Page 13 of Twelve
I thought of Mackenzie, standing on a ledge and looking up at the sky. Up, not down. At least on the ledge, there was air.
At least you’re in control. At least you’re free.
“She said she danced.”
That snapped my attention back to Mackenzie’s father.
“She what?”
“She danced,” he repeated. “Every day, all the time, whenever she could. Whenever it was dark. Whenever she couldn’t see anything. Whenever she wanted to cry. She danced.”
I thought about what it would be like to live in a four-by-four room.You were just a kid. A kid who liked being the center of attention. A kid who wanted to be a pop star.
He took everything away from you. He locked you up. He hurt you.
You danced.
“The older she gets, the harder it is.” Mackenzie’s father looked down. “I thought it would get easier, but she understands more now than she used to. The things she lived through…”
He couldn’t finish that sentence.
“She dances five days a week.” Mr. McBride managed a very small smile, fond and hopeful in a way that hit me like a knife to the gut. “Ballet, tap, jazz. A few years ago, she started martial arts—the kid’s practically a prodigy. There’s nothing physical that she can’t do.”
When it comes to her body—she’s in control.
“Thank you,” I told Mr. McBride. He asked me what I was thanking him for, but I couldn’t explain what he’d just told me—what he’dreallytold me.
If we’d had normal childhoods,Sloane had commented once, a long time ago,we wouldn’t be Naturals. Michael had learned to read emotions because he’dneededto be able to read his abusive father’s. Lia had grown up in a world where deception was a matter of survival. Dean’s father was a serial killer.
I’d had a mother who was a mentalist, and she’d moved us around so frequently that the only relationships I was able to form with other people were in my mind.
Mackenzie McBride had been kidnapped at the age of six. I’d known that she’d been held captive. I’d known the size of the shack. I hadn’t known, until this moment, what she’d done to survive.
You danced. In the dark, you danced. For hours and hours. When you had no control over anything else, you had control over the motion. Over your own muscles. Over the decision to repeat the same moves—familiar moves—again and again and again.
I suspected, but didn’t know, that when Mackenzie had danced, she’d gone to a place in her mind where other things—the bad things, as Laurel would say—couldn’t touch her. What I did know was that on the ledge, Mackenzie had said that she knew bodies, knew how they moved, knew what she looked like when she was dancing without ever looking in the mirror.
With her childhood? Her verynot normalchildhood? That made sense. Even now, losing herself in motion, exerting physical control—it was a coping mechanism.
I’d been trying to approach this objectively. I’d been reserving judgment on whether or not Mackenzieknewthings, the way I sometimes did.
The way we all did.
But now?
I said good-bye to Mr. McBride and started up the ladder to the lightroom.You know bodies. You know motion.
I’d thought that I couldn’t go back in until I had proof that she was right. But right now? I didn’t need proof.
I knew.
When I made it into the room, the first thing I noticed was that Celine was standing opposite the window, closer to Mackenzie than any of the others.
“You’re back.” Mackenzie didn’t turn to look at me. I wondered if she’d seen me come into the room or if she’d heard me.
How in tune with her environment—with the bodies all around her—was she?
My phone rang, the sound almost obscene in the silence that had followed Mackenzie’s statement. No matter what damage control Special Agent Delacroix had done with the adults in this room, it was a good bet that none of them quite trusted me or the way I’d chosen to approach things.
