Page 89 of Waking Olivia

If I heardthe story from anyone else, I’d never have believed it because it’s too terrible to be real. But Olivia’s entire childhood was too terrible to be real, and her dream made far too much sense.

Her father drove her down the road to dig the hole for their dog, she said. He found a spot in the woods and left her there all day. There was a tree above her, raining down acorns at unpredictable intervals, and by the time he came to get her it was dark and she had small pinpoint bruises covering her arms. The next morning, Matthew was gone. Her father said he’d run away.

When she finishes talking, she’s crying so hard that she’s gagging. For the first time ever, I almost wish she could forget. All night I lie there with her, rocking her against me, running my hands over her back and promising things will be okay.

She sleeps sporadically, always waking with a gasp as if she’s just remembered all over again. It’s just before dawn when she wakes again, staring at me with her glassy, unseeing eyes on the pillow we share.

“We probably need to talk to the police, Liv,” I tell her.

It’s the first time I’ve ever seen her look terrified. Even when she fell yesterday, it wasn’t like this. “No.” She shakes her head. “I can’t.”

“Olivia, your father killed him. You know he did. If he’s still alive, he needs to be stopped.”

“Ican’t,” she says. “I just can’t.”

Ileaveher asleep in the morning and go back to the office. I find the detective’s card tucked carefully into the right side of my desk calendar. Somehow I think I knew that it would be me, not Olivia, eventually making this call.

I report what occurred last night, and he tells me he’ll need to interview her right away. “She’s not going to talk to you,” I sigh. “She’s as scared of talking to you as she is almost anything.”

“Sometimes the kids involved are threatened so badly that the fear of speaking up never goes away,” he sighs. “But I still need to try. Secondhand information from you doesn’t get us anywhere.”

“Look, can’t you just interview the other adults involved? At least try to confirm the story through her mother if you can find her?”

“Her mother’s been dead almost 15 years,” the detective says, “so I don’t think she’s going to be much help at this point.”

I lean back in my chair, and his words seem to whistle through me and right back out, as if they are impossible to comprehend. “Olivia told me her mother abandoned her. I mean, she reallybelievesher mother abandoned her.”

The detective exhales. “Look, buddy. I don’t know what stories this girl’s been feeding you, but she knows her mother is dead. She watched it happen.”

I know for a fact Olivia doesn’t think she’s been lying to me about this. But I don’t understand how she can’t know the truth. “So … was it her father? Is he in jail?”

“He should’ve gone to jail, but there was nothing to pin it to him. Olivia was the only witness and she claimed to have seen nothing. It’s probably what saved her life. If she’d talked, you can bet your ass he’d have come after her.”

I feel something icy crawl along my back. “So if her father’s still on the loose,” I ask, “is Olivia even safe?”

“I think it’s fair to say,” he replies, “that as long as this guy isn’t in jail, Olivia will never be entirely safe.Especially if she starts remembering.”

I’mfull of dread as I open up my laptop. A part of me, like a part of Olivia, doesn’t want to know. Wants to continue believing the version of events she’s created in her head.

It isn’t hard to find articles about it once you know what you’re looking for. Had I even once typed in her mother’s name months ago it would have been the first thing I’d found. Is it really possible that Olivia hasn’t? Yes. Something has warned her away from looking too carefully at anything for a long time, has assured her that she can’t handle what she’ll find out.

The story is awful, but it’s the photo that it hurts to look at – Olivia, tiny and smiling beside her mother, who looked very much like Olivia does now. She was stabbed forty-two times. Olivia ran nearly four miles in the dark and was found unconscious the next day, still bleeding from the wound on her back.

The night running. The scar on her back. The way she seems to black out when she’s attacked. If I’d even tried to guess at the source, I’d never have come up with something quite this awful.

Icallthe nursing home once more. This time, I don’t ask for Olivia’s grandmother. I ask for her grandmother’s next-of-kin, who turns out to be a sister. Olivia’s great-aunt, I suppose. I should have thought of it before. Olivia was only sixteen when her grandmother was admitted. There’s no way she’d have had the wherewithal or the funds to fly her grandmother to Florida and get her help.

And if this great-aunt helped Olivia’s grandmother, she sure as shit should have helped Olivia too. I hate her before she’s even picked up the phone. I hate her more after she has.

I explain the situation and the woman immediately launches into a tirade against Olivia. “Well, it might have been nice if that girl could have told the police back then, wouldn’t it?” she explodes.

“She didn’t remember anything until just now,” I snap. “She’s still under the impression that her parents abandoned her.”

She clucks her tongue again. “That stupid story. Anya let her keep believing it, but let me tell you, I’d have put a stop to it right away. She knew good and well what happened. She nearly bled to death. You don’t just forget something like that.”

“What story?” I ask.

“Oh. Olivia’d get so hysterical when people spoke about it that everyone finally gave up. You couldn’t even say ‘died’ around her. So Anya started saying ‘when your mother went away’ and they left it at that.”

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