Free Betrayed by Carol Thompson

numbers from her phone book. I did find a softball programme that reminded me that Tracey had become good friends with the KwaZulu-Natal players. One of them worked for a company that had placed an advertisement in the programme so I dialled the number and told her I thought Tracey may be heading her way.
    I filled in a missing person’s report at the police station and the police put out a description of the runaway on the radio. There was a tense moment when a petrol station attendant along the N3 highway reported that a girl fitting Tracey’s description had been seen in a grey Mercedes. The driver had heard Tracey’s description over the radio and left his phone number at the filling station, so we made contact and arranged to meet in Harrismith. But it wasn’t Tracey, so we turned the car round and headed for home again, still not knowing where she was.
    The next morning her friend in Durban phoned to say Tracey had made contact and was on her way to her office. I phoned my sister Marsha and her husband, who lived about 75 kilometres south of Durban, and asked them to go there and take Tracey home with them. Tracey’s face reflected a kaleidoscope of emotions when she saw them. At first there was fear. She looked frantically around for a place to run, then realised she had nowhere to go. There was hurt at her friend’s betrayal. Finally, there was acceptance, even relief.
    My mother and I left immediately to drive down to fetch Tracey from Marsha’s house. I was angry but relieved she was safe, not knowing whether to kill her or hug her. On the way home we wouldn’t allow her out of our sight. If she wanted to go to the toilet, one of us accompanied her. If she wanted a cold drink at a filling station, we went inside with her. During the whole eight-hour journey home, Tracey was very quiet and withdrawn. She spoke little and only when necessary. Yes. No. I don’t know. A shaken head here, a shrugged shoulder there. There was no unburdening of herself, no expla nations.
    Home again, I made an appointment with the psychologist. Tracey re fused to talk about running away or about the night she had spent in a township in Pietermaritzburg. She refused hypnosis again. There was a lot of talking, but Tracey did very little of it.
    Although she rarely mentioned it, she had lost seven school friends in the previous year or so, killed in five separate car accidents.
    She bottled her feelings about it, but her realisation that no one was invin cible had coloured her outlook on life. She took the death of a fellow softball player who was killed on her way home from practice particularly hard. She and Tracey had been chatting just before we left the sports ground and it was hard to accept that death could loom over us all so silent and unnoticed, the axe fall so quickly and callously.
    Eventually, the psychologist decided to refer Tracey to a psychiatrist who could prescribe sedatives or anti-depressants to help her deal with her problems. I clutched at the new ray of hope. Nothing else seemed to be working, perhaps this would be the answer.
    He was a quiet man and Tracey took to him immediately. Slowly, inch by painful inch, she forced herself to stop running from the sadness and confront it. Perhaps his gentle questions touched something in her. Perhaps she had come to the realisation that she couldn’t help herself. Perhaps the physical symptoms were getting worse. Whatever the reason, it was a major breakthrough.
    Fumbling at first for the right words, she gradually unlocked the vault where her pain and fear were stored. She confided in him how she felt, explaining that she seemed to have no control over the urge to run, no control over her thoughts or actions.
    â€œI’m so scared it eats me up,” she confessed. “I don’t know what I’m scared of or why, but it’s so real. Suddenly I can’t breathe and there are pain s in my chest, I feel dizzy, I feel