Authors: Joanne DeMaio
“Your doctor? What’s up?”
“Yesterday’s up. I can’t be having any more flashbacks like I did at the mall and needed advice. He told me that flashback triggers are activated by things related to the trauma.” She picks up the notepad where she wrote a bulleted column. “Locations, smells, sights, sounds, people, touch. The brain remembers in a lot of ways.”
“Okay. Makes sense.” Celia bites into a chocolate frosted doughnut.
“Some triggers can be as vague as time of day, or if I’m in the right frame of mind, even a certain touch can stimulate a flashback.”
“But you’ll be facing triggers all the time,” Celia answers around the mouthful of food, sucking a glob of sugar from her manicured finger. “So how do you stay in control?”
“Practice. I really have to manage the flashbacks.” She lifts the page to the listed controls and slides the pad to Celia. “If you know these too, you can help me if it ever happens while I’m with you?”
“Maybe.” A quick smile comes and goes, one that says she is sorry Amy’s life has come to this. Celia pulls her chair in close. “Let’s practice now.” With a long sip of coffee, her eyes scan the page. “So these are what you can do if you feel a flashback coming on?” she asks.
Amy nods, waiting to start.
“All right. First. Breathe slowly and deeply. Focus totally on the act of breathing.”
Amy fills her lungs with a long breath of air and exhales. The sunny window over the kitchen sink faces her and she closes her eyes against its image, paying attention only to the feeling of deep breathing. Focusing like this makes her aware of the effort necessary to breathe in a slow manner, reducing her heart rate as well. With the next breath, she slows the process even further.
“Good. Now visualization. Mentally travel to a safe spot. Or use spirituality. Turning to your faith helps those who are religious.”
New Hampshire is ever her place of safety, sitting in her parents’ kitchen. Something cooks beneath the lid of a big pot on the stove. Her mother moves between the sink and the table, and her father stokes the old stone fireplace. Sitting in the plaid-cushioned wooden chairs feels like sitting in a pew. The same peace is found there as in a dimly lit church. “I’m with Mom,” she whispers.
Celia smiles and looks down at the pad. “Next. Plant yourself, setting both feet flat on the ground. Try to slip out of your shoes and do this barefoot. You want the sensation of being solidly grounded, right where you actually are.”
And not in the flashback
, goes unsaid. So Amy stands in her denim board shorts and pink tee, pressing her bare soles into the cool wide-planked kitchen floor, committing the steps to memory by physically doing them now before any anxiety strikes.
I’m home
, she thinks from behind closed eyes.
I’m in control
. The grained wood planks meet her skin.
“That’s it? Just simple things like that?” Celia asks.
Amy hesitates, then turns and picks up the prescription bottle from the kitchen counter. “There’s this, too. It’s a mild tranquilizer. If a situation upsets me, or if I feel I’m losing a sense of control, I can take one as needed.”
“They’re not too strong?”
“No. Just enough to take the edge off my nerves.” She sits beside Celia and they read the label together, Celia’s fingertip following the lines of print. “They might help,” Amy adds quietly. “Especially if they keep me calm with Grace. Because what happened yesterday at the mall absolutely cannot happen again. Ever.”
That’s what this all boils down to. Grace.
The kidnappers, weeks later, still, even now, continue to take her child further from her. Because if she flashbacks in public and risks Grace’s safety again, Amy knows her daughter could be removed from her custody. One sunny day, four men took Grace, and really? She glances into the living room. She still hasn’t gotten her back yet.
* * *
Each day at three o’clock, the church bells ring on Main Street. When he hears them chime today, George turns up the flight of granite steps, pulling open the heavy door and sitting in a rear pew. Sunshine streams in through the stained glass windows, casting an unfamiliar illumination to the space. In the echoing quiet of a church at midday, he feels like everything has turned unfamiliar. Nothing makes sense. Several parishioners walk in, pause, step behind pleated curtains into the confessional and walk out again. The thick velvet curtains hang in heavy deep red folds, the soft pleats falling in refinement right down to the floor.
As each penitent lifts the drape, George wonders about their sins. A man in his mid-sixties, a young woman who looks no older than twenty-one, a nicely dressed middle-aged couple. What can their sins be? Do their digressions compare to his? Do their sins keep them awake late at night, or open the Scotch for a long drink at three in the morning, or clamp their stomachs down against food? One by one they emerge, briefly kneel and depart. After an hour, when the church empties, he sidesteps out of the pew, walks down the aisle, lifts the velvet curtain and kneels.
The small dark space embraces him and he shifts his shoulders as though he has to fit into it before pulling the photograph from his pocket and squinting at the grainy details. His finger traces over Amy’s troubled face. The photograph is what brings him to his knees. There is nowhere else in the world to turn for guidance.
He slips the photograph back into his pocket and bows his head, waiting. Following a long pause, the wooden window before him slides open in dark shadow.
George straightens. “Bless me Father,” he murmurs, the words carrying the full grave weight of every word, look and thought that contributed to Amy’s trauma. He glances at the shadowed outline before him and shifts on the kneeler, feeling the cushion below his knees, his peripheral vision sensing the velvet curtain folds beside him keeping out the light. After dropping his head for a long moment, he looks up again. The priest waits silently for George to go on, leaving him feeling like he is falling into a dark chasm, the wind rushing past as the fall quickens.
“Father, I need help.”
The priest raises his hand in the sign of a cross and begins with a quiet blessing. The low voice sounds fluid, a deep brook flowing over stones, the intonations rising and falling easily. George can’t be sure if the solemn words are spoken in English or Latin, reaching far back into the faith for credence.
“What’s troubling you?” the priest then asks.
George hears every small sound within the confessional, including his own long breath drawing behind his clasped hands. He hears that the priest’s voice is not young and hears the rustle of black fabric as he brings an arm up and leans his forehead on his closed hand.
“Father. Before I begin this, I need to ask you a question. I’m not really sure how to ask, but what I need to know is what your obligation is in hearing confessions.”
“As a confessor,” the priest slowly begins, “I am bound to be both a judge and healer. So my obligation works in two ways, devoted both to the salvation of souls as well as to the honor of God.”
“No. That’s not what I meant.” George clears his throat. “What is your responsibility to the information you hear in a confession? Is it confidential?”
The priest lifts his head but keeps his gaze down. “The sacramental seal is inviolable. Canon Law prohibits me from disclosing your sins, for any reason at all, in any possible way. I am also forbidden to share the knowledge about any sin learned from hearing a confession with civil authorities, or for any purpose of external governance.” He assures him quietly, “You are very safe here. Would you like to continue your confession?”
“Father, the fact is I have a difficult decision to make, but I’m not sure that I’m really here for a confession.” George’s voice is low. Is it a sin that he protected Grace? “I have to right a wrong that’s been done, and I don’t know how to do it without hurting someone.”
“Sometimes it helps to go back and look carefully at the path that brought you to this point. What started all this?” the priest asks. “What does your being here stem from?”
“A crime.”
“Is that why you’re here? To seek absolution from the crime?”
“No. I’m not ready to do that.”
“Maybe it will help in your decision to turn that corner and seek absolution as a starting point.”
Burning tears sting his eyes. What the hell is happening to him? He can’t think straight, can’t sleep, can’t work. He wants nothing more than deliverance from the evil stacks of currency in his tiled kitchen wall, the evil in the semiautomatic weapon in his dresser drawer, the evil that is yet to come.
“I don’t know.” He bows his head on his clasped hands. “Right now I’m afraid at how my life, and something I did, is hurting someone else.” When did he stop being a good person, deserving of pride and respect? He doesn’t want to be this other person. “I’ve got to come clean with someone I love.”
“Why not start here?”
George watches the priest’s dark silhouette long enough to see him breathe. To see him live without trepidation. To live the life he’s chosen.
“I want you to know that I didn’t choose to end up in this situation,” George whispers defensively. “Maybe this isn’t right. Maybe I shouldn’t even be here.” He half rises before sinking back to his knees. Here he has an ally. Here his story stays safe behind the velvet curtains. Here this priest can carefully sort out God’s plan for George in all of this. He will remind him that Grace is alive.
“Okay, Father,” he whispers. “How do I begin this thing?” The priest drops his head and purely listens. No one takes notes, his voice is not being recorded, and reporters won’t wait outside afterward as he tells the story. Some day, he will have to repeat these same words to a man who
will
take notes. Detective Hayes will record every nuance and the reporters will be waiting everywhere he turns.
For now, his words blur into a low monotone that will forever hum through his memory. He closes his eyes for most of the talk, being aware of only his breathing and his low voice.
Astute questions occasionally come at him through the dark, at which point he hesitates and hears his mouth swallow. A slight ringing fills his ears in the pause before he answers the priest’s questions, his dry tongue thickening the syllables of kidnapping and stalking and fear.
“You have to tell her.”
“Tell her?” George asks. “Just like that?”
“Yes, at least that she is being followed. She deserves that much. In God’s abundant love,” the priest explains, “He wishes for us not only to seek His pardon, but to seek His likeness as well. In my counsel, I urge you to tell Amy of the imminent danger facing her and her child. The truth can only open her heart later to compassion, when you one day must tell her the rest of the truth.”
“She needs to know for her own safety.”
“Of course. But it’s more than that. Saint Boniface said that the church is like a ship. But I see life, too, like a ship, with the waves of personal challenges pounding its hull, tossing it on the sea of our days. And in the words of Saint Boniface as well as the Father’s intent, your duty is not to abandon the ship, but to keep her on her course.”
The coincidence is uncanny. George feels like his own father is speaking to him, twisting his love of the sea and Stony Point and the beach into his guidance. After a long silence, he hears an exhortation to make an act of contrition, then the familiar rhythm of the words of general absolution. It is done. Through his relieved exhaustion, the language grows indecipherable again. But he listens and welcomes the benediction in the spoken rhythm of his faith.
“Are you okay now?” the priest asks. He looks directly through the screen at George.
“I think so.”
“I’m Father Rossi. Let me know, please, at any time, if you need help. You have a long road to travel.”
“Thank you, Father,” George answers, seeing the priest nod in shadow. He stands then, presses the velvet curtain aside and walks out into the church. Doing so, he remembers the lightness that filled his step emerging from a confessional as a child and is ashamed at the difference.
Who would have predicted back then the words he whispered today? His shoulders feel the burden depicted in the old arched walls, the stained glass windows and solemn statues. Those statues seem to watch him now, shaking their heads in disappointment as he steps into a rear pew and kneels, his body doubled over in prayer. The priest gives him privacy, waiting behind in the confessional while George collects himself.
This absolution is only the first. More difficult ones will follow, one day. He drops his head over his clasped hands, unsure of how much time passes before he looks up at the looming altar, presses his hands on the pew back in front of him and pushes himself up to leave.
Seventeen
WHEN HER EYES OPENED IN the still-dark room early this morning, she pulled the sketch pad off her nightstand. The dream had come again and sitting up in bed, all that mattered was transferring the image from her mind, through her arm, and out to the paper. Her hand worked methodically to define the details, the large hand over hers, the curve of a wrist. She outlined her fingers extending beyond his grip, feeling Grace’s shoe beneath her hand, and something else atop.
“What?” she asks as she continues working on the sketch with her morning coffee. As she cross-hatches light pencil lines over the entire page, seeing the hands the same way they appeared in her dream. Obscure. Vague.
The shoe beneath, his hand atop. Her fingers struggle to draw a sensation, the pencil wavering over the page. There was a hard lump of some sort, a ridge of a scar, pressing against her hand in his grasp. But her dream hinted at something more behind the veil of sleep and its soft silk netting of drowsiness. The eternal battle of that moment reaching for Grace’s shoe will return again and again until she deciphers what is missing.
Her pencil-shading continues until Grace runs barefoot and laughing into the kitchen, with Angel scampering quick at her heels.
“Whoa, whoa, look at you,” Amy says, setting down her pencil and watching the two of them. Grace wears her new plum colored ruffled bathing suit and a short bouffant-style wedding veil sits lopsided on her head. The billow of white tulle puffs out like a summer cloud. “Have you been in Mommy’s things again?” she asks.