“Heather, honey, it’s Daryl Burns.” He squeezes her hand. “Can you hear me?”
I imagine the faintest twitch of her eye.
Burns sighs. “I guess I really let you down, honey. I’m sorry about that. One thing I can tell you, though, is we got that snake that called himself your husband. Douglas was up to his ears in this.”
This time I’m certain; I see the faintest tremor in the placid lake Heather’s become. Burns senses it as well. He cranes forward.
“You can hear me, can’t you? Come on, Heather. I know you’ve been through enough, God knows it’s more than anyone could handle, but you can’t stay locked away like this. We need you to help us get the man who did this to you.” He’s squeezing her hand, stroking it, and he looks more like a father to me than ever. “We need to get the bastard who cut off your beautiful hair, honey. Remember how you told me you had your dad’s hair?” His voice cracks. I think that Burns is an old-school man, raised in the tradition of hiding your tears, but he doesn’t even bother with an embarrassed glance back at us. He’s too humbled by his own pain to care.
The tremor passes over her now without stopping, like a pile of windblown leaves dancing in circles, aimless but vital and sometimes even beautiful. It’s a sign of life, however distorted, and Burns seizes on it as we watch.
“Heather? That’s it, honey. Come on back. I’m right here. It’s safe.”
She blinks a few times, then faster. Her cheek twitches. She turns to look at Burns, and it’s the motion of a skeleton turning on its own bones, like a creaky door. She opens her mouth and she laughs, a high, horrible cackle. It sends shivers down my spine. If birds were around to hear it, they’d fly off in terror.
“Saaaaafe …?” she croaks. Then the laughter again, but tears follow as well, cascading down her cheeks. Her face glitters in its pain, contorted by laughter that’s really just another form of screaming.
Burns gapes at it all, taken aback. He seems at a loss for what to do. He recovers quickly. His face sets into grim lines, but it’s contrived, a man pulling on a mask.
“Knock that shit off right now, Officer Hollister!” he barks. “Wherever you were, you’re not there now, and we need your help to catch the man who did this to you. Pull yourself together!”
It achieves the desired effect. The awful laughing stops. The tears roll on, staining the white bedsheets with water fingerprints. “D-Daryl …” she chokes. “I’m so so so fucked up. I’m sososososososo fucked up.” She grips his wrists with clutching, desperate hands. “Can you help me? I can’t get out of my head. Can you help me? Please?”
His true face again, a gelid, flash-frozen grimace of sorrow. He gets up onto the bed and gathers Heather into his arms. She writhes against him, alternately boneless and spastic.
Heather’s moans of despair draw the nurse into the room. She turns white at the quality of the shrieks and leaves. I guess she’s more comfortable with physical pain than spiritual.
Alan and I say nothing. We wait, watching without watching, a trick of respectful distance you learn after the third or fourth or fifth time you deliver the news of death to a loved one in their own home. They collapse into the reality and you become an intruder. You can’t leave, so you become a ghost instead. It’s a terrible talent.
Heather’s moans die down after a while. Burns continues to hold her as she quiets, patient with the gusts of grief that whip back up without warning. These become less and less frequent, turning into tremors, which crumble into sighs and, finally, silence.
We wait out the silence too. Comfort comes best in silence, in that wordless closeness only another human being can provide.
Eventually she lies back, and Burns takes his seat in the chair again.
“Better?” he asks.
She nods, then shrugs, then scratches her arm and her head. She’s a mess of constant motion. “I guess. Yes. Maybe. I don’t know.”
“Well, you’re talking again. That’s a start. Are you ready to talk about what happened?”
Her eyes widen. “I think so,” she says. Her right cheek twitches three times. “I’m scared, Daryl. Maybe it will help, though. I don’t know. I guess so.”
Listening to her reminds me of a conversation with a methamphetamine addict, except that Heather has been overdosed on terror. Her fight-or-flight mechanism is set in the “on” position, and the switch is out of reach.
I know all about this feeling. About its constancy. After my rape, when I got home from the hospital, I couldn’t sleep for a week. It wasn’t just the pain of losing Matt and Alexa, I was also terrified. Every creak or wind moan got my heart racing. Adrenaline would spike through me at the sound of a car alarm. I wanted to crawl out of my own skin because it was on fire, but of course I couldn’t, I could only scream inside the burning house of me.
I walk forward, putting a hand on Burns’s shoulder. I make sure to face Heather, so she can see my scars.
“Hi, Heather. I’m Special Agent Smoky Barrett, with the FBI.”
Her eyes jitter over me, widening a little as they grope past the scars.
“What happened to you?” she asks. There’s a desperateness to the question that I understand:
“A serial killer broke into my house. He raped me and tortured me with a knife. He tortured and murdered my husband and daughter in front of me.”
I don’t know if it’s worse than what she experienced or not. I don’t think you can qualify mental agony that way.
“What happened to the guy who did it?” A different kind of wanting laces her tone now.
“I shot him dead.”
She hoots in laughter. “Good!” She licks her lips and repeats this in a firmer voice. “Good.” Her eyes widen again. “Avery. Dylan. What about my boys? Can I see them?”
“We’ll deal with Avery and Dylan soon, I promise,” I answer, keeping my voice soothing, feeling traitorous and awful. “First, if you’re up for it, I’d like to talk about what happened to you, and especially anything you can tell us about the man who did it to you. Do you think you can do that?”
The twitching again, one, two, three. “I think so. Yes, I can do it. Where do you want me to start?” She scratches her skull a little too hard, leaving a livid red mark.
“How about the night you were abducted? What do you remember about that?”
She squints. “That was so long ago … lifetimes ago. Crazy times ago. I tried to keep track of time, I really did. But it was so hard, because he never gave me any light.” She says it again, emphasizing what he’d denied her. “Any
“The lights were out in the area of the parking light you were taken from, right?” I ask, pulling a thread from her free association and connecting it to a real memory.
She frowns. “Were they? Yes, yes, I guess they were. He did it. He’s smart. Very, very, very, very smart. And cold.” She shivers, picks at her left arm until it bleeds a little. “Too cold.”
“You’d just come out of your cardio class,” I remind her, keeping my voice low and soothing. I want to put her into that moment of her past while keeping the now as unthreatening as possible. “The police found your keys on the ground near your car. What happened?”
She cackles again. “That was smart of
“That was smart, Heather,” I agree. “You were smarter than he was at that moment, and it worked out just like you planned. Everyone knew you’d been kidnapped.”
She nods, back and forth. “Yep. Yep. I was smart. He took me, but I was smart. He took me …” Her words trail off, and the twitching returns.
“How did he take you, Heather?” I ask. “Do you remember? Can you tell me?”
She turns her head to look at me. Her eyes and mouth are wide, making her look exactly like a scared little girl. “It was the whispers,” she says, whispering herself. “What he whispered. He put a gun in my back and he whispered into my ear.”
“What did he say?”
“He said I had to come with him right then and there or he’d kill me and then he’d go and kill Douglas and Avery and Dylan. He told me things about them, about where Douglas worked and about what doctor the boys saw.
