“If you’d been able to run, the dog might have caught you. Maybe you’d all be dead.”
“I hid.”
“Of course you did,” she said. “Your brain, your psyche wanted you to survive. You couldn’t outrun his dog—you couldn’t have overpowered him physically. You only had one option. Hide from the monster. You’re a survivor. If not for what you told the police, they might not have found your friends. Hank is alive because of you.”
“But not Tess.”
Dr. Cooper’s office was always warm and cozy, a comfortable place to bare all. The doctor didn’t cry like her mother, or rage like her father. She listened.
“There’s only one person to blame for that, Lara. And it’s not you.”
“They’re both gone,” she said. Misery was a fog that wrapped around her. “Hank. He wouldn’t see me, and now he’s gone. He hates me.”
“He’s filled with rage, suffering trauma just like you. He hates, certainly he does. It may even be directed toward you because you’re safe. But none of this, not for a single second, is your fault.”
“He saw me in that garage,” she said. “He came for me. But I ran.”
The doctor waited a beat and then repeated what she’d have to say a hundred times.
“There is only one person to blame for what happened to the three of you. It’s not your fault, Lara.”
Slowly, slowly, she came to see that it was true. She healed. Her body. Her spirit. She was the lucky one.
“Call me Rain,” she said to the doctor. “That’s what I want to be called now.”
“Rain,” said Greg. He looked down at the pile of letters and back at her. “Make me understand this.”
Greg was a good man, and she could share herself with him. But she often didn’t, especially when it came to Kreskey and Hank. It was a wound, raw and deep. Exposing it to anyone, even someone gentle who loved her, was painful. What her father had taught her about locking it away had served her, allowed her to live a life. Why was it all banging on the lid now?
Because it’s time, her father said. It’s time to tell the story, to own it. Otherwise, and I have come to understand this too late, it winds up owning you.
“I can’t,” she said to her husband. Fear was the lock on the box, and for Rain, it was still fastened tight. “How can I make you understand when I don’t understand myself? I’m sorry.”
She looked at the letters and wanted to snatch them back. Would he throw them in the trash, try to burn them? How could she try to stop him?
“There shouldn’t be secrets between us,” he said, rising. The letters in his hand.
He handed them back to her, locked her with that intense gaze. When she didn’t say anything—what could she say?—he left the room.
FIFTEEN
Life goes on.
It’s such a pat phrase, such a well-worn truth that you almost don’t even hear the words. It’s only when your own life has come to a grinding halt that you understand the cruelty of it. In the aftermath of trauma or grief or loss, life goes on for everyone else. But not for you.
Later, one might come to understand it differently. Life is a river, it washes over you, washes the past away if you let it. If you forgive, let go, move on simply, day by day, one foot in front of the other, even the worst things can be left behind you. They fade away. This is what I tell my patients. And I believe it. At least part of me believes it. Half of me.
The next time I saw you, I was twenty-two, already working on the first of my graduate degrees at Columbia. You, in your senior year at NYU, were working on your journalism degree. It was your father’s book signing at the big Barnes & Noble on Union Square. Remember? I know you do. The old man could still pack a house. (You know the rumor was that after the accusations, he paid that kid off, and helped him get a book published. That’s why his student dropped the charges against your father. I’m not sure I believe that. Meanwhile, that kid’s book, it sucked. So derivative of Bruce Winter it was embarrassing. I can’t imagine your father plagiarizing such a hack writer.)
The event was standing room only. You were up in front, the good daughter—attentive, smiling.
He was with you, leaning in and whispering to you occasionally, his hand on