at. Most of it was video game sites, random stupid youtube videos of dogs skateboarding and parrots dressed in knitted sweaters, clips from TV shows that were apparently worth re-watching... but there were also some disturbing finds. A site called Rotten dot com, which was a macabre affront to human decency masquerading as an "entertainment" website, made up of page after page of gory corpse photographs. In additional, there were various blogs and pages discussing the age-old question: "what is evil?" A few sites on demonic possession, and its signs, and its "treatment". Wikipedia searches on a variety of topics... everything from chinese water torture to Mengele's world war 2 experiments.
Delightful stuff.
Jane had feared, in the back of his mind, what Charlotte would go through when things calmed down. He'd feared it right from the beginning. As long as the stress and tensions were high, and she didn't have a chance to relax or process the past, she'd be okay.
But there would come a point when the past would be wrapped up, and then she'd have to deal with her memories, and her trauma, and her pain and the complete meaninglessness and arbitrary nature of it all.
She'd have to face and somehow process all that had been irrevocably stolen from her, all the precious aspects of life that were dead and gone and could never be repaired. Innocence. Virginity. Faith in human goodness. Childhood wonder. Hell, even normal activities like pre-teen sleep overs and school field trips had been taken from her. The stuff most kids bitched about, like having their cavities filled at the dentist and then getting a dollar store prize after. All gone.
He expected it would be brutal, this process for Charlotte... possibly even worse than the breakdown that had led to his confinement on a locked psych ward.
It was why Charlotte's subconscious was in a panic and unable to let Red John go and really be dead, at least as far as Jane could figure out. It was why she was seeing him in the trees at school and was now peeking out the blinds regularly at 2 am to scan the front and back yards of the apartment complex for intruders lurking in the shadows.
It was his best working theory, the one that made the greatest sense to him based on his extensive history of analyzing human minds and manipulating them.
Charlotte was convinced that Red John was still alive and terrorizing her, because if she admitted he was dead, and tried to move on for the first time, the realization of all she had lost would be too great. The story that was her stolen innocence with Red John, the whole Red John saga, would be over. There would be no redemption, no magical return to Eden, to her lost childhood. Just stunning, inconceivable loss.
That pain was too great to face.
Hence, this delusion.
She was keeping the chaos going, because the chaos was a distraction. The chaos blocked out the worst of the grief and pain. If Red John didn't die, then in the realm of magical thinking Charlotte seemed to live in most of the time, there was still hope that things could go back to the way they had been so long ago, before all the badness and spilled blood.
It made the most psychological sense.
So why didn't he feel relieved? Why couldn't he accept his analysis, as he would have done if he was dealing with any other case, any other traumatized teenager?
Well... because Red John was a phantom. A manipulative and devious monster who delighted in setting people up for impossibly hard and long falls.
Because he had already underestimated Red John's ingenuity and devious nature before... and it had cost him his wife, and his child's childhood, and possibly the lion's share of her sanity.
Because... there was too much at stake, here, to be wrong.
Jane had tried to fairly consider the other possibility: that Red John might still be physically alive, but his gut was no help on that one. The death had felt staged, the explosion much too convenient... and yet, it was the type of sadistic mind-fuck Jane fully expected Red John to leave in place as his last middle finger to the world.
To leave everyone who'd ever known of him and feared him uncertain about whether he really was dead or not, as he slipped off into eternity? Jane could totally see Red John getting off on the idea of that.
So, to split the difference, Jane'd invested in good security cameras and alarms and had gotten the dog and even had (on the down-low, of course) gotten Lisbon to train him how to shoot, and gotten a permit and a handgun and rounds for it. The weapon he kept unloaded, in a lock box high on a shelf in the back of his walk-in closet.
It made him uneasy as hell to have the gun in the house, and not just because he had always detested guns and was well aquainted with the statistics on accidental shooting deaths.
Charlotte... her despair... but, damn it... she didn't even know that gun existed.
It couldn't hurt to have a gun in the house, not if he kept it locked and away from Charlie.
It couldn't hurt, and if Charlotte was right, it might be of utmost importance to have it...
And now, sitting in her beanbag chair, watching her watch him, the way she was dead on her feet... terrified to sleep, because sleep meant she couldn't be on guard for danger... his stomach rolled and curled in on itself.
He didn't know how to proceed. He didn't know what direction to go in. He couldn't be confident when he was playing with his own flesh and blood, and there was so much at stake.
Charlie now stumbled on her feet, sat down at her computer desk again, puffed on the vape and spun on her desk chair, eyeing her father as if she might be able to read his mind if she concentrated hard enough.
"I'm not going to see a shrink, Patrick," she said finally, groggy despite all the caffeine and B-vitamins and nicotine in her system, her body pleading her mind for sleep. Begging for it.
There could be no good end to this. Sleep wasn't an option. It was a biological necessity.
"I'm not going to make you see a shrink, but you can't go back to school until you see one, so I suspect we're at something of an impasse," Jane replied, wondering how much of what he was saying was getting through.
She was treading water, just trying to keep afloat, and this would keep going until she had a breakdown or became extremely ill.
"I don't care about school, really, one way or the other. It was you who thought it was such a nifty idea." Another drag on the vape.
"You're going to need a valid diploma, some day."
"I already have one."
"You have a fictitious diploma you made up to gain emancipation from Red John. It won't stand up to any sort of real scrutiny, and I suspect you know that."
"Who cares?" Charlotte sat and watched him and continued to puff her vape.
"What do you want to do when you get older? What sort of job do you want? Because if it's more than being a gas jockey or a 7-11 clerk..."
"Dad, there are other ways to make money. Ways that involve using one's mind-"
"What do you think school is?"
"I think school is a brain-washing facility for sheep who kowtow to authority figures and don't realize that the American petrodollar is going to collapse completely within ten or twenty-"
Jane cut her off. "And if you're wrong? You've just stubbornly maneuvered yourself out of a ton of possibilities which might, some day, actually interest you."
"If that turns out to be the case, I can always get my GED later."
"Why wait? It's not like you're doing anything besides isolating yourself and surfing the internet right now. Wouldn't you rather have the jump on the competition? Just in case, it turns out, you actually benefit from that jump?"
Charlotte sighed. Closed her eyes.
"You're going to pester me about this until I go back to school, aren't you?"
"Of course," Jane said, smiling.
"Fine. But you deal with the shrink stumbling block. I'm not seeing a shrink. I don't trust them and they make me anxious. I'm already anxious enough. Don't you agree?"
"Yes," Jane said, nodding, tone less playful now.
"And wouldn't you also agree that most of them are over-glorified bean counters who want to be the smartest asshole in the room?"
"Bean counters?"
"Instead of counting money and trying to quantify business assets, they try to quantify minds. Sort of the same thing."
Jane was silent a moment. Had to bite the inside of his cheek to keep from grinning.
"Something like that."
"Well, then?"
"Well, that being the case, I would have thought you, of all people, would have no problem manipulating a shrink. Hell, you're having panic attacks, you're not stripping naked, standing on a bridge and screaming at the sky that you're the next incarnation of Mary Magdalene..."
"That's because I am actually the current incarnation of Ariadne-" Charlotte batted back playfully. Jane ignored this. Stared at his kid pointedly.
"If I see one, it's for no more than 15 minutes. I tell about the panic episode, you can fill them in on the nitty gritty back-story, and if they prescribe me any mind altering substances, I choose if I want to take that shit or not. And you buy me a large Blizzard after, and a vanilla ice cream for Dixon... and take me and Dixon to a movie. Deal?"
Jane huffed out a sigh.
"Yeah, fine, that sounds okay to me." Jane held out his hand. Charlotte got up from her computer desk, padded over to him in her stocking feet and shook his hand.
"I am glad we could come to such an equitable conclusion to this little saga," Jane said, almost a purr, and smiled a genuine, delighted smile. His daughter's response was an annoyed roll of the eyes.
"Whatever, Copper. You should just be glad I didn't ask for more stuff."
"Oh? What other things do you want?"
Charlotte stared at him. She didn't want anything else. She already had everything she wanted, and more. What she really wanted, what she was really crushed about, were things Jane could never buy her, could never make up for.
"I don't want to drain your bank account. And we already shook on it."
Jane smiled, got up out of the bean bag chair, dusted himself off and left the kid's safe space.
He still had it... kind of.
The shrink was named Cullen, someone with extraordinary yelp reviews and a very low-key and non-judgmental air about her. She was caucasian, late thirties with a brunette bob and dressed rather informally in slacks and a cream sweater.
Jane saw her first, filled her in on the history and when she came back out and motioned for Charlotte to follow, she seemed unhealthily pale.
The shrink spoke first.
"Your father filled me in on the pertinent aspects of your history, and your past," dark brown eyes sought Charlotte's green one's out. Charlie just nodded, continued to pick on a piece of loose string hanging from one hoodie cuff.
"What do you think the episode at school was all about?" The shrink asked, and there was no judgment in her voice.
Charlotte shrugged.
"Panic attack," the kid finally said.
"Was that the first panic attack you've experienced since you've been reunited with your father?"
"No.. but it was the most... severe."
"Would you like a prescription for some medication to limit the chances of such an attack happening again in the near future, or of progressing to that level of intensity?"
Charlotte considered this. "I don't really feel comfortable with the idea of medication."
The shrink nodded immediately. "I was thinking more like a PRN, something you take when you feel a panic episode coming on. Not a daily medication."
"And I would have control over whether or not I take it, right?"
"Yes, of course," Cullen said at once.
Charlotte scanned the woman's books in the wall-to-wall bookshelf behind her desk. Nodded in the direction of one heavy tome bound in red leather.
"In 'Personality Disorders and Violent Crime', some of Red John's work is discussed in chapters 5 and 13, though not formally discussed as such," Charlotte's voice was little over a whisper.
Cullen nodded. "I will have to reread those sections, I think."
"So, do you think I am crazy?" Charlotte finally said, eyes leaving the books and coming back to the woman in front of her.
"I just met you, but based on my initial impressions of you? No, I don't think you're crazy. I think you're traumatized."
"Which is normal under the conditions," Charlie prompted.
"It is."
"Could you write a note for the school adminstration stating as much? My father wants me to go back to school."
"Do you want to go back to school?"
"Honestly? No. But then again, I don't particularly want to do much of anything."
"Do you think you're depressed? It would make sense, after all you've been through."
"I think I might be," Charlotte allowed, and pulled harder on the string on her sleeve cuff. "Aside from the panic attacks and nightmares and stuff... most things, so-called normal things, seem remarkably boring and pointless. Is that depression?"
"It can be a sign of depression, a lack of interest or sense of meaning in the world. Most people think depression is feeling sad all the time, but more often it manifests as a lack of interest and pleasure in things, a sort of nihilistic nightmare where interests and hobbies one previously enjoyed are no longer enjoyable." Cullen was watching Charlotte carefully now, even more carefully than she had been before.
Charlotte sighed.
"Do you find that things you enjoyed doing previously are no longer as enjoyable are meaningful for you?"
"Before? Before, my favourite activity was running away from Red John. Now... there is no Red John anymore."
"What else did you like to do?" Cullen pressed.
"Like what?" Charlotted replied after a moment of reflection.
"What did you do for fun? What made you happy?"
"I didn't really have time to focus on happy. So.. I don't know."
"So.. from the age of almost-six, would you say it would be fair to characterize your existence as something of an extended fight-or-flight episode?"
Charlotte considered this. "Yes. Punctuated with moments of panic."
"Charlotte, honestly, cases like yours are exceedingly rare. When you were growing up and should have been learning to trust the world and learn what makes you tick you were running scared from a sadistic serial killer."
Charlotte winced at the description but finally nodded.
Cullen stood up, went to her bookcase and removed a slim volume. 'Man's Search for Meaning' by Viktor Frankl. She came over to the girl, handed her the book.
"Viktor Frankl was a psychiatrist who found himself imprisoned at Auschwitz during the second world war," Cullen started, voice soft, as Charlie took the book and paged through it.
"I think this book could be very helpful for you. He went through Hell and was wise enough to know that if he didn't find some meaingful purpose in his life, something to feel positively about and move him forward day to day, he wouldn't survive the camps, or survive the emotional fall-out after liberation."
Charlotte stared at the shrink.
"Does he tell you how to live? How to make it seem... worth it?"
"Does life not currently feel worth it to you?"
"Life seems exhausting."
"What in your world gives you meaning? Or strength? Or a sense of being loved?" Cullen was watching the kid carefully as she paged through the book. Charlotte shrugged and continued to flip pages. Finally she spoke.
"I like my Dad. Patrick? He's a good guy. He's been through a lot so the least I can do is try and be at least somewhat grateful for his existence."
Cullen nodded. "Your father cares a lot about you, that's true. Anything else?"
"His friend Teresa Lisbon is cool. And my dog? I like my dog."
"Do you have any goals for the future? What would you like to do when you grow up?"
Charlotte, still flipping through the book, shrugged.
"I don't really want to do anything."
"Okay. I get very little feels important to you right now. But if I was to ask you, what is one way you think you could make the world a better place, what is the first thing that comes to mind? Don't think about it, just say it."
"Animals. I'd like to help animals."
"Animals? So... be a vet?"
"No... like... liberate them from labs? Things like that. At least, that is the first thing that comes to my mind."
"So... liberate beings from an existence with parallels to your formative years?"
"Yeah," Charlotte said. "That seems like it would be worth doing."
"Charlotte, you don't have to have a clear-cut plan of what your future is going to look like. You just have to know what you stand for. What makes you tick and what makes you smile, even if you don't smile much. Look for those things in life that, when you see them, make you feel like this world is not worth living in... and imagine how you can help to reverse them."
"I thought we were here to talk about my panic attack?" Charlotte said. Cullen nodded.
"Your system is flooded with stress hormones. But, as your life improves, paradoxically, you may feel worse. You're used to being under severe stress. When things become safer, and healthier, you're going to feel lost. You're going to feel bored. That's why you need to identify clear goals to work towards now... so you don't feel like you're free-falling."
"So... are you saying the panic attack could have been because... because life is slowing down too much? The change is too severe?"
"That could be part of it. Are you seeing a counsellor?"
"No. And I don't want to," Charlotte said, wedging one finger in a page of the book.
"And that's fine," Cullen reassured her. "Counselling is not for everybody. But I would suggest that you keep a diary, if for no other reason that to track your progress and your moods."
"Okay," Charlotte murmured. She didn't add that the diary thing probably wouldn't work because her father would almost certainly pick the lock and read the entries. But she could nod.
"I'll write you a script for a PRN benzodiazepene. And a note for school. Is there anything else you'd like to discuss?" Cullen asked. She was over by her desk, writing on a script pad.
"Is there, in your own personal philosophical belief system, any meaning to life? Any point to it?"
Cullen smiled. Finally nodded. "I think we have to make our own meaning. I think that's the point."
Charlotte nodded back. Didn't say what she thought, which was that was a cop-out answer. She took the script.
"Are you giving me this Frankl book?" Charlotte said, waving the book gently at the shrink.
"Yes, it's your's. I hope you find it helpful."
"Thanks," Charlie murmued, and slipped the book into her backpack.
"I'll finish the note for your school and send it over by email later today," Cullen added.
Charlotte nodded. There was nothing else to say. She had fulfilled her part of the deal, here.
Charlotte walked over to the door, opened it, and was gone from sight.
Patrick fulfilled his part of the deal and got his kid the perfunctory Blizzard. Charlotte flipped through 'Man's Search for Meaning' sitting in the Dairy Queen with Dixon beside her grinning his ecstatic bully-dog grin and tried to make small-talk with her father, but she felt deflated and achy. Questions of what she wanted to do with her life nagged at her. Everything just seemed so damned... prosaic and boring. Pointless.
Red John had noticed the same things about society and had taught her as much. Most people lived lives of zero consequence. They married and procreated, had affairs and ate out at Red Lobster and The Olive Garden, had sex and bought useless shit for their homes, got sick and died, cried hysterical tears when relationship dissolved, then went out and got replacement models to suit their relationship needs. It was all just so much sound and fury, signifying nothing... to borrow from Shakespeare. Pointless. Worse than pointless, maybe. Pointless and boring and depressing in its inanity.
Red John had sparked real fear in the world. Sure, he was a monster. That was undeniable. But he was a flashy monster. When he showed up in True Crime books, they sold like hot cakes. He defied the machine, the endless march into the abyss of taxes and death by grabbing death by the short-hairs and making it jump through his hoops. He broke the rules, and broke them with blood, in a most potently symbolic way, a way that kicked off knee-jerk reactions and shot adrenaline into the most cynical and jaded of human beings.
Charlotte had only known, growing up, how frightened she was of him, frightened and horrified, but over time, the bubbling insanity of it, the extreme neon adrenaline screams of Red John's handiwork had become, bit by bit, her new baseline for what reality was and what meaning was.
What else could compare to his grandiose tableaux staged with corpses, his vicious cunning intellect and head games?
She hated what he had done, not only to herself but others and yet, having gone through the valley of death that was childhood with Red John had altered her brain chemistry to the point where the everyday and the soft and the gentle seemed flat and dull. Lackluster.
Despite herself, she had grown to live for the rush of the games he played. On a physiological level she'd become habituated to his level of chaos. Not much else could catch and keep her attention.
The Frankl book looked interesting, though, offered a small glimmer of hope, however small. An intelligent man thrown into a ghastly situation, trying to find meaning in it, trying to find some way to process that which humans were not evolutionarily equipped to process, and go on, and recover... and live a life he, himself, deemed meaningful and fulfilling.
Could life even be fulfilling?
Charlotte ate her Blizzard and Patrick watched her and slowly worked on his strawberry sundae.
"That wasn't so bad, was it?" Patrick said, taking a bite of soft serve.
"What am I supposed to do with my life, now?" Charlotte said, more to the ether than her father. Jane waited for more, but that was it.
"You do what makes you happy. Which you find meaningul," Jane said slowly, testing out the words as they came out of him. Hoping they were enough and knowing they weren't.
"I do things and sometimes they distract me and occupy my time, but I don't know if I am happy. I am not sure the subjective experience I am having is happiness."
"Are you happy right now, eating ice cream?" Jane asked, waving his red Dairy Queen spoon at Charlotte's Blizzard cup.
"I should be, right? I should be happy eating this. I think it tastes good. But am I happy? I just feel... sort of lost. Like the colour has been drained of human experience."
"Violence does that to people. It burns them out," Jane said, nodding, not surprised by Charlie's admissions.
"If you don't feel particularly happy these days, can you at least imagine a scenario which might make you unhappy?"
Charlotte thought about it. Nodded.
"If Dixon died, I'd be upset."
"There you go," Jane said, smiling. "If you know that certain situations would elicit a negative subjective experience, then the inverse is also true. You have the capacity to feel genuine happiness. It's just... hiding."
"Hiding?" Charlotte prompted, a wry smile tweaking up the right side of her mouth.
Jane shrugged. "It might help for you to think of your happiness and sense of meaning as a feral cat-"
"What are you talking about, Patrick?"
"Unh uh! Let me finish. For so long you wanted things to be different, but they couldn't be. You couldn't escape. You were in an impossible situation. Over time, that part of us humans that makes meaning out of life and finds happiness in things became sort of feral, for you... it had to be wild and distrust its experiences, because that is part of what being wild is. Lacking trust. So now, your sense of meaning, your sense of happiness... it lurks around in the shadows of your subconscious, testing the waters, so to speak. Seeing if it's safe to wander out."
"So using this metaphor, if I want to feel happier and have meaning... I have to do what, exactly?"
"Feed that feral nature in you that desires closeness, and trust, and a bond, and hope and all the fragile and delicate emotions you had to suppress in order to survive. Feed them a little bit each day. Do the things you intellectually think should make you feel a certain way, even if the subjective experience is lacking or seems completely absent. Over time, it might show up, more and more..."
"And if this feral cat of happiness is dead? Then what?"
"Then you're no worse off than you are now, right?" Jane scooped another large spoonful of ice cream into his mouth, licked the spoon, stared it thoughtfully.
"Besides, there is no way your dopamine and serotonin levels are anywhere near normal, after your experiences. No way. When those get wacky, your outlook on life, even what you believe to be your personal philosophical views, begins to shift."
"Yeah. Maybe," Charlotte allowed. She was staring at the laminated table, as if answers to her existential questions might be discovered in the faux wood grain.
"Come Monday, you'll have a lot more to keep you busy, anyway," Jane added, and finished off his ice cream. He carried the clear plastic cup and red spoon to the trash and dropped it in.
"What's on Monday?"
"You go back to school," Jane said with exaggerated cheer. Charlotte moaned.
That night Charlotte had a dream. She was watching her body from the vantage point of the ceiling, and she was in her current bedroom, in the San Diego apartment she shared with Patrick, but there was a door in the floor of her bedroom which opened much like the extendable staircase which pulled out from the attic space.
From a bird's eye view she watched her body writhe on the bed as it dreamed, watched it kick her blue and green striped comforter onto the floor.
Then... knocking. It sounded almost like a woodpecker knocking... coming from undernearth the door in the floor.
And then, with each knock, a stair appeared. Then another. Dropping further and further down into a pit of blackness.
Charlotte hovered against the ceiling, watching her body, taking in the layout of her room and the increasing number of descending stairs dropping down into black mystery. The knocking stopped and in its place, now, was soft footfalls on the stairs.
Someone was walking up the stairs, and now she could faintly see the head, blue and feathery, and there he was. He hopped into her room and his head swivelled on his neck at an unnatural angle and found Charlotte levitating against the ceiling.
"Come down from there," Buzz said softly, in his strange little chirping voice.
"You're just a dream," Charlotte said, back pressed up against the stucco on the ceiling.
"'Just a dream'," Buzz mocked playfully. "As if you even know what dreams are. You have no idea what dreams are. You have no idea what I am. Come down from there."
"I don't know how," Charlotte said, but even as the words left her mouth she felt herself gently gliding downwards. Finally, she was standing wit her feet firmly on the floor. Buzz's head shifted and blurred as clicked into it's new position. He was looking at her in his more usual way now.
"That's better. Craning my neck like that is uncomfortable," the Bluebird said.
"Why are you here?" Charlotte prodded.
"You know he's not really dead, right? You know he is coming back?"
"Maybe he is really dead. Maybe I am imagining things because of stress. A nervous breakdown, maybe..."
"No! That's bullshit and you know it!" Buzz looked angry now. He was a bird, and nothing external in his face or the arrangement of his feathers had changed in any noticable way, and yet, to Charlotte, he looked distinctly angry.
"He's coming back. He's coming back for you. For Patrick, and for Lisbon. You better be ready, Charlotte or you won't like the experience."
"Patrick thinks I can't let Red John die because Red John's existence and fighting Red John has become my purpose for living. Without him, I am lost."
"No, no, NO! Forget that psychobabble nonsense!"
"Okay," Charlotte challenged, and walked back to her bed, got back into the bed. She sat, semi-translucent, beating a pale indigo blue, half in and half out of her prone, sleeping, physical body.
"If you're so wise, and you know so much... tell me something I can't know. Tell me something my subconscious can't know."
Buzz craned his head in the direction of the wall. His eyes squinted almost shut, shuttered by the paper-thin skin of his eyelids. The feathers on his face began to bristle and ruffle up as he concentrated on... whatever it was that he was concentrating on. Slowly, he raised one scaled leg and took the toe of one of his feet into his beak and began chewing on the sharp, curved toenail... like a kid might chew on a pencil.
Finally he was done. He slowly repositioned both legs, opened his eyes and shook himself. His feathers flattened back down. He blinked, hard, as if waking from a deep slumber. His eyes were black and covered in a dewy shine.
"Do you know that Patrick has a gun in his closet? He got it, because even he believes Red John might still be alive. A real bang-bang gun, with real bang-bang bullets."
"Patrick hates guns. Try again," Charlotte taunted, but Buzz just stared impassively.
"Ask him," Buzz said. "Ask him about the gun."
"Yeah, fine. Whatever."
"You just ask him," the bird ordered and then turned his back on Charlotte. He was descending down the stairs again, out of sight, and with each step he took, a strange noise like velcro ripping filled the air. Or maybe... maybe it was the sound of a record skipping. Or maybe it was both. Sensations and visions and noises blurred and comingled. The door didn't so much swing closed as slowly begin to seal at the edges, like a scar closing over.
Then it was gone completely.
Charlotte slipped back into her body, and shut her eyes, and when she opened them again it was to her alarm blasting out it's infernal buzzer, trying to rouse her from sleep.