by Evie Harper
I wish one of them were here now to kick my ass out of this depressed state, but Jake’s in Australia with Lily, Dom’s undercover and Nick is doing actual work for our security company in Dallas.
I want my fucking life back. I want my Emmy back in my arms where she belongs. I know she’s hurt. Jesus, hurt is a huge understatement. I shake my head. I can’t go there, not yet. I can’t think about how much she’s been through or I’ll never come out of my rage. I’d destroy this apartment and anyone who tried to calm me down.
I wonder if calling Emmy again would be okay. Probably not. I look at the clock. It’s eleven pm. She’s probably sleeping, in our bed. I growl and pull my hair roughly. Tomorrow. I can speak to her again tomorrow. I wonder if she found the necklace I made for her. I hope she understood the message. We’re meant to be, no matter what trials we go through.
I take off my clothes and climb into bed commando. The way I’ve always slept. Emmy and I loved the feeling of skin on skin. We always went to bed naked. Whether we had sex or not, although it usually lead to sex. As soon as I would stroke her arm, she would shuffle her back and ass into me and then she’d grind against my cock, and that’s all it took. My dick would grow hard and my hand would reach across her front to squeeze and caress her gorgeous tits until I heard her sweet moans, and that’s all I could handle. Then I’d turn her over and claim her. Take what was mine. My girl.
I blow out a big breath and feel my dick grow hard. Fuck. It’s been a long fucking time since I’ve felt the inside of Emmy’s pussy. I’ve never strayed or been with anyone else in the last five years. I’d been with other girls before Emily, in high school, but never after Emmy, and I never will. As long as she still breathes the same air as me, she will be the only woman my cock craves.
What if Emmy never wants to be with me again? What will I do? How will I live? All I’ve ever known my whole life is that Emmy is the other half of my heart. Even before we were together, she was mine. I was biding my time, waiting for her to grow up. Knowing she wanted me too.
Anger radiates through me. I grab the pillow and throw it across the room. Fuck. I want my fucking girl back.
I calm myself and flop back, lying on the bed. I will get her back. I’ll do whatever I need to do to have my Emmy back where she belongs. I just need to be patient and strong. I can do that. I’ve done that for five years. What’s another few months?
I hope that’s all it will be.
CHAPTER EIGHT
One month being home.
One month of therapist appointments and attempting to pretend to the outside world that I’m okay. I’ve been attending the appointments twice a week. My mom organized it for me. There was no hesitance from me when my mother asked me to go. Her glassy eyes and pleading face was all it took for me to tell her yes.
My mom took me the first time, but after that session, I felt as if someone had cut me open and taken out my carefully buried memories. I was raw and all I wanted to do was break down on my own. I needed space. I needed to be alone, to sit in a corner somewhere and take the assaults of the memories, take the slicing pain and put them back in their dark corners where they belonged. Dr. Zeek dug deep. I hated her. She was pulling apart my well-constructed world after only two hours. I felt weak all over again.
The look on my mother’s face when I came out of the office was torture. Silent tears fell from her eyes as she drove me home. I wanted to scream. I wanted to tell her to leave me alone. Stop trying to help me because she was only hurting me. Bringing up these memories, seeing her pain, all of it was just too painful. I just wanted to pretend. I just wanted to be numb again.
I decided after that time, I would take myself from now on. If I had to go, I would go alone. To do that I needed my car and I needed to learn to drive again. My car was at my parents’ house in their garage. My dad had been servicing it and running it every couple of months to make sure it would be ready for when I returned home.
A small ache hit my chest when I imagined him working on it all these years. Not knowing if I was dead or alive.
Learning to drive again was frustrating and exhilarating all at the same time. My dad took me out for my first test drive. Driving the car was fine, but learning the new road rules was frustrating.
The frustration didn’t last long though. It was also liberating getting into a car and taking myself somewhere. I wasn’t taken, dragged or driven. I was driving myself. I had control over where I wanted to go. It was freeing and for just a little while, all I thought about was the road in front of me. Not the past and not the pain.
My appointments with Dr. Zeek continued to be excruciating. Many times on my drive home, I imagined what it would be like to drive head on into a tree, off a bridge. Then it would all just end. The memories, the pain. Then my parents and Kanye could mourn me and move on. What they should have done five years ago. Forgotten about me. But I don’t. I can’t. Now and again, in the back of my mind in a small corner, a light flickers and I imagine a world where I smile. A life where my family looks at me proudly and I know it’s because of everything I have overcome. I want that life so badly, but the light dims more every day. The other dark corners mock my ray of hope. They creep up on it like monsters in the night, cackling, knowing it’s only a matter of time before they extinguish the light.
I do want Dr. Zeek to help me. I just don’t think it’s possible. I live in a world where harsh realities have scarred my soul. Where real hands have bruised my skin, where spoken words have seared my mind. What can Dr. Zeek do to undo all of that? My own mind turned against me and continues to torment me.
“Anything on your mind, Emily,” Dr. Zeek asks. I look up from my fidgeting hands to Dr. Zeek and see her soft eyes watching me. I’m nervous. Bile rises up my throat because I know how I will feel during this appointment.
“A bit,” I reply. There’s a lot, but I’m unsure of what she means.
“How are you settling in to your house? You’ve been there for three weeks now. Does it feel strange to live there alone?”
“I’ve lived on my own for the past five years, so no.”
“But you had the women from the collection with you. So you weren’t living alone,” she states.
“We may have been in the same house but we were still all alone. We were all fighting our own demons.”
I sit up straight in the chair and tap the floor with the toe end of my sandals. Whenever she gets close to talking about the collection women, I grow nervous. Those are memories I want locked up. I’ve thrown away the key and have no desire to go back to those memories. That is the one thing out of all of this mess I understand. Women were taken, abused and raped, and then they disappeared. I know what ‘disappeared’ means. They were killed. They didn’t stop fighting; they didn’t obey. So they were taken care of. I understand I couldn’t have helped them. That was out of my control. My heart breaks for them and their families. But it is one thing, thank God, I know doesn’t sit heavy on my soul.
“Do you miss Kanye, Emily?” she asks and my breath stills. I promised myself I would tell the truth during these appointments.
“Yes,” I whisper, “with all my heart. I miss him every day and every night.”
“Have you told Kanye this?”
“No, and I won’t. He wants us to be together, but he doesn’t know what he’s asking for. I won’t let him close enough to see how worthless and used I am. I couldn’t handle the rejection.”
Dr. Zeek sits forward and narrows her eyes at me. “Do you know it usually takes me months or years to pull the self-loathing out of my clients? You just handed it to me. Why?”
I shrug. “What’s to hide? I’m a whore. I’ve been with over thirty men. I’ve done unspeakable, disgusting acts. It’s only a matter of time before everyone sees it.”
“No, Emily. You were raped over thirty times. You were forced to do those things. You are not a whore.”
“Does it matter if I was forced or not? They were still done to me.”
Her words give me hope, yet they burn me because I know it’s false. Anger bubbles inside me.
“I see a hundred different hands all over me. I can still taste their semen in my mouth. I feel their fingers tightening around my throat when I fall asleep and when I wake. They burned the memory of feeling sore between my legs into my mind. They are everywhere. In my dreams, in my thoughts and in my memories. I don’t even know if the man standing across the street from me is one of them because I can’t remember all their fucking faces!” I end with a scream and stand breathing heavily.
“I understand your words, although I can never understand your feelings as I’ve never lived what you have lived, Emily. What you are feeling is valid and warranted, but if you don’t try to move past what you think you have become, those thoughts and those memories are going to have you frozen in time. There is a way to lessen the effect they have on you. You need to open yourself up to the possibility that you are more than what they said you are.”
“How?” I whisper to the window.
“You need to take back your power. Stop giving it to the demons in your mind. You keep saying what you don’t deserve. Start thinking about what you do deserve. Stop punishing yourself for the things that were out of your control. You never wanted them. Don’t let them take any more than they already have, Emily.”
Each time I leave her office, I race home and sit in the same corner in the spare room. Here, I grasp a tight hold of my glass rose necklace and cower in the corner while my mind wages war with itself. The old words with the new. Doubts the swords and hope the shields. A little while ago, I began scratching my arms with my nails. When it became too much, I needed to distract myself and think about something else. The only thing strong enough to do that was physical pain, so I scratched my arms with my nails. I don’t bleed often, but the last time I did, and I scared myself, though it worked. I distracted myself and I was able to move past the tormented moment.
Kanye called me every day for the first week, sometimes twice a day. I picked up every time. He would ask about my day and if I needed anything. The same questions all the time. Sometimes there was just silence for long moments. My heart would pound heavily and my palms would sweat. The strength to hold back telling him how much I loved him was taking its toll on me. I would rush to say goodbye before my voice became strangled.
After that week, he started coming over, either in the mornings or in the afternoons. He would bring me some breakfast or tells me he was just checking the mailbox. I’d cling to these moments. I’d look forward to them as much as I dread them, but I realized this was what Kanye’s life had become. I have pulled this wonderful man down with me to the depths of misery where he also counts on these small occasions. These moments are becoming our lives, our reasons for living. That’s not what I want for Kanye. I need him to move on.
***
Forty days of being home and today was the worst. I cut my skin open with a razor. The memories were too much. I had to release the pain and the evil filling my veins.
I’m fucked up, but I know enough that what I’m doing isn’t healthy and I’m not getting better; I’m getting worse. The nightmares through the night slammed into me like a cement wall. I needed something to overtake my thoughts, and at the time, I felt as if my own blood was the enemy and I needed to expel its toxic vileness from my body.
My heart shattered as I watched the blood spill down my thigh and I realized I am this weak, pathetic excuse of a woman.
I feel worthless. I’m learning I’m not, but I feel that way. I want it to stop, but I just can’t.
CHAPTER NINE
Two months of being home.
Not much has changed except I’m sick of hiding away in the house. Today, I have the urge to venture out. I head for the museum. I don’t think I’m at risk of seeing Kanye, my family or anyone I may know at a museum in the middle of the day on a Thursday. I have this sudden urge to see beautiful pictures. For the last five years, all that was in front of me was ugliness.
I dress in denim shorts and a black, capped-sleeve top. I hop in my silver Mazda3 and start her up. The vibration of the engine sends a jolt to my heart. The ability to go anywhere on my own is still new to me. Excitement courses through my veins.
It doesn’t take long before I’m at The Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Walking through the long hallways, examining the artwork on the walls, I come to a picture where men are standing behind a barbed wire fence in black and white striped trousers and jackets. I read the title of the picture.
Holocaust. The Living Dead at Buchenwald, 1945.
Their faces tell of hope lost. Families ruined. Souls damaged beyond repair. They’ve been beaten down and given no light at the end of the tunnel. The picture causes my heart to ache so I move on.
The next picture is of four elderly men, their ages I’m guessing would be somewhere in the eighties or nineties. Each has an arm around the next and all of them with smiles on their faces. I read the statement at the bottom.
Holocaust Survivors, 2005.
I read the names from left to right. I look up to their picture and study each smile. Each man’s grin is unique and tells of a life now filled with happiness.
A small piece of warmth hits my chest. They survived Hell. They actually lived in Hell with thousands of evil men. Could I one day be like them? Smiling and happy. A survivor, actually surviving happily?
I’m unsure how long I stand there staring at the picture of the four happy elderly men, but at some point it hits me. If I saw these men out in the streets, I would never know what they had been through. I look around the hallway and see three other people in a group regarding pictures, talking to each other and smiling. What if these people had been through horrors themselves? Yet they are smiling, happy. How do they do that? Move to the place that allows them to smile again?
I want to buy a camera. I want to capture those smiles on people’s faces. I want to find the answer. People everywhere struggle through hard times. Grief, heartache, and like me, rape. They still carry on; they still smile. I want to capture those moments and fill my life with them. I want to learn how they do that, how they survive and do it with a smile on their face.
***
I’m at home fiddling with my new camera I just bought, a Canon 600D. Kanye gave me a bankcard a few weeks ago; he said it was our joint account. He told me to use it. I vowed not to. I didn’t want to spend his hard-earned money, but this was important. I need this camera.
The front door handle rattles and I know its Kanye unlocking it. It’s that time of the day for him to come over and say he’s checking the mail, but he comes inside and checks the fridge and stares at me instead.
The door opens and I watch the most beautiful man walk through. His blue, soft eyes look from the handle to mine. I’m flashed to an impossible future where this could have been Kanye coming home from work. “Daddy’s home, yay!” Our two beautiful children race each other down the stairs to cuddle their father. Kanye scoops them up into his arms and gives them a kiss each on their cheeks. Then comes to me, his wife and gives me a heart stopping, passionate kiss because he missed me so much in the eight hours he’s been gone for.
“Emmy, you okay?”
I’m shaken from my fantasy. I nod quickly and go back to reading the instructions on my camera.
“What’s that, Emmy?” Kanye asks, pointing to the camera.
“I went to the museum today and decided I wanted to buy a camera. I want to take pictures.” I glance at Kanye to view his reaction.
“Pictures of what, baby?”
I cringe when he uses the endearment. It sends false hope to my heart and I’m left with the wild beating inside my chest. He notices, he always does, but he keeps calling me it.
“I want to take pictures of people.” I see the confusion on Kanye’s face but I just shrug. I’m not sure how to explain to him why I want the camera.
“Um, that’s good, Emmy, and you left the house today. Maybe next time
you can let me know when you go and I can come with you.”
I sigh. He knows I want him to leave me alone, but he doesn’t and he won’t. I shrug once again and go back to studying my new camera. Out of the corner of my eye, I watch Kanye observe me for a minute and then he moves to the fridge.
“Emmy, you're low on food. I told you to tell me when you needed something.”
I take in the contents of the fridge. Hmm, I do need food. This is just another reason why Kanye feels he needs to look after me. Damn, I need to start taking care of myself so he doesn’t have to check up on me. I stand from the table.
“I’ll head to the store now.”
“I’ll go with you. We can take my car,” is Kanye’s reply as I grab my car keys.
“No, I can take myself and shop on my own. I’m sure you have other things to do, Kanye.”
“Yes, I do Emmy. I have a fuckload of shit I need to do. But what I want to do is take you to the store and spend some time with you.”
I sigh once more and drop my car keys to the table knowing I’m not going to win this conversation. I head for the front door and then I pivot, race back into the dining room, and grab my new camera.
We head out to Kanye’s black SUV and drive in silence to the grocery store, while I snap pictures of people we pass.
We arrive at the supermarket and grab a cart. Kanye pushes while I snap some more pictures. I spot a store attendant, who is smiling brightly and saying hello to everyone who passes her as we enter the store. She looks at me strangely after I take the picture. I step closer to Kanye and look around the store as if I never took the picture. It never crossed my mind what people would think if they knew I was taking pictures of them.
I hear a chuckle, look to Kanye and see him grinning at me.
“So you brought a camera to take pictures of grocery store attendants?”