McKay huffs and shakes his head, then looks at Indie. “That’s great. That’s just goddamned great. You know we’re on your side. And if you don’t, Indie, then… you know what? Fuck you.”
Her face is stoic again. Just blank.
I stand up and turn to McKay. Shrug with my hands. “I gave her that tape because I wanted the truth to come out. So… there you go, dude. She’s all yours. I’ll be downstairs if you need me. Because I’m not walking out.”
I couldn’t even if I wanted to.
Because after all these years. After all that poking and prodding inside her mind. After all the desperate hope, and all the disappointing dead ends, and all the ways in which I failed her, and Adam, and McKay, and myself, and yeah, Carter too.
Just when I finally admit that he’s gone and move on—today, of all days, she gives me the gift of a clue.
And that clue might as well be a little piece of paper that says, Carter was here.
There is no way I’m walking out now.
CHAPTER THIRTY ONE - McKAY
PRESENT DAY
Donovan slams the bedroom door behind him when he leaves, his feet stomping on the stairs on his way down just like Adam’s did.
He’s angry. I don’t blame him. None of this is really his fault. Hell, none of this is really anyone’s fault.
It’s just… fuck if I know what it is.
Indie is standing in the middle of the room staring at the bedroom door.
“I want to hear the tapes, McKay. All of them. Right now. I need to know why this is happening to me. I need it to all make sense.”
“OK.” I scrub my face with my hands. Feeling very alone, and tired, and sad all of a sudden. “OK. We can do that. Which one do you want to listen to first?”
“Does it matter?”
“I don’t know, Indie. I really don’t know. I never listened to them. Not after the first few. It always bothered me.”
She turns to me. “Why?”
“Because… you’re always someone different with Donovan. And Adam, too.”
“What do you mean?”
What do I mean? How can I explain it? “You were just… defiant with them. And you were complaint with me.”
Her shoulders relax a little but her frown deepens. “Because I loved you best.”
“You didn’t. You didn’t, Indie. You just…”
“I just loved you best, McKay.”
There are equal parts of me that both want to believe that and reject it in the same breath. “Indie. I need you to hear something right now.”
“The tapes?”
“No. Yes. No. We’re gonna listen to them. But I need you to know this before we start. You don’t belong to me. You don’t belong to anyone. But if you stay with me, you stay with Adam and Donovan too.”
Her shoulders go tense again.
“I thought that was what you wanted? That’s what you told us on your twentieth birthday. That’s what you wrote in that journal. If I had to choose just one of them, I would die. Remember that?”
She nods.
“So we are gonna listen to those tapes but you are not going to judge them. You hear me? Donovan’s right. We did the best we could.”
We lock eyes and stare at each other. And maybe, for the first time ever, I see the girl who really lives inside that head of hers.
The scared little girl. The one that knows she’s not whole. I want to tell her that it’s OK. That’s she’s other things. She’s brave, for one. And smart. And beautiful, and funny, and if she could just face the monster we’ve kept locked inside her head for the past fourteen years, there will be something good on the other side.
But I don’t say it. Because I’m not sure I believe it myself.
Indie rallies and takes a deep breath. “OK.”
“Where do you want to start.
“From the beginning, I guess.”
I agree and walk over to the bag. Donovan is one neat motherfucker. The tapes are in little soft-sided, mini-cassette-tape storage bags, arranged according to year. I never understood why Donovan used a cassette recorder when these things are practically obsolete. But the answer hits me, in this very moment, that this might’ve just been the way he was trained. Twenty years ago, it wasn’t so unusual to use such a device.
And then another revelation hits me too.
Twenty years ago might be the last time he had an actual, real lesson in PSYOPS.
I rub my hand down my face and swallow down fourteen years of regret.
What. The fuck. Have we done to this girl?
I know it’s not all our fault. It’s pretty clear that we picked Indie up in the middle of something. Someone, probably someone called Carter, got to her first.
And she sure as hell didn’t come with an instruction manual, so whatever. I put the first tape into the recorder and press play.
Indie paces the floor as her own little girl voice fills the room. She stops and looks at me. Smiles at me.
It’s a fun tape, I guess. She was busting Donovan’s balls pretty hard that first time.
But they don’t stay fun for long.
The first time Indie Anna Accorsi disappeared and came back with blood on her clothes and no memory of what she did or where she was, she was twelve years old.
Indie faces the door and presses her head against it as she listens to Donovan’s questions. Her own, hesitant, answers. Which are not answers. She never remembered anything, no matter how hard Donovan tried to coax it out of her.
The next one she’s normal again. Lots of them are totally normal. She is a happy girl content to talk about frogs, and Nathan, and the things they get up to in the swamp.
But she disappeared eight times before her twentieth birthday. Eight times she left us and returned with no memory of where she went, or what she did. So we have to get through seven more reality checks.
Even though most of the tapes are no longer than ten minutes, there are a lot of them and it takes a long time. By the time we’re finally at the last one before that very bad birthday, she’s huddled in the corner of her bedroom, hugging herself the way Donovan taught her, sobbing quietly.
I want to go to her. Hold her and tell her it’s all gonna be OK.
But I’m not sure it is.
When that tape is over, there’s nothing left but the one we played first. “Do you want to hear the last one again, Indie?”
She wipes a hand across her face. Sniffs loudly. And then turns her body so she can see me.
She is a beautiful fuckin’ mess.
She is a pretty little nightmare.
A gorgeous piece of misery and cloak of lovely darkness.
But she is my mess. She is my nightmare. She is my misery and my darkness.
So I smile at her.
She sniffs again. “Why are you smiling at me, Core McKay? There is nothing to smile about.”
That makes me smile even wider. She never calls me Core. “Because I love you, Indie Anna Accorsi. I don’t care what you’ve done, I still love you. And you’re not the only mess in this house. We’re all a mess. We’re all hiding darkness inside us. We’re all filled with regrets, and shame, and we were all born into the same fucking nightmare. But you know what?”
“What?”