It happens less and less, though, that I’m confronted with questions about our time there. In the aftermath, it’s easy to gloss over how long ten months is. You hear some stories of people who were gone for years, and their response afterwards was that they weren’t able to escape. They were brainwashed. What the brainwashed bit covers up is the fact that they enjoyed part of it, somehow. They must have. Not in some sick masochistic way, but in a genuine, humble, coping way. It’s hard for me to think back to my time with Jeremy and not think about Christmas, or my birthday, or that Jeep. There are a lot of good memories that come from that place.
The funny thing about our memory is that it protects us. It’s like the way you can’t remember the feeling of physical pain. You remember the ache; you know it was there, but you can’t summon the throb. Your brain has done too good a job blocking it out. For me, it’s the same. I don’t remember pain, I don’t even remember feeling all that scared. I remember feeling fairly safe, secure and happy.
That last bit is the part I try not to admit to many people. They get all suspicious. It doesn’t work with their view of the world and the way it turns. But I did feel happy there. I wasn’t traumatized for life. When we left, I readjusted to living with my mom, continued to go to school and grew up to be a relatively normal human being. I have my quirks like everyone else, but I don’t think of myself as scarred, not really.
Other people do though. To them, my scars are visible. It’s as if the lines slash across my face, huge creases where normalcy used to be. Sometimes people still shy away from my hand when I reach out to shake theirs, as if my scars are so vibrant they fear it might be catching.
I suppose I’m getting ahead of myself, though. It’s been twenty years, and there are some gaps to fill in.
The day Vi and I returned home, we had no idea that Jeremy had turned himself in. We also had no idea, and would find out soon after, that it hadn’t even been Jeremy’s house at all. It had been an employer’s home that he’d been entrusted to care for. The owners were horrified when they discovered what he had been using their property for, and they sued him.
The media went after Jeremy tirelessly. There was a picture, and I’ll always remember it, of Jeremy being taken away in handcuffs. He’s looking directly at the camera and his brow is furrowed, his eyes squinting. He looks sinister, and the press labeled him as such. But I knew that look, and it wasn’t menacing. He’d been blinded by the flash of the camera, for god’s sake. It was obvious to anyone who looked at it with a blank slate.
Our mother clipped out newspaper articles written about us while we were gone, and about Jeremy when we came back. At first I’m sure she did it for her own sanity; later, because she thought she was doing us a favour, documenting the many ways she’d tried to find us. I didn’t read them when I was young; I didn’t understand them or care to. Now when I look over them, I just feel hollow.
Vi and I experienced the press differently. I was the little boy who never had a choice. I was trapped in the backseat, too young to struggle or break free. Depending on who you asked, the same was true of Vi. Poor young girl who didn’t know any better.
To many, however, it was as if she was a monster too. I never understood it. They painted a lurid picture of her as a lovesick woman who had some secret anger because of being adopted (because of course, that was a part of the whole circus too), and who had been willing to put her little brother’s life at risk due to her own stupidity. Or promiscuity, again depending on who you asked. They were relentless. Even interviews that Vi agreed to do were edited against her favour, swooping in on tiny moments where she showed any sort of compassion towards Jeremy. Because she did. We both did. Because we missed him.
I won’t go so far as to say I saw him as some sort of father, because even I know that’s absurd. But when you’re little and you don’t have an older man around and then you do, sometimes it’s hard to differentiate. He didn’t always do the right things, but sometimes he did. If you look at his stealing us as one huge, massive mistake and error in judgment, he kinda did alright on the rest. That’s how I feel about it.
I went back to school that September but I was held behind a year. The friends I had known were a year above me. Kids teased me and called me stupid, and never acknowledged that it was only because I’d been out of school for a year. No one seemed to pipe up with that information, and even I ceased to when I saw the looks it got me. I decided I’d rather be stupid than a freak. Kids were cruel but sloppy; they would tease you for whatever information you laid down in front of them. So I became stupid. Maybe that’s the way I suffered after returning home; I didn’t try. I didn’t listen. I would stare out the window for hours with my head in the curve of my palm, thinking about where else I would rather be. If anyone else in the class did this, they were instantly called upon and disciplined. But teachers let things slide with me, as if they were afraid to reprimand me lest I fall apart. They assumed Jeremy had weakened me, thinned my skin, so that at the wrong word or look I could entirely disintegrate, crumple right before their eyes.
Kids saw this. They notice these sorts of things. I wished teachers would’ve gotten me in trouble sometimes, just so I wouldn’t piss off the rest of the students. School was hell for me, plain and simple, but school was hell for many.
I got older, a little bigger, my voice grew deeper. I started chasing girls and was met with a staggering failure rate. I think I scared them. The damaged boy, the one who could explode at any moment. Everyone expected me to become so full of teen angst that I started to believe I should. I did all the drugs, I stayed out late at all the parties, I drank. I can remember a few occasions where I came home to liquor bottles lined up across the kitchen table, my angry mother standing, arms crossed, behind them. Essentially, I went through what every teenager under the sun does. Except I was still a special case. People always looked at me with a slightly cocked head, as if trying to figure me out. As if they were guessing the exact moment of my demise. I always disappointed them, though. I never broke.
A different story is true for Vi. Constant criticisms from the press followed her like a storm cloud. It gave some people the confidence to sneer at her on the street. While I was met with pitying looks, she got cold shoulders and glares. One woman, as we were walking through the mall together, spat on Vi’s shoe. She shouted, “Shame on you,” before scampering off.
Shame on Violet was a common judgment and after a time, I can’t help but feel that even our own mother started to believe it. Once, a few weeks into our return, Mom couldn’t resist her curiosity any longer. She’d asked us both in advance, made something of an appointment, letting us know she was going to ask questions about the time we’d been away.
Vi and I met her at the kitchen table and we all sat down. We drank some lemonade, ate some strawberries, and then Mom started to ask the things that everyone did. We thought we were safe from the questions in our own home, but we weren’t. Homes are never completely safe.
“Do you still think about… him sometimes?” She would never say his name, as if she was scared of the power of it. As if upon speaking Jeremy Ridgeroy three times in front of a mirror he would climb through it and come after her in the night.
Vi and I looked at each other. The answer to the question was easy. Of course we still thought about him. We both nodded yes.
“Did he ever tell you why he kept you there?” she asked. No one seemed to be able to figure that one out. We knew, but it wasn’t something that could be easily explained. It had taken us months to get it. Sometimes I still don’t fully understand. I left this one to Vi.
“He was lonely,” Vi offered. “He wanted someone to spend time with and he thought the only way he could do it was by force.”
Mom gulped. “And was he? Forceful?”
Vi looked at the ground. “Well no, not physically. He didn’t push us around or hurt us. But there were a lot of things he told us to make us think it wasn’t an option to leave.”
�
�So he tortured you?” Mom said, letting out a sob with her last word. It wasn’t clear whether it had been a question or a verdict.
“No, Mom,” Vi said, touching her hand. “He didn’t torture us. We didn’t suffer, not really.”
“Of course you suffered!” Mom jumped in. “You were trapped for a year, of course you suffered!” I suppose this was true. But suffering is part of the human condition. We would have suffered had we been in the comfort of our own home. I don’t feel any more haunted than you do, probably. We’re all burdened by something. But I didn’t have these words then, I didn’t know how to say it. Neither did Vi. The words never came out right, or maybe it’s that people just weren’t listening when they were.
“Well,” Vi conceded for our mother’s benefit, “I guess we did suffer. He held us in a basement at first, with just a pot to go to the bathroom in and some blankets.” The words were designed to pierce our mother’s heart, and they hit their target. She sobbed into her open hand.
“My poor babies,” she said over and over. “My poor babies.”
Vi did get her job back at that diner. I’m not even sure she wanted it, but an old co-worker came around soon after we got back and told her the job was waiting for her. Vi knew she had to get back to real life at some point, and the sooner the better. She said yes, dug out an old apron from the bottom of her drawer, and went back to serving.
I’m not exactly sure what it was like for her to go back there, but she would come home from long shifts with purple rings around her eyes. When she entered the front door, she would close it quickly and lean against it, as if trying to keep something out. She would take deep breaths, ease her way back into comfort. For the most part, she would smile.
Vi’s smile is something I really miss. I haven’t seen it in years, not really. When we first got back, she tried it on as often as she could. As often as she thought people would believe, I suppose. But there was always a weight behind it, a strain that you could see in the way the corners quivered. I think it got harder for her, because she tried it less and less. It stopped being convincing. It screamed of forgery. Eventually, she decided it was better not to try at all.
She worked at that diner for another eight years and never went away to school. She made enough money; she worked as hard as she ever had, just as many hours. Maybe her tips weren’t as good, but they were still there.
I asked her one day, why she never went away. She didn’t like the question.
“What, so it’s a bad thing that I didn’t go to university? Not everyone does, you know,” she’d said without pausing to conceal her offence. She fingered her shooting star necklace, that noose around her neck.
“Not at all, I thought that’s what you’d been saving for, you know, before, so I just wondered what changed.”
“A lot changed, Ben,” she said. “Everything.”
But the thing was, it hadn’t. Not everything. It was possible to pick up and carry on. I had done it, and most other people do too, at some point from something or another. You fall down and no matter from what height, if you survive, you get up, brush off the dirt, and go on. Right? I mean, isn’t that the way it works? Tragedy is all around us, all the time. I never saw why ours was so special.
The whole time Vi worked at the diner, she lived at home. Her friends had mostly gone away to school. They had new friends, new cities, new boyfriends, whole new lives that Vi wasn’t a part of. A couple of co-workers came calling, frequently at first and then less so as time passed. Their sympathy only lasted so long. Vi didn’t seem to mind. She’d work all day, come home, go to bed, and do it all again. She’d spend hours on the front porch, sitting in the rocking chair, never getting anywhere. Her brow would be scrunched up. I always tried to follow her line of vision, to find what she was staring at so intensely. But it was nothing; her eyes remained glossy and unfocused.
Vi never moved out of the house. From what I’ve gathered, she was afraid to leave Mom alone again. She wouldn’t have been alone – I was there all the time growing up. But Vi felt some strange attachment, as if trying to prove that she hadn’t been hiding from her life; she hadn’t hated her mother and wanted to get away. Perhaps she felt it was her penance for the guilt she had been prescribed.
By the time I survived high school, I discovered something big about myself. My endless chasings of females were all for naught. Nothing had come from them, and more than that, I didn’t mind.
When I was in my final semester of Grade 12, already itching to get away from home and from this town, I was walking home in the rain. Big, fat drops too, and I didn’t have an umbrella. A car pulled up alongside me, stopped and rolled down the window.
“Hey, you,” the driver said. A man, not much older than me. I was instantly struck by his electric green eyes, his turquoise shirt showing more of his skin than I’d ever had the balls to, and his big, welcoming smile.
I should have turned and ran, given my track record with men and cars. But I was older now, I was wise and stronger. There was nothing he could do to me that I couldn’t prevent, I thought.
“Want a ride?” he shouted to me after I’d taken in him and his bright red car.
“Sure,” I gambled. I’d just heard some lightning and figured it would only get worse, plus my backpack was no doubt allowing sufficient water in to smudge all the papers within. I opened the passenger door and sat down.
“Thanks, man,” I said.
“No problem,” he said to me, looking over. “So, you go to school here?” he asked, gesturing in the direction of the high school.
I nodded. “Yeah, just finishing my last semester. Then I’m out of here.”
“Yeah,” he laughed, “That’s exactly what I said two years ago when I graduated. Soon, though,” he stipulated.
“I’m Ben, by the way,” I said then because I didn’t know what else to say and I hadn’t done it yet.
“Arthur,” he said in response, extending his right arm out to me without taking his eyes off the road. I shook it, and I remember being surprised by the strength behind it, the grip and accuracy of his hand in mine. Handshakes, if you think about it, are just holding hands in a brief, firm fashion. I remember not wanting to let go.
“So where do you think you want to go when you’re done school?” he asked.
“I’m not sure yet,” I told him. I was sick of the question, and I hated it when anyone else asked it, but I didn’t mind it from him. “I’ve always sort of wanted to be an architect.”
This was the sort of response most people hear and think, Pipe dream. Never going to happen. I didn’t have any specifics, I didn’t know for certain where I wanted to go. I’d applied to a couple of schools already just because they force you to do it so early, but they were stabs in the dark at best. Arthur took my word for it, though.
“Amazing,” he said, and I knew he meant it. “That would be an incredible job. Me, I’ve always wanted to be a yoga instructor. I’ve been training for awhile now, and I’m almost certified. I thought I’d have to leave town, head south somewhere, but the craze is spreading. I think I could even open up a yoga studio here and people would sign up. We don’t have one yet,” he said.
I looked over at him. His chest was enormous. To this day, I maintain that if he were fitted for a bra, it would be larger than the average female’s. Those muscles were from yoga, from stretching, from holding his body in gravity-defying postures. It had never been something I’d pictured a man doing, but I was struck with the grace of it.
“I’ve never tried yoga,” I admitted, “but I’ve always wanted to.” That was a lie, by the way. I admitted it to him later, too. I wasn’t sure why I’d wanted to impress him, but I know now.
“You should come by for a lesson sometime,” he said genuinely. “I could give you a free trial.” He looked over at me then, flashed me those eyes and his smile, and I felt a stirring inside of myself that I had never gotten from the opposite sex. I could feel butterflies hatching and taking flight, the ones
I’d heard young girls tittering about with hearts for pupils. I thought boys weren’t a part of that, but it’s not true. We can feel love with the same giddiness, the same rosy-cheeked sincerity. Maybe we don’t all know how to access and harness it, or heaven forbid show it, but it lies within like an untapped mine, a wealth of emotion waiting for someone to come digging.
I said yes, that I’d love to come for a yoga class. Before then, I’d never acknowledged my desire for men. I’m sure there were flare-ups in my youth, times when I looked upon them and felt attracted, but never in a fashion I marked as sexual.
No, I’d never lusted after Jeremy. People always ask me that, usually after they’ve had a few drinks. I’m not damaged, I don’t feel deprived or scarred in my adoration of males. I have a vast and insatiable desire to give love. I’m not tainted. I don’t know why I feel the need to clarify this so defensively, but people need convincing. They assume humans are so easily ruined.
Arthur drove me home that day, and the road flew by under our tires much faster than I hoped. When we arrived, I wondered if there was a way I could touch him somehow. I debated shaking his hand again, but that’s sort of a one-time occasion. A hug would be outrageous and I knew it. I had no idea how to read him. Aside from the fact that there was no ring on his left hand, I hadn’t the slightest idea. His smile though, it was something I felt he didn’t share with just anyone. And those eyes, could he really look that way at a stranger he never again wanted to see? Something unpolished and inexperienced bubbled up in me and told me to go for it.
“Thanks again for the ride, Arthur,” I started.
“No problem, Ben. I’m glad I could help.”
“Do you think I should get your number then, if I’m going to call you about a yoga class?” I said it far too quickly, but he did me a favour and pretended it had come out just right.
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