Nineteen Days

Day 2. At Sea. Afternoon.

DAY 2. AT SEA. AFTERNOON.

Some days, the pain and fear were worse than others. Some days her heart hammered so hard in her chest it was a physical pain. On other days she was filled with a deep exhaustion, but still lay awake for most of the night, sweating and tossing, but dreading the dreams that came with sleep. Dreading even more the moment of waking, when the dark curtain closed around her again.

‘It will be like that for some time,’ Ella said. ‘You won’t get over this quickly. Post-traumatic stress affects everyone in different ways, but it disrupts life for months, even years. You have a double burden of grief–a terrible loss, and the stress of being involved in such a traumatic event. You need to be patient with yourself.’

‘But there must be something I can do to blot out the memories. Something to help me with the sadness. Please, Ella give me something to dull it.’

Ella took Genevieve’s hands in both of hers.

‘You can’t stop the sadness coming and you can’t stop the memories,’ she said, ‘but you can do things to reduce their power over you.’

‘How?’

‘By giving yourself joyful things to do, things you can look forward to: a wonderful book, a film, a day by the sea, a delicious meal, a holiday. Things to take your mind off what happened even for a few hours: a cruise, a long walk, a weekend retreat.’

Genevieve and Peter hadn’t talked about the shooting for months. His descent into silence about it had been gradual, even unnoticeable at first. He stepped around the topic and soon refused to acknowledge it at all. But after that session with Ella, Genevieve talked to him about taking a holiday, and it was he who booked the cruise. It would not have been her choice, but there must have been a point where he suggested it and she agreed.

She saw now that the timing was bad. Peter was withdrawn, and she was still too numb to care whether or not she went. But here they were, on a cruise ship full of two thousand people sailing to New Zealand, then French Polynesia, and finally Honolulu, he with his avoidance mechanisms, sense of failure, and buried grief, and she with trauma seeming to reverberate in every cell of her body.

She tried to take Ella’s advice.

She’d listed them mentally that morning to stave off the blackness that came with waking: the first strong, rich coffee of the day; the sun on her face as she circled the walking track; lunch at an elegant table with a starched white cloth and napkins; a massage; a book that gripped her with beautiful words, and now talking with Thomas, her large companion of the deck, with all a new friendship promises.

She found him that afternoon in the same place, she with his tattered copy of As I Lay Dying and he with a new book, an author she’d never heard of. It was science fiction, futuristic literature, he said. She’d never been attracted to the genre so didn’t ask for details. They talked about the ship’s food offerings, pondered the shore excursions, and as they settled into conversation, she asked him to tell her more about his life in the cult.

‘Did you have to train to be an acolyte?’

‘Yes, for two years. But you wouldn’t call it training. I’d grown up brainwashed, but this took the brainwashing to another level. There was a lot about celibacy, about sin, about the devil, about the role of the community in purifying the world. About how The Prophet was God’s only true representative.’

‘This happened when you were sixteen up to eighteen? Did you find the training difficult?’

‘No. I’d learned to be obedient, you see, and I had internalised it was wrong to ask questions. It was after I was anointed as an acolyte and I was “ministering” to the community that the problems began.’

‘Are you still in the community?’

‘No, The Prophet dispensed with my services. So here I am. Not an acolyte, not in the community, not anything. I am…adrift.’