For a long time she just stood there, staring.
Dinner was long over and Noah was fast asleep in his little racecar bed and Olivia was alone, now, properly alone for the first time since this nightmare had begun. In the bathroom, the shower running behind her, she was alone, face-to-face with herself, with a stranger.
It wasn't a conscious decision; she didn't decide to look. She started the shower, stripped out of her clothes, tested the water and found it still too cool for her liking, and while she waited for it to warm up she'd gazed curiously around the bathroom, and discovered a full length mirror attached to the back of the door. In that mirror she saw herself, all of herself, in a way she had not done since the accident; most of the time in the hospital she'd been covered, and even when she'd cleaned herself up there she hadn't really looked. Hadn't thought to; she'd had neither the time nor the inclination to really examine her body.
There was no denying it now, though, and she stood transfixed, drinking in the sight of herself with fear rising in her gut.
It was a nice body, really. Curvy and warm. She had no complaints with the shape of her body, the form of herself. Was glad, actually, to look into the mirror and see something she liked. But the line of her hips, the weight of her breasts, the curve of her ass were not the only truths revealed in the depths of that mirror.
There were scars. Everywhere. It wasn't as if she were covered head to toe in them, wasn't as if every inch of her skin was marred with the red marks of pain, but there seemed to be no part of her body untouched by those hateful marks. Small, rounded divots dotted the swell of her breast, the swath of skin beneath her collarbone. Jagged red marks sliced across her belly, and a silvery one curved over the line of her hip. When she turned and looked back at herself over her shoulder she saw more of them, on her ass, her thighs. The marks were scattered, chaotic, no rhyme or reason to their placement, the shape and size and even color of them varying so that she could not even begin to guess how they had been made.
The thin, almost invisible scar on the back of her hand, that might've been a dog bite, a cat scratch. The straight clean line low on her belly, that might have been from a surgery. If there had only been one or two scars she might have dismissed them, assumed they were no more than the consequence of a life well-lived, but the story etched in her skin spoke to her of heartbreak. It was a tale of hurt, but she had not read this book, and she did not know how it had begun, let alone how it had ended.
What happened to me? She wondered, staring, dragging her fingertips across the marks on her breasts. It was, she thought, a strange place to be scarred. There were bruises across her chest, her ribs from the seatbelt, small scratches on her face from the impact of the airbag, and it seemed to her that however she had come to be scarred it wasn't another car accident. Those marks…they felt deliberate, somehow. Intentional.
Who am I?
It was the question she kept coming back to, the one that seemed to have no clear answer. She was Olivia Benson, fifty years old, mother to a four year old boy, six months a widow, retired cop from New York City. These things she knew, but only because she had been told. What little truth she held had been given to her by other people, and none of it had come from her own soul. It wasn't enough; there were, she thought, so many blanks left to be filled in. Was Olivia Benson a kind woman, a smart woman, a hard woman; was she a reader, a painter, a singer? Was she lost in sorrow, far from home and mourning her husband, or was she glad to have been given a new start? Who had she loved, before she loved Ed? And what sort of woman found herself in a situation as dire as the one that had left the memory of grief etched forever on her skin?
It was like you wanted to put it behind you, Malcolm had told her, explaining why she'd never talked much about her life before she came to this place. What was it, though? What was it, that she and Ed had wanted to put behind them, refused to speak about, wanted to forget? Was it this, this pain that had been done to her? Had they been running from the person, the life that had put those scars on her skin?
The most frightening thought of all, though, was that she wasn't sure she actually wanted to know. It terrified her, the person she might have been, the things she might have done, the things that might have been done to her. There was something like happiness in this little house, with Noah, who was so sweet, with Malcolm, who was so kind. She felt safe; she felt at peace. There was no safety, no peace to be found in her reflection, though, and she wasn't sure she was ready to face it, wasn't sure she was ready to lose the piece of solid ground she'd found here. What if she was happier, not knowing?
But how could she remain in ignorance? Just floating along, doing whatever Malcolm said, snuggling with her son, blissfully unaware of the story of her own life? That would be akin to death, she thought; if she dug no further, if she gave up this investigation before it had truly begun, she would only seal her own fate. Olivia Benson died in that car, and the only person who could bring her back to life was Olivia herself.
With a sudden effort she tore her gaze from the mirror, stepped resolutely away and into the shower. The water was warm enough now, hot enough to turn her skin pink, and she relished in it. Six months since Ed died, and the accoutrements in the shower gave no evidence that a man had ever used it; the shower boasted a wide array of pink bottles, shampoo and conditioner and body wash and scrubs and oils and a pink-handled razor. She used them all, scrubbed and shaved and washed every inch of herself until her skin was raw and her fingers were pruny and the hot water began to fail. The last thing she wanted was to be cold, and so she stepped quickly from the shower, dried herself with one of the fluffy white towels, and then ventured out from the bathroom into the connected bedroom.
Her bedroom; theirs, once, but hers, now. The bed was huge, a thick, plush mattress sitting on a sturdy wooden frame beneath a thick white duvet. Two small tables - wooden, in the same color and variety as the bedframe, a set bought to match - flanked the bed. The table on the right was bare, save for a lamp; that must have been his side of the bed, she thought, Ed's, because the table on the left was cluttered with objects. Another photo from their wedding day in a wooden frame, bottles of pain medicine and heartburn medicine and vitamins, lotion, chapstick, a candle. A ceramic trinket dish with a single pair of earrings inside it. The detritus of an ordinary life.
There was a single drawer in the table, and Olivia went there, naked, her hair dripping slowly down her back, her feet borne along on a current of curiosity and fear. This was her room, and these were her things but she still felt as if she were snooping, rummaging around in someone else's life, and she was almost - not quite, but almost - ashamed of herself for her inquisitiveness. Still, though, she wanted her answers. She meant to open every drawer and cupboard in the house, to flip through every book, every photograph, do whatever it took to piece together the puzzle of her heart, and there was, she thought, no better time to start than now, when Noah was sleeping and Malcolm was tucked up in the spare bedroom for the night.
The drawer was deep and full to bursting with things. A pink silicone cock that made her blush to see it, and a little rose that began to buzz, vibrating exuberantly in her hand when she pressed the little button at its base. She turned it off and tossed it aside as quickly as if it had burned her. Next she found a pair of what appeared to be leather handcuffs, a box of condoms, a small bottle that identified itself as personal lubricant. But sex toys were not the only secrets hiding in that drawer. There was a pouch of something that looked like candy with the words cannabis gummies written in fine print on the bottom, and a silken eye mask - for sleeping, surely, she thought - and a very small copy of the New Testament. She tossed the tiny Bible - really it was less than six inches tall, the print must have been miniscule - onto the bed next to the scandalous rose, and when she did something fluttered out from between its pages.
A photograph, she realized at once; it was a small, square photograph that had been tucked inside the Bible, dislodged when she carelessly discarded the book. Elated at having found another clue she reached for it at once, and gazed at it hungrily.
There were two people in the photograph. One of them looked an awful lot like Olivia herself, only a decade or two younger; is that me? she wondered. Could it be? The woman's hair was shorter than Olivia's was now, but thick and dark like hers. The face looked the same, the dark eyes, the proud line of her jaw, though there were no wrinkles to be found there. The body was familiar, too, the right height, the right shape, though leaner there than she was now. She wore a plain white blouse tucked into a pair of black trousers, a gold badge - a police badge, perhaps - clipped to one hip and a gun holstered on the other. It must be me, she thought, but that interested her less than the man who stood beside her with his arm around her shoulders.
It was him. The blue eyed man from her dreams. A little taller than her, dark hairline receding from a handsome face, split with a wide smile. He wore a plain black suit, his tie hanging open around his neck, and he touched her easily, casually, as if it were the most normal thing in the world.
It wasn't, though. Nothing about that picture seemed normal, to her, squirreled away inside a Bible, hidden in a drawer next to her sex toys. A picture of the man who haunted her dreams, the man who was not her husband but was still the only memory she had of her own life. Who was he, and why did he mean so much to her?
She turned the photograph over in her hands, and found a few words scrawled on the back in faded blue ink.
Liv and El, '99.
Everyone here called her Olivia, but Liv could be a nickname for Olivia, couldn't it? Maybe she'd been Liv, back in New York City, back when she was a cop, with her badge and her gun. Another woman entirely, maybe, from the Olivia who Malcolm knew, keeper of still more secrets that Olivia would have to unravel if she ever hoped to find herself again. Maybe it was Liv who was hurt, and Olivia who wanted to forget, but she was tired of it, the forgetting. She wanted to know.
And she knew something now that she had not known before. The blue eyed man had a name. Whoever he was, wherever he was, he was El, and he had held her once.
I have to find him, she thought, turning the photo over and staring into his face once more. El would know what Malcolm did not, she was sure of it. El would save her.
And tomorrow, when she and Malcolm got her phone back, she was going to call him. She was going to find the answers she needed, whatever it took.