This felt like… well, if felt like I’d accidentally stumbled into someone else’s life.
Then there were the cases the FPA had to deal with. As a soldier, I’d fought wars and taken lives. Surely, being a detective, someone who spent a lot more time filling out paperwork and hunting down evidence than wielding a gun, should be easier.
Except, when I was a soldier, every target had been seen only through the long lens of a scope. I took lives from hundreds of yards away, and even when the fighting did get up close and in your face, the enemy was mostly nameless.
Detective work was different. It was personal. I became intimately familiar with the names and stories of every victim and every abuser.
The job wasn’t what I expected, and while I didn’t hate it, I also didn’t know what to do with this new well of empathy that had been ripped open in me. I didn’t know my coworkers well enough to talk to them about it, and it didn’t seem right toburden Chantal with my emotions. Not after we’d finally found our way to a good place after navigating the rough waters of marriage and divorce.
So, I spilled my guts to an unconscious man who couldn’t even respond. Like shouting into a void, I wasn’t sure if anything I said was actually heard, but in the end, I felt better anyway. Once my insecurities were given voice, they no longer rattled around in my head, scratching at the inside of my skull with their sharp barbs.
When visiting hours were over, I left the hospital feeling lighter than I had in a long time. To my great surprise, that night was the first night I slept without nightmares waking me up.
CHAPTER 12
Mia
Things were different this time.The reading voice… didn’t read.
Instead, the voice just talked.
It was nice. Almost like having a conversation. I couldn’t remember the last time someone talked to me. There were so many unpleasant things I could recall with perfect clarity, but something as mundane as simple conversation eluded me. I clung to the words, soaking them in like I’d been lost in the desert, and they were rainwater running over my skin.
The reading voice—or perhaps, I should now call it the conversation voice? —could have told me anything and I would have been equally as interested. However, learning that this voice that brought me comfort was a detective came as a shock.
How could he be a detective?
That was basically like a cop, right?
I’d had experience with cops before, but they were far from comforting.
It started soon after I escaped from clutches of Camp Green Hill and found myself living on the streets. No home. No job. No plans for the future other than survival.
But I did have a friend.
Eli.
Eli was a young man about my age, though he’d already been living in Camp Green Hill for several years by that point. If I hadn’t met him by chance shortly after arriving there, I probably wouldn’t have lasted longer than a few weeks.
Eli was kind, despite living such a hard life. He took pity on me and tried to stop the camp’s punishments on me, often taking on those punishments himself in an effort to protect me. Whenever they wanted to take one of us down for treatment, he would tell them to take him. If he could save me from some of the pain and trauma, that was what he was going to do. He was like a brother to me, had been almost right from the moment we first met.
The same happened once we were on the streets. Together we were introduced to soup kitchens, discovered which bakeries threw out their leftover product at the end of the day, and most importantly, we shared a tent.
Being homeless meant not having a home, but people still need shelter, and tents were the next best thing. A whole tent city had sprung up in an abandoned factory on the edge of town. It was almost reassuring to know that I wasn’t the only one to end up in such a low position. Many people were just as bad off as I was, but we still managed to make our own semblance of a community. We had safety in numbers, and by sharing warmthand food we could eke out an existence among our self-made city.
It was a form of survival, but no one would ever call it comfortable. My body seemed to hurt all the time. From the cold that had soaked into my bones, the hard ground that bit at my joints and left bruises under my skin, and the hunger that never quite went away. I was always tired, even on good days. Some mornings, as I watched my breath turn to fog in the air, I barely had the strength to shake the frost from my tent and crawl out into the world to face another day.
Being tired, cold, and hungry was terrible, but I’d experienced all these things before. They were nothing new. What did take me by surprise was how inhuman I felt. As much as I hated Camp Green Hill, they did at least provide us with plenty of supplies for bathing and hygiene. I never realized how much I took it for granted until I no longer had access to soap or running water and found myself dreaming of a shower. A film of dirt and stale sweat constantly clung to my skin, like I was some grimy creature that had crawled out of the muck. Every time I moved, I could feel the way my unwashed clothes stuck to me. It was a constant reminder I could never escape.
Under those conditions it came as no surprise that the people living in the tent city took advantage of any escape they could. Even if it was only temporary. Most found their escape in the bottom of a bottle or the puff of a joint, but some turned to harder stuff. Cocaine. Heroine. Cocktails of over-the-counter meds that no one could actually pronounce. Drugs like this were as common as candy on a schoolyard.
My own drug of choice ended up being prescription painkillers. At least, at first. I didn’t like anything that got me too high. The few times I tried mind altering drugs, I just ended up going ona bad trip and falling into a hallucination of Camp Green Hill that was so real I legitimately thought I was back within their clutches again. So, no, those types of drugs weren’t for me. I wasn’t looking for euphoria. I just wanted to make the pain stop for a while, and prescription painkillers did the trick. With a high enough dose, I could forget every ache and pain and didn’t even feel the hunger anymore.
But drugs required money. Survival in general required money, and without a job there were only three ways to get it.
Begging on the side of the road.
Stealing.