Bury Me(44)

Nolan’s mother might have given me another piece of the puzzle, no matter how weird and confusing it was. Her words didn’t evoke any memories, but they still left me feeling uneasy and—I hate to say it—afraid. Fear is for the weak, and I will never be weak again.

“T means death, death means T,” I say out loud again, hoping it will trigger something. Obviously the letter T stands for something. Picking up the pencil again, I start writing names I know that begin with T.

Tanner Duskin, my father

Trudy, now my ex-best friend

There’s only one more person I know whose name begins with the letter T and my hand starts to shake when I merely think his name. I hear a loud snap and realize I just broke the pencil in half from squeezing it so hard. Closing my eyes and taking a few deep breaths, I drop the eraser end of the pencil and use the small broken tip to write the last name.

Dr. Raymond Thomas…

I put an ellipsis after his name because I have no idea who he is to me. I only know that his name fills me with dread, makes my skin crawl, and fills me with the urge to scream at the top of my lungs until my throat is raw.

I’ve avoided thinking about him since the night my mother shot herself. When I asked her about him, she said something about how he only did what they asked him to do. I’m assuming she meant her and my father, but who knows? She might not have even been talking about the doctor. For all I know, she hadn’t even heard me say his name and was rambling about something else.

I can’t avoid it any longer. I have to think about him, even if my mind is screaming at me to run away because it will do nothing but hurt me. There has to be a reason why just the mention of his name by Dr. Beall caused me to black out on the stairs. There has to be a plausible explanation for why the few times his name has quickly flown through my mind by accident since then, I feel like someone is physically causing me pain, and I have to stop, remember to breathe, and calm down.

When I heard his name, it was almost as if he became one with my most painful memories and the scariest dreams I’ve had since this all began. Even if I know it’s something I have to remember to put all of this missing information in my mind together once and for all, it’s still something I’ve been refusing to do since that night.

Those memories make me feel so much more than the comfort of hate and anger. They make me want to do more than just fantasize about harming people. It’s one thing to think about these things and realize there might be something just a little bit strange about myself. It’s a whole other nightmare to feel so overwhelmed by those feelings—by the mere thought of one man—that I know without a shadow of a doubt that I could end someone’s life and not feel bad about it at all.

I’m not a killer. I don’t know much, but at least I know that.

Right when I come to terms with it, forcing myself to think about that man just to see if I can remember something about the person who elicits so much pain inside me, I hear the door to my father’s office fly open, slamming against the opposite wall.

Pushing the chair away from the table, I get up and hurriedly go to the kitchen doorway to see my father head toward the stairs.

“We’re out of whiskey. I can’t believe Claudia hasn’t bought more. I’ll have to speak to her about it,” my father mumbles as he stomps down the stairs, the keys to his car jangling in his hand.

I was fully prepared to bang on his door later to demand he come out and talk to me. I figured I had nothing to lose by telling him I’ve started remembering things, just to see what he would say, even though I’m pretty positive he would just continue lying. He seems to be an expert at that. I want him to know that I’m aware that he lied to both Dr. Beall and me when he said he didn’t know how I got back to the prison after getting hurt that night. I want to be looking him in the eye when he realizes that I know all about the threats he made to Nolan, and I want to see his reaction when I mention the name of Dr. Thomas.

Hearing him speak to himself about my mother like she’s still alive immediately kills that plan. I should probably stop him from driving anywhere in his condition, but at this point I don’t really care if he crashes his car and hurts himself, or even if he gets himself killed. He’s avoided me for days, the first time he even looked at me being the night my mother killed herself, and he shouted accusations and blame at me. He quickly laid waste to the silly notions I had when I first woke up after the accident, that he was a good father and truly loved me. I shouldn’t have ignored my instincts that day in the cell block, when it felt foreign to hug him, as if I’d never done it before. I shouldn’t have brushed aside the gut feelings I had that he was lying to me from day one. Maybe if I had listened to what my head was telling me sooner, I’d have remembered everything by now.