“We can get more later if we need to. And it does matter. This has been eating away at you for months, and it’s something we need to deal with.”
“I’m gonna get changed.” Tessa knew that her words had barbs to them, but she didn’t try to remove them at all.
As she left to stow her winter clothes, she did her best to shake off the thoughts of that night when she’d fired the gun and-whether it was really that guy’s intention or not-had plunged out of reach into her own private little prison.
73
Tessa and I met downstairs again, sans jackets and boots.
I chose the footstool, she returned to the sofa.
Though she didn’t seem like she wanted to talk about that night, now that we were into this, I wasn’t ready to drop the conversation in the middle. “Let’s say for a minute that I believed you, that it wasn’t a suicide attempt, that, just as I shot him, you turned the gun on him and squeezed the trigger.”
“Yeah, but you don’t believe it, though.”
“How would it change things if I did?”
She was wearing a gray hoodie and began unconsciously toying with the hood’s string. “What do you mean?”
“Is that what it would take for you to leave this behind, to stop revisiting it?”
“For you to believe me?”
“Yeah.”
“You mean like with Sean?”
“That’s different.”
“Oh. I see.”
“But maybe,” I backpedaled. “I don’t know. Maybe, yes. Like that. Like if I would’ve believed Sean. Would things be different?”
She stood and walked across the room, pausing beside a framed cross-stitched picture of a whitetail deer hanging on the wall near Sean’s minibar. “You remember that guy in San Diego like a year ago who tried to… well… force himself on me?”
Even now the memory burned hot and intense. “Of course.”
“Well, what would it mean for me to forgive him? Do I have to be able to go up to him one day and chuck him on the shoulder and say, ‘Hey, by the way, it was no big deal that you tried to rape me back there. How ’bout I friend you on Facebook?’”
“This is serious. Don’t be flippant about it.”
“I’m not being flippant. It’s the same as what you were saying-what would be different if I forgave him? That’s what we’re talking about. What does forgiving someone even mean?”
“I think in some way you need to be willing to let go of what happened. Whenever you don’t forgive someone-”
“Don’t even say ‘you end up hurting yourself.’”
I was quiet.
“Were you gonna say that?” She didn’t sound spiteful, and I almost wished she had. More than anything she sounded lost. “Were you going to throw me an overworked cliche?”
She stared at me, waited for my response.
“My point is, it’s not helping anything for you to live in the past.”
“I’m not living in the past,” she said sharply, “but I can’t help being affected by it. Right?”
I didn’t know what to tell her. Talking through issues like this, finding deep answers for a hurting teenage girl, I felt like I was way out of my league. “You’re right,” I agreed, “yes, the past affects us. It affects everyone.”
“So is that what it means then? To forgive yourself-is that what you’re saying? To just stop beating yourself up for the past, to stop hating yourself?”
“Or in this case, hating him, I don’t know. But that’s not exactly what we were discussing. Forgiving someone else is one thing, but we were talking about you, and I’m telling you, I don’t think you need to forgive yourself for what happened that night in DC. That man was threatening to-”
“All right.” Her tone was stiff and certain. “One last thing, then. That school shooting in Oklahoma last year, remember that?”
“What does that have to do with-”
“Just, do you remember it? Those two sophomores and the sixteen other kids they… well…”
“Yes. I remember.”
“Well, afterward I heard this guy being interviewed on Fox News; he was, like, some kind of youth motivational speaker or something-you know, who travels around telling kids at school assemblies not to use drugs and to have positive self-esteem, stuff like that. Anyway, on Fox News they asked him why he thought those two kids did it, why they killed those other students.”
Of course I remembered the incident and the nationwide search for answers that followed it. “What did he say?”
When she’d mentioned self-esteem, it sent my thoughts flying to the videos I’d been watching earlier and made me think of Lien-hua’s comments on the submissive role of Basque’s partner: more easily dominated, lower self-worth.
The knives would hold different meaning to him-or none at all.
In the videos, Basque was “The guy”-Tessa said, crossing the room toward me again-“he was like, ‘I can tell you this much, those two kids didn’t have any answers. They were lost, they hated their classmates, hated themselves.’ And the anchorwoman, she leans forward and says, ‘But what is the answer?’”
“And did he have one?”
Only Basque was filmed. So who would stand behind the camera, the dominant partner or the submissive one? I wasn’t certain, but my inclination was that the person behind the camera would be the one calling the shots.
Unless that’s his signature, recording the murder of women “No.” Tessa looked at me. “The youth speaker guy was, like, ‘I don’t really know, but I know kids oughta feel good about themselves.’”
“Self-esteem again,” I said, still struggling to follow both her train of thought and my own.
The locations of the victims matter.
It’s always about timing and location.
“So here’s the thing: go to any auditorium full of teenagers and ask ’em if a coach, a teacher, a counselor has ever told them to feel good about themselves, how many hands do you think would go up?”
“All of them.”
DNA from two victims was found on a knife in Reiser’s trailer, but no videos of their deaths.
Torres arrived the day before you did. Lien-hua was in Cincinnati…
The psychosexual background would show a close association between sex and violence…
“Right.” She tapped her finger against the edge of the couch. “So then, ask the kids if they already know that’s not the answer. Guess how many hands go up then?”
“All of them,” I conceded, still unsure where she was going with all this.
The videos were planted. That’s why that person returned to Reiser’s trailer Wednesday night…
“Exactly.”
You need to follow up on any other cases with videos of people being killed during the years of Basque’s imprisonment, see if the person who filmed him might have used a different partner in the intervening “Because,” she went on, “they know they’ve done stuff they shouldn’t feel good about. That’s the thing-any idiot can see that just feeling good about yourself isn’t the answer, and I’m tired of being told that it is. I’m tired of being lied to. Are you even listening to me?”
Her words scattered my thoughts of Reiser and his murderer. “Yes. Sorry, I am.”
“You get it, right?”
I wished I had a quick fix for her, a way to heal her emotional scars, but I didn’t. Honestly, I had the feeling that anything I said would only come out sounding trite or cavalier. “No one likes being lied to. Especially about something as important as dealing with a heavy conscience.”
It wasn’t a great reply, but she accepted it, then let out a soft breath. “You can’t just make it go away, Patrick. It’s there-guilt or shame or whatever. And trying to feel good about yourself isn’t gonna solve it, not if you’re trying to be honest with yourself at the same time-honest about what you’re capable of. Denial is too cheap a cure for what I did.”
Having her finally open up like this meant a lot to me, but also left me feeling awkward and ineffectual because I could hear her desperation and brokenness and I had no real answers for her. “Even if you did kill him, Tessa, wouldn’t that be a sign of courage, not weakness?”
“How would it be courage?”