So I interrupted all of them, all of the men, and I said, “One of you needs to tell us what happened to our daughter.” Dr. Baird and the detective looked at each other like neither of them wanted to go first. The doctor drew the short end of the stick. And then he told us. He told us how she had been raped. It was not what I had hoped—that it was some boy she liked and he got carried away. Oh God I know how bad that sounds. The feminists would have my head, wouldn’t they? I’m not saying that that kind of rape isn’t really rape or shouldn’t be punished. Believe me—when Lucas is older, I’m going to make damn sure he knows the kind of trouble he could be in if he isn’t absolutely sure he has consent. I do believe that men have a responsibility, that they need to realize that when it comes to sex, we are not on equal footing. And not just because of the physiology. It’s the psychology as well—the fact that girls still feel pressure to do things they don’t want and boys, men, have very little understanding about what girls go through. Anyway, it was not what I had hoped. And actually, it was what I had feared most. Detective Parsons filled in this part. He wore a mask. He forced her to the ground on her face. He…I’m sorry. This is hard to say out loud. I can hear the words in my mind, but saying them is another thing altogether.
Charlotte stopped to gather herself. She had a particular method, which she used without deviation. It was a long inhale, eyes closed, quick shake of the head, then a slow exhale. She looked down first after opening her eyes, then nodded in confirmation of the control she had wrangled.
I’ll just say it, all of it, quickly and then be done. She was raped from behind, vaginally, anally, back and forth apparently, for an hour. Okay. I said it. It’s done. They did the rape kit. They found traces of spermicide and latex. This…this creature wore a condom. They didn’t find one hair either, and the forensic people who were brought in from Cranston later that night said he probably shaved himself. Can you imagine? He prepared for this rape like an Olympic swimmer. Well, he didn’t get his gold medal, did he? Every physical wound healed beautifully. She won’t ever feel any different from any other woman. And emotionally, well …
She paused again, this time more to take stock than regain her composure. Then she continued in a voice that was irreverent.
I remember thinking, thank God for the treatment. Everything he did to my little girl, we undid. So, I’m sorry for the bad language, but I thought—fuck him. He doesn’t exist anymore.
Chapter Three
Charlotte and Tom Kramer did not agree on the decision to give Jenny the treatment. Charlotte won that fight.
The medical community is still learning about the formation and retention of memory. Studies have been on the rise, and new research surfaces regularly. Our brains have long-term memory, short-term memory, the process for storing memories and of locating and retrieving memories from the places where they are stored, which scientists now believe to be vast. Consider that for decades, neuroscientists believed that memories were stored in the synapses that connect our brain cells and not in the brain cells (or neurons) themselves. Now they have disproved this and believe it’s the neurons that hold our history. We have also discovered that memories are not static. In fact, they change every single time we pull them from storage.
The treatment used to induce limited anterograde amnesia of traumatic events was found through a series of trials on both animals and humans over many years and in many variations. It starts with morphine. As early as the 1950s, doctors noticed a reduction in PTSD from the early administration of morphine in high doses. The findings were inadvertent—the morphine had been administered to children who were victims of burning following a fire, purely for the intention of pain relief. Those who received the higher doses immediately after the fire had noticeably reduced symptoms of PTSD than the children who received less or no morphine. In 2010, a formal paper was written confirming the benefits of morphine for children suffering from burns. Morphine, along with other drugs, has been used for years to treat soldiers in the field, and researchers correlating records of trauma, morphine, and PTSD have found that high doses administered immediately after a trauma can significantly reduce PTSD in wounded men and women.
This is why: Every waking moment, we have experiences. We see, feel, and hear. Our brains process this information and store it in our memories. This is called memory consolidation. Each factual event also carries some emotional counterpart, and that triggers chemicals in the brain and those chemicals then place the events into the appropriate file cabinet, if you will. Things that capture our emotions are filed in the locked metal cabinets. They are not replaced by subsequent events and can be easily recalled. Other less provocative events, what we made for dinner last Thursday, might go into a manila folder somewhere. As time passes, these will get buried under other manila folders and at some point become impossible to find. They may even get sent to the shredder. Some researchers believe that morphine reduces the emotional reaction to an event by blocking nor-epinephrine so a “metal cabinet” event may get reduced to a “manila folder” event. This is the first component of the treatment.
Now, because the filing of any event requires the interaction of chemicals in the brain, you can see how interfering with those chemicals while they are trying to do their filing could interrupt the process. This is why a night of binge drinking results in a “blackout.” It’s also why drugs like Rohypnol (the date rape drug) enable a person to function “normally” but not remember anything that happened while the drug was in the system. The brain’s filing staff is on a break. Nothing gets filed, and the events are presumably lost, as if they never happened. But this is during the short-term-memory phase. The second part of the treatment involves a revolutionary drug that claims to send the filers on their break during the consolidation of long-term memory—it stops the synapses from working at this stage by inhibiting necessary proteins, so the short-term memories are discarded. They call it Benzatral.
The tricky part with trauma is the timing. There is no exact time between short-term- and long-term-memory consolidation. Every memory involves different parts of the brain, depending on what the memory is made of. Was it a sight, a sound, a feeling? Was it music or math or meeting a new person? The brain is functioning while the trauma is occurring, so the filing is in process. The treatment has to be given within hours of the trauma, and even then it may not be completely effective if some of the events have already made it to long-term storage.
Jenny had the perfect set of circumstances. She was already inebriated when the rape began. She went into shock during the attack. Within half an hour, she was given a sedative. And within two hours, the treatment was administered. She awoke twelve hours later with only the small bits and pieces I have already mentioned.
Tom Kramer also recalled the conversation in the family lounge. I cannot fully capture the emotion with which he recounted it, so I will just give you his words and tell you that he did not cry. I think by this point he had no more water.
I don’t remember exactly what was said. I just kept hearing the word “rape” over and over. I can tell you that it was a brutal, merciless attack. That they had no suspects. That he had been careful, wearing a condom and perhaps shaving his body hair. They thought, and this was later confirmed by the forensic investigators, that he wore a black wool mask—like one of those ski masks that covers your entire face and head. They said it lasted for about an hour. I have thought about that more than I should. When Jenny was back in the hospital eight months after the rape, when I knew this was not over, I went home and lay on the floor with my face pressed to the ground, my body positioned the way they said hers was. I lay there for an hour. An hour is a long time to be tortured, longer than any of us can imagine. I promise you that.
Anyway…the treatment. So they explained the process. The drugs that would be given. How it would put her into a sort of coma for about a day and that, if we were lucky, it might block her memory of the rape and at the very least, and this they said they knew for su
re, it would reduce any PTSD she might suffer. They said the PTSD could be debilitating and require years of therapy. Dr. Baird asked if we wanted to speak with a psychiatrist to better understand the treatment and what life might be like for her without it. He said every minute that passed reduced the effectiveness.
Charlotte’s eyes got so wide. “Yes!” she said without even looking at me. “Do it! What are you waiting for?” She stood up and pointed to the door like they should both rush out to follow her orders. But I grabbed her arm. I may not be the smartest man, but this didn’t sound right to me. If she couldn’t remember, how could she help them find this creature? How could she help put him behind bars, where he would get what he deserved? Detective Parsons nodded and looked at the floor like he knew exactly what I was saying. He finally confessed that it would be very difficult. That even if the drug didn’t work completely, anything she did remember would be ripped apart in court as unreliable. Of course it would, right? I mean, come on. Game over. Look—I’m not saying I wanted this guy caught and punished more than I wanted my daughter to recover. But where her mother saw her recovery in forgetting and pretending this never happened, I saw it coming more by way of facing the devil, you know? Looking him square in the eye and taking back a piece of what he had stolen. And I was right, wasn’t I? Jesus Christ, I wish I wasn’t, but I was.
I asked him the next logical question. “If you felt so strongly, why did you agree?”
He thought about this for several seconds. I think he had asked himself this same question a million times, but he had never had to say the answer out loud. When he did, he looked at me with a blank face, as though it should have been obvious to me. Tom had not yet come to see that the dynamics at play in his marriage were anything but obvious—or normal, for that matter.
Because if I was wrong, if Jenny didn’t get past it, I would be blamed. So why did I agree? Because I was a coward.
ISBN: 978-1-474-04486-8
THE DISAPPEARANCE
© 2016 Annabel Kantaria
Published in Great Britain 2016
by HQ, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street,
London,
SE1 9GF
All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.
By payment of the required fees, you are granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right and licence to download and install this e-book on your personal computer, tablet computer, smart phone or other electronic reading device only (each a “Licensed Device”) and to access, display and read the text of this e-book on-screen on your Licensed Device. Except to the extent any of these acts shall be permitted pursuant to any mandatory provision of applicable law but no further, no part of this e-book or its text or images may be reproduced, transmitted, distributed, translated, converted or adapted for use on another file format, communicated to the public, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher.
The Disappearance Page 31