The Stranger Inside

by Lisa Unger

  ELEVEN

  They’re gone. I’ve answered their questions the best that I can; they’ve scribbled their notes and nodded at my insights, hungry for anything I might be able to give them in the absence of any evidence at all.

  I’ll admit to feeling a little badly as I brew some tea. (It was peppermint you ordered the last time we met, peppermint tea with honey. It was too hot, and you sipped it gingerly, getting up the courage to tell me that you didn’t want me in your life anymore. At all. Not as a lover. Not as a friend. But you didn’t unfriend me on Facebook. Does that mean there’s still hope, Rain Winter? Just kidding.)

  The strawberry blonde FBI agent was so earnest and fresh-faced, still with hope, that straight-bodied righteousness that only young law enforcement people seem to carry. They are fighting for right with gun and shield, intelligence and perseverance. The older ones start to sag a bit, though, don’t they? They get those exhausted shiners under their eyes that no amount of sleep will ever fix, the gray pall of late nights, cramped spaces, bad food, injustice cramming its big fist down their throats at every turn.

  Her partner had a bit of that. Large guy, silent, graying at the temples. He had a paunch. I didn’t love the way he looked around my living room, staring at my books, looking into the fireplace. It was clear that it had been recently used, full of ash and spent logs. Did he wonder why I had the fireplace burning? In fact, I didn’t love the way he looked at me. A cynical frown, a watchful quiet.

  But I liked her pluck. That’s sexist, probably that’s what you’d say. What’s pluck, after all? When a woman is assertive where she should be shy, questioning when she might be acquiescent, hard when she should be soft? Yes, plucky is a bit—what would you say—condescending. But then, I’m a man, and we’re all misogynists in our deepest secret hearts. We fear you for how much control you have over us, even when you don’t know it. Your words, not mine. I have nothing but respect for women, truly. I vastly prefer their company over the companionship of men.

  Still, I haven’t always been the man you deserved. I regret our last night together, Lara. I play it over and over in my mind, thinking of everything I could have done differently.

  But there’s no point in going back, is there? Isn’t that what you said? We can’t change the choices we made or the consequences of our actions. So why do the memories never fade?

  I still so vividly remember that eternal suburban smell of cut grass and wet leaves. It was hot already but there was a coolness in the shade in the trees. The cicadas were humming already; they’d get louder as it got hotter.

  I heard your voices as I drew deeper into the woods. My heart lifted, like it always did when I heard your voice.

  I was right, I thought. I knew the way you two would take. We knew each other so well then, didn’t we? We all accepted each other completely the way only our childhood friends do. Later, friendships change. Girls and boys, there’s another layer suddenly. Adults, their focus shifts to work and family. Friendships become a lower priority. But as kids, those relationships define us. We love each other so fiercely. Of course, my love for you was deeper still.

  At first, I thought it was the two of you laughing. But then I heard that off chord; it was almost as if even before I intellectually knew that you were screaming, the sound touched something primal in me.

  What did I do? When confronted with a threat—we fight, we flee or more commonly we freeze. We don’t have a lot of control over which; this is a limbic response of the brain. It is beyond personality or choice. It’s hardwiring.

  I froze, listened.

  Then I pedaled as hard and as fast as I could in the direction of the sound. That’s my hardwiring, to jump into the fray, I guess. Even though I was the skinniest kid in our class, regularly bullied and picked on through grade school and middle school, taunted as gay, and for only hanging out with girls—namely you and Tess.

  As I approached the bridge, my brain had a hard time processing what I was seeing. A huge man, all in black, accompanied by the biggest dog I’d ever seen. It was the stuff of nightmares and for a couple of seconds I thought: Wake up, wake up. This is not happening. There was blood. Tess was screaming. You were still and silent on the ground, curled up on your side. And then he hit Tess, threw her over his shoulder like she weighed nothing, which she didn’t. She didn’t weigh a thing—a dragonfly, a flower petal of a girl. He grabbed you by the wrist and started dragging your unconscious body over the ground. You were slack, a rag doll, blood trailing from your mouth in a line.

  Looking back, what I should have done was run. I should have gone for help. The nearest house was minutes away on my bike. Good old Mrs. Newman. She would have heard me screaming as I rode, she’d have the phone in her hand by the time I got to her porch. We all might have survived if I’d done that. Kreskey’s car was parked a good mile away, we’d later learn. The police would have been on him before he made it there with you. You’d have woken up and maybe fought again.

  But I didn’t do that. I climbed off the bike and grabbed the pump that was mounted on the bar. PS—this is not an effective weapon. I would learn that too late.

  “Hey,” I yelled. My voice was high-pitched and weak. “Hey, let them go!”

  And I ran, yelling like a warrior, toward the man who was trying to hurt my friends.

  Later, one of my many, many shrinks postulated that it was my obsession with superheroes, my video-game addiction, and my penchant for the heroes of spy movies and novels—Mission Impossible, Bourne, Bond—that contributed to the idea that I could take on and best a man like Eugene Kreskey. He weighed in at two hundred seventy-five pounds; I was barely over a hundred. He stood over six feet tall and was by all accounts preternaturally strong. My arms looked like Wikki Stix; you and Tess were both taller.

  Kreskey was a violent sociopath, newly released from a psychiatric facility and living alone in a house he’d inherited from his deceased parents. And of course, there was the dog, a vicious, abused German shepherd he’d trained to hunt. Wolf—who I’d get to know well.

  I agree with that shrink. What did I know then about real violence, about true evil? My mind was filled with fantasies—about myself, about the world. I was fully indoctrinated into the lie of good-always-triumphs-over-evil, even when good is an ant and evil is a mountain. There was no way the hero ever lost. And in that scenario, in my adolescent mind, I was the hero. I was going to save you.

  Of course, I never had a chance; I know that now. It only took a single blow to the jaw, Kreskey’s favorite backhand strike. All the power of that giant shoulder radiating into the knuckles. My jaw shattered; I was instantly stunned into submission.

  Wow. The pain. How it blasts down your neck and up to the crown of your head. It steals your breath, your voice. I know you understand. That first time that anyone ever hits you?

  I had a slight advantage in that I’d been in a fight or two on the playground, so I knew the shock of it, the flood of adrenaline, the rage, the fear. But those playground wimp-fests didn’t prepare me for real violence, the intentional action of an evil man wanting to do irreparable harm. Your whole body goes into a chemical revolt. I bled and bled, lay there weeping in pain, helpless. He dropped you to deal with me; he couldn’t take us all. Then I was the one being dragged, Tess still over his shoulder. I thought she might be dead. Her head was tilted. I’d never seen skin so white. Her hands just flopped around. She wasn’t wearing her glasses.

  He grunted, angry, his moon-face red.

  “Find it,” he yelled at the dog. “Bring it to me.”

  It. He meant you.

  Because when I looked around, you were gone, Lara. Laraine. LAH-raine, as your father was quick to remind anyone who dared to mispronounce it—because it was about him, wasn’t it, your name? The dog ran back behind us, and Kreskey kept walking, lumbering really. He muttered. Stupidlittlebitchstupidlittlebitch. He was slow, plodding, crazy as a
shithouse rat. His breathing was a painful wheeze. He thought you got away, that you were running for help.

  His grip on my wrist was steel, a vise. My efforts to pull away were pointless. I know you know what it’s like to be utterly powerless, to be sick with terror. I couldn’t move my mouth, the sounds coming from me were animal, strangled. I choked on the taste of my own blood, retching.

  The dog came back without you; Kreskey picked up his pace best he could, that fat fuck. I was glad, I was, and yet I hated you. Lara, I wanted to scream. Lara, help us.

  Because I saw you as he dragged me away, a shivering black shadow in the hollow of a tree down by the riverbank. Your white, white face, it was blank, your eyes were unseeing, your body was quaking. I know now—years later, a doctor who has extensively studied trauma and its effect on the brain, the psyche—that it was shock, that you retreated to another place in your mind.

  You would sit there like that for the next twelve hours until they found you, while Kreskey got farther and farther.

  You ran, Lara.

  You ran and hid.

  And Eugene Kreskey took us away.

  TWELVE

  Why was she doing this? She hadn’t seen her father in months.

  The rural road twisted and wound in front of her, the canopy of trees so thick above that her headlights automatically turned on. Lily napped in the back seat. Rain glanced at her in the rearview mirror that was trained on the baby instead of the road behind her, something Greg would notice the next time he took the car in for service. It’s not a baby-view mirror, he’d admonished her last time. You’re supposed to be watching the road, not the kid.

  The closer she got to the place where she grew up, the more tension she felt settle into her body, the shallower her breathing became. But that’s where she was headed with her story, wasn’t it? The road home was a journey into the past. Maybe that was why she was going to see her father. Or maybe it was just that there was something that drew her back home, to her father, when she had questions she couldn’t answer. Wasn’t there a part of you that always wanted to go back to the time when you thought your parents knew everything?

  The crystal heart was in the pocket of her jeans.

  She turned onto the long drive to the house where she grew up, taking the rocky, potholed path slowly, hoping not to wake Lily. The house, when it crept into view, was ramshackle and gray, yard a crazy tangle, dominated by a large twisting metal sculpture. Her father had the piece commissioned for some ridiculous sum and it had sat, rusting in the elements, for twenty-odd years.

  The statue was an eyesore to begin with, sharp-edged and menacing. Now it just looked like a piece of neglected junk, akin to a rusting old jalopy, or a dilapidated lawn mower.

  It was exactly the kind of purchase that drove Rain’s mother crazy and was a part of the eventual undoing of her parents’ marriage. Wasteful, pointless expenditures that frittered away their earnings. The money from his novels came in chunks. There would be months of excess, extravagant trips, lavish gifts, then long dry spells. Her mother worked as a teacher, trying to create stability—financial and otherwise—for Rain. She worked, and managed the house, and Rain’s life—while her father stayed in his attic office, or went on book tours, or spent months at writers’ retreats.

  The sight of that sculpture put an uncomfortable squeeze on Rain’s heart, thinking about how her mother worked until the year she died. She got almost nothing in the nasty divorce from Rain’s father, but still managed to save money for Rain’s education with enough left over so that Rain had started her life with a “fuck you” fund—the most important thing a woman could have: the ability to walk away from a shitty man, an exploitative job or any other situation in which she felt helpless and trapped.

  Rain stepped out of the car and listened. A chickadee issued a sweet, low whistle and the chimes sang on the porch, wind rustling the leaves. She heard the tap-tap-tap of the woodpecker. Though she’d left this place at sixteen when her mother and father finally divorced, she never stopped thinking of it as home.

  Her father, tall and thin, a hurricane of silver-white hair, black shirt and pants, emerged from the house, stepping onto the porch. He lifted a hand, unsurprised, though she’d given him no warning, and it had been nearly half a year since last she’d visited. It was another place she kept promising not to visit again—too many sad memories, her dad too difficult—yet here she was. She walked toward him, leaving Lily in the car with the windows open. He walked the path, grass as tall as his thighs.

  “I thought you’d come,” he said when he reached her. He took her face in his palms, kissed her gently on the head. Then he walked past her to peer into the car at Lily, who was sound asleep, head tilted to the side, snoring a little.

  “She’s just like you,” he said after a moment.

  “Is she?”

  Lily always just seemed like herself, this magical gift from the universe, not like Rain really, not like Greg. There were flashes of her husband—in her smile and in her frown, in the color of her eyes. But Rain didn’t see herself in Lily’s face.

  “You don’t see it?”

  “Maybe around the mouth?” It didn’t pay to argue with her father. He was never wrong.

  He squinted at her from behind his glasses. “It’s in the spirit.”

  Something about this made her smile.

  “We can sit on the porch,” he said. “Until she wakes up.”

  She sat on the old rocker and watched the car, while her dad went in to get them something to drink. The ghost of her mother was everywhere here, kneeling in the overgrown garden, staring up in disbelief at the monstrosity in their yard, standing on the porch looking for Rain to come up the drive on her bike. Rain tried not to think about her mother’s final days in hospice, the dim room, the sound of her breathing, how quiet and slow the world became. Everything that was important—school, grades, internships, her trauma, her father’s disgrace—slipped away behind a curtain of grief. He was there for them then, even if he hadn’t been any other time. He was there, a hand on her shoulder, by her mother’s bedside, whispering to her. He was the husband and father in Mom’s dying days that he had never been when she was well.

  “I regret so much,” he’d said to Rain after the funeral.

  Don’t be angry with him, her mother said once. He is only the man he knows how to be.

  “It doesn’t matter, Dad,” she’d said. There was an ache in her chest for him, for both of them. “She knew you did your best.”

  “I did,” he said. He bowed his head and took off his glasses. “A poor showing, but, yes, unfortunately, my best.”

  Now he handed her a cold glass of lemonade, which she couldn’t even believe he had. It was good, tasted fresh and sweet, tingling. There was a woman who came in twice a week, did the housework, the grocery shopping for him. He’d mentioned it the last time they spoke.

  “How’s motherhood?” he asked.

  “All-consuming,” she said. “Wonderful, exhausting, frustrating as hell and totally blissful.”

  Her father demanded total honesty. He could hear the ring of lies and half-truths, dug in until he got the whole story in all its terrible, shimmery, dull and beautiful layers. She wouldn’t dream of bothering with the pat answer.

  “Was it a dig?” she asked. “That damn jogging stroller.”

  “Not a dig,” he said with a slow shake of his head. “An encouragement. A reminder.”

  “Hmm.”

  He gave a chuckle, looked at his glass. The wind chimes sang.

  “You know, your mother was a better writer than I ever was—really in every way. Whatever small amount of ability I had was dwarfed by her talent.”

  Lilian Rae Winter wrote about love, motherhood, failure, regret. Her characters were layered—wise, flawed, human. They hurt each other, did wrong, were redeemed. She’d had a few books published, a
s well, small literary novels that were well reviewed and sold a smattering of copies. Rain had them on a shelf in her office, opened the pages when she wanted to feel close to her mother’s love, her wisdom.

  “Compared to you, we were both hacks,” he went on.

  “Stop.”

  He lifted a palm. “Talent doesn’t know itself.”

  Rain sat up from the slouch she was in. She didn’t like to think that Lilian had given things up because of motherhood, because of her selfish husband, that her life hadn’t been all she’d hoped.

  “She didn’t want your life,” said Rain. “Gone all the time, dogged by fans, lauded then slammed by reviewers, living and dying by the numbers you couldn’t control.”

  She listened to the wind, for the sounds of Lily waking.

  “But she missed the writing,” her father said. “Which she didn’t have to give up, but did anyway. There’s always time to write, if you want it. Story creates a space in which to be told.”

  Just like a man to think the world was simple, that story made a place for itself. That you didn’t have to juggle and bargain for every moment of free mental space, for energy.

  “Maybe if you’d been around more,” she said, unable to resist a dig herself.

  He drew in and released a long breath.

  “Maybe,” he said with a nod.

  “So—it was a dig.”

  “Like I say.” He turned to face her. The lines around his mouth and eyes had grown deeper, his skin crepey and soft. But he was still handsome, still a smile turned up the corners of his mouth—in, as always, on the cosmic joke of it. “It was just a reminder. You have a gift. A calling.”

  She laughed a little. He’d always said this to her—her gift, her talent, her calling. It seemed like this idea, like so many of the ideas he had about his only daughter, was more about “The Bruce Winter” than it was about her. What would it be like for the great writer to have a child who was just normal, who had no special place in the world? As much as she wanted to believe that there was more to her than had so far been revealed, she was fairly sure there wasn’t.