Page 37 of A Mother’s Love

The morning after she’d been detained by the police, Halley woke up feeling as though she had been beaten up.

Every inch of her body ached, though they hadn’t laid a hand on her or been rough with her.

She looked like what she was. A respectable, expensively dressed woman, middle-aged by technical standards, no matter how young she looked.

And even the police had guessed that the matter would be cleared up quickly.

If the president hadn’t been attacked and almost killed, no one would have cared about the absence of Halley’s passport.

But in light of a terrorist attack, they couldn’t overlook a single detail of protocol.

They had been careful about how they handled her, suspecting that she could be the wife of someone important, and that all hell would break loose when her husband found out she had gotten locked up by the French police.

Those things could easily get out of hand and had before, so they handled her with kid gloves, but she didn’t feel like it the next day.

They had still detained her and briefly put her in a cell.

Her little black dinner dress was badly wrinkled when she woke up still wearing it.

She took it off and took a bath, and felt slightly better.

She was starting to recognize the danger signs that had plagued her over the years at times of great stress.

It had only happened a few times when the twins were young, and it had all come back in a rush when Robert died.

She had spent six months with a therapist, every day when she needed to.

His assessment was that she was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, and when they went over the major traumas in her childhood, it didn’t surprise Halley or the therapist. Halley always knew what it was and where it came from.

She knew she was one of the lucky survivors, but the scars of her trauma were deep.

After Robert died, she had had nightmares for months, dreaming that her mother was coming after her, to kill her.

Halley was drowning in the dreams, and Robert couldn’t save her.

And then she would find Robert dead on the beach or in a forest, and her mother would appear and come after her, and would kill her too.

The dreams were easy to decipher, and harder to get rid of.

“You’ve lost your savior and protector, and you’re afraid your mother will come back and you’ll be helpless again, and this time she’ll kill you.

Robert dying is the loss of your happiness, you think forever, and in your dream, you’re a helpless child again,” Dr. Thacker had explained.

Halley had had several acute anxiety attacks before she asked her doctor for the name of a therapist. She didn’t want to spend the rest of her life having panic attacks and nightmares.

She’d been happy for a long time, and even without Robert, she wanted to get back there.

It had taken longer than she wanted, but a year after Robert died, she felt like herself again.

She missed him, but she wasn’t plagued by the ghosts of the past. The therapist had helped her finally put them to rest and bury them.

Now they were back, having risen from the grave again.

She wanted to deal with them quickly this time before they made themselves at home.

She hadn’t particularly liked Dr. Thacker but he specialized in trauma, and was good at what he did.

He had carefully led Halley through a minefield of pain, to all the most agonizing memories in her life that she had buried for decades.

She’d had therapy before, but the recent time was the most effective.

She wanted the ghosts out of her life forever now, even though she hadn’t forgiven them and knew that she probably never would.

The therapist didn’t ask her to. He said that Halley didn’t need to forgive them, but she had to be willing to leave them, forever this time, and give up the dream of winning their approval or their love. Therein lay the key.

They had gone through all her most painful experiences, and the worst forms of abuse, the beatings, the injuries, the stitches, the broken bones, and worse, the broken heart of a child that her mother didn’t love, and the realization of it.

Halley had had to almost physically wrench herself away from the idea that her mother would emerge from the grave and finally love her.

“Sabine was incapable of it,” Dr. Thacker had said matter-of-factly.

He wasn’t gentle with Halley, but he wasn’t cruel either.

He reminded her again that she was no longer five years old, or three, or six, and that her mother, the most dangerous person in her life, hadn’t killed her, probably because she didn’t dare, not wanting to face the consequences, but would have liked to.

That had always been a hard idea for Halley to stomach, but she knew it was the truth.

Being hated by her mother was one of the hardest hurdles she had to clear.

Her mother had been so excessively narcissistic that there was no way for her to love a child.

Halley represented the ultimate narcissistic injury to her mother, even more so because she was beautiful as a little girl, and her mother saw her only as competition, not as her own flesh and blood.

Her mother had been the evil queen in Sleeping Beauty, the villain of every story Halley had ever read, and of many of her own books.

Sabine had a textbook pathology, and there was no way Halley could conquer or escape it.

It was just bad luck that she was her mother.

That was an accident of nature, or of Fate, but the deck had been stacked against Halley from the beginning and she knew it.

And her father was weak, immoral, and almost as narcissistic as her mother.

He simply ignored Halley most of the time and hoped she’d disappear, which she had obligingly done in closets and under stairs.

Until he perceived her as sexual, and then would have loaned her to his friends for their amusement, if she had let him, which amazingly she hadn’t.

And he had decided to try her out for himself one drunken afternoon, with no thought of what it would have done to her, except that she hadn’t allowed him to do that either.

He was her enemy from then on, just as her mother had been.

They were people she could never trust for an instant.

The only remarkable part of the story, in the therapist’s eyes, was that Halley had the courage and the wisdom at a tender age to protect herself from the ultimate blow, from her father, which might have been the final one that pushed her over the edge.

She might not have recovered if he had raped her or seduced her.

Her own powerful survival instincts had saved her by not letting him do it.

Instead, she had fought with all the wiles available to a child her age to escape both her father and his friends, who had touched her and tried to abuse her, but she had fled and never let them rape her.

They had never touched her soul. Dr. Thacker pointed out that some grown women wouldn’t have been as brave or as resourceful.

But somehow, Halley had instinctively known that if she let them, she would never have been whole again or able to lead a normal life.

“Your preventing them is probably why you were able to love Robert so fully, and have a healthy sex life with him.” It had been one of the most fulfilling parts of their relationship, which might not have been the case otherwise.

It was the only part of her psyche and her body that her parents hadn’t succeeded in battering.

It was hard to understand people like them, and what motivated them.

Many sociopaths actually did succeed in killing their children, and Halley had no idea why they hadn’t.

They had come close at times, especially her mother, while her father’s crimes against her were more subtle.

She blamed her mother more, because the injuries she inflicted were so obvious, and involved tissue damage.

Those inflicted by her father were frightening in a different way.

But she had been old enough to outsmart him and his friends and protect herself, like a child in a war zone fleeing the enemy.

From her mother’s abuse at the age Halley was, there had been no hope of escape, and there had been no one to protect her or save her.

Only Robert, many years too late. She simply had to endure the abuse.

Then Robert left too, and could no longer protect her from the ghosts that returned after his death, once she was helpless and alone again.

Halley could feel the ghosts hovering now, ready to reenter her life and try to crush her again, or kill her this time.

Tomás Maduro had opened the door to them when he threatened her and brought the memories back again.

The man who had stolen her bag had let them in.

The trauma of the sense of violation she had, and the helplessness, had awakened her childhood abuse and trauma again.

Not wanting to let the ghosts settle in, she looked for her therapist’s number in the New York directory, and found him.

She hadn’t spoken to him in two years. Her life had been peaceful since then.