Page 8 of A New Days Don

“Please! Let me go!” I cry out. The darkness of the alley swallowing me whole. There is pain. So much pain.

I blink rapidly, trying to hold myself in this reality and not the nightmare waiting to drag me under and suffocate me with feelings of being dirty and vulnerable.

“Help!” It’s my own scream.

“Yes, that’s all. Everyone is incompetent.” Vicek brushes it off, and I want to snarl, but a knot forms tight in my throat. Vicek slams his hand down on the table, startling me.

“Please help me. He won’t stop.” My vision blurs, and I can barely see the man.

A familiar chill runs down my back, and I clench my fists harder, forcing my nails into the palms of my hands. The pinpricks of pain tether me here and not there.

“You'd better do better than the rest of them.” Vicek growls. The threat is clear as day, even though it hasn’t been said. Or else I’m fired.

The last seven people who worked with Vicek on this have all walked out, stripped of their badges and guns.

“I don’t plan to mess up or contaminate crime scenes like some fool if that’s what you’re suggesting.” I drawl, keeping my mind focused on him, even as the dark claws of my past try to rip it from this moment.

Vicek’s lips pull back into a dark smirk, “Tonight, nine o’clock. We are headed to Adelaide. I’ve had a lead, and we are going to do some investigations and interviews.”

It’s funny, not in the literal sense of the word, more in the astounding sense, that when something traumatic happens and when you are thrown into the hundreds of different shades of darkness with no hope or light to guide you, everyone always responds back with ‘look at the bright side.’ As if living is my consolation prize for being assaulted. What they don’t see… What they refuse to see, because if they do, they wouldn’t be able to cope with the insurmountable pain it would put them through, is the kind of hell that living through trauma puts you through. There is a reason why most people live in ignorant bliss, because if did you pull back the curtains to see the kind of demons that lurk in the world and in your mind, you would never be the same again.

You would become a fractured version of who you once were.

I may not be able to remember the rape, but I remember every torturous day after. I lost my innocence that night, and not because it was my choice. It was ripped from me by a man who thought it was his right to take. I remember the day before, the closest memory I have to the event, I remember painting a girl dancing in a field of flowers on my easel. I was happy. I was excited for life. I was giggling with Karmin and planning our next adventure.

Then that day happened, and the virginity I was saving for myself was stripped from me. I wanted my first time to be special. I wanted it to seer into my memory and be something I could hold onto. But that was silly, naïve Mila thinking. That isn’t how the world works. Instead of finding a man or woman to fall in love with and share the experience with, I was given dying in a back alley.

Tears burn in my eyes, threatening to fall as I desperately try to bring myself back to that day. My breath becomes ragged, and images from nightmares flash in my mind. Screams, my screams.

“Please,” I beg my mind as I sit, locked up in the police cruiser.

Just give me one image. One distinct memory. Anything more than that stupid ring and his more than likely fake name.

My pulse pounds against my temple. I grip the steering wheel. Allowing the panic to flow through me. Allowing myself to feel every last ounce of humanity I have left.

I scream as my phone vibrates, pulling me from my hundredth attempt in the last three years to pull any more information from my blank mind. Most of the psychiatrists I saw told me it was normal to experience amnesia surrounding trauma. They call it dissociative amnesia, as if putting a fancy name to it makes it better.

If I could only remember what he looked like.

More tears spill down my cheeks, and I wipe them furiously with the sleeve of my shirt.

Fuck. Thank the makeup ladies for waterproof mascara.

With trembling hands, I turn my phone over.

If I answer anything other than an enthusiastic great, she and my dad will be at my doorstep, which is the last thing any of us wants. They do it because I am their daughter, but seeing the shell of the girl I once was tears them apart. It took weeks of Karmin and I working together to get them to leave Las Vegas last time.

9:05PM

Shit. I’m late.

I put the address Vicek sent me into my GPS and pull out of the station, blinking rapidly to cool the tears and stress that had built up in my system.

I have tried to access the lost memories with Annalese, but we have never been successful in her office. The only time I can seem to get close is when I recreate that evening in the alley by the station. Once nightfall happens, when I am feeling brave enough, I hop into one of the cruisers and reverse down the tight alley until all I see is the street in the distance and the two brick walls on either side of me. Only then, once I know I am locked in and safe enough, can I dissociate from the world around me and reach for the familiar strands of what I know is that memory.

I pull up behind Vicek’s car and step out to meet Vicek, who is leaning against his car with his phone to his ear. He isn’t saying anything, just listening. When I approach him, he places his finger to his lips as a way to tell me to keep quiet, and I do so. That’s when I notice he’s fully geared for an op.

I thought we were interviewing people, not running an operation.