Snow Creek(9)

My roommate, Maria, did.

“Look, Megan, either you get some help, or you’ll need to find someplace else to live. Your night terrors are turning into a problem for me. I’m sorry. It’s the way it has to be.” Maria took me to a counselor and after one session he referred me to Dr. Albright, a professor of psychology, who maintained a small practice outside of her university duties.

“She can help you better than I,” the bespectacled counselor said. “Don’t be afraid. You can do this.”

I told myself that I’ve never been afraid a day in my life.

It was a lie, of course.

I open the windows and pour some iced tea that I’d made that morning before work.

The box is where I left it. How I left it. It sits in the back of the closet, taped shut.

“You’ll want these someday,” Dr. Albright had said.

I refused it at first. “I can’t see that happening.”

She smiled. “Trust me. You will. The day will come and listening to the tapes will make you even stronger.”

She put her arms around me. We both cried. We held each other for a long time. I knew it wasn’t goodbye forever, but it was the end of therapy that had spanned a year and a half. I was graduating from the university with a degree in criminology and had enrolled in the police academy in suburban Seattle.

I carry the small black box from the back of the closet and set it on the kitchen table. I take a kitchen knife—the irony of my action gives me pause—from the drawer and slit it open.

I draw a breath and peer inside.

More than two dozen mini cassettes, each numbered with the dates on which they were recorded. Dr. Albright had also, quite thoughtfully, enclosed a tape recorder.

I switch to wine.

My hand wobbles again as I insert a tape. Damn! My finger hovers and I push PLAY. I hear Dr. Albright’s soft, kind voice. She addresses me by a name that I no longer use, a name that I hope has been forgotten by everyone who ever knew it.



Dr. A: Put me there, Rylee. Take me step by step through what happened, what you did.

Me: Okay. I got home from school, and I heard the water running in the bathroom sink. I just knew my mother would bitch at me for leaving it on. Even though I didn’t. Mom had been critical of me, while praising my little brother, Hayden—despite the fact he didn’t do much to deserve it. If he remembered to flush the toilet after a late-night pee, she practically did handstands the next morning. Mom had always been harder on me.

Dr. A: Why do you think that was?

Me: She always said it was because I had so much potential. Which meant that whatever I did disappointed her. Like homeschooling. Mom was big on that. She homeschooled Hayden.

Dr. A: Why didn’t you want that?

Me: That’s easy and pathetic. I just wanted to fit in with other people. I didn’t want to be the loser at the mall who had no social skills and didn’t know what’s in and what isn’t. How to wear my hair or whatever. You really can’t learn all you need to know from TV or the internet, and contrary to what most people think—that all kids that age do is hang out online—it’s not true for all of us. Not for me at least. I’m a watcher. An observer. I liked being out in the real world, mostly because my home life was always so fake.

Dr. A: You said you enrolled in school.

Me: Right. I was a sophomore at South Kitsap High School in Port Orchard. While I didn’t know for sure if I was fifteen or sixteen (long pause)—it’s complicated—I knew that for the first time in a long time that I actually fit in somewhere. That was no small feat. By then, we’d moved fourteen times. I think. So many times that I’ve lost track. But in Port Orchard, no one asked any awkward questions about where we lived before because people came and went around there all the time. Across the inlet was the naval shipyard. Moms and dads would arrive in the naval ships or go out to the Pacific on their way to the nearest war. Kids would come later and stay in crummy housing near the shipyard or the submarine base a little farther north. In a way, all the moving around that other people did made me feel as though I was actually part of something stable.

Dr. A: I understand, Rylee, I do. Let’s go back to that afternoon… after you got home from school.

Me: (long pause). Right. I heard Hayden squawking as I turned off the running water in the bathroom. I looked down at the toilet bowl, the water was the color of sunshine, and I dropped the lever and the whirlpool sucked down my little brother’s pee. Then…

Dr. A: Why are you stopping?

Me: It’s stupid.

Dr. A: Nothing is stupid. You need to trust me and trust the process. Everything, Rylee.

Me: It is stupid, but here goes. I remember glancing at myself in the mirror above the sink. Thinking how average I was. Sometimes I had actually wished that I had a big hairy mole on my chin or something that could distinguish me from other girls. The ones who lurk in the halls at school with pleading eyes and heavy eyeliner that makes them look more glamorous than I am. At my school before Port Orchard, I adopted a kind of Goth persona and really piled on the mascara—two extra coats of the blackest I could find. My dad thought I looked kind of slutty, but I told him that’s what I needed to look like in order to blend in.

Dr. A: Blend in?

Me: Right, Dr. Albright, my whole life has been about blending in, being invisible. My hair is brown now—not chestnut, not auburn, just a nondescript brown, the color of the bark of the dead tree near my dorm. My real hair color could be blond, but it has been dyed so many times I have forgotten what shade it actually is.