4

4

The ensuing weeks would prove to be the worst of my fifty-one years of living, to include those surrounding Kathy’s murder. They began with a statement, a strange statement from Felicia’s lips, and ended in death and institutionalization. The period between was a blur of doctors, specialists, and investigators, whose paths, collectively, led essentially nowhere. Some answers were found, but only where there was the raw material to work from. The creature that had glutted himself on the slow brutalization of my family would remain the elephantine shadow upon all of our souls.

Felicia’s statement came after a visit with one of the more mainstream of the above mentioned specialists, a psychiatrist who dealt specifically with trauma patients. She’d flown in from Anchorage to review Kristin’s case and had made little headway in penetrating the shell that had formed. A crack was to appear soon enough, though, with no one’s help but Felicia’s and my own. At least to the extent that the mother in Kristin was concerned. She would not address what happened in Brazil until it had more than addressed her, in the form of a sustained barrage of scream-level nightmares.

The revelation came as we sat on my living room couch one evening, after putting Kristin into the only bed she would sleep in for a while to come, myself dispossessed into a cot that I placed practically within arm’s reach of the mattress I normally slept on. But when it came, it came spontaneously, and with impact. Aside from any subtler implications—and I was as susceptible as Felicia when it came to the moment—the news could only add to Kristin’s emotional instability. I remember the frame in time, the coffee mug passing from my hand to Felicia’s, its steam rising around her mouth as she hesitated, lower lip quivering slightly, before uttering the strange words.

“Her hymen wasn’t broken, Barry.”

“What?” I was not sure I had heard—but yes, I had as I felt a nerve twitch in the back of my neck.

“Her hymen.” Her head tilted oddly to the side as though it was on strings. “It wasn’t broken.”

“Just what are you saying, Felicia? I’m no expert, but isn’t it true that sometimes the hymen isn’t broken . . . ?”

“The OB mentioned it to Dr. Whittler. She said that while it is not uncommon for intercourse to occur without the hymen breaking, it would have seemed highly unlikely in Kristin’s case because of the way she’s built down there. That it was a wonder she hadn’t broken it at some point during childhood—it being that fragile. Meanwhile Kristin, unbeknownst to me, told Dr. Whittler that she didn’t believe she’d had sex that night. He actually had to convince her she could not trust her memory, given the circumstances. The impression he had, though, was that her belief was not based in memory, but in instinct. You know what high regard Dr. Whittler has for Kristin. He took it upon himself to talk to the boy, who happens to be a patient of his, and came in for a physical a few days later. The boy admitted under the threat of his parents’ involvement that he had lied by omission. He claimed the rumor had been started by someone else, and he’d let it go to look cool among his friends. He and the other kids with them that night hadn’t even been around after they put her in bed to sleep it off. The others could vouch for him, he said. They left her passed out in the house where they had been partying and went out cruising.”

“If the others could vouch for the fact that he wasn’t there,” I said, taking firm hold of reason against whatever the underlying suggestion—aliens? immaculate conception?—“then just which friends was this punk looking cool for? That doesn’t even make sense, Felicia. Did Whittler tell him Kristin was pregnant? The kid was probably trying to squirm out of responsibility. What the hell was Dr. Whittler doing talking to him in the first—”

The sentence met a wall as I watched her eyes suddenly widen, fixing on a point to her left.

There in the hall doorway stood Kristin, the ghost of life in her eyes for the first time since our return. But only for as long as the billowy tongues took to register. They subsided as we watched, essence-ing out with her quietly vented words, “I knew that bastard was lying.”

The flickers seemed to want to rise again as the three of us painted our forsaken triangle, then my daughter, soul of my soul, simply turned around and walked back down the hall.

“Go after her,” Felicia said, voice, expression, manner all still in that puppet place. “Tell her . . . how much we love her.”

***

Others would look at Kristin, other opinions would be expressed—not about the hymen matter, whose bubble of secrecy, thank God, would expand no further than Whittler and Mallory—but to be honest, I scarcely noticed after a while. Had Kristin shown any kind of intensity of emotion, other than in little offshoots of that initial crack, I would not have permitted them to probe her. But hope is a contagion, and I subsisted off Felicia’s there at the beginning. Even at that early stage, though, what germs transferred from my ex-wife to me on the way to these appointments were gone by the time we returned from them, having been sucked up into the buzz of postulations and advice that filled in for action. Eventually I had no preconceptions. Quite the contrary.

Somehow in the midst of the futile appointments, the follow-up phone calls to Brazil, the sleepless nights managing Kristin’s nightmares, the ensuring she was fed, I found the time to ask myself—I couldn’t depend on anyone else—just what the hell had happened. I had killed a man, that was certain. He had killed one of my daughters and terrorized another; this seemed indisputable. The authorities in Nevada and California were not ready to close the Tahoe case based on the notion that a single knife-armed man fond of bestowing the German pet name ‘little treasure’ had been responsible for both crimes. Which was fine with me, as my whole point in abandoning my daughter for two days and flying down to Reno-Tahoe was to encourage them to leave the case open toward the purpose of determining who the culprit was. Where had he come from? What had been his motives? Thus far the investigation in Brazil had uncovered nothing, including the man’s identity. That he was Latin was about all they seemed to know.

Which led to another question, one that floated out on the fringes of scientific investigation: What were the odds that I would choose a carnival festival in the part of the world he originated from? Sure, there were millions of Latin Americans on both sides of the Canal, and he could have followed us wherever we’d gone, but he’d been in his element there; it was his culture, at least in a racial sense. Within said element he had found his way into our psyches with a familiar image. He’d demonstrated knowledge, I was now convinced, that I myself had not possessed before Kristin confessed it to me. To take this fanciful thought process a step further, when events were considered as a whole there was almost the hint of orchestration about them—right up to the very end, when he seemed to willingly let me plunge the knife in. While personal decision had obviously gone into my choosing that particular festival among carnival’s many, that particular hotel with its convenient garden into which to lure a father away from his daughter, how could I know such decisions had not been deliberately influenced? It wasn’t as if the propensity for intent hadn’t been established, with the Monty Python routine. How could I know the brochure I’d discovered in an airport, the one that had brought the Spider Festival to my attention, hadn’t been dropped there purposely, like the magazine with the Bavarian excursion ad? In fact, I couldn’t be sure it hadn’t actually been Hotel Rio Campestre’s brochure, or that the hotel hadn’t at least been advertised in the leaflet. It had not been until later that I’d found a use for the information, long after I had glanced over the brochure then tossed it in the bin at the airport. It sounded extreme, but the coincidences had been piling up like pancakes from the griddle, and where there were pancakes, there was someone holding a spatula. But to what end?

I managed not to spend too much precious time in this arena, for fear of joining my daughter in hers. Trauma could play tricks on the mind. I knew that. Just as I knew that a more reasonable line of thinking went something like this: A psychopath who’d read one of my books and by some pretzel logic come away with an evolution or revolution fixation had targeted my family as the means of seeing his fantasies through. I didn’t care how many psychopaths ran loose in the world, I in no way doubted that the two separate crimes against my family were related. I would give, very reluctantly, that it was theoretically possible two separate attackers were involved, but it was as far as I would bend. There were simply too many questions to be writing things off because they did not fit the template. As with all families, victims to tragedy, ours needed closure. I needed closure, and a nameless body in the morgue wasn’t doing that.

Thus, I made a decision, to dedicate myself to pursuing the answers to these questions, to not stop until I learned why. Not only was this the only way to true closure, it was quite possibly the only way to my daughter’s full recovery. Perhaps not this year, but the next. Perhaps not in her teens, but in her twenties. At some point the wounds were going to have to scar over, entirely, leaving only the phantom itches. Already she had shown it wasn’t going to be an easy road. There had been a moment in Tago, in the police station, when the one question I had allowed them to ask her had lured her in hysteria out of her shell. She had referred to her attacker in the present tense. “He will kill me if I tell!” Though I tried, after the outburst, to get through to her that he was dead, that I had personally killed him and he wasn’t coming back, the shell had already reestablished itself, and twice as thick for its momentary failure.

As I gathered what little there was in the way of raw material in my effort to fulfill my oath to myself, I longed desperately for the answer to what the attacker had told Kristin when he had leaned to her ear.

I was not going to compromise my daughter to that end, though.

The question itself had become a potential trigger, and one I would not pull no matter how far along the road to recovery she was. She would tell me when she was ready. If that never happened, so be it.

Meanwhile, the most tangible thing I had to work with was the elephant suit. It was an astronomically long shot, but that’s where I would begin my search. If he had deemed it a useful and meaningful device, then so would I.

The computer and its living soul, the internet, were my tools in this endeavor as one appointment-free afternoon, perhaps three weeks after the attack, I put myself to the task. I first did a search for elephant costumes in general. While this yielded pages upon pages of results, mostly children’s Halloween outfits, they produced nothing of value—at least within the timeframe my hovering, impatient fingers imposed. When the words Monty Python were added, a whole new set of possibilities opened up. It was on page three that I found the link that would send me scrambling among the desk drawers for the reading glasses I hardly ever wore. Sure enough, there it was, plain as day. Too pat for contemplation . . . if it said what I thought it said. I called up an online translation dictionary, plugging in the English search word and looking up its translation both in Portuguese and in Spanish. Bingo. When he had spoken the word, he had used Spanish. Here, it was in Portuguese. I suppose I’d just assumed that the word was the same in both languages.

Evolução Handmade Costumes,

Portavora, Brazil.

It read exactly like that, in mixed Portuguese and English. While the word for “evolution” obviously stood out loudest, the name Portavora also hit me, as I had seen the seaside town on a map I was looking over on the bus ride down from Rio de Janeiro. It lay to the southwest of Tago, easily within twenty miles.

The question of the context of the man’s dying utterance as it related to the costume shop and its unusual use of the same word would come at its own pace while I looked over the website. The site’s only content on the Monty Python elephant costume was a photo showing someone modeling it with its exaggerated arms spread wide, and a blurb beneath the picture stating in both Portuguese and English that it was a commissioned special tailor order. For now, though, I just stared at the magnified name and address, tracing those graceful, somehow lovely and terrible accent marks . . .

***

The evening before I was to fly to Brazil for the second time in a month, I went into my room in hopes of communicating to the person inside Kristin’s shell that she would be in her mother’s care, at my house, for a few days. I found her snuggled in the covers asleep, however, processing a dinner Felicia had hand-fed her after she had taken only a few bites on her own, preferring instead to roll the vegetables around on her plate with her spoon. That being the only utensil her mother, at some white coat’s advice, would let her use. I sat on the edge of the bed and watched her for a few minutes, touched by the peaceful expression she wore, before deciding to call it an evening myself.

I said goodnight to Felicia, who sat on the couch in the living room re-reading for the dozenth time some notes our Anchorage psychiatrist, who’d visited twice now, had given her. Then I showered and shaved in preparation for the morning’s early departure. When I returned to my room, Kristin was in a different position on the bed, one leg thrown over the bunched-up covers. Her expression had changed. Not so dramatically that I was alarmed to the possibility of another recurrence. Not frightened or pain-wracked, as I had seen too often during these past weeks, but rather troubled. She didn’t appear to be having a nightmare, but was obviously involved in the experience, her brows knitting, her lips moving, murmuring soft incoherencies.

This aspect moved me in a similar way to the tranquil one it had replaced. I found it hard to get a handle on when I was so used, of late, to seeing the haunted expression that occupied her features between nightmares. Where was she right now? Was she experiencing the normal frustrations and inadequacies we do in our dreams? Was she having a problem with her homework or trying to talk to someone who wouldn’t listen? Or, was she in a less healthy place, where reprieves from terror took this other than ideal form? If only I could join her there, to brush out those lines in her brow, calm those uneasy utterances.

A word emerged out of the murmuring. I wasn’t sure I’d heard right at first, but then a coherent stream issued from her, its content uttered in a voice of lilting wonder . . . while affecting me like a lavishly cold wind.

“The trees . . . there are faces in the trees.”

***

In the middle of the night I woke to her screams. Unlike the night before, and the night before that, these screams contained words. And the words were horrific.

“They want them. They want my babies!”

I was on the bed in a flash, wrapping protective, restraining arms around her. She thrashed against them, bit my shoulder, smashed my face with her forehead before I could bury her head in my chest offering shushes that were lost in the soprano squeals the screams devolved into. Her saliva against my bare skin, the ripples of her shuddering body inside my person, were their own occurrences in the heightened empathy state the episode commanded. In turn, I impressed my own physical responses on her, clutching her head, squeezing her body with force, insisting that she know I was there, that I was stronger than her tormentors, that together we forged a bridge back from the place she had gone, back to a nucleus I hoped still had some familiarity to her, a womb of love.

She resisted this emotionally-driven physicality at first, resisted wildly, but then gradually, beneath a continuous and unwavering onslaught of will on my part, her teeth quit trying to find purchase in my skin. Her cries tapered to feeble feline noises, her body shrank back upon itself, molding with my own. In the end she not only returned with me, she came so far back as to let the word ‘Dad’ escape from her . . . ‘Dad’ followed by: “God, Dad, help me.”

I rocked her in my arms. “Kristin, everything will be okay. Everything will be okay, baby. You just need to trust me. Trust those who love you. We’re here. We’re real.”

“Amen,” I heard from the door, which I’d been keeping open at night, allowing light in from the bathroom across the hall. Perhaps the communion had assumed the proportions of spiritual rhapsody for Felicia as she stood there looking in, the light a faint halo around her fussy hair. The incarnation didn’t matter. That love inundated every corner of this room did, and that was happening. Kristin was bathing in its pure white energy, and there was nothing the demons in her could do about it. There was no gate they could release over her mouth, which spoke its secrets in whispers.

“They want my babies, Dad.”

“Who, honey? Who wants...?”

“Him,” she said, snapping her eyes at me, whip-like. She seemed to be searching inside me as she went on, “The elephant man.” Her voice fell to a level below a whisper. “And Kathy.”

The hair stood on my flesh. From the door a strange, off-key, undulating protraction of a moan . . .

“The other one . . . she told me,” Kristin persisted. “The girl who looks like Kathy. She told me they want my babies.”

The crawling came in waves, one after the other over my scalp, my arms, the back of my neck. “Kathy is dead, baby. The man in the elephant costume is dead.”

“They are not dead! I saw them take the girl who looks like Kathy away.”

“But they’re dreams, sweetheart,” Felicia said, having temporarily regained possession of herself as she joined our huddle on the bed. “They’re just dreams. No one can hurt you here.”

“They can hurt you anywhere.”

“Baby . . . ”

“‘Serve me.’ That’s what he said when he was on top of me, touching inside my stomach with his mind. ‘Serve me as your sister serves me.’”

The whine released itself from Felicia’s body again, a sharp wandering music in the tomblike chamber we occupied. I put my hand on her shoulder, telling her to go sit down, but she wasn’t hearing anything except what came out of her daughter.

To Kristin I said, “Is that all he said to you in the hotel?”

She narrowed her eyes, almost malevolently, as she said, “Not in the hotel. Before then, when he put the tube thing inside me.”

A cry came out of Felicia, high and anguished, like her very soul was being ripped out of her.

“Go sit down now!” I shouted at her.

She obeyed, but not to the chair. She shuffled past it and out the door, dragging behind her the part that wasn’t flesh, like a wounded soldier.

“Kristin,” I said, gently taking her face in my hand. “Listen to me closely. When did he put something inside you? Was it before Brazil?”

“I don’t know. I remembered in the hotel when he . . . when he . . . ”

“Sweetheart? Sweetheart . . . ”

Her eyes were rolling up under her lids, exposing shocks of white in the semi-darkness. “Felicia!” I yelled. “Felicia!”

When she didn’t come immediately, I grabbed the phone by the bed, vacillating momentarily on whether I should call 911 or Dr. Whittler. If it was a seizure—

“Dad,” the blessed word came from the bundle in my right arm.

I turned to her, phone hanging there at the end of its cord. “Kristin . . . ”

Her eyes had returned from their false refuge, bringing moisture with them. “Dad,” she said, lip quivering. “I’m so sorry. I’m sorry I left Kathy alone that day.”

“Oh, baby.” I let the phone fall and held her, never ever to let go of her again.

But I did. Not the next morning as scheduled, but soon enough, and God save my living soul for it.