Page 38 of I Will Mend You

I want to scream that this is sick, but the words die in my throat. The world dissolves into a storm of swirling whites.Delta’s shadowy figure looms closer, the point of the scissors tracing a cold, cruel line up and down my folds.

Panic mounts. I try to fight back again, but the drug won’t let me move.

“Cast your mind back to when you were ten.” His voice snakes into my thoughts. “What was the last thing you remember before the asylum?”

“I don’t know.”

“Close your eyes.”

My eyes flutter shut.

“Good girl. Now, picture yourself with Lyle. He was taking you somewhere, yes?”

I want to ask how he knows Dad’s name, but the words remain stuck in the back of my throat. All I can choke out is, “Yes.”

“Where did he take you? What happened that day?”

My mind rolls back to the blank wall encasing my earliest memories. It’s made of gray bricks, covered in the same photos Mom placed all over my bedroom. Among them are sticky notes, reminding me that I lost my memories in a car crash brought on by unbuckling my seatbelt.

I try to tell Delta what I see, but he tells me it’s a construction of lies. I float around it and find a tiny crack.

“Good girl. Look harder. Squeeze through. What’s on the other side?”

Images explode through my consciousness in glorious technicolor. My nostrils fill with the mingled scents of burnt metal, gasoline, and motor oil. Looks like the car accident was real.

“I’m lying on a stretcher, surrounded by paramedics,” I reply.

“Look around. Where are you?”

“I don’t know. There’s an ambulance. Its lights are still flashing. A truck. Lots of bystanders in a circle behind tape. And the police.”

“What else? Can you see anyone familiar?”

I turn my head to find a gray car, crumpled beyond recognition. Firemen just extracted a man from the wreckage, but his body is limp. I relay all this information to Delta until I catch a glimpse of the man’s face.

Heart clenching, I choke out, “It’s Dad. He’s dead.”

“Good girl.” Delta says. “What else?”

The girl I was then and the woman I am now are swamped by the pain and horror of that day. My throat closes, and I force out the words, “They’re putting him in a body bag.”

My stretcher gets wheeled backward and lifted into the interior of an ambulance. I reach out with my mind, wanting to stay with Dad, but the paramedics close the doors.

“What happens next?” he asks. “Focus.”

Darkness overwhelms my vision, and my ears fill with the sound of beeping machines. My mind gets pulled under until even the grating sound of Delta’s voice fades into the echoing drone of my pulse.

I did it. I finally broke through the wall of false memories and found a sliver of truth. Dad died all those years ago, yet I remember him so vividly during key points in my later childhood and adolescence.

While I was recovering from the accident at home, the father who came to my room and kept me company must have been a hallucination. All those words of comfort he offered when I got into trouble at school were figments of my imagination.

Somewhere on the edge of my consciousness, I’m aware of probing fingers, scissoring and twisting, and of Delta’s voice comparing the state of my vagina to my sister’s. I summon every ounce of energy into my legs, desperate to kick him in the balls,the face, to launch myself off the couch, but the drugs keep my limbs paralyzed.

A whimper lodges in my throat. My tongue is so heavy, I can’t scream at him to stop.

“If you want this to end, you’ll answer some questions about Xero and his organization.”

As I slip into unconsciousness, my last thoughts are to protect Xero’s people from Delta.

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