Chapter 2

I'd only been back home for two short days. My wife, Ginny, had seemed very nervous around me. I'd been at the state hospital for a little more than five and a half months, before they finally felt it was time to release me. My body had adjusted itself to the medication they'd put me on to help me control the psychotic periods caused by my paranoid schizophrenia. I hadn't had any reoccurrences of these psychotic episodes. The drugs left me feeling somewhat hazy and detached from much of what was happening around me. I think Ginny was being put off by my lack of expression, and by the delay in me answering her questions. She claimed I wasn't 'really there', whatever that was supposed to mean.

I could tell my mental focus wasn't all that it should be, but I knew I needed to continue taking the medicine if I didn't want a reoccurrence of the kind of episode that had first caused me to be committed to the hospital. I liked to just sit in my chair and watch my young daughter playing on the floor. She is such a beautiful little girl. I really loved her a lot. It had been painful when Ginny had made me promise not to pick Kaitlyn up. She said it was because my medicine made me a little bit clumsy. I knew she was afraid I'd injure Kaitlyn if I somehow was to drop her or something.

I had come home to a very tense situation. Because of my hospitalization, my own income had been next to nothing. I didn't really have any set salary, and I couldn't earn any commissions from my job when I wasn't out there making new presentations. We were in danger of losing our home to foreclosure, and all of the credit cards had long since been charged up to their limits, because Ginny had needed to use their cash advance options in order to try to keep as many of our bills current as she could.

We had been living right on the very edge of both of our combined incomes, before I ever got sick. I could see that my illness had been very hard on her. Her being worried that the doctors had released me too early didn't help things either. It wasn't a happy homecoming that I'd returned to.

I didn't blame her. I still remembered what had happened to me that time. I knew it was important that I didn't allow my bloodstream to go too long without the medicine they said I needed. The last thing I wanted was another visit from those voices inside my head. I knew how self destructive I'd been before. I had come home full of hope that I'd be able to resume the life I'd had before I started listening to the voices inside my head.

When I'd called Mr. Ames, the boss at my company, and told him I'd been cleared to go back to work, he'd let me know about the recent company cut backs, and how they hadn't wanted to say anything so that I could continue getting my worker's compensation disability payments. Now that I was well once again, he told me that I was one of the ones who'd lost their jobs in those recent company cut backs.

Ginny didn't take the news about my layoff as well as I'd hoped she would. That's when I first found out just how precarious our financial situation really was. On top of everything else that had happened, this seemed like more than she could cope with. She'd been back and forth, between our bedroom and the living room, trying not to let me see her crying.

I sat there in my living room trying to keep everything I needed to know positioned in the forefront of my conscious mind. I was out of work, broke, and having to constantly see my wife, who I loved, crying her eyes out in hopeless despair.

Oh, and my medication, the cost of which was being covered under my company provided medical insurance policy, was now going to become an additional personal financial obligation. I looked over at Kaitlyn as she slid along the carpet, rolling her toy across the room and laughing as all the lights on it sparkled, and the noises coming from it made all those musical sounds she loved so well.

<Frank, might I, perhaps, have a moment of your time?>

The sound of the voice inside my head startled me. My first reaction was relief that it wasn't one of the voices I'd heard before. During that time when I'd been saved by the police from killing myself. My second reaction was a bone deep sense of fear and horror that I was in the living room alone with my beloved Kaitlyn, while in the midst of undergoing a brand new psychotic episode. I feared first for her safety, and secondly, despaired for my own safety and sanity. I was close to weeping when the voice spoke to me again.

<Frank, please remain calm. I'm not here to bring any harm to you or to your family. I'm here instead to make reparations for the harm that was earlier done to you. The individuals who were responsible for your earlier difficulties have been dealt with. They will not trouble you further. I have been assigned to render whatever assistance I can, within my limited powers, and to restore you and your loved ones to a point where nothing those other individuals did has any lingering consequences on your present or future lives. Tell me, what you would have me do to begin to correct any problems that might have been created for you by their actions?>

I know what you're thinking. I know it because I thought the same thing at first. The medication had somehow failed, and I was again crazy. There was something different about it this time though, something that hadn't been present the last time. Whoever this voice was, I felt him radiating a feeling of calm within me. I'd been in a panic at first, and then I could feel myself getting more tranquil and relaxed. I didn't know how the voice was doing what he did, but I also felt an overwhelming sense of trust that he was there to do exactly what he claimed.

"Can you speak to Ginny for me? Help her not to be so sad and upset? This has really been difficult for her. If she knew those voices were real, she might not be so worried about what has been happening with me."

In about ten seconds Ginny came into the living room from the bedroom. She looked at me as if to ask me why I'd summoned her. I could tell the exact instant when the new voice started talking to her. I couldn't hear anything, but I was watching her facial reactions when it first dawned on her that there was a voice talking inside her head.

"Frank, what's happening? Ooh, oh my God, Frank. Can you hear him too?"

I continued watching her until I noticed that she too was becoming a lot calmer than she'd been in the beginning.

<Frank, forgive me for prying through Ginny's memories. I only did so in order to give myself a more comprehensive understanding of the overall damage your family has been made to suffer. I'm afraid this problem is far greater than I have current authority to deal with. It is going to require me to go back to the Chambers of Decision, to seek further guidance and instruction from the guardian collective. I will take my leave of you, but rest assured that I will return with instructions that will allow me to improve your present situation. I go now to prepare my presentation on your behalf. I will return to your presence in three of your days. Do nothing to change your present circumstances. Rest assured, Frank, that you will be well compensated for the terrible wrongs that were perpetrated against you. This was no mere prank as we'd been led to believe. As a guardian, you have my most sincere promise that nothing you have been made to suffer will go unpunished, nor will those responsible for it be quickly forgiven. When I return, I will redress the wrongs you've been subjected to.>

In just another heartbeat, I sensed the absence of that voice inside my head. When I turned back to look at Ginny, she'd already launched herself into my arms. The force of our collision nearly knocked me over. The way her lips attacked every part of me she could reach above my neck, told me more than any words from her ever could.

I didn't know what that other voice had said to her, but whatever it was, it had broken down all the barriers that had been keeping us separate since my release from the hospital. Never was the warmth of another human soul as welcome as what I was now having lavished upon me.

"Oh Frank, I didn't know. I'm so sorry."

"The voice told you I wasn't crazy?"

"I meant I'm sorry for not believing you about the voices. It never even occurred to me that such a thing was possible."

Whatever this last voice had done to me to make me calm, it remained at work. I felt better than I'd been feeling. Much better. Ginny and I started talking about whether I should continue taking my medications or not. If the voices that had been inside my head were real, and Ginny sure seemed to believe hers had been real, there was no reason for me to continue taking them.

One benefit of this visit from the latest voice was that Ginny quit treating me as if I were a ticking time bomb, and she stopped being so on her guard when I was playing with our daughter. We still had all our same financial problems, but the voice had told me to do nothing, to make no changes until it returned. I didn't have any ideas about what to do to improve our situation anyway. Ginny and I talked more about our situation, and we both decided to wait to see what would happen.

That night, Ginny and I made love. This was something we hadn't yet done, not since my release from the hospital. It ended up being somewhat awkward between us for some reason. In spite of everything that had happened, I wasn't able to rid myself of the pictures and the video the first group of voices had shown me.

I'd been fine with everything, just as long as I believed the voices were simply a product of my mental illness. Now that I knew the voices had been real, I wondered just how much of the story they had told me were lies, or, if any part of them could have been the truth.

Naturally, I couldn't raise this subject with Ginny. That's the main reason why our lovemaking ended up being awkward and unfulfilling. After I came, neither of us said anything. We just rolled away from each other and said nothing. Sometimes, saying nothing communicates a lot.

After that happened, I lay awake, only pretending to sleep, wondering if I'd be able to find out for sure whether what the other voices had said to me had been truthful in any way. Even if the video they'd showed me had been totally bogus, it had seared itself into my memory. I couldn't get those images out of my mind.

Across from Frank on the bed, Ginny too pretended to be asleep. She'd noticed that their lovemaking had lacked its usual zeal and enthusiasm. Frank wasn't a great lover, not even at the best of times, but he usually put on a better performance than he'd put on this time. It felt like he was only going through the motions with her. More like doing what he thought was expected of him rather than actually wanting to be with her like that. Ginny was very worried.

As she lay there, hoping for sleep to overtake her, Ginny prayed that Frank would never discover her single great lapse in judgment while he'd been in that hospital. Looking back on it now, she still couldn't believe she'd let herself be talked into submitting to that ridiculous night of drinking, and later on, all that groping around in Kevin's back seat. What could she have been thinking? Her only excuse was in having had so much to drink that night, and having no one close by to help her with all the worry about what was happening right then in her life.

She knew it had been wrong, and she was ashamed. In the weeks since it had happened, she had so wanted to find the strength to go to Frank, to confess her one night of weakness. She felt like the guilt of what she'd done was more than she could bear.

All this was even before that strange voice that just came into her head and started talking to her. At first, she'd been panicked, but then she calmed back down very quickly, as the voice explained what it was, and its purpose in being there with her.

Now though, all that calmness and serenity had fled from her mind. In its place was the stark terror of not knowing if that voice had somehow learned of that night. What if it had, and then told Frank before she could steel up her nerves to do it herself?

She had been so happy, so relieved, to find out that Frank hadn't really been crazy before. She had thought this meant that everything was going to be all right again. It was only after she'd had a chance to think of some of the other implications, of possibly having the voice know her terrible dark secret. That was when she began to have these worries.

She loved Frank so much. She'd loved him from the first few times they'd gone out together. She knew that she had been the one of them most anxious to make their relationship a permanent one. She'd managed to get her way, but only by insisting on them getting married.

As much as she'd been frightened at the prospect of losing the house, and of not having enough money to pay their bills, that had been infinitely better than what she now faced. Ginny prayed that somehow everything would work out between Frank and herself.

She mentally searched for some good way to tell him about her one evening of weakness. She knew she had to tell him before that voice returned. As bad as it was, the prospect of her having to confess her actions to him, it would be much worse if he were to find out from anyone else.

At least she didn't have to worry about Kevin telling anyone. Ever since the night it had happened, he'd kept as much distance as he could manage from Ginny. He knew that Connie would never forgive his having taken advantage of Ginny like he had. For the hundredth time at least, she wished with her entire being that she hadn't insisted on needing to get back home that night. If she'd only listened to Connie, and spent the night on Kevin and Connie's living room sofa, instead of insisting on having Kevin drive her home.

It had all been so innocent at first. Harmless flirting between two long time friends. Perhaps she'd always been a little envious of Connie. Kevin was such an attractive man. It was all the drinking she'd been doing. She never would have allowed things to go as far as they had if her inhibitions had been as high as they normally were. It had seemed exciting, and Frank had been gone for so long. Still, drink or no drink, she had known she was going too far when she agreed to getting in the back seat with Kevin.

She was thankful that she'd finally come to her senses before Kevin had managed to actually insert his penis. As bad as it was, she could still take some comfort in the fact that she hadn't gone all the way with him. Letting him finger her while she had rubbed her hand over his hard on, from outside his trousers, was bad enough though. It made a difference, to her at least, that she hadn't let him actually penetrate her with his penis. Would it matter at all to Frank though?

I awakened slowly, refreshed from one of the few nights of halfway decent sleep I'd managed in the past few months. I'd slept in the beginning, at the hospital, but this was due, at least in part, to the early doses of medicine I was given. Once they were satisfied that they had the correct dosages, my sleeping pattern had reverted to the very light sleeper I'd always been before. I wasn't an insomniac, but I seldom slept for more than an hour or two at a time, before something happened to wake me up. Usually that something was Ginny stirring in her sleep, or turning herself over to get in a more comfortable position.

It had taken me several hours to nod off to sleep, but, once I did, I'd slept for a good five or six hours. When I woke up, Ginny was gone. Kaitlyn would have gone over to Ginny's mom's house for the day, to be watched while Ginny worked. I got up and washed up a little before heading out to the kitchen to look for something to eat. My plan was to spend the day trying to see if I could make some inroads on the condition our yard was now in. Ginny didn't do yard work, and there hadn't been any extra money to hire anyone to take care of any of the outside landscaping.

I was thankful to have something to do to take my mind off of the way my thoughts had been going. I didn't want to think bad thoughts about Ginny. I loved her. I couldn't imagine she had really done any of those things the first voices had tried to get me to believe she'd done. Maybe we didn't have a perfect marriage, but who did? We loved each other though, and we both loved Kaitlyn a great deal. I just had to put all those other images out of my mind and concentrate on how things had been for us before those voices came into my life.

I really lost myself in my gardening. Things had been neglected out in the yard for so long, that I was able to make significant improvements simply by cutting back on all the over growth that had occurred. I mowed, edged, raked and trimmed. I pruned and dug, spread fertilizer, and re-seeded a few areas that had long been neglected. I had to replace one of the sprinkler heads, and to clear away leaves from some of the drainage spouts coming off of our roof. By the time Ginny and Kaitlyn pulled up into the driveway, I was tired and sore from all that unaccustomed labor. Looking around though, I found myself well pleased with what I'd been able to accomplish.

I remember looking around and thinking, right before Ginny came home, that my life was a lot like my lawn and grounds had gotten. A lot was wrong with it right now, but I could begin work to make it better. I really wanted to get my life back into good shape again.

After dinner, Ginny told me to go sit in the living room while she took Kaitlyn and got her ready for bed. She told me we needed to talk. Something in the way she said it made me very nervous. I don't know why, but my first thought was that she wanted to tell me that all those things the original voices had told me about, and had shown me, were true. I took my seat, trying to stay calm enough to listen to what she was going to tell me.

I have to confess that I was actually quite a bit relieved when she only told me about what she and Kevin had gotten up to the night he drove her home from her evening spent over at his and Connie's place. I heard her trying to justify what had happened, and her saying it couldn't have possibly happened, except for a long combination of things all coming together at that exact same time. While I listened to her, I thought she was trying to make it seem like she hadn't been at all at fault. It was all her drinking, the financial problems, me being away in the hospital, her being lonely, and four or five other things. All that aside, I was angered most by the inordinate amount of pride she seemed to be taking in the fact that she hadn't actually done most of the things that god damned Kevin had wanted them to do.

Neither Ginny nor I were virgins when we first met. That time we had broken up, after she got so upset that I hadn't proposed to her, she'd had a short lived affair with one of her co-workers. I didn't think I was one of those guys who had some insanely jealous streak, but Kevin and Connie were really our best friends, for God's sake. Knowing what had happened, how was I supposed to act around him, or even around Connie for that matter?

Still, as bad as her confession seemed, it was a lot less of a problem than the other would have been for me. You better believe I asked her about the other too. She swore none of that had ever happened, and even offered to let me come to her work so she could show me the guy she'd been fucking when she and I had been broken up. She told me he was shorter than I was, and had dark brown hair. She said he looked nothing like the man I had described to her from the pictures and the video that the voices had shown to me.

After we got done talking, we went straight to bed. We didn't even try to touch each other. I hadn't been able to tell her that I forgave her yet, and I was as much upset by her attitude about the thing that happened with Kevin, as I was with what had happened itself. I knew damn well, if I told her I'd gotten drunk and ended up diddling Connie in the backseat of my car, she wouldn't have seen my drinking as any kind of a damn excuse at all. I was glad she hadn't let him fuck her like he wanted, but I didn't think her refusal to let him do that undid any of the things that the two of them had gotten up to.

I was going to have my own damn talk with Kevin too. He better watch his ass around me from now on. That was some pretty rank shit he had pulled. Talk about taking advantage of a friend.

Surprisingly enough, I enjoyed my second consecutive night of good sleep. Ginny and Kaitlyn were once again gone by the time I finally awakened. After breakfast I went over to our bills desk and started looking through all of the accumulated financial mess. Ginny hadn't ever needed to handle our bills before I went to the hospital. It wasn't that she couldn't do it, it was more like she preferred not to do it. To be fair, she had everything better organized than I usually did. She always remembered to write down all the checks she wrote, and she had reconciled our check book every month. It took me only an hour and a half to confirm everything she had told me about the current state of our finances. If I needed to only use one word to describe our financial position, that word would be BLEAK. We were tottering on the edge of insolvency.