Night, Forgotten

Original Edition - Chapter 36: Now

I land with a heavy thud on a different floor. The floor of the Dolans' storage shed.

At first, the only thing I'm aware of is a man's uneven panting next to my ear. His raspy breath merges with the far-off sound of someone screaming and fills the space inside the shed, vibrating with an urgent violence and now it is everywhere.

But I don't feel the dampness from the floorboards soaking through the fabric of my shirt and melting into cold filth against my back.

I'm completely separate from the body trapped beneath the man's horrible weight.

It's as if I'm nothing more than a vibration, just like the scream that rattles the shed's walls around us, or the man's humid breathing.

Free of my body, I realize something with a comforting certainty that I've never felt so deeply before. Ever since Thomas's birth, I haven't had any desire to know who his biological father is because I do not need to know.

I've spent what feels like an eternity searching for some kind of truth in all the inexplicable things that keep happening, ever since we brought Thomas home. I've gathered the fragments of memory and half-bits of information that sometimes flutter to the forefront of my consciousness, frantically collecting them like clues.

But after all, they haven't been deliberate messages from an otherworldly place that makes infinite sense – what Owen called "God in Heaven" once. No grand scheme has been carefully orchestrated to lead me to the identity of this rapist.

He's not important enough for that.

What he did to me will always be wrong, in every sense of the word. It shouldn't have happened and it doesn't belong in my story. He forced himself into my life, into my consciousness. He still looms there, but he doesn't deserve the space. This story isn't about him.

Letting go isn't about him, either.

It doesn't matter to him, after all, whether or not I choose to hold onto the terror of what he did to me that night. He doesn't suffer in the least when I let it all swirl in my chest, waiting to smother me in my sleep.

He probably never thinks of me at all and I could hate him for it. I could hate him more for not knowing that I hate him, for not even caring whether I move on from what he did to me. But the only person who is worse off for not letting go is me.

This truth is suddenly a part of who I am, and who I will always be from now on. It vibrates right along with me, at the same frequency, as if it has just been waiting for me to notice it here and let it become a part of me.

So I decide to embrace the truth, which is that I can let go of him.

He will not be real for me anymore.

As soon as that acceptance settles over me, I come back into my body. My limbs course with sudden, inexorable strength, as if animated by all the anger and sorrow I've been holding onto. With more power than I've ever felt, I press my forearms and knees against his chest and shove. His body takes the impact, then it disappears, fading into the darkness of the shed like a ghost.
Finally, gratefully, I'm alone on the damp floor of the shed. The screaming has faded to a dull ringing in my ears. Whoever raped me is gone, but the stench of his breath lingers in my nostrils. It's stale beer mixed with something else, something that I haven't been able to remember clearly enough to identify until this moment. But suddenly, the odor is distinctive and unmistakable.

A menthol cough drop.

"You knew it was Eddie." Liza's incredulous voice snaps me back to consciousness in Marcus's office. I can still hear someone screaming, but it's far away now.