I am less hard on myself these days. I try to treat myself the way I treat my daughter-with patience and understanding. I strive to treat my memories of the girl I was in the same way. Ophelia was a damaged young woman who did what she had to for survival. I see a version of her every day at the clinic-with her head hung, her arms wrapped around her middle, her eyes dull. I see her cut herself, starve herself, slit her wrists, poison herself with drugs and alcohol. I know that Victory is not in danger of becoming one of these lost girls. We have taught her to know and value herself, to respect and protect herself. I hope to be better at teaching by example.
I look around the large classroom, watch the other students tap furiously on laptop computers or chat with their friends before class begins. A girl flirts with the guy behind her while another girl looks on with unmasked envy. Two young men talk heatedly in the corner, one of them gesticulating wildly, the other listening with his hand on his chin. They all seem so put together, so well dressed and healthy. I imagine their idyllic childhoods, their close relationships with parents and siblings. I realize that this is just a fantasy. No one knows the dark places inside others; no one knows what pain, however horrifying or banal, has been visited upon them.
Last month I claimed my mother’s ashes. She’d been cremated and stored with her belongings at the county morgue. We took her ashes to Rockaway Beach last Sunday and scattered them as the sun rose. I picked this place because it is the setting for the only happy memories I have with both of my parents. I like to think that she remembered those times, too, that sometimes, maybe when she was alone in bed at night, she missed me. I know I have missed her. I loved my mother. And, in her way, I believe she loved me, too.
I still haven’t talked to my father. After we moved into town, I went to see him, to confront him about what he knows, what his role was in the things that happened to me. But the shop is closed. His landlady says she gets a rent check every month from his bank. She let me into his apartment while she waited at the door. I walked around, looking for some clue as to where he might have gone. But there’s nothing-it’s exactly the same as it was that night, except his clothes are gone. I walk by his building once a week or so, check to see if she’s heard from him. I have a hole in my heart where my father should be. I’ve been chasing him all my life; I guess I won’t stop now. Gray thinks he’s our last, best link to the truth. But I know that even when he returns, he’ll do what he’s always done. He’ll lie.
I know he wanted to help me, to save me from Marlowe, to save me from myself. He did what he could do. I guess he finally did come for me in his way. But then he left again. Maybe that’s all he knows.
The instructor enters through a door near the front of the classroom. It’s a large room, more like a theater really, with a podium and microphone and many rows of seats grading upward. He is a tall, lean man with a chaos of ink black hair and ice blue eyes. His voice is deep and booming; he hardly needs the microphone. His class is called The Secret Life of Trauma, and it is packed, most of the seats taken. He teaches his students about things with which I am intimately familiar: the defenses created by the personality to survive the unthinkable. I’m my own best case study.
Today he has a slide show, some artwork created by trauma patients. He asks one of the students to bring down the lights. Before the room goes dark, out of the corner of my eye, I see her. She sits down the aisle from me, the girl who waited for a rescue that never came, who finally rose to save herself. I see her finally as Janet Parker saw her, a beautiful young woman with everything before her. There’s a light to her, something powerful that radiates from within, something that none of the horrors of her existence could extinguish. Just before she fades away with the dimming lights, she turns to look at me and smiles, at peace. At last.
Author’s Notes
Fiction writers dwell most comfortably in the land of their imagination. But we frequently need to venture forth to learn a thing or two about the real world. I have had the good fortune to find some very accomplished and fascinating people who have taken time out of their busy lives to make my fictional world more viable.
Raoul Berke, Ph.D., very kindly pointed out a mistake I made in an earlier novel and was rewarded by my hounding him for information on various forms of mental illness. My thanks for his interesting insights and observations on fugue states, dissociative identity disorder, and psychotic breaks.
K. C. Poulin, CEO, and Craig Dundry, vice president of special projects at Critical Intervention Services in Clearwater, Florida, spent an afternoon with me and shared their tremendous wealth of knowledge on privatized military companies. I can’t thank them enough for their generosity, openness, sense of humor, and amazing expertise. Fair warning: You haven’t heard the last of me!
Mike Emanuel, renowned Florida cave diver, took the time to answer a ridiculous number of questions about Florida’s underwater caves and the sport of cave diving. His website (www.mejeme.com) features some remarkable pictures that provided me with insight and inspiration. And it’s a good thing, because you couldn’t pay me to go down there.
Marion Chartoff and her husband, Kevin Butler, both extraordinary attorneys and dear friends, offered their expert knowledge on death-row appeal cases.
As always my good friend Special Agent Paul Bouffard with the Environmental Protection Agency has been my source for all things legal and illegal. He never gets tired of answering my questions-or, if he does, he hides it very well.
The following books were very important in the writing of this noveclass="underline"
The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defenses of the Personal Spirit (Routledge, 1996) by Donald Kalsched is in turns moving, disturbing, and illuminating.
Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry (Cornell University Press, 2004) by P. W. Singer is the best resource I found on privatized military companies and their role in modern warfare.
Naturally, I take responsibility for any and all mistakes I have made and liberties I may have taken for the sake of fiction.
Acknowledgments
There are a number of people without whom I couldn’t do what I do. I am truly blessed by their presence in my life, and I’ll take this opportunity to thank them for all the myriad ways they bolster and support me.
I thank my lucky stars for my husband, Jeffrey. Without his love and support, I wouldn’t be where I am or who I am today. I would also slowly starve to death because, at some point since the birth of our daughter, I have lost the ability to prepare food. My daughter, Ocean Rae, has brought a light into my life and shone it into places that I didn’t even know were dark. I am a better writer and a better person since she arrived. Together, Jeffrey and Ocean are the rock-solid foundation of my life.
I would be lost without my agent, Elaine Markson. Every year I try to find a new way to say what she has meant to me personally and professionally. She has helped me achieve the only dream I’ve ever had of my life, pulled me from a burning building (figuratively speaking), advised, edited, supported, encouraged, and just generally been the best possible agent and friend a person could have. Her assistant, Gary Johnson, is absolutely my lifeline every single day. I couldn’t begin to list all the things he does for me. Thanks, G.