Being in my hometown had stirred up ghosts. Not physical ghosts, but memories that I hadn’t thought about in ages. Alone in my room, with nothing to really think about except jaguars, cannibals, and Nazi war criminals living in Argentina, I found myself thinking about these ghosts instead.
One would assume that my lack of emotion would also mean a lack of emotional memories. This was not the case. I did have memories with emotional baggage attached.
After my encounter with Callow, my father would have locked me in a tower and thrown away the key, if he could have. Fortunately for me, that kind of stuff was only legal in fairy tales. Instead, I’d been watched like a hawk. When my parents or siblings weren’t around to keep an eye on me, it was my great-uncle.
My great-uncle had been elderly even when I was young and spry. He walked with a stoop and carried a cane. I couldn’t remember his face, but I could remember his pants being just a little too short and showing his ankles and black socks. His brown loafers were scuffed and well worn, one heel had broken down more than the other creating a fake limp that I wasn’t sure he had ever noticed. He was bald, completely, not a single strand of hair was visible on his scalp. His shirts were always loud, Hawaiian print with bright colors and strange floral designs.
However, all of these details paled in comparison to the sensory memory attached to him. He smoked a pipe. Instead of the stale odor of tobacco, he smelled like cherries. After he died, I learned that his pipe was always filled with cherry tobacco. It was this scent now that filled not just my memory, but my nose. It was as if the old man was sitting in the room with me, enjoying a pipe and telling me stories.
For the first time, I realized I had never known his first name, just his nickname: Chub. The origin of his nickname was just as unknown as his first name to me. However, I had liked him. I had liked spending time with him. I spent hours sitting on the floor or on his couch, listening to him go on and on about life experiences.
My father and Uncle Chub had made some kind of arrangement after my kidnapping. The old man had sold his house and bought a house just a few doors down from us. He walked me to school every morning and home in the afternoons. If my parents and siblings were out, he waited with me for one of them to come home. He was the only person my father had ever allowed to smoke in the house.
Uncle Chub had died just a year before my father. I distinctly remember being more upset at his funeral, than I had been at my father’s or my sister’s. He had made a dent in my hard exterior where the others hadn’t. It seemed strange that I couldn’t remember his face considering how important he had been to me as a child. I didn’t consider it odd that I couldn’t remember what my father or sister looked like, they had been emotional blips in my life.
Surprisingly, the worst part of being a sociopath, was the lack of memory about people. I couldn’t remember the last time I had actually thought about my sister. She hadn’t been mean to me, there was no sibling rivalry between us. From what I could remember, we’d had a decent relationship. There were no major memories, she had never called the school and told them I was sick so that she could take me to a water park. We’d gone to a few movies together, but I couldn’t remember what we had seen. She’d never skipped school to hang out with me when I was sick.
Those things had been done by Nyleena. I had gotten measles once, I was sicker than a dog. Nyleena had been in college at Stanford at the time. She’d ditched class for a week, flying home to help my mom take care of me. My memory of my bout with measles is limited, because of the illness, but I did remember rolling over in my bed one day and throwing up. Nyleena had been there, holding my hair and soothing me. My mom had rushed in a few seconds later with a cool rag to place on my forehead after I stopped tossing my cookies. I remember Nyleena being on Spring Break one year and calling my school to tell them I was sick. It was late May and very hot. She and Uncle Chub made arrangements to meet at my house before school. The old man had given me pocket money I hadn’t needed and sent me off with my cousin. We’d gone to World’s of Fun in Kansas City.
My father had been furious when we returned late that evening. My mother had just smiled and shook her head. It was Uncle Chub that eventually smoothed things over and got the three of us out of trouble. I believe my mother might have been in on the spur of the moment day trip.
My sister had been named Isabelle. She and Eric had been closer in age and more emotionally connected than I had been with either of them. Even before Callow, I had been closer to Nyleena than my own siblings.
Perhaps it was because she was an only child and I wasn’t a rowdy, mouthy child, but a reserved, mature child who was much older than my age would suggest. But she had taken me to movies and bookstores long before I had become a survivor. She had taken me to see Nine Inch Nails when I was only ten. She had spirited me off to New York to see a play on Broadway and take me to the Museum of Natural History when I was eleven.
Surprisingly, after the incident with World’s of Fun, my father never complained again about Nyleena taking me anywhere. She was about the only person allowed to take me places other than my parents.
I never questioned it, any of it. I had never noticed the twelve year age difference between us, even when I was a child. As an adult, I usually felt like the older of the two of us. I didn’t know why she had become my friend and not just my cousin. I didn’t know why she stayed my friend with my sociopathic tendencies and magnet for dangerous people.
It was another mystery of the universe. I would unlock the secrets of black holes before I understood why Nyleena had been my companion since I was five years old. Since it was something I couldn’t answer, I choose to ignore the reasoning behind our strange friendship, just letting it exist.
My thoughts were interrupted by another face. This one much younger than my own. The face of a three year old girl that had been plastered all over the news in the weeks before I was abducted. In the pictures, light blue eyes had sparkled from under thick black curls. She had been smiling and holding a kitten. A normal three year old by all accounts, except that she had gone missing and her uncle had been Mr. Callow. She was suspected to be his first victim. Her body had never been found. I didn’t know why I remembered her face or the photograph of her that had been in the newspaper and on the TV news. My mind worked in mysterious ways, even for me. I racked my brain for her name and came up empty.
My father had come home from work one night, a day or so after her disappearance. He’d been angry. Not at us, his family, but at life in general. He’d been a God-fearing man; praying at meals and at night, tithing to the church, going to mass when his job allowed. It was the first time I ever remembered him swearing. He’d slammed the door to his home office and shouted “God Damn it!” at the top of his lungs. After that night, he no longer made us pray before meals or came into my room and prayed with me before bed. He swore more often and stopped going to church. That Christmas, he skipped Midnight Mass and then never returned to church again. Somehow, in the short months that Mr. Callow had been committing dreadful acts of violence against the children of the city, my father had lost his faith. He never found it.
While I believed my father was most likely a sociopath, I didn’t believe he was like me. I believe he was more capable of feeling. I also believe that at some point, he just gave up. It’s hard for a sociopath to feel, it requires effort. The only real emotion is anger. My father was an angry man for the rest of his life. I think after Callow and the other child murders he’d seen, he just stopped trying to be human and started letting the monster take control.