For some reason, the only thought that entered Anne’s mind then was that she couldn’t remember seeing the doll, seeing Mother, as Terry called her, on the ground where her daughter had dropped it when Jane had burst through the door.
Jane took it. Or maybe Benjamin.
Anne LaForet lay in complete darkness for a long time before finally passing out.
Chapter 16
Time heals all wounds.
Wallace had said that, or at least Anne thought he had.
It wasn’t true, of course. The pain that Jane and her husband and Jessie had inflicted on her that night would stay with her until her dying day.
Time numbed all wounds, was probably more accurate.
The whip marks on Anne’s face, back, and arm all left scars, the worst being the inch-thick gash on her cheek. Still, she was glad to be alive; glad that they had left her slumped, broken, but alive.
And they had either decided to leave Teresa alone or they hadn’t known that she was home at the time; it didn’t matter which. What mattered was that both she and Terry were still alive.
Anne stayed inside for the week following the incident, allowing Terry to help her nurse her wounds. The girl didn’t ask many questions, for which Anne was grateful. She hoped deep down that her daughter had somehow fallen asleep and hadn’t seen or heard what had happened.
Somehow, though, especially given the particularly vacant look in Terry’s eyes, Anne didn’t think that this was the case.
Time numbs all wounds.
“Are we going to be okay, Mommy?” Terry asked, in one of the brief interludes of very few words exchanged during that first week.
Anne couldn’t lie to her daughter.
“I don’t know, Terry. I don’t know.”
And that was the truth.
Take your money and leave this place... the people of the swamp never forget.
Anne didn’t need the old woman in the market to tell her that she should get out of the swamp, take Terry and just run. But that was pretty much where the fantasy ended.
Where would they go? They didn’t have as much money as Anne had initially thought, and even if they had a place to go, hitching a ride would prove difficult. Not many horses in the swamp were for hire, and even if they were, Anne had the sneaking suspicion that the people of the swamp would be less than eager to help her out.
She should have been smarter. She should have saved more.
But there had just been no way of knowing that things would take such a turn...
On the second week after the encounter, a woman from the swamp, one that Anne recognized, came to visit. She was young, barely twenty, and wanted a child.
Anne turned her away.
Two other women came shortly thereafter, but Anne’s response was the same as it had been for the previous.
When the fourth woman came, Anne completely lost it and screamed in her face.
“Leave me alone!”
And the woman had. Either her reaction or her scars kept the others away. For a time, as their dwindling produce stocks reduced to nothing, things went back to the way they had been before. And Anne slowly came to grips with this fact. All of her fleeting wealth and prosperity was behind her, but this didn’t bother her as much as she had thought it might. She had Terry, and that was enough.
Still, things would never be completely normal again, she knew. Never.
When the fresh food supplies exhausted, Anne and her daughter went back to choking down dry oats. Her nipples, particularly the left, were horribly disfigured, which made even the thought of expressing her milk enough to cause her entire body to seize. By the time Anne finally considered this option, her supply had all dried up. She doubted that she would have been able to breastfeed ever again, for her own child or for others.
No one asked her what had happened to her face. Things went back to the way they had been right after Wallace had passed. The people of the swamp started to take a wide berth around her at the market, issuing their sidelong glances filled with pity. Even the women that she’d helped bring children into this world treated her as if they had never met.
Anne was worse than a widow to them. Now she was a damaged widow, a strange widow with scars on her face and body. She had become something that the people of the swamp couldn’t possible understand.
But for Anne and Teresa, it was as close to normal as it was going to get.
That is, until Jane returned.
Chapter 17
Anne froze—it was as if her entire body was suddenly encased in ice. She simply couldn’t move.
The knock wasn’t like the other women from the swamp—tentative, uncertain—or like when Jane had come the last time—deep, loud bangs. Instead, it was the same knock that Anne had heard what seemed like an eon ago. Slow and light, as if the person’s knuckles were simply grazing the wood.
It was Jane; there was no question about it. Even though Terry was already asleep, Anne’s eyes immediately went into the bedroom door, her thoughts turning to her daughter.
They came back for her—Jane couldn’t get pregnant, so she came for Teresa. To take her.
It seemed ridiculous, but given what Mr. and Mrs. Heath had done to Anne, she thought that no matter how farfetched, it was a real possibility.
The knock came again as Anne sat like a statue at the kitchen table, unable to decide what course of action she should take.
Run? Hide?
But Anne did neither of these.
She couldn’t; she couldn’t do anything.
Rooted in place, Anne’s eyes flicked to the door next. After what had happened, she had not only gotten into the habit of locking the door, but she had installed a wooden brace as further security at night.
“Anne? Anne, you in there?” Jane’s voice was quiet, meek. Just as it had been three months ago.
A trick—it’s a trick. She wants Teresa—she’s trying to trick you into opening the door.
“Anne?”
For some reason, this mention of her name snapped the frost off Anne, and she found herself finally able to move again. Part of her was amazed that she managed to remain so calm, that her heart rate had only raised a little bit, and the only sweat that broke out on her skin was on her palms.
But part of her also knew that time numbed all wounds, and that there was only so much that Jane could do to her that hadn’t already been done.
But they can take Teresa.
Anne silently slid of her chair, and landed on all fours on the floor. It was dusk out, which meant that she hadn’t lit the lantern yet.
That was something.
Jane didn’t know that she was in there—she might assume that the place was abandoned, that Anne had taken Teresa and fled the swamp, like the old hag in the market had suggested.
But if Jane thinks it’s abandoned, she might break in to make sure. She might even come in to see if there is any milk left over, any that I may have forgotten to take with me.
Anne slithered beneath the table, trying to push these scenarios from her mind in an attempt to maintain the strange calmness that washed over her.
“Anne? I wanted to come by, tell you that I’m sorry. I—I just lost control, I didn’t mean to—to—shit, I can’t believe what I did to you.”
Anne stared at the front door from beneath the kitchen table. It was hard to comprehend after what had happened that just three months ago she had been sitting across from the woman that was now outside, planning her future with Teresa.
And now the woman sounded much like she had back then, and not like the crazed lady with the horse whip.
A trick—it’s a trick.
Anne waited in silence, her eyes flicking from the front door to see if it opened, to Teresa’s room for the same reason. If either of them opened, she would be forced to act.
Anne just wasn’t sure what she would do in either case.
For a brief moment, Anne was transported back to another time, back before the accident at the Mil
l. Anne, Wallace, and Teresa had been at the edge of the swamp, all three of them with identical smiles on their faces, their lower bodies caked with mud.
“You see that log there?” Wallace said, pointing at a particularly gnarled piece of driftwood about twenty feet from the shoreline.
Anne nodded, and Teresa said, “Yeah.”
“Well, what if I were to tell you that that’s the same log I saw when I was here with my dad more than twenty years ago?”
Teresa seemed to mull this over, her eyes scanning the vast swamp before them.
“No way, Daddy.”
“Yeah,” Anne chimed in. “No way.”
They all giggled.
“How can you know it’s the same log?”
Wallace smirked, his smile breaking the thick black beard that covered his face. He bent down and picked up a stick.
“Because,” he said with a grunt as he launched the branch toward the log, “that’s not a log.”
The stick landed within a foot of the “log,” splashing water several feet in the air. To Anne and Teresa’s surprise, the log moved—it actually moved.
Anne took a step backward, confused. But then the log moved again, and two yellow reptilian eyes raised out of the swamp.
Anne stumbled, slipping and falling to the mud. She was still holding little Teresa’s hand, barely two years old, and she pulled the girl down with her.
Wallace laughed.
“That’s not a log,” he said, the smirk still plastered on his face. “That’s old Ghengis, a gator that’s as old as the swamp itself.”
“Wally!” Anne shouted. “What about Teresa!”
Ghengis opened his mouth, revealing so many long yellow teeth that Anne couldn’t even contemplate counting them all. Teresa would have fit inside that gaping maw with no problem—five Teresas would have fit in there.
Wallace turned and scooped both his wife and daughter out of the mud in a giant bear hug.
“Don’t worry,” he said, his eyes glittering in the moonlight. “He’s old and crusty, but friendly enough. Besides, nothing’s going to happen to you guys. At least not while I’m around.”
Anne swallowed hard.
But you aren’t around anymore, are you, Wallace?
“Anne, I don’t know what came over me. I was just—just—well, I guess you know.” Her voice dropped an octave. “Benjamin stopped hitting me, at least for now.”
There was another long pause, during which Anne held her breath.
“I don’t know if you care—I don’t blame you if you don’t. I wanted to give you something, Anne. But I want to give it to you in person. I’ll come back. Next month, I’ll come back. I’m just so sorry.”
Footsteps receded away from the house, but Anne didn’t move. Tears streamed down her face and her back started to ache, but she remained glued to the floor beneath her kitchen table nonetheless.
Only after the moon had reached its apex in the sky did she dare move. But Anne’s first inclination wasn’t to rise. Instead, her hand instinctively went to the scar on her back. Not the one made by Jane’s whip, but the one made by what she now knew was Benjamin’s ring that he had heated with the box of matches.
The one that had branded her with his initials. With BH.
Where are you now, Wallace? Why aren’t you protecting us now when we really need it?
Chapter 18
“No, no, no...” The words came tumbling out of Anne’s mouth in such rapid succession that they soon melded into one unintelligible moan. Sobs racked her entire body, and she clutched her stomach as she stood alone in the bathroom.
“Please, no...”
Her mind was a tortured mess, unable to form any rational thought. The only thing that stopped the word no from spewing from between her pale lips was another lurch of nausea. Her guts roiled, an undulation that made its way slowly upward, serpentine-like, until it hit her throat.
Anne gagged and then vomited a thin gruel that consisted of nothing but bile and partially digested oats. With spit and puke trailing from her mouth, she said the word again.
“No.”
A voice from outside the bathroom door made Anne’s eyes bulge and her heart race.
“Mommy? You okay?”
Teresa; it’s only Teresa.
Gasping, trying to force the sobs and the rest of her breakfast, lunch, and dinner back down to the dark, infinite pit that was her stomach, Anne somehow managed to formulate an intelligible sentence.
“Fine, sweetie, go play with the—” Another uncontrollable wave of nausea struck her, and she was helpless to prevent it from taking over her entire being. Her stomach flexed, her hands biting into the hard side of the metal basin with such strength that the muscles in her arms started to burn.
More puke came.
“Mom? Mom!”
On the verge of hyperventilating, Anne struggled to get the words out.
“Fine, just—just not feeling weeeeell.”
The finally word was drawn out as she puked again.
“Mom!”
“Fine,” she gasped. “Fine, just sick. Please, just go.”
Anne couldn’t believe it. It just wasn’t possible.
As her nausea passed, she managed to slowly rise into some semblance of standing.
She stared at her reflection in the mirror. Her skin was so pale that it bordered on translucent. Her face was thin, gaunt, her eyes sunken and rimmed with black charcoal. Her lips were pale, her hair a matted mess atop her head. The nipple on her left breast was a mangled mess, just a dark smear, while the right was more defined, but ragged, as if it had been chewed on by a mangy dog.
Despite her thin arms and legs, her stomach held a little weight, the area just above the dark thatch of pubic hair thicker, swollen.
“No.”
She turned so ever slightly, intending to view the pouch in her lower abdomen from the side. Instead, she caught a glimpse of the two letters, raised scars that while normally pink, now almost seemed to glow.
BH.
Anne’s mind was transported elsewhere, to another time.
Benjamin Heath was on top of her, him being so tall that his narrow chest was in her face, and with each thrust of his hips, his clavicle struck her in the chin, driving the back of her head into the floor.
“Now I know why Jane liked you so much... now I know why Jane wanted you so much...”
Anne was sobbing again, tears streaming down her face.
Wallace, where are you? Why did you leave us?
Somewhere in the back of her mind, she realized that there was someone outside the bathroom door again.
“Mom? What’s going on in there?”
“I’m—I’m just sick, honey,” Anne lied, still staring at her own reflection.
I’m sick, honey... and you’re going to be a big sister.
Chapter 19
“Anne? Anne, it’s me, Jane. I brought you something—some money. I brought you some money. I’m going to leave it here, on the doorstep. I’m going to leave it here and leave you alone. I won’t come back; I won’t bother you anymore. Okay? Please, just let me know that you are okay.”
Teresa squeezed her hand so hard that Anne was inclined to look at her daughter despite how badly she wanted to hang her head over the basin and vomit some more. For the life of her, Anne couldn’t remember if she had felt this sick while pregnant with Teresa.
For some reason, though, she thought not.
“Shh,” Anne whispered. “Don’t say a word.”
They sat in the darkness for at least a minute. It was near midnight, Anne supposed, although her only indication of the time was the fact that it was pitch black in the entire house. Sometime during the middle of the night, she had awoken with a curdled stomach, and despite her best efforts to remain quiet, Terry had felt her rise from the bed.
“Anne?”
Terry squeezed her hand again and Anne squeezed back.
Teresa didn’t know any of what had happened, and although s
he was smart enough to know that Anne was pregnant, that was the extent of her understanding. If Anne had any say in the matter, the girl would never know the truth.
“Don’t say a word,” Anne repeated in a whisper so quiet that she could barely hear the words inside her own head. A sudden wave of nausea passed over her, but Anne gulped it away.
“Please, Anne, I am going to leave now, I just need to see you...”
This time, Anne couldn’t help but vomit. She tried her best to do it as quietly as possible, but it was no use. Her vomiting was violent and a full-body affair.
“Anne!”
Hidden in the bathroom, both Terry and Anne heard the front door suddenly burst open.
I forgot to lock it. I forgot to lock it. I forgot to lock it.
“No,” Anne muttered.
But it was too late.
Jane was inside, and a moment later, the woman was at the bathroom door. Anne ushered Terry behind her crouched body protectively. As the door to the bathroom was slowly eased open, Anne tried to straighten, to rise to her feet to meet the woman, but she couldn’t. It felt as if someone had driven an iron spike through her guts and was turning and twisting it, causing pain and contractions with every rotation.
Jane stood in the doorway for a moment, her eyes flicking from Anne to Terry and back again, an expression of pure confusion on her face. Then she stepped to action, leaning down on one knee and gently laying a hand on Anne’s back.
Relief washed over Anne as she realized that this wasn’t a trick after all, and that Jane really was here to apologize. But this sensation was quickly overshadowed by the urge to vomit again. As she puked into the basin, she felt Jane’s hand gently stroke her back.
“What’s wrong? Are you ill? Did you eat something sour?”
Anne shook her head. Her blonde hair, damp with sweat, the ends soaked in vomit, whipped back and forth, before clinging to her cheeks. Jane reached out and eased her hair back, pulling it from the basin. Somehow Anne managed to shift to a sitting position, the twisting in her guts abating for the moment.
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