“Melinda Jeffries,” I reiterate.
“I’m sorry, but I don’t know who that is.”
I look at her fixedly. “What do you mean, you don’t know? She’s the head nurse on this floor.”
“They just moved me here,” she says, as if this addresses my concerns. She throws in a shallow smile that seems vaguely apologetic.
“Did anyone explain why they just moved you here?”
“No. I’m sorry. They really didn’t.” Her smile dims. “Is there something else I can help you with?”
I motion around me. “You can tell me what’s happening on this floor.”
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
“The patients. Why are they not secured inside their rooms? Why are they just wandering around?”
She looks confused. More than before.
“I can’t believe this!” I fumble for my phone.
“I need an officer down to Alpha Twelve. Immediately,” I tell security. “It’s complete pandemonium here. All of the patients have broken out of their rooms!”
I consider the nurse, then look at the time display on my phone screen. I’m late for my session with Donny Ray.
“Did you even bother to let anyone know what’s been going . . . Oh, never mind!” I snap at her. “You’ll be hearing from your supervisor!”
She blinks and draws back from me.
47
I grab an extra moment outside the consulting room to decompress and remind myself that I’m in my professional element. That this is where I’m most comfortable. That I know how to do my job, and that the evaluation is due tomorrow.
I can do this.
I walk inside. Donny Ray is already sitting at the table. Once again, something about him has changed, but this time it’s not just his physical appearance—it’s subtler, a slight shift in demeanor, as though he’s shed yet another layer of discomfort.
Wish I could feel the same way.
I have to keep my concerns about Alpha Twelve and the shrinking hospital population outside this door and tread very carefully. I’ve worked too damned hard to build trust, and fast as that trust can build, it can just as easily come tumbling down without warning or provocation. The plains of human suffering are slippery slopes. Every traveler is so frail and unsteady, vulnerable to even the slightest threat of doubt or uncertainty. The goal here is to change his emotional climate. To normalize the feelings he has about his past trauma so that he’s able to talk about them.
I lean back in my chair a few inches, gather my wits, and offer Donny Ray a neutralizing smile. “I’ve been thinking about what you mentioned yesterday.”
He shakes his head.
“About your mom. How you described her. It kind of reminded me of my own mother.”
“In what way?”
“That thing she would tell you? About your town being small?” I look down and rub my forehead. “Something about how there’s nothing to do every minute?”
“But every minute counts?”
“Yeah.” I point to him and nod. “That’s it.”
“Did your mom say that, too?”
“No. I was thinking more about what you said after, how she chose to look at life.”
“Yours did the same thing?”
“Man, did she ever. In fact, I used to make a joke about it—well, it was actually more like a complaint disguised as humor. How when bad things happened, she always pretended that they hadn’t.”
“So, what was the joke?”
“That I always imagined her entry into the world went something like this: the doctor gave her a slap on the ass, and instead of bursting into a scream, she turned her head away and let out a despondent sigh.”
Donny Ray suppresses a chuckle, then looks bashfully at the floor.
“It’s okay to laugh,” I tell him, “it was meant to be funny. I mean, that’s kind of how I survived all those miserable years.”
“You had a rough childhood, too?” He seems surprised.
“Rough would be putting it mildly—in fact, if I didn’t laugh, I would have cried all the time.”
He watches me in deliberative silence. “That bad?”
I nod slowly. “Yeah . . . that bad.”
He doesn’t speak, but his expression relaxes. I allow the calm to linger. Not just because that’s what a good psychologist does, but also because I actually need it. Because for a few seconds, some of my own pain managed to sweep to the surface.
When I look back at Donny Ray, he’s scrutinizing me.
“Anyway,” I tell him, “this really isn’t about me. What I’m trying to say is that I wasn’t aware we had that in common.”
“What happened to you?” he abruptly says, as if the need to know has broken through his uneasiness and given him the confidence to ask.
“It’s a long story, Donny Ray, and it’s not why we’re here.”
“I know why we’re here,” he says, voice sturdy with resolve that surprises me. “What happened to you?”
I feel my expression go slack. I take in his attentive gaze, those eyes of steel that have become pools of empathic awareness. Like something is tugging at him to crawl through that narrow, confined space and reveal his own pain.
While it would be very unprofessional to tell Donny Ray about my tragic past, I can’t deny there’s a piece of me that would like to. A piece that knows his pain so intimately and might even help him find a way out of it. If I could, I’d tell him that I understand how, once inflicted, the pain caused by a parent never leaves. How it becomes the biggest part of you.
But I can’t do that. I can’t, because we’re not here to talk about my problematic childhood. Still, for a moment I get lost in it all. The memories. The emotions . . .
When I refocus on Donny Ray, he’s watching me with concern and slowly shaking his head, and I see sadness. I see understanding and sympathy. But most of all, I feel as though he knows what I’ve been thinking. He parts his lips slightly, like he wants to say something but can’t.
I realize this session has slipped from my control. I’ve got to bring it back. But as I reach for my notebook, I find it’s not there. I look at my empty lap in bewilderment, and then turn my gaze around the room.
My notebook rests beside the computer about ten feet away.
I hear that strange noise again, then a shadow swoops down the wall and across my lap. I look toward the ceiling, and this time I catch a split-second glimpse of—
No way. It can’t be.
“What’s wrong, Christopher?”
I turn to Donny Ray.
What just happened?
48
“Christopher?” Donny Ray says again.
I fight like hell to navigate through my fog of confusion, to regain normality, even though I’m fully aware there’s nothing about this situation that’s anywhere close to being normal.
Don’t you dare slide off the rails, I demand of myself. Jeremy is waiting. The MRI results are waiting. Focus now. Go crazy later.
Donny Ray is still staring at me.
“I was just . . .” I steady my voice and try to reestablish the flow we’ve lost, so I can move this session forward. “. . . I was just thinking about what we were discussing.”
“About all your pain?”
“No.” Flustered, I look at him. “About your mom. I’m wondering what it was that she pretended not to see.”
Donny Ray’s voice reveals nothing but anguish when he says, “Lots of things.”
“Can you tell me about them?”
He focuses on the door, runs his hand along a spreading five o’clock shadow. “I’m not sure I want to.”
“How about one of the things, then?”
“I . . . I’m . . . I don’t think I . . .”
“It’s okay. You don’t have to ri
ght now,” I say, thankful to at last find a toehold on lucidity. “I just want you to know that you can.”
“It’s just that . . . I’m so . . .”
“I know,” I tell him. “I get it. I really do.”
“He did things,” Donny Ray says.
“Who did?”
“My father.”
“What kinds of things?”
“To both of us. He did them to us both . . .”
“To you and your sister,” I confirm.
Donny Ray twists his body away from me. Now he is literally fighting for each breath, back heaving, broad shoulders rising and falling. “It was just Miranda at first, but I didn’t know. I . . . I didn’t know that was what he was doing to her.”
“When they left you alone.”
A fast nod.
Again, I think about the ice cream cone, and my stomach turns queasy.
“Then, after she was gone . . . after that happened . . . I figured it out, because he started doing it to me. I became her replacement.” Donny Ray turns back to me, tears welling, mouth trembling, and in a defeated whisper, says, “All that anger toward Miranda . . . I was so damned wrong, and it was too late to tell her.”
“Where would this happen?”
“The shed. I remember the shed.” He falters, then stops.
I hold to the silence. He’s on the verge of opening the door to his childhood nightmare, and I don’t want to shake him out of it.
“It was my safe place where I would go,” he continues, “and it was a good place, but he turned it into a really bad one.”
Gently now. “What did your father do to you inside that shed, Donny Ray?”
“There was this lightbulb . . . and it . . . it hung from the ceiling by a chain. And I’d concentrate on this dirty naked bulb, swaying back and forth while he did it to me. And I’d count . . . I’d count each swing until he was finished. One time I got up to two thousand and fifty-seven.”
Nearly an hour and a half of sexual abuse, I calculate. An hour and a half of deep emotional and physical turmoil, inflicted on an innocent child. Turmoil that was likely repeated until that child’s mind was broken. Destroyed. I swallow hard to fight back my nausea.
Donny Ray hunches over, face in hands, rocking his body to a slow and steady rhythm. Forward and back . . . forward and back. I know he’s still in that horrible place, and I have to take him out of it.
Very softly I say, “Those feelings you had of being alone? They must have been so much worse, after.”
His shoulder muscles pull taut—they are bulging with tension.
“And after losing your sister . . .”
“I loved my sister. I miss her so terribly.”
Within this new context of Donny Ray’s own sexual abuse, I again ponder the flat affect he uses while describing Miranda. It’s not that unusual for victims to detach from emotions associated with the incident. Only after intensive therapeutic work are they able to rejoin with those feelings. What has me scratching my head is that Donny Ray displayed such powerful emotional response to his abuse, and yet while addressing Miranda, there seemed to be nothing. And now I go back even farther to my initial thoughts about a possible unconscious pathology and the trauma trigger. Is there something about Miranda that’s far more painful than Donny Ray’s abuse? Something he’s not yet able to tell me? Maybe even something he can’t recall?
I don’t know . . . can’t be sure.
Moving on in pursuit of that answer, I ask, “Where was your mother when all this was going on?”
“Hiding,” he snaps, and the anger returns. “Hiding like she always did. Pretending that none of it was happening.”
I try to separate my personal identification with him, because I understand it from a firsthand perspective, although in a completely different way. “And after you left the shed? What would he do?”
“After was worse.”
“Worse, in what way?”
“I didn’t get the ice cream cone.”
“What did you get?”
“The punishment,” he says, voice crackling with contempt. “He’d punish me for seducing him, call me a filthy, disgusting whore boy.”
I close my eyes, open them. “I’m so sorry, Donny Ray. I can’t begin to imagine—”
“No. You cannot imagine. Nobody could unless—” He grits his teeth, as if doing so might help keep the humiliation, the anger, contained. “But that wasn’t the punishment.”
“How did he punish you?”
“He’d drive me to the center of town, shove me out of the car, and leave me there.”
“Making you feel more alone than you already were.”
“It was the dress,” he says, choking.
“The what?”
“He made me . . .” Donny Ray gnashes his teeth and lets out a barely audible moan. “My father made me walk through town to get home . . . wearing my dead sister’s dress.”
I draw what feels like my first taste of oxygen since he began telling his horrific story.
“I felt like a freak show. I was ashamed. I was angry. I was so . . .” A tiny yet excruciating whimper passes through his lips. “All I wanted to do was crawl into a hole and die.”
“But you couldn’t.”
“There was no lightbulb to look at then,” Donny Ray Smith tells me. “Just everyone staring. Laughing.”
And in that instant, his eyes return to their previous state.
Blue fury. Cold as steel.
49
One of the first things I learned during my early clinical studies was that trauma is attracted to trauma. While my childhood experiences bear no resemblance to Donny Ray’s, the family dynamic feels awfully familiar: a father who inflicts deep psychological pain on a child, and a mother who checks out, only to inflict yet another layer of damage.
It would be difficult for any psychologist to hear a story like Donny Ray’s and not feel affected by it. We are, after all, human. We have emotional vulnerabilities just like everyone else, and while we’ve been trained to compartmentalize in order to help others, every so often a patient comes along who holds up the mirror to us. When that happens, it can be difficult to ignore what’s looking us in the face.
Still, I refuse to believe that I’m losing objectivity with Donny Ray—I’m simply using my own human experiences as a tool to get information I need.
There’s a difference.
It doesn’t mean I can’t separate my feelings. It just means I need to be mindful of my own past while assessing him.
And perhaps my instinct after our previous session was right. Maybe I can parlay our connection into finding the missing link: does Donny Ray remember murdering Jamey Winslow?
I begin sorting out my thoughts, hoping to integrate new knowledge with the old. I don’t think there’s any question that Donny Ray’s father murdered Miranda. He had the means and the opportunity, and the files indicate the cops thought so, too. Was she intentionally waving good-bye to her brother that day for the last time? After seeing Donny Ray’s detached reaction twice while he spoke of Miranda, I have to wonder whether he might have actually witnessed her murder. This could explain why he appeared so disconnected.
Which brings me back to Dr. Philips’ notes. She entertained the possibility there was some kind of psychological disorder at play but never could pinpoint the pathology. Since the doctor made no mention of Donny Ray’s sexual abuse—or the subsequent punishment his father inflicted—I have to assume she was unable to get him to open up about it. That might be the critical cornerstone she failed to uncover.
But what does this new information mean?
I allow my intuition to wander. Young incest victims don’t just notice the inanimate during their abuse: the inanimate becomes their entire world. I revisit that eerie image of the lightbulb, how all this little boy coul
d do was focus on it, obsessively counting the number of times it swung from a cord while his father violated him.
A violent and intolerable shiver rides through my entire body.
Logic tells me that from what Donny Ray described, during those moments, he could very well have entered into a dissociative state. But plenty of kids detach from reality during traumatic events, and it doesn’t turn them into killers.
There has to be more.
What kind of incident might have pushed Donny Ray into such predatory killing behavior that he can’t recall? The repetitive rounds of sexual abuse would certainly qualify. And being abandoned in public afterward, wearing his dead sister’s dress, piled one trauma on top of the other, which would be more than enough to push him over the edge.
But how would the effects of that experience express themselves? Is becoming a serial killer a guaranteed outcome? I’m not sure yet, but my mind is trending toward the idea that the other victim in this—Donny Ray’s sister—may be able to tell me.
I look to the Internet and search the news coverage of Miranda Smith’s disappearance. The first thing that pops up is a school photo of her. I zoom in and see that, much like Donny Ray, she was positively striking in appearance. Same raven-colored hair, same well-defined features. But Miranda’s eyes were mirror opposites of Donny Ray’s: dark as night, yet in their own way, just as intense.
I begin reading an article and learn that she disappeared on her way to school one morning.
Wait a minute.
I flip back to the notes on Donny Ray’s last victim, Jamey Winslow, who also went missing on her way to school. After pulling up the news story about her murder, I at first think it’s the wrong link. Then my stomach seizes.
No way.
Jamey Winslow bore a remarkable resemblance to Miranda Smith.
I bring up more stories about Donny Ray’s other victims, and one by one, with each photo, my mind whirls into a tailspin. Every one of them resembles Miranda Smith—some not as markedly but all with the same color hair and dark, intense eyes—each disappearing on her way to school.
Each wearing a blue dress.
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