by Anne Malcom
Then I got back up, using the side table as traction to pull myself up, and then the furniture as crutches to get myself to the open door that housed the bathroom.
It was cavernous, cold, and so blindingly white that I had to blink several times for the room to come into focus. Again, it was all sharp edges, like the owner. I guessed every square inch of this abode, of this prison, contained surfaces that would cut me as soon as my guard was down.
Then again, I didn’t have a guard, so everything did cut me, slashed at my skin.
My steps were slow, aiming first toward the toilet in the corner. I idly wondered about those embarrassing needs and how they were met when I was unable to leave the bed, the prison of my own mind.
With the medical instruments I’d taken in while blankly limping across the room, I guessed he had a catheter in. A snake of shame slithered across my skin with the knowledge of him having to deal with such basic needs.
The shame didn’t stay for long—there wasn’t space for it to command focus in my brain, not with everything else already pulsating my skull. I tried to escape everything rattling inside my mind by focusing on immediate tasks in front of me, so I took painstaking effort to take care of my bladder. And it was painstaking. My body was frail, skeletal, every bone visible underneath my translucent skin, yet it was as heavy as lead. My time in the bed meant whatever muscles I had left weren’t used to supporting even a corpse’s weight.
But I reasoned corpses were always heavier than the bodies of the living.
I remembered how heavy my tiny baby was on my chest. How the weight of her shattered my ribs so she could shred my heart, grind it into nothing.
I had to brace myself on the wall in order not to collapse under the weight that settled on my chest with the mere memory of that moment. The one I carried with me constantly. The one I’d carry with me always. The one I’d be buried with.
I wondered if that burial would be anytime soon.
In that moment, with my breath coming in painful pants, with the room coming in and out of focus as images of my dead baby assaulted me, I hoped it would be soon.
But I was too much of a coward to be the person to bring it about—death. So I stood there, holding onto the wall, holding onto myself, cutting myself on the sharp edges.
And then I wandered to the deep tub. There was a shower stall the size of a walk-in closet, but I didn’t trust myself to stay standing.
My clothes—not mine, the murderer’s—pooled at the floor. I stepped into the empty tub and sat down, demons converging on my mind.
It was only when goose bumps rose on my arms and my teeth began to chatter that I realized the tub was empty and I had forgotten to turn on the water.
I blinked at the knobs at the other end of the tub. I had to crawl on my hands and knees to reach them—that’s how big it was.
There was one for hot, one for cold. I twisted the hot. Steam rose quickly and steadily from the scalding water that bit at my body, flaring it red. I didn’t flinch, didn’t do anything. I wanted it to burn me, rip all the skin from my body, maybe so it didn’t feel so dirty all the time.
But I knew better than that.
I was born with filth, with blood coated on me.
Nothing would change that.
Only the grave.
I stumbled.
Not because I was a clumsy child. No, I made it my mission not to be clumsy. Ladies weren’t clumsy. Mother told me that. Ladies were composed, well versed in table manners and always knew what shoes to wear on every occasion.
Tripping over my own feet would only make Mother’s cold and sharp look even chillier and more cutting. So I trained myself not to trip. Mostly I made sure I didn’t enter her presence so I wasn’t put into any situation to be frozen by her gaze or punctured by her stare.
It wasn’t my feet I tripped over.
It was someone else’s.
The trajectory of my fall meant I landed parallel to their face. Their glassy, blank eyes. My cheek was wet.
I was usually quick to react. I had to be, in my family. You had to have good reflexes when growing up with a family of snakes disguised as people. Especially when they didn’t hesitate to bite you because you weren’t a monster masquerading as a human being—you were a human being. Human beings were weak in this family, and weakness was abhorred, destroyed if possible.
But they—even with their lack of moral fiber—couldn’t destroy their own family.
So I remained.
Remained in a house where I tripped over a dead body while creeping into the kitchen to get a bowl of cereal since Mother had forgotten to tell the newest maid that I needed a meal cooked.
The sticky hot liquid on my cheek was blood.
It came from the bullet wound between the man’s sightless eyes. Clean, quite small, tidily done.
My stomach roiled as I pushed up, scuttled backward like a crab until my back hit the wall painfully, but I didn’t even register it. I was too busy trying to get the blood—someone else’s blood—off my cheek. But then it only stained my hands. I looked at them in horror and rubbed them on my woolen trousers, not worrying about what Mother would say about stains. But all I managed to do was get streaks of red on the fabric. Most of the blood remained on my palms, my fingers, staining them the color of rust.
“Elizabeth, what are you doing on the floor? Get up,” a sharp voice commanded.
It took longer than it normally would have to respond to that voice, to tear my eyes away from my hands.
My mother stood at the doorway, arms folded across her chest, eyebrow sharply raised, mouth pursed into disapproval.
“But there’s a...” My eyes went to the man.
I don’t know what I expected him to do. To say something, to apologize to my mother for putting her daughter in such a position, to move, to blink. He didn’t do anything. Of course he didn’t do anything—he was dead. Dead people didn’t do anything. They made the living do things.
Like scream. Cry. Throw up. Run.
I felt like doing all these things, yet I did none. My body was paralyzed; even my mother’s sharp command couldn’t make me stand to attention like it normally did.
“Elizabeth.” The word was a whip.
I blinked from the dead man to the living woman. She wasn’t paying attention to him at all, like he didn’t exist. She couldn’t exactly scold him for bleeding all over her carpet. He couldn’t hear her, bow to her will so I guessed to her, he really didn’t exist.
“Get. Up,” she seethed.
Woodenly, I did, holding the wall for support. But that didn’t help. My hands were wet and sticky with sweat and blood so I slipped, almost falling. I should’ve known better than to expect anything in this house to help me stay standing. Everything, even the structure itself, wanted to crush me.
My mother’s stare remained. This time it went downward to my pants. She let out a seemingly gentle exhale, but I knew it was the smoke that came out of the dragon before the fire.
“Go change those trousers immediately.” Her eyes jerked up. “And clean yourself up. You’d think you could compose yourself better than this. You’re a Hades.”
I looked helplessly from my mother to the man. She didn’t follow my gaze.
“But Mother,” I whispered. “That man is dead.”
She glared at me. “And?”
I gaped. “And… he’s dead. In our house.”
She stepped forward, her $800 shoes gracefully bypassing the body and blood below them.
“You should know by now not to let things like death become of consequence to you,” she said. “Let them rattle you. Death doesn’t rattle a Hades. It can’t. Because then it stops being a part of life. It becomes a fact of demise.” She snatched my chin between her fingers painfully. “You’d do well to remember that if you want to survive this world.”
The stare she held was more physically painful than her fingernails digging into my jaw. It was full of disgust. Displeasure.
She let me go and my chin snapped downward.
“Now, go,” she hissed.
I didn’t hesitate this time.
I didn’t trip either.
I turned the water hotter, maybe so the blood from that day twenty years ago might scald off.
Then again, it didn’t matter, not with the blood I had running through my veins.
Two Weeks Later
My days became routine.
Wake up.
Breathe against the ceiling, which was lying against my chest. The world that was lying on my chest. Get used to that weight, realize it wasn’t going to kill me, that I wasn’t going to die. That I couldn’t. Not in that moment, at least.
I’d struggle with my feelings about that. About my inability to die, about the pain of living. Did I wish for death? Or did I pray for more strength so I could continue breathing?
Then I’d get up.
My feet would slip into warm woolen loafers. Expensive. Ones designed only to be worn inside the house, the leather and soles too thin and high quality for the outside world. The kind I imagined some British royal eighth in line for the throne to wear.
He bought them for me.
They didn’t suit me.
Along with the 100-percent silk beige pajamas I was wearing, and the matching robe.
Then again, nothing suited me. Not even my skin. But I had no choice but to wear that, so I wore the rest too.
Along with all the clothes he’d stocked the closet with.
It was tempting to stay in the pajamas that were smooth and soft against my skin. Light. It wasn’t like I needed to get dressed to skulk around the hallways of the ornate and eerie mansion, otherwise known as my prison. No, I didn’t need to be dressed for that.
But the silk was light. Smooth. Vulnerable. So that was the last thing I needed. Especially if I ran into someone—him—looking like that. Looking weak, unable to even get dressed under the weight of my fear.
So I’d go into the walk-in closet, trail my hands across the various textures hanging, all expensive. All my size.
Same with the shoes. Every style imaginable. Heels that maybe I would’ve salivated at in another life. Another skin.
The shoes were the one thing I didn’t put on. What was the point? I’d just hear the echo of the thick soles on the marble flooring, taunting me with the fact that they’d never crunch into the gravel and grass that led my way to freedom.
So I’d put on the clothes. Layers of them. As much as I could without overheating. I had to pick the loosest of the bunch, and there weren’t many. My captor, my murderer, obviously liked impeccable tailoring.
Maybe I needed to start thinking of it as my closet. But I couldn’t. Nothing was mine, not even my underwear.
I wasn’t mine anymore.
I hadn’t been for quite some time.
At birth, I was a possession of my family. Then I became an object, like some unwanted gift they’d been unable to toss away. Then they found use for me as a pawn in a larger game, so I become Christopher’s possession. Plaything.
After that, I wasn’t anyone’s. Because I wasn’t a person, just a ghost floating through the world who had crushed anything resembling strength or life.
Now I was his. The man who wouldn’t even give me his name. Because I didn’t deserve to know that.
Was I his prisoner? His project? His victim?
I was something to him. He was something to me.
My murderer? My captor? My savior?
I would ponder this while showering. Someone had stocked the bathroom with all sorts of cosmetics and body products that reeked of fruits, flowers and musks.
I always chose the simple white soap bar.
Makeup sat unused, unopened.
What was the point?
I didn’t look in the mirror. I was too scared to face the stranger wearing my skin.
He knew things about me, though. More than I knew about him. Which wasn’t hard, considering the only thing I knew about him was that he was a ruthless hit man with cold eyes and an absent soul.
It was from before, this knowledge. From when he’d watched me. When he’d made his preparations for my death. Before it all unraveled for whatever reason and I was here instead of the nowhere that waited for me in the grave.
He did things.
Like turn the small office beside the room I slept in into a yoga studio.
I hadn’t known when he’d done it. Before I woke up? Or after? When he’d decided I was going to survive long enough to stretch into a downward dog? What meant more? Or did it all mean nothing?
The door was always closed, when I’d first started venturing out. The first time, I’d merely glanced at it, my nerves too exposed, too vulnerable to worry about closed doors. I had been focused on the fact that the floor at my feet was cold and foreign, the ceiling above my head was unwelcome, strange and not protecting me from the outside world. I’d barely had enough presence of mind to put one foot in front of the other, let alone explore the house around me.
Then one day, a week after I emerged from the thorns of my interior prison, the door to the study was open.
He didn’t say anything as to why, but that was likely because we didn’t speak.
Not since that day I’d woken up.
I hadn’t seen him since then. Like he was some kind of ghost, floating the halls, only appearing when he so desired, which was never at this point.
The silence echoed against the wood of the walls, the thorns of my mind.
But his silence said more than words ever could.
Words were treacherous. I hated them. Before everything, I had to learn how to hate them. Because words were weapons more dangerous than anything that could be shot from or stabbed with.
Words and promises were things that damaged your soul and couldn’t heal it when it was broken.
Apologies were like Band-Aids on shattered marble.
“We’re sorry, Mrs. Atherton, but we were unable to find a heartbeat. Unfortunately, it’s too dangerous to go in and retrieve the fetus. The safest thing to do will be for you to carry it to term, and then we’ll induce labor.”
Unable to find a heartbeat.
The fetus.
Carry it.
No longer a baby, my beautiful girl, my little light, my savior. A fetus. An it. A dead thing sitting inside me.
Those disembodied words ripped through me.
My broken bones healed. The cuts disappeared, leaving pinkish blemishes on my pale skin.
But the words stayed, tattooed onto my brain. The words were the final push into the darkness that had always been my life, where she had been the only light I’d clung to.
So yes, I was grateful for the lack of words. For the fact I didn’t see him, didn’t have to acknowledge my catatonic state, have to acknowledge that I was not dead and at his house. Didn’t have to feel the cut of his words that were so much sharper than even my mother could conjure up.
I had enough words. They roared in my ears every damn day. Every damn moment.
Fetus.
It.
Unable to find a heartbeat.
Sometimes the heavy silence surrounding the tomblike dwelling chased away the words, and it was nice. The air was still stale, toxic, decaying, but that was the scent of my interior soul anyway, so what did it matter?
Utilizing the yoga room—one that almost exactly replicated my space at home—became part of my daily routine.
Then I’d wander to the dining room, where breakfast was always laid out for me, yet the person who prepared it was nowhere to be seen. It was creepy, to say the least, especially since I experimented with coming in at varying times and no matter what, the coffee was always piping hot, the orange juice cold and the croissants fresh.
I reasoned there were cameras everywhere. That didn’t surprise me. I supposed I should’ve felt violated to have someone constantly watching me, tracking my movements. But I was already violated. There was a point when further violations mea
nt little.
Meant nothing.
Because I was nothing.
And I was nowhere.
That’s what he said. And that was definitely what it felt like.
Away from everything that was familiar. From the comfortable bars of my farmhouse that was located… did it matter where it was located, really?
When you were imprisoned, it didn’t matter what was on the outside. It was just an image through the window, never a location. You were floating in the middle of a space in the universe that was equivalent to a living form of limbo.
The in-between.
The nowhere.
I didn’t expect a lot of things after he turned up in my bedroom. I certainly didn’t expect to have things in common with my captor, my kidnapper, my murderer.
We both called nowhere home.
And I tried to turn his nowhere into something that resembled shelter from the outside world. And that meant my routine.
I clung to it with everything I could.
With everything I was.
So I’d utilized the laptop left on my bed when I was eating breakfast one morning—shoved away the unease that came from the unknown person ghosting through the hallways brewing my tea, pouring my juice and leaving me electronics when my bedroom was empty. I found all my projects through my Google account. A lot of my clients had dropped me for my sudden absence, while others were curt and downright rude in their emails but still stuck with me. I was the best, after all. I’d had enough time in my youth to master graphic design, locked away in my room, finding peace in the structure of computers. The logic.
I was glued to my laptop for the first days after trying to create a new version of normal, after accepting there was no way out, only death.
But then I found it.
His real tomb.
His collection.
6
It took me longer to find than it should’ve, all things considered.
Then again, I wasn’t actively searching for things. Skeletons. I didn’t want to search the sprawling mansion that I’d decided needed to be named an estate.