A local woman missing- Mary Kubica

and plenty of it. His hair wasn’t thin like it is now. It wasn’t gray. His
smile wasn’t bogus back then, either.
He’s let himself go.
“The way the psychiatrist explained it to me,” Dad says, “being
isolated in the dark for as long as your sister was drives people to
the brink of insanity. It impairs their sense of time, their sleep cycles.
Without being able to see, they suffer sensory deprivation. It fucks
them up, Leo,” he says. I go rigid because Dad just said fuck. Dad
doesn’t swear.
“This friend of Delilah’s was a hallucination. But to her,” he says,
“he was entirely real. Where she was kept, she had no one to talk to.
She couldn’t see anything in the dark. In the absence of all other
stimuli, Leo, her mind kept working, and it created Gus, who, to your
sister, was as real as you are to me. She wasn’t lying. She’s not a
liar. She believed one hundred and ten percent that Gus was real.
It’s possible that Gus was the only thing that got her through all this.”
When he says it like that, I feel like a shithead for calling you a liar
and a schizo.
Dad doesn’t make me apologize. I do it, anyway.
I get an idea then. I ask Dad to drag out the home videos and we
watch them. For just a little while, it’s like you are you again and
Mom is still alive.