The Stranger Inside

by Lisa Unger

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry I ran and hid. I’m sorry I wasn’t more or better or stronger that day. I’m sorry for everything he did to you and to Tess. I’ve carried it with me. If I could go back and change a hundred things about that day, I would.”

  “Lara.” Notes of sadness, regret.

  “Instead I have no choice but to accept that I survived and that she didn’t. That Kreskey, a deranged man, did horrible things to you that have damaged you. But I was a frightened kid. I was badly hurt. I wish everything about that day had been different. But the one thing I can’t do is go back and change the past. I have moved on. You should, too.”

  He turned, his face ashen, so sad. “Don’t leave,” he said. “Of course I don’t blame you. Please.”

  But the words he’d spoken, the things he said—they were a poison. Every time she looked at him, she would hear them. She’d know that in some nether region, beneath his affection, he hated her. She’d seen the hatred burning in his eyes, etched into the lines of his face. He blamed her. She couldn’t look at him again.

  “Goodbye, Hank.”

  She left, letting the door close behind her, and ran down the stairs.

  “Part of him is still back there,” she told Gillian now. “He’s still trying to understand what happened to us.”

  “Part of him?”

  “There are two of him,” she said. “The doctor, the writer, the commentator—he’s well and whole. He helps people through trauma, has used his experience to do good.”

  “Okay.” Gillian wore a concerned frown.

  “But there’s a part of him that’s still filled with rage—at Kreskey, at me.”

  “When you say a part of him, you mean—”

  “There are two Hanks.”

  “You’re scaring me,” said Gillian. “Like he’s dissociated? Split?”

  “In a sense, maybe,” she admitted. “It’s that Hank, I think, mostly—or sometimes, I don’t know really—who writes to me.”

  She started flipping through the letters. “Why?” Gillian asked after a bit. “Why do you keep these? Why do you read them?”

  Rain picked one up, stared at the crisp, buttery pages filled with his beautiful handwriting.

  “Because he’s lonely,” she said. “Because he’s the only 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. His skin was gray, flesh hanging, eyes dead with medication. He moved as if carrying a great weight around his shoulders, a yoke—stooped, gait slow and dragging. For weeks, he only moved between the halfway house, a grim block building outside town, and the contractors’ office where he was the night janitor five miles away. A van drove him to his job and picked him up.

  Then, one night, I watched as he left the office building on foot through the back door. He walked the mile and a half back to that house, the house where he brought Tess and me. He stayed there for nearly two hours. Just standing in the front yard, staring. What was he thinking? What voices was he hearing? Then he lumbered back, finished his work. The van picked him up at 5 a.m., hours before the workers returned for the day.

  I knew what I had to do. I wasn’t about to let him hurt another living soul. That other part of me wouldn’t be able to live with it.

  There is the world you live in, Lara, and there is the world I live in. You live in the light. Your happy family. Your friends. Your career ambitions. Yes, I know you still have those ambitions. That belly of fire to know, to understand, to dig in deep, find and tell the stories of humanity. You may be on a little domestic vacation, but this whole stay-at-home-mom thing? It’s not for you. Not that there’s anything wrong with it. Quite the contrary. The world would be a better place, I think, if someone stayed home, if it was someone’s full-time job to be there, especially in those early years when we are formed. What would the world be like if everyone had a loving parent at
home, someone happy and contented, someone who loved and nurtured, cooked and cleaned? Of course, that’s not the world. Among the young people I see, there is so much horrific abuse—physical, verbal, psychological. More than that, there is neglect. A turning away from our children—as we indulge ourselves, succumb to our vices and addictions, worship our material goods, stare unceasingly at our devices, climb and climb that corporate ladder. We tell ourselves that we do it all for them. But we don’t. They don’t need the toys, and the iPads, and the Range Rovers. What they need is our attention.

  I will say that I admire you, Rain. I see the way you are with her. Attentive, loving. I don’t see you staring at your phone like the other mommies on the playground. I saw one woman, glued to that thing while her baby clung to her leg and cried and cried. As if to say, what are you looking at? Why aren’t you looking at me? When she finally picked the kid up, the child reached urgently for the phone. What’s so special about this thing? she must have been wondering. Why does Mommy look at it more than she looks at me?

  I watch you jog with your stroller, pushing her around the park. You are a beautiful girl, always have been. Not that plastic, Barbie blonde. Nothing revealing. Nothing flashy. Snow White. You beguile with your beauty, your goodness. I know why Kreskey watched you. Why he wanted to take you to his little house in the woods and keep you for himself. That, above all, is the fantasy of the neglected man. To be loved and cared for by beauty and goodness. To have that mother’s love that was withheld.

  My mother loved me. She stayed home awhile, went back to work when I went to school. She read to me and held me when I cried. She bandaged my knees and taught me how to stand up for myself when the bullies brought me down. My dad played catch and took me to the movies. He checked on me at night. That boy, that Hank. He is well; he survived and thrived. It’s the other one, the one formed in trauma. He’s the problem.

  My patient today is Grace, a bulimic. She’s also a cutter. With a razor she hides in her sleeve, she slices at the inside of her thighs.

  “Why?” I asked her in one of our earlier sessions. “What are you thinking when you make the decision to hurt yourself?”

  She seemed surprised, as if no one had ever asked her why she would do such a thing. It surprised her to think of it as a choice. At first, she didn’t know how to answer. She stayed silent and I waited, let her process the question and its implications.

  “It quiets the other pain,” she said finally. “The pain inside.”

  “Does it work?”

  Another moment or two of silence. “Maybe for a while. But there’s always more pain.”

  “When you’re in pain, hurting inside, what other choices are there besides taking a razor to your flesh?”

  It was a breakthrough for her, the idea that she had a reason for doing it, and a choice not to hurt herself.

  Today she sits in my office. Fuller, pinker—healing. She always curls herself up in a ball, as if she is trying to make herself as tiny as she can be. Her mother is a cold and graceful beauty. She drips with diamonds and expensive fabrics, one of those women who exudes confidence, an easy comfort in her own petite and perfect body. Grace is a beauty, too. Her blond hair a wild mane, her limbs long and coltish. She has been given everything. It was the first thing her mother told me. All of me; I stayed home with her, have always been here. There’s been world travel, every material thing and opportunity money can buy. Why wasn’t it enough?

  It was enough, I assured her. It’s not about that. Mental illness is not about that. We are all an impossibly complicated web of biology and circumstance, nature and nurture. The event that cripples one child, gives another child wings. The trauma that breaks one person in two, imbues another with a supernatural strength of spirit. We cannot apply intellect and logic to our humanity. We can only try to understand ourselves, to heal the broken, to make strong again the injured.

  Grace lifts her skirt for me and shows me her thighs. She’s not teasing me, though many of my young female patients have. I am not a man to Grace, just a kind teacher, a friend. Her thighs are creamy and white, her scars fading.

  “See?”

  “Very nice,” I say. “No uncontrollable urges?”

  She shrugs, tugs her long hair around the back of her neck, strokes it on one side.

  “I breathe,” she says. “I say my mantra. I am enough. I am more than enough. I don’t have to be anyone else but who I am.”

  We came up with that one together. There are some drugs, too. A light dose of antianxiety meds, which I’ll wean her off slowly. Sometimes I use medication to take the edge off, but I like to teach my patients techniques for managing anxieties and chaotic thoughts. I teach them to meditate, to journal, to draw. I encourage punishing exercise for some, especially my young male patients. Physical exertion, and the brain chemicals that flow from it, the exhaustion that follows, work beautifully to quiet the mind. I am a distance runner, taking winding trails through the woods, along the twisting roads of this town, up into the foothills of the mountains that surround us. Sometimes when I’m at my most anxious I can log nearly sixty, seventy miles a week.

  “Nice, Grace,” I say. “Good work on yourself, kid. You seem a lot stronger. I’m super proud of you.”

  She smiles broadly. If only more grown-ups knew: it’s okay to push, but a little praise goes a long way with kids.

  “Thanks, Dr. Hank. Thanks for helping me.”

  After she leaves I do the invoicing, filing. I type up my notes. I am organized and efficient. I always have been—a good student, a good doctor. I was a good friend, too, wasn’t I? A good lover. I might have been a good boyfriend, husband, father. Don’t you think so, Lara? Might have been.

  I keep the Toyota in a parking garage about an hour away. I drive my red Volvo there and park it. I am mindful, watchful, have been since the FBI knocked on my door. I don’t think they’re watching me. As the days have passed, I’ve come to think that Agent Brower really was just looking for help, looking for someone who might know what seems unknowable. Why people do the things they do? Isn’t that what we’re really all trying to figure out—detectives, doctors, writers? Aren’t we all just trying to unravel the mysteries of ourselves?

  She hasn’t visited again, or called. Still. I have been keeping to my routine. The hospital. My office. Home. I am not seeing anyone. You are my only friend. (And you’re not much of one, are you?) Sometimes I take my secretary to dinner, or on our late night we’ll grab a drink before she heads home to her family. I monitor the outdoor security cameras at my home, keep my eyes on the rearview mirror. If there’s a tail on me, it’s a very good one. And I don’t think anyone’s that good at anything these days.

  Still. You can’t be too careful. I leave the parking lot and jog the mile to my gym. Through the park, the town center. It’s a quiet little town, not many people around this time of night. The gym is in an old warehouse. It’s not your usual chain with brightly clad hard-bodies and blaring music, television screens on every machine and in every corner. There’s a big boxing ring in the center, an area for free weights, a couple of rows of treadmills and bikes for cardio. This is a serious bodybuilding gym—lots of cops and firefighters, EMT guys, martial artists.

  “Doc,” says the young woman at the desk. She’s as big as any man I know, muscles ripped, neck thick, mousy hair shorn almost to the scalp. I’d say sexual abuse in childhood, if I had to hazard a guess.

  “Marin,” I say. “How goes it?”

  “No complaints.” But her eyes are sad. It’s always in the eyes if you know how to look. Not just the eyes, but the muscles of the face that jump and dance ever so slightly.

  “What’s it today?” she asks.

  “Shoulders and back.”

  “Let me know if you need me to spot.”

  “Will do.”

  I have a brutal and punishing workout regimen, in addition to my runni
ng. It’s the only way I can keep him in place, exhaustion. I’ll be an hour and a half tonight, working lats and traps and deltoids. Rows, pull-ups, deadlifts. I’ll go as heavy as I can, work to shaking failure. Then I’ll do forty minutes light on the bike, run back to the car. I have a trainer here, too. I see him twice a week—he keeps me limber, working out on all the planes, twisting and balancing so I don’t get tight and stiff like some of the guys here. A couple of guys will get into the ring with me. A couple of them beg off; fighting, the adrenaline, it brings out another side of me and some people can sense it, though I’ve never lost control here.

  When I’m done, I realize I’m the last one and it’s ten minutes past closing.

  Marin sits patiently at the desk, her bag and coat by the door. She pushes back on the office chair, which looks like it’s about to snap under her weight, reading, I see as I get closer, a copy of one of my books: Surviving Trauma.

  “Sorry about that,” I say. “Lost track.”

  “Happens to me all the time,” she says. She holds up the book. “This is helping me. Thank you.”

  I nod. “I’m glad.”

  I reach in the pocket of my coat and hand her a card. “I have a practice,” I say. “If you need to talk.”

  She smiles, takes it. “I can’t afford that, Doc.”

  “We can work something out,” I say. Her eyes slide away from mine, and I realize how it sounded. “I mean—pay what you can afford kind of a thing.”

  She presses her lips together. “Thanks.”

  She won’t take me up on it. I can tell; some folks don’t want to talk. Can’t trust. Don’t have the words. Don’t want to hear those words on the air. And that’s okay, don’t you think? Don’t you wish you never had to tell a soul what happened to you? Don’t you wish you could just forget?

  “Can I walk you to your car?”

  She gives me a look, a kind of smiling up and down. She’s got a couple of inches and maybe even a couple of pounds on me. “No offense, Doc. But can I walk you to your car?”