The Next Accident - Lisa Gardner [98]
“It’s true! You may be on the verge of something wonderful, but you’d rather steel yourself for the downside than inspire yourself with the good. Oh . . .” Kimberly blinked. “You and my father, I get it.”
“Oh, no. Don’t you go there right now. I really don’t need this right now.”
She might as well have not spoken. “I was so sure my father was the holdout in your relationship,” Kimberly declared. “I mean, given his distant relationship with his father, his reserve with his own children, his fears of intimacy with my mother. But this time around, it’s not Dad, is it? It’s you. You’re the one who doesn’t trust the relationship.”
“Why do you people insist on speaking of trust as if life were a Disney movie? Kimberly, my mother beat me as a hobby. My father was basically a sperm donor, who fucked the town whore and moved on. Seventeen years later, my mother’s current boyfriend decided she wasn’t good enough and turned his attention on me. I have trouble trusting people? Hell yes, I have trouble trusting people. My mother was a mean, ill-tempered drunk. And I still loved her. That’s not Disney; that’s a complicated world.”
“My father doesn’t drink.”
“Give him a few days,” Rainie said sourly. “He also didn’t curse or plot revenge until three days ago, and he’s doing a fine job of that now.”
“He would never hurt you,” Kimberly said seriously.
Rainie groaned. “God save me from psych majors. Kimberly, look . . . I know your father is a good guy. I know he’s different from the others. But knowing isn’t always knowing, if that makes any sense. I mean, it’s one thing to grasp something intellectually. To tell myself that Quincy’s different, that he’s okay, that he won’t hurt me. It’s another thing to change a lifetime way of thinking. To emotionally, really . . . believe. To genuinely feel safe.”
“I tell myself logically that my mother is dead,” Kimberly said abruptly. “But emotionally, I don’t believe it yet.”
Rainie nodded slowly. Her voice softened. “Yeah, it’s kind of like that.”
“I tell myself it’s not my mother’s fault, or Mandy’s fault, or my father’s fault,” Kimberly said. “But I’m mad at all of them. They left me. I’m the strong one and I’m supposed to take it, but I don’t want to be this strong. I’m angry at them for that.”
“I keep having this dream,” Rainie said. “Two or three times a week, always the same dream. This baby elephant is running across the desert. His mother is dead; he’s all alone and desperate for water. Then these other elephants come, except instead of helping him, they beat him into the ground because he’s a threat to their own survival. He gets up though. He fights to live and staggers after them. Finally they find water. I relax. In my dream, I think the baby is going to be all right. His struggle has now paid off. He will live happily ever after. Then the jackals come and tear him apart. And I wake up with little baby screams still echoing in my head. I don’t know why I can’t stop dreaming it.”
“We read this study last year,” Kimberly said, “about how children go through phases when they will want to hear the same story over and over again. According to the scientists, there is an issue or theme in the story that the children identify with. When they have resolved the issue, they don’t need to hear the story anymore. But until then, night after night, they’ll request the same tale.”
“I’m a four-year-old?”
“You identify with something in your dream. Probably the baby elephant.”
“The baby elephant dies.”
“But he fights to live.”
“Nobody helps him. He’s desperate to join the herd. He would’ve been better off alone.”
“He’s following instinct. It’s everyone’s instinct to be part of something. In evolutionary terms, we are stronger together than alone.”
“But not in my story. In my story, the baby elephant’s desire to be with other elephants kills him.”
“No, Rainie. In your story, the baby elephant’s desire for companionship keeps him alive. What’s he running across the desert for? Why does he get up each and every time? He’s not fighting to live simply