Ch.15 – "Take me home, mom!"

Buffy woke up early as she always did. For almost two weeks she had had nothing to do with herself in the evening, except looking nasty at whichever doctor or attendant came in.

The exception was Gwynneth Pryce. Buffy felt that this woman paid attention to her. Not that she exactly liked her; something deep in her told her that this woman was as deep and dangerous as a canyon, and that getting close to her was risky. But in an environment that did not respond to her at all, felt like a living thing among a wilderness of statues.

But when came this morning, she had a different expression. As usual, she came together with a very large helping of breakfast. Her decision to associate herself with the blessedly large meals Buffy had been receiving since her midnight pizza raid was deliberate and not without reason; she had insisted on this in the staff meetings that had followed that traumatic event. And the association with the pleasure and relief of eating may have been obvious, but it worked all the same. But now was having to put a brave face on a decision she had opposed. simply did not want a super-being in his clinic, and it seemed, from things that had been said, that the "confidential" groups who... helped him... in his work did not want anything more to do with her either. So there went her good work and the opportunity to mold a superheroine in the pattern that they regarded as progressive. And personally, Gwynneth Pryce found Buffy Carter Summers quite attractive.

And the girl was smart. She immediately spotted that there was something different this morning.

...

If there was one thing that the last few months, and especially the last two weeks, had burned into Buffy's soul, is that she could not trust anyone. Those who deserved her trust, like Mom and Sammy, did not have the power to do anything to help her. Those who had the power could not be trusted. And the world swarmed with enemies. By nature, Buffy Summers was an affectionate, trusting soul; and just because of that, the upheavals of the last few months had been traumatic. They had branded her with a distrust of people and things that would mark her for years to come.

So, when – or Gwyn, as she liked to be called – came in with her breakfast, Buffy could tell at once that something was up. The woman was more controlled than usual, and the smile on her face had something stony about it. Still, she was not expecting the whole strange and cruel mess to end just like that, from one minute to the next. She could see that Gwyn did not like that, and she made a note of that. It confirmed her view that the lady, however interesting, was dangerous.

Buffy carefully gathered up every single item she had there, including the little bits of paper on which she had scratched enigmatic hints to the thoughts she had had and that she did not want anyone but herself to understand. She ate every bit of the breakfast, leaving only a few crumbs behind. She almost literally wanted to leave nothing of herself in that place, as if the bound posed by a neglected pen or piece of paper might give them a link to her.

And yet the last two weeks had been such a shock that she was unwilling to believe that she was being released until she saw blue sky and the clinic's gates behind her. She walked through several corridors she vaguely recognized, all with the same impersonal aspect and scrubbed smell – very offensive to her superhuman sense of smell; and then suddenly, at the end of another corridor, there were plants and big glass sheets and the space of a large entrance hall. And there were two tall blonde women, and they were Mom and Sammy! And Sammy was wearing her uniform!

Buffy had been holding herself together for two weeks, with nobody she could trust and nobody with whom she could even gossip without suspicion. The first, and almost the only, lesson she had learned in this place was how easily her words could be turned against her. To see at last the two people she loved most in the world, the two people who uwould not/utake, use, abuse her words and her feelings, just broke her up. She ran to them and threw herself in their arms, weeping like a child and saying "Take me home, mom, Sammy, take ME HOME!"

...

But it was not quite a matter of going home after all. Yes, they did drive to their old house in Hollywood; but on the way there Buffy had to listen to Mom telling her that they were going to move, probably to Sunnydale, certainly away from her recent haunts. Her sudden disappearance into the jaws of the psychiatric system had, it seemed, caused ugly rumours to spread, adding to Joyce's already many reasons to move away and find a place where Buffy would not be known.

Buffy could have lived with that; Cassie's dreadful death and the way her friends had taken it, let alone her desperate last clash with Lotos and his rabble, had left her with reasons not to want to see the place again in a hurry. But the way things had just been changing almost out of recognition in two weeks, while she was away, was somewhat unsettling. At that moment, she needed to be in a safe, known, reliable environment; the change left her with an inner tension she did not want to show.

It bothered her, too, that none of them seemed to know why she had been released. Buffy might well suspect that her midnight snack had had something to do with it, but then the only change she had seen in the clinic's attitude to her had been that they had started feeding her better. Oh yes, and that Gwynneth Price had become her main reference among the doctors. Buffy, of course, had no idea of the panic behind the scenes and of the disorganizing effect her very presence had had. To her, things had all taken place as if falling from an open sky. And now, finding that neither Mom nor Sammy knew anything about how things had developed and ended – and that they were quite obviously refusing to discuss the reasons why they thought she had been abducted – confirmed something she had been suspecting: that the people she could trust had no power, and the people who had the power were infinitely untrustworthy

By this time they had reached home, and it was bright morning. Joyce and Samantha started discussing the coming move; and aS they talked, Buffy began to realize that she had no great desire to be in her old house as it was being emptied and dismantled. She would rather go somewhere else till it was over.

Samantha had an idea. She still had 29 days' leave and wanted to use them all up. Why didn't Buffy come with her on her road trip? (Her bike was there, parked in the driveway after being picked up at LAX airport the previous evening.)

"What, on the back of your Harley and sleeping under the stars? Sammy, I love you, but sometimes you're weird."

"All right, city kid. Suppose we went to New York City? And perhaps to Boston and Washington DC and a few other places? I don't think you've ever been on the east coast, have you? And I think Father would be delighted to see you."

Buffy was a bit less sure of that. Her physical father had always left her with a certain feeling of cold and distance. But she had no problem with a flying visit. Mom, even with the expense of a house move, was happy to help with the expense, and soon they were sitting around the dining room table, with maps and a computer looking for bargains and deciding on a route and on a timetable.

...

Schwinkle did not destroy his confidential papers about the Buffy Carter Summers case, even though they could have convicted him of a number of serious crimes. That, after all, had not been an issue for a very long time. The records of his clinic had two forms, the official ones for the eyes of inspectors, HMOs and outsiders of all kinds, and the confidential ones that circulated only in the pampered underground of which it was a centre. He might have destroyed them because the girl had been an embarrassment and a fiasco, but then he held that you learn as much from failure as from success. He kept, in particular, Price's assessment.