by Alona Jarden
"It's you."
"Right, and I'm your father."
"Yes, that's you," she repeated her answer. "That's me, that's you and now you are my father."
"That's right, Kate, and this was your third birthday party."
"Yes, this is my birthday party."
"Do you remember now? Do you remember there were many friends, but the rain made them leave and we were left to put out the candles on the cake by ourselves?"
"No, Dad, they stayed with me and sang songs for me."
"All that was in your dream, Kate. What really happened is that you and I celebrated with each other because we were all we needed. Do you remember?"
Once a week I would bribe her with a hot chocolate and have her listen to my stories about all the photos in the album and, only after a few years, when her answers made it clear that she had remembered the story of our shared life in the context of each and every photo, did I allow myself to gradually stop pushing her re-written life stories upon her.
I always wondered if a day would come when I would regret what I had done.
When she came to live with me, I decided that it was better to tell her only bits and pieces of the truth and to make sure that it was diluted and spiced with more pleasant memories, even if they were falsified. I made up a lighter version of the truth for her. One that I believed would allow her to grow up in a healthy and balanced way, and the days that followed proved I was right.
The version I told her helped her focus on the future without being haunted by the past.
I closed the photo album and found myself walking between the walls of our deserted apartment. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do without my daughter there. How could I sit and wait for her to be found without doing anything?
Time after time I chose her and she chose me. I was the one who raised her and, thus, she was, and remained, my daughter and no adoption papers could testify otherwise.
I straightened the kitchen, folded the pile of clothes waiting for her to do it herself and, when there was nothing else left for me to do, I went back to sit on the bench out on the porch.
I looked at the starry sky and wondered if she, too, was looking at it from wherever she was. She could be anywhere, and it was hard for me to imagine the experiences she might have endured since she’d left our apartment two days ago.
Officer Swenson asked me to try and remember who could have wanted to hurt her or perhaps hurt me indirectly through her, but there was not a single name in my mind except those who were no longer alive to do so.
Chapter 11
Andrew
I had many photos of that celebration in my shoebox. I’d kept them like they were my prized possessions, but I could only start the next stage of my plan with one specific picture. In all the others, Katarina's parents appeared and I didn’t believe she was ready to see them yet.
I gave it much thought and consideration before choosing a picture her father had taken, one in which her mother didn’t appear.
I was filled with hope that it would be the first step to her past. A path leading to the truth and to the discovery of the lie that, up until now, she’d called her life.
"How are you feeling?" I asked after confirming that she had seen her name on her birthday cake, although the answer was clear to me in advance.
"I... It's all very strange."
"I know."
"I don’t believe that you do, Andrew."
"Trust me, I know exactly how you feel." I risked receiving a defensive response, but went on anyway. "You feel that something in your life isn’t right. You know deep inside that you can't have two different memories of the same event and you wonder which one is the right one."
"No," she looked down, "I know for sure which one is the right one. I feel it in every part of my body."
"What is it that you feel?"
"I feel like I'm going to throw up." And she did.
If I stuck to my plan, I was supposed to make her sit there for an hour and talk about what she had seen in spite of her troubled response, but her body seemed to be reacting violently and was still unable to accept what her mind already knew.
She emptied the contents of her stomach into a bucket I brought her and then emptied the tears that had accumulated in her without saying a word.
She was obviously too destressed to talk about what she had seen and I decided to show flexibility and not force her to do so. Instead, I sat next to her, stroked her head, and hummed an old lullaby we had both grown up on close to her ear. I listened until her crying subsided and she fell into a deep sleep.
About an hour later, I sat alone on one of the rocking chairs on the porch. This cabin was one of our most frequent conversational subjects when Katarina and I were kids. Every corner of it was shaped out of memory chips left by the words she’d told me, even though she was only four or five at the time. It was hard to forget how opinionated and rational she was back in the day.
"I said, no, Andrew," she shook her pretty head. "I'll never marry you, you'll just live there with me and my husband."
"Why should I live with you if we are not going to get married?" I couldn’t hide being hurt by her decision.
"Because you're my best friend and I always want you to be near me, but my husband and I will live with you in the forest."
"I don’t understand why I can't be your husband."
"Because you're not right for me and I'm not for you."
"Right for you? You're just a silly girl. You know nothing about love. You're just a silly little girl." I crossed my arms and frowned at her.
"I'm actually in love, but I won't tell you who he is."
"Because you're ashamed to admit that it's me, right?"
"Maybe." Her smile was the only answer I needed.
We used to sit there for days on end, just us and her sketchbook, carefully planning our house in the forest.
On one of the pages she drew the balcony detailing the exact position of the rocking chairs, and on the other pages she drew the living room, the fireplace, the guest room and the grand entrance. I hoped that when I reached the point where I released her from her bonds to the bed, she wouldn’t be disappointed by my attempt to make her dream come true.
I kept all the pieces of her life-puzzle in the shoebox and planned to only show her the ones I thought she could handle. I knew that in order to expose everything to her, I would have to continue slowly and crack the reality embedded in her. I could only hope to succeed in widening the crack created in the things she took for granted and peeling the mask off the face of the man who’d taught her to call him Father.
The adrenalin of the past few days had dissipated and a terrible drop of tension had taken its place. I went back to the cabin and took a peek into Katarina's room. It'd been years since I had purchased the cabin, but apart from short visits, I hadn’t dared to live in it without her. I felt it was wrong living someone else’s dream when every morning they woke up having forgotten they’d ever dreamed it.
I poured myself some whiskey and sipped it slowly on the sofa in the living room, savoring the burning sensation of the liquid as it pierced my throat until I, too, fell asleep.
"No, no, no!" I woke up a few hours later to the sound of Katarina screaming in her room.
"Shh," I hurried to her room and stroked her hair, trying to calm her down without waking her from her dream.
"No, I don’t want to. I don’t want to go, Andrew. I don’t, Andrew. Save me!" She kept screaming the last words I ever heard from her as a child and the memory of that horrific day immediately came to mind.
Just like her, I too tried not to recall the exact, for fear of getting lost in them. But at that moment, while she was still asleep, struggling with memories that gave her no rest, I gathered the courage and made myself remember everything.
The first image that came to mind was a drawing she had left behind, and the next one was the silence that pulled me out of her room, followed by the bloody scenes that greet
ed me at her kitchen and the need to explain to everyone that I was the last to see her alive.
I guess, most of all, I remembered her. The love of my life. The most special girl I knew, the one who I thought had disappeared forever.
"Andrew? Why are you crying?" Her gentle voice dragged me out of that painful journey.
"I'm thinking about the all these years when you weren’t part of my life."
"What was I for you? When I was Katarina, what was I for you?"
"You were everything to me, K-A-T-E," I exaggerated the way she’d asked me to call her "When my life of poverty in Costa Rica was too much for me to handle, I used to run away to you. We would hang out, talk about life, the other kids in the neighborhood and our dreams for the future."
"Did you manage to accomplish any of those dreams?"
"I devoted my life to finding you and, if that can be defined as one of my dreams, then I guess I fulfilled it." I looked down and continued, "But if you mean our childhood dreams, then I didn’t. Not from lack of interest, but because I turned all my energy to fulfilling one of your dreams instead."
"What does that mean? Which one of my childhood dreams did you fulfill?" She sat up on the bed.
"In order for me to answer that question, I would like to have another session of guided imagery with you."
"Is this another part of your two week plan for me?" A playful smile spread across her face.
"No, it's a spur of the moment addition."
"So what will I get this time for my cooperation?"
"Yourself."
"I need more than that, Andrew." I wasn’t surprised my answer hadn’t satisfied her. "I listened to you without interrupting and in return you removed my blindfold. When I agreed to dive into the first session with an open mind, you released my arms for a while. What will I gain this time if I do as you wish?"
"If you promise to open your eyes only when I tell you to do so, I will untie the knots from your hands. Not for a while, but for good."
A bright, shiny sparkle in her eyes hinted at her excitement, and the fact that she closed them indicated her agreement to the deal.
I led her to the center of the living room with her eyes shut and felt the need to make myself perfectly clear.
"I'm serious, Kate. You only open your eyes when I tell you to."
"Don’t worry about that, psycho. The compensation you offered is worthwhile. I'll play along with you."
I sat her down on the rug, which was perhaps the hardest item to get, and pulled one of her sketches for the dream cabin in which we were supposed to live out of the shoebox. An undeniable smile made me giggle as I remembered who the cabin was for. Just me, her and her husband.
"What are you up to?" She turned her head toward me with her eyes closed as she reacted to my amusement.
"Nothing. I suddenly remembered some of the nonsense you said when you were a child."
"Me? Speaking nonsense? Well that's just another unreliable detail in the version of reality you're trying to make me believe."
"You're so arrogant. It's like you haven’t changed at all. For your information, you used to say a lot of nonsense back in those days. For example, you said you weren’t in love with me, which was perhaps the biggest nonsense of all, Kate."
"So in response you decided to kidnap me twenty years later?"
"What can I say?" I sat cross-legged in front of her closed eyelids, holding the sketch in my hands. "Sometimes love makes us do strange things, Katarina."
"Kate. Don’t forget my name is Kate."
"That wasn’t a mistake," I lied brazenly. "I called you Katarina since we're starting the session now." I found a sorry excuse for calling her that as soon as my feelings for her were mentioned.
For a few short minutes, I guided her breathing and helped her enter into a calm and loose state of mind. I reminded her of smells, songs, and flavors that led her way to one of the routine days we spent together in her room.
"I want you to look at a blank sheet of white paper, Katarina."
"Okay."
"Now I want you to look at your fingers. Tell me, what's there?"
"A drawing pencil."
"What are you doing with it?"
"I'm sketching."
"How do you feel when you sketch?"
"I'm happy. It's like I'm liberated. Like there are no limits and no rules." I remembered vividly how less than twenty-four hours ago she’d said she never drew.
"Why are you so free while drawing?"
"There is nothing that stops me from putting on the white paper what is going on in my mind," she replied.
"Can you see what you're drawing?"
"Yes. It's me when I grow up," she breathed deeply. "I drew my life as an expert doctor who saves people in a hospital."
"Finish the drawing, Katarina," I said, and waited in silence until she announced that she had finished.
Her eyeballs rolled frantically under her closed eyelids. She clearly saw something that moved her.
"I'm done."
"Great, now go on to the next blank sheet."
"I did. I'm starting a new drawing."
"What are you drawing now?"
"Wait, I'm not alone!" She suddenly became alarmed. "Andrew, I want to stop. There's someone else here with me. Oh my God, I'm not alone. I want to stop! Now!"
"Think, Katarina. Do you believe you're afraid of that someone?"
"No. It's strange. It almost feels like I'm used to him being there. Like him sitting and watching me is a regular thing and he doesn’t bother me."
"What is he doing?"
"I don’t know. I'm not looking at him. I know he's there, I remember inviting him, but I'm focused on the paper and the drawing."
"What are you drawing now?"
"A sketch of the house where I will live when I grow up." I smiled when I knew exactly where she was in her memory and who the lucky boy was, sitting and looking at her crossed-legged in silence.
"What can you tell me about this house?"
"It's not a regular home, it's like a vacation hut."
"Keep telling me everything you see, Katarina. What are you drawing now?"
"The living room."
"What will be in the living room of the holiday house you'll live in?" I continued to direct her through the details she had already shared with me.
"There will be two red sofas and a black one. There will be a fireplace, but I won't have to light it because the weather will be just perfect."
"Is that important?"
"Of course. I have to be able to place snow globes on top of the fireplace from countries I visit around the world."
"What else will be in the living room?"
"There'll be a large window with a sitting area next to it and a see-through white curtain with a pink ribbon that keeps it pulled back so I can see the view from it."
"What's the landscape like?"
"I can't see the landscape in the drawing, but I know that my vacation home is in the middle of a large forest."
"Is there anything else you're drawing now?"
"Yes, in the center of the living room there is a large carpet."
"Yes, I already know everything there is to know about that carpet," I grinned.
"I don’t think you do, Andrew. I've never seen a carpet like this one before," she smiled. "Wow," her smile grew even wider. "It's so special, I am spending hours designing it."
She went on to detail each line and shape that filled the carpet she had dreamed of and, indirectly, gave an explanation and justification for the months required for the artist I hired to create that exact, unique carpet.
Half an hour passed and we were still sitting cross-legged, her hands in mine, the sketch she had drawn years ago detailing all her dreams resting on my lap, her eyes still closed and our breathing accelerated.
"I'm done," she suddenly said.
"Is the drawing perfect? Do you feel that the living room of your dream cabin is finished?"
"Ye
s, I finished drawing."
"So what are you doing now?"
"I'm looking around."
"Tell me, what do you see?"
"I see a little girl's bedroom."
"Whose room is this?"
"I guess it's my room. I feel like it is, but I don’t remember it."
"That's all right, Katarina. You don’t have to try and remember everything right now, you just need to let yourself look around and experience what your heart is willing to experience."
"I knew it!" Her grip on my hand grew stronger. "I knew I wasn’t alone here. I see him now."
"Do you recognize him? Who's with you there?"
"There's a boy here. He's older than me."
"What's he doing?"
"He’s sitting on the floor with his legs crossed, looking at me."
"Is he saying anything?" I knew the answer to my question.
"No. He is just watching me. I think he loves me."
"Is that what you think or do you know?"
"I know. He’d told me that many times."
"And what do you feel about him?"
"I... I... I want to stop now. I want to open my eyes, Andrew. I want to open my eyes right now."
For a few more minutes I guided her through breath and tried to connect the world of imagination with reality and to have her emerge gradually and confidently from the state of relaxation.
She confirmed that she had left her childhood room and had returned to sit opposite me with her legs crossed, yet I reminded her to keep her eyes closed until I said otherwise. I couldn't wait for the next stage of my plan to begin and took a deep breath, preparing myself for it.
"Before you open your eyes, I'll ask you to lower your head down to your feet, Kate."
"Why? What are you going to do to me, pervert?"
"Do you want to cooperate with me according to the agreement or not?" I chuckled.
"Sorry, psycho." She loosened the muscles of her neck and her head dropped so that she faced her crossed legs. "But I'm warning you, you better not..."
"I'm letting go of your hands, but I'll ask you to keep your eyes closed."
"All right," she confirmed in a hesitant voice.