Cast a Pale Shadow(41)

"I'm not surprised. He has spent his life destroying his memories of his family, and his memories, in turn, have almost destroyed him."

"They hurt him? The scars?" Trissa vividly remembered the scars. "Old battles. Long forgotten," he'd told her.

"Yes. His father was -- is -- severely disturbed, psychotic, and quite violent at times, with episodes of prolonged catatonia. He's hospitalized now and will be for the rest of his life. But that happened too late to save Nicholas and his family.

"The case was quite notorious for awhile, though I expect you are too young to remember it, Trissa, and maybe it would not have received the notice here that it did up north. Nicholas had two sisters and a brother, all younger. His mother was a loving woman who struggled to keep her family safe from her husband's increasingly frequent rages. But in the end, she was helpless. He isolated her from her own family by moving them to Michigan from Ohio. When she objected to his treatment, he locked her out of the house and made her sleep in the garage. She called the police a couple of times, but he had the children so frightened that they lied about what went on at home. They thought they were protecting her. Their father had told them that the police would lock her up for being a bad mother and running away.

"Nicholas, when he was nine, stole the little ones away and hid them in a neighbor's abandoned dog kennels. He kept them warm and fed by breaking into homes and stealing blankets and food. He was afraid to go to anybody for help. He had no faith in adults. When they were found, it was Nicholas who was punished. He was placed in a boys' home for eight months. That confirmed to the other children what their father had threatened all along. He had them more tightly bound together than ever.

"I won't go into the worst of the abuse, but it took all forms. Nicholas was, in a way, the lucky one because he had a brief respite from it during his detention. By the time he was returned to his home, his mother had given up and sought her escape in prescription drug addiction. She spent nearly all her time sleeping. The oldest daughter, Valerie, had been forced to take her mother's place, in all ways possible."

Trissa shuddered and put her face in her hands.

"I think she's heard enough, Doctor," Augusta said.

"No, if it will help Nicholas, I have to hear it. Go on."

"Though there were periods of relative calm, Duncan Brewer eventually became so sick that he was no longer able to keep up the facade necessary to work and earn a living. He was fired from a series of jobs. The last occurred just before Thanksgiving when Nicholas was thirteen. Duncan drank for three days straight but demanded that a Thanksgiving dinner be prepared as if they were a Norman Rockwell painting family. Nicholas and Valerie tried but Duncan was not satisfied. He flew into a rage, smashed up the house, every dish, every stick of furniture. Then he killed them."

"No!" cried Trissa and Augusta together.

Fitapaldi pressed his fingers to his temples and nodded. "He killed them all. Or thought he had. He carried their bodies to a lake in the trunk of his car. Jill and Danny and his wife first. He took the bodies out to a duck blind and collapsed it on them. Then he came back for Valerie and Nicholas. Before he had a chance to dispose of their bodies, something spooked him, no one knows what, and he just let the brake go on the car and ran it into the lake. It was probably the cold water that saved Nicholas, slowed the bleeding. He lay, half-conscious, with his sister's body for hours, until some kids spotted the partially submerged car."

Trissa clung to Augusta for support. Both women's cheeks glistened with tears.

"We didn't do well by Nicholas even then. His physical wounds healed. A miracle, they called it. But grief and self-blame overwhelmed him, and he plummeted into a depression so severe that he had to be hospitalized to prevent him from harming himself.

"In that hospital, someone thought to try to work another miracle on him, and he underwent a series of experimental shock treatments. Imagine! On a thirteen year old! The treatments erased all memory of his childhood. Under the guardianship of the courts, he became a pawn, a guinea pig, treated with their drugs, experimental therapies, and shock treatments, until all but the most basic of his childhood memories were obliterated. He ceased to be Nicholas Brewer.

"That's when he became Cole. They thought to give him a new identity, a new life. But it didn't work. The memories return in bits and pieces. As Cole, he snatches on to them, like a lifeline. When he was eighteen, legally ready for the world, and no longer their responsibility, they released him. It was amazing that he was able to function at all.

"I came to know him because I work at a hospital where his father was committed for a time. When he remembers, Cole visits his father regularly. It seems a punishment he must put himself through. To keep himself remembering. And then one day, he'd just stop coming. For months we would hear nothing, then we might get a letter or a phone call from him, giving a new address, a new pseudonym. Cole Baker. Cole Baxter. Cole Burke."

"Nicholas Brewer."

"No, Nicholas is the name of the child Cole wishes he never was. He would never use that name, when he remembers."

"Might he someday become like his father? Is he dangerous?" Augusta asked.

"Augusta! No! How could you think that? He couldn't. I know Nicholas. He would never hurt -- could never hurt anyone like that." Trissa wanted to be with him at that very moment. She wanted to hold him and never let him go. It was more than his being sent to save her. They were sent for each other. No one else could understand each other's secret sorrows so well.

"I believe you are right, Trissa. Duncan Brewer is psychotic, completely dysfunctional. It is a disease for which the recovery rate is a scant five percent. Cole's disorder was not passed on from his father but induced by his father's abuse and, I'm convinced, the shock treatments -- though many would dispute me on that. For all I've known of Cole, he would sooner die than be the cause of another's suffering. His whole life shows that pattern. The many ways he tried to protect his brother and sisters, taking beatings for them, covering up for them against their father.

"But he does fear it -- becoming like his father. In the past, he has isolated himself from human contact so that no one would get close enough to become a victim should that happen."

"But Dr. Fitapaldi," said Augusta, "Nicholas is a charming, personable man. He has become a part of my family. He married Trissa."

"Yes. That surprised me. But then I never really met Nicholas."

"What do you mean?"

"Nicholas was lost. To the tragedy. To the shock treatments. Cole had buried all that was painful to him, the fact of being Nicholas too, long before I met him. It was the only way he could survive all that abuse, the memory of all that pain, to shut it off in various compartments so that Nicholas has a little, Cole a little more. As if he sensed that knowing the horrible whole of his tragedy would destroy him, he's sheltered his sanity in the only way he could."

"Sanity?" asked Augusta shakily. "Does he need... must he be..."

"Locked away? He is not insane, Mrs. Blackburn. Though I am sure such a life as he has had would have driven a weaker man to that. It would have been easy enough to escape into madness. It was almost expected of him. Instead, through a combination of intelligence, creativity, and will, Nicholas Brewer's mind grasps at survival, defending itself with periodic bouts of amnesia, a loss of self, a surrender of the whole in favor of the parts. I believe that in a desperate scramble to survive, Nicholas has pieced together a highly structured form of traumatic neurosis, shell shock, or posttraumatic stress. He seeks a way to buffer himself from real life but never to withdraw from it completely, as many with less reason than he would have. But the most important thing is that Nicholas -- Cole is a survivor. He'll survive this."

"What can I do for him?" asked Trissa, wiping her tears away with the palms of her hands.

"Do you love him?"

"Yes. Oh, yes."

"Good, because you will need that and more. He will not remember you. You are part of Nicholas' memory, not Cole's. Cole may reject you. He may do things to force you away from him. He shuns human attachments. He thinks himself unworthy of them. But if you love him, if you stick by him, you may be able to reach that part of him he hides so well and bring it to the surface. If that happens, he may be on his way to becoming whole once again.





Chapter Sixteen





Trissa rested her forehead against the cold, metal bed rail and watched Nicholas -- Cole -- sleep. Her eyes burned with the salt of her tears and every muscle in her own body ached with fatigue. In the hours since Dr. Fitapaldi had left, Cole had not stirred, or muttered, or moaned with pain.

The nurses who came to check his vital signs and change his IV bottle seemed to smile a little more. They had lost the cool distance Trissa imagined they must have to maintain with a patient they would lose. Nicholas' thick lashes lay against cheeks that were pinker now, and when she stroked them with the backs of her fingers, they seemed warmer.