A/N: This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance between the characters and real people is purely coincidental. Hold on to your seats, it’s not where I want it yet!

The ragged woman moved about her cell like a caged animal. Once in a while she threw herself at the walls, crying and yelling. The little girl’s eyes watered outside, watching her. The woman fell to her knees in weeping, and repeated, “Forgive me!” but the girl could not choke out any words. Finally the woman leapt from her feet and lunged at the bars and screamed. “GIVE HER BACK TO ME, YOU BASTARDS!!!”

Vanessa awoke in a cold sweat to find someone hovering over her. The person had a hand on each of her shoulders, like she had been trying to shake her awake, and kept repeating that it was alright and to calm down. Vanessa’s heart was pounding, her throat was dry. She knew she’d been screaming again.

She forced herself to be calm, and relaxed her shoulders a bit so that the person holding her would lighten their grip. “I’m okay now… sorry if I woke you,” she said. “Thanks… for coming to help me…”

The face of one of Dr. Tetlyn’s assistants came into the light and spoke. “It’s alright now. Just try to think of happier things before you go back to sleep.”

That’s right. It was only a nightmare. She’d be fine when she was rested. She wished she hadn’t started the story with Dr. Tetlyn, but she didn’t ever, ever want to end up as some mental case. She was normal, and all she had to do was prove to Dr. Tetlyn that she could cope with the normal world. The problem was, if she kept having nightmares like this, and waking people up at night, they would send her away anyway.

I wish I didn’t have to go back to the orphanage… I don’t want to deal with those kids again. The orphanage kids were really a nice group, and most of them were very sensitive considering they all knew that every one of them there had no parents, and nobody had any more reason to complain than anyone else. Except that while other kids usually did try to complain once in a while, Vanessa never did, and the other kids had the innate feeling that she did have more reason to. She was given the nickname ‘Nessa’, and despite the fact that she rarely liked being fussed over, she really liked it. She’d never had a nickname before. But she didn’t like the fact that they were so… so careful with her. All of the kids seemed almost afraid of her, like she was some sort of walking timebomb. That was when she’d found out she’d been screaming in her sleep. One of the newer children had climbed out of bed and woken her up while she was in the middle of a nightmare, and she had nearly clawed him before she caught herself. He asked if she was alright, and told her she’d been screaming.

And she hadn’t gone back to sleep that night. She tried her hardest, for their sake, to take longer naps during the day, and to stay awake at night until early morning when she was simply too tired to continue. Then she would be shaken awake for breakfast every morning before she had a chance for any bad dreams. It would have been a good plan, except that on lack of sleep, the stress of day to day life kept getting to her and she would break down in tears while washing dishes, or her head would fall forward during a bible study, earning her a whack from one of the nuns whose order had apparently founded the place. And it didn’t quite solve the problem, either, because once in a while she would go to bed and she would just be so tired… that she would wake up screaming.

That was why she was here.

“Alright, we’re going to continue right where we left off, is that okay, Vanessa?”

“Yes Dr. Tetlyn,” the girl said mechanically.

“Why don’t you call me Dr. Farah? That might be a little nicer. Now you had been telling me why you scream at night, and you chose to begin with a fight between your parents. What happened that night?”

“I don’t want to keep going…”

“Vanessa, you have to. We have to find out why you don’t need to go to the ward.”

Vanessa let out a long sigh. She knew of course that she wouldn’t win, that her arguing time had been last session and she’d lost by letting herself be scared. “Okay, Dr. Farah. We’ll continue…”

“I said my father didn’t wake that night. He didn’t. He woke two days later in a hospital where my mother was watching him night and day. I was at a friend’s house for a while so that she could be away. I spent most of my time trying to hide my bruises from Laura and her parents, so it wasn’t exactly fun. Luckily her family didn’t try to hug me or anything; I may have cried and blown it. I didn’t want anyone fussing over me. I didn’t want people paying me attention. I hid from people the same way I hid from father when he was home.

“But mother never did come to pick me up. Instead a man came from the hospital to talk to me. I asked if he was going to bring me home, but he said he couldn’t. I asked him why, but he wouldn’t give me a straight answer. It wasn’t until I was at the hospital that I found out. My father had woken up two days after his fall, and died that night. They said it had more to do with stress and a bad heart than anything else, but my mother wouldn’t listen to them. When I was first brought to her, she yelled at me. ‘You made me do it!’ she said, and she cried and soon I was crying too.

“I couldn’t help it, I wanted to help her, but I couldn’t… I didn’t know how. When we were at the funeral mother kept on crying and wouldn’t stop crying. I felt tears streaming down my face but I didn’t allow myself to sob because I didn’t want mother to see me crying. I went to the box and saw my father inside, and he looked like he was sleeping, still alive. I reached out my hand and touched his finger, and it was cold, brittle, and waxy. That’s when I actually realized he was gone and really never coming back. I think I cried harder then, but I'm not sure if I was really sad.

“Nights after that I could hear my mom crying out… but not like I do. Instead it was like a quiet sobbing into her pillow that I could hear… and it pierced the quiet of the house like an arrow. I could hear her saying, “Forgive me, forgive me.”

“It went on like that for weeks. Finally one night she tucked me in and said her goodnights like always, and then walked out and downstairs, and I could hear her talking downstairs but I couldn’t tell who else was there. In fact, it sounded like she wasn’t talking to anyone at all. After a long time she came back up the stairs with a pillow and came into my room again. I closed my eyes and held myself stiff, knowing she’d want to see that I was asleep. I felt her hand touch my cheek and hold steady there for a while, and then pull away. I must have felt safe there, in my bed, with my mother standing over me. Even if my house was scary sometimes, my bed was always a safe place. But then something else touched my face and pressed down hard. It was the pillow.

“It stayed down and I started kicking. I tried to scream but it came out as a muffled cry. I tried to breathe, but I couldn’t draw enough air through the pillow! I was kicking my legs frantically and trying to pull the pillow off my face but I couldn’t move, and I started to get dizzy and nauseous… After a while I felt like I just couldn’t do it anymore, and I stopped kicking, and screaming, and not long after that my arms lost their grip too. The pillow pulled off my face and I gasped, sucking in as much air as I possibly could, and my mother was crying again. I dove from the bed and screamed at the top of my lungs, and it seemed like only minutes before our neighbor, Pete, had arrived, and had lifted me up and was asking me what was wrong. I couldn’t say. I couldn’t! She was my mother!

“Mother looked up at me with the strangest eyes and said, ‘tell him. Tell him everything. You made me do it. You know you did. You killed my husband!’

“ ‘Lindsay!’ he said, ‘You shouldn’t say things like that! Are you drunk?’

“Mother was as cold as father had been. ‘I’m not drunk and you know it. She killed her father.’ I shivered in Pete’s arms, and he moved me away from mother just as she started to get up. ‘Pete,’ she said, ‘Give me my daughter back. Give me back Vanessa.’

“Pete might have given me back to her, but I shouted out before he could. I didn’t want to be here anymore! I begged Pete to let me stay at his house for one night. ‘One night,’ he repeated after me. ‘One night, is that alright Miss Harper?’

“But mother sprang to life, and she tried to pull me from his arms. She pulled on my hair and arms until finally he pried her hands loose and she fell on the floor. ‘One life not enough for you, girl?! You want mine, too?’

“Pete took me away from my mother, just like I asked him to. Once we were at his house, he locked all the doors and spent almost an hour on the phone, then he told me to go to sleep. I heard some cars pull up to my house not too long after, and saw flashing blue light dancing across the ceiling from out the windows. Then I heard my mother yelling again, and screaming Pete’s name. I don’t think I slept at all that night.”

“I think that might be a good place to stop, I have another appointment. But I’m sorry for being so harsh before. You feel free to tell the story however you want to, I won’t call it embellishment again.” Dr. Farah moved in front of her desk and leaned against it, displacing the papers that had been hanging off the edge. “You can go. Why don’t you ask if Tony in the kitchen will give you some cookies? Tell him I sent you down.” The girl climbed off the chair she sat in and wiped her face with her sleeve. Farah thought she heard a tiny “thank you” as Vanessa disappeared down the hall.