Page 96 of Haunt Me

Eden’s Email

Dear Elliot sisters,

Ok, it’s been a few months.

Thank you for the cards you sent me. You sound perfectly lovely and normal. That scares the crap out of me, if I’m being honest. I have met Mr. Elliot (sorry, I still can’t call him ‘Dad’), but the psychiatrists said I wasn’t ready to meet you two yet. But soon.

So, until then, I will write to you, emails I will never send. (I didn’t know emails existed before now—bear with me.)

Here we go:

I met Mr. Elliot.

I don’t call him ‘Dad’. I don’t know if I ever will; I mean, he is little more than a stranger at this point. A kind stranger, one who is committed to protecting me and who is insanely angry on my behalf, but a stranger. He doesn’t pressure me into calling him that, and I’m not ready, so Mr. Elliot he is (Dad).

Side note: I have never used the word (Dad).Father HeThe man I lived withI’ll just call him by his name, Solomon. Solomon wanted to be called ‘Father’. After I met Isaiah, I got jealous of howhekept talking about his dad all the time, so I tried it too. I said it in front of the mirror a couple hundred times, to get used to it. Dad. Dad. Dad. Then I tried it on Solomon. He didn’t like it. After a few hours of him screaming at me, I had to do penance by fasting—starving—for five days. After that, I don’t remember much, because I kept fainting a lot and the rest of the days passed in a daze. He never took me to the hospital, but somehow, I survived. Obviously. The effort to call anyone ‘Dad’ didn’t.

So no calling Mr. Elliot ‘Dad’. I can’t even call him by his first name. But I think there is something there, something between us.

Our connection was instant. As if something inside me recognized him—we were in sync instantly. Attuned. It was like I had known him for years, and he me. He just looked at me and cried and cried. I didn’t cry, but inside I was melting. I think for the first time I understood thatFather’s (wait, no, not Father’s)Solomon’s face hadn’t been kind. Not really. Because here was a kind face. A face that held nothing but love. I had not been living with such a father all these years.

The specialists, (police, psychiatrists, social workers, etc., etc.) who are working on mycase, all agreed that I should be taken to a ‘neutral place’ to be rehabilitated. Mr. Elliot (Dad) agrees with everything they ask of him without question. The neutral place was decided: New York. To a girl who had not been anywhere apart from her room and the woods of Massachusetts, New York kind of resembles a zoo. Or a circus. Did no one think it would be kind of overwhelming for me? We’ll never know.

Side note: These specialists don’t know nearly as much as they pretend to. Just saying. Mr. Elliot (Dad) knows how to handle me so much better, just because he is a Decent Human BeingTM—something I haven’t previously experienced in my entire life, with one notable experience.

I stayed for a while in New York with Mr. Elliot (Dad), monitored by doctors. We tried to get to know each other. And to ‘heal’, as they call it. I told him I would never be normal. He said a bad word in response. I laughed. (There was a time when I would have thought that hearing a bad word and then laughing about it would send me straight to hell. I know now this was one of the many liesFatherSolomon tried to control me with. They are still stuck in my head, these lies. But I’m fighting them.) (Too many parentheses). (Sorry).

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