Twisted (17 page)

51

Driving home, those awkward moments with Adam wheel toward annoyance.

I fully realized my theory about Donny Ray wasn’t concrete yet; there was no need to point it out. He said he was just trying to help but instead came across as extremely overcritical.

The simple fact is that while Donny Ray’s previous psychologist had an inkling of what was going on, she obviously wasn’t skilled enough to ask the right questions, therefore she never got the right answers. I have far more practical experience in the field of forensic psychology than she. I’ve been doing this for years and doing it well. Talking to Adam, you’d think I was some kind of rookie fresh out of school, seeing a zebra where there was only a horse. I’m greatly bothered that, instead of acknowledging my discovery, Adam demonstrated a lack of respect for my abilities. He doubted me.

That’s because Adam despises you.

I can’t help but question whether his doubt came from a bad place, if beneath his voice of concern was a whisper of professional competitiveness. He’s already completed his assessment and concurred with Ammon that Donny Ray is malingering. If my theory is right—if Donny Ray dissociated during Jamey Winslow’s murder, and his amnesia was caused not by the head injury but instead his previous psychological trauma—that would make both of their opinions irrelevant. Mine would prevail.

Adam has always felt threatened by you.

This is very disappointing.

I have every intention of closing the missing links he mentioned, and when I do, Adam will realize he was wrong. He’ll feel embarrassed, and then I’ll flaunt my success in his face. I’ll be the one who gets to shame
him
. See how he likes it.

Don’t forget when he asked about the MRI. It was a vicious move.

As if he thinks the accident has in some way compromised my professional judgment. That simply isn’t true. The injury has compromised many things but not my ability to properly assess Donny Ray’s case, and I resent the implication.

I just don’t understand what’s gone wrong inside Adam’s head.

52

I walk into the house and find Jenna talking on the phone. She takes one look at me, and I can tell she senses the residual steam rolling off my back. I head for the refrigerator and try to play it down, but after looking inside, I can still feel the heat of her gaze on me.

“I’m not sure what to tell you,” Jenna says, continuing her conversation. A minute or so later, she hangs up.

I look back at my wife, and now I see more than concern. She stares at the phone as if it might answer her confusion.

“It was Kayla,” she says.

“Kayla?” I repeat and feel a stab of discomfort. She never calls here. We don’t exactly have that kind of relationship with her, especially after my disturbing outburst at her home. “What did she want?”

“Something about a globe?”

Oh, shit. The globe.

I’d forgotten all about the damned thing. It’s still upstairs in the closet, inside a pants pocket.

You need to lose that thing, buddy.

I’m not your buddy.

Jenna waits for my reaction.

“A globe . . . ,” I repeat, knowing my statement to be a weak avoidance effort. Then I shake my head because there’s not really much more that I can say. Anything else could potentially cause a slipup.

“She noticed it went missing from her living room right after we left, then struggled for days over whether to mention it.” Jenna wrinkles her nose. “The whole conversation felt really awkward.”

“So she thinks we stole it?”

You did steal it.

“She didn’t say that, but I can’t see any other reason why she’d call to mention it.”

“She’s probably just still angry about the way I treated her. You know how Kayla loves her drama,” I reply, giving pause to the thought of secretly returning something that, in retrospect, I haven’t the slightest clue why I stole in the first place. Too risky, I decide. Its reappearance after another visit to the house would point the finger at me even more.

Jenna appears to be thinking about my comment, but I’m unable to determine whether she agrees with it.

“It’ll turn up,” I try again.

Her nod is speculative.

I shift my attention toward the floor, but there I only find more discomfort, because Jake’s food is only half eaten. By the time I get home, his bowl is typically licked clean. But not tonight.

“Honey,” I say, “have you noticed Jake acting different lately?”

“Different, like how?”

“He seems a little lethargic and withdrawn.”

Jenna shakes her head and shrugs. “He seems fine to me.”

“And there’s still food in his bowl.”

She looks down and examines the uneaten food.

“Strange,” I say, “right?”

Jenna slowly raises her gaze to meet mine. She doesn’t answer, but we’ve always been able to read each other, and the misgiving that streams across her face speaks volumes.

The bowl is empty.

53

“The dog knows.”

I wake up with a start.

That voice again, but this time, I could swear it didn’t come from inside my head. This time, it sounded as if someone were speaking from right beside me.

Beside me?

I survey my surroundings. I’m in the family room. I look at my watch. Dinner was close to an hour ago.

“Jake knows.”

I nearly fall out of my chair because now the voice comes from a far end of the room. I spring to my feet and inspect every inch of that corner.

“Not there,” the voice taunts as it zooms swiftly overhead and toward the other corner.

“Where the hell are you?” I pull furniture out of position, search under tables, and lift the rug, trying to find it. “Stop hiding!”

From the floorboards beneath my feet now: “I’m not hiding. You are.”

I leap from my spot as if it’s just caught fire. “Quit chasing me! Leave me alone, goddamnit!”

The voice laughs from the entryway.

I pivot in that direction. Jenna stands there, and from the distress washing across her face, I know she’s been there long enough to watch me frantically race around the room, shouting at no one. Her mouth hangs slightly open. Her arms are glued to her sides.

As for me, my feet feel anchored to the floor like lead. I can’t speak. I’m embarrassed and humiliated. I’m shaken, because in one fell swoop, all the comfort Jenna was able to restore after the MRI yesterday, all the hope she helped me rebuild, feels lost. Not just for me, but from what I’m seeing, for her as well.

“Mommy!” Devon calls out from his bedroom. “Where are all my baseball hats?”

“Probably wherever you left them, sweetheart,” Jenna yells back, but her eyes never waver from me.

“They were all on my dresser,” he says, “I just saw them there this morning!”

Jenna shifts her fretful attention to the staircase. “Ten baseball hats?”

“Yeah, and they’re all gone!”

“I’ll help you in a minute,” she says, then turns back to me.

Reprieve over.

“I should be getting my results from the MRI tomorrow,” I offer quickly and nervously. “We just have to ride this out a bit longer, and then we’ll have answers.”

Before Jenna can respond, movement over her shoulder distracts me. Jake crosses the entryway.

Carrying one of Devon’s baseball hats in his mouth.

I look back at Jenna and see my fright reflected on her face. She doesn’t understand what I’m thinking, but it doesn’t matter—I know she feels it. My wife takes a step away from me, and I see a shadow drift along the planes of her face. Something that looks like uncertainty. Like doubtfulness. No, it’s more than that. It’s—

“Chris,” she says, voice shaky and holding unsettled eyes on me. “I don’t know what just happened, but it’s making me very nervous.”

She’s not alone on that.

54

NOW YOU SEE IT, NOW YOU DON’T

My father began seeing and hearing things that weren’t there—sometimes people, sometimes small animals, and sometimes beings that defied the laws of biological reason.

He also began screaming at them.

After that day in the car, I already knew the score, knew exactly where we were headed. To a place with no promise of a new day and no escape, just new ways to experience old and troubling emotions. A life of being tossed between extremes, none of them good.

My father was very sick, and that was a secret Mom could no longer hide from others, even as she continued the fight to hide it from herself. One day, Dad wandered out of the house in his pajamas and strolled to the next-door neighbor’s. After welcoming himself inside, he plopped down on their sofa and launched into a loud and frightening diatribe about six-legged, subhuman creatures, cohabiting and reproducing inside sock drawers. Frightened and unnerved, they called my mother, who rushed over to explain that he’d become disoriented after getting a flu shot: they didn’t buy it, and news of my father’s lunacy quickly traveled through the neighborhood. Everyone watched us now with guarded suspicion.

We were all struggling against the same truth, each in our own way: my mother fighting mightily to ignore it, me feeling threatened by it, and my father hopelessly lost in it. The more difficult my dad became, the more my mom would bounce between two rocky states, either digging into her toolbox for another mental contrivance or isolating herself within the dark clouds of depression. When things became most intolerable, she would exercise the option of committing my father for “evaluation.” Then off he’d go, shipped away for the county to deal with.

“They’re going to make him better!” she insisted every time, her smile so tragic, tears so desperate. “You’ll see. They’ll fix him—they will—and then we can finally have him back!”

But it was like sticking a Band-Aid on a bullet wound. We always did get him back, but he was never anywhere near fixed, and in some ways the hospital visits only made him worse. He’d arrive home medicated, stupefied, and for a short tim
e more manageable, but eventually his disturbing behavior would resurface and escalate further. Even while he was gone, I didn’t find much relief, just a permeating sense of oncoming doom that germinated within me like a fast-growing seed. So many nights I cried myself to sleep, feeling lost in my helplessness. Lost on this mental merry-go-round with him, cycling through tragic hopelessness and going nowhere fast.

Our family threads were quickly unraveling, a river of denial swirling and pulling them looser as my father continued to come undone.

And in the process, he was taking us all down the same path.

55

As my car drifts toward work, restless worry hangs ahead of me like a bad vapor.

I told Jenna the MRI results would bring answers and give us hope, but if I’m going to be honest, my statement was more an act of desperation than assurance. An MRI can’t detect schizophrenia, so I’m praying it will reveal a brain injury, because at least that might be treatable. Against schizophrenia, I don’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell.

I
t’s sad—if not completely ironic—to hope that a damaged brain could save me from going crazy, but fighting for sanity feels a lot like struggling to maintain balance on the tip of a double-edged blade. Each day I slip a little closer to the end, trying to keep my mind from
destroying my family before it destroys me. I don’t know how much longer I can hold on. Judging from Jenna’s reaction last night, it would seem she’s beginning to wonder as well. I could almost see cracks spreading through the courage she’s worked so hard to maintain.

My breaking mind is also breaking my wife.

I try to ignore the thought, but it won’t let me. Then, as I pull into Loveland’s entrance, ten feet of tarmac brings a distraction I didn’t at all want.

My foot briefly slips off the brake pedal.

Oh, hell no.

Yesterday, the lot was two-thirds full, but today there are more empty spaces.

More trouble.

Keep your nose out of it.

“Get out of my damned head!” I shout, hands clapped over ears as I barrel through Loveland and toward the consulting room. “I have to tell someone!”

Tell no one. Too many people are working against you.

“Nonsense! If others are disappearing, everyone can’t be in on it.”

The ones who are disappearing don’t know anything, and the rest are part of it.

“I’m going to Jeremy with this.”

Jeremy’s the last one you want to tell. What proof do you have? He’ll know you’re going crazy. He’ll put you away.

Rounding a corner, I squeeze my eyes shut, grab hold of my hair.
“
But
something has to be done!”

“About what?”

I look up. Evan McKinley stands outside the consulting room. He leans to one side, looks past my shoulder, then comes back to me.

“Nothing,” I say, struggling to put a lid on the voice. “Just thinking out loud.” I force a smile.

Evan forces one back.

He steps away from the door, and I work to tame my twitchy nerves into submission. I tell myself I’ve got to stay focused, that the evaluation is due in just a few hours. I’ve got to find out what color dress Donny Ray’s father made him wear, then confirm that it’s the trauma trigger for his disassociation. But upon entering the room, Donny Ray doesn’t seem onboard with my plan.

Not even close.

He stares ahead, unfocused, his body completely still. I follow his gaze, and where it ends chills me. Again, he’s honed in on the picture of that girl in the blue dress, and, just as before, seems transfixed by it. No reaction to my presence—in fact, no reaction to anything at all. I pad forward, keeping my attention on him, then take my seat. His eyes are glazed over, arms hanging loosely on both sides, fingers limp and spread apart.

“Donny Ray?” I say, trying to capture his attention.

Nothing.

I look at the picture, then back at him. He’s in some faraway place, and wherever that is, I need to bring him out of it.

“Donny Ray,” I say again, this time with volume and urgency.

And again, he shows no response.

I lean in closer so we’re face-to-face, snap my fingers, speak louder. “Donny Ray. Can you hear me?”

He blinks a few times, looks startled, as if just now realizing that I’m here, or that he is, or . . .

I pull back a few inches and continue watching. His eyes seem a little clearer but still clouded over by confusion, so I give him a minute to acclimate before saying, “Donny Ray, do you know where you are right now?”

He circles his gaze through the room, then brings it back to me. He nods but still seems marginally unsure.

“Can you remember the last thing you saw before this?”

His face is a blank slate.

“I need you to stay with me here,” I tell him. “Can you do that?”

Another nod, this one sluggish.

He’s still noticeably detached from his surroundings, and I need to ground him. Searching around, I say, “Donny Ray, can you find three things in this room that are red?”

He searches, too, and as he tells me, I see his awareness sharpen.

Excitement ripples through me. Conviction. Donny Ray has just been in a state of disassociation, triggered by the blue dress in the picture—a confirmation that my theory is dead-on. With time at a premium, this evidence couldn’t have come at a more perfect moment.

I grab a bottled water off the computer table and hand it to him. “I need to ask you about what just happened, and I need you to remain alert. Are you able to do that?”

He takes a greedy swig from the bottle, gasps for air, then gives me the okay to continue.

“What you mentioned when we first met, how you forget things. How they don’t fit together. Is that what you’re experiencing now?”

Donny Ray clears his throat and says, “Yeah . . . uh-huh.”

He’s lying. Don’t believe him.

What? No. This is one of the missing pieces of evidence I’ve been looking for. I don’t have time for you. Zip it, and let me do my job!

Going back to the question he was unable to answer earlier, I ask, “What’s the last thing you remember before seeing me here?”

He looks at the door and scratches his head. “Evan sitting me down.”

I point to the wall. “Do you remember seeing that picture at any point?”

He blearily narrows his vision on the girl in the blue dress, then nods.

“Was this before or after Evan sat you down?”

“After.”

“Okay. Going back now, can you give me an idea when experiences like this started happening?”

“Young.”

“
How
young?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Any idea at all? Maybe an approximate age, even?”

He takes hold of his shirt with one hand, and, with the other, starts twisting it. Then he shakes his head.

“Was it before or after Miranda’s disappearance?”

“After.”

Close enough. The disassociation probably began around the same time as his abuse, but since he blocked a lot of that out, it wouldn’t be unusual for him to be hazy about the circumstances that followed. I feel confident enough to move on.

But as I prepare, the noise I’ve heard before rattles above, much louder now. A thundering roll, followed by fast and frantic pounding that nearly knocks me from my seat. Next comes the shadow, so large that it nearly covers the entire room with darkness. I look up, and my body instantly pitches back, then jerks into paralysis.

The teenager in the red hoodie speed-crawls across the ceiling, chasing after his rubber ball.

I look back at Donny Ray. He watches me, brows crinkled, head crooked.

I cannot afford to let reality slip from my grasp or lose my patient’s confidence. I’ve got to hold it together at least until I’m finished here.

I shove my thoughts through the flurry of confusion, find my way back to our conversation. “Do you have any recollection of losing time when Jamey Winslow was murdered?”

“Yes.”

“What exactly do you remember?”

“Waking up in bed. With blood on my clothes.”

“How do you know it was the same day?”

“Because I panicked and ended up being late to work, and I saw it on the news later.”

“Okay.” I push back my sleeves, lean in toward him. “I’m going to ask a lot of you today. We’ll need to discuss your abuse again.”

Donny Ray swallows hard. His Adam’s apple rises, then falls.

“The dress your father made you wear. Was there more than one?”

He closes his eyes and slowly shakes his head.

“Can you describe it for me?”

When he opens his eyes, he’s fighting back tears. His lips part, and I see the slightest quiver. “I . . . I don’t want . . . I can’t . . .”

“I have to know, Donny Ray.”

He looks to one side and toward the ceiling, the lights above reflecting off tears that fill his lower lids. “It’s too . . .”

“What? Tell me.”

“It’s so . . .” He stops again. “Humiliating!” he says through a strangled voice, still refusing to look at me.

“I know . . . I understand, but I wouldn’t ask unless it mattered. I need this information for your evaluation. I need you to help me.”

Donny Ray collapses forward, reaches around his legs, and pulls them tightly together. With cheek resting on knee, veins grossly protruding from his neck, he rocks his body. Like he’s back there again, enduring his father’s relentless cruelty. Like this is all too painful.

I fall back in my chair and wait, knowing how difficult this has to be for him. To suffer that kind of shame after such horrid abuse. To be hurled back into that dark place and describe such a lurid and repulsive detail.

Donny Ray tries to pull himself together—or I think that’s what he’s doing. His posture rises and stiffens, but he still can’t look at me.

“Lace,” he at last tells me through sputtering lips. “It was lace.”

“I need to know what color it was.”

“I . . . I don’t . . . I can’t.”

“Please try. This is extremely important.”

He leans forward again, rocks harder. The side of his face that I can see is stained by tears that fall quickly and seem endless.

“White.”

The floor falls out beneath me. In a few heartbeats, my theory has caved in onto itself. Adam was right. I’m sunk.

My voice is unsteady when I ask, “Was . . . was the dress all white?”

Donny Ray finally looks at me. He pushes the bangs off his face, swipes away a tear. “No, the dress wasn’t white.”

I’m confused. I ask him to explain.

But he has trouble forming words, like they’re lodged in his throat. He clamps his hands to each side of the chair. Muscles strain against skin. A bead of perspiration rolls down the front of his neck, then disappears beneath his shirt collar. Now he looks angry—no, it’s more than that. I’m witnessing rage, a brand so raw and caustic that it almost feels like my own.

And in a fast second, Donny Ray’s eyes open so wide that I can see the whites. His fiery blue irises rest at their center, aimed directly into mine, their heat so intense that I can barely stand to look at them.

A guttural sound rumbles from deep inside his throat, and Donny Ray growls, “You. Fucking. Monster!”

I try to remain calm—or at least look that way—because I know he’s not just remembering what happened. He’s at last experiencing the rage he was never allowed.

“What was white?” I ask, gentle but firm. “Tell me what was white.”

Just as fast as it appeared, his fury morphs into a new emotion. His angry eyes go dull and unfocused beneath half-opened lids. His shoulders droop, posture crumbles.

Then, in the tiny voice of a child, weak, pleading, and barely audible, Donny Ray mutters, “The bow . . . The bow was white.”

And there is nothing but aching silence in this room.

Donny Ray looks down. Tears fall into empty palms as he says, “A giant bow . . . the purest white. It was the only time I ever saw my father’s hands clean. He’d stand over that bathroom sink—he’d stand there and scrub them—for twenty minutes before fixing the bow on the front of that dress, and . . . and I always knew what was coming next . . . then he’d spray it with starch, wouldn’t even let me use the seat belt on our drive to town.”

Donny Ray stares vacantly while the impact of his narrative lands. “Every day, I pray to God that hell never gives the man a second of peace. Not a goddamned second.”

I can’t argue with his sentiment. I inhale and exhale. My heart is breaking, but time is flying. I have to move this forward. The picture on the wall feels as though it’s screaming at me. I lift my head to look at the girl in the blue dress and nearly choke on bile. The girl in the picture is no longer peaceful. Now a thin line of scarlet blood trickles down her leg, collecting into a growing pool by her feet.

Tick tock, tick tock.

Overwhelmed by a fusion of nausea and terror, I have no choice but to close my eyes and open them, hoping my insanity will hold off until I can get what I need from Donny Ray. Slowly, the blood near the girl’s feet and on her leg evaporates. The picture is restored to order, and for the moment at least, I am able to tackle reality.

So now I must ask. “The dress, Donny Ray. What color was the dress?”

“My favorite color. He did it on purpose.”

“Donny Ray, what
color
was the dress?”

He spits out the word as if it tastes rotten.

“Blue.”