“How is she?” I asked quickly.
“She’ll rest. I don’t want you getting yourself sick now,” Dr. Bloom told me. “Your dad and mom need you to help. Make sure you eat, hear?”
I nodded. “But I can’t right now, Dr. Bloom. My stomach feels too weak. I’ll just throw up what I eat.”
“Eat small portions frequently,” he said.
“What about Mother? She has to eat something.”
“The doctor’s giving her smaller dosages of a tranquilizer for now. I’ll see if I can get her to eat in a few hours or so,” Daddy said.
“Call me if there are any changes,” Dr. Bloom said. He nodded at me, and then Daddy followed him to the door, where they spoke some more.
Daddy returned to the kitchen and made some toast for us and poured himself a fresh cup of coffee.
“I guess I’d better call the relatives,” he said as he worked.
I doubted any of them would come to help us.
Daddy’s parents were living in a Florida development for retired people and didn’t travel anymore. Mother’s father had died when she was in college, and her mother, our grandmother, Nana Clara Beth, had remarried and lived in Arizona. Her new husband had children of his own, and we sensed early on that Mother resented how our grandmother doted on her new husband’s children more than she did on her or on us. Mother was an only child.
Daddy had two brothers. His older brother, Uncle Jack, had gone into the military and was stationed in Germany. He had a wife and two children, a boy, Philip, now eight, and a girl, Arlene, now ten. Daddy’s younger brother, Uncle Bret, was a salesman for a drug company. He was married with three children—Tim, Donald, and Jack, who were five, six, and seven. They lived in Hawaii, so we saw little of them.
Daddy served me some toast and put some jam out. I stared at it. The doughnut was enough, but I couldn’t tell him. Actually, I was feeling a little nauseated.
“Try to do what the doc said, Haylee.” He took a bite of his toast and jam.
I picked up a piece and nibbled at it. “I could take Mother’s car and go looking for her,” I said.
“Oh, no. God, no, Haylee. All I need is something to happen to you now.”
“At least I would feel like I was doing something.”
“There will be plenty for you to do. Your mother won’t be herself for a while.”
A while? If Kaylee doesn’t return, she’ll never be herself, I thought. I was sure he knew that, too, but was just trying to make me feel better. He took a few more bites of his toast, drank his coffee, and rose.
“I’ll go up to check on her and make some calls while I’m there,” he said.
“Okay,” I replied, my voice tiny and thin like a five-year-old’s. “I’m going back to my room in a few minutes, too. It feels so strange being down here without Kaylee,” I said mournfully. “It’s like I feel . . . naked.”
“Sure. Rest. I’ll call you right away if I hear anything.” He left the kitchen.
How should I spend the day? I wondered. Was Kaylee’s disappearance news yet? The police had her picture. Would it be on television already? Were newspaper reporters getting ready to interview us? What should I say when my friends found out? They’d be falling all over themselves trying to be the first to speak to me.
I’ll pick up the receiver if they call my landline, say hello, and then immediately say I can’t talk and hang up. If they call my cell phone, I won’t answer and will just let it go to voice mail. They’ll be all abuzz about it and might even come over to see me. I won’t see them. Not yet, I thought. I’ll have Daddy tell them I can’t see anyone.
Who will they feel sorrier for, me or Kaylee?
Or will Mother be right again and they’ll feel sorry for us both equally?
I can’t even have my own pity.
Not yet.
But I would. Someday soon, I would.
4
Kaylee
I awoke in his arms as he was carrying me to the bed. He put me down gently. I was still shaking.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry I left you alone so long so soon after you arrived. I was dumb to do that and not very considerate. I’m sure it’s difficult getting used to a new home, but I don’t take sick days, and I didn’t want my boss asking all sorts of questions. People can be so nosy because they’re bored sick with their own damn lives. They’re always trying to find out what I do, where I go, who the hell I see.”
He smiled and nodded again as if I had responded. It was eerie, because when he did that, I almost believed I had. My deliberately forced muteness wasn’t bothering him.
“Right,” he said. “We’ll have all night and all day tomorrow and all night tomorrow, too.”
I realized I wasn’t going to change his mind or frighten him into letting me go by refusing to speak. Besides, I still hoped that I could somehow persuade him to let me go because I was the wrong sister and this wasn’t going to work or please him. I wasn’t the one who supposedly fell in love with him over the Internet. Just how cozy and lovey-dovey had Haylee been with him? How sick was the whole thing? She was capable of saying some very sexy things.
It was time I confronted him, I thought.
“You didn’t leave me alone just after I arrived. I didn’t arrive,” I said. “You knocked me out and brought me here. You abducted me. You’ll go to jail and have to live in a cell that will be nothing compared to this, and you won’t have Mr. Moccasin, either, to keep you company. Just let me go home, and nothing more will happen.”
He folded his arms across his chest and nodded. “You know what this is?” he said, widening his eyes as if he had just had a brilliant realization. “It’s like what performers go through when they first go onstage in front of an audience. I heard about it. It’s them butterflies in your stomach sorta thing, right? You’re just nervous we won’t do well together, but I’m not, and soon you won’t be, either. I know this is gonna be just great like we planned. Hey, you came up with a lot of the ideas, Kaylee. Just try to relax, and it’ll all work out. I swear,” he said.
“Ideas? What ideas? Did I tell you I’d like being chained to a wall? Did I tell you I wanted you to take away all my clothes?”
He held his smile as if he hadn’t heard me. He hears only what he wants, I thought. How could I ever get through to someone like that, someone with a built-in filter to keep out anything that opposed what he wanted? I might as well talk to the wall.
“I know all your favorite games, and you’re going to teach me some of them modern dance steps, remember?” he asked. “I got the music you told me to get you, and guess what’s in that bag there. That’s right, a CD player. Tell you the truth, I never had one. That old tape recorder and those tapes were from when I was a kid and living down here.
“I promise that after a while, when I think you’re ready for it, I’ll get a television hooked up for you so you can watch them shows you like in the late afternoon, those soap operas. I still don’t get it. Why do they call them soap? Are they clean or something?” He laughed. “You said you were going to find out for me, do some research on your computer, but you musta forgot, huh?”
Teach him how to dance? Choose music for him to buy? Why did Haylee construct so many specific things in this fantasy? How could she not see how sick it was? On the other hand, I knew how she enjoyed playing with boys, teasing them and flirting. She was like Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind, keeping all the men on a hook, promising to dance or eat with each.
“Don’t boys look like bees around a flower when they hover near me, Kaylee?” she had asked me more than once.
“They look like idiots,” I’d told her.
She didn’t like that. As usual, she called me jealous.
“So,” Anthony said now, slapping his hands together as if all disagreements were settled amicably. “What say I start on our great dinner? Bet you’re hungry. What did you have for lunch?”
“I didn’t eat lunch. I didn’t know what time it wa
s. You took my watch, and there’s no clock here.”
“You don’t need to eat by a clock, Kaylee. You eat when you’re hungry. I bet you’re twice as hungry as I am because you didn’t eat lunch. I’ll get right to it. Glad you took yourself a shower. I’m bringing you some clothes in a while. You should dress for dinner tonight. It’s special, being our first dinner. We’ll do candlelight. You said you liked that, and I brought the candleholders and candles down. And yeah, we’ll play music, and you’ll tell me more about yourself. I want to hear why your parents got divorced and how you felt about it. You never said. You just said they got divorced. Conversation. That’s what makes a dinner special. So you can imagine what it’s been like for me eating dinner alone all these years, huh? Mr. Moccasin doesn’t talk much,” he added, and smiled.
He went to the kitchen area, whistling. I lay there thinking, wondering how I could frighten him enough to get him to let me go. Would he ever? Wouldn’t he be afraid that I would have the police go after him for what he had done already? Could I ever convince him that he had made a mistake, and if I did, how would he react? Would he be sorry, or would he become the frightened one and maybe do something even more terrible to me?
Think, Kaylee, I told myself. Think, think, think, and stop feeling sorry for yourself. You’ll never get out of here if you don’t think.
When someone is imprisoned like this and has so little choice about everything involving her, she can feel so defeated she simply gives up. I felt like a puppet on a string. The more he pulled and pushed, the less I felt like resisting. What good would it do?
Once, when I was having a discussion with Mr. Feldman, my English teacher, about Huckleberry Finn, he had made a big thing of Huck’s decision to help the slave Jim even though he believed it meant he would go to hell. That’s what he had been taught in the Southern world in which he had grown up.
“What makes him heroic was he was willing. He chose to do it, and making a choice gave him meaning,” Mr. Feldman had explained. “It’s important to be able to choose. Think of this,” he’d continued. “You’re caught in a current that is taking you downstream, and you can’t fight it. What can you do to keep your identity?”
“What?” I had asked.
“You swim faster than the current. You’re the one making that choice. Understand?”
“Yes,” I’d said.
Yes, I thought now. That will be how I deal with this, how I might stop feeling like a puppet.
I sat up. Show courage, I told myself. Show strength. No more fainting. Swim faster than the current. Embrace his madness, and get him to give up on you.
“I’d like to see the clothes before dinner,” I said in the tone of a demand.
He stopped working and turned to me. “Huh?”
“I want to choose what to wear for dinner. Bring all you have right now. I can’t just throw something on. I need time to make it right.”
He stared at me a moment.
I held my breath. Would he get violently angry? Would he tell me I couldn’t order him to do anything?
He smiled. Then he shrugged and nodded. “Yeah, you’re right. Of course. Girls like that. I shoulda known. Sorry. I’ll get right on it.”
“And shoes,” I said. “I don’t like walking on my bare feet. Your mother’s shoes might not fit me, so bring slippers, too, and some stockings or socks.”
He nodded again and started for the door.
“Wait. I need a hairbrush. You didn’t put a hairbrush in here.”
“Hairbrush? Right. Sorry,” he said. “Oh, I don’t have any lipstick or nail polish, any stuff like that. It all went bad or got hard or something.”
“So you’ll buy some. I’ll give you a list. My nail polish is worn away, and I don’t want my lips to get too dry. Get me a pencil and a pad to write on.”
“Buy some? Yeah, right. I’ll do that, but not tonight,” he said.
“And bringing me a hairbrush won’t help if I have no mirror. There’s no mirror in the bathroom. I need a mirror.”
He stood there thinking. “I broke the mirror in there years ago and never replaced it. Worried about bad luck, or maybe I didn’t like the face looking back at me, huh?” He laughed. “It’s a happier face now, so I’ll like it. Yeah, I got a mirror I can put up. Sorry I didn’t think of it. It’s been a long time since I thought about what a woman needs.”
Excited, he hurried out, and I stood. I had to figure out a way to get the chain detached from my ankle. That would be my first chore. I’m not going to just lie around crying and begging. I’ll fight back in every way I can, I thought, and suddenly had a new surge of energy.
When he returned, he had his arms full of garments and socks, with a hairbrush and a mirror on top. He brought it all to the sofa and put the items down carefully. He had a pair of light-blue slippers that he held up quickly.
“You were right about my mother’s shoes. She had big feet for a woman. These are mine. They’re big, too, but I’m sure you’ll get around in them.”
“What about my own shoes?”
“Got rid of all that. I don’t want you having memories of an unhappier time.”
Unhappier time? How could he think this would be happier for me?
“I need shoes. What good are nice clothes if you don’t have shoes, too?”
“Yeah, sure. I’ll buy you new shoes and some boots. Yes, you’ll need boots someday, and newer socks. You do what you said. You make a list. There’s a pencil and some paper on the shelf there with the books. Let me put this mirror up,” he said, showing me the small round mirror in an ivory frame. “I took it from my mother’s bedroom.” He went into the bathroom, and I approached the pile of clothes and began to separate the garments.
There were three more nightgowns, two skirts, two blouses, and a ruby-red dress with an embroidered bodice. All of it looked like it would float on me the way the nightgown I was wearing did. His mother must have been stout with a heavy bosom, I thought.
“Couldn’t you at least have saved my own panties and bra?” I asked when he came out of the bathroom.
“You don’t need that stuff now. Later,” he said. “Rome wasn’t built in a day.” He was getting testy. Maybe I had pushed him a little too far, but I couldn’t stop now. I had him doing things for me.
“How can I wear this?” I asked, holding up the dress. “It’s so big.”
“I’ll fix it tomorrow. Do the best you can for now. There’s a belt in that pile. Just tie it around your waist. You’ve got your hairbrush. Go do your hair and put on the dress,” he ordered. “I’ve got to get back to our dinner. No more interruptions.”
I saw how easily he grew impatient. That was my plan, to get him frustrated. It was dangerous, I knew, but if I could get him to be disgusted enough with me, perhaps he would say we weren’t meant for each other and send me away. The trick, I thought, was not to whine and cry but to complain, complain, and complain without sounding too pathetic. He wouldn’t believe it if I sounded like a spoiled young woman.
“There’s not enough light in here,” I said from the bathroom. “Can’t you put in a stronger bulb?”
“No,” he said, without looking back at me. “The fixture can’t take a bigger bulb.”
“Well, there’s not enough light. Maybe you could get a bigger fixture.”
“I’ll look into it,” he said, the irritation building.
I slipped off the nightgown, cowering behind the little wall space that would block me from view, and put on the ruby dress. It was ridiculous even when I tied the belt around my waist. His mother must have been very tall, too. The hem touched the floor. Mr. Moccasin came to the doorway and gazed at me.
“I look stupid, don’t I, Mr. Moccasin?” I said.
Anthony turned around. “You don’t look stupid. You can’t look stupid in my mother’s things.”
“They’re nice, but they don’t fit. It’s not even close. Did you really throw away my clothes?” I asked. “Can’t I have them back until you
fix these or get me something new?”
“I threw them in the Salvation Army collection box near where I work. They’re gone. Make do for now,” he ordered. “You’re ruining the mood for our first romantic dinner with all these complaints.”
“It’s easier for a man,” I said. “All you do is throw something on and brush your hair quickly.”
He smiled. “My mother used ta say something like that. My father would just growl back at her. At least, that’s what it sounded like to me, a growl. He was half pack dog. And he had a lot more hair on him than I do. Well, I do, but I shave it,” he said. “He had as much hair on his back as most guys have on their heads. I get a barber to do my back. Maybe you’ll do it for me now.”
The expression on my face brought a smile to his.
“Don’t worry. I won’t ask you to do that. Girls have weak stomachs, I know. My mother wouldn’t do his back, and he wouldn’t let anyone else do it. So most of the time, he looked like an ape when he was naked.
“Hey,” he said, waving a stirring fork at me, “don’t fret. You look damn pretty, even in a dress too big. You got the hair. I know how proud you are of it, too. My bad. I shoulda brought down one of her hair ribbons. I’ll remember next time. She had lots of that stuff. I buried it all in a carton in the closet in her bedroom.”
He turned back to his stove. “You set the table,” he ordered.
I walked slowly, afraid that I would trip over the hem of the dress. As I was carrying the dishes to the table, a salad plate slipped and shattered into small pieces as soon as it hit an uncovered part of the floor. I froze, staring down at it.
Trembling, I turned to him. He was glaring at me, all softness gone from his face.
“Those are my grandmother’s dishes,” he said slowly. “How could you be so damn clumsy? Don’t you care about the value of older things, family treasures?”
Broken Glass Page 5