Chapter Seventeen
Three months later
What’s the first thing you remember?
It was difficult to sleep without the sound of the ocean. The endless sigh, back and forth; white noise that drowned everything else, that swept it all away. The ocean and the moonlight and the unfamiliar stars. Strange that he’d slept so well there.
The sheets itched. They smelled of laundry powder.
There were no insects here, buzzing in the night. No breath of wind. No salt on his lips.
You shouldn’t miss the place where they ruined you.
It was the quiet moments Lee missed. Those moments when his body was racked with pain, those moments of fear and horror, all of them had left him open to the stillness afterwards. To the ocean and the night and to Shaw. He’d never slept as deeply anywhere as on that last week on the island, and that was fucked-up.
He couldn’t sleep now. He hadn’t been able to, not since getting back. Not at night. Now he lay awake and counted the hours until dawn, trying to relearn the rhythms of his childhood home.
His dad usually watched television until eleven. The third step creaked when he walked upstairs to bed. That third step had creaked forever. Lee remembered how he’d had to dodge it when he was sneaking out of the house as a teenager. Straight out into the night, breathless with exhilaration, because nothing scared him back then. Now he was a hostage to every nightmare in the world.
Except for those quite moments on the island. He’d had nothing to lose there, nothing left to fear. Nothing except a glimmering thread of hope, the sound of the ocean, and Shaw sleeping beside him. Now, every step he climbed toward recovery, he was afraid he had further to fall. He wouldn’t survive that again. He couldn’t.
And it was irrational. He knew that. It wasn’t going to happen to him again, but something would. What if his dad had a heart attack? He hadn’t been watching his cholesterol lately. What if his mom was in a car wreck? She never paid enough attention when she was driving. Tornados, disease, crime, and plain dumb luck: Lee was afraid of it all these days. Everything was so fucking fragile, and he felt it most acutely at night.
His scars hurt. The skin felt too tight across his back where his welts had healed. There was some muscle damage as well, and he had a list of exercises he was supposed to do and an appointment with a physical therapist every two weeks. Between that and the regular appointments with the psychiatrist and the psychologist, Lee felt he might as well be living in Minneapolis, he spent so much time driving there. Well, his dad drove. He always found some excuse to go into the city on the same day as Lee’s appointments. He’d even closed up the hardware store one morning, which was stupid. Lee didn’t need a chaperone.
His dad had asked him to come back and work in the store, like he had when he was a kid. Lee had refused. He wasn’t ready to face people yet. Not people who were his dad’s long-standing customers and who’d gone to Lee’s memorial service. Shit, no. He felt enough like a ghost already.
The day after he’d arrived home, he’d found a card shoved in the drawer of the bureau in the dining room. His parents must have missed it when they’d thrown the others away. In deepest sympathy. He’d felt a sick thrill when he’d opened it and hadn’t known whether to feel invincible or like an interloper. They’d mourned him. Not for long, but it didn’t matter. Coming back, he didn’t know if he was the answer to his parents’ prayers or their worst nightmare—a broken thing that had crawled out of a grave.
They kept finding excuses to touch him, as though they were assuring themselves he was really there. If he was, he didn’t feel it. He wanted to be better; he wanted to be healed. He was sick of feeling like a stranger in the house he’d grown up in.
What’s the first thing you remember?
The question was instinctive in him now, and he hated it. He should have been able to shed it now he’d left the island, now he no longer needed it, but it always came back to him at night.
Stop it. You’re home; you’re safe.
The psychiatrist had prescribed sleeping pills and antianxiety meds, and Lee still couldn’t sleep at night. He slept during the day instead, on the couch in front of the television, but not at night. Never at night. At night, he was watchful.
Lee looked at the patterns of shadow and moonlight on the ceiling. They were fading. It would be morning soon. The sunlight would creep in the window, and gradually the room would brighten, and at seven o’clock, he would hear Mr. Keller rattling past in his old truck, and then the day would begin.
He snaked his arm out from under the covers and squinted to read his watch. Five-thirty. An hour and a half to go, and then he could stop pretending he was sleeping and get out of bed.
“He’s sleeping so much,” his mom had said on the phone to someone the day before.
Not true, Mom. He got a couple of hours in during the day, and that was it. At night, he lay awake and tortured himself with his memories, but his parents didn’t know that.
“Come on, why are you torturing yourself?” Shaw had asked him on the ship. Frigate. Whatever.
“Got no one else to do it for me now.”
That was fucked-up as well. Everything was fucked-up. His life and his parents’ lives. When was the last time his dad had kept the store open late like he used to? And his mom had quit her job. Just quit, like the past twenty-five years didn’t matter. She’d always talked of retiring. She’d mentioned it again at Christmas, but she’d talked about it like it was at some indeterminate, distant point in the future, because she loved teaching those kids. She’d done it so long that she was teaching her kids’ kids. She loved it. She always had, and now it was gone.
No more finger-painted pictures on the refrigerator: I love you, Mrs. Anderson.
No more lopsided cookies or cupcakes with the frosting sliding off. “I made this for you, Mrs. Anderson.”
No more shy trick-or-treaters on Halloween, peeking out from behind their masks. “It’s me, Mrs. Anderson!”
And Lee had taken all of that away from her.
Lee had tried to ask them about money. The shop wasn’t doing great anyway, not with the chain store just a couple of miles away, and now his mom wasn’t earning. His dad had waved the question away. “We’re doing fine, Lee. You concentrate on you, okay?”
Lee was sick of concentrating on himself. He’d lived in his head for eight fucking weeks on the island. He didn’t want to do it anymore. Sometimes he wished he could just go to sleep and never wake up.
That, Doctor Fisher said, was passive suicidal ideation.
“Do you want to hurt yourself?” she had asked him at one of their earlier sessions.
No. Not exactly. He couldn’t do that to his parents, not after everything. But would he care if he accidentally walked in front of a truck? He didn’t know. He wanted it to be over, that was all, over for good. He was sick of these long nights that stretched out forever. He was sick of not sleeping. He was sick of always feeling like shit.
He closed his eyes as he heard his bedroom door squeak open. One of his parents checking on him. A moment later, it closed again.
Apparently, nobody was sleeping at night these days. He rolled over, the scars on his back tightening and itching, and shoved the pillow over his head.
Everybody just wanted to help, and it was so fucking cloying.
God, he felt like he was five years old again. Every time he turned around, one of his parents was there. It was like they didn’t trust him to be alone for five minutes. They’d been like this ever since Doctor Fisher had given him the booklet on Acute Stress Disorder and PTSD to take home and his dad had found it. Lee wished he’d thrown it out instead, because now his parents treated him like they were afraid he was going to break or snap. And it wasn’t fair on any of them. Moving back home had been a mistake. He should have stayed in Denver, although it was stupid to think he could have slipped straight back into his old life like nothing had happened. Lee knew there were things he needed to work out first. He needed time. And he probably needed space as well. Coming back to Andover, to the house he’d grown up in, had been a mistake.
His relationship with his parents had never been worse. It threatened to smother him. His mom hadn’t retired, Lee realized. She’d just traded teaching for full-time suicide watch.
He closed his eyes and lay there, and nothing happened. He was tired, but nothing happened. He couldn’t sleep.
What’s the first thing you remember?
Maybe he should pick up one of those white-noise machines and see if that helped. That seemed like an eminently practical thing to do, and something Doctor Fisher would approve of. Doctor Fisher was always encouraging him to find coping strategies, to identify his triggers, and to celebrate the small steps forward without dwelling on those times he’d jumped two steps back without realizing.
Or ten steps, like the time his mom had screamed when she’d caught him getting out of the shower and seen his scars. And at the time, all Lee could think was: Well, now you know why I’m wearing long-sleeved shirts these days, Mom. Afterward, though, he’d retreated to his bedroom and sat in the closet for hours. And he hadn’t done that since he was seven and throwing a stupid tantrum. Weird.
He realized only much later that it wasn’t about his bedroom closet at all. It was about the closet in Vornis’s house where he’d slept on that filthy mattress. It was about the tiny prison that was his sanctuary before Shaw. And after, apparently. At least it had given him and Doctor Fisher something to talk about.
That night, his dad had taken him aside. “The scars, Lee. What did the doctor say about those? Should you be doing anything for them? The ones you can’t reach, I mean.”
His dad meant applying cream to soften them, Lee had supposed.
“We’ve talked about dermabrasion and maybe surgery. I can’t have anyone touch them, Dad, not now, okay?” He hadn’t been able to look at his dad when he answered. He knows I was whipped. He knows I was burned. They both know, and they can probably guess the rest.
The scars itched at night when they rubbed against his sheets. They pulled when he moved, and he couldn’t imagine they would ever be better. He couldn’t imagine he would ever be better.
“It’s a process, Lee,” Doctor Fisher always said.
Well, he was sick of the fucking process.
Lee thumped the pillow and squinted at his watch again. It wasn’t even six yet. There was still an hour to go until Mr. Keller’s truck roared past and the day could begin. Physical therapy in the morning, and Doctor Fisher in the afternoon. Another full day of staring his memories in the face, of dissecting them in front of strangers.
His throat ached with tears. Fuck, he was so sick of this. At least on the island, he’d always been able to sleep after they tortured him. Seemed like a fair trade-off now.
What’s the first thing you remember?
The sound of the ocean.
Shaw.
This.
* * * *
He was tired. His whole body ached with it. If he closed his eyes, he thought he’d just drift off, and that would be okay. That would be nice. Except he was in the middle of a session with Doctor Fisher.
“I should be happy, right?” Lee asked, passing a hand in front of his stinging eyes. “My blood tests came back clean, and that’s a fucking miracle.”
“It’s good news,” Doctor Fisher said. She leaned back in her chair. “You say ‘should’ a lot, Lee. I wonder if you’ve noticed that.”
“Do I?” He glanced at the windows. Looked like a nice day outside.
“I should be happy. I should be better. I should be able to get on with my life,” Doctor Fisher said. “These things don’t have a timeline. It’s a process.”
Lee shrugged.
“Did you go out last night?” Doctor Fisher asked him.
Lee nodded, wondering if she could smell the alcohol still on him, or if it was something they’d talked about last week. Something they thought he might be ready to try. “Yeah, to a club.”
“And how did that go?”
“Badly,” Lee admitted. He’d hated the thump of the bass and the press of strangers’ bodies. The strobe lights had made him nauseated, and he’d drunk too much. That was a habit he needed to break before it became an issue, he knew, but he hadn’t found a reason to stop yet. “I keep thinking that if I can get laid and get it over with, it’ll be okay.”
“Is that what you thought on the ship?”
Frigate, Lee thought automatically. The crew gets shitty if you call it the wrong thing. He studied the pattern of the carpet for a moment. “I guess.”
“Sex isn’t a hurdle you need to jump, Lee,” Doctor Fisher said.
“Well, I didn’t,” Lee said. “I had a few drinks with some guy, but I chickened out.”
The look on the guy’s face had made him anxious. He’d looked at Lee like he was just a hot body, which had been the whole point of the fucking exercise, but he’d freaked out about it. He’d muttered his apologies and got the hell out of there. The guy had been too predatory. A few months ago that would have been a turn-on. Now it made him want to be sick. He’d almost had a panic attack right there in the club. He’d had all the symptoms: sweaty palms, elevated heart rate, and the constricting pressure in his chest that was the weight of his own fear.
Panic attack. It sounded almost mild. The reality was completely different.
He’d had one full-blown attack before, a few weeks ago now when he’d heard Mr. Keller’s truck rattling up the street and the association had taken him straight back to the island, to the session where he’d hallucinated home. It’s not real! You’re still in that room! He hadn’t been able to breathe. He’d thought he was having a heart attack. He’d been sure he was dying. It had been terrifying. His mom had called the paramedics.
Lee looked toward the window again. His dad was waiting outside for him, just like last week and the week before that. This time, he’d made up some bullshit story about needing to come into the city to drop his printer off to be repaired, as though there was nowhere in Andover that did that.
Rob. That was the guy’s name from the club. Rob, like steal or take. Like force. And he probably wasn’t a bad guy, but Lee had been too afraid to risk it. Anyway, what would Rob have said when he took his clothes off? He would have asked what happened, anyone would ask, and all those scars would have turned him off. And if they hadn’t, if he’d been the type of guy who wasn’t turned off by scars, then it would have been even worse. Lee wondered if that was his only option now: some sadistic freak who was turned on by marks of torture. Vornis had ruined sex and relationships for him forever. He’d managed to destroy Lee’s life without killing him. He was probably smiling in hell.
Maybe it would have been better if he’d died on the island. Passive suicidal ideation. Lee recognized it now.
“I’m not sleeping,” Lee said. It all came out in a rush when he let it. “I hate the way my parents treat me. I feel like a kid. I feel like I’m climbing the walls. I need some space, I need to get away sometimes, and I don’t even have my fucking car.”
His car was still in Denver. His whole life was still in Denver, and he wasn’t sure he wanted it back. Could he really walk into the DEA office there like nothing had happened? Or, worse, acknowledge to all his colleagues that something had? It’s not like it would be in the staff newsletter, but Lee knew how it would go. Everyone would find out sooner or later, if they didn’t already know.
Lee liked Doctor Fisher. He hated his sessions, but he liked her.
He raised his eyes and looked at her. She was wearing the same even, nonjudgmental look she always did. The light gleamed on her square glasses as Lee looked at her. He looked at the carpet again. “I think I want to quit my job.”
“Now may not be the time to make those sort of big decisions, Lee,” Doctor Fisher told him, “but it’s certainly something you can think about. What would you do if you didn’t go back to the DEA?”
And that was the problem right there. He shrugged.
He couldn’t stay in Andover forever, and he didn’t want to go back to Denver. Was it because the island had broken him that he didn’t want his old life back? Or had it given him something completely unexpected—clarity? Maybe it wasn’t an admission of failure that he couldn’t just pick up the pieces of his life like nothing had happened. Maybe another man would have made a different decision: I won’t let those bastards beat me. But did it have to be about victory and defeat? Maybe it was time he thought about what he really wanted in life instead, and it wasn’t his job. Because life was too short for regrets. Shit, if he’d learned anything, wasn’t that it? He couldn’t tell.
He looked at the window again, the carpet again, and then back to Doctor Fisher. Admission time. “I miss Shaw.”
“That’s not surprising,” Doctor Fisher told him. “We’ve talked a little about that before. We’ve also talked about how post-traumatic stress disorder actually changes the chemical balance in your brain. It physically changes the way that you think. This is why it’s important that you don’t make any big decisions now.”
Like she was worried he was going to jump straight on a plane and head for Australia. Jesus, his head might have been fucked-up, but Lee still wasn’t that stupid. Shaw deserved better. Shaw deserved someone who was as strong as he was, as brave, not some emotional cripple with scars all over his body.
“Did you masturbate this week?” Doctor Fisher asked him.
That was another thing. A few months ago, the thought of having to answer a question like that would have made him squirm. Not now, though. This was sex for him now: something horrible, something frightening, and at best something clinical.
“Twice,” he said.
“Do you remember what you thought of?” Doctor Fisher asked.
“You,” Lee said, his mouth quirking. “Sorry, that sounds sick, right? I mean, I thought about how you’d ask me about it, then I got on with it.”
She smiled at that.
Lee glanced at the window. “I thought about Shaw. About fucking Shaw. Like we did the second time, when it was good.”
Although, not exactly good. If it had been good, Shaw would have wanted to do it again before Sydney. They’d both come, but it hadn’t been enough. And Lee couldn’t blame Shaw for that. Shit, who wanted someone who cried when they came? Who wanted someone that broken? Lee wouldn’t have, and that was what he was reduced to now. Someone so screwed up, so desperate and needy, that it was more trouble than it was worth to fuck him. He hated himself for that.
For that and for so much else.
“Did you enjoy it?”
Lee closed his eyes briefly. “Sort of, I guess. But my brain got in the way, and I started to think about Vornis.”
“You must like that, boy; you’re getting hard.”
Fear, Doctor Fisher had told him, sometimes provoked the same biological reaction. And sometimes, Lee knew, when people were assholes, they made you like a thing just so they could throw it back in your face. Just so you were an accomplice in your own torture. So it was never just Shaw when he jerked off in the shower. Now it was a race against time: Think of Shaw. Think of him and come before Vornis gets here. Hurry!
There was no part of him that Vornis hadn’t ruined, no corner of his mind that it was safe to hide in.
“It’s my head,” he told the carpet. “It’s been fucked-up since Colombia.”
“It’s your survival mechanism,” Doctor Fisher told him. “It’s part of your lizard brain. Logic and rational thought don’t come into it. Your brain got you through eight weeks of hell, Lee, where you were reduced to one thing only: the need to survive. All of those coping mechanisms you developed, all of those chemical changes, they served their purpose, because here you are talking to me.”
“I hate my lizard brain,” Lee muttered.
“It’s more powerful than we give it credit for,” Doctor Fisher said.
“Except it wasn’t my brain that got me off the island,” Lee said. “It was Shaw.”
“You stayed alive,” Doctor Fisher said. “Don’t underestimate that.”
“And it wasn’t my lizard brain that said to trust him,” Lee said. He picked at a thread in the hem of his shirt and frowned. “I don’t know what that was. It wasn’t instinct; it was very much a conscious choice. It was because of the way his face changed when he looked out at the ocean. It was because he had bad dreams. He didn’t seem like a monster. I mean, he talked like one, but he never acted like one. Not to me.”
“It’s not uncommon to develop feelings for the person who saves your life.”
Lee shrugged. “Except I developed these feelings before he saved my life.”
“You developed a strong emotional attachment to the one man who didn’t torture you,” Doctor Fisher said in her quiet, steady voice. No judgment, no censure, just concern. “And that was the smart thing to do. That was what you needed to do, on the island. But you’re safe now. Do you think that it could in any way be an even relationship?”
Maybe that’s what I was thinking on the ship. Fucked that up as well.
“I don’t know,” Lee said. He rubbed his temples. “I mean, you say don’t make any big decisions. You say my brain isn’t working properly, and I know that, but what if it was real? If I can’t trust my logic, how about this: do you throw away a six-year assignment to save the life of a guy you don’t even know?”
“Maybe,” Doctor Fisher said. “If you’re a moral person.”
“I don’t think morality comes into it,” Lee said. “Not for people in that work.” He sighed. “I just want to know, I guess. I want to know if the one person who looked me in the eye when I was at my worst could still do it now.”
Doctor Fisher didn’t say anything.
Lee sighed. “How will I know when I’m better?”
“It’s a process, Lee,” Doctor Fisher said quietly. “It’s going to take time, and it’s going to take work. Do you feel better compared to last week?”
He shrugged.
“Well, you went out to a club,” Doctor Fisher said. “That’s something you wouldn’t have done a month ago.”
“It didn’t exactly go well.”
“Do you remember what we said about celebrating the small victories?” Doctor Fisher asked him. “This is important. You took a big step. You should be proud of that.”
Lee leaned back in his chair. “I don’t think I want to go to clubs anymore. I don’t think I want to go back to my job. I don’t think I want to try and be the person I was before the island, because it will always be a lie. I was an arrogant asshole, you know. I thought I owned the fucking world.”
“You’re young.” Doctor Fisher smiled. “You’re smart. You’re good-looking. I think most people would agree that you owned the world. We all did when we were twenty-two.”
“I was wrong,” Lee said. He rubbed the whorl of scar tissue near his throat and thought of Vornis. “I don’t even recognize that guy anymore. Shit, last night I didn’t even want to get into the taxi because I saw the way the driver frowned at me when he saw me coming out of a gay club. The guy I was would have been dry humping some random stranger in the back seat, and to hell with what the asshole driver thought.”
Doctor Fisher’s smile grew. “I’d like to meet that guy one day, Lee.”
“I’m fairly certain he’s gone.” Lee sighed. “It’s easy to be brave when you’ve got nothing to be scared about.”
“Don’t sell yourself short,” Doctor Fisher said. “Not now, and not then.”
Lee sighed again. “Yeah, I know. It’s my brain, right? I’m just sick of feeling like I’m not getting anywhere with this.”
“You are,” Doctor Fisher said. “You’re taking bigger steps than you realize.”
Lee looked at his watch and thought of his dad waiting in the parking lot, and the long, awkward drive home.
Doctor Fisher looked at her watch as well. “Okay, then. Homework for this week.”
Lee smiled at that.
“You’re going to write down all the steps you take, however small you think they are, and next week we’ll discuss them all.”
“One foot in front of the other,” Lee murmured.
One sand dollar and then another.