Justin’s voice spoke to me out of the darkness. “Lee, I don’t want to go to any cops.”
Damnation, I’d hoped we’d gotten past his hang-up, whatever it was. “Why aren’t you in a lather to get home?”
Silence. I flicked on the flashlight, and in its feeble remaining illumination I saw an answer of sorts in his face. He looked down, then to the side, then turned away from the light.
More gently I asked, “Justin, what are you ashamed of? Nothing’s your fault.”
“Yes, it is!”
“Like what?”
“Like you said yourself, I could have called 911, or I could have told a teacher anytime I was in school, and—and now that I’m away from Stoat, I don’t know why I didn’t! I’m worthless. I—”
“Stop that, Justin. You got drawn into an appalling situation, that’s all, and you dealt with it the best you could. You have to remember you’re a good guy. You’re a hero. You saved my life.”
“But I let my parents down for two years. I’m a coward.”
“No, you’re a survivor. Lots of captured people do what you did.”
“Sure they do.”
“No, it’s true. In order to go on living, people adapt to brutal situations and accept them as normal.” Belatedly, my brain offered me the name on a platter. “It’s called Stockholm syndrome,” I told him as if having a labeled disorder might help him.
I think for a moment it did. He stopped looking at the ground; he looked at me instead. “You serious?”
“Yes. Totally.”
He stared at me for a while before he asked, “So you think my parents will forgive me?”
“Justin, there’s nothing to forgive! The whole world will welcome you back.”
“Okay, but everybody will want to know—they’ll ask questions—especially the cops.” He sounded panicky. “Lee, I can’t face it.”
“Face what?”
“Just for starters, my—where he hurt me, Lee—I’m going to need to see a doctor.”
“Not your fault. Are you scared?”
“Mostly embarrassed.”
“If I got raped and needed a doctor, should I be embarrassed?”
“Lee, that didn’t ever really happen, did it?”
Yes, it had. College. Date rape, although I didn’t have sense enough to call it that at the time, and I hadn’t reported the prick who did it, either. But this mustn’t be about me. “It happens to one in every four women,” I said. “Should we be embarrassed?”
“No! That’s horrible!”
“Exactly. Horrible is the word. What else did that effing pervert do to you?”
Silence, and I thought I’d lost him, but finally he said very softly, “He—my body hair—he’s been making me Nair myself all over. Even, you know, down there.”
Unexpected, that hit me in the gut. I banged the table with my fist. “That total creep!”
“He wanted a little kid. He was going to find one soon. Replace me. You think I’m such a hero, listen to this: I snuck the baseball bat into the van because I was pretty sure that when he went to kill you, he was fixing to kill me too. Like, that letter you wrote, that was a farce. He would never have let me mail it. Which told me I wasn’t going to live to mail it.”
“I know,” I said, my voice low.
“You know?” His adolescent voice creaked up an octave.
“I figured. Why would he bring you along to be a witness to murder? He meant to kill you too, and you’re smart enough, you knew it.”
“Kind of. I knew yet I kind of didn’t know. Am I crazy?”
“Nope. You were just in denial. I’ve been there myself.” I thought of the five wasted years before the divorce. Georg running around, chasing skirts, looking for his missing e. I had thought it was just his midlife crisis. Crapola. I should have dumped him before he dumped me. Way before.
In a very low voice Justin said, “I could have got away once he let me start going to school. Just a phone call. Now I feel like a total coward.”
“Hell, no. It was incredibly brave, what you did, whacking him with that baseball bat to save me. To save us.”
“But what if you hadn’t come along? What am I supposed to tell people when they ask me why I didn’t try to escape?”
“Tell them they should just try it once. Try being kidnapped by a psycho. Try being immobilized by a stun gun and raped and beaten and starved and chained to a bed and afraid of dying any minute.”
Silence again. I kept my lips pressed shut to keep from saying any more. Thousands of his self-esteems could have danced on the head of a pin. The decision to contact his parents was one he had to make himself, if at all possible.