'Jason. Jason what?'
'No way, Jason?'
'Jason!'
It's remarkable how insensitive people are. Of all names, that one is anathema, dumping gallons of adrenaline into her system. Do they like to see her blanch and jump?
'Jason, are you sure?'
'It's such a nice name, Jason.'
'What did you say the name was again? Jason?'
You're 'found' after three years being missing, presumed dead, and all they want to do is talk about the guy. You get it, but you don't want to hear his name, still, they never stop using it, even though they must know that it hurts. They don't believe you either, because you haven't performed the script correctly. No one is abducted, no one goes missing, and when they are, they don't come back. Therefore, that's not what happened to you. There's no such thing as serial killers, that was a fad from the Sixties and Seventies. You simply ran away because you were having trouble at home and work, and you got tired of the guy you shacked up with, or he left you, so you returned. Yes, we heard what you said. How many times must you say it?
It's not just the trauma which makes itself known after you escape, that kicks you in the head, it's the fuss too. And the lack of it. Doctor's visits, where Emily refuses to be touched, refuses to take anything without looking it up, refuses to let Kevin out of her sight. She can see they think she's used goods, a host for every disease known and unknown. They want to take photos, scour her body for evidence, she says no, she's not a crime scene, the evidence is not in her, but in Crystal Lake.
Police questioning, they want to know exactly what happened, when, in what order, again and again, seeming to linger on the parts she least wants to speak about, the officer's eyes aglow. So, tell us again what he did to you? No, never mind about your friend. Never mind about your baby. Start from when he pulled your dress off. What happened next. No, no bodies were found. Of course the case goes nowhere, but now graphic descriptions of what she suffered are sitting in some folder, out of her control.
Psychiatrist visits, where she opens her mouth, acquires fifteen new mental illness diagnoses each time, and closes her mouth again. You did what? You kissed him? Why would you kiss someone you say assaulted you? You felt sorry for him?...*papers shuffling* Tell me about your parents. What was their relationship like?
Her parents don't question her at all, her father doesn't believe her and her mother wants to know why she didn't run. The same old shit. Emily must be attracting this sort of thing. She must have a complex. That's what they say.
You know who runs? Her friends. Every single one of them. She gets blocked in real-time. No one wants to deal with that amount of 'baggage', as if she's a hoarder who went on a shopping spree.
Creeps manifest out of thin air, as they always do after an Incident, always old women, who make sexually charged comments at random. She wonders if porn plays in her wide open eyes or something. Wide open because she's always on edge. Maybe demons are speaking through these people, trying to needle her. It works.
The only people who are conspicuous by their absence are the Three Letter Agencies, and the journalists. Three letter agencies who are not actually absent, but hidden from Emily's notice, putting a kibosh on the journos. Nothing gets into the news. Crystal Lake is a perfectly safe, happy community. Has been for thirty years. There is no Jason Voorhees Problem.
Quietly, she receives money from an unnamed fund. Hush money. A threat. A promise.
With her whole life taken away, and then returned, there's only one place to go. She can't stay so close to where her daughter died. If she does, she'll go back. And she doesn't want to go back. She wants to forget.
On the flight to Phoenix, it seems like every other man is named Jason, and every time she hears that word, she jumps, so much so that it's noticeable, and embarrassing. No one knows her history. She wanted them to dredge the lake, search the forests, the mountains, burn it all down, but she feared it at the same time. It didn't happen, and she doesn't have energy to be angry or upset, but it's disappointing. At least no one knows, she couldn't bear if others knew, she doesn't want to know.
Kevin is her great big silver lining, and he's not the only good thing she received from her experience. She knows it's not her fault, and that she's not responsible for people making evil out of good. She could barely think for three years but she did everything she could that she thought was right, and some of the things she did saved lives, including her own. Her body was the ultimate hero, rising up to prevent her death when her brain, following the ignorant advice and accepted notions of how one is supposed to act in the face of extreme peril, would have cast her into it. You don't know how you will act in those rare situations when civilization and behavioural norms no longer count, when a predator steals your air and breathes it back into your face, and those people who are the loudest in declaring what they will or won't do, will turn out to be the least reliable.
Family offered to take her in after her parents couldn't bear her disturbing presence anymore and she expressed a fear of being alone, so to family she goes, building herself a paper mache shell around her feelings, hoping and praying they say nothing horrible about Kevin. His eyes aren't that strange, he's not that big for his age, and they don't know what his father looked like anyway, but because no one wants to speak about where he came from, they don't want to speak about him at all. They imagine she hates him, and would rather be rid of him if she could, so they carefully leave information about foster care lying about in key locations. She'd rather die than give him up, and unlike Jason, she'd really rather die. If they don't like to acknowledge her son's existence, far less do they want to acknowledge her daughter's, so much so that Emily stops mentioning her, locking away her little baby in her heart, where no one can look down on her.
Arizona is perfection. It's beautiful. She's never going to leave. Hot, desert, sand, few plants, little chance of snow, on the other side of the country from New Jersey. Her aunt and uncle are rich, CEO and CEO of individual somethings or other. High powered people. She can't imagine being that powerful. Their house suits their lifestyle, a mansion in the foothills, light, bright, airy, a pool, but most importantly, a guest house she has to herself. Close enough to not be alone, not too close that people can hear her weeping.
She's pregnant. That's no surprise to Emily, but a huge, traumatic, awful, horrible, hideous shock to her family, who can't understand how such a thing could happen.
"Do you have a boyfriend, Em?" Aunt and Uncle ask over the fancy faux marble dinner table once their teenage children have shuffled back to their rooms for TikTok marathons, conventional faces worried and perplexed. They're not bad people, just very narrow. Everything in their lives went smoothly. "Isn't it a bit, um, soon?" asks her aunt. Soon? Like she was married to her abductor or something? Why can't people speak plainly. Why can't they say 'aren't you still too messed up for that?' that would be painful to hear, but it would be honest.
It takes everything she has in her to answer, and even then Emily doesn't think she'll manage to make the leap. "No. It's…his."
Human jaws don't really drop to the floor when someone's surprised, but they sure do try. "What? Didn't the doctors give you something to take care of it?"
Yeah, like she came down with an ear infection. Nothing else happened nothing else happened nothingelsehappened. Emily can see the poor people are on the verge of running out on this conversation, their bodies stiff and leaning away from the table, their lovely white cotton shirts darkening at the underarms despite the air-conditioning. Her head's about to boil away, run down her shoulders, make a mess on the nice white tiles. A toddler babbles. She flies a piece of eggy bread into Kevin's mouth, making the traditional plane noises. He laughs and closes his eyes. Her aunt and uncle stare at him like he's the Devil himself. "They tried." Emily says.
"Why didn't you take it? How can you…" Aunt jerks a hand. Confused beyond the bounds of confusion, and a little annoyed. Emily has always been strange, always.
How to explain without sounding like an even bigger degenerate freak than they already think she is. "I like babies." she couldn't kill a man, in what world do they think she can kill a baby?
The look she receives for this is indescribable. Naturally, once she exits the main house to take that short walk to the guest house, numerous phone calls to psychiatrists are made.
In the middle of the night, when consciousness butterfly kisses unconsciousness, she wonders if Jason is alive, and if he thinks of her. He'd better, she can't be the only one left in such pain.
The answer appears to be no on the second count, because a year passes, she has her baby, at home, another strawberry blond and perfect little boy, and nothing happens. She thought she knew Jason better than that, and her body seems to think she's still in danger. She's done her research now. He's been away from his kingdom before. No revenge is enacted on her for escaping, the world around her wants her to move on, is more and more pissed off when she's still 'anxious' and 'jumpy' and 'non compliant' a year after she walked out of the woods covered in blood and dirt, thin as a rail, her eyes looking into the far, far distance. Why won't she take drugs, why won't she make new friends, why won't she move on, why why why. Three years isn't that long. It only asks questions she doesn't want to answer, never the ones she does. Very quickly it ceases asking at all, and begins demanding.
News arrives through select sources, and gossip, leaked. There's been another spray of missing persons around the Crystal Lake area. A group of campers. A group of weekend vacationers. Two sets of young people, six weeks apart. Not a single one has been found…June the thirteenth…Emily hopes they either all got away, or they're all dead.
She blacklists the words 'crystal' and 'lake' from her search engine. She blacklists 'Jason'.
After the whispers and news cease coming, Emily prepares to do what everyone keeps telling her to do, prepares to settle down into some sort of life as a single mother, forever single. No man is coming near her again. It's not that she feels dirty, although she does, more often than not. She is trying to 'work on it', like it's not a wound that one must let heal in peace and quiet. It's not her body that makes her averse to the idea of finding a father for her children, it's her mind, specifically her heart.
Stockholm syndrome is not really something shrinks decide you have, it's more of a proposed explanation for why captives sometimes grow attached to their captors, as if the answer isn't obvious. It's not a syndrome, and it should be obvious, even for those who've never been in the situation. The human heart is built to love, and what do they say about love? Love is patient, love is kind, etc. It overcomes all. It neutralizes pain. Defeats monsters. Anaesthesia. The best. The heart actively seeks out something to love, no matter how small the crumb is. It seeks doubly hard when one is deprived of love. It will find something to love, or it will create something to love. Most captors can never be cruel one hundred percent of the time. They slip up, and show their real selves, hidden under so much bullshit, and the victim responds, which makes the captor respond, a dance begins. Love is born from proximity and a shared life, sexual intercourse is deeply bonding, and she has had three children by one man, gone through many experiences with him, some of them very dangerous. Yes, she was afraid, is still afraid, but she's lain in his arms and been the recipient of his tenderness. Cared for him, dying and not, and kept what passed for his home. Why should she play a sterilised part for people who don't even want to help bear the smallest iota of her suffering. How would three years leave nothing behind? You can't erase emotional scars like you can physical. You can't sew those wounds up. Sometimes you can't even reach them. You don't even know they're there, and if other people see them, you're treated like you're defective. Why won't anyone sit down and speak to her about this, the fact that life is not a film, and there are no perfect happy endings. No girl bosses, no supermen. Why won't they listen while she cries.
The psychiatrist (psychologist?) her family wants her to visit in exchange for their benevolence, tells her she's trauma bonded to a narcissist, whatever that means. Emily says narcissist is an understatement, but technically correct. Jason sure does 'love' himself. Even his mother is a figment of his imagination, built to excuse the desires he knows are wrong. And yeah, she's bonded to him, and no amount of talking is going to change that. No yoga pose, no mind-body centering. You can't cure Stockholm syndrome with drugs and chatter, it has to fade away, like fat used up in starvation. It's not bad, and you know why? Because good is stronger than evil, and it is Emily's love that renders Jason's hate inert. Every time she looks into her son's face, she sees his father. What is she supposed to do about that? What would she do if she didn't have a buffeting, insulating layer of gentle feelings for the monster? Detroit Become Inhuman? Give her boy away? Kill him?...He did nothing wrong. She's not sorry she can't be the perfect victim.
The psych woman ignores her input, yaps on and on, talking about cognitive behavioural therapy and antipsychotics. Emily says a psychopath murdered her daughter and buried her in the woods, but she thinks he was having a nightmare at the time he killed her. She thinks he's sorry, somewhere in his deep black pit of a heart. She thought he was sorry, so she helped him. Yeah. The woman's face turns hard, her mouth set. In response, Emily only becomes softer, and sweeter. She used to be mocked for it, but it was softness that saved her life.
She's too anxious to work outside of the home and away from Kevin and his brother, so she's given a job at her aunt's company, a big property firm. This work can be done in bed from a laptop, allowing for lots of healing naps. She doesn't get much sleep at night, when it's dark, and anyone could be lurking in the bushes. Dear God, Arizona is gorgeous. One day she'll go for a walk through exquisite desolation. Her and her boys. They're called Voorhees, because that's their name. There's no use denying it, she won't lie to herself. They look like him. She won't deny it. No more. She is not the criminal here. The victim will not be blamed anymore, least of all by herself. She takes bitter pleasure in people's discomfort when they hear the name. A name, they can't even bear a name?...They have no idea. It's almost funny. Perhaps deep down, she gains a little insight into Jason's viewpoint, but his mistake is to confuse inculpable weakness, for culpable weakness.
One night lightning and rain lash the windows of her bedroom, and as lovely as it would be to fall asleep hugging her sons, she can't risk rolling on top of the younger one. Placing him in his cot, which is in her room, Emily turns to Kevin, plopped on her bed, against the opposite wall from the window, who begs for one more cuddle because it's cold and scary. It's not cold, but it is scary. She doesn't like rain and lightning either. It makes it difficult to hear.
Snuggling up, she pulls the duvet over the toddler's shoulders. He's so big, taller than other boys his age and often mistaken for being older than his three years. She wonders what to tell him one day when he asks about his dad. The last thing she wants to do is place her own pain on him.
Mother and son cuddle for a while, and doze, before Emily yawns and decides that it's beddy-bye time. She sits up with him in her arms, both of them listening to the weather beating at the house. The boy's mismatched eyes swivel towards the window, the blind not yet pulled down. He often looks out at nature like that, gaze like an eagle, not so much watching, as searching. He'll spot little bugs and little animals his mother will not see even when he points them out. Lightning silently strikes the nearby mountains, turning him as pale as a ghost. His expression changes, becoming raptorish, awake and delighted, blue eye darkening as its pupil dilates. A strong arm rises, confident, forming a long straight line that ends at a thick fingertip.
"Daddy!"