She was put into a mental health institution because she was fourteen and still hardly talking, so she must be crazy. The mental health institution did more to harm her than help. Tilly roomed with psychotic teens. Dangerous teens. Suicidal or homicidal teens. And some who were like her: traumatized. Many were from foster care. Some were poor. Others were middle class or from prominent and wealthy families.

Tilly rarely saw a psychiatrist, and when she did, all he did was stare at her chest. Another one hardly looked at her and spent ten minutes with her filling out paperwork and calling her mother about a bad date she’d had the night before. The man was such a jerk, the psychiatrist whined to mommy. Didn’t even pay for dinner!

Finally, at sixteen, she was moved to a new foster care home. She was the only child. The couple was in their sixties, patient, and wanted to help kids. It was the first time she felt love since her mother and Johnny.

Tilly also saw a therapist named Kate. Kate was compassionate, smart, and experienced with working with traumatized kids. She tried to get Tilly to open up. Once a week Tilly went to her appointment, and they played cards together. Eventually Tilly said yes or no, then spoke in short sentences. With the kind steadiness of her new foster parents behind her, she started to talk more. She started to remember what happened that night, bits and pieces sliding in and out of her mind, one vision after another.

Tilly remembered her father yelling at Johnny and Johnny yelling back. They were fighting about her mother, who had left when she was five years old. There was something else she was trying to remember. It nagged at her brain. It was right there, almost there, a whisper, a hidden secret . . . something happened that night before her mother left . . . what had she seen? What did she know? What was trying to come through from the prickly shadows of her scared and damaged mind? It had something to do with her mother . . . something Johnny said.

Her therapist told her that her memory was coming back and not to push it but to embrace it. To be brave. Tilly tried not to push it, but whatever it was scared her, like a threatening monster of hate. The monster was trying to tell her things that made her shake. Not only about the night her father died, but about a night that happened two years before that.

Tilly eventually realized that she needed to remember everything for Johnny. For Betsy.

So she allowed her memories to crawl back in, inch by inch, so they wouldn’t kill her, which was one more brave thing that Tilly Kandinsky had to do in a life filled with fear and other utterly terrifying events.

Chapter 28

Chapter 28