Black Box

by Cassia Leo

  I wasn’t thinking. And now I need to get her out of here before those guys come back. I tuck the gun into the back of my jeans and run to her. Her face is a swollen bloody mess and they must have brutally raped her; there’s blood all over her legs and all the way up to her exposed breasts. I place my fingers on her neck to feel for a pulse and it’s there, though very faint. Scooping her up in my arms, I’m immediately struck by the metallic scent of her blood mixed with what must be the acrid tang of their sweat. I want to vomit, but I grit my teeth and carry her to the car.

  Her breath comes in soft, shallow gurgles that make me want to go back and kick the shit out of that guy even though he’s dead. How can anyone do this to another human being?

  There’s a little blackness inside all of us.

  No, I think to myself as I adjust my hold on her to stop the lolling of her head. This is not a little blackness. This is an all-engulfing black hole in the fabric of humanity.

  I consider laying her down in the backseat, but I’m afraid she’ll start choking on her blood or stop breathing and I won’t see it until it’s too late. I lay the passenger seat as far back as it will go and lay her down on her side so she’ll be facing me as I drive. Her entire backside is smeared with fresh and old blood. How long have they had her? Part of me doesn’t want to know the answer to this question, but another part of me knows it will probably make me feel even more justified in my actions tonight.

  As I drive toward Good Samaritan hospital, I’m tempted to speed through all the lights, but getting myself arrested is only going to delay her care. Eight minutes later, I’m just a few blocks away from the hospital when I realize that . . . this girl saved my life. I don’t believe in fate, but I don’t know what else could have put her there at that exact moment. The idea makes me both sick and grateful. If they’d gotten there just a few minutes later, both of us would probably be dead.

  I reach inside my coat to grab my phone and pull out a small, mint-green book instead. I tuck the book back into my pocket, then I pull out my phone and look up the number for the emergency room on my phone. Pulling up about twenty yards beyond the emergency-room entrance, I pull my hood over my head and hop out of the car. I race around the back of the car, thankful that there’s no one outside the emergency room to see me. I wrench open the passenger door and easily scoop her up. She can’t be more than fourteen or fifteen. Her skin is stretched taut over her bones and now that she’s lost so much blood, she wispy as an angel in my arms.

  That’s what she is: an angel. A broken, bloody angel. I want nothing more than to stay here with her to make sure she’s okay. To thank her . . . for existing. But I can’t.

  I enter the emergency room through the sliding doors and gently lay her down on a waiting bench near the entrance. The harsh fluorescent lights illuminate her bloody body, and that’s when I see the bunny tattoo on her chest. I make a split-second decision to lay my only copy of Black Box on the bench next to her head, then I race out the emergency-room doors to my car.

  Just hearing the words April fourteenth makes me want to vomit again. ‘Who are you?’ I scream, covering my eyes with the sheet so I can’t see his face.

  ‘I don’t want to hurt you.’ His voice is getting closer.

  ‘Stay away!’ I shriek as memories of my humiliation flash in my mind. ‘Don’t touch me!’

  ‘You don’t understand. I’m not one of them.’ His voice is soft and reassuring and it makes me sick.

  ‘Get out!’ I want to threaten to call the cops, but I can’t.

  I’m trapped in this fucking hotel room with one of the few people in this world I can say took my soul from me. My body trembles as my mind flashes to our conversation in the club; how he joked around about killing me. I wonder if he recognized me the moment I walked into that airport terminal and I just played right into his hands.

  This is not how I want to die. I want to die on my own terms. I can’t let him take that away from me. I have to do it before he does.

  I pull the sheet away from my face and I can’t stop the tears once I see the hardness in his gaze and the way his chest muscles bulge beneath his shirt. ‘Please don’t hurt me again,’ I plead, sick with myself for once again being so weak. ‘Please just let me go.’

  His jaw clenches as he stares at me. ‘You think I’d do something like that to you.’ I don’t know if he looks more angry or hurt. ‘I’m not one of those pieces of shit who did this to you. I’m the one who found you. I’m the one who took you to the hospital.’

  ‘You’re lying.’

  ‘I’m not!’ he shouts and I squeeze my eyes shut against the memory of the bottom of a sneaker coming down on my face. ‘I’m not one of them,’ he says, a bit gentler this time. ‘I swear to fucking God, I’m not one of them.’

  ‘You want me to trust you.’ I sob into the blanket. ‘I’m not falling for that.’

  ‘I can prove it. I left something with you, when I dropped you off at the hospital. A book.’

  The trembling stops completely as I think of the book I’ve been carrying with me for more than three years. There’s only one person in this entire world who knows about that book other than me and my sister Meaghan. I pull the blanket away from my face and peer under the sheet at my chest where the tiny tattoo over my heart stares back at me. Is this what gave me away?

  ‘Black Box,’ I whisper, staring at the bunny tattoo; my old Twitter profile picture.

  ‘It’s me,’ he responds, and I don’t have to look at him to hear the relief in his voice. ‘I’ve been looking for you.’

  ‘Why?’ I pull the covers below my chin so I can see his face.

  He shakes his head as tears well up in his eyes. ‘I don’t know. I guess I wanted to know that you were okay.’

  ‘Why?’

  His gaze pierces into me, as if I should know the answer to this question. And I do know.

  He moves toward the bed slowly and, when I don’t flinch, he takes a seat on the edge of the bed and buries his face in his hands. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Sorry for what?’

  ‘For not staying with you.’

  ‘You didn’t have to stay with me. I was in a fucking hospital. Trust me, I was being taken of.’

  I wipe the tears from my face as I think of the first shower I took in the hospital bathroom. There’s only so much the nurses could wipe away with a sponge bath. The dried blood came loose from every crevice of my body. No matter how hard I scrubbed, more just kept coming, from my hair, my fingernails, my mouth.

  ‘Can you please leave?’ I ask, wiping the last tears on the sheet, almost expecting to find blood smeared on the white fabric. He doesn’t look at me. He just gets up and silently heads for the bedroom door. ‘Just – just wait outside the door, please.’

  He looks over his shoulder and nods before he closes the door behind him. I throw the covers off me then scramble into the bathroom to get dressed. Then I head back to the bedroom to dig the book out of my luggage. I lift the flap of my gray messenger bag then I unzip the interior compartment. Digging my hand inside, I come up with the soft, mint-green book. As always, the bloody fingerprint stains along the top edge of the cloth cover make my stomach twist.

  I sink to the floor and clutch the book to my chest as the memory closes in on me.

  I try to open my eyes, but my left eye is covered with something and my right eye seems to be fused shut. I whimper as my eyelashes are painfully pulled apart by the frantic struggle of my fluttering eyelid.

  ‘Ow,’ I mewl desperately.

  The pain in my eyelashes is nothing compared to the pain in my mouth and my . . . The memory of the attack starts coming back to me and, through the cotton stuffed inside my cheek and bottom lip, my cries become less like weak whimpers and more like desperate moans.

  ‘Help,’ I groan thickly.

  A nurse walks in and her eyes are wide with concern. I must look like shit for someone who’s seen as much trauma as she’s seen.

  ‘Are you in pa
in, sweetie?’ she asks, checking the monitors around me, pressing buttons that mean something to her, but to me they’re just bleating reminders of my fragility; my humiliation.

  ‘Yes,’ I mutter through the cotton and the knot in my throat. ‘It hurts.’

  ‘Where does it hurt?’ Her hand clutches the side rail of my hospital bed as she peers down at me with her wide brown eyes.

  ‘Everywhere.’

  She nods her head solemnly as she repeats this in a whisper. ‘Everywhere.’

  She can’t hold back any longer. She wipes a tear from her eye as she reaches for the bag of clear fluid hanging from the IV stand. I think it’s just a cover, because the bag is almost full.

  She turns back to me and sniffs loudly. ‘I’m sorry, honey. Your parents will be here soon. Did you want some pain medicine now? It might make you too sleepy to visit with them.’

  ‘They’re not here yet?’

  The corner of her mouth screws up as she tries to hold back her tears again. ‘You didn’t come in with any identification. It took a while to find them. But they’re on their way.’

  ‘Ow . . . I need medicine, please.’ I don’t want to feel this pain. This feeling that I’ve been hollowed out with a dull knife. ‘Please.’

  She pushes some buttons on one of the machines and a soft pumping sound startles me. It reminds me of the sound of the van as it squeaked up and down beneath me. My fingers tremble as I squeeze the bed sheet in my fist. But my grip slackens quickly as the drugs kick in and soon I drift off into blissful blackness.

  When I come to again, my mom is standing next to me, her green eyes bloodshot from crying and her light-brown hair frazzled, as she was woken in the middle of the night and probably didn’t bother combing it. She reaches for my hand and I yank my hand back. This sends a sharp pain through my shoulder and I cry out.

  ‘Ow! Don’t touch me.’

  My mom reaches for a button on my bed, probably to call a nurse, as the soft sound of Meaghan’s cries come to me from somewhere near my feet. I lift my head a little, ignoring the pain in the side of my neck so I can see her. The collar of her T-shirt is pulled up over her face so that it covers her up to her eyes. She’s trying to hide her tears from me, but she can’t hide the way her shoulders jump with each sob.

  I lay my head back on the pillow and close my eyes, then I immediately open them again when I see the Red Sox cap. ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Seven a.m.’ My father’s voice comes to me, ragged and reserved, from somewhere near the door of the hospital room.

  Seven a.m. I left the party around eleven o’clock. I’m almost afraid to ask, but I have to know.

  ‘How long have I been here?’ I ask just as a different nurse enters the room.

  ‘Since two a.m.,’ she replies while reaching for something behind me to turn off the nurse call. ‘You were in surgery for an hour, then you were sedated for a while. Are you hurting?’

  ‘In surgery?’

  My mom covers her mouth as she turns around and steps out of the way for the nurse to check my IV lines. ‘Nothing too serious. The doctor will talk to you about it tomorrow after you’ve had some rest.’ The nurse leans in, pretending to adjust my pillow as she whispers, ‘I have your book if you want me to bring it to you. I figured I’d let you decide if you want to keep it or let the cops take it.’

  I almost ask her what the fuck she’s talking about, but my heart starts racing with the prospect of possibly finding some kind of clue as to who did this to me.

  ‘I want it now, please,’ I whisper as she’s pulling away.

  She nods as she turns on her heel and leaves the room. She returns a couple of hours later and insists that my family needs to leave so I can rest. Mom, Dad, and Meaghan wander off to some waiting room or restaurant where they’ll surely speculate about what happened to me; maybe even feel sorry for themselves for having to see me like this. The nurse returns a few minutes after they leave with a large plastic zipper bag containing a mint-green hardcover book. Smudges of blood are visible on the cover of the book and inside the bag. I don’t recognize it at all, until she holds it up in front of my face so I can see the cover: Black Box.

  ‘This Black Box is yours to keep, to stash your troubles away. Just lock it up and call my name, and I’ll be there always.’

  ‘This is your book, right?’ she asks. I nod slowly and she smiles. ‘I’ll keep it safe for you until you’re discharged. They took way too much from you already, sis. I won’t let them take this.’

  I wait outside the bedroom with my hands and nose pressed against the door, waiting for the slightest noise or vibration. I don’t know if I can trust her in there alone. My entire body is on alert, like I’m back in Brockton, driving along Cary Street in the car I torched later that night, praying she doesn’t stop breathing.

  ‘Are you okay?’ I shout as softly as I can through the door.

  I don’t know how to shout softly, but I don’t want to scare her again. She’s so on edge. How could she not be?

  She doesn’t respond so I wait a few seconds before I call out to her again. A moment later, the bedroom door swings open and I glimpse her back as she walks toward the bed. She drops a book – the book – onto the mattress, then she sinks down onto the floor with her back leaned against the foot of the bed.

  I move slowly toward the bed and my chest aches when I see the book. It’s stained with blood, probably from that night, and I’m almost afraid to pick it up.

  ‘I knew it wasn’t them who took me to the hospital. They would have left me for dead. I knew that the minute they stuffed me into that trunk.’ I lift the book from the mattress and ease myself down onto the floor next to her. She glances at the book before she continues. ‘There’s a sense you get around someone new and, instantly, you know if you can trust them. I knew the minute that guy called out to me on the street that I was going to regret leaving that party for the rest of whatever life I had left.’

  She draws in a deep, stuttered breath and I wish she would look at me instead of the splintered bathroom door.

  ‘My sister and I have read that book about a thousand times trying to figure out who wrote it.’ She turns to me, her face incredulous. ‘What kind of book doesn’t have any information about the author or publisher? What the hell is Black Box?’

  I open the book to the title page and trace my finger over the words Black Box. The pages were already so worn when I left the book with Mikki, but, even after all these years, I can still recognize that the pages have been turned many, many more times.

  ‘You mean to tell me you’ve read this book a thousand times and you still don’t know what it is?’ I close the book and turn it over in my hands to examine every inch of it.

  She lets out a soft huff. ‘I know what it is. I just want to know how you came upon this book. Who gave it to you? Who wrote it? Why did they write it? Because I feel like this book was written for me.’

  I smile as I remember the first time I read the last few lines of Black Box; how I felt exactly the same way. ‘That’s because it was written for you. And for me. And for my grandfather who gave it to me.’

  She finally looks up and the sheen of tears on her cheeks makes me want to kiss her skin. She’s silent for a moment before she looks away again.

  ‘You killed that guy.’ She’s not stating this as a question. There’s no confusion about this. ‘You did that . . . for me?’

  I nod, even though she’s not looking at me. ‘He was going to kill you or just leave you there to die.’

  She buries her face in her arms, which are folded on top of her knees, and she cries softly. I want to rub her back or hold her. I can’t stand to see her bear the burden of this alone. But I’m so afraid of scaring her away. I’ve looked for her everywhere. The police and the hospital wouldn’t release her information to anyone because she was a minor. I was forced to look for that tattoo. I incurred a long list of one-night stands while searching for it. I can’t scare her away now. I have so
many questions that only pile up the longer I stare at her.

  What happened to her after I left the hospital? Was she treated well? Did she have to identify the body of her attacker? How did that affect her? Would she still be this afraid if they had convicted those other bastards in the van?

  I need answers, but, most of all, I need to know that I did the right thing . . . in her eyes.

  Finally, she draws in a deep, congested breath and turns to me. ‘I’m hungry.’

  ‘How’s your head?’

  ‘No more messed up than usual.’

  I smile as I hold the book out to her. She stares at it for a moment before she takes it from me. I rise from the floor and head for the door. ‘You want to look at the room-service menu.’

  She smiles and the glint of light on her lip ring makes my guts feel all warm and gooey. ‘You pick something. I trust you.’

  *****

  Room service arrives twenty minutes later with a cart piled high with plates covered in silver domes. I pretend not to notice when Mikki suddenly needs to get something out of the bedroom when she hears the knock at the door. She comes out of the bedroom a few minutes after the waiter leaves our room, which gives me enough time to set up the plates and accouterment on the dining table.

  She eyes the half-dozen silver domes on the table warily as she approaches. It’s past eight in the evening, so I’m not surprised to see her wearing an oversized black T-shirt and pajama pants covered in images of anime characters. But I am surprised by how much it turns me on.

  I turn my attention back to the food and begin removing the lids from the plates. ‘I didn’t know what you wanted, so I thought we’d try a few different things.’ The first lid I remove reveals a plate of plain spaghetti with marinara sauce. ‘I’m not sure if you’re a vegetarian, so I told them to hold the meat.’

  She shakes her head as she takes a seat at the table. ‘I’m not a vegetarian, but I don’t eat meat in restaurants. I don’t trust it.’

  ‘Well, then you should be happy with the other items I ordered for you.’

  I lift the next lid and she laughs when she sees a pile of blueberry muffins with the tops cut off. The woman who took my room-service order must have thought I was crazy when I asked for these, but it was totally worth it to see Mikki’s reaction.

  ‘That’s a lot of muffin stumps. I can’t eat all of those.’ She grabs one off the top of the pile and shakes her head as she peels away the crinkled paper.

  ‘You don’t have to eat them all right now. We’ve got at least a few more minutes before the advocates for fair treatment of muffin tops bust down our door.’

  Her eyes widen. ‘What are you going to do about the bathroom door?’

  ‘It’s just a little damage. I’ll pay for it when we leave.’

  ‘Just like that, huh?’ And she shakes her head. ‘I can’t believe I was saved by a rich boy.’

  ‘Twice. And why does that surprise you?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She shrugs as she takes her first bite of blueberry muffin. ‘I guess I just expected it to be some punk kid who spent way too much time on Twitter while hanging out in dark, deserted parking lots.’ She takes a swig of the iced water in front of her then looks me in the eyes. ‘Why were you there in that parking lot?’

  The confident smile Crush was wearing when he unveiled the muffins is gone. A chill lifts the hairs on my arms as I think of the very far-fetched possibility that I’ve considered for the past three years: that the guy who saved me also raped me, but he had a change of heart when he realized I was about to be murdered. The only thing that stopped me from allowing myself to give in to this theory is that there were two sets of fresh tire skid marks in the parking lot and the trail of my blood led toward a set of tire marks that did not match a mini-van. But that hasn’t stopped me from wondering if maybe he used another car to take me to the hospital. And Crush’s silence following this question is troubling.

  Finally, he looks me in the eyes. ‘I’ll be honest with you. I’ve spent the last three and a half years trying to find you while also trying to forget what happened that night. I was in a very dark place.’

  ‘Oh, fuck,’ I whisper involuntarily as I begin to feel woozy. ‘I need a cigarette.’

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  I shake my head as I set down the muffin in my hands. ‘Were you . . . were you with them?’

  ‘What? Fuck, no! I was parked there alone when the van pulled up.’ I let out a loud sigh of relief and he continues. ‘I was . . . I was thinking about my cousin. Jordan died a year before that. I was with him when it happened.’

  I have a strong feeling he’s holding something back, but he’s been so patient with me today that I think it’s time for me to return the favor. ‘Hey, look at that. You ordered booze.’

  I grab a bottle of beer out of the bucket of ice in the center of the dining table and he quickly reaches for it to take it away. His fingers graze mine and I drop the beer onto the table. Luckily, it doesn’t break and he swiftly saves it from rolling off and onto the floor.

  ‘You need a bottle opener for these,’ he says, his eyebrows knitted with worry. ‘How about I crack these open and we can go out on the terrace for a smoke?’