Still Missing by Chevy Stevens Page B

ceiling.
    What was he afraid of? How was I going to get him to trust me and open up? So far, all I'd been able to do was put myself through emotional hell by dredging up this shit. I'd heard some kids feel loyalty to their abusers. Was that what was holding him back?
    "I probably shouldn't even be telling you this stuff," I said. "My mom did so much for me over the years that I feel like if I say anything bad about her I'm betraying her." His head cocked toward me. "But I guess parents are humans who make mistakes too." My mind worked to call up every forgive-your-parent self-help platitude I'd ever read. "I keep telling myself it's okay to talk about these things, I can still love my mom and not always like everything she does."
    "My mother was a wonderful woman." He paused. I waited. "We had dress-up time too."
    Now things were getting interesting.
    "I was only five, but I still remember the day she came to see me at my foster home. The idiot she was married to was there too but he barely looked at me. She was wearing this white sundress, and when she hugged me she smelled clean, not like the fat pig who was my foster mother. She told me to be a good boy and she was going to come back and get me, and she did. Her husband was away on another of his trips, so it was just us, and when we got home--I'd never seen such a clean house--she gave me a bath."
    I tried not to show any emotion in my voice when I spoke.
    "That must have been nice...."
    "I'd never had one like it, there were candles and it smelled good. When she washed my hair and back, her hands were so gentle. She let the dirty water drain away, then she added more and got in with me, to wash me better. When she kissed my bruises, her lips felt soft, like velvet. And she said she was taking the pain out through my skin and into her." He glanced at me, and I don't know how I pulled it off, but I nodded as though what he'd just told me was the most natural thing in the world.
    "She told me I could sleep in her bed because she didn't want me to be scared. I'd never felt another human being's skin against mine--no one had ever even held me before--and I could feel her heart beating." He patted his chest. "She liked to touch my hair, like how your mom touched yours, and she said it reminded her of her son's." My hand resting on his curls itched and I fought the urge to pull away.
    "She couldn't have any more children, and she said she'd waited a long time to find a boy like me. She cried that first night.... I promised I'd be a good boy." He grew quiet again.
    "You mentioned playing dress-up together.... You mean like cowboys and Indians?" It took him a long time to answer. When he did, I wished he hadn't.
    "After our bath every night...." Oh, shit. "I slept in her bed, it made her feel safer, but on the nights when he was coming back from a trip, we'd have our bath earlier and then I'd help her get dressed." His voice flattened. "For him."
    "That must have made you feel kind of abandoned. You get to have her all to yourself, then as soon as he's home you're shoved to the side."
    "She had to do that, he was her husband." He turned his face back to me and in a firm voice said, "But I was special to her. She said I was her little man."
    Got it.
    " Of course she thought you were special--she picked you, right?"
    He smiled. "Just like I picked you."
    Later, when he climbed into bed beside me and laid his head on my chest, I realized I felt bad for him. I did. It was the first time I'd felt something other than disgust, fear, or hatred for him, and it scared me more than anything.

    The guy abducted me, Doc, raped me, hit me, I shouldn't have given a shit about his pain, but when he told me that stuff about his mother--and I knew there had to be even more--I felt bad he had a fucked-up mom who fucked him up. I felt bad he'd been in an abusive foster home, bad that his new dad didn't seem to give a shit about him. Was it because my family's warped? Is that why I felt his pain,