Page 132 of Trapped: Until The Darkest Of Night

I grope around again. My fingertips touch rough, cold wood. Very close in front of me. To my sides, left and right. They’re walls. No, impossible!

“Grey?”

A rough scraping whispers through the air, metal clicks. One, two, three, four, five, six.

My blood freezes to a lump of ice. Top and bottom blur. He found me. The monster found me. It killed Grey and put me in a coffin. Nobody will ever find me. Nobody knows where I am. My throat constricts. The suffocating air makes my eyes water. I wildly push against the wood, but it won’t budge. The narrowness crushes me like a hand crushes ripe fruit. I can’t breathe anymore. Again, I press against the lid. Suddenly, it breaks and I lie in a fresh grave. There is earth everywhere, heavy and damp, full of worms and bugs. They go into my mouth, into my lungs…

I wake with a start and hear myself screaming.

Grey is with me immediately, lying by my side as if guarding me. Drenched in sweat, I bury my fingers in his fur and, gasping, stare at the south window. The full moon is silver and large in the sky, casting a brilliant ray of light on the old parquet floor.

Only a dream. It was only a dream, Brendan.

I focus on my breath like Dr. India Lee advised me. Slowly in through the nose, evenly out through the mouth. Just a few breaths per minute to slow the heartbeat. She prepared me for the nightmares.

The more memories we look at together, the more they’ll accompany you in your dreams, she said.

Restless, I get up and run water over my face in the kitchen. Now the dark dreams haunt me every night. I go to India Lee twice a week, but we don’t always work to integrate the bad memories. They have to be gradually sorted and evaluated in my life story, and eventually, I should be able to consciously control these memories so that they don’t flood me upon a trigger. India Lee warned me about new seizures. They’re re-traumatizing you, Brendan. You relive your childhood trauma over and over again and that keeps throwing you back.

But it’s difficult to find words for things that left me speechless from the horror. How do you remember without those memories ruining you? Many of my impressions are patchy even now, but examining them is essential for healing. I told Dr. India Lee about some of the beatings, the chains, and the loneliness, but there is still a lot she doesn’t know.

And I am realizing more and more how much of what happened on Thorson Ave. has been emotionally repressed by me. In the dreams, I often get close to my true feelings, undergoing the moments in the coffin with full intensity. The boy once said I only knew the echo of the pain, and he was right.

Despite the slow progress or maybe because of it, I can’t stop thinking about Lou. I often find myself picking up my phone to look at her pictures. Then, one day, I mindlessly erase them from my cell phone and laptop so as not to be tempted any longer. After that, I smash the smartphone against the wall because I’m so angry with myself.

In mid-November, I begin drawing again. I paint Lou as I remember her and use it to paper the living room. Lou under the pines, afraid and shy. Lou in the RV, staring straight ahead without really seeing anything. Lou and her first smile in the Yukon while feeding Grey. Lou at the lake washing clothes, Lou under the willow tree, wringing her hands and looking stunned. Do you know now? Lou naked in the sand, half-covered by another body.

I take these pictures with me to the therapy session along with my dark drawings, the rose tendrils on ebony. I need these pictures to be able to tell India Lee what happened. Back on Thorson Ave. and this year at Lodgepole. My voice breaks a few times and I keep repeating things, but India Lee listens patiently without interrupting. Every now and then, she sips her tea as if the story she’s hearing is one of many. Only when I mention the coffin and later the chloroform, does she take a deep breath, a sign of her dismay.

Finally, I’m finished and stare at a bright area on the lime-green wall where a picture may have once hung.

“So you let the girl you kidnapped go,” India Lee sums up the last part of my story.

I only nod and cautiously look at her. If she’s shocked, she doesn’t show it, she shows nothing at all.

“I’m not here to judge you, Brendan,” she says, folding her hands back on her lap. Her eyes are clear and open. “Trauma can lead to bad deeds. You came to me so I could help you.”

“Am I like my stepfather?” The question comes out of my mouth so unexpectedly that I’m surprised myself.

“You already answered that earlier, didn’t you? You had to flee to gain your freedom, but you let the girl go.”

I ponder her words for a moment. “Why did he do it? I mean, holding me captive and locked in a coffin?” Sometimes I think I could take it better if I knew the why.

India Lee shrugs. “One can only speculate. In the end, most likely he wouldn’t have been able to explain it, either.” She rolls the chair closer to me again. “Believe me, Brendan, too many people often don’t understand their own actions. And even if their lives were on the line, they might not be able to explain in a comprehensible way why they did this or that. During the process of humanization, from being purely human to humanity, an awful lot of things went wrong for such people. Not all people behave humanely. You, Brendan, are lucky to have been with your mother for at least the first three years, regardless of why you were separated from her. The first three years shape us significantly. You learned what love means from your mother. Others may have just forgotten it over the years like a language they haven’t spoken in a while. The girl helped you speak it fluently again. And that’s the difference between this winter and last winter.” I still see no judgment in her eyes. “You have something now that you didn’t have then.”

I look at her expectantly.

“You don’t know?” She smiles. “Hope.”

Chapter

Thirty-Five

Six weeks later

The unassuming film studio in Echo Park, Los Angeles, is past its prime. Stucco is crumbling from the graying facade and a few broken roof tiles lie like flotsam next to the entrance. I park the RV in front and pause for a moment, my hands gripping the steering wheel.

Hope. Right now, I have to think of India Lee. So much has happened since then. Still, I can’t believe I’m back in my old city. Los Angeles still feels like a hurricane that sweeps my thoughts out of my head. I find it difficult to concentrate.

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