The Stranger Inside

by Lisa Unger

  I watched you walk down the hall, small, slim—not much bigger than you had been when we were kids. I want you to know that I was—that I am—sorry. For how I treated you, for what I made you do. It was wrong.

  Then I heard Kreskey, shuffling through the leaves outside, the groan of the stairs as he climbed onto the porch. All the blood drained from my body, my throat went dry. He moved so slowly, huffing with effort, then pushed the door open. He stood a moment, the night filling the corners of the doorway. Christ, he was more vile, uglier than he had ever been.

  He was the boogeyman.

  The monster in the closet.

  I wasn’t prepared for the rush of emotion, the dry suck of pure terror. The knife in my hand was too heavy; my arm filled with sand.

  He regarded me. All the time I’d been watching him, he presented like a zombie. But when he looked at me, his eyes were bright and alert. His hands clenched in fists.

  I felt my insides loosen. I was frozen. The beast inside me was gone and it was just me in my skin, a beaten, traumatized boy grown into a weak and fearful man.

  “You,” Kreskey said. He knew me, his mouth twisting into a hideous smile that revealed gray and crooked teeth. “You came back to me, you little bitch.”

  It took me a second to realize that he wasn’t talking to me.

  He was talking to you.

  You came to stand beside me. I felt your cool small fingers wrap around mine.

  You took the knife from my hand.

  And, then, before I could stop you, you were running for him, a great warrior’s cry exploding from your open mouth.

  I feel my way up the narrow staircase, and come quickly to the locked door, which I foolishly try to ram with my good shoulder, causing myself so much agony that I nearly black out. I almost take another tumble down the stairs. The door won’t budge.

  “So, Billy,” I say, slinking against the wall, back down the steps. “How did you wind up in this mess?”

  I’ve asked this question of countless traumatized children. It’s not as flip as it sounds, though maybe a little. It’s more a light way to get a young person to think about the journey. To think about the journey from the perspective of a person who had at least some control over the way things went. Responsibility. Not guilt. Not blame. Responsibility is the ability to respond better to our current situation, to consider ourselves the actor in what comes next—not just a victim of what happened to us.

  “So, Hank,” says Tess from the emptiness in front of him. “How did you wind up in this mess?”

  Fair enough.

  “My dad died,” Billy whispers. I know what he looks like from the pictures I saw. But now, he’s not even a shadow. We are two voices in the black. “And my mom got married again.”

  “That’s rough,” I say. Acknowledge how hard it is, but don’t encourage wallowing. Whether we survive trauma is all about how we narrate the past, the future. “How were things with your stepdad?” As if I have to ask.

  “I hated him,” he says. “He hit me.”

  “Did you tell your mom?”

  “He hit her, too.”

  “And what about your father. Was he a violent man, as well?”

  “Sometimes,” says Billy. “But I knew he loved me. He was just—I don’t know—he just got sad sometimes.”

  Depression. Violence. Abuse. How many of us grow up this way? A lot, with approximately 3.5 million claims of abuse or neglect investigated annually. Neglect is by far the most common maltreatment. Then physical abuse, then sexual. Some children are what we call polyvictimized, suffering more than one maltreatment. Four in five abusers are parents or stepparents. That’s a lot of damaged people walking around. Not to mention the abuse that begat the abuse.

  “So how did you handle the situation with your stepfather?”

  There’s a familiar pause here. Most victims of childhood trauma are not asked what their role might have been. Again, not about blame. We don’t blame the child victim. Just giving them a new way to frame the situation.

  “What do you think you could have done differently, Hank?” asks Tess, snarkily.

  Not left the pack out of reach, for one.

  Not let my guard down.

  “Did you do anything right?” asks Tess.

  Maybe one thing. There is one person who knows where I am tonight, I’m pretty sure.

  “I tried to fight him,” Billy tells me. “When I realized I couldn’t beat him, and that my mom wasn’t going to stop him, I ran away.”

  “Was there someone you could have called? A family member. A teacher.”

  “My stepdad told me that they’d take me away,” he says. “That I’d never see my mom again.”

  I’m guessing Tom Walters found him at the bus station, offered him a place to sleep and something to eat. He was probably kind, warm—an irresistible lure to a boy like Billy.

  I wait a moment, let his words hover. Meanwhile, my own wheels are turning. I think my only option is to wait for Tom or Wendy to return, as they must.

  “I guess that’s what happened to me anyway,” he says softly.

  “Let’s see if we can work together and find a way out of this, get you back with your mom and find some help for your family.”

  “That’s what Tom said,” Billy answers, sounding frightened. “He said he’d call my mom, offer her a place to stay.”

  “And that was a lie,” I say.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, Billy,” I tell him. All we have at first, therapists, is our words. It takes time to earn trust, especially with young people who have been gravely injured by people or life, or both. “I’m not lying. I want to help.”

  It sounds really weak, especially given our current circumstances.

  “Okay,” he says after a pause.

  There’s a crash overhead then, and another. I leap from my place at the bottom of the stairs and hide against the cold cinder block of the staircase. My only plan is to trip whoever comes down first, use the dark to my advantage. Billy starts to weep.

  “You are so fucked,” offers Tess. “What a mess.”

  Another crash, then another. Then a heavy thud; the outer door opens slowly, someone grunting on the other side. Finally, a face appears above me like a moon.

  I don’t believe my eyes. I’m dreaming.

  Or, this time, I’ve lost my mind completely.

  FORTY

  The locked box opened, that was the best way that Rain could describe it. It wasn’t just the fear and sorrow, the shame she felt about the day she lost her best friends, that she hid instead of helped. It was the rage.

  At the sight of Kreskey in that doorway, his words, something burst inside her and the world was colored red. Hank was frozen; limbs stiff, his face white, jaw slack with terror. Though Hank towered over her, was nearly double her weight, Rain could see he would be useless.

  She grabbed the knife.

  The weight of it in her hand, the gleam of that blade. It felt good.

  And before she was even aware of herself, she was running.

  In her mind there was a horrible film reel—standing on the bridge with Tess, Wolf issuing that guttural sound, his teeth in her flesh, Tess’s terrified scream of pain, Kreskey’s blow, her own mind-numbing shock and pain, Hank’s warrior yell. She was back there. But this time, she wasn’t cowering in the hollow of a tree while he took her friends. This time, she was armed, she was strong. This time she ran to him, screaming with all her power, knife raised.

  She could save them, save all of them. And they would all escape, grow up healthy and whole, raise their children together, watch each other grow old. They would have normal lives of proms and weddings, baby showers, moms’ nights out. They’d cheer each other through the good days and carry each through the bad. Friends. They’d be friends forever.

  She w
asn’t present that night in the Kreskey house, she wasn’t herself.

  Afterward, she’d claim—to Hank, to herself—that she didn’t fully remember what happened. That night, too, she’d lock inside. Another box. Another nightmare.

  But the truth was, she took that hunting knife of Hank’s and ran without hesitation to drive it straight into Kreskey’s heart.

  He never had a second to react; she hit her mark and used all her weight to drive it in, knock him down onto the tarp beneath him, and fall on top of him. He issued a great gasp, opened his mouth to release a river of blood. She looked him straight in the eye, the stench of him nearly overwhelming her; she watched his light go out, his eyes go glassy and still, felt the final shudder of his body. And then she screamed again, releasing all the horror, all the terror she’d carried, all the nightmares she’d had, all the things about herself and her childhood that she lost to him.

  Hank pulled her off, and wrapped her up in his arms, and rocked and rocked her until she stopped screaming, weeping, until she was just whimpering.

  “Itsokayitsokayitsokay,” he kept saying. “Imsosorrysosorrysosorry.”

  She clung to him, his arms strong and safe, and he held her, weeping himself. She turned away from Kreskey, buried her face in the rough of Hank’s jacket.

  That’s how Detective Harper found them.

  “Holy shit,” he said, coming through the door, startling them both. Rain and Hank both froze, the three of them locked in a triangle of shock.

  Detective Harper’s face was slack a moment; he put a hand to his head. “Oh, my god,” he breathed.

  Hank and Rain clung to each other. She couldn’t stop sobbing, but Hank was silent and stiff.

  The air was electric with all the horrible implications of what could happen next, Kreskey slowly bleeding out on the floor.

  “Okay,” Harper said finally. “Let’s get this cleaned up and get the hell out of here.”

  With Detective Harper’s help, they stripped to their underwear and burned everything they were wearing in the fireplace in his living room. Rain shook uncontrollably, crawling into pink sweatpants and T-shirt that read Sexy Lady. Hank got a pair of jeans and football jersey.

  “Now,” Harper told them while everything burned, “this is done. You never speak of it to anyone. You forget it ever happened. No one will ever come looking for you. And if you ever have the urge to confess—to your shrink, to your priest, remember that you’ll be frying me, as well as yourselves and anyone who ever loved you, for a man who destroyed your lives, killed your friend and would likely do it again if the opportunity arose.”

  Rain and Hank sat on Harper’s couch stunned, speechless, nodding.

  “Don’t see each other for a while,” he went on. “Maybe never. Easier for you both to move on that way, you know. Like war. Don’t talk about it. Try to forget it.

  “Can you drive?” he asked Hank, who nodded, still mute.

  “Good,” he said. “Get out of here. And when the reporters come knocking? Don’t answer. Whatever you do, don’t talk to the press.”

  They rode in silence back to the city. When he stopped in front of her dorm, she climbed out and never looked back at him. She heard him roll down the window and say her name, but she didn’t answer.

  After Rain killed Kreskey, there was nothing. No regret. No nightmares. In fact, fewer nightmares than she’d had before. Rain felt, if anything, free. She’d freed the version of herself that Kreskey kept in his imagination. There was a giddy lightness, a raw sense of personal power. She’d faced down the boogeyman—and won.

  Kreskey’s murder hit the news the next day, and the wave of calls from reporters, the storm of photographers waiting in front of her dorm on Eleventh Street was massive. She hid in her room, exhausted on every level, Gillian coming and going for her—food, materials from her teachers. Greg didn’t even call; she knew she’d lost him forever. Finally, Rain just went home. Her father sent a car, and she moved back into her old room.

  On the third day of hiding out, Greg came back to her. If he suspected what they’d done, he never said so. And she spared him the truth, spared herself his reaction. If she told him, she made him complicit. If he judged her, she’d have no choice but to judge herself.

  He forgave her for Hank, for being unfaithful. He wanted to protect her, came clean about some failings of his own. She wasn’t angry; in fact, she was glad he wasn’t as perfect as he seemed.

  “I think we are—us together—bigger than our screwups,” he said. He sat on one of the rockers on her father’s porch. “I hope we are.”

  “We are,” said Rain.

  When she made love to him that night, she thought of Hank, how he held her next to the corpse of the man who’d killed their friend. She pushed the gloom of her past away, forced herself into the light with the man she chose for her future.

  The media storm passed quickly and the Kreskey investigation grew cold. Suspicion never once turned to Hank and Rain, not even for a moment. This town takes care of its own business, said Harper that night. Kreskey’s body was buried in a pauper’s grave, she didn’t know where.

  Eventually, she returned to school, to life.

  “How is this sitting with you?” asked her shrink at the time. Dr. Coppola had a swanky office uptown; the bills went straight to her father.

  “Not as I would have expected,” said Rain.

  The truth was, she’d started to wonder about her own internal coldness. She’d killed someone, murdered him in cold blood. This was a psychically damaging event, under any circumstances. Why did she feel so little?

  “Oh?”

  Rain never felt like this doctor was much older than she was. Her first doctor, Maggie Cooper, was comforting and motherly. But she felt like under other circumstances Dr. Coppola and she might be at a bar or a coffee shop, just chatting. Svelte and stylish, with a black tangle of curls, tortoiseshell glasses, he had a habit of reflexively pushing the hair from his eyes, which made him seem boyish and sweet.

  “I feel freed,” she said. “Released from his grip.”

  He nodded, even, gaze kind and warm.

  She couldn’t tell him everything, of course. “The death of someone who harmed us can be a kind of catharsis. It reveals the impermanence of all things—even pain.”

  “He was a person, someone who was damaged and ill,” she said. “Shouldn’t I feel—something else?”

  “Was he that to you? A person, someone who deserved your compassion?”

  “No.”

  “What was he, then?”

  “Someone evil who killed my friend, and damaged irreparably my other friend. Someone who stole my childhood. Who still had a version of me captured in his imagination. Those pictures he drew, and the people who bought them—whoever they are. It has haunted me.”

  He nodded, listening, handing over that eternal box of tissues to dry tears she didn’t even realize she’d been crying.

  “And now he’s gone. Why wouldn’t you feel freed? You’re okay, Rain. Let it all go now.”

  And what would you say if I told you that I killed him with my own hands, that I drove a knife into his heart without hesitation? And that I don’t have an iota of remorse. What does that make me, Doctor?

  That might be a different conversation, one she had no intention of ever having. With anyone.

  In the woods, Rain found Hank’s pack first, knowing instantly that something had gone wrong. He’d never leave that pack out in the open. She knelt down beside it. She always thought of it as the kill bag—inside she found rope, a hammer, that same type of hunting knife, duct tape, a tarp folded into a tiny square.

  She zipped it closed and hefted it onto her back.

  Hank was nowhere to be seen, the night still, the air grown frigid. Her hands were stiff with cold, her face tingling, her jacket too light.

  Insti
nctively, she checked the phone. It was a scroll of texts.

  Gillian: He’s calling me. I didn’t answer. What am I supposed to do here?

  Greg: I thought you’d be home by now. Lily’s fussing a little in her sleep. What should I do if she wakes up?

  Gillian: He just texted. This is not right, my friend. Loop me in here. What’s going on?

  Greg: She settled. I’m going to bed, I guess. Wake me up when you get home.

  Greg: Rain. Wherever you are, you should come home.

  A line from one of her mother’s books came back to her: Once a woman has a husband and child, her time, her heart, her desires never quite belong to her again. A blessing some days, a burden others, like all the other gifts that life brings.

  He was right, of course. She should go home. This was madness.

  She checked the camera app; Lily was sleeping, peaceful. Greg was still on the couch, snoring, phone on his belly. The sight of her living room, pretty, softly lit, television flickering, filled her with longing, and with a sudden clarity.

  Her life, everyone’s life was split by these series of moments, these choices. Fight or flight. Go with Hank or call the police. Leave him in the house that night or go back and fight Kreskey with him. She’d made the choices as best she could. Some under duress, some out of guilt and fear, some out of anger. Right or wrong, they were all true. She had another choice now—keep following Hank into the darkness. Or turn around and go home to the people who needed her most.

  She put the pack down, turned back the way she came. Whatever Hank was doing out in the woods, he was on his own.

  That’s when she heard voices. She kept walking, back toward the car. It was the other sound that stopped her cold. The sound of metal on flesh, a cry of pain, the hard slamming of doors. Then arguing.

  But she wasn’t just a mother, and a wife. She was a journalist, a writer, a person with more questions than answers, with a complicated past. Maybe even with the latent desire to self-destruct, to race toward danger. She paused, listening.

  Footsteps coming her way, urgent, swift.