Chapter Eighteen Ana #2
“It’s strange how I remember every detail about that day. What I was wearing. How I got to the rink. Even what the air smelled like with the leaves falling. Do you remember how the pine needles started to cover the roads?”
She glances at me, and I give her a nod.
“The rink was so different on Sundays,” she says. And I get a quick flash because I can see it and feel it as she draws it all out.
“Dawn asked me to come at four o’clock. That’s after the last public session, so it was empty.
The rink, the locker rooms. The snack bar was closed, but it still smelled of stale coffee and grease from the fryer.
The cleaners hadn’t come yet, so there was ketchup and other shit on the floor. Soaking into those black rubber mats.”
Yes. It’s all right there.
“I walked around the boards by the lockers to the other side. Up the steps to that hallway, then the first door on the left.”
Dawn’s office. The long hallway that was dark and smelled of mildew.
“It was open, so I walked in. Dawn was always at her desk, but on that day she was standing in front of it. She told me to come closer. She told me to close the door behind me.”
Kayla’s voice grows unsteady, her mouth beginning to quiver. And suddenly I’m back to that night in the field, when she lay in the back seat of Jolene’s car. When she cried for the first time, at least that I’d seen. How it rocked my world as much as anything else that night.
“She had that look on her face,” Kayla says. “The one she gets when she has the upper hand.” Now a pause and another bitter laugh.
“This may be hard to believe, Ana, but I was a lot like you back then. Dawn was the only grown-up in my life. And not just because I was at Avery Hall. But because I was an orphan in every sense of the word. There was a time when I longed for her approval—the same way you did.”
With each piece of this story, each disclosure, the landscape of the past is ripped from the ground. Like a tornado that’s pulled up all the trees and flower beds. I have no idea where it will all land.
“So she walked up to me and put her hands on my shoulders with that smile. I was still thinking about good news—or maybe just something good—when I felt her hands move from my shoulders toward my collarbones on either side. The same smile on her face, but her eyes growing—I don’t know.
Smaller? Darker? She didn’t say a single word, but instead . . .”
Kayla draws her hands to her throat. “She started to close her fingers around my neck. Her thumbs pressing—here.” She traces her hands over her trachea as she says the words.
“And then the other fingers wrapped around the back, here . . .”
Again, she places her hands where Dawn’s were over seventeen years ago.
“I can’t believe I’m saying this out loud because it’s so surreal.
But she started to squeeze my neck. And at first, I thought it was a joke.
I think I may have even smiled and tried to laugh.
Because she was smiling, and her eyes were narrow, like the way eyes get when someone’s just being mischievous.
But she kept squeezing and squeezing, and I lifted my hands and placed them on hers and tried to get my fingers between my skin and her skin, but there was no room and then I couldn’t breathe . . .”
I sit, frozen, arms buzzing, heat building in every cell. Because I can see this, I can see Dawn, her face, her narrow eyes, as if I was right there in the room with them.
“She pushed me step by step until my back was against the wall, and I could feel my head growing dizzy, and my arms flailing against her.”
Kayla pauses to draw a new breath, while my mind spins wildly. Picturing Dawn with her hands around Kayla’s throat.
“Just when I thought I was going to die, and I did think that—she let go and stepped away, leaving me buckled over, coughing and holding my neck where her hands had just been.”
She strokes her skin, softly, with the delicate fingers I never noticed before.
“She said—and I remember her exact words—‘I am what you should fear. Don’t forget that.’”
I gasp, seeing the words from her book. “That’s what she wrote about,” I tell her.
“Creating a fear that surpassed anything we faced on the ice. Like a gun to our heads. Kay—I’m so sorry .
. .” Dawn became the bigger fear. Westin taught us to channel fear to rage.
To fight for her approval. To land the jumps and perform for her.
Kayla wipes her face with the backs of her hands.
“Well, I suppose it worked. She told me to leave, and I did—I ran out of there as fast as I could. I went back to Avery Hall and told Jo and Indy what happened. And they did what you would think. They hugged me and told me all the ways they would get revenge—but I told them to stop. Because where would I go if Dawn made me leave?”
Her face steadies, and she regains control. This is not the end of the story.
“Later that week I had a session with Dr. Westin. I didn’t tell him what happened, but he knew.
He kept asking if I wanted to talk about something.
And I kept saying no, that I was fine. And then he said the strangest thing to me, which didn’t make sense until hours later.
Something like ‘Your friends will follow where you lead them.’ And how that power came with ‘great responsibility.’ And about Indy—how I had a friend who was ‘poised to see her dreams come true, but she can’t seem to get out of her own way.
Can she?’ He said it was important that I help her.
‘It’s important,’ he said—and this I remember, his exact words—‘that all of you are devoted to the program.’”
Jesus Christ. I think about Westin, who was just in the condo with me. His wool sweater and gray socks bunched up by his ankles. The boots by the door. His name on that book.
There’s so much I want to say to her. But I can’t contain the questions that take on a force inside me.
“Do you really think he knew what Dawn did to you in her office? That she put her hands around your neck? Threatened you?”
She doesn’t hesitate with an answer.
“Of course he knew. And I don’t think I’m the only one, though Jo swore Dawn never touched her.
But she didn’t care about Jo. And the thing is, I don’t think she cared about me either,” she says, spinning the coffee cup in circles on the table.
“It was about Indy. That was who she cared about, and that was who needed to fall in line. Westin’s message was pretty damned clear. ”
Yes, I think. Dawn was always sending messages behind her fake smile and that one crooked tooth. Indy was her prized skater. And Patrice’s daughter. It was an irreconcilable conflict inside her.
“And it was received,” Kayla continues. “Indy fell in line as best she could, crying to us and Bobby Stark behind Dawn’s back. Begging her mother to let her come home, but never telling her the truth about Dawn. And we—me. Well . . .”
“You became reckless,” I interject. The pieces land in a new place, but one that makes sense. “And Jo—she did what she always did.”
Kayla lets go of the cup and leans back. “She pretended it never happened.”
When I met them that first day, all of this had come and gone. I’d stepped into the aftermath.
“I told you that story to explain. So you would understand . . . if I wanted anyone dead, it would be Dawn. What happened at the field was horrible. But it’s that day in Dawn’s office that haunts me.”
I consider this in light of my work. My experience. How abuse by someone trusted leaves a different kind of wound.
“Do I wonder what shape my life would have taken if Emile hadn’t told me not to report the rape—that no one would believe me, and then my life would be over?
All the fucking time.” And now her face reveals the scar that hasn’t fully healed, and I think there are layers upon layers of faces hiding behind this one.
“And how he took my clothes and gave me a bath? Like I was a child. He stayed in the bathroom while I washed myself.”
Her body recoils as this all plays back.
“I mean—was he really looking out for me? Not knowing any better? Or was he protecting The Palace?”
I don’t have an answer. Emile was only twenty-three. But trying to erase Kayla’s rape wasn’t the only time he changed the course of our lives.
Kayla leans forward, elbows on the table, and shakes her head. Then she gets up, and retrieves a piece of paper from a small desk in the corner next to the pantry. She slides it across the table in front of me.
“The thing is,” she says as she sits back down, “about six years ago, someone sent this to me.”
I look at the paper. It’s a clipping from The Denver Post—an article about a man who was killed in the woods off Route 27—a mountain road north of Denver.
A picture shows the man when he was still alive.
He’s wearing the necklace that Kayla told us about that night.
The one with the black and white beads. It says he drove semis.
That it was a robbery gone wrong. His truck was stolen.
I feel my back straighten, and the air cling to my lungs. I don’t move a single muscle in my body as I stare at the article.
“It’s so strange,” I manage to say.
“I always thought it was Emile who sent it,” she says. “I thought it was his way of, I don’t know, apologizing maybe. Like he saw it and thought it would make me feel better knowing this guy was dead.”
“Did it?” I ask, thinking about the text I got at the conference in Aspen, as I slide the article away from me. The emoji of a blade. It was the day Emile disappeared.
She smiles a little. “Yeah. It did actually. And I don’t care if that makes me a bad person. What I do know is that I felt differently about Emile after that. It took me a while to sort it out. It took the therapist and the stability of my new family.”
Kayla picks up the paper and stares at the man who raped her.
“I heard things after I left. About Indy, of course. But also about you,” she says. “We all knew about your dinner parties with Dawn.”
My heart stops. I thought this was the part of my story I lived alone. In secret. Even from the Orphans. When Dawn would pick me up from down the street. “Don’t tell the others.”
And then the night when there were three place settings, and the light came on from the path to the guest cottage. It was after everyone had left but me. Kayla, Jolene, Indy. I was the last Orphan. I thought no one knew.
“Coach Emile is joining us for dinner.”
My God, how many hours I’ve spent deconstructing the time I spent at the house on the mountain. The fifth light along the access road. And that one night—when Emile joined us.
And right then, as this memory flashes, Kayla looks me dead in the eye.
“I know you came here to see if I could have killed him.”
And then:
“The truth is, Ana—the only person I know who might want Emile dead—is you.”