The Time I Died
Chapter Eight
Freeport
The wind died down as Kate made her way from the Hyatt to Romanesque. She took the opportunity to unwind her scarf, allowing it to hang Harry Potter-style as she walked. It was cooler now than it had been earlier, and the cold air felt good against her throat. It also distracted her pit in her stomach, which grew a little bigger with each step.
James! Hey! I’m sorry I’m late, I was stuck in line at the Post Office and…
No. NO. Was she really going to start lying to him? Not because of brainwashing, but deliberately? Where would that land her, five or ten years from now? All bad habits had origin stories. She didn’t want this to become one of them.
Hey, honey! So, you’re not going to believe this. I ran into a woman I knew back in college. She was in the cult with me. So, I hypnotized her and took her back to her hotel room…
God, NO. Even presented in context, it made her look like a predator.
Hey, hun! Whew, did I have a busy afternoon! We can talk about it after dinner. How was your day?
That wasn’t bad. Not a lie, not a sock full of quarters to the face like the truth. Just a hint of a story to be explained later.
You’re just ing the buck to Future Kate, she chided herself. What if she’s too afraid to tell him, too?
June 4
“You moved to Freeport after you broke free from Decker?”
“I didn’t break free from him. Something happened out in California that caused the whole operation to crash down around us. Decker never told me what it was, only that he blamed me for it.”
“Is it one of the memories you’re still having trouble with?”
“All I know is that there was a lot of blood. I stopped trying to after that.”
Freeport
She lined up in a small queue at the corner of Fifth, waiting for the light to change. There was a young mother waiting with her, pushing a double stroller. Beside them was an elderly couple, the man’s arm wrapped around the woman’s waist, his other arm curled around the light pole for . Kate’s eyes shifted from the mother to the couple and back. Could that be her someday? The mother of two children? An old and grey woman with piercing green eyes, arm around her amazing husband, her two children grown up and married to amazing spouses of their own?
That was never in the cards for Kate Thomas. Could it be in the cards for Kate Pendleton?
The light changed. The old man pushed away from the pole like a ferry leaving the dock. He said something to his wife as they crossed Fifth, a funny quip that caused her to playfully swat at him. The mother with the stroller patiently waited for them to her, then swung in behind.
Kate followed them, thoroughly charmed. The walk signal began to flash red, and she hastened her pace. She reached the safety of the opposite curb just as someone approached her from behind.
“Hey, would you like to me for dinner?”
She tensed. It took a moment for recognition to catch up. When it did, she slowed her stride and put an extra wiggle in her hips. The elderly couple and the stroller-pushed continued ahead. Kate pursed her lips, eagerly awaiting the next words from the man following her.
The wonderful, understanding, sexy man following her.
“I wish I knew why I chose Freeport, of all places. It’s so different here than California. Why would a beach girl move to the northeast? Why would she trade a busy city for a little one? Did she apply for jobs and took the first one she got? Was she trying to hide?”
“It could have been something programmed into your mind. We’ve talked before about how both Michael and Decker influenced a lot of what anyone else would have seen as your free-willed decisions.”
“I dunno. I feel like… at that point, whatever happened to Decker had already happened and I was technically free to do what I pleased. Like the Golden Dawn girls after Michael got arrested. I woke up one morning as SoCal Kate, totally not a brainwashed sex slave assassin, and I packed up my car and moved three thousand miles away? Why?”
“Sometimes things just work out that way, Kate. It could be that you were looking for a fresh start. You’d spent your entire life in California. A move east would certainly have offered the promise of something different. Maybe something better.”
“Something better. Yeah, you could say that.”
Freeport
“See, I’m thinking of going to this place called Romanesque,” the man said. “I hear they have this amazing scallops plate…”
He pulled next to her, at her left shoulder, filling her personal space in that way that only a lover could. Like a moon falling into the shadow of its planet, she let his presence wash over her, loom over her, feeling protected and guarded and loved. He was here. He was real. He was both.
She grinned. “What a coincidence! I’m going to the same place! What are the odds?”
A million to one. A billion to one.
Odds meant nothing to James, who responded with “Hmm, it could be crowded in there… whaddya say we get a table together, you and me?”
“Sharing my table with a sexy stranger?” She pretended to pout. “I dunno…”
“Scallops, Kate. Do it for the scallops.”
She giggled as she fell into him, arms and smile as wide as possible.
“I call it the Great Blackness. Doctor Kapoor calls it my ocean. Memories on one side, memories on the other, this big empty scary space in between. Unknown depths, plenty of shipwrecks. It’s a good analogy.”
“And how do you feel about having such an ocean in your memories?”
“Frustrated, because so much of it is just completely blank. Angry, because there’s a lot of things in that ocean that I want to . Time spent with James. My wedding, for fuck’s sake! And also… terrified. I know I did a lot of bad things when I was Decker’s puppet. And I know I also did some bad things even when I wasn’t.”
“Decker lied to a lot of people. He could have lied to you, Kate. About what you supposedly did for him. There’s no evidence that you traveled the world as a deadly assassin. That could have been something he told you in order to gaslight you into believing that he had total control over your mind. That he could make you do anything he wanted, even kill.”
“I still have the nightmares. Those are real.”
“Are nightmares real?”
“They are when your mind controller tells you that they are.”
“Your mind controller who was also a proven liar.”
“Gah! You’re trying to make me say it’s unknowable, aren’t you?”
“I’m just pointing out that you’re never going to find a plane ticket in your name to Moscow, or anywhere else on the globe, during that time when Decker was supposedly sending you around the world to do bad things. No hotel bookings, no port stamps, no video footage. All we have are a bunch of supposed murders that could have been committed by anyone, and which would have been more easily done by a local criminal than by you. And we know that Decker would say anything and everything to convince you that you were his helpless puppet, even when you were cutting those strings right in front of him.”
“I…”
“I think that the best way to get beyond Decker is to acknowledge that he wasn’t nearly that powerful.”
“Okay, okay. I guess it’s unknowable. How do you prove that a powerful Russian arms dealer was murdered by a random twenty-eight-year-old spreadsheet jockey from America? But then again, that’s why Decker’s program worked. No one would ever suspect me. No one would ever be afraid of me. Just like the college girls I hypnotized. By the time they realized what I really was… it was way too late for them.”
“It is unknowable. Is it even possible for a twenty-eight-year-old ant to show up in Russia and be in a position to meet and kill an arms dealer? You’ll never really know, and I’ll never really know. But keep that one in your back pocket, Kate. Decker could have put memories in your head of you being a killer just as easily as he put memories in your head of being at the beach in Miami. The more he had you brainwashed into thinking that you would do anything for him, the more he could convince you to do other, less exotic but actual things for him.”
“Like?”
“Boring white-collar crime. You’re good with numbers, you’re good with software. He might have had you cooking books, laundering cash, things like that.”
“He made me sleep with the men I killed. I know that.”
“You suspect that.”
“Fine.”
“I don’t want to sound like I’m belittling you, Kate. I believe you when you say that it’s possible that you were turned into a killer for hire. And that could mean that you were asked to seduce or kill men you’d never met and were told to never . Because as rare as it is, it sometimes happens. But everything that you and I and the FBI know about him tells us that he would have had to have been very lucky to pull off that sort of thing.
You’ve told me many times in these sessions that you’re a killer, a murderer, that you have blood on your hands. I’d like you to imagine a world in which you’ve never killed a single person, and consider that it might be what actually happened.”
“I guess. Even he said that I would never know for sure. That the only certainty was uncertainty. But I tried to kill my own husband, acting on a memory of… maybe killing someone?”
“But you didn’t kill your husband.”
Freeport
James, ever the planner, had a table reserved for them. A waiter took their orders for drinks—house red for Kate, a stout for James—and disappeared into the bowels of the restaurant.
He folded his hands. “How was your day?”
I had a busy afternoon! I’ll… no, we can talk about it later.
Those were the planned words, but sitting here in the luxury of Romanesque, surrounded by other people, laughter, and small talk, Kate reconsidered. Why later, Kate? What if later turns out to be never? Suck it up!
“I… um… so it was weird, I ran into this woman I haven’t seen since college. Well, she ran into me, I guess.”
James took it in stride, his cute smile never wavering or failing. “Did she try to sign you up for the alumni association?”
“I’m kind of shocked that she didn’t!” Kate chose her words carefully. She hated doing it. Take it slow, girl. Don’t beat him over the head with it all at once. “Michelle used to be the chair of the Pennsylvania NU alumni association. Not like there’s that many of us that wandered away from California.”
“Michelle… do I know her?”
“No, she was just in town for a conference.”
Their waitress brought them a basket of breadsticks. James stuck one in his mouth like an oversized cigar, the end of it dangling from his lips as he spoke. It was hard to take him seriously in this position.
“Ah,” he said. “The conference life! We both know how—oh! Shit!”
As he spoke, the breadstick broke in two. The larger piece fell from his lips and tumbled down his shirt, coming to rest in his lap. He looked down, frowning.
“I’m such a dork,” he concluded, chewing and swallowing the smaller half of the stick. “Do you still love me, lovely wife?”
“I still love you, lovely husband.”
“I tried, though! I legit tried to kill James! What if he hadn’t grabbed the towel bar? What if our bathtub was luxurious and made from rock-hard marble instead of, whatever, the usual cheap stuff? He could have died, Doc.”
“Take a deep breath, Kate.”
“Yeah, but…”
“Please. Deep breath. Just one.”
“But… okay, okay. Whew. Okay. You see where I’m coming from, though, don’t you? Even now, even after all this time, I’m scared. I’m so scared that there’s a monster lurking inside me and someday she’s going to jump out again. Jump out to hurt James. Jump out to… oh God, what if I did that to my children? I would die! I can’t ever be that person ever again! And it’s not… it’s not like Golden Dawn. It’s not about a forgotten trigger phrase. It’s about me, specifically.”
“This would be a strange question in almost any other situation, Kate, but here…”
“Yes?”
“Have you tried to kill your husband lately?”
Freeport
“How’s the carbonara?”
Kate glanced down at her plate. It was mostly cleared of pasta. “It was delicious! Sorry I plowed through it so quickly. I was super hungry today for some reason.”
“It’s cold out. Your body demands calories.” James had devoured his mussels just as fast. He nudged his empty plate to the edge of the table and folded his hands again, his eyes fixed on Kate. “I’m glad we decided to do this more often,” he said. “This was a great idea.”
“Eating out?”
“Mmmhmm. Makes me feel fancy. Even here in Freeport we can live it up now and then. And, this was a great idea because someone here had to work through his lunch hour.”
Kate shook her head knowingly. “That thing with Chicago again?”
“I don’t know why they need so much hand-holding! Every week it’s something new! I’m at the point where I want to throw down and say ‘it’s not my job to teach you how to do your job. But…”
“But?”
“But that would be the end of my job. And fancy dinners. And kids, if and when we have kids.”
“You’d get another job,” she said, nodding to herself and to him. “A better one. God, James, you’re so good at what you do! You literally saved the company $1.2 million dollars last year without cutting a single employee! That would be an automatic hire in my book.”
“I know. And I love you for saying that. But I also want to make sure that you’re okay, Kate. This working from home thing has been so good for you and your health. I don’t want to put you in a spot where you’d have to go back into an office.”
“Well I’m not brainwashed. I think I’d do okay in the corporate world.”
James grinned. “Oh, trust me, they all brainwash you!”
“Yes, Master,” Kate replied, shaking her head. She held her arms in front of her, like a zombie, fork dangling from her right hand. “I will work sixty hours a week without a raise, Master.”
“You just described my entire career. Which one of us was brainwashed, exactly?”
Kate’s foot darted out, intent on a kick to her husband’s leg, but she settled for a light tap. Her green eyes sparkled. God, she loved him.
“Have I tried… no! Of course not!”
“Or ever? Since that one and only time?”
“I know where you’re going with this, but—”
“At that time, Kate, you were dealing with some really heavy stuff, and you were forced to handle a lot of it on your own. Without even really knowing what it was you were facing, or ing. That’s not the Kate you are today. You know what happened to you back then, and now you know why it happened.”
“How do I know that, though? How do I really know that? that I tried to kill Decker, too. The only thing that stopped me was James tackling me to the floor.”
“While you were hypnotized.”
“I still wanted to kill him! Even if I had been completely under my own control and free will! Do you know how much anger there was? How much hate? How much blind, desperate, vicious anger I had in my heart right then? He destroyed my entire life! He was a monster! Mulroney hypnotized me into doing the deed but I swear to God, if I’d known that Decker was in my house and holding my husband at gunpoint I’d have done the same thing on my own. That bastard. That fucking bastard! That son of bitch monster! I hope he’s rotting in hell, because sometimes I feel like I’m right there with him. Oh God, I… he… fuck… fuck him and every rotten, foul word that ever oozed out of his mouth. I’m… I’m sorry, I… where are the, um…”
“Tissues are on your left, Kate.”
“I… thank you. I’m so sorry, I know I shouldn’t be crying.”
“That’s why I buy plenty of Kleenex.”
“I’m just mad at myself. I’m so mad at myself right now! What’s the point of all of these sessions if I’m still a hot mess? I feel like I’m never going to be normal and this is going to be hanging over me for the rest of my life. It’s not fair. I know that life isn’t fair but it’s not fair. None of it. I’ve had so much shit thrown in my face and I’ve come so far and I’m still so scared!”
“Kate, there was a time when just talking about these things frightened you so much that you hid inside of your car.”
“Okay, but… no, no, you’ve got a point there.”
“My goal, and your goal, isn’t to silence those feelings, or erase them. That’s what brainwashing attempts to do, and as you know, even that doesn’t make the feeling go away. Little smudges, you called them, and I think that’s a perfect way to describe them.
Our goal in this room is twofold. One is to confront those fears and find effective ways to turn the mental nozzles in your head, letting those fears fizzle out instead of building up to explosive pressure.
The other is to focus on the positives. You’ve done an outstanding job of that, Kate. You’ve built quite a life for yourself, and you did it after going through more hardship than most of us could even imagine.”
“Can I tell you a secret that I’ve never told anyone?”
“Go ahead.”
“I wish I’d killed him.”
“Who?”
“Decker. I… oh God, I just realized that was a little open-ended, huh? Like, we just talked about James and the bathtub.”
“A betting man would have picked Decker to finish first, second, and third.”
“Okay, that makes me feel a little better. I’m glad you saw where I was coming from.”
“Why do you wish you’d killed him? And why do you feel like it’s a secret you need to keep?”
“We watched him die. We watched the cops shoot him. He died on my tile floor. He died in the very same spot where I hit my head after I fell off the ladder. How ironic is that, huh?”
“Have you spoken with anyone about how that made you feel? Watching someone die is never easy, no matter who it is. People who witness executions of criminals are often profoundly affected by it, even when those criminals are terrible people who did terrible things.”
“My husband did. Our friend Kwame is a psychiatrist. James has known him since high school, so he set up some sessions. Meanwhile, I was… surprise! I was too fucking scared to do the same! Coward Kate strikes again. I kept convincing myself that it wasn’t scarring at all. The monster died, the movie ended happily.”
“But?”
“But it should have been me. I had the gun. I had the opportunity. I even had the excuse! I was hypnotized! And then James tackled me and held me down until I snapped out of it. A part of me will never forgive him for that. I know that. As much as I love him, I’ll never forgive him for depriving me of being the one to shoot that bastard over and over until he was dead.
I know why he did it. He doesn’t think of me as a killer, and he wanted to prove that I wasn’t. And… he was right about me. But… that woman he tackled? She was a killer.”
Freeport
“Can I ask you a question?”
“Mmmhmm. The answer is ‘tiramisu.’”
“Yes, yes it is,” she smirked. “The answer is also ‘cheesecake,’ because they put that really yummy syrup on top.”
“That is fair. I concede.”
“But also…” She took a deep breath, held it in, let it out slowly, realizing too late that it was all a little overly dramatic for the moment. Oh well. “What did you see in me, when we first met?”
He lit up, his eyes reflecting all of the feelings he’d felt on that day. “Oh my God, what didn’t I see in you! You’re going to laugh, and I know it’s a cliché, but it was like winning the lottery.”
“But what made you fall in love with me?” She didn’t laugh. Her pretty face soured into a not-so-pretty half-frown. “Specifically. What did you see in me that made you want to marry me?”
A mischievous grin. He leaned back in his chair. “Well, you are the hottest woman I’ve ever met.” He followed this revelation with the world’s biggest shit-eating grin. His happy eyes stared into hers.
“You are the worst husband ever.”
“I am! Also, I have a real answer for you. I know the exact time and the exact place when it happened, but give me a second to gather my thoughts.”
They fell into silence, James pondering, Kate focused entirely on him, the hustle and bustle of the restaurant temporarily forgotten.
“That’s not being a killer, Kate. That’s being human. A human with very human feelings and emotions who had those feelings turned against her with drugs and hypnosis.
What your husband told you bears repeating. You are not a killer. Even if the worst were true and Decker really did send you around the globe as an assassin, you’re not a killer today. Or tomorrow, or next week. I’ve been a therapist for fourteen years. I can assure you that there’s a significant difference between patients who are legitimately, psychologically prone to violent outbursts and, for lack of a better term, patients such as yourself.
That’s a long way of saying to you that there was a time when you felt lost, and rudderless. And that manifested in some very angry and self-harming behavior. But Alice, whoever she was, whatever she did… she was right. You were ready to free yourself. And you did free yourself.”
“Because I have something to live for?”
“Because you created something to live for. You fell in love with James, and you’ve been an amazing companion and wife. You love Claire, and you’ve nurtured a fantastic friendship. Those things didn’t happen in a vacuum. They were the result of you, the real you, the real Kate being her real self and winning the love and respect of everyone around her.
In short, Kate, you have things to fight for because you created them.”
Freeport
“Okay,” James said, just as the waiter arrived with their desserts. Cheesecake for Kate, tiramisu for James. He waited for Kate to settle in, fork in hand, before continuing. “Do you the day we went to the Freeport Art Museum? This would have been a couple of dates into our dating, so, like, autumn of 2017.”
“I…” Kate searched her spotty memory. It was there, vague, ghostly, little more than a place and a vague time. “...not a lot. Fuck.” She blushed. “Sorry, you know how mad I get when I can’t—”
“ stuff. I know, hun. But this’ll help, I think? It’s a good story. I learned a lot about you that day, and it was magical.”
She set aside her half-eaten cheesecake. “Okay, background first?”
“Sounds good,” he said, winking at her.
Kate stuck out her tongue, just a little, happy that they had so many of these little moments together. Shared jokes, shared sentences, a shared life. In the span of two years she’d gone from sharing nothing to sharing everything. Everything.
Two years. Every new day was one day further away from Decker, from Michael Oliver, from the hell of everything before… well, before whatever story James was about to tell her. Now it was her turn to lean back in her chair. She settled into a look that she’d seen many times in her life, a look she never thought she’d be sporting herself one day. A smile on her face, eyes slightly lidded, hands resting below the table in her lap. Looking into her soulmate’s eyes. Taking him in. Taking it all in. The delicious food, the promise of more cheesecake, the soft mandolin music playing over the speakers, the gentle buzz of a modestly-full downtown restaurant at dusk. Never in a million years. And yet, here she was.
“Sounds good,” she replied.
Inside, she was melting.
“So, we’d already been on some dates, and we’d slept together a couple of times, so we were kind of a couple by that point. But it was still at that point where I felt like it could all come apart, because what if there was something about you that I didn’t know about? What if you thought that about me?”
Kate giggled, in spite of herself, in spite of what she was about to say. “Like, what if I was actually a deeply brainwashed and mind-fucked hypnobot? Gosh, that would have been awkward!”
“You are the worst wife ever. Can I get back to my sweet and happy romantic tale, please?”
“Yes, please.”
“Okay. So… you probably don’t this, either, or maybe I told you this after the accident, but before I met you I was the least artsy guy in the entire world. I mean, I knew about art, but it was like a foreign language. People spoke it, lots of people, but not me.”
“Like Jupiter and Saturn,” she said, recalling a very old memory.
“Huh?”
“Jupiter and Saturn. They’re up in the sky, every day, now and for millions of years in the past. Millions of years into the future. They’re important to someone, but to you and me, they’re just another two blobs of light in the sky.” She reached for her wine glass, and cradled it in her hands. “I understand completely, James. Trust me.”
“You know what I love about you right now?” he asked.
“Everything?”
“Yes. And especially the way your brain works. It was exactly like that! Jupiter and Saturn! To be honest, when we met at the front entrance I was just thinking that I was going to take my girlfriend on a fun date. Something she would enjoy. Kate likes art, right? Hey, let me get two tickets to the art museum! She likes art, and this is lots of art! Perfect, right? I want her to be happy. I love seeing her happy. This will make her happy. And then…”
She tilted her head, curious, like a dog hearing an odd sound. She pursed her lips. “And then?”