Snow Creek(72)

“Look, I can see you don’t really understand. Not every criminal is caught. Not every victim is believed.”

“I know that, but I still don’t understand. It’s worth a try, right?”

“Your mother did file a report. And she had her body probed and scraped for evidence. She said it was nearly as humiliating as what he’d done to her. She even told me once that she felt the police and the doctors were almost an extension of her captor’s crimes. Their questions were like acid poured over her wounds. They didn’t think that she had been abused, raped, whatever. Our mother—your grandmother—didn’t believe her. Even I wondered about it.”

“But why didn’t anyone believe her?”

“Because she’d been captured once before.”

A pause.

“Or she said she was.”

Now I am confused. Completely.

“The year before she was raped,” she goes on, “your mom disappeared. She claimed she’d been kidnapped, well…” I can tell by the way she’s wringing her hands that this part is hard for her to disclose. The torture of my mother was, oddly, easier. “She’d run off to be with a boy. She had gone to the coast. She was afraid she would get in trouble, so she made up a story.”

My aunt catches the look on my face. She pounces. “She was kidnapped. She was brutalized by that monster who raped her. She wasn’t lying about any of that.”

Her explanation placates me only a little. “So, if she made a complaint to the police, why did he carry on stalking her? If it was all out in the open, he had to know that even if he wasn’t arrested that the police would be watching his every move.”





I go back to the kitchen table and fast forward through the last bit of the tape, the words that changed my life.

And made me do what I did.



Me: Aunt Ginger said the police didn’t believe her… past incident… might have been more to it…

Dr. A: …must have been painful… how could it be?

Me: …friends in the sheriff’s office… made evidence disappear…

Dr. A: Why didn’t the rapist just leave her alone?

Me: … got away… he is.





I speed to the end of the tape. Much of it seems blank, just hissing. I’m almost to the point of flipping over, when I hear my voice say my mom had something my biological dad, her attacker, wanted.

I hold my fingertips to my lips. Tears tumble down as they did that evening in Aunt Ginger’s darkened living room, and later, in Dr. Albright’s room.

Me: My aunt started to cry. And then I did. Even before she said another word. It was like she was warning me. Or breaking a trust with my mother. I don’t know. Her words came out one at a time.

You.

He.

Said.

He.

Wanted.

You.





My stomach roils. My eyes mist over. I suddenly feel like I’m being sucked inside of my past. I need to talk to the only person who knows the story—at least most of it.





Forty-Nine





It’s against department policy and I know it, but I find Karen Albright’s address through the DMV database. She’s in her sixties by now, retired from her practice, and living in Woodland, a small community not far from the Oregon/Washington state line. As I drive southward on the interstate, I think about what I want to say to the doctor who saved me from where I was going. She led me to what I needed to do. She didn’t preach. She didn’t convince. She simply let me know that what I am can be good.

No matter where I came from.

Mindy and Sheriff only know bits and pieces. Not all of it. Not the really terrible things I did and why.

Hayden does. Most of it. He’d never betray me.

I loosen my grip on the steering wheel. The cut on my hand has reopened. Red blooms through the layer of medical gauze. Red. The color I know best.



Dr. Albright’s house is a lively seafoam green and trimmed in cream. I’ve never been there, but I know at once it has to be her place. Out front is a massive forsythia bush. It’s fully leafed, yet its spider-like limbs betray it. When I first went to see her, she had a vase of bare branches in her office.

“Not pretty now,” she had told me. “Just wait. Beauty comes from the most unlikely places, Rylee. You’ll see.”

It was February and the world outside was cold and gray. It was the way I had felt inside too. Also empty. Hurt. It was as if I was floating on a sheet of ice in the middle of a lake with the shore completely out of reach. Hopeless.

The next time I had gone to see the doctor the twigs had sprouted a hundred bright yellow trumpet-shaped blooms.

“See?” she’d told me. “You’re like those budding branches. We’ll get you to bloom again.”

I get out of my Taurus, smiling faintly at the memory of those flowers and how she forced blooms from naked twigs.

I knock and the door swings open right away.

Even though it has been more than a decade, Dr. Albright looks the same, just a kind of bleached-out image of exactly how she was. Her hair is even whiter than I remembered, and her skin now is a page of wrinkled paper.

Recognition immediately comes to her face.