by Jen Waite
The only person he’d say he got along with was his mother. She seemed to understand him or at least she didn’t think he was beyond saving. A memory flashed into his mind. He was eight and his brother was six. They were alone and then suddenly his mother was there; she must have run toward his brother’s screams. After she checked his little brother’s neck and made sure he was ok, she sent his brother to go find their father. “Don’t tell him what happened, honey,” she’d said to his brother, “it was just an accident. If you can keep it a secret, we’ll get ice cream later.” Then she had taken his chin in her hand. It hurt, her fingers tugged so tightly on his jaw. He was ready for her to yell, to tell him to never, ever do that again, but she said, “I am calm.” She looked into his eyes. “I am calm,” she said again. “Say it.”
“I am calm,” he said.
“I feel nothing,” she said. “Say it.”
“I feel nothing.”
“Whenever you feel those feelings, the ones that make you do bad things, I want you to repeat that in your head. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
She’d let go of his chin and kissed him on the cheek. “Nothing is wrong with you, my love, you’re just different.” She smiled and wiped her hands against her eyes. “You’re my special boy.”
He looked at Thea again. He needed her to wake up. He saw her eyes open before. If she died, if her small body shut down, then this would be all for nothing. He rubbed his hands together on his lap. It was too cold. His hands shook involuntarily, and the gun trembled on his thigh. The man thought he could take it, but the girl’s body wouldn’t last much longer in the cold. He got up and walked outside without saying anything. He wasn’t worried about the women escaping; the women would not leave the girl. As he gathered branches and leaves, he thought about the girl and then his thoughts turned to Julia. He remembered something else the guy from prison said to him, “Women are taught to acquiesce. Since they were little girls. If you find a fighter, enjoy it.” The man had had to look up the word acquiesce in the library a few days later. ACQUIESCE. TO ACCEPT SOMETHING RELUCTANTLY BUT WITHOUT PROTEST. He picked up a branch from the ground, mulling the words over in his head. No wonder he didn’t get better after Julia; she had barely struggled. That was partly his fault, because of what he’d done to her, but it was over so quickly. Too quickly. Thoughts of Julia swirled in his brain and he couldn’t make them stop. The man pricked his finger against the end of a sharp stick he was holding. He thought about his last parole hearing, his third and final. He had told them not to let him out twice before, and twice before he had been denied. He had explained to the board about the hunger—about how it had grown, not diminished. About how he could remember it, the nag in his stomach, for as long as he had memories. This kind of talk had worked twice before. But the third time the man sat quietly, listening to the board discuss his case. When it was his turn to speak, he talked about being a troubled youth at the time of his crime and how he had made progress with the in-house therapist since his last parole hearing. He fixed his mouth into a straight line and said he wanted the chance to redeem himself, or at least to do some good in the world. The woman sitting in the middle of the panel, with her tired eyes, declared, “You’ve done ten years. You’ve served your time.” As if that meant anything. He had leaned forward slightly, waiting. And then, to no one in particular, she had announced, “The board finds the prisoner suitable for release.”
The man fingered the sharp end of the stick again. How would it feel to push it slowly into his eye, through his brain? When he walked back into the cabin, the women eyed his load but didn’t move. The man threw the sticks and leaves in the fireplace and felt in his pocket for the lighter. Before he lit the kindling, he took the pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and lit one up. He thought again about the girl waking up and felt a mixture of sickness and excitement churning in his stomach, mixing with the smoke.
TWELVE YEARS
BEFORE THE CABIN
ANNE
When Anne woke up in the hospital, the first thing she noticed: Her body was empty. Ethan stood to the side of the hospital bed, gripping her limp hand and wiping a tear from the corner of her eye.
“Baby,” Anne whispered, trying to move her head up from the pillow.
“What, love?” Ethan bowed his head down.
“The baby,” she said, her throat felt raw and the back of her head throbbed.
“She’s fine. Just a little early so they took her to the intensive care wing.” He caressed her cheek with his hand. She felt rage bubbling up from her groin into her head. Did you fuck him? It all came rushing back. Maybe it was the drugs coursing through her veins, giving her strength, but the next words she spoke came out perfectly clear. “If you ever touch me again, if you ever come within a foot of my baby, I will kill you.”
Ethan blinked and when his eyes reopened they were dark and blank. “You’re not remembering clearly, Anne. You tripped on your way down the stairs.”
“Touch me again and I will scream.” She was crying now, desperate. “Leave. Leave now or I will fucking ruin you, Ethan. I’ll go to the police.”
“Do you really think anyone will believe you? You’re a whore, Anne.” He said the words kindly. “And if Joseph were under oath . . . Well, it wouldn’t look good for you, love.”
A nurse came into the room, alerted by the beeping of the monitor. “Ok, ok, calm down, honey,” was the last thing Anne heard before she sank into blackness again. When she woke up, her husband was gone, and Rose was there, holding her hand. Her father sat in a chair at the foot of the hospital bed, his hands placed firmly on his knees. Anne told her parents about the stairs and what Ethan had said about “not remembering clearly.” She didn’t tell them what he had said about Joseph.
“I’m going to kill him,” her father said. “I’m going to—”
“Sam,” Rose cut in. “Please.” Anne watched a look pass from her mother to her father. “Everything will be ok,” Rose continued. “We’ll figure all this out. Right now, you need to rest so you can be strong for . . . Does she have a name?”
Anne thought about the name she and Ethan had picked, Madeleine, for his grandmother.
“Thea.” It had been Anne’s favorite after she’d stumbled upon the name on a baby name website. Ethan had already decided on Madeleine but Anne carried the name and its meaning in the back of her mind. Thea: goddess of light.
“Beautiful.” Rose smiled. “Sleep. Everything will be ok. I promise.”
For the moment, as she plunged back into darkness, Anne believed her.
* * *
—
For ten weeks, Thea lived in a tiny incubator in the NICU and then in the neonatal wing of the hospital under close supervision. Anne was technically discharged a few days before Christmas, but as soon as she could move around, she spent her days and evenings in the NICU, staring at her daughter’s tiny form and then, when the doctors and nurses gently shooed her away, sitting in the waiting area until she could go back in. The baby weighed three pounds ten ounces at birth—Anne was told that was big and strong for her gestational age, in the eightieth percentile. She looked like a featherless baby bird that had been thrown from its mother’s nest, translucent skin wrapped too tightly around tiny bones, fingers like little claws. Anne wasn’t allowed to touch her daughter for the first twelve days of her life, and so she watched. She watched the nurses open the side of the Plexiglas box, checking the IVs, the tube under Thea’s nose, the monitor over her heart. She watched for something to go wrong, even as Thea began to gain weight and the nurses assured Anne that the baby was doing great, as healthy as possible under the circumstances. She watched Thea’s chest, convinced that she might stop breathing at any second. She stood for hours, eyes on her stomach as it jutted up and down with each breath, sure that as soon as she looked away, the tiny body would fail.
Anne spent nights at her friend
Nicole’s, whom she’d worked with at the law firm before quitting (Rose had had to return to the bakery but visited every week for a night or two, staying at a cheap hotel in Queens). Anne was never particularly close to Nicole, but she was quiet and kind and offered her couch without asking any questions. Anne had grown apart from all of her friends since marrying Ethan, and she wasn’t ready to explain why she had come out of the hospital without a baby, without a husband, and without a place to sleep. She set her alarm for midnight and three a.m. and pumped milk in the dark.
A few weeks after Thea came into the world, Anne left the hospital for a couple of hours in the middle of the day. She took the subway to the Upper East Side and got off at her old stop, Eighty-sixth and Lex, determined to grab her passport and birth certificate from the safe, and some changes of clothes. She hadn’t been back to her apartment since the day of Thea’s birth. She had been living off her dwindling checking account; she no longer had any of her own credit cards—she was an authorized user on several of Ethan’s credit cards, but they had all been canceled the first night in the hospital, three e-mails in succession alerting her that she had been removed from the accounts. A lump formed in Anne’s throat as she threw a duffel bag over her shoulder and walked up the subway stairs to the street. It had only been a few weeks, yet the neighborhood felt completely different—the green awning on the deli that she passed every day looked fluorescent and the people and buildings came into hyper focus.
She hadn’t seen Ethan since the first day in the hospital. That first night, she dozed in and out of sleep, startling awake at every sound. Her eyes moving to the door of her room every time it cracked open, expecting his face to appear, heart accelerating and then slowing to a steady thud each time a nurse’s head popped in instead. When he didn’t show up that night, and then stayed gone the next forty-eight hours, Anne knew he wasn’t coming back. A wave of relief mixed with sadness washed over her, and she cried with relief and then she cried harder, as it hit her that she was on her own, fully and completely.
She made the trek to their apartment on a Wednesday. Her husband would be at work, and Anne, of course, still had a key. She knew there was a possibility that he had changed the locks but, walking down the street, toward their building, she was almost certain he hadn’t. Anne had been in charge of house stuff; if anything around the house needed to get done, she was the one who took care of it, from calling the plumber to setting up the automatic utility payments. It occurred to her once or twice how odd it was that Ethan had managed to build an extremely successful career yet couldn’t seem to figure out how to get the mail.
She walked slowly, with one hand protectively placed in front of her abdomen where the incision area still smarted. She slowed her pace even more as she made the left onto their block. They lived on a quiet tree-lined street surrounded by an odd assortment of large luxury buildings with ornate lobbies and doormen, antiques dealers, and small buildings, like theirs, that didn’t have fancy trappings but housed only two or three spacious (by New York standards) apartments. Anne chose the apartment, but the apartment was his—everything signed in his name. It was his money, after all, and when they’d bought it they weren’t even married, just engaged. She took out her keyring and climbed up the front steps to the building door, inserted the key into first the outside glass door and then the interior wood door. The entryway was completely silent. She unlocked the mailbox and quickly sorted through the letters, pamphlets, and magazines that spilled out of the slot. Nothing of importance. She climbed the stairs that she had crashed down a few weeks earlier, gripping the railing and keeping her eyes looking up and ahead. When she got to the front door of their apartment, her entire body was shaking—half with fear, half with expectation. He wasn’t going to be home. She knew he wasn’t. But still. There was a slight possibility. Just in case, she knocked softly, ready to bolt—nothing. She slid the key in and the latch clicked. She pushed the door open.
“Hello.” It came out barely above a whisper, hardly loud enough to alert anyone to her presence, but she could tell from the still air that the apartment was empty. She averted her eyes from the kitchen and walked down the hallway that ran the length of the apartment, toward the bedroom. The quiet felt suffocating and the surroundings suddenly foreign. Even though Anne had picked each piece of furniture and decoration, down to the forks and spoons, Ethan had had final approval over everything. She’d felt the tiniest bit silly standing idly at Restoration Hardware, sending him picture after picture, and waiting for his thumbs-up or thumbs-down, but they were a team, he’d said, and they were building this home together. She tiptoed into their bedroom like an intruder and went straight for the safe in the closet, quickly dialing the code and exhaling when she saw the documents stacked neatly inside. She stuffed a few pairs of underwear, bras, socks, three shirts, one sweater, and two pairs of jeans into the duffel bag. Next, the bathroom. Since she was there, she might as well load up. She walked over the plush beige carpet of the bedroom into the black-and-white tile of the bathroom. The bathroom was her favorite room in the apartment—open, crisp, and clean with an old claw-foot tub and a large window that let in the soft afternoon light. She grabbed a small travel case out of the vanity and filled it with deodorant, toothpaste, and a toothbrush. The balance of her checking account flashed into her mind: $106.58. She reached for an expensive face cream and shoved it into the bag. Color rose to her cheeks as she realized that the weekly transfer from Ethan’s account to her own would most likely never be coming through again. The medical bills were mounting, her daughter was in the NICU and she was worried about face cream. She shook her head and shut the medicine cabinet door. She couldn’t help but exhale sharply at her own reflection. She’d been avoiding the hospital bathroom mirrors, at least close-up, and this was the first time she’d truly stopped and taken in her face since the “accident.” Her eyes were sunken and dull, her cheekbones jutted from her face, and her skin ranged from gray to deep purple. She was about to tear her eyes away when she saw something in the cabinet mirror. Not her skeleton face, but something in the foreground, a speck of bright white, in sharp contrast to the black tile, peeked out from underneath the claw-foot tub.
Anne walked over to the tub, got down on her hands and knees, and pulled it out, holding it in front of her, pinched between two fingers. A piece of notebook paper, small and lined, as if from a diary. There were numbers written neatly all the way down the page. And beside each number, three letters. Initials? She stared at the numbers. Some looked like they could be phone numbers, but some were longer, too many digits. Her head felt hollow, unable to piece together what this meant. She stayed kneeling on the floor for several minutes. Perhaps it was nothing. Just some work document that had fluttered out of Ethan’s briefcase . . . in the bathroom. Before her brain understood fully what she was doing, Anne was on her stomach inching under the tub, one hand placed flat against the scar on her abdomen, the other pushing along the floor. Cold sweat ran down her face as her body protested. She took a deep breath and reached as far as she could, running her fingers along the side of the wall where the lip of the tub touched the window, feeling around for . . . what? More pages from a diary? There was nothing, just dust rubbing off onto her fingers. She started to inch her way back out from the under tub. The slit in her lower belly ached and she paused for a moment and then turned carefully onto her back. She began to shimmy out from under the tub and then had to stop again. “Ok, you’re ok,” she whispered to herself. The incision area throbbed and she waited for the burst of stars to clear from her eyes. A small black notebook, secured directly on the underside of the tub, stared down at her. It blended almost completely into the underbelly of the tub. She ran her fingers around it, feeling under the edges. She heard a small ripping sound as the notebook came away from a Velcro base. She opened to the first page. And then the second and the third. She flipped all the way through, squinting in the half-light. Every single page of the notebook was filled with nu
mbers, like the first scrap of paper. After each number were three letters. Some of the letter combinations showed up frequently. Some only once. She put her head against the cool floor, closed her eyes, and lay absolutely still. For a moment, the pain coursing through her body felt secondary. Her husband had a secret diary Velcroed to their claw-foot tub containing nonsensical codes of numbers and letters. Anne tried to open her mind, to allow for all the possibilities of what this could mean. She had underestimated her husband once. She wouldn’t do it again.
Tears pricked her eyes and trickled down the sides of her face to the floor. A few weeks ago, she was expecting a baby with the man of her dreams, living in the home they’d made together, wanting for nothing and now . . . She took a shaky breath in and found her lips starting to curve up. The smile turned into a laugh and then she was laughing hysterically on the bathroom floor, still halfway under the tub. It was absurd, unimaginable, how much had changed in the past month. She felt suspended in between two realities—on one side, her old life, polished and serene, and on the other side, a mangled fun-house mirror image. It hit Anne that she hadn’t come back to her old apartment for underwear, or her passport even. She was looking for something, she didn’t know what, but something that would fill in the gaps between the husband she knew and the man he had morphed into over the past year. What she found didn’t exactly fill in the gaps, in fact she had no idea what was in the pages of that notebook, but it reinforced what her gut had been telling her: she had never known Ethan at all. A sick feeling came over Anne as she realized she was choosing the second reality, the fun-house one; she pictured her old life oozing out of the mirror and evaporating like mist. Even if she wanted to, she couldn’t go back to something that had never existed.