Primal

by Serra, D. A.

  The hostages press through the chaos.

  “Get back!” Ed pushes one of them.

  Jimmy’s eyes are wide with confusion. He doesn’t understand. One of the reporters reaches in and grabs Alison’s shoulder to make her turn toward him. Jimmy kicks him hard in the shins. The reporter recoils. Another one says, “Oh, like mother like son!”

  A reporter yells “Mrs. Kraft! Have you ever handled a weapon before?”

  Everyone seems to be yelling at her.

  “Alison!”

  “Mrs. Kraft!”

  “Alison, were you scared?”

  Alison puts her hands over her eyes. Hank takes the lead and pulls her through behind him trying to shield her and Jimmy with his body. A reporter reaches his arm inside the protective shell and clicks his camera near her face. Her eyes shoot up, and when they do, she doesn’t see the dock she is on, she sees the woods. She is back in the woods, back up on the tree limb pointing her gun at Ben. She pulls the trigger and click…click. The reporter near her face…click…click. Alison flails out suddenly and violently smashing the camera away from her face and sending it to the dock where it shatters.

  The reporter reacts angrily, “Hey! What the…”

  She makes eye contact with him for a split second and the dead frost in her gaze shuts him up.

  A police car pulls into the circular drive at the end of the dock. Officer Bill Thomas steps out of the driver’s side and trots toward the group breaking through the swarm of reporters. Thomas is in his late forties, a tall stalk of a man who drinks milk shakes every night before he goes to bed hoping to put on some pounds. He is a no gloss guy with a serrated edge. For the department, politically, he’s a nightmare, but he’s an expert on the Burne brothers. He yells over the reporters to Hank. “This way, Mr. Kraft.” A reporter slides in between them. Thomas says, “Get back or I’ll arrest you.”

  “You can’t arrest me.” The reporter sneers. “Freedom of the press, baby.” Thomas sticks out his foot and the reporter trips over it swearing as he hits the dock.

  “Shit. Hey!”

  Thomas replies, “Oops, sorry.” To Hank, “Did you hear me say sorry?”

  Hank answers, “Sure did. I’d swear to it.”

  Hank grabs Alison and Jimmy and follows Officer Thomas to the police car. He opens the door for them and they slide inside. Officer Thomas has wide bull-like nostrils and he is breathing heavily as he gets into the driver’s seat. It isn’t from exertion but from irritation. “Damn vultures. I’m Bill Thomas. Chief asked me to pick you guys up and then do a quick debrief at the station and…”

  “No, debrief. Take us home,” Hank tells him.

  “It’ll only take a few…”

  Interrupting, “Take us home or stop this car.” Thomas meets eyes with Hank in the rearview mirror. He sees the three of them nearly on top of each other and he thinks they look like baby birds in a nest outside his window when he was a kid. Thomas picks up the radio. He has been working on the Burne brothers cases for years. He is the officer who found Mrs. Burne smothered to death. Ingesting each of their files, and predicting their moves, he has come as close as anyone could to getting inside their perverted heads. With his eyes now on this fragile twig of a woman, he cannot reconcile what she did with what he knows to be true about those men. He is dying to ask her questions - a ton of questions. And while he would not admit it aloud, he is disappointed that he didn’t get his own shot at Gravel Burne. Several months ago, Thomas was honored by the force for tracking down Ben Burne and putting him behind bars. He was uncontrollably angry when the warden fell for the kidney ploy, which Thomas never would have bought, and now people are dead and Ben is loose. He stomped around the department yelling obscenities and ready to shoot the warden and the doctor for criminal stupidity.

  Thomas speaks insistently into the cruiser’s radio, “Nope, takin’ ‘em home.”

  The voice on the other end of the radio sounds stressed, “Thomas, Chief wants to see them at the station.”

  “I said I’m taking them home. Out.”

  Hank and Alison feel a surge of gratitude toward him. All they want is to go home.

  “If you guys get a chance to jot down some notes, and things you remember, ‘cause we’re tracking Ben Burne right now and that’d help me out some with my boss. You, know, whatever you remember exactly.”

  “I remember everything exactly.” Alison says sadly, as she looks off at the passing scenery. “Forgetting won’t be a problem.” Hank wraps his arms around Alison and Jimmy. They lean their heads in together and in a cocoon of their own bodies, they block out the world.

  Half an hour later, they pull up in front of their home. News vans are parked on the street in front and several cameramen and reporters leap out and race toward them as the police car pulls into the driveway.

  “Can’t you get rid of them?” Hank asks distraught.

  “They gotta right.” Thomas shrugs.

  “What about our rights?”

  “You can keep ‘em off your property. That’s about it.”

  They get out of the car. The reporters surge forward.

  Thomas yells, “Back it up! Back!”

  The four of them hurry toward the front door. The reporters yell Alison’s name repeatedly and she holds her palms over her ears as she runs inside. Once inside the foyer, Hank slams the door. Alison runs upstairs. Jimmy follows. They crawl into her big bed together, pull up the covers, and lie completely swept up into the sweet comfort of home. Hank is alone in the foyer with Thomas.

  “My family is not public property.”

  “Tell me about it,” he agrees sarcastically.

  Hank goes to the front windows in the living room and starts pulling all the drapes shut. Reporters use their telephoto lenses to shoot right into his house and pictures of him closing the drapes hit the press.

  “She’s suffering. We need privacy.”

  “I can put a unit in front and keep them off your grass that’s about all unless they break the law.”

  “This is harassment!”

  “They call it news now. The public eats this stuff up.”

  “What can we do?”

  “Stay inside until it blows over and it will blow over.”

  For the next three days, Alison and Jimmy stay in her bed. They soak Alison’s wounds in hydrogen peroxide and then coat them with Neosporin. Her bruises turn purple and yellow. Jimmy takes a colored pencil and makes a circle around one of them and adds petals so it looks like a flower. She smiles and tells him it’s beautiful. They watch mindless cartoons, and eat in bed, which Jimmy knows was never allowed before.

  Meanwhile, Hank fumes about the relentless dogs of the press outside. The “I’m a mother” comment leaked to a reporter and made front-page headlines. Then, it turned up on T-shirts by day two. The NRA immediately started a new website called “Mother-loaded.” Jay Leno and David Letterman wove it into their monologues. Jon Stewart made fun of Leno and Letterman for weaving it into their monologues. Hank held onto his rage with a slippery grip, after everything they’d been through, to be subjected to this was heartless. What gave them the right to stalk them, to badger her, to hang around their yard, to peek in their windows, to talk to the neighbors, to follow their car? She is wounded. She is a victim. All three of them are victims. They are forever changed. Hank sees his life sliced into two finite sections - before and after. Before, he believed in a god and in goodness. Before, he believed in fairness and in human decency. Now, he believes there is a brutality beyond reason, and that it survives on the bloody edges of life, and there is a society of sofa slugs, whose lives are so tedious, they find that brutality entertaining.

  On Monday, their neighbors Pam and Jessie fought their way through the frenzied group of reporters to deliver casseroles so that the Krafts didn’t have to leave the house to shop. Hank passed a few words with them in the living room, but Alison never came downstairs. She can’t chitchat. She can’t talk about it and she can’t talk about
anything else. The casseroles unnerved her. They reminded her of when her mom died and the neighborhood ladies would come by with food for her and her dad. A tragic association was cemented, which she never completely shakes off, and so the casseroles only serve to reinforce her belief that something is deathly wrong - why else would there be casseroles? The telephone rings constantly with relatives and friends checking on them. It becomes so intrusive Hank leaves a message for the people close to them and unplugs the phone.

  * * *

  Chapter Nineteen

  A therapist who specializes in post-traumatic stress arrived early the second week and spent a couple of hours. Doctor Cartwell is a restrained white-haired gentleman in a neatly pressed suit and tie. He speaks with a soothing tone and deserves his reputation for successfully treating victims of crime. Officer Thomas, who doesn’t particularly believe in therapists, and who comes from the just-get-over-it-school-of-mental-illness, gave them Cartwell’s number when Hank asked. The police department has recommended him for years. Hank and Jimmy found him easy to talk to and genuine. Doctor Cartwell felt good about the things Jimmy had to say and advised Hank that Jimmy should return to school and his usual routine immediately as the best course of therapy, but that he should let Jimmy pick the day. He found Hank already looking for ways to put it behind him, and felt that moving on was the best therapy for him as well. Then, he approached Alison.

  Alison sits upstairs in the flowered lounge chair where she usually enjoys reading by the morning light on weekends. This morning the bedroom is dark because the news crews outside have forced her to keep the drapes shut. A book sits opened in her lap but she is not reading. She just sits. Doctor Cartwell knocks.

  “Mrs. Kraft?” She looks over. “May I come in?” She shrugs. He enters and takes a seat on the edge of the bed facing her. “I’m Doctor Simon Cartwell. I spent some time this morning with your husband and your son and I do think they’re doing okay. They are, however, both worried about you and so I thought perhaps we could talk?”

  “About what?”

  “About how you’re feeling, about the experience, just work through it a bit together.”

  “Why would I want to do that?”

  “It’s been my experience with victims of violence it is a first step toward healing.”

  “I’m not just a victim. I’m a perpetrator.”

  “Is that how you see it?”

  “That’s the fact.”

  “We both know it’s not that simple.”

  “I killed three men.”

  “And in doing that saved yourself, your family, and a number of other innocent folks.”

  “I let one get away.”

  “You didn’t let him get away. It is the police’s job to find him.”

  “He will kill us all now.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “I know him.”

  “Mrs. Kraft, may I call you Alison?”

  “You can call me Shirley; I really don’t care.”

  “I’ll go with Alison. Alison, with all due respect to the horrendous experience you’ve had, you do not know this man.” Alison turns her head away and stares at the photograph she has hung on the wall of Jimmy when he was a toddler. She drifts into it. Doctor Cartwell feels her leave the room and he waits. He knows this drifting in and out process thoroughly. It is a coping mechanism he sees often. He rises from the bed and walks over to the photograph. He looks at Alison pushing Jimmy on a swing. Jimmy looks about three years old; his hair is blown back, and his face is brilliant with glee.

  “He’s a beautiful boy.”

  “Yes” she whispers. “He is.”

  Cartwell takes the little chair that is pushed under the delicate wood writing desk against the wall. He pulls it out and places it closer, but not too close, to where she is sitting on the lounge. He reaches into her with skilled intimacy. “Alison, I’ve read the police reports about what happened, but I’d like to hear it from you. You’re the only one who really knows.”

  “If you read the reports then you know the details.”

  “I don’t know what it was like for you.” Cartwell is only a few feet away from her and it is possible for her to whisper, so she does. He leans in and listens very intently.

  “It was a progression,” she tells him.

  “How so?”

  “The first one, it was mostly an accident. He was chasing me…” she breaks off. Her throat closes.

  “Alison, sometimes it helps to tell it in third person. Try that. Let’s try that.”

  “The first one was chasing her. He slipped. Slid off a cliff. He was almost an accident. She knew the cliff was there. She led him there. There was a moment when she could have saved him. She didn’t. She thought about it, but then she didn’t. She watched him fall. She heard him break. The next one, she planned it and she killed him. But it was from a distance. She didn’t get her hands dirty. It was not up close. He was a good eight or nine feet away from her. But that third one was…” She falls back into first person, “that third one was in my face, bloody and gory all over me. I felt him die on top of me. I was wet with his blood. And then, the worst one got away.”

  “I see.”

  “No, you don’t, you can’t.”

  “You’re probably right about that. Doesn’t sound like something a person could imagine.”

  “Look, Doctor, you seem like a nice man and you can come and talk to Jimmy and Hank all you want, but unless you can call in the Marines to protect my family you really can’t help me.”

  “Perhaps next time I come you will meet with me downstairs.”

  She let her gaze go back to the photographs on the wall. She falls into them. They are a sweet place for her to be.

  At the bottom of the staircase, Hank crosses quickly to Doctor Cartwell and asks. “What do you think?”

  “She’s traumatized. It’s going to take a while.”

  “Okay.” Hank focuses with sharp intensity. He wants frantically to do all the right things. “What should I do?”

  “Anything that feels normal.”

  Hank’s head shakes, “Doctor, nothing feels normal.”

  “I understand. But anything that can be tied to what was normal before will help her reconnect with herself.”

  “Okay” Hank says. “Yeah, okay.”

  Abruptly on Wednesday at 1:30 p.m., the media siege ended: some teenager across town shot his friend two times in the chest and Hank regretted he lived in a world where for them that spelled relief. The news vans packed up and split in seconds. Hank was positive that now things would begin to fall into place. But the departure of the media had unexpected consequences. While the house was surrounded by cameras, Alison felt a limited safety, but when the media left, it became very quiet, very quickly. Then, she knew - he was coming.

  * * *

  Chapter Twenty

  Friday morning feels fresh when Jimmy opens his eyes. The air in his bedroom is autumn cool and he hears his dad downstairs making coffee. He’s always loved Fridays. He likes the assembly at school where all the students gather in the gym for announcements and sometimes they give awards. He sits on the wooden pullout bleachers next to his best friend, Barry, who can fart anytime he wants and always does when the principal is talking and that is hilarious. Then the principal asks why are you boys laughing, and tells them to stop laughing, which of course, they just can’t. Yeah, he loves that. He throws off the covers and gets out of bed. Also, his mom, who always monitors everything he eats, lets him buy lunch on Fridays. Lunch at the school is cool because you can get nuggets, or pizza, or hot dogs, and there isn’t anything green for miles, and even though his mom says it’s disgusting, on Friday he gets to have it.

  Down at the breakfast table Hank is sitting alone with his coffee and the newspaper. He acts nonchalant when Jimmy enters dressed for school, walks over to the pantry and takes out a box of Cheerios. Yes, Hank thinks, this is good - this is normal. He holds back the grateful tears in his eyes. Jimmy i
s turning the corner.

  He asks casually, “Hey, buddy, you’re up for school today?’

  “Yeah.”

  “Cool.” And that was all they said. It was perfect.

  After breakfast, upstairs in Hank’s bedroom, where Alison is lying awake in bed, there are no grateful emotions.

  “Absolutely not,” Alison says.

  “He’s going back today. It’s his decision and it is what the therapist recommended.”

  “No, Hank, no, please.”

  Hank sees the fear on her face, walks over, and sits on the side of the bed. He takes her hand. “Alison, this is the right thing for him. He looks good this morning. It’s what he needs. It’s what’s best for him. You have to support it.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  Jimmy bounds into the room. He has his coat on, his favorite scarf and beanie, which he believes makes him look really “swa-eet”, and his school books balanced on his hip. He practically skips over to the bed, kisses her on the cheek.

  “Bye, Mom. See you right away when I get home.”

  Hank kisses her, too. “I’ll call you when I get to work. I love you, Alison. Try to get out of bed.”

  * * *

  Harbor Hills Elementary School ripples with excitement and then opens its arms to Jimmy. Denise, Gary, and a few of the other teachers surround and hug him, which embarrasses him in front of the other boys.

  “Jimmy,” Denise says, “you look really good.”

  “Uh, thanks.”

  She continues, “Honey, how’s your mom doing?”

  Jimmy shifts from foot to foot and then says, “Okay, you know, kinda.”

  “Did she say when she might come back to school?” Gary asks.

  “Nope. She’s awful tired.”

  “Of course,” Denise adds, “I stopped by yesterday. But there wasn’t any answer at the door.”

  “Oh, she doesn’t answer the door.”

  “Okay, tell her we miss her, okay?”

  “Sure.”

  Jimmy’s classmates are mesmerized by his commando experience and while it certainly seems peculiar, Jimmy suddenly finds himself very popular and the center of attention. The boys pepper him with questions. So he tells the story again and again, the sting of it lessens, and it begins to feel only like a story. The school counselor observes him and she is encouraged by his ability to concentrate on his schoolwork and to play during recess. When she pulls him aside he tells her it feels like he was just inside a video game and that it really didn’t happen. She sees this as a positive distancing mechanism and the report she sends home is even more encouraging than Hank had hoped.