Broken Wings 2 - Midnight Flight, Andrews, C. [classic books for 10 year olds .TXT] 📗

“Why? Why do you want me to do that?”

“I want you to feel, to see and understand the most basic human needs in you.”

“You're right. I don't want to be afraid and I don't want to be sad. Okay? You're right.” Hot tears bubbled under my lower eyelids. “Satisfied?”

“I'm not worried about being right, Phoebe,” she said slowly, and smiled. “I have nothing to prove.”

I raised my eyebrows skeptically at that and I couldsee she didn't like it. She stopped smiling, stepped away from the desk, and stood as firmly as a steel pole, her eyes sharp, angry, bearing down on me.

“I'm already a success at what I do. I have the respect of my peers. I have been awarded many honors, and courts, judges, counselors, and other psychiatrists have given me the trust and the responsibility to reshape and save girls like you, so this is not about ego.”

“What's it about then?”

“Right now? It's about you. Do you realize”—she reached back for the letter from the clinic—“that you are really all alone in the world now?”

I tightened the embrace of myself and looked at the closed window curtains.

“Oh, I know you have an uncle and aunt, but I also know you're not fond of them and you do not believe they are very fond of you. You believe they would rather you disappeared. Am I right?”

I didn't answer.

“I said, am I right? Wasn't that in the autobiography you wrote for me on orientation day? Well?”

“Yes.”

She nodded, satisfied. “You were correct in your analysis of them. They haven't even called to see how you reacted to the news. I've heard nothing,” she said with such vehemence, I thought she was enjoying the pain her words imposed on me. They were like whiplashes, slicing and stinging my weakened wall of protection.

“In this world,” she continued, returning to that teacher voice of hers, “someone without any family, without any friends, loses any sense of herself and any reason to go on and do anything with her life. Like it ornot, this is your new home, Phoebe,” she said, holding her arms out widely apart.

"We are your new family. I want you to believe that and I want you to trust me, trust that I have your best interests at heart, no matter how hard and severe I might seem to be. We have demons to drive out of you, important changes to make. Just like a surgeon has to cut out a cancer, I have to cut all that out of you. Oh, not with a knife, a scalpel, of course, but with every available technique at my disposal. All I ask is you cooperate and try to help yourself.

“Is that asking for too much?” she followed in a tone so reasonable, all I could do was shake my head.

“Good. I think you're different from the others, Phoebe, and I don't mean the color of your skin or your background or anything like that. I think you have potential. There's more to you and a lot more to save.”

She stood there looking at me. I kept my eyes directed at the floor, then 1 sniffed back my tears and closed my eyes and took a deep breath.

Of course she was right about what I was feeling and what I was desperate to avoid. Good memories, happy memories, of Mama were trying to rush in and I was holding the door closed, but I could hear Mama's laughter, catch a glimpse of her in the mirror as she fixed my hair or talked to me about how to make up my eyes like hers. The images were leaking in under the door. These memories weren't memories of the woman 1 had seen at the clinic after I had run away from my uncle and aunt. These were memories of my mama of long ago when I was still young enough to forgive her for her weaknesses and her failures, when I was still young enough to believe things would be better for us all.

“You want to cry, Phoebe. I can see it. Go on. Have a good cry. There's no shame in that.”

I wiped away a fugitive tear quickly and shook my head. She approached me and touched my shoulder. I looked up at her. Should I trust her with my tears? I wondered. Was she sincere? So many cruel things were done to us here. Was she right in doing them? Did we need that? Was it the only thing that would change a girl like Robin or like Teal, Mindy, and Gia? Or me? What terrible thing had Mindy done with a baby? And Gia, I was sure, setting fire to her own home, among other things, surely made her a lost cause out there. Suddenly, I began to wonder if Dr. Foreman wasn't the last and best hope for girls like us after all.

“Poor Phoebe. You didn't deserve the life you had. You don't have evil in your heart. You never really intended to hurt anyone, did you?”

“No.”

“Of course not. All sorts of events, social and psychological experiences, have put you in a place you don't want to be in.”

“What's going to happen to me?” I asked, flicking off another errant tear.

She smiled. “You're going to get out of that terribly dark place. You're going to grow and improve and become one of my girls, a Foreman girl, proud and strong and capable.”

She returned to her chair behind her desk, folded the letter, and inserted it into an envelope. I watched her put it into a drawer.

“The funeral was yesterday,” she said.

“Yesterday?”

“Yes, I wish I could have sent you back for that, but it wasn't possible. Your uncle and aunt understood. Ifinally decided to call them. Actually, they weren't at all disappointed about your not attending the services,“ she added dryly, sounding like she was on my side against them. ”That's why I said what I said before, but none of that