Katie Beers (37 page)

“They were beautiful,” Mary said. “I loved that she thought of caterpillars, because after all, they eventually turn into butterflies! She loved working on these critters. The initial point of this project was to ‘help little kids find their feelings, especially kids who were abused and had trouble talking about their feelings.’”

Katie also toiled over many sessions to complete the lock on the clay box, but she decided at the end of the project that the box didn’t need a lock anymore. A great moment, Mary said, signifying she had become more trusting, less guarded and capable of helping someone else.

“
I felt she had a glimmer, for the first time, that no one was going to invade her body. She felt safe. I told her not to keep any more secrets.”

Mary phoned Katie when Sal died in 2009, but Katie didn’t return her call.

“Her whole thing is to go underground. She didn’t call me back. We were so close. I couldn’t believe it. It was disturbing to me. But that is how she takes care of herself. She erases. She just shuts down.”

Katie seems to have done well blocking memories out for many years. In terms of recovery, is it healthier to remember or forget?

On this, Mary was unequivocal.

“It’s better to slowly remember, much better, because if you are in a safe harbor you slowly let out everything you can, rather than have it ice over. There are other theories, that the effect of trauma is twenty years later. You want people to let it out, you don’t want them to keep it a secret or suppress it. Denial worked for Katie for some time, but she had so many secrets to let out, and she took her time with it.”

Why would Katie “remember” later, so many years later, that she was raped?

“She was old enough to truly find her voice.”

Why didn’t it come out earlier?

On this, Mary paused and looked deeply into my eyes. “Carolyn, you know what? That didn’t matter.” What did matter, said Mary, was that Katie was slowly releasing her secrets, learning to trust in a world that had betrayed her.

I knew from the landmark work,
Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror
⁴²
that

“atrocities refuse to be buried.”

“While the ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness…denial does not work. Remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites…for the healing of individual victims.

People who have survived atrocities often tell their stories in a… contradictory and fragmented manner which undermines their credibility… When the truth is finally recognized, survivors can begin their recovery.”

Katie is clearer on these memories now. She believes she was guided by shame and humiliation. She told me she never wanted to admit to herself that she had let things get so out of control, that she had
let
someone violate her like that. Somehow, she felt responsible for her fate.
Has Katie broken the cycle of abuse?

Mary is certain she has.

Love, Mary believes, was the lifeline, the essential ingredient. It was provided in abundance by a community that felt a sense of collective guilt over the abandonment of a child.

Motherhood, she warned, is the final frontier. “She will be extremely obsessive compulsive about things to try to keep her children safe. She will have overwhelming anxiety. And she won’t connect it to her trauma. She has the tools but she will need reassurance. The work that I did with her was stage one of recovery. And being able to go into young adulthood without depression was another stage. But the next stage is mothering. This mothering stage brings up all the mistrust that anyone ever had. She was not mothered. The only mothering she received was after the kidnapping. More and more issues will come up for her. Betrayal. Everyone betrayed her. I hope I didn’t.”

I told Mary that Katie credits her entire life to her love and that of her foster family. Mary’s eyes watered and she tried to smile.

Has Katie recovered? Is telling her story a tool in her recovery?

“We are all recovering from something. Everyone is damaged in some way. I am so glad she is on this path of sharing her story, which is such an important part of her recovery.”

“But,” Mary warned, “trauma can, and sometimes does, return.” “The recovery doesn’t stop. There is no end of story.”

I met Derek at a college-town bar. I was sporting a dazzling engagement ring and he, a pool cue and an attitude. I was happily engaged to Scott and not looking to meet anyone. My college girlfriend, Aileen, and I would go regularly, after we had finished our homework, to shoot pool and often found ourselves in a game with two cocky arrogant townies. I figured they were interested in Aileen because they’d always drift over our way and show off trick pool shots.

I really didn’t care for Derek or Martin. Neither one was my type. I liked nice guys, and these two didn’t seem the “nice guy” type. They acted as if they owned the bar because they were locals and not college kids. Derek owned a successful information technology business and everyone knew him. To me, though, he was simply a stranger.

I always had my guard up at the bar. There were a lot of people that I didn’t know, and I didn’t want to get into a situation where I was not in control. Control is a major issue for me. Feeling out-of-control launches my anxiety attacks. I need to, at all times, control my “exit strategy.” In high school, I would always be the designated driver. I felt safest when I was behind the wheel, and in control of the vehicle. I don’t like being cooped up either, or in a room where the exits are blocked by something or someone. I don’t like feeling helpless. With my guard up, I have been told I come across as standoffish. I just don’t give people the time of day that I don’t know, and that is how I behaved toward Derek.

That didn’t stop Derek and Martin from inviting Aileen and me back to their apartment after shooting pool one night. It was hardly a date and by this time, I felt I knew them well enough to go with Aileen to their apartment. We all got some snacks at a twenty-four-hour gas station and curled up on their couch to watch a movie. Aileen and I ended up staying until four in the morning. Half asleep, with me still completely oblivious to Derek’s interest, we exchanged numbers and I went back to my dorm to catch a few hours of sleep before class.

When I broke off my engagement that spring, I spent a lot of time shooting pool in between the time spent cramming for finals. I didn’t give Derek a second thought. He always showed up on the other end of the pool table. He was there to help me forget about school work, the disintegration of my engagement, and at the end of semester, to help me study for finals and move out of my dorm room to head home. He was also very easy to talk to. I told Derek about my childhood before I left school that first summer. He casually answered that he already knew. He had “googled” me.

I liked Derek’s down to earth style and I wanted to get to know him better. We began to talk on the phone almost every day. I enjoyed the friendship that was now a budding romance. Our relationship started very quickly after my engagement ended. I was realizing that I should never have said “yes” to Scott, but I was blinded by the beautiful ring and the promise of a fairytale ending. Derek was more of where I wanted to be in my life. He owned a business and wasn’t thinking of starting a family any time soon.

For our first official date, Derek promised to take me to my favorite Italian restaurant, even though it was almost an hour drive from our rural Pennsylvania town. He was going to pick me up after work at six o’clock, but called right before pick up time to say he was running an hour and a half late. He arrived two hours later than that, apologetically offering the option of rescheduling. It was so late, we ended up scarfing down subs at a nearby Subway. Not very romantic, but the perfect beginning for two unpretentious people, and a fitting start to what would later evolve.

Derek and I kept in touch most of the summer while I was home in Springs. I went to visit him twice over the summer, but pulled back when I found out he reconnected with an ex-girlfriend while I was home. It started as a favor. He told me he was just going to be picking her up from the airport—after not seeing her for a long time. I didn’t understand why he was the one picking her up and he explained that she had asked him for a ride because her parents were working. I gave him credit for being honest, but I told him that if he spent any more time with her after picking her up from the airport and dropping her off at her parents’ house, he could forget about dating me anymore.

He spent the entire week with her.

He actually was so upset with her departure, when he dropped her off at the airport, he called
me
to vent! I was in disbelief and I was done. I wanted nothing more to do with him.

This was a deal-breaker for me. I wasn’t going to play “second fiddle” to someone who I didn’t know, who lived in another state and who Derek told me had broken his heart.

Being a single college student in the Hamptons over the summer was no hardship. My girlfriends and I went out dancing in East Hampton, Southampton, Sag Harbor, and Montauk regularly. I was learning the value of having girlfriends in my life, girls who didn’t judge me, no matter how difficult I am to get close to. They understood why I have trouble trusting people. Caitlin and I were inseparable. I had known her since my freshman year in high school. Then there was Corinne. Corinne was a year ahead of me, and she was friends with Caitlin. In my mind, Corinne was a threat to my relationship with Scott. She was a new girl in high school, and Scott, being a nice guy, went out of his way to show her the ropes. This didn’t sit well with me. I didn’t trust her near Scott, even when she was dating someone else. In the end, I recognized my paranoia and understood its origin. Both Caitlin and Corinne ended up serving as my bridesmaids.

When I came back to college the fall of my senior year, I had no intention of seeing Derek again. I didn’t need someone in my life who didn’t want me. But I had to make one exception. Derek had my television in his apartment and I had to get it back. So I headed over to his place one night and Derek asked if I wanted to stay and watch a movie. There was no one else on campus; I was up at school two weeks early for RA training, having taken a job as a resident assistant in the dorm. I was very apprehensive when I got to his apartment. I had my guard up, a shield that I had no plan of letting down. I only stayed for the movie so I wouldn’t be alone the entire night. That was it. We watched the movie and parted awkwardly. Not so coincidentally, we both showed up the next night at our favorite bar to shoot pool. It didn’t hurt that word was circulating that I was suddenly single and a few of my residents were asking me out. After a few dates, I realized quickly how much I missed Derek and how close we had become. He realized it too.

I fell in love with Derek’s values, his love for his family, his work ethic, and once I got to know him, his personality. He loved me for who I
was and didn’t judge me. He could put up with my baggage, my emotional, defensive, immature and always on-guard nature. Derek loved me, in spite of my many flaws.

For a long time, the trust issues lingered with Derek. I was exhibiting what Mary would call “self-destructive” behavior. I constantly wondered if he was still in touch with his ex-girlfriend or other women. Every time he got a text message or a phone call I would wonder if it was her. I was constantly grilling him about it, looking at his phone and his text messages. Derek was patient with me then, and even now, when insecurities resurface. I never know if my insecurities exist because of the dysfunctional models of relationships I had growing up, or because I have reason to mistrust. This is one of the pitfalls of surviving child abuse. I never know if my instincts are normal or just recurring mistrust creeping back from beneath the crust.

The awful lessons Sal and Linda taught me also resurface, and this is perhaps the most painful part. I don’t like admitting that I am wrong; I get defensive when I feel like I am being attacked. I have a short fuse and don’t like being criticized or put down. If someone is criticizing me, I become severely defensive, or alternately, completely shut down. It could be as simple as Derek saying that there are dishes in the sink—he isn’t criticizing me, he is just making an observation. But I take comments like that to heart, and automatically feel like he is attacking my homemaking skills. I put up a wall, or I lash out.

I wasn’t thinking about the future that night in 2005 traveling home from a sales training trip for my first job after college. My flight from Minnesota was delayed for hours due to mechanical problems and I missed my connection in Chicago. I could have stayed the night, or flown to a different Pennsylvania city. Derek, who was picking me up, told me to grab the flight to Harrisburg even though he would have to drive hours to retrieve me and I wouldn’t arrive until after midnight. I was at the baggage claim carousel when Derek found me, exhausted from travelling and sporting freshly dyed bleach blond hair. He gave me a hug and a kiss, and held me extra tight, telling me how much he missed me and loved me, and couldn’t picture his life without me. I had no idea where he was going with this, until he got down on one knee at twelve thirty in the morning, with the baggage circling next to him, and asked me to marry him, presenting
me with the most beautiful ring. My immediate response was, “Are you kidding me?” and followed quickly with a resounding, “YES!”

His original plan was to pick me up at the airport on time and surprise me with the ring tied around our Jack Russell Terrier, River’s, neck. But the airport was hours from home and the time was late. The execution of the plan mattered little to me. I was truly ecstatic inside. I had a feeling from early in our pool hall days that I would make a life with Derek. We clicked; we wanted the same things out of life, out of a marriage and out of work. The next day I awoke in complete bliss! I was so excited, I wanted to tell everyone. Derek’s family got the news first; because they live close, we saw them often. I had to wait three weeks to tell my family, because I didn’t want to do it over the phone. They truly loved Derek, and knew how happy he made me. It was, to me, the start of a fairy-tale and the first step in what I never had before in life but always imagined.