The Stranger Inside

by Lisa Unger

  The giant in the woods, the evil dog; she’d been bitten, struck—her jaw shattered—watched her friends be beaten, dragged away. Dusk fell; she drifted in and out of consciousness. Then her name on the wind. Even then, she didn’t dare call out. She dug herself deeper inside the tree, the black, wet womb of its hollow.

  “Hey, Lara Winter, is that you? Everything’s okay now, kid,” said the police officer when he came to kneel in front of her. Detective Harper. She’d come to know him well over the years. “You’re okay.”

  But it wasn’t true, and she knew it even then. There was who she was before and who she was after. She would never be that other girl again. And nothing could be okay now.

  He reached a hand to her, but she huddled away from him even though his eyes were kind and he seemed strong and good.

  He stood and started yelling. “Here! I need the paramedics. I’ve got the Winter girl!”

  She heard a woman scream and she knew it was her mother. And still no words could come. The Winter Girl, someone with arms like dead branches, covered in ice, hair and lashes icicles, frozen and half-dead. That was the image those words put in her mind. She wondered before she blacked out again if maybe she was dead.

  Then there was a crowd, her parents hovering, holding each other. Tess’s mother stood frozen, arms wrapped around herself, her face blank and pale. Rain was in and out, lifted, carried. Pain a distant siren. She heard her own screaming.

  Her mother weeping in the ambulance.

  Detective Harper was there, too: Lara, honey, I know you’re hurt. But you have to talk to us. Where are your friends? What happened?

  The words came then in a tangled rush, everything, everything she could remember—shouldn’t have been in the woods, he sat by the creek, the dog, big, enormous, a disgusting beard and thick ugly glasses, a monster, he walked north. She knew the direction because of where the sun was in the sky; her father taught her to always know where she was.

  The man in the woods. Did she know him? Had she seen him before?

  Yes.

  Where?

  She couldn’t remember.

  Think. Think. Try, baby, try, urged her mother.

  No one said that Tess’s and Hank’s lives depended on it. But she knew that.

  “I know how hard this is,” said Detective Harper. They were at the hospital; he ran beside the stretcher down a hall where people shouted. “Where did you go the last few days? Who did you see? Try to remember, Lara. Help us find your friends.”

  Tess and Hank. They needed her to remember. Through the pain and terror, she pressed. Summer days. Hot ones. Nothing to do. Her father wanting her to come while he ran errands, she didn’t want to go but did anyway. Because she loved any attention he had for her.

  And then she remembered.

  At the garage where her father got their car serviced. She went with her dad, under protest, and waited and waited and waited in a room that smelled like gasoline, filled with ancient magazines for old people, wood paneling and a sweating, struggling air conditioner. Even the vending machine looked spent, it’s wilted offerings unappetizing and off-brand. Her father talked forever with the mechanic who was apparently a fan of her father’s work. They talked and talked in the other room, endlessly, like grown-ups do, about nothing.

  “Dad, can Mom pick me up?”

  “Just a minute, LAH-raine, darling.”

  She felt his eyes on her before she saw him. He lingered in the shadows, watching through the window that separated the waiting room from the garage. He lifted a hand, looked at her with a strange blankness. She ran to be with her father, hung on him until he couldn’t ignore her anymore. But it was just a moment. She forgot him as soon as she was back in front of the television at Tess’s.

  “Where was this?” Harper asked her father.

  He looked stunned, confused, uttered the name of the garage.

  “Good work, girl,” said Detective Harper. “You did it.”

  The detective ran from the room. Her mother held her. Her father dipped his head into his hand. She remembered the flickering fluorescent lights, the scratch of the gurney sheets, the pain.

  “Will they find them?” she asked. “Is that enough to find them?”

  Her mother tried for a smile, but it burst into a thousand little pieces and she started to cry again.

  “Let’s hope so, darling,” her father said, coming up behind her mother.

  She heard accusation in his voice, she thought, a vague disappointment. He later said that no of course not, that he was stunned by the events, absent, mind reeling. She believed him. But then, that’s how it felt. They wheeled her away, voices soothing. A mask came down over her face, and she was gone.

  Hank came home. Not Tess.

  Eugene Kreskey was arrested.

  The things he did. Even now, even when it had all been laid bare in articles and books, documentaries, crime blogs. She didn’t allow herself to think of it. She couldn’t. When she remembered her friend Tess, it was just as she always was—laughing, always ahead of Rain, pigtails swinging.

  Rain wasn’t well enough to go to the funeral.

  Tess was dead. Her body buried. She’d found the news impossible to process. How could she grasp that a girl who’d been her best friend all her life was simply—gone? Not on the phone. Not sending goofy pictures of herself via email. She wouldn’t sleep in the creaky trundle bed or sit in front of her in math class. Her funny pigtails. Her big glasses. She was a ghost.

  And Rain was shattered—physically weak, psychologically battered, her jaw reconstructed and wired shut. A plastic surgeon had stitched her leg and there was more surgery ahead, but that scar would be there forever. A twisting, textured relief map of her horror. Years later, her hand would find it under desks and tables, in bed. Sometimes when she was bare-legged, she’d catch someone’s eyes fall on it. And she would remember.

  Days passed, one gray day after another. Her parents took her home. Everything seemed different, the house, her room, all her dolls and toys. She felt like it belonged to someone else. There were visits from the police, a seemingly endless string of questions.

  It’s my fault, she thought. He was there for me. He followed me. I ran away. He took them instead.

  She wanted to see Hank. She begged, day after day until finally she and her mother climbed in the car. No one came to the door when they rang at his house. She stood there, kept ringing. The red door. The slow, deep chimes of the bell. The rustle of leaves and the whistle of the chickadee. She left the card she brought. Inside it simply read: “I’m sorry.”

  When they were back in the car, she saw him. He stood in his window, a slim and nebulous form behind the gauze of the curtain.

  She waved to him and he didn’t wave back, just moved back from view, let the curtains close.

  “Is he alone in there?” worried his mother. “Did they leave him alone? Surely not.”

  He knows it’s my fault, she thought. He hates me.

  Because they were minors and had been so traumatized by events, their testimonies were taken in chambers with the judge and the lawyers, shown on video to the jury. They weren’t asked to testify sitting feet away from Kreskey. Hank’s family moved away before school started the next fall. She didn’t see him again, not for a long, long time.

  “It’s the stuff of nightmares,” said the doctor who helped her survive the trauma of her experience, Dr. Maggie Cooper. “You were trapped in a nightmare.”

  “If I’d run, I could have saved them.”

  “If you’d been able to run, the dog might have caught you. Maybe you’d all be dead.”

  “I hid.”

  “Of course you did,” she said. “Your brain, your psyche wanted you to survive. You couldn’t outrun his dog—you couldn’t have overpowered him physically. You only had one option. Hide from the monster. You’re a s
urvivor. If not for what you told the police, they might not have found your friends. Hank is alive because of you.”

  “But not Tess.”

  Dr. Cooper’s office was always warm and cozy, a comfortable place to bare all. The doctor didn’t cry like her mother, or rage like her father. She listened.

  “There’s only one person to blame for that, Lara. And it’s not you.”

  “They’re both gone,” she said. Misery was a fog that wrapped around her. “Hank. He wouldn’t see me, and now he’s gone. He hates me.”

  “He’s filled with rage, suffering trauma just like you. He hates, certainly he does. It may even be directed toward you because you’re safe. But none of this, not for a single second, is your fault.”

  “He saw me in that garage,” she said. “He came for me. But I ran.”

  The doctor waited a beat and then repeated what she’d have to say a hundred times.

  “There is only one person to blame for what happened to the three of you. It’s not your fault, Lara.”

  Slowly, slowly, she came to see that it was true. She healed. Her body. Her spirit. She was the lucky one.

  “Call me Rain,” she said to the doctor. “That’s what I want to be called now.”

  “Rain,” said Greg. He looked down at the pile of letters and back at her. “Make me understand this.”

  Greg was a good man, and she could share herself with him. But she often didn’t, especially when it came to Kreskey and Hank. It was a wound, raw and deep. Exposing it to anyone, even someone gentle who loved her, was painful. What her father had taught her about locking it away had served her, allowed her to live a life. Why was it all banging on the lid now?

  Because it’s time, her father said. It’s time to tell the story, to own it. Otherwise, and I have come to understand this too late, it winds up owning you.

  “I can’t,” she said to her husband. Fear was the lock on the box, and for Rain, it was still fastened tight. “How can I make you understand when I don’t understand myself? I’m sorry.”

  She looked at the letters and wanted to snatch them back. Would he throw them in the trash, try to burn them? How could she try to stop him?

  “There shouldn’t be secrets between us,” he said, rising. The letters in his hand.

  He handed them back to her, locked her with that intense gaze. When she didn’t say anything—what could she say?—he left the room.

  FIFTEEN

  Life goes on.

  It’s such a pat phrase, such a well-worn truth that you almost don’t even hear the words. It’s only when your own life has come to a grinding halt that you understand the cruelty of it. In the aftermath of trauma or grief or loss, life goes on for everyone else. But not for you.

  Later, one might come to understand it differently. Life is a river, it washes over you, washes the past away if you let it. If you forgive, let go, move on simply, day by day, one foot in front of the other, even the worst things can be left behind you. They fade away. This is what I tell my patients. And I believe it. At least part of me believes it. Half of me.

  The next time I saw you, I was twenty-two, already working on the first of my graduate degrees at Columbia. You, in your senior year at NYU, were working on your journalism degree. It was your father’s book signing at the big Barnes & Noble on Union Square. Remember? I know you do. The old man could still pack a house. (You know the rumor was that after the accusations, he paid that kid off, and helped him get a book published. That’s why his student dropped the charges against your father. I’m not sure I believe that. Meanwhile, that kid’s book, it sucked. So derivative of Bruce Winter it was embarrassing. I can’t imagine your father plagiarizing such a hack writer.)

  The event was standing room only. You were up in front, the good daughter—attentive, smiling.

  He was with you, leaning in and whispering to you occasionally, his hand on your leg. Greg. I could see it in him—a little controlling, isn’t he? Possessive as hell. He knew what he had and he wasn’t about to let you get away. Your body language wasn’t aligned, though. Greg leaned into you, but you—ever so slightly—leaned away. He took your hand, and you let him. But then you unclasped your fingers a few minutes later. Maybe I was reading too much into it. Seeing what I wanted to see. But I suspect you’ve never loved him the way he loves you.

  I’d already been watching you. I stalked you on social media. I knew where you lived. Your schedule at NYU, what time you crossed Washington Square, how you stayed in the library late to study on Wednesdays. How you were with him almost all weekend, most weekends. He was so—I don’t know—clean-cut, a journalism major like you. A runner. Your choice surprised me. I always figured you’d go for someone edgier, cooler. Someone more like your dad. But maybe it was stability you craved—after the trauma and violence of your near-abduction, the divorce, your mother’s early death. Your father, his issues with money, his mental and emotional absence—maybe you wanted the opposite. Greg—does he have a creative bone in his body?

  That night I noticed you wore a skirt, your legs bare. A couple of times you reached down and rubbed at that scar, the place where Wolf bit your calf to the bone. You do this when you are anxious, nervous, thoughtful.

  I didn’t expect you to recognize me. By the time I was twenty-two, I’d shot up to nearly six feet, weighed over 200 pounds, all muscle. When I wasn’t watching you, all I did at that point in my life was study and work out. I started practicing the martial arts during my freshman year in high school and by the time we met again, I was a skilled practitioner of kung fu and bukido. I was two years into my parkour training then. Unfortunately, I was always a little too big to ever achieve the agility one needs to leap around an urban landscape without breaking my neck. I gave this up, though those skills sometimes come in handy.

  I wore my hair long, sported a full beard. I suppose I was hiding. From the world, from myself. In my center, there was a burning core of anger that no amount of therapy could extinguish. You would later claim that this was not so for you, but I could see it in you. In those blue pools you have for eyes, sunny on the surface, shadow beneath. It’s a theory I have: only those who embrace anger, who accept its raw power into their lives, survive extreme circumstances.

  “Leave her alone,” urged Tess. She was always with me then. “Let her live her life.”

  I never answered her in public. I’m not completely crazy, Lara. I get that other people can’t see her.

  I stood near the back of the room and listened without really hearing. I just watched the back of your head, that silky raven hair, the way he dropped an arm around your shoulders—loving, protective. Yes, I realized, that’s what you wanted. Someone who protects you, someone who’s there. I was surprised because when we were little—before—you were always the fierce one. You were the defender, the protector. You stared down the bullies, comforted Tess when she’d been mean-girled. You stood up to Kreskey and Wolf that day at first. I guess that’s one of the things he took from you that day, that faith that you could stand up for yourself. You couldn’t, not that day. None of us could.

  I stood near the back as the crowd filed out. You lingered near your father as he was mobbed by fans, signed piles of books. I watched as you kissed Greg goodbye. He would be off to the library to study, because that’s what he did on Thursday nights. A straight arrow.

  I was surprised when I felt your eyes on me. Even more surprised when you started moving toward me. I’d have moved away, quickly blending into the crowd and disappearing as fast as possible. I had come only to see you, not to be seen by you. But I’d waited too long, lost in watching you. It was just me standing there alone against the wall.

  “Hank?” you said.

  I almost said no, no, you’re mistaken, sorry. But we had locked eyes and I’ll admit I just froze.

  “It’s you, isn’t it?” Your face. So wide open, that smile turning up
the corners of your mouth. You were happy to see me. Another surprise.

  “Hi, Lara,” I said. My voice sounded deep, awkward. I wasn’t used to being seen, not the way you were seeing me.

  “I call myself Rain now,” you said.

  “Rain,” I said stupidly. Of course, I knew that. But you’ll always be Lara to me.

  Did you know that I’ve loved you since kindergarten? Did you know that I’ve never loved anyone else?

  You did something I never would have expected. You threw yourself into my arms, wrapped me up tight. I must have felt so stiff, so awkward. The shock waves of your gentleness moved through me, so unaccustomed was I to anything but a fighting touch at that time.

  Then I felt something release and soften inside me, and I embraced you. The delicate form of your body against mine, the warmth of you. The clean, light scent of your hair. I held you tight. God help me, I almost wept. You brought me right back to the me I used to be. Someone I’d almost forgotten.

  “I’m so sorry,” you said, breathless. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Dr. Reams?”

  My receptionist, Brenda, cuts a slim figure in the doorway. I’ve told her a thousand times to call me Hank, but she won’t. She’s one of those old-school people who stand on ceremony. I appreciate her for her astounding efficiency, foresight and competence. She manages my schedule with dictatorial zeal, but also with a deep compassion for my patients, for the sensitivity of the work.

  “You have the afternoon blocked off for research. But Patrick’s aunt called. They need a session.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Apparently the dance did not go well,” says Brenda, pushing up her red-framed glasses with a manicured nail. “He’s in a bad place.”

  I feel a wave of disappointment for him, run through by a wide skein of worry. “Have him come in.”

  “Do you need me to stay?” For some of my more unstable patients—who I mainly don’t see here in my office—Brenda likes to stay until we close up. Patrick did have an outburst here once, early in our work together.