“I loved my sister. I miss her so terribly.”
Within this new context of Donny Ray’s own sexual abuse, I again ponder the flat affect he uses while describing Miranda. It’s not that unusual for victims to detach from emotions associated with the incident. Only after intensive therapeutic work are they able to rejoin with those feelings. What has me scratching my head is that Donny Ray displayed such powerful emotional response to his abuse, and yet while addressing Miranda, there seemed to be nothing. And now I go back even farther to my initial thoughts about a possible unconscious pathology and the trauma trigger. Is there something about Miranda that’s far more painful than Donny Ray’s abuse? Something he’s not yet able to tell me? Maybe even something he can’t recall?
I don’t know . . . can’t be sure.
Moving on in pursuit of that answer, I ask, “Where was your mother when all this was going on?”
“Hiding,” he snaps, and the anger returns. “Hiding like she always did. Pretending that none of it was happening.”
I try to separate my personal identification with him, because I understand it from a firsthand perspective, although in a completely different way. “And after you left the shed? What would he do?”
“After was worse.”
“Worse, in what way?”
“I didn’t get the ice cream cone.”
“What did you get?”
“The punishment,” he says, voice crackling with contempt. “He’d punish me for seducing him, call me a filthy, disgusting whore boy.”
I close my eyes, open them. “I’m so sorry, Donny Ray. I can’t begin to imagine—”
“No. You cannot imagine. Nobody could unless—” He grits his teeth, as if doing so might help keep the humiliation, the anger, contained. “But that wasn’t the punishment.”
“How did he punish you?”
“He’d drive me to the center of town, shove me out of the car, and leave me there.”
“Making you feel more alone than you already were.”
“It was the dress,” he says, choking.
“The what?”
“He made me . . .” Donny Ray gnashes his teeth and lets out a barely audible moan. “My father made me walk through town to get home . . . wearing my dead sister’s dress.”
I draw what feels like my first taste of oxygen since he began telling his horrific story.
“I felt like a freak show. I was ashamed. I was angry. I was so . . .” A tiny yet excruciating whimper passes through his lips. “All I wanted to do was crawl into a hole and die.”
“But you couldn’t.”
“There was no lightbulb to look at then,” Donny Ray Smith tells me. “Just everyone staring. Laughing.”
And in that instant, his eyes return to their previous state.
Blue fury. Cold as steel.
49
One of the first things I learned during my early clinical studies was that trauma is attracted to trauma. While my childhood experiences bear no resemblance to Donny Ray’s, the family dynamic feels awfully familiar: a father who inflicts deep psychological pain on a child, and a mother who checks out, only to inflict yet another layer of damage.
It would be difficult for any psychologist to hear a story like Donny Ray’s and not feel affected by it. We are, after all, human. We have emotional vulnerabilities just like everyone else, and while we’ve been trained to compartmentalize in order to help others, every so often a patient comes along who holds up the mirror to us. When that happens, it can be difficult to ignore what’s looking us in the face.
Still, I refuse to believe that I’m losing objectivity with Donny Ray—I’m simply using my own human experiences as a tool to get information I need.
There’s a difference.
It doesn’t mean I can’t separate my feelings. It just means I need to be mindful of my own past while assessing him.
And perhaps my instinct after our previous session was right. Maybe I can parlay our connection into finding the missing link: does Donny Ray remember murdering Jamey Winslow?
I begin sorting out my thoughts, hoping to integrate new knowledge with the old. I don’t think there’s any question that Donny Ray’s father murdered Miranda. He had the means and the opportunity, and the files indicate the cops thought so, too. Was she intentionally waving good-bye to her brother that day for the last time? After seeing Donny Ray’s detached reaction twice while he spoke of Miranda, I have to wonder whether he might have actually witnessed her murder. This could explain why he appeared so disconnected.
Which brings me back to Dr. Philips’ notes. She entertained the possibility there was some kind of psychological disorder at play but never could pinpoint the pathology. Since the doctor made no mention of Donny Ray’s sexual abuse—or the subsequent punishment his father inflicted—I have to assume she was unable to get him to open up about it. That might be the critical cornerstone she failed to uncover.
But what does this new information mean?
I allow my intuition to wander. Young incest victims don’t just notice the inanimate during their abuse: the inanimate becomes their entire world. I revisit that eerie image of the lightbulb, how all this little boy could do was focus on it, obsessively counting the number of times it swung from a cord while his father violated him.
A violent and intolerable shiver rides through my entire body.
Logic tells me that from what Donny Ray described, during those moments, he could very well have entered into a dissociative state. But plenty of kids detach from reality during traumatic events, and it doesn’t turn them into killers.
There has to be more.