Once, We Were Stolen

by Courtney Symons

  Once, We Were Stolen

  Once, We Were Stolen

  Midpoint

  EPILOGUE

  ONCE, WE WERE STOLEN

  By Courtney Symons

  Smashwords Edition

  Copyright 2012 Courtney Symons Publishing Co.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Once, We Were Stolen

  By Courtney Symons

  The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.

  - Maya Angelou

  We were with him for almost a year as a strange, forced family. Can you hate someone you’ve spent so much time with? Can you love them? Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference.

  I still think I hear him coming down the hall sometimes. I feel the creak of the floorboard and subconsciously count the five seconds until I see his face. The feeling wasn’t terror. It was something entirely different, something I couldn’t ever put a finger on. It felt ancient and ailing; something deep in your bones that keeps you weak.

  The symptoms weren’t physical. They didn’t remain on our bodies as scars we could point to. They lay somewhere we’d swallowed them down into long ago.

  But he wasn’t a monster. No more than any of us are.

  Once, we were stolen. And this is how it happened.

  1

  “So what would you like to talk about?”

  The question caused Jeremy Ridgeroy to sink down low in his seat. Already he wanted to hide. Instead, he cleared his throat.

  “I guess the past, mostly,” he said.

  The shit we went through, no one should face that alone. It’s what his foster brother Derek had said to convince him to show up in the office of Linda Sanford.

  Linda had posted an ad in the paper saying she had two ears and wanted to use them. No one should be convinced by such an ad, but it caught Jeremy on one particularly lonely day. Looking through the classifieds, it popped out at him and he found himself longing for those ears.

  He’d walked into her Main Street business called Mind Mappers. It was a terrifying name, prompting visions of miniature boats voyaging through his brain, paddling through the grey matter, circulating his skull. But somehow, the name and rates didn’t keep him away, and he walked into the office as confidently as he could. He told the receptionist he would like to book an appointment with Dr. Linda Sanford. She smiled generously and gave him some paperwork.

  Do you have suicidal thoughts? No, that wasn’t it. Jeremy didn’t want to end his life, he just didn’t particularly want to live it. More accurately, he wanted to survive it.

  Linda was still looking at him, expecting him to continue.

  “I just don’t really have anyone else to talk to. I don’t really have many people.”

  “How about family?” she asked.

  “No. Yes. I have foster siblings, but they all have their own families and my foster parents I don’t like so much.”

  “Hmm. Well, we can talk about that too. But how about friends?”

  He felt his cheeks grow warm. “No. No one. I don’t know why people don’t like me, but they don’t.”

  Each time he ended a sentence, Linda quietly waited for him to continue.

  “I get scared to talk to people because I think they won’t like me, and it makes me worry about what I would say to them, how my face might look, what they expect of me. There’s too much to think about, so I avoid it.”

  “So it’s not that people don’t want to talk to you,” Linda offered. “It’s that you’re too scared to talk to them.”

  “Oh, they’re scared of me, too. They don’t come close.”

  “Jeremy, if you think that people don’t like you, maybe you’re sending a negative signal that they pick up on. Maybe they think you don’t want anything to do with them.”

  “Sure,” Jeremy said. He knew he never made eye contact with cashiers. He never waited long enough anywhere for someone to start a conversation. He was the last to enter a room and the first to leave it whenever it could be helped. Even his job allowed him to stay away from too many people.

  “Well maybe,” Linda said jolting him back, “you could focus on trying to make yourself look a little more approachable. What if you smiled?”

  “I don’t have a nice smile.”

  “I think you’d be surprised at how many people would beg to differ, if you just let them see it.”

  This was nice of her and Jeremy smiled in response as a reward.

  “I can smile,” he said, “but that’s too easy. Then I have to deal with them.”

  “Are you going to be able to deal with me?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean you’re sitting here, having a conversation with me and I’m not going to go away. Are you okay with that?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why can you talk to me, but not go out and do the same in your everyday life?”

  Pause. “It’s not the same.”

  “What makes it different?”

  “I’m paying you, to listen. You’ll listen to me because you have to.”

  “That’s not entirely true.”

  “No, it’s true, and I don’t mind. That’s why I came here in the first place. Because I knew you would have to listen, and I’d have to fill in the silence, and I might do that with some stuff that would feel really good to get off my chest. It’s like forcing myself to communicate outside of my head.”

  His arms were erect in front of him and his fingers clamped together like claws as he spoke and sat in her worn patient chair.

  She just nodded. He found himself able to continue. She didn’t bat an eye when he described hearing little girls being pillaged in the room next to him growing up, girls he was getting to know as his new sisters, by the man in charge of their care. She didn’t even flinch.

  Once a week he would visit her, bringing with him a box of chocolates. The first session they had together, he saw a box on her desk and assumed it was part of the procedure if a session had gone well; a tip to let her know she had done something good. He figured it couldn’t hurt and gave her a box each week after, not realizing she’d brought the first one in from home so she wouldn’t end up eating it all herself.

  Months later, Linda began doing a bit more talking.

  “Jeremy, can I tell you what I think about all of this? My professional opinion?”

  He nodded.

  “I believe you’re suffering from a social paranoia that keeps you distanced from the people around you. You overanalyze every social situation, and you can’t allow your body and your mind to relax and enjoy normal, human interactions.”

  She began to talk about treatment options, but her voice faded away as Jeremy tried to process what she’d said. He didn’t know if he should be angry or impressed. He liked it better when she just nodded and listened, but he couldn’t help but hear himself in everything she had said. He did walk down the streets faster than everyone else so his stride wouldn’t be matched by anyone. He would jot down things to say when he knew he would be faced with a conversation.

  But it didn’t feel good to think about th
ose things, especially when he felt strongly that there was no way he could change them. Linda suggested putting himself out there slowly, bit by bit, engaging in small conversations with someone like a bus driver or a vendor. Just a quick exchange not meant to last, that he could walk away from almost immediately. Then slowly, bit by bit, he could attempt longer interactions, by chatting with a waitress or saying hello to a neighbour. Then slowly, bit by bit, he could take on larger conversations, maybe by joining a local club or council, by taking walks, maybe trying some online dating.

  All of it sounded impossible.

  He knew his relationship with Linda had changed. She wasn’t willing to just listen to him anymore; she wanted to break him into pieces. He didn’t need to be told these things, he’d sensed them his whole life and so had everyone else. There is a reason certain people are picked on in school. They lace their arms across their chests and keep their heads down and try to be invisible. But the problem is that there are other kids who aren’t much further ahead of them on the loneliness continuum, and they know how to spot those invisible kids because they’re not really invisible, not even close. They instead become overly visible; their deformities, physical and otherwise, inflated and paraded for everyone to see.

  Jeremy had always felt like a big, blown-up version of his anomalies. Linda wasn’t going to be able to help him change that; she hadn’t gotten to him soon enough. He was too far-gone.

  That was the last time he ever saw Linda. He left that office and went back to the life that had left him wanting, heading to the only other place he knew to find solace.

  He sipped his coffee slowly, took the tentative slurp that affirms if you’ve added enough milk or cream or sugar. He takes about a milk and a half, give or take, and a sweetener. Sometimes a cream if he’s feeling decadent, because you really can taste the difference. It’s a richness that rolls over your tongue and clings to your teeth.

  Sitting alone in a booth is the only way Jeremy ever eats while he’s at a restaurant. Usually, he brings a book providing somewhere to comfortably rest his eyes, but on that particular day, he brought no weapons. Just himself, and the hope that his people-watching skills were discrete enough for others not to notice, or at least not to care.

  His hair was disheveled, his head aflame with curly amber locks. Green eyes were his best feature, he felt, but they were always hidden behind his hair and downward gaze. He rarely showed them to anyone.

  Someone so long-limbed has a hard time being inconspicuous, but he tried it as best he could. His six-foot-three frame folded in on itself like a spider tucking its legs around its body. Booths are never built to fit his size, so he was used to being condensed.

  He sat in the fifties-style diner that exists in every town. One thing it had going for it was that the jukeboxes actually worked, sometimes. Each table had its own, which Jeremy liked. He could put quarters in and choose songs at his leisure, without getting up and gangling in front of the big machine while trying to make his pick. He felt deep satisfaction knowing he controlled what was going into the ears of those around him. As often as he put in a quarter, they had to listen to whatever he selected. And it didn’t matter if they liked it or not, because they didn’t know it was him who had chosen it.

  Last time he was in, he’d picked a song he knew no one would like; a contemporary hit that had somehow found its way into the song selection list, one of those breathy embarrassments with unreasonably sexy lyrics. He’d looked around for reactions, but caught them only from staff members who groaned and rolled their eyes. He’d felt gleeful with power.

  That day, he picked a classic. Something he thought the whole diner would enjoy. When feeling particularly grandiose, he considered himself the DJ of the place.

  “Did you pick this one?” A female voice broke through the din.

  Jeremy’s head snapped up out of his reverie to find his waitress smiling and jerking her head towards the jukebox. Her arms were laden with plates, knuckles laced through half-empty mugs, and he imagined her head was her only plausible method of indication.

  “Yeah, I did,” he muttered sheepishly, a bit unnerved that his secret pleasure had been discovered, but a bit more flabbergasted that she’d taken the time to notice.

  “Good choice,” she nodded. “I can’t stand when people choose the newer songs. It’s a fifties diner, you know?”

  He did know. His stomach clenched with guilt for inflicting that on her in the past, and he silently vowed never to do so again.

  She looked at him expectantly, and he realized he hadn’t said anything in return. He wasn’t very good at this.

  “Um, yeah,” he mumbled. “Tell me about it.” Stupid.

  She didn’t appear to mind, asking, “How’s your meal?” and reminding him that he still had a landfill of breakfast in front of him that he’d barely touched. “You’re not hungry?”

  “Oh, I’m hungry. I’ll get to it. Thanks.” He smiled at her, winningly? Not likely. She smiled back and gave him one more nod. Her arms must have been on fire from all of the weight she held. Other people’s leftovers. Ketchup everywhere, egg yolks lining plates like a child’s finger painting, edges of bread from people who don’t do crust.

  “I’ll be back with s’more coffee in a bit,” she said pleasantly before turning and walking away. Jeremy noticed her long, blonde ponytail swirl around a second behind her, following her lead; that bobbing mane a prerequisite, seemingly, for those who wait.

  Tracking her with his eyes, he saw her spastically kick the kitchen door open. The wooden windowed panels swung open just long enough for her to breeze through, then quickly fell back into place.

  Breakfast beckoned. Over medium, sausage, brown toast. He never thinks twice before ordering, he just does. Autopilot. With new reverence, Jeremy resolved to eat every last bite before him, cold or crusty. He placed his eggs on top of his toast so that when he cut them, the yolk wouldn’t run all over the porcelain plate. There’d be no stains or tidbits left for her to avoid touching as she cleared away his dishes, not from him. He’d even put his cutlery on top, and his empty jam container too, and he might even add his crumpled napkin. He never used napkins but most normal people did, didn’t they? It wouldn’t hurt to try one.

  Jeremy was struck with the sudden panic that she might come back soon. She said she’d bring more coffee. What would he say to her? He could ask what brand of coffee it was, and did she brew it herself? Does she like coffee? What does she take in it? He knew they were meaningless questions that she’d undoubtedly been asked by every other man she’d served that thought she was lovely.

  He did think she was lovely, which was strange because he hadn’t really noticed it before, even though he found himself there every Sunday morning. It started with a craving for eggs, and perhaps a normal human ritual.

  She worked every weekend. She always served him, because he sat alone and she handled the section with the small tables close to the bar, but something had changed. It was the jam, he thought. She’d brought him extra, made sure his coffee cup was full, checked that his eggs were cooked the way he liked them.

  “Sometimes it’s tricky with over medium,” she had said sympathetically. “That’s how I eat mine too. They have a hard time getting it right.”

  Chugging back his coffee, he placed the empty mug along the edge of the table. He would do this with his plate when he was done too, so maybe she’d see it and know he was finished. Maybe it could be their code.

  Sure enough, she came back out of the kitchen and looked over at his mug. She made a tiny, almost imperceptible nod of her head; an acknowledgement not meant for him but only for her, and added it to her mental checklist.

  She. He wished he didn’t have to refer to her in his head that way, and wanted to know her name. He knew he’d never be able to ask without stuttering and stumbling all over his question. Blood rushed to his cheeks and ears just thinking about it. Normal, everyday human transactions were like a foreign language. Interaction with ot
her people was a struggle, a blind search through scripts and codes that he hadn’t written and never fully understood.

  There she was, a full, steaming pot in hand.

  “Ahh, there’s your appetite,” she said acknowledging his feverish attempt to make his entire plate’s contents disappear. Without even waiting for him to ask, she refilled his mug, didn’t spill a drop. Didn’t splash, and her wrist didn’t shake. He’d never seen so much confidence in one small flick.

  “You’re good at that,” he said, testing the words.

  “At what?”

  “At pouring coffee.” He was horrified the instant the simple words were past his lips, but she smiled and recovered for him.

  “Oh yeah, a real pro!” she joked. “I always save my slopping for when I pour myself a cup.”

  He didn’t know if this was her attempt at being humble, trying to make him feel better by acknowledging her faults. Maybe she was being ironic. Should he laugh? He decided he should; it couldn’t hurt.

  What came out of his mouth sounded only partially forced. The volume was alright, too. Sometimes he overestimated how loud his outbursts would be, probably because he gave them so infrequently. The result was something close to a friendly chuckle. As close as he could get, at any rate.

  “You like coffee too?” He knew this was bad conversation. He could see her eyes wandering and knew that he should accept that he was merely a tick mark on her check list. Now that she had refilled his mug, he should let her move along to her next task. But he couldn’t help it.

  “I’m actually more of a tea drinker myself,” she said easily. “Coffee is good but sometimes it makes my tummy hurt, you know? If I drink it too early in the morning or I haven’t eaten.”

  Tummy. The sound of that word out of her mouth was incredibly endearing, so informal and childish. She must feel at ease, he tried to interpret.