“Marc? I thought you lived with him already.”
“No, not Marc, Aldo. Rinaldo.”
The doctor’s brow furrowed in puzzlement. “The … mathematician?”
“The genius, yes.”
“Why do you call him that?”
“Because he is.” And he was. She’d seen the proof several times over. She was positive he only had so much time for her because he could do the work faster than his colleagues. He rarely had to do things twice, and as far as she could tell, he never struggled. He was a genius and she, lamentably human, regularly marveled.
“What about your painting?”
“I still do it.” Aldo was usually busy during the day, and she’d kept her studio. It was littered wall to wall with paint supplies and canvases now, things left out to dry while she slept at home with Aldo. “I’m working on something new. A collection.”
“What are you working on?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Charlotte.”
“I don’t know yet,” she repeated, irritated. “I’m not not telling you or anything. I just don’t know what it is.”
The doctor stared at her for a moment.
Then, “I called your pharmacy expecting that you would need a refill authorization, Charlotte. They told me you still had three refills remaining.”
Regan said nothing.
“I wrote you a six-month prescription,” the doctor said, “and it’s been nine.”
Regan knew enough about guilt and innocence not to fidget.
“You’re not taking your pills,” the doctor finally deduced, and Regan crossed her arms over her chest, annoyed.
“No, I’m not. I don’t want to,” she said. “I don’t like them, I don’t like what they do to me, and I can’t paint when I’m on them. I’m happier now.”
“Are you?”
“Yes, things are different. Very different.”
“Because you’re not with Marc?”
“Because I’m with someone better than Marc.”
“I thought he was a friend?”
“I don’t have friends,” Regan said, with a laugh that sounded hollow, even to her. “Aldo was never just a friend. I just didn’t want to admit it.”
“Did you cheat on Marc?”
“What does it matter?”
“I’m just asking.”
“No, I didn’t. Aldo isn’t the bad guy in all this. And Marc certainly isn’t the good guy.”
“Then who is? The bad guy, I mean.”
Regan laughed again. “Me, I guess. I’m the criminal, aren’t I?”
She could see the red flags in the psychiatrist’s mind; surely this had been a subject on all the psychiatry exams. Surely this doctor had once convinced a board of established professionals that this was something she could handle. Oh, a recalcitrant patient says they will no longer medicate, they self-identify as a problem or an illness, what do you do?
“I don’t like the idea of you not being on pills, Charlotte.”
Excellent, Regan imagined a professor saying in response: gentle yet tactful, harsh but fair. Human, but not excessively so. Let us not forget our roles in this office. Let us not forget the parts we’ve all agreed to play.
“I hate being called Charlotte,” Regan said, suddenly feeling her edges start to fray, “and you don’t know me. You don’t know anything about me. You only know my prescriptions, my diagnosis, things you’ve written in your notes. Why should I do what you think is best,” she scoffed, “just because you went to Harvard? Because my family wants me quiet, they want me numb, is that why you don’t like it?”
The doctor was silent a moment. “If I don’t know anything about you, it’s because you’ve never told me anything. You’ve told me the barest, least informative details about your life, and I have no way of knowing who you are, or how you feel, unless you tell me. If you’re not participating in therapy, you’re wasting both our time.”
Regan’s voice was bitter, coarsely mean. “So should I go to prison, then? Is that what you think I deserve?”
“Is it what you think you deserve?” the doctor countered, and Regan wanted badly to break something. A window, an elbow, anything.
“Before I met Aldo,” Regan said tightly, “I was a forger.”
“Yes. I know.”
No, Regan thought, you don’t. “Forgery isn’t art,” she said, “it’s precision. It’s a process of labor more than it is a craft. It’s interpretation, translation. But it is a talent, and it is the one I had. There really is nothing more to who I was than that.”