Cold Cold Heart

by Tami Hoag

  Dana took her time responding, staring at the doctor with no expression for a moment before shaking her head slowly within the confines of her hood.

  “Good, because talk therapy tends not to be the way to go with someone who doesn’t talk,” Burnette pointed out with an arched brow, her full lips kicking upward at one corner.

  Dana held her silence again.

  Burnette drew in a long, dramatic breath. “Much as I love the sound of my own voice . . .”

  “What happened to you?”

  “Ah . . . ,” the doctor said softly to herself, pleased to have finally gotten a response. “Well, they tell us in shrink school not to share these personal things, but the people who wrote those textbooks have never been victims, and they don’t know what it’s like to sit down on a couch across from a stranger who wants to poke and prod inside their minds and tell them what they should and shouldn’t feel. That’s just bullshit, if you ask me. It made me angry when I was going through it, and I vowed I would never do that to anyone. So I will tell you right up front that I’ve been a victim, and while I didn’t have your exact experience, we have some common ground.”

  “What kind of victim?” Dana asked again, her curiosity muscling past her determination to be uncooperative.

  “I went to college on a track scholarship, had a goal to make the Olympic team. I was good enough, too,” Burnette said. “But late one night I was in the parking lot of a convenience store waiting for a friend to pick me up, and I got pulled into a car and taken for a ride by two guys who didn’t care how fast I could run four hundred yards. The second they got hold of me, it didn’t matter anymore.”

  “They raped you?”

  “They did. And used me for a punching bag. And stabbed me. And held a knife to my throat. And at one point, when I tried to get away, one of them tackled me, and I blew out my knee,” she said. “So when you tell me something and I say I understand how you feel, I really do. I get how hard this is, Dana. I know how much you lost.”

  “They didn’t carve your face up like a Halloween pumpkin.”

  “No, they didn’t, but I spent a year rehabbing a knee that never worked right again. And I spent a lot longer than that trying to come to terms with the anger, and the panic, and the nightmares, and the rest of it. We both lost big dreams, you and I.”

  “And this is where you tell me I should still consider myself lucky, and that I can still have a great life,” Dana said, the familiar resentment sour on her tongue.

  “You can still have a great life,” Burnette said, unfazed by her sarcasm. “You will. You didn’t fight that hard to stay alive for nothing. You stuck it out for a reason.”

  And if I had known what the aftermath would be like, would I have fought as hard? Dana wondered.

  If she had known about the endless anxiety and the physical pain, the struggle to sleep, and the exhausting ordeal of relearning life minute by minute, would she have fought as hard?

  “Where there’s life, there’s hope,” Dr. Burnette said.

  The words snapped Dana out of her thoughts.

  “You know how this works,” Burnette said. “You’ve been doing it every day since this happened to you. You survive this minute, and then the next minute, and then the minute after that. Each minute has the potential to be better than the last.”

  “Or just as bad,” Dana countered. “Or worse.”

  “Or better,” the doctor insisted with the quiet, firm resolve of someone who had had this conversation many times before. “I know you’re feeling overwhelmed. Just the step of moving from Weidman back home is a big deal. But I saw your homecoming on the news last night. That was a whole lot of crazy to deal with that you probably didn’t expect.”

  Dana replayed the scene in her head, the surprise, the frustration, the chaos, the flood of emotions . . .

  “What happened to me happened months ago,” she said. “It’s over. He’s dead; I’m not. There’s nothing left to say about it.”

  “You’re the only living survivor of a serial killer. That will make you news for the rest of your life.”

  Dana frowned and looked away, arms crossed tight over her chest. She wanted to deny it, but she knew she couldn’t. She would forever be the asterisk in the accounts of Doc Holiday’s exploits as the one that got away. She didn’t want the attention. The irony wasn’t lost on her—the girl whose goal had been the spotlight didn’t want the spotlight.

  “They asked me about Casey,” she said. “I didn’t know what they were talking about,” she confessed. “Casey was my best friend since grade school. She disappeared the summer after we graduated. I didn’t remember that. How could I not remember that?”

  “It was out of context,” the doctor said. “You’ve spent the last few months working like a dog just to get your brain to function in the moment. Don’t expect it to turn on a dime and redirect its efforts to something from the past.”

  “She was my best friend,” Dana said again. “We were like sisters.”

  “Dana, you’ve just been through your own abduction and every horrible thing that went along with that crime. It doesn’t surprise me at all that you may have blocked out the abduction of your friend,” Burnette said gently. “Those are two horrific events. And to your mind they are essentially the same recurring event viewed from two different perspectives. Your brain is trying to protect you from that. It doesn’t make you a bad person that you didn’t remember.”

  But does it make me a bad person that I don’t want to think about what might have happened to her? Dana wondered. Does it make me a bad person that I don’t want to remember the man who did this to me, even if remembering could help solve Casey’s mystery?

  She kept those questions to herself even as the horrific images from her nightmare flashed through her head: Casey as the victim and the demon, taunting her, tormenting her . . .

  “I can’t even remember what happened to me,” she said.

  “You may never,” Burnette said. “Or it may come back to you in bits and pieces.”

  “I think I have some memories from the days before . . . But I don’t know how much of that is real and how much of it my brain has pieced together from other sources—or just made up completely.

  “I don’t remember him at all,” she said. “I can’t see him. I don’t want to see him.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “But how can I be so terrified of something I have no memory of?” she asked. “And how can I move past something I can’t remember?”

  “Because the brain stores emotional memories and the physical details of what happened in two separate places. This is oversimplifying, but in a sense your mind doesn’t want you to remember the details of that trauma,” Burnette said. “And the brain injury makes it easier to pull that off. You’ve got a built-in excuse to not remember. But whether you consciously remember it or not, that experience, and the emotion attached to it, is a part of you. It’s just deeper than you can readily access.”

  “I don’t want to access it,” Dana said. “Everybody wants me to remember. They want to know every gory detail.”

  “Unfortunately, that’s human nature. It’s entirely your call what you want to share, Dana. And how you feel about that may change over the course of time. Some victims find it cathartic to talk about their experiences. Some find it empowering to share their stories in a way that might help others. Some just want to move on.”

  “I want to move on,” Dana said impatiently.

  “Fair enough. But don’t think that means you don’t have to deal with the effects of what happened. You don’t have to access the physical details to address the emotional damage within yourself. You can’t escape your own experience.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Dana said. “I hardly recognize who I used to be. It’s like that girl is someone I met once a long time ago. I’m someone differe
nt now.”

  “That doesn’t mean she’s not still a part of you,” the doctor said. “She always will be.

  “But let’s focus forward,” she suggested. “You want to move on. So do you have a plan? What are you going to do with yourself?”

  Dana shrugged and nibbled at a ragged cuticle. “I don’t know. So far today I managed to take my clothes off before getting into the shower. That might be the highlight. My mother tells me that should be enough. She says my job now is healing.”

  “Healing is ongoing,” Burnette said. “But I don’t think that’s going to be enough for you. It’s Mama’s job to protect you. You’re her baby, and she’s not going to be quick to forgive the world for hurting you. She’s going to want to keep you in the nest. That’s understandable. It’s even okay for a while. But that’s not going to be good for you long term. You need a goal. You’re a fighter, Dana. You need something to fight for.”

  Dana didn’t think she would have described her Before self that way. A worker, yes. Ambitious, yes. Goal oriented, yes. But a fighter? No. Before Dana had been a rule follower, a diplomat. She had thrived on making people proud of her, on meeting and exceeding expectations. But a fighter? Someone who kicked and scratched and fought to win? No. She hadn’t needed to be.

  “What do I have to fight for?” she asked. “I’m an unemployable newscaster living in my mother’s basement.”

  “When you woke up in the hospital, you had a goal to get out of the hospital. When you went to the Weidman Center, your goal was to get well enough to go home. Now you’re home. You need a new goal. And when you reach that goal, you’ll need another goal. Does that sound like a plan?”

  “It sounds like a lot for someone who got lost on the way to the kitchen last night.”

  “They don’t have to be big goals. A small one each day. They’re like handholds and toeholds as you climb the bigger mountain. Ultimately, you will get to the top of the mountain, but in the moment you only need to focus on the next ledge.”

  “Yesterday I dumped all my clothes out of my suitcase into a pile, then couldn’t cope with what to put in drawers and what to hang on hangers,” she confessed.

  “So your first goal is to put away one thing, then another thing, then another. Eventually, the pile goes away and the job is done.”

  “‘Brain-Damaged News Girl Empties Suitcase. Film at Eleven,’” Dana said sarcastically.

  “Nine months ago you were in a coma.”

  “Ten months ago I was a morning news anchor.”

  Dana looked out the window again, at the people walking up and down. Burnette waited patiently.

  “I loved my job,” Dana confessed after a moment. “Yesterday, standing there in the driveway, looking at that reporter, the blond girl . . . I saw my face. I literally saw my face on her body. That should have been me asking someone else the questions. It’s so unfair.”

  “Yes, it is,” Burnette agreed. “Life is completely unfair. That’s no news flash, is it? You lost your dad when you were young, right? Your best friend disappeared when you were barely out of school. No one has seen her since. You know firsthand that bad things happen. You’ve no doubt reported on stories of child abuse, rape, murder.

  “It’s no surprise to you that life isn’t fair. You just never thought you’d be the one getting the shit end of the stick again. Neither did I,” the doctor confessed. “I had my life all planned out. I was going to win a gold medal and have my picture on a Wheaties box, and get a million-dollar Nike sponsorship, and go on to be a star for ESPN.”

  “You still could have gone into broadcasting,” Dana said. “You’re a beautiful woman.”

  “Thank you, but my life took a different turn. After what happened to me, I fell down a deep, dark rabbit hole. Depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress—the whole nine yards. It was a long climb out of that, and on the way, I learned a lot about myself and what I really wanted to do with my life—which is help other people out of their rabbit holes.

  “So maybe you can’t be in front of a camera anymore,” she said. “That doesn’t mean you don’t still have skills. Dr. Dewar told me you like doing research on the computer. So you start by researching subjects that interest you. Maybe you end up doing research for news stories. Maybe you end up becoming a writer. Start with writing a blog. Or maybe this journey takes you on a whole other path. I don’t know. But I do know if you don’t have a destination, you’ll never go anywhere.

  “I want you to think about that for next time—after you’ve organized your closet,” Burnette said, unfolding herself from her chair. “What’s your first goal going to be?”

  Dana got up, chewing her lower lip as she thought about her answer, smiling a little when she did. “Finding the elevator.”

  The doctor smiled with her. “I’ll help you with that one.”

  Burnette padded barefoot across the room to a door that exited directly into the hall within sight of the elevator.

  “None of that was in your bio,” Dana said, lingering in the doorway. “What happened to you. None of that came up when I researched you.”

  “I had a different last name then,” Burnette confessed. “I was a different person. Just like you were.”

  “Which you is better?” Dana asked.

  “I’ve learned to love them both. You will too.”

  “Will I?”

  “When you were in the hands of a killer, your goal was to get out alive, and you achieved that goal,” Dr. Burnette said. “After that, I wouldn’t bet against you, girl.”

  I hope so, Dana thought as the elevator descended, dumping her back into the world. But as she caught the shocked glances of people passing by, she had nothing but doubts.

  12

  A Liddell County sheriff’s cruiser was waiting at the end of the street when Dana turned onto the cul-de-sac.

  After her appointment with Dr. Burnette, she had decided her goal for the day would be to take a small step toward independence by driving home. If she could prove to her mother that it was possible for her to get from point A to point B without getting lost or crashing into someone or something, she would begin to build her case to get her own car back. After a minor glitch in that she had no idea how to start her mother’s Mercedes, she had succeeded with the aid of the navigation app on her phone, only mixing up right and left twice.

  She was feeling very pleased until she saw the sheriff’s car. In that instant, the bottom dropped out of her stomach and an old feeling that was attached to an old memory came rushing up through her, taking her breath away.

  Suddenly she was fourteen, sitting in the backseat with Casey, giggling and laughing, excited to get home to show Daddy the dress she had bought for their father-daughter dance at the country club. It was a fall day, just like this day—a little chilly, a little blustery, but the sun was shining and the sky was blue. It was too pretty and too perfect a day for something bad to happen, but something bad had happened.

  A county cruiser had been parked at the curb in front of the house. The deputy standing beside it with his arms crossed looked grim. Roger paced the length of the patrol car, agitated, running his hands back through his hair again and again.

  From that memory, Dana’s mind went back to the last time she had seen her father that same morning. He had made breakfast, as he did every Saturday. Even though the weekends were busy at the nursery, he insisted on his family time. Ed Nolan’s Saturday mornings consisted of cooking breakfast for his daughter: chocolate chip pancakes, bacon, and scrambled eggs. Sacred time.

  Dana remembered she had chattered nonstop that morning about the big day she was about to have with her mom and Casey and Casey’s mom. They were headed to Louisville for shopping and lunch, manicures and pedicures. She was looking for a dress like one she had seen in a magazine. She had shown the picture to her father, and he had told her she would make that dress look special, n
ot the other way around, because she was the most beautiful, special girl in the world. She could still feel his arms around her as he hugged her tight and kissed the top of her head.

  He had come out of the house to wave them off as they backed out of the driveway. She could see him in her mind’s eye like she was looking at a movie. Her father waving with one hand, the other hand hanging on to the collar of Moose, their chocolate Lab. She could see her father’s face, as clear and sharp as a photograph—his wide, rectangular smile, his piercing blue eyes crinkling at the corners. He was a compact, athletic man with more stubble on his square jaw than hair on his close-shaved head. Even without hair he was as handsome as a movie star.

  It was the last time she had seen him alive. He had been found dead that afternoon. An accident, they said. No one knew really what had happened. There had been no witnesses.

  They knew he had taken Moose and gone pheasant hunting by himself in the late morning. He and Roger—his best friend and business partner—owned seventy-five acres of hunting property a few miles east of town—a rugged mix of woods and open fields bordered on the south by bluffs that dropped off to the river. Speculation was that, for whatever reason, he had ventured too close to the edge of the bluff and had fallen to his death. Some hikers had found his body, still warm, but too late.

  “Dana? Dana? Dana!”

  Dana came back to the present, turning to her mother, indignant. “What?”

  “We’re sitting in the middle of the street.”

  “Oh.”

  She had stopped the car a good fifteen yards short of the driveway. She pulled ahead, only glancing at the deputy who had gotten out of the cruiser. He was holding a bouquet of pink and white flowers.

  “Tim!” her mother exclaimed, getting out of the car. “Oh, my goodness!”

  “Hey, Miss Lynda. How’s your day today?”

  “Oh my God! What a wonderful surprise! I had no idea you were a deputy! Dana, look who it is! Tim Carver! For heaven’s sake!”