Chapter Twelve Tyler
Chapter Twelve
TYLER
THE HUMAN brAIN is capable of healing in unimaginable ways.
It’s efficient in restoring both our bodies and minds with a mix of signals and chemicals, as well as our own thought processes.
The irony is that we are often the ones to sabotage the process of any type of healing, like choosing to inhale another drag of a cigarette instead of letting our lungs recover from the last. Thoughts can be just as powerful when it comes to mending our minds, but it’s also our thoughts that can, and often do, sabotage any progress.
Science and psychology have concluded that the first thirty years of life form the strongest aspects of the human personality.
Whatever trauma shapes a person becomes embedded in their core schema and adaptive behaviors, and how they project them.
Desires, fears, personal tastes, and recognition of self in others are close to hardwired by that age.
Which makes changing any part of those things arduous work.
When Delphine first started teaching me how to blink myself into the pocket, to launch myself into a dissociative fugue state, I spent the first few months feeling as if the world was crashing down on me.
I did everything I could to escape the buildup of emotions threatening because I never truly dealt with what I had temporarily suppressed.
From the beginning, I knew that in order to continue to enter the black—to use it when it suits me—I have to engage cathartic processing before I can re-enter.
Between the times I can’t purge what I suppress, I allow my subconscious to handle what I haven’t yet processed during those states.
Every once in a while, and especially when I was raising Zach, I’d go on a sabbatical for controlled decompensation, letting the emotions take their toll.
Those purges were hell on earth for me. At times, I was able to heal or gain perspective—though that was rare.
It’s been long years since I’ve purged, but I’ve been managing.
Mostly because I have no one now to answer to in the personal sense for my behavior.
But from the look in Larissa’s eyes since we’ve been shackled together, from hearing her judgments, it’s clear that I’ve disconnected greatly from the man I once was.
Not that her opinion does or should matter.
In the last two nights, after muted days of signals and long bouts of silence, I’ve witnessed Larissa unknowingly trying to process her own issues much the same way I have in the past.
Her subconscious forcing her to try to navigate what has harmed her while she sleeps.
Her fears triggered because, in her mind, the monster she’s speaking of is coming for her.
The problem with trauma is that when it takes place, if there’s no reconciliation or guidance on how to heal it, it becomes a memory linked to the acute stress response, or what most call—fight or flight.
Therefore, memories are replaced by haunting replays and nightmares, sometimes playing out as they occurred and other times arranging the memory around current fears, which makes the processing even more terrifying.
A combination of instilled fears, along with fears being battled in the present.
It’s clear that Larissa’s fight-or-flight response is now in effect due to the explosion and the fact we’re on the run.
However, to Larissa—for the rest of her life—the monster coming for her, even if he has a different face and name, will forever be Ciro.
Though I tried my best to avoid listening to her whimpers and cries, last night’s admission cut into the better half of my morning, her recalling the day she watched her father nearly drown her brother in the lake.
“Ignacio was splashing around in the water, around Ciro. While swimming close, he accidentally caught my father in the chin with his elbow. Furious that there was family nearby who witnessed it, he held Ignacio underwater for a crime he didn’t commit.
For disrespect that was not yet possible from a little boy still unaware of ego, he tried to drown his own fucking son in retaliation for a slip.
All I could see was my little brother thrashing, a plea for help from the man meant to nurture and protect him, who was instead punishing him for an accident.
” Her haunted eyes found mine in the dark. “He was barely four years old.”
The shake in her voice has stayed with me for the last twelve hours, and when her whimpering began again, I didn’t wake her, though I should have.
Her mind still hasn’t healed from her past trauma, and it’s becoming clear she’s been given no tools on how to cope with or process what she’s endured. I watch her now as she sits typing in a camping chair and feel it the minute she realizes she has my attention.
“What?”
I bulge my eyes sarcastically, knowing that talking to her is pointless.
The fact that her hearing hasn’t returned should be concerning, and some part of me knows that anyone else would be panicking with the prolonged loss.
The explosion detonated so close to her that it might take her a little longer to regain her hearing, and though I have a slight inclination to reassure her of at least that much, she seems not to need it.
What’s even more surprising is that when she came to after my front door exploded, she demanded a weapon to enter the fight, even while going in and out of consciousness.
As ridiculous as the demand was, I couldn’t help but recognize her bravery.
Though it’s no more than what I should expect of an underboss.
Her display in hand-to-hand combat the other day was telling enough as well.
It’s as if she wants me to know just how skilled she is in certain ways.
She hasn’t taken or asked for another dose of morphine, and I know her ribs have to be stinging like a bitch.
It’s obvious now she’s no stranger to pain.
While following her through the woods today for a bathroom break, my eyes snagged on a scar on her back that peeked out of the top of her sports bra and below, extending into the waistband of her jogging pants.
A scar that looked every bit like the lash of a whip.
It was the sight of that which had me reconsidering her.
Considering, for once, that she might be speaking the truth of her hate for her father.
That all of the detailed memories she’s relaying might not be rehearsed.
The dreams can’t be faked. Neither can the sweat on her skin nor her unconscious whimpers, but it’s what she’s purposefully regaling me with when she wakes that has me curious about authenticity.
Even so, and even if she is being a hundred percent truthful, it’s not enough to gamble with the lives that I’m responsible for. Drunk as I might have been, it’s her words the night we met that have me scrutinizing her every word under a magnifying glass.
“You and I both know appearances can be deceiving. Maybe every single thing you’re noticing about me, down to my pulse rate, is fabricated and manipulated.”
The recollection of those words has me convinced she has a motive other than what she’s voiced thus far, and keeps her suspect until the last second this plays out.
Most of my curiosity now stems from her constant attempts to connect with me.
To gain my audience, to have me hear and understand her. But why?
Black hearts.
That’s what DiCiccos are notorious for and why they’re one of the most feared families—if not the most. All of this I keep close as I spend the day chopping wood while tracking her progress.
As I wield my axe, I mull over her insistence that the only vendetta being carried out is Larissa’s own—against Ciro.
Even as I think it, I refute it. She’s highly intelligent, that much is evident.
It could all be an act, as she’s fully capable of professional-level manipulation.
Believing her could likely be the downfall of us all.
But I can’t help my gut feeling that there’s something else going on, some additional motive, and I need to pinpoint it, and fucking fast.
After reasoning with myself all day, and despite my inner argument, I decide to do my part to make our fight fair. Long after lights-out, I find myself speaking to her sleeping form. Her back facing away from me, where she lies on her good side.
“I caught my father cheating on my mother when I was a teenager. I walked through the door to hear the man I’d admired—wanted to grow up to resemble—fucking some woman in broad daylight in my parents’ marital bed.
Due to the trauma he suffered during deployment, he refused counseling and medication and took to the bottle.
Although I eventually confronted him, I never asked if he had taken into consideration that I would be getting home from school at any point that day.
The day I listened to my father hurt my mother in the most inconceivable way, my eyes focused on a family portrait we’d taken years before, which was hanging between our bedrooms.”
I swallow as the faces in the portrait, the smiles, and the positions of the three of us come to me with crystal clarity. As do the accompanying sounds I heard during the second I was irrevocably altered.
“It was in the days after that I realized just how deluded I was in thinking I knew the people closest to me. Only to realize people always present the version of themselves they want others to see, even and sometimes especially to the people they’re closest to.
That fucked me up in a way I can’t describe.
My na?veté died that day—my innocence stolen in a way that left me unable to see things as they truly were.
Or view people as they once were, especially those close to me.
People cheat on their spouses every day, but the havoc my father wreaked with that one act completely altered me, along with my entire belief system, which in turn made everyone else in my life subject to the same scrutiny. ”
I palm my knees where I continue to sit next to her pallet, tracing the curves of her silhouette in the dim light. She lies with her back turned to me, her breathing steady.
“Just after, I recognized I have always had the ability to see right through people, but never wanted to believe the worst of anyone. So, before that day, I ignored that inclination—never after.”
I watch closely as her upper half continues to rise and fall in a natural rhythm. Mirroring the perfect pace of someone engaged in a restful slumber.
“It didn’t hurt that when my innocence and natural propensity for benevolence were stolen that my mother was a psychologist, which granted me access to some of the best resources to further educate myself.
A hobby I took the initiative to maintain for decades, to take my schooling to the highest level possible.
At this point, I’m an expert at detecting deception.
I’m a human lie detector, which you’re well aware of, and I rarely miss when discerning agendas, often pinpointing these things within the length of a single exchange. ”
I drop my palms to my side and push off on them, leaning in as close as I can get as her body remains lax.
“If you know so much about me, then maybe you came armed with the knowledge that I, too, witnessed my father cheating on my mother, and about my own experience with PTSD. By knowing that, you could make it a point to voice that commonality to gain ground. If you came to my fucking door knowing about any of my other capabilities, then you must know I became aware the second you regained your hearing earlier tonight.”
I lean closer to make sure she feels my presence just next to her as her body draws tight.
“Just like I know you’re awake now and purposefully withheld your bedtime story tonight to see if I’d open up at some point and share my own.
You’re going to have to do better than that, Larissa, if you want to earn my ear and convince me to believe a fucking word you say.
If you want any sort of respect from me, earn it by showing me who you really are beneath what you’ve been taught.
Show me who you were before your own innocence was stripped by Ciro and your disillusioned mother.
Before you watched him terrorize your brothers.
I don’t need you to convince me he’s a fucking monster.
I need to know who you are. Show me, and then maybe I’ll start listening and give your words some merit.
Maybe, in turn, I’ll start to reveal parts of who I am instead of the expectation I live as for others because of who they need me to be.
The version of myself I started living as after I lost my own peace of mind. ”
I crowd in closer, making sure she can feel my breath on her neck.
“See, manipulation, along with the ability to carry out malicious acts, exists in everyday people at any given time. Not just monsters. It’s the people who’ve made peace with doing those acts—that make a show of it—that most deem scary.
At this point, I know better. It’s our neighbors on any given day who decide within a breath or blink they have nothing to lose, and how they decide to demonstrate it to us, that we should all fear. ”
Slowly, she turns her body to face me, peering back at me where I sit at the edge of her elevated pallet.
My challenge lingers in the air between us while I rest in the knowledge that she heard every single fucking word.
It’s then that I recognize I’ve met my equal when it comes to manipulation and deception.
In her eyes, I see the same recognition. Both of our gazes unwavering; I can see her weighing every word of my confession. Realizing who we’re up against, we continue our stare off until her eyes finally flutter closed and sleep truly claims her.
“It is only one who is thoroughly acquainted with the evils of war that can thoroughly understand the profitable way of carrying it on.”
—Sun Tzu, The Art of War