Lisa Unger - The Stranger Inside

I had a stack of new comics that my dad brought the night before from his favorite shop in the city. I read one—Batman—as I ate a huge bowl of Cocoa Puffs, then drank the chocolate milk that was left behind. The way we ate. Remember how we’d ride to the general store and buy bags of junk—gum and candy bars, those peanut butter cookies, and cheesy puffs, potato chips in cans. We’d just sit on the sidewalk and eat it all. I look at those old pictures and we were all so skinny. I guess that’s the magic of being a kid, right. Eat whatever you want. No consequences. Until much later.

I remember the sunlight glittering on the pool. The birds singing in the backyard. The hum of a lawn mower from across the street. There was a note from my mom: Get out and do something today. Don’t just lie around in front of the television. Love you!

Later, she blamed herself. She should have been home. If she had been—The way I see it, there’s plenty of blame to go around.

The last time I wrote, you told me that you didn’t remember much of anything. You told me that you didn’t want to remember. That’s when you asked me to stay away, to stay out of your life. If you could go back and relive that day, change things, you would. But you can’t, you said, so you had no choice but to move on. You politely suggested that I do the same. Move on.

It’s so easy for you.

Not so easy for me, of course.

What if I hadn’t gone out looking for you and Tess? What if I had, instead, called your mom, asked for you? She’d have known that you weren’t where you were supposed to be. She’d have come looking. It’s like you said, you can drive yourself crazy running through all the scenarios, all the ways things could have been different.

You can really drive yourself crazy.

The air smelled of cut grass, and the gravel driveway crunched beneath my sneakers as I left the house. My dirt bike lay where I’d dumped it the night before on the grass. Someone’s going to steal that thing, my dad complained the night before. And I’m not going to replace it. But like all spoiled kids, I knew if it did get stolen—which it wouldn’t—that he’d bitch a blue streak then get me another one eventually. Anyway, nothing ever got stolen, not in that neighborhood. Everyone had everything they wanted and then some. No need to steal. We didn’t always even lock our doors, would forget to close the garage sometimes. We felt safe. Remember that? Remember what it was like to feel so safe that you didn’t even know what it meant not to feel that way?

I pulled the bike up from the damp ground, didn’t even bother wiping it off. Just hopped on it and headed toward the dirt road. Your mom told you not to cut across anymore. But I figured you guys, especially Tess, were too lazy to go the long way. The air on my face, hot and humid. The sudden coolness when I was on the dirt road, under the tree cover. A squirrel skittered in front of my bike. I swerved to avoid it. Mrs. Newman waved from the window over her kitchen sink. Hey, Mrs. Newman! I called back to her.

I heard something then, something high-pitched and out of place, came to a skidding stop on my bike and listened. Birdsong, and wind in the leaves.

Right there.

I go back to that place. Because even though I convinced myself that it was nothing and I kept going, I remember the way the hair came up on my arms, that sudden stillness inside, the urge to freeze and listen. That’s instinct. That’s the brain picking up on something, a note out of the symphony of normal life. The way ahead was dark. I think I even looked back at the way behind me, the sun-dappled road home.

If I had spun my bike around, then what? Then what?

From the way you talked about it, I could tell that you’ve had a lot of therapy. I have, too, believe me. Years of it, shrink after shrink, well into adulthood. After something rips your psyche apart, they try to stitch you back together. The physical wounds, they’ve healed. Even the scars have faded.

But whatever got broken inside, it’s still not right. Do you feel the same way? I suspect you do. I see it in you, too, Lara. That look, the one I see in the mirror. A kind of emptiness behind the eyes, a strange flatness. You’ve seen the things that make all the other things people do seem meaningless.

Do you feel as if there are two of you? The one who’s living out her life—working, having relationships, going to the grocery store, cooking, reading. The person you would have been if it had never happened. And then there’s another you. The one who survived but is still somehow trapped in the nightmare.

I don’t know. Maybe it’s just me.

I was a child, you wrote. And I acted out of terror and extreme trauma. Even though I wish things had been different, I don’t blame myself. I have moved on to try and live a whole and happy life. She would have wanted that for us. Don’t you think?

I get that. I hear that. They give you the language of survival. The phrases you are meant say to yourself, words like a bridge over the bottomless gully of despair. I have those words, too. I dole them out to others now in my work with trauma victims, mainly children and adolescents. That’s the work that the whole and healthy part of me does; I help children who have suffered find their way back to normal, or forward to a new normal. It’s good work. Gratifying and healing.

So I get what you’re trying to say. And part of me even agrees, that one way to honor Tess is to live out the lives we’ve been given.

But no, I don’t think she would have wanted that for us. I mean, think about it. I’m fairly certain that if the choice had been put to her, she would have wanted one of us to take her place. I think she would have vastly preferred, as anyone would, to be the one picking up the pieces of that summer morning, trying to live a whole and happy life in the wake of a terrible event that she survived.

I think she would have wanted one of us to die instead at the hands of a monster. Personally—and I know you’ll find this hurtful—I think it should have been you.

He came for you, Lara. Not her. And if it hadn’t been for me, he would have gotten you.

Don’t bother to thank me. It’s far too late for that.

I key in the code to my gate and pull up the long drive. My own house is empty. There’s no one waiting for me at home, no one to hold me when the ghosts come to call. I sit in the car for a while. I can still hear the sound of you humming to your daughter—did you even know you were humming? I let the sound of your voice fill my mind.

Rain saw the dog first, a German shepherd that sat still and stiff as a sentry beside the big man. Large, mostly black but with tawny fur on the legs, belly and around the eyes. She’d seen the man before. Somewhere. Where? She felt a flutter of unease in her belly.

“Good morning,” he said.

He seemed nice enough, a slight smile playing at the corners of his mouth. He pushed his thick black glasses up his nose, stayed where he was beside the creek. Just sitting. He wore a black jacket, too hot for a summer day. His hair was long, pulled into a loose ponytail, his beard thick and long. He was heavy, very overweight.

“Good morning,” said Tess sweetly.

Rain didn’t say anything, just moved quickly toward Tess and grabbed her hand, started pulling her away.

“We’re late,” she said.

“Didn’t your mom teach you to be nice?” asked the man.

She bristled, annoyed. In fact, her mother had not taught her to be nice, and neither had her father.

“My mom,” she snapped, “told me not to talk to strange men in the woods.”