All Is Not Forgotten(85)

It’s almost over. Only seventeen minutes and eight seconds left.

Jenny opened her eyes and met mine, just inches away. We were both crying, our memories now fully before us.

I remember it. Jenny said, I remember him.

“I know. I can see it in your eyes. I can see it!”

And I could. I could see everything. I could see myself. I was no longer alone.





Chapter Thirty-six

My parents did not want to report the rape. They did not take me to a doctor until the school nurse made them, and then it was just to stitch up the carving. They were afraid the state would remove their foster children, including the one who had taken me into the woods behind our house. My mother said this was something that we could work through. That this boy had a very sad story and needed our help. His behavior—that’s what she called it—was a result of his difficult life, and we should not judge him too harshly. The school nurse saw blood from my shirt, and I told her it was from a fall. There was a report, but that was it. The pain of this secret, of having shared it with no one, was brutal.

I remember the day I shared my story with Glenn Shelby. We were having a session at the prison in Somers. He was telling me about a boy he had stalked. How he’d stood outside his house, watching him from the woods. How he had thought about touching him. I started to tell him that these urges were bad. That they could hurt people. He asked me how this could be when it felt so good to imagine it. He recounted examples from the inmates. He recounted things that they did to each other and to him. He had been with hundreds of people, men, women, teenage boys. They were mostly prostitutes. Some were just heavily intoxicated. A few had been drawn in by his charm and so desperate for love that they failed to see the psychosis in his attachment to them.

I had been trying to explain to him that boys should be off-limits, even the ones working as prostitutes. I did not want him to develop a taste for youth, so I started to tell him the story. About the boy lured into the woods. About the fear and the pain. He asked me for details. He asked me why it hurt this boy. I shared my story in great detail. I had not told anyone this story. Not one person. Not in my entire life. Before me was a wide-eyed consumer of my tale of horror. I could not resist the urge to finally say the words out loud. He was so very skilled at luring secrets from their vaults. And I had been so pathetically weak. I told him about the physical pain. I told him how it stole this boy’s will. And I told him about the carving. I told him that I was that boy.

Glenn followed this story like a road map when he stumbled upon Jenny in those woods. The rest of it—how he knew the ways to protect himself, the shaving, the condoms—he learned from the other inmates and the endless stories they divulged. I try not to dwell on the fact that he had gone there to rape my own son. That he had gone there to punish me, but then perhaps to give me a gift, the bond of empathy with this girl he had stumbled upon in the woods. With Jenny. How he thought this gift would bring me back to him. The gift in lieu of the punishment. This is what he told me that day in his apartment. That he had been flexible.

I was honest at the start of my tale. When I began to treat Jenny, my desire to give her back her memory was grounded in concepts of justice, and in my belief that it would heal her. Everything changed the moment I read about the carving in the police report. I have described how shocking information enters the brain and wreaks havoc. How it takes time to make the adjustments to the new reality. It was that way for me when I read those words. When my mind adjusted to the facts, the truth was undeniable. It could not be a coincidence. I knew with absolute certainty that Glenn Shelby had raped Jenny Kramer. And I knew he had done so because of me and the story I had shared with him.

Why, then, did I not run to Detective Parsons? Why did I not give Tom the vengeance he craved? Why did I deny my new patient her justice? How can I explain it now if you don’t already see? I had been alone for so very long. Yes, some of my patients are victims of assault. Of rape. But none of my patients had been so young. None of my patients had been carved, branded like an animal. There was no one else on this planet who could understand. I walked alone. Until Jenny Kramer. The sudden need to have her remember was more powerful than my conscience. And they would have taken that from me if I had told them the truth.

I went to see Glenn at his apartment when I thought I might need another plan to save my son. And to make sure he never came near my family again. There was more than one way to accomplish this.

It was not until I went through my son’s phone that I realized Glenn had gone to that party to harm Jason, that he had been stalking him through social media. Before that moment, I had na?vely believed that he had simply gone where there were children so he could find a victim, any victim. It had even crossed my mind that Teddy Duncan, the twelve-year-old boy next door, had been the target. Glenn knew I was twelve when I was attacked.

I am a better doctor to borderline patients now than I was when I first met Glenn. I understand the depths of the disease, the extent of their obsessions with an individual. And the lengths they will go to affect us. Before I left Glenn alone in his apartment, I told him poisonous things. And the poison is what killed him.

“You failed, Glenn. You did not hurt my son, and this gift you think you gave me was unsatisfying. Jenny is a girl. I was a boy. She was fifteen. I was twelve. I will not see you again. After today, I will not see you. There is nothing you can do that will ever change that. There is nothing you can do that will ever make you important to me.”