Afterward (16 page)

My eyes glance at the house across the street and then fixate on the dark wood of the front door. The Christmas wreath of red and green ribbons is still hanging there, waiting to be remembered and put away until next year. I think about what Dr. Greenberg said about having time to figure out God.

I don't know if I can figure out God, but I remember God. Or I remember my idea of God from before. He was this nice guy in the sky who would help me out with math tests.

When I was in the closet, though, I prayed to God so much, begging for help. For someone to find me. And it didn't happen.

So eventually I gave up. And I think I started to hate God. Maybe I still do.

I sense my hands are gripping the edges of the Adirondack chair. I close my eyes. I wish I hadn't thought about the closet. The closet makes me think about his rough hands. His fake smile.

My brain is buzzing. I can feel the weight of words at the back of my tongue, anxious to be spoken. Begging to be spoken. I think they've been there for a very long time. And I've been ignoring them as much as I possibly can. My heart, which had been beating along at a pretty normal pace, is suddenly racing at hyper speed.

“Dr. Greenberg,” I begin. The words sound weird outside my ears, like I'm hearing them underwater. “For the first few months after I came back,” I say, not believing I'm actually admitting this out loud or finally even to myself, “there was a part of me that thought that he could read my mind. Even though he was dead. I mean, I
knew
he was dead. I knew it, like, logically. But it was like he was still there. In my head. Watching me. And I'm worried that it means I'm crazy.”

I swallow and wait, and Dr. Greenberg doesn't say anything right away. I must be right. I must be totally nuts. He's probably got a form in his desk that he's going to fill out to admit me to the psych ward. When my mom pulls back into the driveway, he's going to have to speak with her privately and call ahead to the hospital to let them know I'm coming.

The thought makes me panic. Even more than being away from my parents again, I'm afraid that I'm beyond getting better. If they take me away, doesn't that mean normal or typical really can't happen for me? Ever?

Dr. Greenberg readjusts in his seat, crosses one leg over the other. I watch him from the corner of my eye. I can't face him.

“You're not the first client of mine to have these thoughts,” he says.

My whole body goes loose all at once, so fast my legs feel rubbery and I'm not sure I could stand if I tried.

“Yeah?” I ask.

“Yes,” Dr. Greenberg says, and I finally manage to look at him. He looks at me, too, his grizzled face serious. “That's a common reaction when someone makes it through something like what you've gone through. I once worked with a young woman who was part of a suicide cult, and almost a year after she survived and the leader died, she still felt that the leader could read her mind, even though she had the rational thinking skills to know that such thoughts weren't logical.”

“Shit,” I murmur under my breath. It dawns on me that I might not actually be the most screwed up patient that Dr. Greenberg's ever had.

“You remember how we've talked about how, when someone goes through extreme trauma, the brain is capable of coming up with all sorts of unusual thoughts to try and make sense of things and just survive? I know it seems odd to you now that you thought that about the kidnapper, but ultimately, Ethan, the important thing is that you survived. You managed to survive and come back from something horrible.”

“Yeah,” I answer. I do know this. Logically. But that I once thought he could read my mind feels absurd to me. Really, when I try to see my situation through other people's eyes, the whole story seems absurd. “People think I just could have left,” I continue, and I feel my hands ball up into fists. “Sometimes I think maybe even my mom and dad think that, even though when we have our family therapy sessions, they tell me, ‘Oh, Ethan, we get it.' But, like, how can they get it, really?”

“No one can, unless they've been through what you've been through,” Dr. Greenberg answers, “but I think some people will try to understand.”

“I mean, I was able to walk around alone outside, and I never asked for help even when I could have,” I argue back. My throat is tightening. My body is trying to decide if I should cry. “Just the other day I remembered this time we ran into a cop, and I didn't say anything. People think that's bullshit. Sometimes I think that's bullshit.”

Tears start streaming down my face.

“Ethan, do you believe me when I tell you that I've studied the human mind and trauma and captivity and all of these things for years and years?” Dr. Greenberg says, his brow furrowing. He leans forward in his chair. His voice is steady and sure of itself.

“Yes,” I say.

“And do you believe me when I tell you that the way you behaved is the way that countless victims of similar crimes have behaved? That all the research shows that what you did was what you had to do to survive?”

I shrug and wipe away some tears with the edge of my sleeve, not really convinced.

“Ethan, let me ask you, you do know that sometimes in wartime people in the military get taken captive, right?”

Sniffling a little, I turn and frown at Dr. Greenberg.

“What?”

“You've heard of prisoners of war? It happens to tough guys, right? Army soldiers? Marines?”

“Yeah.”

“So how old do you think those soldiers, those Marines are, when they're taken captive?”

“I don't know,” I answer.

“Are they eleven?” Dr. Greenberg presses.

“Of course not,” I snap back. “They're adults.”

“Right. So what if I told you there are many documented cases of prisoners of war behaving just as you did after they've been imprisoned? Who reacted just as you did? What would you say to that?”

I squeeze my eyes shut for a minute and try to stop crying. I know Dr. Greenberg is trying to make me realize it's not logical for a kid to be stronger than a Marine. But I still wish I had been able to walk away. Maybe it wasn't possible. I guess.

“You survived war, Ethan,” Dr. Greenberg tells me, his voice quiet. “You survived the unimaginable. Which makes you a pretty incredible person in my eyes.”

We sit there for a while longer, and I keep my eyes closed. I feel better about the fact that Dr. Greenberg doesn't think I've lost my mind, but some days the heaviness of all of it is so much I can't stand it.

Finally I open my eyes and look at Dr. Greenberg.

“I feel like I'm never going to be normal again.”

“Remember what I said about the word
normal
. I like the word
typical
. You might not be typical in your life experiences, but that doesn't mean that you can't experience life in ways that will bring you fulfillment. Happiness and joy.”

“Yeah,” I answer. “I guess.”

We sit there for a while, both of us staring forward at the house across the street. Letting time pass. I can feel the temperature shift, and it gets a little chillier, but I don't want to go inside yet. Something about sitting on Dr. Greenberg's porch makes it easier to unload some of this stuff. Lay it out right there in all its weird, deformed fuckedupedness.

“Ethan,” Dr. Greenberg finally says, “I'm not going to try and reduce the weight of your burden, but I'm going to help you grow strong enough to carry it.”

I repeat the words in my head over and over. I picture myself scaling Mount Everest with a pack that's double my body weight. The breeze picks up again, and the places on my face where the tears snaked down my cheeks feel extra cold. I imagine going home tonight and getting into bed and having to sleep with the lights on. I'm not sure how I can climb a mountain or carry some huge burden if I can't sleep with the lights turned off like a normal person. Or like a typical person. Or whatever.

But I don't say that to Dr. Greenberg. I just nod, and the two of us sit there not saying anything else, waiting for my mom's Volvo to appear at the end of the street. When it finally does, my tears are all dried up, and I'm glad about that because I don't think I could handle having to deal with my mom if she sees that I had been crying.

 

CAROLINE—224 DAYS AFTERWARD

There's something about the first day back at school after winter break that truly makes a person want to move to a remote island where no schools exist, so school attendance is not only not required but also impossible.

This morning when I woke up, the idea of going to Dove Lake High and dealing with Emma and Jason and the way my US History classroom smells like the crushed dreams of thousands of hopeful Proactiv users was just too much. I still don't know how I managed to do it. When I got home, I went right to bed, and I've been here ever since.

My phone buzzes. I stick my hand out from under my bedspread and grab it off the nightstand, hoping maybe it's Ethan wanting to talk about some of the songs we're going to work on. He still hasn't shown me those lyrics like he promised. But it's just Emma with her twenty millionth let's-be-friends-again text. The day after Fabiola's party she texted me like everything was normal, and it wasn't until after I told her I saw her messing around with Jason that she even acted sorry about it.

I ignored her all break and all day today at school. But the truth is, I'm not even ignoring her to prove a point. Honestly, the past few weeks without Emma in my life haven't been that lonely. Which makes me think maybe all the years we were friends were sort of bullshit. Which actually
is
depressing to think about.

Jason McGinty hasn't texted me, and at work he's read my silent treatment as the real deal this time.

Emma being out of my life burns a little. Jason being gone just feels like nothing.

I read Emma's text.

Girl come on don't be ridiculous over this. I'm gonna say it again but I was drunk and Jason was too. You were never totally BF/GF—let's not throw our friendship away over this.

I almost want to laugh at how easily Emma can justify anything.

Stop texting me
I write back, and then I toss my phone aside. I can make out the muffled sounds of my parents fighting down the hall in the kitchen. Their voices are building in volume until I can hear everything they're yelling at each other. When this used to happen before Dylan was taken, I would go find my baby brother and distract him with
Jeopardy!
on the television or one of my whistling songs. Right now I'm too frozen with my own sadness to move, but as my parents' fighting escalates, the sadness transforms into anger. I twist my face until it hurts and beat my fists against my bed, wishing voluntary temporary deafness were a real thing.

DAD: Mindy, it's nothing. You're freaking out over nothing. Stop reading meaning into shit when there's nothing there.

MOM: Andrew, don't talk down to me. And don't curse with the kids in the house.

DAD: It's not like Caroline doesn't use the exact same words, and he doesn't even know what the hell we're saying.

MOM: He does know! He does understand! God, you're the reason he started cursing at all. And he has a name, you know. He's your son!

DAD: You don't think I've had to live with that for years?

MOM: Go to hell.

And commence door slamming in three, two, one …

SLAM!

*   *   *

Yup.

The house is still for a while, and I imagine the players acting out the rest of this drama. Is MOM grabbing her phone and stepping outside to the back deck to call her sister in Chicago and cry and smoke one of the cigarettes she thinks I don't know she keeps hidden inside the doghouse from back when we used to have a dog? Is DAD driving aimlessly through the streets of Dove Lake thinking up ways of how he could be a bigger dickhead? And BROTHER, where are you? Who is watching out for you?

That last thought forces me up out of my bed, suddenly filled with guilt. It's not like Mom asked me to watch him, but whenever it hits me that I'm not 100 percent sure where Dylan is, I'm reminded of that miserable day in May when my mother popped her head into my bedroom, a small frown on her face.

“Caroline, have you seen Dylan? I thought you were keeping an eye on him.”

I make it down the hallway and find him on the back porch with my mom in the last sunlight of the day, playing with his favorite wooden alphabet blocks, including the new ones I gave him for Christmas. The way Dylan plays isn't by making castles or towers like other kids. He likes to take the blocks and line them up in one long line, like a train going down railroad tracks, and if you interrupt him, he gets super frustrated. It's weird, I guess, but I think he finds it soothing, and I'm glad that he's doing something that relaxes him at least.

My mom is standing by the fence, talking on her phone. When she hears the back door slam, she comes toward me. Her eyes are pink from crying.

“Hey, I'm going to go inside and talk to Aunt Josie for a sec, okay? Will you watch Dylan?” She hesitates a little as she says this. Like for some microsecond she's debating if leaving me responsible for him is a good idea.

The hesitation is like a knife in my gut.

“I'll watch him, Mom. I won't even go to the bathroom. I promise.”

I plop myself down on the white plastic lawn chair dotted with bird poop and draw my knees up to my chin. Dylan doesn't even look up to see I'm here. The back of his hair is curling down over his collar. He needs a haircut bad. My mom likes to take him to this kids' stylist in the city who's trained to work with kids who have autism because anyone else who tries to cut Dylan's hair usually can't handle him.

When we were younger, I had to get my hair cut by that stylist, too, and I hated how she always cut my bangs too short. But I couldn't say anything because it didn't make sense for my mom to have to drive all the way into the city for Dylan to get his hair cut and then spend some other Saturday afternoon driving some place local for me. Eventually, I stopped getting my hair cut at all, letting it grow out super long and trimming the bangs myself.