The Night Before(81)

I know what he would say, because after a short while, I asked him to help me understand my mind. I could see that he was different. That he was not like the other men I had pulled close only to push them away or be hurt by them. Devastated. Immersed in pain that was so familiar.

I suppose this is a gift he left me. This understanding of my mind, which, ironically, I can now believe in.

Jonathan Fielding. The third man. He is everything he said he was. Just a man. A guy. Stumbling his way through life. Through his mother’s death and his divorce and his job and his car needing a repair and trying to be sexy again as a single man with a younger woman. Loneliness. Hope. Desire. All of it had been real. Everything he said to me had been true.

And now he has paid the price for that.

More facts have come out in the past several hours. Gabe had seen a therapist throughout his teen years. He had a breakdown in college and spent three months as an inpatient. We were all told he was studying abroad.

As for Rick, he joined the army right after he graduated from military school. After a long string of violent outbursts, he was eventually dishonorably discharged, and later sent to prison for a gruesome bar fight that left a man dead.

Violence. Secrets. Mental illness. Right next door in the Wallaces’ house.

Two men dead. And also one woman.

Melissa Wallace was strangled to death and stuffed in a bag. She’d never gone on a business trip. She just got too nosy. Too angry at her husband’s obsessions. She got in the way.

I’ve gone over every detail of my life with the investigators. From the first memory of my childhood to knocking Rick Wallace off Gabe by the fort, to kissing Rick in a game of spin the bottle and all of the things I knew about his violence toward Gabe. I told them about the night in the woods and how I didn’t see him, how I didn’t know it was Gabe. And how I now know that I did not swing that bat. Not once.

After I left for college, there were other strange incidents that now raise questions. Men who left suddenly and without much explanation. These were my wolves, the “wrong” men I chose so they would hurt me. So I could try to make them love me, but then prove to myself I was unlovable so I could play the old record of my childhood over and over.

We are drawn to the familiar, even if it hurts us.

But now I wonder which ones were wolves, and which ones left because of Gabe. There was a guy freshman year who told me he couldn’t date someone with a crazy ex-boyfriend. At the time I thought maybe he meant Mitch Adler. I thought he’d discovered my real last name, like Jonathan Fielding had, and read about my past and that night in the woods. I told the investigators about it and they are tracking him down. I suppose he will tell them that Gabe paid him a visit.

Gabe knew everything about my life because I told him. Every bad date. Every painful breakup. He was always there to comfort me. And, in his mind, to protect me. But what did he do with this knowledge? I fear what we will find.

Rosie and Joe sit with me in the room. Rosie says it is the same room where she saw my phone records, and where Joe confessed what he knew about the past just hours before.

A forensic psychologist is with us, along with a young man who is training to be one. He is going to learn a lot today.

“I just don’t understand,” Rosie says. She’s said it a dozen times since we got here. I can feel her remorse, though she has been nothing but heroic.

Joe sits quietly now that he has the facts. He seems to understand Gabe in a way that we don’t. He sits between us, one arm around Rosie and another around me. We huddle together in a giant heap of emotional chaos.

The forensic psychologist mostly asks questions, but she also tries to explain the possible scenarios.

“Sometimes during a childhood trauma, especially one that is ongoing, the child will create an unrealistic attachment to someone who makes him feel safe. That person becomes so crucial to his emotional survival that he has to have her all to himself. In this case, it is possible that Gabe developed that attachment to Laura. You said she was brave, even though she was just a little girl?”

Joe nods and even smiles a little like he’s proud of me. Proud that he’s my brother. “She was brave. And fierce.”

But all I can think is that everything I was and everything I did back then contributed to this psychotic attachment that has now left three people dead.

The psychologist nods as well.

“And, Laura, you were the only one who knew about his brother, right?”

“Except for his mother. And my mother,” I say, and I cannot hide my anger.

“But Gabe only told you. And you were the only one who tried to stop it. That’s what matters. You became essential to his survival.”

Rosie sniffles now even though the tears are gone. “I don’t understand,” she says again. “Why didn’t he try to be with her? To date her or be physical with her in any way? Why didn’t he try to marry her when they were older?”

Now a shrug and a tilt of the head. She doesn’t know. But she offers a theory.

“It’s likely he needed to keep those things separate. Sexualizing Laura risked making her vulnerable or weaker in his eyes. The act of sex involves a kind of submission by both parties. It exposes us in ways we don’t share with everyone. I suspect he needed to keep her pure.”

I lean forward now. Something bothers me about all this.

“Gabe said he was my protector. He said he had to protect me from the men I was with. But you’re saying he saw me as his protector.”