June Exclusive tale | "Therapy" | Part 2

It’s the rain, drumming persistently that wakes Lola up.

She didn’t have the baby dream. She feels calm and relaxed.

She stretches – the crib is long enough to more than accommodate her 4 feet 11 inches height – and is perfectly at ease until she opens her eyes and sees the wooden bars. And reflects on her situation in a new light.

“Oh.”

Lola is no longer calm and relaxed. She sits up, looks around the dimly lit nursery. She is inside an adult-sized crib. She is wearing sickeningly pink and soft pajamas, and – she pokes gingerly at her waist and crotch to confirm her fears – a diaper.

Lola gives herself another poke. She’s not wet. At least there’s that.

She is dressed like a baby. She allowed Dr Light to treat her like a baby. To stroke her hair. To sit her on his lap!

No, she is no longer calm. She feels the return of her tried and tested anger. But she also feels afraid. Because why did she let the therapist do all these things? Why on earth? She is reminding her of when she visited with her mother’s sister one summer. Aunt Kim had no experience with kids and had treated Lola like a girl half her age, cutting up her food and giving her bubble baths. Lola had put up with it, leaned into it, until her mother had come to pick Lola up and found her daughter in the most uncharacteristic frilly dress and gushing over a doll.

Lola calls her childish docility and her mother’s reaction, and her face is hot with shame and fury.

And now this! Bad enough to be treated like a baby when she was eight years old. But as an adult…?

The rain continues to drum on the windowpanes. She’s been given a chance, a wake-up call before Dr Light presumably plans to come back and give his ‘patient’ more baby treatment.

For a moment, Lola wonders if she will just remain in the crib. Perhaps she is brainwashed, or crippled. But she gets to her feet without difficulty, and she can swing herself over the side, landing with the softest of thumps on the carpet.

She goes to the window, pulls the curtain just enough to let in the late afternoon light. Her appointment had been for after lunch, so it seems that she has slept for just a couple of hours.

Assuming it’s still the same day.

Her mouth goes dry. Maybe Dr Light has been keeping her here for days. For weeks.

Maybe this is her life now.

She runs fingers through her hair, to tidy it, to remind herself that she’s still the same person. She hasn’t been transformed into a clumsy, idiotic infant.

She looks down into Swenson St. The rain is coming down hard, the drains can’t cope. What little traffic there is comes at a crawl.

She turns back into the room. No sign of her real clothes; the doctor has taken them away, along with her phone and ID. She’s just a girl in footie pajamas.

She grits her teeth. A woman.

She must get out of here, of course. Whatever Dr Light’s plan is – there will be the sex at the end of it of course, or sex and murder, because isn’t it always with maniacs like him? – Lola is not intending to stick around long enough to find out.

The room is lit up suddenly, a flash of white, and Lola’s stomach flips. She looks towards the door, but it is closed. The flash came from the window. Just lightning.

Lola counts in her head. One…two…three…

A rumble of thunder. When she was a child for real, she was afraid of thunderstorms, picking up on the high-definition excitement in the newsroom.

Keep your phone charged.

Find your safe space.

The storm isn’t going anywhere. If anything, it’s getting worse.

A part of her – too big for her liking – wants Lola to get back into the crib. Better yet, she could go into the closet, take refuge inside. She did that before, didn’t she, all those years ago?

Yes, she did. And her mother found her and calmy dismissed her childish fears.

“That’s called lightning. It happens when tiny bits of electricity jump from one part of the cloud to another or from the cloud to the ground. It’s nothing to be afraid of.”

But maybe Lola is traumatized, like Dr Light said. Maybe she needed to be held, not rationalized with. So, can she just hide until the monster goes away? Can she just cry out and let the grown-ups take care of her?

If she cries out now, surely Dr Light will come running. He will save her.

And then she wonders if she would like to sit back down on the good doctor’s lap.

No, thanks.

She imagines Dr Light hearing the thunder, wondering if it has disturbed his ‘patient’. She imagines him sitting in his office, and glancing towards the hallway. Deciding to take a walk upstairs.

Lola hurries to the closet. There’s no way she’s running out of here in these damn pajamas.

She pulls open the closet doors and winces. A rack of frilly dresses and onesies. Amazing, despairingly, there’s nothing that would be a trade up from her current outfit.

“I’m going to take such good care of you.”

It’s not just one night, Lola is sure of that. She has to get out of here now.

She is a fighter, a survivor, despite (or because of) her diminutive stature. A group of girls bullied her in fifth grade, and instead of marching down to the school and insisting that something should be done to protect her precious child, Mom and sat Lola down and told her to stand up for herself.

“Believe in yourself and your worth. Standing up for yourself takes courage, and by doing so, you are showing respect for yourself.”

She has seen enough episodes of Dateline to imagine herself in a situation like this, kidnapped and imprisoned by a maniac, and she has always imagined that she would emerge victorious. But there was nothing in her imagination about just letting the maniac do it. Nothing about sitting on his lap and smiling as he petted her hair.

She walked calmly upstairs. She got undressed. She let him diaper and cuddle her. She listened to his stories.

The dryness in her mouth returns. How did he do it?

A drug of some kind, surely. Something in her food, but she has never eaten here. A gas, perhaps.

And then Lola remembers. The little glass bottle. The ‘homeopathic’ drops Dr Light had given her. A week’s supply, to ‘help with the anger’. But that wasn’t the effect the drops had.

“We continue your therapy here, Lola. In your nursery.”

The drops had left her vulnerable. Open to suggestion? Childlike? Lola felt her hands bunch at her sides. Dr Light had turned her into a naïve little girl.

She doesn’t feel like that now. The effects have faded. But who knows what other tricks he has waiting for her?

Lola goes to the window. It’s locked. Besides, she’s not about to leap out of it.

She goes to the bedroom door, takes a breath, opens. No mad therapists in the hallway.

Lola takes the stairs one at a time, feeling like a toddler trying her luck after bedtime, trying to avoid any creaks. When she gets to the bottom, she can hear noise from the kitchen. She recognizes the voices of ‘All Things Considered’ on KUT public radio.

The sound of a refrigerator being opened. Is the doctor making dinner? God knows what mush he’s planning on forcing down Lola’s throat. Not that he’d have to force her, of course.

Because Lola is a good girl.

Lola shudders.

But do depraved murderers really fix dinner for their victims? Do they put them in a crib and stroke their hair until they fall asleep?

She thinks back to Light’s analysis.

“You’re having nightmares of being a baby because you are trying to process the trauma you experienced as an infant. Only way to get past it is to take it into your waking life.”

Again, Lola wonders what trauma Dr Light is imagining. Because Lola’s childhood was unremarkable. If anything, she looks back on her upbringing as a positive experience. Her father was often absent, but didn’t this teach Lola self-reliance? Her mother had refused to “patronize” her, and so wasn’t Lola spared the ignominy of being dressed up like a doll and coddled like so many of her “little princess” peers?

It was only Aunt Kim who ever coddled Lola. Giving her that damn baby doll in the pink onesie.

What was that silly thing Aunt Kim said whenever Lola pushed back on the kiddie treatment?

Lola blinks. She can’t remember, and yet she feels a wave of dizziness. She puts a hand to the wall to steady herself. Something about what that woman said…

She rubs her face. Forget Aunt Kim. Forget baby dolls dressed pretty much as Lola is now.

Face facts. Her early years were not marred by abuse or neglect. It was just a few weeks with Aunt Kim to teach Lola that she didn’t need an innocent, fluffy childhood – if anything, her upbringing better prepared her for the harsh realities of modern life.

Lola ain’t broke, she’s just pissed, like every other Gen Z! There’s nothing for Dr Light to fix.

So, it begs the question, as she stands whisper-quiet in the hallway and listens to the doctor humming to himself, what on earth is Dr Light trying to do in his misguided way? It doesn’t make any sense!

She takes another breath, and then walks swiftly past the open kitchen doorway, a pink blur, praying that her fuzzy pink feet don’t send her slipping back onto her fuzzy pink butt. Because maybe he’s not out to kill Lola, but the last thing she needs is a second infancy.

There are four framed certificates on the wall by the front entrance, all earned by Robin Light. A bachelor’s in psychology, a master’s in psychology and neuroscience from Arizona State, a PhD from the same school, and the Examination for Professional Practice in Psychology.

How reassuring it must be for his clients. Hadn’t Lola herself noticed the qualifications as she’d entered that first time? The sense of expertise.

He must know what he’s doing. He must be safe.

Beside the certificates, there’s the picture of the Dr and his wife. No kids, just the couple. And as Lola noticed from before, they’re both smiling, but isn’t there something else in the wife’s expression. An intent gaze behind her cat-eye style glasses, her hair tied up.

What is she thinking in the photo? Blissful ignorance, or is she holding the secret that her husband is using his psychological powers to kidnap and infantilize women?

She would like to ask her.

“Do you know what your husband does in his office? Do you turn a blind eye?”

But she has no time to talk to the wife. Maybe next time, maybe never in a million years.

From the kitchen, a series of beeps and then the whirring of a microwave oven.

No supper for me, thanks. No mush. And please cancel my fourth visit.

Lola pulls on the front door, ready to pull it off its hinges, and it opens easily.

The wind and rain threaten to knock her back. She steps out of the house, the door slams shut behind her, and she is instantly soaked.

She remembers that she has no plan, beyond what’s just happened. She looks up and down Swenson. A few cars edge along.

Left or right?

The front door opens behind her.

Something is shouted, but the words are lost in the wind and rain.

Lola sees the shape of Dr Light looming in the doorway.

He’s telling her something, and just a faint sense of the words make Lola weak at the knees. She should walk towards him. Fall towards him. She should be loose-

Saved by the wind and rain in her ears, Lola runs.

She can lose herself in the rain, or she can drown like a fuzzy pink rabbit. The one thing she won’t do is let Dr Light get his gentle, terrifying hands on her again.

She sprints, waterlogged, the pajamas deciding that they will take on all the water. Her hair feels glued to her head.

But she runs, fists pumping, and she doesn’t look back.

She turns onto Prospect, impulsively decides to cross, and there is a screech and spray of brakes and tires.

Lola stares at the high beams, a pink rabbit caught in the headlights.

The car stops inches from her. Lola wipes her face, peers at the vehicle. She sees the driver get out, walk towards her.

An offered hand.

“Come on,” says the voice sympathetically. “You’re soaked to the bone.”

“I need help,” Lola shouts into the storm.

The driver grabs her hand. Laughs. “You’re telling me.”

To be continued...