Stay on course, Stella!
I take a calming breath. “What happened after I saw the pair of you carrying Ivo’s body from the house?”
No response.
I shout, “You persuaded me I was a murderer, for Chrissakes! Why?” I look from Dad to Mom. “Why didn’t you stop at conditioning me to forget what I’d seen?”
“Because hypnosis isn’t easy!” Mom cries out, her eyes glistening once again. “All I wanted to do was to erase your memory of that event. But I messed up. During the session, your subconscious mind rewrote the memory in the way nightmares do. You became convinced you’d met a hiker and killed him.”
She breaks out in tears.
Dad pats her hand, his eyes on me. “When you were six or seven, an aggressive alpine crow scared you while we were hiking. You chucked a rock at it to drive it away and killed it. When you realized it was dead, you felt terrible.”
“I don’t remember that incident,” I say.
Dad nods. “Your conscious mind had blocked it, but your subconscious mind projected it onto Ivo when your mom hypnotized you.”
Let’s say that’s what happened. But then…“Why didn’t you try to undo the harm? Why did you let me take that warped memory for the truth?”
An emotion I’m well familiar with flashes on my mother’s face.Guilt. And then, I know why.
“You realized it was convenient!” I exclaim.
The remorse in Mom’s eyes deepens, confirming my hunch.
“For six years,” I say, my voice cracking, “I lived with guilt and shame. I thought you were protecting me because you loved me!”
“We do!” my parents cry out in chorus.
“We love you more than anything in the world,” Dad says reproachfully.
I feel my mouth twisting. “Yet you invented a mental disorder for me, pulled me out of school, kept me scared and isolated from the outside world…”
He doesn’t deny any of it.
“It wasn’t as calculated as it sounds,” Mom mutters.
“Maybe,” I say.
The wildest part is that despite everything that happened, I believe them when they say they love me. It’s a twisted, destructive love, but it’s real. I can feel it hanging heavy in the room, weighing me down.
“What about Darrel?” I ask, reminding myself that I still have unanswered questions. “You found him half-dead in a crevice, but instead of calling an ambulance, you brought him here. Why?”
Silence.
“Was it one of his tattoos? The one with two hands cupping a gem, the Mage’s mark as you call it?”
Dad’s face tightens. “How do you know about his tattoos?”
I respond with a weary sigh.
“Yes,” Mom says. “We saw the mark through a tear in his clothing.”
Just like I thought.
I level my gaze with hers. “You know what hurts most, even more than the injustice of what you did to me?”
“What?” she breathes out.
