said, resting a hand on the stack. “And only you can tell it.”
She felt the weight of it, the air in the room suddenly overwarm.
“So, what’s the story, Laraine? What are you going to tell them?”
“I’m going to tell them the truth,” she said, surprising herself.
Most of it.
THIRTEEN
When I woke up it was pitch-black at first. And so quiet; the only sound was my own wheezing breath. It was cold, too; wet concrete beneath me. I knew that stink right away, the mold of a northern basement. A persistent damp that sinks into everything.
My body didn’t feel like my body. It shook uncontrollably. Oh, and the pain. It was like the worst earache, the worst toothache, times a million. What did we know about pain then, beloved children of the suburbs, private schools and parents who for all their minor flaws and mundane failures loved us to distraction? We’d barely been yelled at. Even our teachers weren’t allowed to be mean anymore.
If not for the steady diet of comic books and horror movies, the ideas that got me into the whole mess in the first place, I might not have survived what came next.
Or that cop—remember him?—the one who came into the school and told us what to do if we were taken. First, don’t let them take you. That was lesson number one. (I know you remember that one, Lara.) But if he gets you, he told us, break all the rules. Anything anyone ever told you about being good, and not making a scene, and obeying the grown-ups in your life—toss that right out the window. Be bad. Yell and scream. Fight. Make a mess. Tear things up, flood toilets and bathtubs, smash drywall. Anything that calls attention.
Remember how he taught us to punch out taillights—if we were in the trunk of some psycho’s car. It was a surreal presentation, but no one laughed. We didn’t even joke about it afterward. Because it was scary as fuck. People were out there. People who wanted to take you and do unspeakable things to your body.
Something weird happened to me in Kreskey’s basement. In extreme trauma, especially in the very young, the psyche can split. People generally think of this as a bad thing. It can present as psychosis, or dissociative states, even catatonia. But most trauma experts agree that this split can sometimes be a gift, as a stronger self emerges to protect the weaker aspects.
In the fearsome dank black of that basement, a darker, stronger, bolder version of me was born. I might never have met him otherwise. I can’t say I like him, or that I’m glad we have had occasion to know each other. I also can’t say I’m not grateful to him.
The Hank I was when Kreskey took us—he, alone, wouldn’t have survived what came next. I wish I could have left the Hank who emerged in that basement behind when I didn’t need him anymore. But that’s not the way these things work usually.
It’s about fifteen minutes before my last session of the day. And from my office window, I see her car, a black sedan, pull into the lot and just sit, waiting.
Patrick, my four o’clock patient, notices my attention waver and I think the last bit of the session suffers some. Children of trauma are finely tuned to shifts of expression; they see everything. It’s a survival mechanism. When raised by an unpredictably violent parent, the abused child learns to watch every movement, every microexpression, to listen for every shift in tone or even breath. They become watchful adults, unusually intuitive to the point of being empaths.
Patrick is a gifted artist, obsessed with the human form, the face especially, the eyes. I feel the heat of his gaze our whole hour together; most of my other patients stare at their hands, the floor, the art and objects hanging on my walls. Not Patrick. Patrick’s father abused him physically and psychologically, brutally, relentlessly. He bears the scars—a broken nose that didn’t heal quite right, an arm that wasn’t set properly gives him pain, a burn on the side of his neck, still red and angry. Patrick’s father killed his mother brutally as the boy, beaten nearly senseless, watched, helpless.
His aunt and uncle took him in, and they are getting him the help he needs. I don’t know what lies ahead for him. He’s quiet, folded into himself most of the time.