Snow Creek(71)

Dr. A: Rylee, what did your aunt tell you? About your mother?

Me: Sorry. Just thinking about it. How incredible and awful it all seemed to me.

Dr. A: But you’re here now. You’re safe.

Me: (pause). I think so. But I don’t know for sure. No one really does.

Dr. A: I suppose that’s so. You’re no longer in imminent danger.





I don’t say it, but I remember thinking it at the time. That’s what you think, Doctor.

I see our conversation in pictures. My aunt sitting on the sofa, looking away from me to tell her story. I play the whole scene in my mind.





“When I was twenty, your mom was sixteen,” she told me. “She was coming home from feeding the neighbor’s cat. It was summer, and the dahlias were in bloom. We had planned to go out shopping after dinner. She needed a new outfit for a party at the end of the month.” Aunt Ginger hesitated, lost in a memory that might have been bittersweet and horrific at the same time. I gave her a minute. I have memories like that too; the kind that take me far away from the present.

“No one saw it happen,” my aunt said, back from wherever her thoughts had taken her. “I mean, she just vanished. It was as if Courtney was just lifted up away from home by a helicopter or something. There was no trace of her. Nothing.”

She stopped short.

I wanted an answer. “What happened?”

Again, Aunt Ginger weighed how much she’ll say. I wanted it all, but she looked at me and sees a kid. She had no idea how much strength I had or what I would do for my family.

“How much do you know?” she finally asked me.

“I know who my real father is, if that’s what you’re asking.”

Me: Aunt Ginger tells me she’s so sorry, or something lame like that. I just let it float away from me. I didn’t want apologies, Doctor. I wanted to know. I mean, here I was fifteen and my bio dad was a serial killer and that meant we shared a ladder of DNA code steeped in violence and murder.

Then she tells me. “Your mom was abducted by a monster. That’s what happened.” It was so empty. So, nothing. It was what I’d already known from the letter and clippings. I asked her for more. I needed to know details. If he took her again, then I wanted to find her.

Dr. A: How did she react?

Me: Weird. She said a couple of things. That I wouldn’t be able to find her and, here’s what I thought was so wrong, she said my mom wouldn’t want me to find her. She was insistent that we’d be better off just moving on or something.

Dr. A: How did that make you feel?

Me: Pissed. I told my aunt that no way was I going to just let my mom die. And that she’d left all the things in the safe deposit box, so I could find her. Even a gun.





I turn off the tiny machine. I know every word of what’s to come. I go to the refrigerator and retrieve a bottle of water. I don’t want wine. I don’t want beer. The window facing the Port Townsend Bay calls to me and I go to it, looking at a car go by on the street in front of my house. A dog running around loose. A woman with a crackly voice calling for that dog to come home.

I think of Aunt Ginger crumbling under the weight of her story. I had come unannounced and reopened a wound that had not yet healed. Not in sixteen years. I never thought about that until now. I never considered her situation. Only mine. Only Hayden’s and mine.

I watch the scene outside my window, but I only see my aunt and me, sitting in her darkened living room.





“Start,” I say to her. “Tell me everything.”

She inhales half the oxygen in the room. It’s a long pause. Not of the kind to create drama, but the kind to stoke some courage.

“Your mom said she stopped to help someone who was trying to load some things into the back of a truck. The things weren’t heavy, she told me later. Just awkward. Your mom is like that. Always helping people. When she wasn’t looking, he came from behind her and put something over her mouth. Chloroform, she thinks. It could have been something else…”

She let her words trail off. I give her a moment. Reliving whatever happened to Mom is painful.

For her.

For me.

Her words pummel me: “captive, abused, tortured.” She says that my mother was subjected to the vilest of humiliations. She says that only the sickest, most depraved mind could conceive of the things done to her. Now that she started, it all comes tumbling out, and my aunt seems to be in another, horrifying, world until her eyes focus back on mine, realizing who I am. How old I am.

I remember her staring at me with her pale, penetrating eyes. She wanted me to understand the next part, to embrace it.

“A weaker person would have folded and given up,” she says. “Courtney is the bravest girl who ever lived.”

How she could say that? Mom, brave? We’d been running all of our lives. Exactly how is hiding brave?

“How did she get away?” I ask.

“She said she was able to drug his coffee. She doesn’t even know what the pills she used were. She should have cut his throat while she had the chance. It was the biggest mistake of her life. She regretted it more than anyone could ever know. She said she was too weak to kill him, no matter what he’d done to her.”

“Why didn’t she just go to the police and have him arrested?”