Chapter 6 #2
“Make that plural,” Amy clarified, “and that would be my parents.” At that, everybody stared at her, and she shrugged.
“There are many ways to parent, I guess. There are the helicopter parents, or then you have the ones who don’t have a life, so they try to live through their kids.
That was my parents. They didn’t have a life.
I appeared to have some ability, and, although they were extremely against it at the beginning, once the money started rolling in, they were the ones who wouldn’t let me stop.
” Amy shook her head. “Their success, their self-identity, was tied to my success in closing cases. My success became their achievement, and they became addicted to it.”
Amy continued. “You do get a very tainted view of life when you beg and plead to not have to face another grieving family and to find yet another dead child, then not be allowed to talk to anybody or to get any therapy because they didn’t dare risk anybody finding out what my parents’ part in all of it was.
It was a very difficult time for me,” Amy stated.
“The only thing I could do, again with that feeling of guilt, was to just shut down.” She was getting emotional, and her cheeks were flushed.
“It seemed to be the only way I could make it work. Then, as I relaxed, I reopened to my gifts.”
Terk clarified, “What you mean is, you shut down so you could heal.” At that, everybody else nodded.
“You did what you had to do for survival,” Terk noted.
“Never apologize for wanting to survive, and, although you were a child and had no say in the matter, you did what everybody asked of you, until you just couldn’t do it anymore.
That is not something you should feel guilty about. ”
Just hearing his input did so much for Amy’s own peace of mind that she felt a tremendous weight sliding off her back.
Wallace turned to her and smiled. “Told you.”
She glared at him. “Nobody likes a know-it-all.”
He chuckled. “You do.” She flushed and glared at him, but he just smiled. “I’ll get you more coffee.” With that, he hopped up and walked over to the coffee station and poured her another cup.
Everybody else sitting here now stared at her, and she flushed again. “Okay, now it feels as if you guys have questions, and I don’t have a clue what you’re looking for.”
“Clarifying the relationship between the two of you would be nice,” Celia suggested. “Obviously you are good friends, and I get the vibe. So is there anything more than that?”
“Yes and no,” she replied. “We haven’t had a proper chance to reconnect or to even figure out who we are anymore. So maybe ask me that question in another month or two.”
“I will hold you to that,” Celia stated. “Then the other burning question we all have is, what exactly did you do to help? You mentioned missing people, but was it just missing people or was it missing objects too? And how did that change as you grew after this recent illness?”
“Ah,” Amy muttered. “Yes, it always comes down to those kinds of questions, doesn’t it?
” She couldn’t help but turn bitter. “Sorry, it’s a bit of a touchy subject for me, even now.
It’s tough to explain because they don’t always have simple answers.
I would like to tell you that I had all these definitive skills and that I could find missing people saying, abracadabra , and they would appear, but I can’t.
” She shrugged. “Usually I closed my eyes and saw what was happening around that person, seeing a location where they currently lay, sat, were being held, whatever. Sometimes that worked. Sometimes it didn’t.
Sometimes I would be given an object of theirs and would see them in person and would be able to…
I know it sounds stupid, but it’s almost as if I could talk to them. ”
“It doesn’t sound stupid at all,” Wallace stated, “especially not in the present company.”
“That’s good,” she muttered, “but, to be honest, it didn’t always work.
I guess it was me, but it seemed to depend on the other person too.
Sometimes I could reach out and could tell them that help was on the way, to stay calm, that we were doing our best. Sometimes that made it better, and other times it made it worse. ”
“It was after one of those worse times that you decided you’d had enough, wasn’t it?” Celia asked.
Amy turned to Celia and nodded slowly. “I’m not sure how you figured that out, but yes.” She looked over at Wallace. “Maybe you can pick up that tale.”
He nodded. “I knew about it from before. It’s still painful obviously, but Amy went looking for a series of young girls who had gone missing,” he began.
“What she didn’t realize was that, as she went looking, she didn’t know anything about protecting herself, about keeping her energy close to her body, or that predators were out there with energy skills too.
So, you can imagine what happened when this child molester, this murderer, realized somebody like Amy was coming after him.
He managed to get a hold of her mentally, and it wasn’t pretty at all.
She managed to get free, but she was scarred for a very long time. ”
“And that’s when I got strong enough to tell the rest of my family and everybody else in the world to eff-off,” she added. “Some traumas are just too difficult.”
“Have you worked with the police at all since?” Celia asked.
“Anonymously,” she replied, with half a smile. “But have I entered that arena again? Hell no. I’ve been holding back on it. Occasionally I do wonder about it because it was something I was good at.”
“Was?”
“Am,” she clarified, acknowledging it a bit tersely. “It’s just not necessarily something I can do again, not in the same way as I did before.”
“If you didn’t have a ground and if you didn’t have anybody there to help support you, with no loving support at home,” Celia noted, her tone very soft, “then I can only imagine how it was for that child inside you, who was already asked to do way more than anybody should. You should never feel guilty for that.”
“Yet how do you stop it when it’s already there?” she asked defiantly. “Just because you tell me that I shouldn’t feel guilty doesn’t mean I can just wipe it away.”
“No, of course not,” she agreed. “You can’t, and I get that.
One of the hardest things to deal with is the constant failure we feel when we can’t do something, and the joy when we can, but also realizing that you can’t ever share those things with anybody is the worst,” she added.
“Believe me that this team does some pretty-amazing things, a lot of them. We see terrible things along the way, but we have each other, and that makes all the difference. You didn’t have anybody, so the fact that you’re even sane is huge.
Yes, we’ve known people in our group and people we wanted to help who didn’t have the capacity to handle it mentally, and that means they’re in a place that we can’t help them now.
God knows we’ve tried. We check in on some of them to see if they’ve healed enough on the inside, but a lot of them just don’t want anything to do with the current world.
They just want to hide away and to stay away.
We’ve tried many ways to get them to come back to reality, but they’re not interested,” Celia shared.
“That must be very hard too,” Amy murmured. “I can’t imagine what that’s like for their families.”
“For the families it’s definitely very hard. It’s hard for everybody, really. Yet what else are we to do? Life isn’t always easy, but it is always a challenge. We do what we can do and hope for the best, no matter what we do.”
Amy smiled at that. “I like that philosophy, and the fact that you have a team to provide support for everybody is huge. I’m just not so sure that it works for everyone.”
“No, of course it doesn’t work for all. It doesn’t work for a lot of people a lot of the time, but, as our families have all grown and expanded, we’ve realized just how much our abilities have also grown and expanded.
That leads me to ask you how or if anything changed when you had the car accident. ”
“Ah, yeah, the accident,” she muttered.
“Was there one?” Celia asked.
“Oh, yeah, there definitely was one, and technically I died.”
At that, Wallace squeezed her hand and sucked in his breath.
So, he didn’t know . Amy nodded.
Wallace frowned at her. “You didn’t tell me it was that bad.”
“I didn’t tell anybody it was that bad,” she stated. “Remember how it’s all about not letting too many people in. You are too many people,… all by yourself.”
“Too bad,” he muttered. “I was all-in before, and I’m still all-in now.”
“And that’s why, when I was kidnapped this time,… I was calling out for you,” she shared, “because you were somebody I could telepathically communicate with at one time. So, it made sense that you might be somebody I could communicate with now.”
He nodded and stayed quiet, watching as everybody else digested that.
“Okay, so one thing just came out right there,” Terk noted. “You mentioned, when I was kidnapped this time . Can you explain that?”