Free The Skeleton Cupboard by Tanya Byron Page B

hungry.”
    â€œOK, Imogen. Let’s go and eat.”
    I told myself I was getting somewhere. I was sweating, building a picture of what had happened to Imogen in my mind. I was feeling good about myself. I thought I was on my way to understanding.
    I would turn out to be very wrong.
    *   *   *
    Sitting behind the one-way mirror in the family therapy suite and watching the family session was, frankly, exciting. I could see them, but they couldn’t see me.
    It was also uncomfortable—who thought up this therapeutic strategy? The family knew they were being viewed but were expected to “act normal.” I felt guilty.
    Imogen sat still and pale-faced between her mother, Mary, and stepfather, Jake. Jake cried; Mary didn’t. They were reliving the moment of discovering Maisie dead. My soft-moccasined colleague was with them in the room, steering the event.
    â€œTell me about that day.”
    It was a normal day, they said: The girls were playing outside. Mary was working in her office in the house, on a call to LA, speaking with a celebrity’s assistant. Jake was conferencing with his agent, publicist and manager about an upcoming photo shoot for designer swimwear. Yep, an ordinary day in an ordinary household.
    â€œWhere were you, Imogen?”
    She said that she was at the bottom of the sea, sea, sea. And then she asked for me to come into the room and pull her out.
    I am ashamed when I think back. When I entered the therapy session from that room behind the one-way mirror, there was a moment with Jake. A look we exchanged. I had seen him on billboards around London and in the pages of glossy magazines. And now I was in the room with him, for real, joining a family meeting as Imogen’s individual therapist, and his eyes were the same, his slight smile the same, as they were in all the ads I had seen. He saw me recognize him, take in his striking features, and he knew exactly what I was feeling; worse still, he realized I knew that he knew. It was a split second, but Imogen saw it—saw that “moment” between her stepfather and me. I had let her down by being pathetically and predictably human. I snapped back into the room just as Imogen jumped up, lifted her chair, threw it at the one-way mirror and, with her dead sister’s stinky rag doll under her arm, ran out of the room.
    In the chaos, I leaped up and chased after her. As I left the unit, I heard the alarms going off; my heart pounding in my chest, I told myself not to panic.
    Outside, it was raining, the type of dense, light rain that drenches in seconds and leaves everything looking oily. I could feel myself slipping, so I kicked off my shoes, immediately regretting it as the loose gravel bit the soles of my feet. No time to stop. I had to keep running—besides, the pain was my punishment for being rubbish.
    I could hear colleagues behind me shouting and dispersing in tag teams to try to close down our little quarry. My name was being called, but I didn’t dare stop or slow down because I still had Imogen in my sights. I was responsible for her running, so I needed to catch her.
    As I got to the end of the central road that divided the asylum and rounded the corner toward the exit, my heart skipped. I had forgotten that leaving this closed community, I would enter the real world and the busy road that met the highway. I looked frantically left and right, and spotted a tiny figure sprinting toward the overpass.
    I was panting and feeling leaden-leg heavy. It occurred to me to wonder—not for the last time—why the fuck we were housing suicidal children so close to a major road. These were big roads, ribbed with overpasses—perfect platforms for the suicidal. Thinking this, still running, I started to cry.
    We were heading toward the highway, toward civilization and the big city. She was slowing down; I wasn’t.
    I was wet and cold and, I assumed, running for Imogen’s life. I