by Gregg Olsen
She stopped short.
I wanted an answer. “What happened?”
Again, Aunt Ginger weighed how much she’ll say. I wanted it all, but she looked at me and sees a kid. She had no idea how much strength I had or what I would do for my family.
“How much do you know?” she finally asked me.
“I know who my real father is, if that’s what you’re asking.”
Me: Aunt Ginger tells me she’s so sorry, or something lame like that. I just let it float away from me. I didn’t want apologies, Doctor. I wanted to know. I mean, here I was fifteen and my bio dad was a serial killer and that meant we shared a ladder of DNA code steeped in violence and murder.
Then she tells me. “Your mom was abducted by a monster. That’s what happened.” It was so empty. So, nothing. It was what I’d already known from the letter and clippings. I asked her for more. I needed to know details. If he took her again, then I wanted to find her.
Dr. A: How did she react?
Me: Weird. She said a couple of things. That I wouldn’t be able to find her and, here’s what I thought was so wrong, she said my mom wouldn’t want me to find her. She was insistent that we’d be better off just moving on or something.
Dr. A: How did that make you feel?
Me: Pissed. I told my aunt that no way was I going to just let my mom die. And that she’d left all the things in the safe deposit box, so I could find her. Even a gun.
I turn off the tiny machine. I know every word of what’s to come. I go to the refrigerator and retrieve a bottle of water. I don’t want wine. I don’t want beer. The window facing the Port Townsend Bay calls to me and I go to it, looking at a car go by on the street in front of my house. A dog running around loose. A woman with a crackly voice calling for that dog to come home.
I think of Aunt Ginger crumbling under the weight of her story. I had come unannounced and reopened a wound that had not yet healed. Not in sixteen years. I never thought about that until now. I never considered her situation. Only mine. Only Hayden’s and mine.
I watch the scene outside my window, but I only see my aunt and me, sitting in her darkened living room.
“Start,” I say to her. “Tell me everything.”
She inhales half the oxygen in the room. It’s a long pause. Not of the kind to create drama, but the kind to stoke some courage.
“Your mom said she stopped to help someone who was trying to load some things into the back of a truck. The things weren’t heavy, she told me later. Just awkward. Your mom is like that. Always helping people. When she wasn’t looking, he came from behind her and put something over her mouth. Chloroform, she thinks. It could have been something else…”
She let her words trail off. I give her a moment. Reliving whatever happened to Mom is painful.
For her.
For me.
Her words pummel me: “captive, abused, tortured.” She says that my mother was subjected to the vilest of humiliations. She says that only the sickest, most depraved mind could conceive of the things done to her. Now that she started, it all comes tumbling out, and my aunt seems to be in another, horrifying, world until her eyes focus back on mine, realizing who I am. How old I am.
I remember her staring at me with her pale, penetrating eyes. She wanted me to understand the next part, to embrace it.
“A weaker person would have folded and given up,” she says. “Courtney is the bravest girl who ever lived.”
How she could say that? Mom, brave? We’d been running all of our lives. Exactly how is hiding brave?
“How did she get away?” I ask.
“She said she was able to drug his coffee. She doesn’t even know what the pills she used were. She should have cut his throat while she had the chance. It was the biggest mistake of her life. She regretted it more than anyone could ever know. She said she was too weak to kill him, no matter what he’d done to her.”
“Why didn’t she just go to the police and have him arrested?”
“Look, I can see you don’t really understand. Not every criminal is caught. Not every victim is believed.”
“I know that, but I still don’t understand. It’s worth a try, right?”
“Your mother did file a report. And she had her body probed and scraped for evidence. She said it was nearly as humiliating as what he’d done to her. She even told me once that she felt the police and the doctors were almost an extension of her captor’s crimes. Their questions were like acid poured over her wounds. They didn’t think that she had been abused, raped, whatever. Our mother—your grandmother—didn’t believe her. Even I wondered about it.”
“But why didn’t anyone believe her?”
“Because she’d been captured once before.”
A pause.
“Or she said she was.”
Now I am confused. Completely.
“The year before she was raped,” she goes on, “your mom disappeared. She claimed she’d been kidnapped, well…” I can tell by the way she’s wringing her hands that this part is hard for her to disclose. The torture of my mother was, oddly, easier. “She’d run off to be with a boy. She had gone to the coast. She was afraid she would get in trouble, so she made up a story.”
My aunt catches the look on my face. She pounces. “She was kidnapped. She was brutalized by that monster who raped her. She wasn’t lying about any of that.”
Her explanation placates me only a little. “So, if she made a complaint to the police, why did he carry on stalking her? If it was all out in the open, he had to know that even if he wasn’t arrested that the police would be watching his every move.”
I go back to the kitchen table and fast forward through the last bit of the tape, the words that changed my life.
And made me do what I did.
Me: Aunt Ginger said the police didn’t believe her… past incident… might have been more to it…
Dr. A: …must have been painful… how could it be?
Me: …friends in the sheriff’s office… made evidence disappear…
Dr. A: Why didn’t the rapist just leave her alone?
Me: … got away… he is.
I speed to the end of the tape. Much of it seems blank, just hissing. I’m almost to the point of flipping over, when I hear my voice say my mom had something my biological dad, her attacker, wanted.
I hold my fingertips to my lips. Tears tumble down as they did that evening in Aunt Ginger’s darkened living room, and later, in Dr. Albright’s room.
Me: My aunt started to cry. And then I did. Even before she said another word. It was like she was warning me. Or breaking a trust with my mother. I don’t know. Her words came out one at a time.
You.
He.
Said.
He.
Wanted.
You.
My stomach roils. My eyes mist over. I suddenly feel like I’m being sucked inside of my past. I need to talk to the only person who knows the story—at least most of it.
Forty-Nine
It’s against department policy and I know it, but I find Karen Albright’s address through the DMV database. She’s in her sixties by now, retired from her practice, and living in Woodland, a small community not far from the Oregon/Washington state line. As I drive southward on the interstate, I think about what I want to say to the doctor who saved me from where I was going. She led me to what I needed to do. She didn’t preach. She didn’t convince. She simply let me know that what I am can be good.
No matter where I came from.
Mindy and Sheriff only know bits and pieces. Not all of it. Not the really terrible things I did and why.
Hayden does. Most of it. He’d never betray me.
I loosen my grip on the steering wheel. The cut on my hand has reopened. Red blooms through the layer of medical gauze. Red. The color I know best.
Dr. Albright’s house is a lively seafoam green and trimmed in cream. I’ve never been there, but I know at once it has to be her place. Out front is a mass
ive forsythia bush. It’s fully leafed, yet its spider-like limbs betray it. When I first went to see her, she had a vase of bare branches in her office.
“Not pretty now,” she had told me. “Just wait. Beauty comes from the most unlikely places, Rylee. You’ll see.”
It was February and the world outside was cold and gray. It was the way I had felt inside too. Also empty. Hurt. It was as if I was floating on a sheet of ice in the middle of a lake with the shore completely out of reach. Hopeless.
The next time I had gone to see the doctor the twigs had sprouted a hundred bright yellow trumpet-shaped blooms.
“See?” she’d told me. “You’re like those budding branches. We’ll get you to bloom again.”
I get out of my Taurus, smiling faintly at the memory of those flowers and how she forced blooms from naked twigs.
I knock and the door swings open right away.
Even though it has been more than a decade, Dr. Albright looks the same, just a kind of bleached-out image of exactly how she was. Her hair is even whiter than I remembered, and her skin now is a page of wrinkled paper.
Recognition immediately comes to her face.
“Rylee!”
“Dr. Albright, I wasn’t sure you would remember me.”
It was kind of a lie.
Actually, a big lie.
I didn’t think she could ever forget me or what I had told her.
She immediately gives me a warm look and wraps her arms around my shoulders.
“You are all grown up,” she remarks. “I’m so happy to see you.”
I pull back a little and look deep into her pale blue eyes.
I don’t blink. I just hold her sympathetic gaze.
“I’ve been playing some of the tapes.”
She lets out a sigh. “I knew you would someday,” she says, leading me inside the house.
Her living room is a mix of antiques and contemporary furnishings. I recognize the large crystal vase from her office; it’s on a table next to the sofa. The room is like she was when I was her patient: comfortable, smart, and warm.
“I’ve been following you,” she says.
I must appear a little surprised as she quickly amends her statement.
“Or rather your career. The internet. I’m not a stalker. At least not a real one. I’m happy for you, Rylee. I always had such faith in you.”
She did. I didn’t doubt.
“When did you listen to them?” she calls from the kitchen.
“Like I said, I haven’t listened to all of them.”
“That will take some time. There are hours and hours to go through. It will also take the right frame of mind.”
I swallow. “That’s right.”
“Tell me how I can help you, Rylee.”
I haven’t been called that name in such a long time that it almost makes me feel as though she’s addressing someone else.
“I’m not sure. Just some perspective, I guess. You’re the only one who really knows me. What happened. Why I did what I did.”
She gets us water and sets a glass on a coaster on the coffee table. Embarrassed, I move mine to one right away. I wipe the ring from the table’s gleaming glass surface. Looking down, I see my face. I am who I am. I will never be like anyone else.
I’m no longer really listening to Dr. Albright.
“I can only reiterate what I know to be true and what I told you all those years ago during therapy. You could make a choice to live a life that would keep you safe and still allow you to be the kind of person you were meant to be.”
“Sometimes I am. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to be with someone, to really share myself. Be loved.”
“No one knows you? Is that it?”
“Sheriff knows. He fixed things for me so I could be in law enforcement. Nothing illegal, but certainly not completely ethical either. I owe him a lot.”
“Does he know everything?”
I shake my head. “No. No one does but you and me. Not even Hayden.”
She brightens a little at the mention of my brother.
“Are you in touch?”
I look down at my water glass, appropriately half empty.
“Hayden is in Afghanistan. We email sometimes, and I’ll see him when he returns to the states. Our relationship has always been a little strained, but we’re working on it.”
I wonder if she still can tell when I’m lying. I’m working on the relationship with my brother. However, it’s a solo effort. Hayden doesn’t want a thing to do with me.
“I’m glad to hear that,” she replies.
She can’t tell anymore. That’s good, I think.
“Are there any other tapes?” I ask.
She looks at me quizzically. “No. Just the ones I gave you. Why?”
I’m not accusing her, but I need to know.
“No copies?”
She pulls back. “Of course not. I told you when I gave them to you that they were the original recordings and that no copies or transcriptions were ever made. For obvious reasons, Rylee.”
Obvious reasons, indeed.
I let out a sigh of relief.
“I’m going to destroy them when I finish listening to them. I just needed to make sure that, you know, nothing ever got out.”
She suddenly looks defensive.
“I would never do that,” she says. “You know that. Don’t you?”
My face feels warm.
“Sometimes I don’t know anything. Sometimes I’m going along, and I feel like a regular person. And then bam, I see something that reminds me of what I did. My parents. All of that. I want to shed my past and live without it bombarding me every now and then. You know what I mean, Dr. Albright?”
“I do,” she replies, getting up and moving closer to me. Her white hair is framed like a halo in the light. Her blue eyes seem even more watery.
I hurt her.
“You need to know that even if it weren’t the law,” she adds with an air of indignation, “I would never disclose anything about you. Not to anyone. That isn’t how I operate. No good psychologist does. However, that’s almost beside the point, Rylee. I have always wanted one thing for you… to live life free from all that bullshit from the past.”
I think that’s the first time Dr. Albright ever used a swear word in front of me.
She puts her hand on my shoulder and invites me to stay for dinner.
“Nothing fancy,” she goes on. “For someone with eastern European ancestry, I make a pretty decent lasagna. It’s in the oven.”
I smile. “I thought I smelled something wonderful.”
A half hour later, I sit across the table and look at this kind and generous woman and wonder how it was that she was able to rescue me.
And how it was that I could doubt her.
She tells me about her life, her pet iguana, her recent trip to Hungary and the Czech Republic. There is very little shop talk between bites of pasta and sips of cabernet. I tell her that I have the occasional bad dream and some generalities about the Wheaton case.
“You’re doing what you’re supposed to do, Rylee.”
“I think so,” I say.
“I know so,” she says.
I give her a warm smile.
If I had a pet iguana or a pet anything, I would have told her about that too.
Fifty
He wanted me.
As I drive home, those words from my taped session with Dr. Albright play in my mind. Actually, it plays at me. Like a cat, claws out, toying with a small bird. It wants blood. It wants to win. I know it’s the reason I felt the need to see Dr. Albright after all these years. I would like to tell the world that there is great help in psychotherapy. It’s what we tell everyone we see as they struggle through things, visible and invisible.
I remember everything about that moment when my aunt told me. She changed from rose dusting powder to a lilac scented one. It was strong, but pretty when she left the room. At least it wasn’t wintergreen. The clock ove
r the mantel chimed. I could smell the cinnamon rolls she’d baked that morning.
Everything.
The drive is long. Each flashing headlight is the beat of a drum. It’s foiling my efforts to move my mind to another topic.
When I get home, I feel defeated somewhat. I try to shut the past away by getting something to drink. I stream Maren Morris’s first album. From the refrigerator, I pour some orange juice. And then I do what zillions of other people do when searching for a distraction, I stare down at my phone.
I’m unable to resist.
I check my email. Of the fourteen new ones, one has to be from my brother.
Shooting in Denver. Fire in downtown Portland. A protest for the homeless in LA.
I immediately start to delete.
I hesitate on one. It sends a chill down my spine.
Its subject line:
It’s You, Rylee.
It seems non-algorithm created, not spam. The spelling of my name is a challenge for just about everyone as they always assume RILEY. I don’t recognize the sender. It’s a guy named “Wallace”.
I open it anyway.
And I forget to breathe.
Saw you on the news. Good work. How’s the weather there in Port Townsend? Maybe I’ll come by and we can talk about what you did.
I snap my phone to the table so hard that it tumbles to the floor. The glass face shatters.
I’m shattered.
Someone knows.
God, help me. Someone knows.
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