For a few panicky moments, I couldn’t recall my wardrobe and where things were. He saw the fear in my face. How was I going to adjust to what Dr. Sacks called a “normal life” if I couldn’t even deal with such an ordinary request? What made her think I was ready?
“I could pick things out for you,” my father said quickly, seeing my hesitation. “I warn you, however, that your mother never thought I had any sense of fashion. Whenever I dressed myself, she would pounce like a drill instructor in a marine training camp and send me back to the closet. Remember?” he asked, smiling.
“Yes. Just choose any pair of jeans. I have some white blouses in the closet, and you’ll find a light pink sweater on the shelf. There should be a blue denim jacket beside it.” I almost couldn’t say the words, but I did so quickly. “You’ll find my bras and panties in the dresser drawers with my socks. Just any pair of running shoes.”
“Got it,” he said. “They’re doing your paperwork, so I’ll be back in an hour or so.”
One of the nurses stepped in to take my vitals. She told my
father she would help me take a shower and get ready to leave. I still didn’t have enough hair to brush. One of Anthony Cabot’s punishments was to cut it down to my scalp. After the nurse left, my father sat on the bed and took my left hand in his.
“We’re going to be all right, Kaylee. Both of us will help each other through all this. I promise.”
He leaned in to kiss me, and instinctively, I cringed and turned my head. He kissed me on my temple.
He didn’t have to tell me. I thought it myself instantly.
The longer I suffer, the longer I fear, the more I will hate my sister.
Mother, of course, would say, “The longer you will hate yourself.”
1
It had taken me almost two months after my rescue and recuperation to build up the courage to visit Haylee in the juvenile detention center where she was undergoing psychiatric evaluation and counseling, the result of an agreement between the district attorney and the defense attorney my father had to hire for her. With Mother also still in a mental hospital at the time, my father, despite how disappointed he was in Haylee, was the only one who really could be involved in her present and future. Our grandparents and my father’s brothers and their families were too far away to be of real assistance and still in quite a state of shock over what had happened to me and what Haylee had done.
My father was overwhelmed himself by all that had occurred and had decided to take a leave of absence from his work for a few weeks after I was released from intensive psychiatric care following my rescue. He wanted to spend more time with me. Dr. Sacks had explained to him as well as to me that I had constantly to learn how to live with the memories of my horrible entrapment. He wanted to be there to help. Even though he needed the quiet time to handle all the legal and family issues, I knew he had put aside his professional life mostly to be there for me. In his mind, one of his daughters was probably lost forever. There was still a chance to save the other.
My father had lived with Haylee alone, too, while I was still trapped in Anthony Cabot’s basement apartment, because Mother was in a mental hospital. No one at the time, including him, knew what Haylee had done. My father admitted that the police detectives had some suspicions concerning Haylee, but he wouldn’t let them pursue her because he couldn’t imagine her doing what she had done. A central part of her plan was never to reveal to Anthony Cabot that she had a twin sister, so he was convinced that I was Haylee when I met him at that clandestine rendezvous my sister had arranged.
Returning home felt so strange. Everything reminded me of Haylee and Mother, and it was weird at first not seeing either of them or hearing their voices and footsteps. Everything familiar had a different look to it. During those early hours at home, I anticipated Haylee popping out of a room or rushing up the stairs to tell me something “we must never tell anyone else or hope to die!”
The silence was loud and in some ways was the most difficult thing to contend with, especially those first few nights, when I had to have my bedroom lights on and the door open. I don’t think my father slept very much, either. He was probably lying there in his bed, poised to jump up and rush to my side because a nightmare had exploded behind my closed eyelids.
Gradually, things improved, but almost as soon as my father brought me home, he and I immediately began to talk about my attending a private prep school, just as Dr. Sacks had intimated. From the things my father said, I realized he had obviously done a good deal of research on them.
“I agree with Dr. Sacks. I think you need a fresh start,” he said. “Make new friends. I found what I think is one of the best schools for you, Littlefield. It’s about sixty miles northeast of here. It has a great academic reputation. I took a ride to see it. It’s on a beautiful campus just outside the city of Carbondale, and what I like the most is that the class sizes are pretty small. You’ll get a lot of personal attention.”
“Personal attention? More counseling?” I grimaced. “All my teachers will know and be expected to handle me in a special way?”
“No, no, of course not. Nothing concerning what has happened will be anyone’s business,” he quickly said. “We’ll tell no one anything, not even the administration. You’ll be just like any other student transferring in from a public school or a different private school.”
“What if someone looks me up on the Internet? There were newspaper stories.”
“Why would anyone do that, Kaylee? Look,” he added, leaning forward, “you have to let it go, too. I know it’s very difficult to do that, but if you don’t, then, as Dr. Sacks says, you’ll always be a victim. Right?”
“Right.”
I wasn’t going to disagree about the school. I was still quite fragile, and talk about making so dramatic a new move frightened me. However, Dr. Sacks and I had spent a great deal of our time together talking about how I thought I was going to feel when and if I returned to my present school and my friends began asking me questions, hoping to get me to give them the disgusting details. I knew what concerned her as well as me. How could I not think everyone would look at me and think of me as a victim forever? Most would assume I had been raped repeatedly during my abduction. They would see my denial as some sort of mental defense, smile, nod, and tell me how happy they were that it hadn’t happened, but surely they would whisper about it when I wasn’t around. Their suspicions would haunt me. Their eyes would study my face, my hands, my arms, any part of me that was exposed, looking for scars.
Actually, that sort of thing began as soon as people heard I had come home. Friends began to call, each one eager to be the first who had heard something, but I refused to speak to anyone. I knew what really lay beneath something as innocuous as “How are you now?” or “Thank God you were rescued.” They would all hope to trigger a flood of information from me, information they would take and spread like birdseed at the front door of every other classmate.
My silence was unambiguous. I wouldn’t tell anyone anything, no matter who it was. Some tried a few times and finally gave up. Soon no one called. I wouldn’t accept any visitors, either, nor did I go anywhere on my own. My father was aware of how troubled I was about having to face down those inquisitive eyes. He tried to fill my time by taking me to restaurants out of our area and shopping in Philadelphia. At times, I thought he was in almost as deep a depression as Mother, who remained in the hospital. His emotions were inside a ping-pong ball bouncing from rage at Haylee and, of course, my abductor to sympathy for me, even sympathy for himself, and sometimes careening to compassionately consider Mother’s condition, although I always had the sense that he countered her accusations against him by placing all the blame on her.
For weeks after I came home, he and I tried to make sense of it all. We talked for hours sometimes after dinner, and when I was finally able to describe in detail some of the terrible things I had endured, his face would redden and his lips would drip his rage at Haylee. I didn’t want to upset my father, but Dr. Sacks had urged me to do this, to confront the demons. “The more you do, the faster you will defeat them,” she said. Nevertheless, I knew it gave my father nightmares, as it still did to me.
Ironically, however, the more he voiced his anger at Haylee, the sorrier I felt for her, which also made me sorrier for myself. I guess I couldn’t help it. It was instinctive. We had lived this long protecting and sympathizing with each other. How could I stop doing it now, no matter what the circumstances? Mother was never angry at one of us without being angry at the other. That was still true.
Haylee wasn’t in a terrifying basement of terror like I had been, but just like me, she had a seemingly impossible challenge to overcome. How could she ever return to this world, her friends, and our school? The story was out; she was quite the villain, and I was quite the victim. Neither of us could face familiar faces. The irony was that we were still looking at the world in a similar way, and it was still looking at us the way it had. We were never able to throw off the oddity of being so similar in appearance. People called us the “Mirr