Epilogue
EIGHTEEN YEARS EARLIER
Hello,” I say to the woman behind the big walnut desk. “I’m here for an appointment with Dr. Twist? My name is Jasper Black.”
The lady taps on her keyboard and then looks up at me and smiles. “Please,” she says, “take a seat.”
I settle myself on the smart sofa and look around at the empty waiting area.
Water from a cooling machine with clear plastic cups.
Fruit in a bowl. Some magazines. I feel my stomach growl and complain.
I’ve not had anything to eat today. I was too nervous this morning.
I look at the fruit and consider an apple and then shift my gaze away from it when I imagine myself picking it up, crunching into it, the sudden terrible noise of it, the woman’s eyes on me, the humiliation of being caught eating an apple without asking.
But I can’t ask, that would be too embarrassing.
I pour myself a cup of water instead, slightly alarmed by the loud glug of it through the cylinder as it descends toward my cup, and drink it as quietly as I can.
Finally the lady calls my name and directs me to a door where a pleasant-looking man is waiting to greet me with an outstretched hand.
“Mr. Black, Dr. Twist, lovely to have you here, do come in.”
I like him; he puts me at ease instantly. He directs me to a nice chair, and he seats himself in his and eyes me kindly through his trendy glasses. “So, Jasper—may I call you Jasper?”
I want him to call me Patch, but I know I can’t ask him to do that, so I nod and smile. “That’s fine,” I say, and then I clear my throat.
He spends some time talking me through what he does.
He’s an EMDR therapist. Someone on my clowning course told me about it when I mentioned that I’d run away from home because something bad had happened to me.
I told him I’d been having nightmares, that I never slept, and he told me about how EMDR had cured his girlfriend of night terrors and other behavioral issues related to her PTSD after surviving a multiple pileup on a motorway.
I had not survived a multiple pileup on a motorway, had not been pulled from wreckage by strong, safe hands and taken in brightness to be fixed by brilliant people; I had experienced a blinding, deafening, destabilizing trauma in the quietest, darkest corners of my childhood home and it lived with me every day.
My friend told me that a man like Dr. Twist had the ability to reprogram the very essence of me by desensitizing me to my trauma without me having to utter a word, which was ideal, because I could not tell—I could not speak about the things I saw, the way I felt.
I know that I will never be able to find the words, not ever, and so this—this—I can do: a silent therapy, like surgery, the doctor’s techniques like invisible knives and needles, doing their work while I remain silent.
I am ready to hand myself over entirely to this man.
Because not only do I live with this every minute of every day of my life, but now, as a broken adult man, I am becoming a monster not unlike those who broke me.
I scare women. Deliberately. And then when I have scared them, I touch myself and I am disgusting, more disgusting than I can properly contain inside my head.
It is not me and it is not Patch when I find those women and do that to them; it is someone else entirely, a clown without a name who crawls out of me and takes me over and I hate him. I want him purged and annihilated.
I turn my full attention back to Dr. Twist, who is asking me to do something difficult, so difficult I feel breathless and nauseous merely contemplating it, but contemplate it I must, before I do something I really, really regret.
Dr. Twist tells me I am to put myself, in my mind’s eye, back in the moment of my trauma, back in the place where it happened. I must see it as clearly as I can, every inch of it, every second of it, every blade of light and blot of darkness.
I do as I am told—I always do as I am told—and I put myself there, in that strange, dark place beneath my father’s study, that strange place where he put girls to live, girls with mothers and fathers of their own, girls with stories and foibles and lives and friends.
The au pair girls. My father still called them the au pair girls even as he was shackling them to beds, locking them in the outhouse, raping them night after night.
We all called them au pair girls, but we all knew that they weren’t.
In my mind’s eye I follow the sound of noises, of muted screams. I pull up the trapdoor under my father’s rug, and I step onto those uneven stone steps.
My eyes adjust to the pale light from the night-lights on the walls.
I start to see the outlines of things: the beds, the armchair, the shape of a young woman sitting against the wall.
As my vision clears I see that it is Claire.
Claire was my favorite. She wasn’t like the other au pairs.
She was soft and sweet, naive almost, like me in some ways.
And she wasn’t scared of Patch the Clown; she enjoyed my tricks and my mimes.
She could play the guitar and at first, when she was still in the upstairs secret room, I’d bring her the tiny guitar my parents had bought me when I was a child, and she’d play to me on it, making up songs as she went along.
I did desire her, sexually. I did think things and feel things when I was around her.
I did touch myself and think about her while I was doing it.
But I would never have hurt her, never have scared her.
But Jessamine hated Claire. She hated her because, in my opinion, Claire was better than her.
She was prettier than Jessamine, cleverer than Jessamine, better at playing the guitar than Jessamine, more special than Jessamine, and, as I think of my sister’s hatred toward Claire, I take another step into the basement in my mind’s eye, aware somewhere in the background of Dr. Twist’s soothing, encouraging voice, and I see her there, in the half darkness, my sister, holding a small knife in her hand.
It is, I know immediately, the knife that I smuggled in for Claire last week, hidden inside my sleeve.
I see my father slumped across the bed and there is blood still leaking from a hole in his throat even though he is clearly dead, and my sister has the baby in her blood-soaked arms, and I see that Claire is also dead, that the wall behind her is a scarlet screen of her own infinite blood.
“She killed Daddy!” Jessamine cried. “Claire killed him! I heard noises and I came down and she had the knife in her hand, and she’d stabbed him. She was about to escape, with the baby!”
I look at the dead glassy eyes of Claire, rolled up toward the ceiling, and hear myself whisper, “Why didn’t you let her escape, Jess? Why didn’t you let her?”
I hear the sound of my mother’s voice from the study above calling out our names, a hint of annoyance in her tone: “Where are you all? What are you all doing down there?”
My sister, a streak of blood across her left cheek, turns to me with those wild, wild eyes of hers and says, “I didn’t have any choice! She was going to escape. I had to. I had to!”
I say, “No, no, you didn’t have to! Daddy was dead! You could have let her go! We could have called the police and Claire and the baby could have been free! We could all have been free! And now you’ve killed her and we’re stuck again! Why did you kill her, Jessamine? Why?”
The look on her face turns then from indignation to fury and her voice is ice-cold when she says, “She killed Daddy. She deserved it!”
The sound of the baby crying, my hands over my ears, my eyes screwed shut; in that moment, there, came the knowledge, blinding, penetrating, all-consuming, that my sister was as evil as my father, that we, this family, were made of bad things, sickening things, that it ran through all of us like a virus, and that I had it too.
And even though it was over, and my father was dead, it would never be over, not while those girls lay down here in this animal pit, not while my spiteful sister lived and breathed, not while my mother spent fortunes on her hair and her fingernails and pretended that none of this was happening. It would never, ever be over.
In my mind’s eye, I turn once more and look at Claire: beautiful, innocent Claire.
“I’m sorry!” I hear myself whisper to her. “I’m so sorry.”
“Are you there?” asks Dr. Twist. “Have you found the place?”
I gulp and nod. “Yes,” I say, “yes, I’m there.”