Chapter 9
Chapter
Nine
EREZ
Alice didn’t speak until she was seven. Ever. For anything. Not even in her sleep.
Her preferred form of communication was pointing. She also had this look like we were being dense if we didn’t understand what she was making blatantly clear. I can still see that expression when I close my eyes.
No one tried to force her to talk. I’m not sure her mutism was a choice so much as a result of trauma, just as Matty suggested it was.
As a child, my parents brought in a speech therapist, but Alice refused to take part.
After seven months, they let the therapist go despite Alice not meeting her verbal milestones for her age.
We attended Van Doren Prep, and her teachers were always accommodating. They gave her opportunities to speak. They encouraged it. But they never pushed. When Alice made it clear that she wasn’t going to speak, the teachers moved on.
The day Alice spoke, we were lying on the floor of my bedroom on our stomachs. Alice was coloring. There was nothing she enjoyed more than coloring. She could fill up an entire coloring book in a week.
She also loved when I read to her, so while she colored, I read. I was reading a book told from the point of view of a dog named Scoob who was a full-time resident at a dog rescue haven that his human mother operated.
To this day, the memory of Alice’s first words are vivid in my mind.
She pointed at the picture—at an abused golden retriever who was being shown around the sanctuary by Scoob.
Showing them they were safe. They were cared for.
They mattered and they were wanted. The world was a better place with them in it.
Alice pointed at the golden retriever and said, “I had one of them before.”
I was so startled by her voice that I stared at the place where her finger touched the page. My brain glitched for a minute before I asked, “A dog?”
She nodded. “That kind. Gold. Long fur.”
“Before… I found you?”
Alice nodded again. The tip of her crayon paused briefly, then she continued coloring.
“Where did that man take you from?” I asked.
She continued to color until she eventually said, “I don’t know. I don’t remember.”
Her words were clear. Crisp. Just as coherent as a seven-year-old’s should be.
“Is your name really Alice?” I asked.
She nodded and shrugged. “It is now.”
“What was it?”
“I don’t remember.”
“How old are you, really?” I’d been waiting for three years to ask her questions and for Alice to answer, so they came spiraling out of me.
Alice sighed. “I don’t know.”
“Why was that man hitting you?”
Her crayon stopped, and her shoulders stiffened. “I don’t want to talk about that anymore, Erez.”
“I’m sorry,” I said quickly and leaned over to wrap my arm around her shoulders, resting my head against hers. “I didn’t mean to… Uhm…”
Alice’s shoulder shrugged again. “I just don’t want to talk about it ever.”
“Okay. I won’t ask again. I promise. But if you ever do want to talk, I will listen. I won’t even say anything.”
“I don’t want to,” she insisted, and I didn’t push.
She didn’t speak again that night. I continued to read the book to her. I read it three times total because in true Alice fashion, every time I closed the book at the end, she opened it to the beginning, a clear request to hear it again.
The next morning, when she came down for breakfast, she said, “Good morning, Erez,” as she sat next to me. Every person in our family stilled and stared. Alice either didn’t notice or pretended that she didn’t notice.
While Alice was never chatty, she spoke from that day on. Sometimes she’d go quiet for a few days, but she always talked to us.
The book in my hands now is the book I read Alice too many times to count. As an adult, I think it’s the message that Alice loved to hear. Rescued into safety. Care. Respect. There was no more abusive touch, something the rescued golden retriever took a while to trust.
I read this book to Alice what must have been every night for years. It was one of the first books I read to her. In fact, the golden’s name was Alice. I never put that connection together until now. Alice saw herself as that golden. A golden terrified of men because it was men who abused them.
Alice was that golden retriever. She was telling us what happened to her from the moment she named herself Alice.
“What is it?” Fade asks.
I’ve probably been kneeling beside the bookshelf with this book in my hand for an hour. Remembering. Connecting.
“This was Alice’s favorite book as a child. I read it to her a hundred times.” I run my hands over the glossy cover. I bet her fingerprints are still there.
“Read it to me,” Fade says.
My breath catches, and tears sting my eyes. I’m not sure I can. It takes me a long time just to open the cover. If there’s a message, maybe it’s in this book.
It takes me even longer to read the book. It’s probably no more than eight hundred words, but it takes me probably half an hour to read it. I look at the margins and the words and the pictures, waiting for anything at all to jump out at me.
By the time I close the book, I know for certain that Alice related to the rescued golden retriever. Her abuse went beyond what the dog experienced, but I think her trauma was reflected in the same way the dog cowered away from the men and cried whenever they’d come close.
“It’s a beautiful message,” Fade says, resting his hand over mine on the cover. “I see why she took comfort in it. There’s darkness, but it closes with a happy ending.”
“A happy ending that she couldn’t make it to,” I murmur.
Fade rests his forehead against my temple.
“Maybe not, but I think you should back up a little. For eleven years, you and your family gave her that happy ending. She didn’t die in the awful place you took her from.
Even if we don’t understand why she took her life instead of asking for help, she died on her own terms, at her own hands. ”
It feels as if something brushes against the back of my neck. It’s cold and raises the hairs, right as Fade says she died on her own terms. Is that confirmation? Is that an agreement? Is Alice here?
“How many people did they kill?” I whisper, various paintings of Alice’s flashing through my mind like a marquee. All the ones she painted where she was the spectator and not the victim. “How many kids did she witness being murdered?”
Fade nods. “I wondered that too.”
“I’m afraid of what we’re going to uncover,” I admit.
At this point, most of the dark paintings that Alice hid have been brought to the tech lab at Van Doren Technologies to run through scanners.
They identified more than a dozen unique individuals.
Most of the faces in the paintings are repeated. Repeated abusers.
I haven’t shared this with Fade. I haven’t told him that we’re looking for the men Alice painted. They’re just paintings, after all. Paintings of a child. From memories up to eleven years in her past. How accurate could she have painted them?
“She didn’t want you to know,” Fade says. “I think she might have been protecting you from the horrors in her past.”
“Protecting me? I wasn’t in danger.”
“You rescued her, Erez. You stopped her abuse. You gave her life, freedom, and autonomy again. I’m guessing she knew how much she meant to you. How much you made her your responsibility. You’re not subtle in the way you protect those you care about.”
I huff, a smile touching my mouth.
“You said you killed the man you found beating her,” he says quietly. “Right?”
I nod.
“I imagine, to a little kid, she thought you’d run into the fire to kill the rest of the men who hurt her.
The things she saw, the things she witnessed and experienced…
I imagine she didn’t think you were immune to their abuse, and she didn’t want you to run into the fire and become their victim too. ”
Another chilly hand rests along my neck, and I shiver. “She didn’t have to protect me. Our dads would have taken care of it, not me.”
I almost wince because I didn’t just admit to murdering someone as a small child again. I practically admitted that my parents might be murderers themselves. They are, of course, since long before my brothers and I were born, but that’s a family secret. That’s not something we share.
“Let’s keep looking. There are a lot of books on that shelf.”
Alice had three low bookshelves against the dormer wall, each of them three shelves high. One is filled with completed coloring books, and although I’ve looked at them in the past, we carefully page through them and examine everything. Every damn thing.
For days, Fade and I do this. He comes over after he’s finished working for the day, and together we sort through Alice’s room. Sometimes one of my parents joins us. Sometimes one of my brothers. Zeph almost always brings one of his boyfriends with him. Everyone stays for a few hours then leaves.
Fade stays with me. No matter how late I want to look. He doesn’t leave until I leave.
We’re moving through Alice’s room far more slowly than I ever did in the past. Examining every crack in the wall, every nook, every seam of every shirt. Under every piece of furniture. I crawl through the dormers until I’m sure they’re empty.
It takes us two weeks, and, unsurprisingly, we find nothing. No scribbled note. No goodbye. No letter. Today, we’re putting her room back together, just how it had been when we began. Fade and I are carefully sliding the desk back into place so we can get the bookcases where they were.
Something stops us from moving, like the desk is stuck on a raised floorboard. In tired irritation, I crawl around it, shoving it away from the wall so I can see what it’s caught on.
A book fell. From where, I don’t know. I pick it up and turn it over. There’s nothing on the front cover or the back. Sitting back on my haunches, I open it, and my heart stops. Across the end pages, Alice’s loopy scroll reads, “ALICE DEATH.”
Death. With an A. Chills cover my entire body. There are scratchy doodles all over the place. A knife, a length of rope, something that’s disturbingly phallic shaped. There are cracked lines all over the pages, as if to make clear that something is broken. Shattered.
“What is it?” Fade asks, coming up beside me.
“I…”
I turn the page, and the words “SCREAM LOUDER” are scratched so roughly into the page that it’s torn in various spots.
A little girl’s face is scribbled there too with sharp lines, more reminiscent of the black canvases than her colorful art.
She’s screaming. Tears run down her face.
I think there’s the depiction of a bruise on her cheek. Anguish in her young eyes.
“Oh my god,” Fade whispers.
I turn the page then shut the book with a snap as bile rises. That’s not an abstract memory of rape. That’s a detailed, vivid memory. I slam the journal on the floor and keep my hand pressed against it as tears fill my eyes. Fade wraps around me as I begin to shake.
I only caught a glimpse, but a glimpse was all I needed to confirm the truth of what Alice was telling us in the dark paintings.
They were purposefully vague. Intentionally suggestive without being loud.
They told you a message but did so quietly, giving you the option to look away and see something else.
This drawing was raw, real, and absolute.
It’s damning but faceless. There’s no mistaking the subject of a little child and a grown man.
In true Alice fashion, you’re meant to be looking at it as if you’re the victim.
They’re faceless, looking on. The monster is in full focus, though.
All of him. What he’s doing is in full focus.
There’s no misunderstanding. No misinterpretation.
My chest heaves as I try to force off the emotion that’s attempting to erupt loudly inside me. I shake. Fade grips me tightly to his chest as the world spins. Nausea threatens to overtake me.
“This… I can’t… Fade, what do I…” I’m not entirely sure what I’m trying to say.
I can’t look at these, but I need to look through this journal.
If there’s a message anywhere at all, if there’s an explanation or an apology or a goodbye, it could very well be here, where all her deepest, darkest secrets were hidden.
“Okay,” Fade says. His fingers dig into me harshly. I’m sure he’s not doing it on purpose, but I’m thankful for the little bite of pain. It’s enough to break through the torment rolling inside me. “Okay,” he repeats, but I don’t think his words are for me. He’s trying to process what we just saw.
Fade takes a deep breath. “Do you want to call the authorities?”
Everything inside me rejects his suggestion.
They’ll take her art and her journal and probably never give it back.
I’m confident without a doubt that nothing at all will come of it.
Alice has been dead for a decade. She never once claimed that she was the victim of…
anything. I’m sure the doctor we took her to made note of her bruises and shit, but did they note that she was raped?
It would be the unspoken words of a child’s art and nothing more. No evidence. No testimony.
“No. It’s too late for that.” Pedophiles in this country aren’t punished as they should be. I like to think that’s why my dads work for the contracts department of Van Doren Tech. The underground contracts department. The one that brings justice to evil people that the law fails.
“What about… FBI?”
I shake my head. I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to bring it to Lanzo. Lanzo will look at it critically, and it won’t make him sick because Lanzo doesn’t work that way.
But I can’t do that with Fade.
Instead of addressing the horrible journal right now, I let Fade take my weight. He holds me securely, just as I knew he would. Fade’s a good friend and a person who isn’t afraid of showing affection and offering comfort to his male friends. Right now, I need that more than anything else.