Nicole questions everything about Kyle.
(19Nov07)

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Chapter 4:
The Same

Nicole Trager sat at her dining room table, too worried and exhausted to do anything else. Her eyes scanned the papers strewn across the entire surface and fell on a small photograph of Kyle taken the previous year. She detached it from the County Juvenile Detention Facility file and picked it up, centering on the face she knew so well. A knot formed somewhere between her stomach and her throat. She'd had this feeling only twice before: the first time when Kyle had run away with nothing but the pajamas he was wearing; and the last (and by far the worst) when his natural parents, the Petersons, claimed him and took him back to Connecticut. Now the Petersons were dead, and Kyle was back.

Nicole loved Kyle in a way she couldn't explain to herself, let alone to anyone else, but the seemingly connected chain of bizarre events over the past year began to cast terrible doubts in her mind. A storm – no, a hurricane – seemed to be brewing with Kyle at its eye; and nobody could tell her why. She knew Kyle had been hiding things from her. Many times she had noticed that his intense eyes said one thing while his mouth and body language said quite another, yet she hadn't challenged him. She believed he had suffered terrible trauma in his life and needed space to adjust. Had she been naïve to trust her instincts about Kyle? Had he lied about everything all along? What was he hiding? A dark thought intruded…what if he'd somehow been responsible for his parents' deaths? Or those of his abductor, Adam Baylin? Or of Baylin's academic colleague, Professor Kern? What if Kyle were somehow responsible for all of those deaths? What did anyone really know about him?

Her mind ricocheted backwards and forwards between believing Kyle's innocence and believing his deception. She, as a psychologist, knew that the human mind was capable of hiding hideous things even from itself. She also knew that Kyle was different to most people…he possessed incredible mental agility, and his powers of observation and mimicry were phenomenal. Maybe Kyle had faked all of his reactions to his unique situation convincingly. Yet Nicole still believed that the confusion and anguish she'd seen in his eyes on numerous occasions was genuine…most recently seen when she'd discovered him about to sneak out of his window in search of the runaway Jessi Hollander earlier that day. Nicole had been so furious with him at that point. That's all she had felt. But now, in the terrible emptiness of the family dining room, his words haunted her…You told me once that I never brought anything but love into this house, but all I ever brought was pain. What did he mean? That just wasn't true! Why hadn't she challenged him on that?

She felt her own guilt bubble up from deep inside, resulting in a single sob. Nicole had let her own anger and curiosity blind her to Kyle's very real pain and desperation, and his potentially misguided loyalties towards Jessi – a girl he hardly knew. Or had he lied about that too? All Nicole had wanted at that moment was to know how he and Jessi were connected, because the coincidences she had noticed were driving her crazy. She had neglected to realize that Kyle had obviously pieced together some things himself – or maybe he already knew them?

She and I are the same.

Once more, Kyle's words threatened Nicole's defenses. Her guilt rose up vehemently and tightened in her chest. She should have told Kyle that he was wrong about that too; that it couldn't be true. What had he meant by 'the same'? Having been therapist to both of them, Nicole knew that Jessi's nature was nothing at all like Kyle's. And deep inside, away from her logic and scientific training, Nicole Trager's intuition screamed at her that she was right about that one fact, if nothing else.

Emotional exhaustion took away her usual resilience to displays of vulnerability and tears began to leak from her eyes, and not for the first time that day. She wasn't angry with Kyle anymore and she desperately wanted him to know that. But how? He was gone! She, herself, had let him go. She ran the fingers of her right hand over the small photo she held in her left. She was frantically worried for the boy who had lodged himself firmly in her heart as one of her own children. She mentally kicked herself over and over for letting him go – or at least for not having warned him. Dropping the little photograph onto the table, she buried her face in her hands while huge sobs began to come up from that place deep inside her that knew Kyle was alone and in trouble.

How could she have been so stupid? If anything terrible happened to him she would never forgive herself. She had let him go after Jessi without arming him with at least a little of what she knew: that Jessi was very, very dangerous… especially to someone like Kyle.

(Next chapter: Cold)