Part I
It’s really hard being the unfavored child in a family. My mom always loved my younger brother, TJ, more than me. It wasn’t even close. In her eyes, he walked on air and could do no wrong. On the other hand, I did everything wrong, from missed homework assignments to not putting my clothes in the dirty laundry basket quickly enough to taking long showers that supposedly ran up our water bill.
When TJ graduated college and went to medical school to become a podiatrist, I grew a superpower—invisibility. It was like I didn’t even exist anymore to my mom. Even though I was working hard as an assistant at a law firm, it was nothing she could brag to her friends about.
It was no wonder that I ended up joining The Organization, where people told me how smart and full of potential I was as long as I kept paying money to take their classes so I could graduate to the next level. But once I ran out of cash, almost got evicted, and had to drop out, I became invisible to them, too.
That’s how I landed in Dr. Bethany Anderson’s office for her high-demand recovery group. She was a psychologist that specialized in helping people that had left cults. The Organization wasn’t a traditional cult, but she still allowed me to join her group after interviewing me.
There were eight of us, and I didn’t relate to most of the other members of the group. Lucy complained of experiencing panic attacks at Starbucks, faced with too many choices—hot coffee, iced coffee, latte, cappuccino, Frappuccino, forced with having to make a decision for herself for the first time in her life. Teresa struggled with getting ready for work in the morning because whenever she put on lipstick or brushed her hair, the voice in her head told her she was being taken away by the spirit of vanity.
The only one I semi-related to was Quinn because he had lost a lot of money to his old cult—albeit his parents’ money, who had been supportive of him through the years. He spoke about how guilty he felt for financially bankrupting them.
I knew he worked at a gym near my office, so I decided to stop by one day. I wanted to tell him that while he might’ve felt bad for taking his parents’ money, at least he had a family that loved him and that squandering your own savings, like I had done, with no one that loves you is worse.
I went there with an open heart and thought that giving him my perspective would make him feel better about his situation. But he was cool with me and gave me the brushoff. And, to my surprise, he brought up my impromptu visit to his office in our next group meeting.
“Ava showed up at my job without asking or warning me,” he said, pointing to me. “Nobody there knows I was in a cult.”
Everyone in the group looked at me like I was some pariah. “I didn’t tell anyone you were in a cult,” I said, trying to defend myself.
But he continued, talking about how I had violated his boundaries, which he’d been working hard on since he’d left the cult and how he didn’t think he could continue to be in the group with me there.
After the session ended, Dr. Anderson approached me and told me I had violated the confidentiality agreement I had signed before joining the group. I had been in a lot of individual therapy before but had never been in a group setting and hadn’t read the fine print, so I didn’t realize showing up at Quinn’s job was a violation.
I told Dr. Anderson I would never do it again, but she was adamant that it wouldn’t be possible for me to stay in the group. It would set a bad precedent. I was distraught. It felt like she was choosing Quinn instead of me, the same way mom had always chosen TJ over me. I even shared a story with her about when mom decided to go to TJ’s final soccer match over my middle school graduation and explained how her favoring Quinn felt the same, but she was unmoved.
When I got home, I thought about how I had nobody, a job my own parent wasn’t proud of, and all of my savings evaporated due to The Organization that had given me a few meager crumbs of attention. And how, now, a therapist supposed to help me had fired me.
I marveled at how easy it was for Dr. Anderson to leave me in the dust, and it made me burn inside. So I started googling her, hoping the universe would reveal some tragedy in her background that would temper how angry I felt toward her for how she had abandoned me.
But instead, pictures of Dr. Anderson at various conferences on different continents all over the globe popped up on my browser. She was at the top of her field—a world-renowned psychologist specializing in the recovery of individuals that leave high-demand groups, a prodigy in her field at the age of 30. She already had more success than I ever would, and she was a decade younger than me.
To make matters worse, I came across a grainy old picture of when she was a teenager with her mother on a bridge wearing matching white dresses, probably on their way to a family wedding. I flashed to her first group session I went to when Quinn had asked her what her biggest influence was in getting into the field of psychology, and she had answered, “My mom.”
Envy washed over me as I looked at the picture of her and her mom holding hands and smiling together. She had a mother who loved her, which is why she had achieved all her success. If only I had a mother who believed in me, I could’ve been someone and done something BIG with my life.
Instead, I was neglected, and the rage that had been burning inside me since the day TJ was born, the rage I had managed to keep tucked down just enough to get through each miserable day, shot upside of me, and I snapped.
I needed to do something to correct this injustice. That’s when I noticed Dr. Anderson’s mom’s name underneath the picture of the two of them—Patricia Anderson, and I made a decision to call her. I wanted to explain to Dr. Anderson’s mom what her daughter had done to me, hoping she might sympathize with me and tell her daughter it was unfair and to give me another chance.
I was a little nervous about calling, but her mom was very understanding on the phone and even offered to have me over for dinner. She lived a few hours north of San Francisco, deep in a wooded area, but I was happy to drive there to meet her.
When I arrived, I stood on a small doormat with God Is Good and rang the doorbell. Patricia opened the door with a warm smile, her grey hair in a loose bun. The smell of a home-cooked meal poured out of her house and immediately comforted me.
She invited me inside and gave me a slice of homemade lasagna—my absolute favorite. As a child, I always begged my mom to make it, but she refused and made hamburgers almost every night—TJ’s favorite. It was like Patricia, or rather Patty, as she told me to call her, had read my mind.
We ate dinner together and talked, and I felt understood for the first time in my life. She met me with so much compassion when I told her not everyone was as fortunate as her daughter had been to have a mom like her. When she asked me about my background and job, I explained that I wanted to be a musician and that I had even gotten into a music conservatory, but my mom told me musicians made no money, so I gave it up. Patty felt terrible that I lacked the support I needed growing up to pursue my dreams.
She asked me questions about her daughter, how long I had been in group therapy with her before the incident, and whether I knew if she was dating anyone. Apparently, Dr. Anderson was very private about her personal life, but I didn’t have any information.
I then asked her if she would ask her daughter to let me back into the group. “Of course,” she told me, gently placing her hand over mine.
After eating, she told me to meet her on her deck for dessert and tea. She put a kettle on the stove, and I walked through the living room, stepping outside on the deck. There were no houses in sight, only a small ravine below and sounds of water running and birds chirping. The sun was setting, and I took a seat on a lounge chair, taking in the peaceful surroundings.
Patty came out with tea and a plate of homemade chocolate chip cookies, and we talked some more. The tea was unlike anything I had ever tasted before, and it was delicious.
Hours must have passed because the sky was black with a full white moon when I woke up. I hadn’t remembered falling asleep. I looked around, realizing I was now all alone except for a COYOTE that stood in front of my lounge chair, staring at me like he was going to devour me.
I started screaming out of sheer terror, but Patty was long gone. I ran toward the glass sliding door to get back inside the house, which was now dark, but the door was locked. I slowly peered over my shoulder, looking at the coyote who was still staring at me like I had a target on my head.
I then started banging on the glass, not caring if I broke it or not when Patty finally appeared and let me back inside the house.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I didn’t realize I had locked you out. It’s my habit always to lock the door when I go inside because of the coyotes,” she said.
“The coyote could have killed me,” I told her.
“You looked so peaceful sleeping. I didn’t want to wake you,” she explained.
I wasn’t having it. What she had done felt like another abandonment that could have caused me grave injury or death. I told her I needed to head back to San Francisco and angrily stomped through her house out the front door where I had parked my car. I turned on the engine and drove down the main road to catch the freeway home, but several large yellow barricades were blocking the street.
I took out my cell phone to call the police for help to remove the barricades so I could leave, but there was no reception. It was freezing, so I turned the heat on in my car and noticed the low fuel warning light on my dashboard. I hadn’t realized my tank was nearly empty. I rubbed my hands together to stay warm when I saw Patty approaching me in my rearview mirror.
She knocked on my window, holding up my sweater that I had left on the deck lounge chair. I rolled down the window and took it from her. She apologized again for what had happened, saying she knew she had messed up and how it must have hurt me even more because of everything I’d gone through with my mom. She pleaded with me to spend the night, said she couldn’t live with herself if I got frostbite, and promised to make French toast in the morning.
I was chattering from the frigid weather and worried about how I would make it through the night without heat once the gas ran out of my car, so I decided to give her a second chance—the one her daughter had refused to give me, and turned my engine back on, following her back to her house.
Once inside, she led me to Dr. Anderson’s childhood room. A couple of ballet trophies stood on an old faded wooden dresser missing a drawer, and a twin bed with lavender sheets and a comforter laid underneath a small window.
Even though I wasn’t getting any cell phone reception, I still took a picture of the room and sent it to Dr. Anderson with a text: Your mom is nicer than you, thinking, eventually, it would go through.
Patty brought me a cup of hot milk as I slid into Dr. Anderson’s childhood bed. While it was a strange feeling, it also felt like a corrective healing experience that one of my old therapists had talked to me about when you are re-exposed to emotional situations from the past under more favorable circumstances that you couldn’t handle in the past.
My mom had always tucked TJ into bed at night, reading and giggling with him, and left me alone down the hall in my room, wondering what I had done to justify her neglect. Now I was getting the attention I had always deserved.
After Patty left, I drank my milk and closed my eyes. I fell asleep and had the sweetest childhood dream in which TJ threw me off my bike, and mom reprimanded him for the first time in his life until a violent scream awoke me.
I sat up straight in bed. The scream stopped momentarily, but I heard it again, so I jumped out of bed and ran downstairs to the kitchen, where a light was on. Patty stood in front of the stove in a bathrobe, her back facing me, her grey hair down, as she boiled water in a kettle.
“Who was that?” I asked.
“It was the kettle,” she said, turning around, lifting it. “It was whistling. Sometimes I get up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom and have trouble falling back to sleep, so I make myself some chamomile tea. Want a cup?”
“It didn’t sound like a kettle. It sounded like someone was screaming,” I said.
She looked down, ashamed. “I lied. I’m a sleepwalker. I walked right into a wall, screamed, and woke myself up. Guess I woke you up, too. It’s embarrassing,” she said.
“I was a sleepwalker, too, when I was a kid,” I told her. “I got kicked out of every sleep-away camp my mom tried sending me to. The counselors said none of the other girls wanted to bunk with me—”
Before I could finish the sentence, there was another high-pitched SCREAM.
“Who is that?” I said, now a little scared, realizing her sleepwalking story was a lie.
“Wanna tell me why you’re really here?” she asked.
“I told you why,” I said nervously.
She dropped her warm smile. “Why are you here?”
“Your daughter kicked me out of her therapy group, and I thought you could help me get back in,” I said.
The screaming wouldn’t stop, and whoever was screaming was saying something that I couldn’t make out.
Patty got closer to me with a strange look in her eye. “This is your last chance. Tell me why you’re really here,” she said.
“I already told you,” I said, terrified.
“STOP LYING!” she suddenly shouted in my face. “How do you know about Heather?”
“Heather?” I asked.
She pulled her hand out of her bathrobe pocket, holding a steak knife, and pointed it at me, backing me against some kitchen cabinets with an icy glare. I now realized I was in a house with a psychopath and some other person named Heather who wouldn’t stop screaming.
“You’re a liar,” she said. “And lying is a sin.”
She pricked the skin on my neck with the knife, just enough for a small stream of blood to dribble down.
“Turn around and keep walking until I tell you to stop,” she instructed me.
“I want to leave,” I told her. “Let me go home. I don’t care about your daughter’s therapy group.”
“That window has closed,” she said. “Do as I say, or else… “
I had no choice but to turn around and walk with the knife pointed at my back. “Where am I going?” I asked her, petrified.
She steered me toward a padlocked door near the back of the house and made me open it.
“Get in,” she said. As soon as I did, she shut the door behind me. I kept trying to open the door back up so I could try escaping, but it was futile. She had padlocked it again.
I was standing on top of a stairwell. I slowly walked down the stairs. When I reached the bottom, I found myself in a windowless one-room basement with a fluorescent light hanging above. There were hundreds, maybe thousands, of cans of food–soup, beans, fruit. An Andy Warhol wall of mirrors. A panic room. Preparation for the Armageddon.
The screaming wouldn’t stop, growing louder and louder. It sounded like a girl, but I didn’t see her. I noticed a small door in the back of the basement. I walked toward it, frightened of opening the door and what I might discover.
I grabbed a can of tomato soup and held it in front of me like a weapon of protection as I slowly opened the door.
Inside was a small closet with an emaciated teenage girl chained to a pipe with a handcuff—a girl that was the spitting image of Dr. Anderson.
“MAMAAA!” she screamed.