Dr. Argent leans in like she’s about to tell me a secret. “Life is the great maker of crazy. No one’s immune.”
I’m not sure if that’s more reassuring or depressing, but I know it’s true. After everything, I’m starting to wonder if the whole point of life is to see how much each person can take before they break.
“I’m sorry you got stuck with me,” I say because how frustrating must working with me be for a person whose profession is to help piece back together a person’s life? Mine has been totally and irrevocably obliterated.
“Actually, I requested your case. I couldn’t wait for the chance to meet you.”
I would have laughed if my throat wasn’t burning. “It’s such an honor to meet the stupid girl who managed to get herself kidnapped by a total stranger a whole twenty feet away from her front door, right?”
Dr. Argent crosses her legs and folds her hands in her lap. She doesn’t have a pen and notepad like I would have expected. You know, so she could make notes for her book deal. “It’s an honor to meet a strong woman who managed to survive ten years of captivity with a severely mentally ill man. It’s an honor to meet a survivor.”
This time I do laugh. It comes out ragged-sounding though. Like I’ve spent most of my life puffing on a cigarette. “Yeah, well, I didn’t really have a lot of choice in the matter. He kind of kept me chained up for ten years”—God, has it really been that long? I guessed closer to eight.—“and it wasn’t like he starved me or beat me senseless, so I didn’t really have a choice in the whole surviving part. It was kind of forced on me, because that wouldn’t have been my choice.”
My eyes shut. After those first months spent locked in that dark closet, the months—or hell, years—that followed were dark ones. I held on to too much of the old part of me, and I wanted to die. If I had been given the opportunity, I probably would have taken it. It wasn’t until I forced myself to strangle the life out of the girl I’d been that life got better. I could be Sara Jackson more easily when Jade Childs was dead. The life I had wasn’t so bad when I didn’t compare it to the one I’d had before.
“Do you know how old you are, Jade?” Dr. Argent asks. “Or would you prefer I call you Sara? That’s what you told the officers your name was when they found you.”
“My name’s Jade. You can call me Jade.” I open my eyes and stare at the ceiling tiles.
“That doesn’t necessarily mean that’s what you want to be called.”
“I want to be called Jade,” I say slowly. “The sooner I get back to my old life, the better off I’ll be.” It’s a lie, but I’m telling her what she wants to hear. I hope it doesn’t backfire on me because I’d like to pass the shrink test and move on to . . . whatever comes next. “And I’m twenty-seven,” I add because even though I hadn’t known I was missing for ten years, I can still do simple math. Seventeen plus ten equals twenty-seven.
My God, I’m almost thirty.
My stomach roils.
“That’s right. It’s June, so you just had your birthday.” Dr. Argent’s voice stays the same no matter what she says. It doesn’t change even when mine does. I guess that’s what years of college and hundreds of thousands of dollars in school loans will get you—a level, emotionless voice. “Do you know the name of the man who kidnapped you?”
I barely have time to absorb that I’m in my mid-twenties before she thrusts me into the next difficult topic. “Earl Rae Jackson.” My tongue drills into the side of my cheek when I say his name. I don’t know why.
“Do you know where you were being held?” She crosses her legs and leans back like she’s getting comfortable.
This is one of the most uncomfortable experiences of my life.
“In an old house. Somewhere in the country.” I wet my lips and think. How could I have lived somewhere for a decade and have no idea where, in what city in which state, I was?
“That’s right. You were just outside of Bellingham.”
Bellingham. In the same exact state. So close to home . . . what took them so long? Why couldn’t they have found me before I lost myself? Why . . .?
That had been the tenor of my early years with Earl Rae, and it messed me up good—I’m not going back there. Asking why doesn’t do anything. It can’t fix what had happened. Asking why doesn’t belong in the future; it belongs in the past.
“Do you need anything, Jade?” Dr. Argent pauses like she’s waiting for me to rattle off some laundry list of things I need.
Maybe I do need plenty of things, but none of those things can be picked up at a grocery store. I let the silence continue.
“The doctors say that, given your circumstance, you’re quite healthy. It’s hard for them to say until the bloodwork comes back, but it doesn’t appear as though you have any vitamin or mineral deficiencies, and with some exercise and time, I’m told you’ll be able to run marathons by next summer if you so desire.”