other person alive who was there that day. And because part of me—a big part—wishes I could go back and save him.”
“But you can’t,” she said. “Like you told him. We don’t get to go back, only forward.”
“I know.”
Gillian drew in and released a deep breath. There was worry on her friend’s face, but also the dangerous excitement of a journalist staring down the barrel of a big story. That was the power of the work—when you investigated the truth, when you put the words down on the page, you ordered the chaos of the world. When you took control of the narrative, it stopped controlling you. She hoped.
TWENTY-THREE
The Hero’s Journey. There are plenty of heroes in our human mythology and myriad journeys on which they have embarked. But it’s only one story. A young man—yes, in classic mythology it’s always a man—hears the call. He is made aware that an epic task is his to accomplish. He rejects the calling—he is too young, too weak, unable. But the call is relentless, and finally he must answer it. And so begin the trials—the struggle, the pain, the loss. All of this strife prepares him for the final battle, where he faces his ultimate foe either within or without. He has been made strong by all that he has endured. He is ready for the great battle.
My journey started with Eugene Kreskey.
He’d been hospitalized already once before we knew him, after the death of his parents. It was widely believed that he had attempted a murder-suicide, rigging the gas furnace so that the house filled with deadly carbon monoxide gas. But it couldn’t be proven, and he wasn’t charged. He was raised in the system; which I’m guessing was a far better deal than being raised by sadistic monsters who kept you in a basement for twelve years. I’ve read the case files. He was docile as a lamb, no sign of violent behavior. Arrested development had him operating on the emotional level of an adolescent; he had an IQ of about 70—not disabled, but able to comprehend about as much as a twelve-year-old.
He was released at twenty-two, a caseworker assigned to visit him at home and work, and went to work in his cousin’s garage. That’s when he saw you, Lara.
He followed you, we know now. Maybe for weeks that summer. He knew your routines, how you spent your days. He watched your bedroom light go out at night.
What is it about you?
He told his doctors that you looked like the girl who visited him in his dreams—raven-haired, white skin, those pale blue eyes. Snow White, he called her. The fairy-tale princess who loved dwarfs. You don’t have to be Freud, you know, to figure some of this shit out. She loved him, this girl in his dreams, when no one else did.
The lonely, stunted Kreskey said you smiled at him, sweet and innocent. An invitation, he thought. He wanted to bring you back to the house where his parents tortured him. He imagined that you’d cook and clean for him, tuck him into bed, read to him. You’d be the sweet, pretty girl mother he never had. But you fought him, and you hurt his dog, you had a nasty mouth, and you weren’t nice at all. And he was angry. He never wanted Tess, or me.
He was declared unfit to stand trial for the murder of Tess, for our assault, my abduction, unable as he was to differentiate between his dreams and reality, the voices inside and outside his head. He was a paranoid schizophrenic, truly. But after ten years of medication, therapy and work release, the powers that be considered him ready for a halfway house. Supervised living, a room of his own, a job as an office-building janitor.
I could not accept that. He couldn’t.
As you know, I was a student then. A year from my PhD, writing my dissertation on the gift of the split psyche, how it can allow a traumatized mind to survive horror and abuse. How, even if it never quite returns to wholeness, a traumatized psyche with adequate therapy and sometimes medication can function in society. Who would know about this better than I? Though I guess some might argue that I’m not exactly functioning.
After my school day, making sure I stayed on top of my workload, in the evenings I drove north. I started shadowing him.
He was even bigger than he had been, a great, lumbering ogre. He’d lost his hair.