Little Comfort

by Edwin Hill

  Waffles woofed again.

  There was someone in the house.

  Hester jumped lightly from the bed and lifted the dog after her. She knew she was in danger, and yet she felt nothing but calm. She needed to get to her phone, call for help, and get Kate to safety. Everything she’d said, everything she’d done, all the anger and resentment, all the complaining, meant nothing. She lifted out of herself, retreating to simple, primal words like run, protect, hide. She flipped off the bedroom light, took the dog by the collar, and padded into Morgan’s closet. She forced the dog through the dog door to the apartment on the other side. She tried to follow, but even she wasn’t small enough to fit. “Kate,” she whispered as loudly as she dared. “Wake up!”

  When Kate didn’t come, Hester slid a box in front of the dog door to keep Waffles on the other side. She edged to the top of the staircase. Someone had turned on the lights in the living room. She heard the refrigerator open and the lid to a beer pop off, and she nearly convinced herself it was Morgan, but not enough time had passed for him to make it home from the bar. She receded into Kate’s bedroom and huddled behind the door till she heard footsteps on the stairs. Whoever was in the house continued into Morgan’s room, where, after a minute, metal hangers in the walk-in closet clanked together.

  Hester edged around the door and clung to the railing. Down the stairs. Across the living room. Open the latch. Turn the knob. She heard footsteps again, and this time they were pounding, and she could feel something powerful and unknown closing in on her. She fled across the landing and into her apartment, where she slammed the door shut and drew the deadbolt.

  Upstairs, Kate rubbed her eyes, Monkey clutched in one hand. Hester picked up the girl and stumbled to the bedroom. She heard another deadbolt turn. She threw open a window to a blast of frigid air and snow. They were three stories up. Too far to jump. She shrieked for help, but no one was on the street. “We’re all right,” she said to Kate.

  She heaved her shoulder into a dresser and toppled it in front of the bedroom door.

  “Who that?” Kate asked.

  Waffles howled.

  “Inside voice,” Hester said. “We’re playing a game. You have to be very quiet.”

  Hester grabbed her phone from where it lay on the bed. She punched in Morgan’s number. Kate would listen to him. While it rang, she dragged Waffles and Kate into the closet and closed them in. Kate slid easily through the dog door. Hester forced Waffles to follow, and then tried again to contort her way through, squeezing her shoulders together, wriggling, pawing at the floor.

  “Be home soon,” Morgan said when he finally answered. She could hear the crowded bar behind him.

  “There’s someone in the house,” Hester said, and when Morgan tried to break in she cut him off. “Don’t say anything. Listen and do what I tell you. I’m trapped. Kate’s in your closet. I’m giving her the phone. You keep talking to her till you get her out of the house. Understand? And I’m sorry about tonight. I love you.”

  “I love you too,” Morgan said.

  “Get the police here.”

  Hester handed the phone to Kate and smiled. “Remember,” she said in her gentlest voice, “we’re playing a game. Do what your uncle Morgan says. Okay? Now run.”

  Kate smiled and nodded. She put the phone to her ear. “Hello, Uncle Morgan,” she said, and then paused. “Okay,” she added.

  She waved to Hester, ran out of the closet, and down the stairs. Hester heard the back door slam open as Kate, in her pink pajamas and bunny slippers, ran into the storm. Waffles whined as if beckoning Hester to follow, and for the first time in Hester’s life she wished she was the tiniest bit smaller.

  “Quiet,” she said to the dog, and then jammed the box in front of the opening again.

  She heard a knock at the bedroom door. It banged against the dresser.

  She turned to face the slats. She lay on her hip, with memories of that self-defense course taken long ago during Safety Week, a course that made her imagine being brave. Use your elbows, knees, and fingers, Daphne had said. Aim for the eyes, the throat, the groin. Pivot, kick. Pivot, kick. Stay balanced. Gouge. Don’t give up.

  Breathe.

  Women unite! Take back the night!

  The door slammed into the dresser again.

  Fight! And Daphne’s knee was suddenly digging into Hester’s back again. Survive! Use your strengths. Be smart. The only thing you think about is how to stay alive.

  Hester kicked open the closet door.

  CHAPTER 24

  It had been easy enough for Gabe to let himself into the house using the key hidden in that plastic rock. Once he’d stepped into the dark second-floor apartment and saw the toys and sorted through the mail and batted away a few kittens, he knew that she’d told him the truth, she did have a husband, and it made him feel empty and angry and betrayed, as though he’d lost something he’d never really had.

  Yet he still opened the fridge and popped the lid off a beer. He drank down half of it in a single swig and then left the bottle on the counter for the police to find. He listened and thought that maybe he heard someone upstairs, and then he found himself in their bedroom, his hands on the mattress, sorting through the piles of Sam’s postcards that he found lying there. The sheets on the bed were pristine white. He lay down and ran his hand over a pillow, where he found a long, black hair that he wound around his finger. There was a photo of the two of them sitting on the bedside table, and Morgan, Gabe had to admit, was handsome. Not handsome the way Sam was. But better, with red hair and a kind face. Morgan had an arm around Hester, and she leaned into him in a way that said don’t ever let go.

  Gabe heard the dog whine. He gathered up the postcards and the rest of the file to take with him—it wouldn’t do for the police to find those—and went into the walk-in closet that was lined with clothes, more shirts than even Sam owned. Gabe couldn’t help but take one from its hanger and feel the soft gray cloth against his face and slide it over his own shirt and imagine what it might feel like to come down those stairs in the morning wearing this shirt. The dog whined again, and when Gabe moved a box aside, she stuck her snout through a hole in the wall and licked his hand. He looked through the hole to the back of another darkened closet, this one small and narrow and littered with shoes.

  Then he heard the patter of feet behind him.

  He moved the box in front of the dog door and followed. He ran, actually. Down the stairs and across the living room and he caught a glimpse of her face, ashen with fear.

  Unfortunately, Sam was right. He couldn’t let her go.

  He heard her slam the door to the attic apartment and slide the bolt in place, but he ran his hand over the doorway till he found the spare key. Inside, he climbed the carpeted stairs. The apartment was as messy and tiny as he remembered it being. An aerie high over Somerville filled with newspapers and videotapes and secondhand furniture. On a threadbare love seat, a nest of blankets lay abandoned and still warm. A bottle of scotch had tipped over and soaked into the matted beige carpet. Gabe used a wad of paper towels to soak up the scotch, and then drank what remained straight from the bottle.

  He crossed to the bedroom door. It opened an inch before slamming into something on the other side. He said her name. He pushed harder, shoving his broad shoulder into the flimsy wood till whatever blocked the door toppled over. He squeezed into the room and could see his breath as snow filtered through an open window. He could understand her panic, even when the closet door burst open and she lay balanced on her hip in a pile of shoes with one of those tiny legs jabbing toward him with a slippered foot. Her hair had begun to fall out of its ponytail. She pushed those glasses up her nose with a fist. He told her not to be afraid, which, justifiably, she seemed not to believe. The dog let out a deep, mournful howl from the other side of the wall. He tried not to laugh, and then he did. “We need to go,” he said. “Before the snow. Before it’s too hard to drive.”

  He stepped toward her.

 
“No!”

  Jesus, that hurt. He fell backward, and she scrambled around him, still balancing on that hip, still jabbing at him with those slippers. He wanted to tell her that he would never hurt her, not for a million dollars, and not in a billion years, but he wondered if that was even true. He needed her to stop moving. He grabbed at her legs, and she kicked again, and he pinned her to the ground, but she yanked a clump of hair from his head and smashed her knee into his chin.

  “Get the fuck out of my house,” she yelled.

  God, he loved that voice and that she dared to face him down. He would miss wishing this could be his. But outside, a police siren wailed closer. So when she grabbed a lamp, he knocked it out of her hand and jammed his knee into her back and twisted her arms behind her and wrapped her in a blanket, lugging her in a shrieking, struggling bundle down three flights of stairs, where he stuffed her into his trunk.

  *

  Now he steered the car toward Route 93 and headed north. Soon, he passed Route 128 and 495 and crossed the state line into New Hampshire. Surely crossing state lines made everything worse, though it hardly seemed fair in these tiny New England states. But then kidnapping was pretty bad no matter how you did it. His stomach growled, and he realized that he’d gone the whole day without eating. She hadn’t stopped banging on the trunk yet, so McDonald’s was out of the question. Even the drive-through. He hoped he had enough gas to get where they were going. He hoped she’d understand in the end.

  Right before the first toll in New Hampshire, he pulled off the highway and down a dark, narrow road. He cut the engine and sat still for a moment, the only sound being that endless thumping. He couldn’t leave her in the trunk all night. She must be cold, and he imagined holding her close till the shivering stopped. He imagined holding her longer than that. He swung the door open to the storm and popped the trunk with his key remote, and it clicked and then slammed open as she sat up. “You fucking, fucking fuck face,” she said.

  He stepped toward her. She smashed a tire iron into the side of his head. He fell backward and felt blood oozing down his face and dotting the snow, and she was on the ground where she hit him again and then she was running through the drifts, toward the trees, into the dark, those Lion King slippers popping from the snow like rabbits.

  Gabe tried to sit up. He thought about going after her. But he lay in the snow instead. It was twenty degrees out and two a.m. and not another soul lived within a mile of where they were. She’d figure out that there was no place to go soon enough.

  *

  It was cold. Colder than Hester had ever imagined it could be. She huddled behind a line of trees as the snow built up around her and the headlights from Gabe’s car cut through the night. She had no idea how long she’d been out here, though it seemed like hours. Her toes had gone numb in her snow-filled slippers, and the thin fabric of her pajamas provided almost no protection from the elements. She clutched the tire iron and imagined Kate out in the storm too, wandering the streets. She imagined the phone dying or dropping into a drain or simply losing its connection. Surely one of the neighbors had opened the door to Kate’s pounding, but what if they hadn’t?

  She peered around a tree trunk. Gabe still lay where he’d fallen on the snow, and she wondered if he was dead, whether she could creep from her hiding spot and pry the keys from his hand. But Gabe sat up as she found her courage. He rubbed his head and moved to the front of the car. Hester held her hands between her thighs and tried to ward off the shivering that had begun in her shoulders, and then spread to her chest, her legs, her very core. She imagined a steaming radiator, a mug of tea, the sun. Lying on a beach, warm sand beneath her blanket, water lapping at the shore, a dog-eared book waiting to be read. The smells of salt and sand and fried clams and charcoal and lighter fluid and behind her, the docks and a restaurant.

  *

  A breeze blows through Daphne’s hair. It’s shockingly red, like when they were in college, when Daphne snuck into Hester’s room late at night and took her away, when they’d run onto the green and around the pond and their legs moved without effort and they flew through the night into a world of their very own, and Hester, who’d never been wanted, who’d never been asked, pinched herself because she couldn’t believe any of this could be real.

  A wave crashes. Water spills around them. Sand melts way like caramel.

  “If I swam beyond the horizon,” Daphne asks, “would you let me go?”

  “If that’s what you want,” Hester says.

  “What if I don’t?”

  “Then stay. We’ll get clams. They’re whole bellies.”

  “I’ve never liked clams.”

  “We’ll find you something else. We’ll keep looking.”

  And now Hester is back in the trunk, and she’s banging at the door and shouting and warding off claustrophobia and cold and fear, and the car bumps over a pothole and the spare tire jumps beneath her and the tire iron hits her in the head and she has it in her fists when the car stops. This time when the trunk pops open, it isn’t Gabe. It’s Sam. And Cheryl Jenkins. And Bobby Englewood. And they’re all laughing. Hester swings the iron. Sam steps out of the way and the trunk slams shut again and Hester can’t breathe. There’s water all around her. It’s cold. She gasps and she’s clawing forward, through the dark, and there may be a light and there may not be, but she had no idea which way is up. Her lungs are about to burst. She knows that all she has to do is open her mouth and let the cold flow in. But then she feels the fingertips. She feels the hand, and she thinks it might be Daphne’s, and even in the dark she knows enough to hold on and not let go. But when she opens her eyes she sees that it’s her own hand, and that she only had herself to rely on.

  *

  Hester looked out to where Gabe sat on the car’s hood, and then she stepped out of the trees toward the headlights. She let the tire iron fall into the snow and lifted her hands in surrender. Gabe opened the passenger-side door for her.

  “No trunk?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “Sorry,” he said. “Can I do anything for you?”

  “Seriously? How about this? Take me home and then shoot yourself in the fucking head.”

  “I can’t do that,” he said.

  She got into the car, if only to escape the cold. When he slid into the driver’s side and turned the key, heat poured from the vents. The warmth enveloped Hester, and yet she still shivered. She took her feet from the sodden slippers and tried to rub feeling into her toes. She put her face right up to the vent and cranked the seat warmer as high as it would go.

  “I could use some tea,” she said.

  Gabe pulled onto the road and drove carefully through the drifts. “We can’t really stop,” he said.

  “I’ll keep my mouth shut,” she said, and he turned on the radio as if to tell her neither of them believed her. “They’ll be looking for me,” she added, but she also knew that the world was big with plenty of places to hide. Now that she was out of the trunk, she paid attention to highway signs. They’d headed north and had already crossed the state line into New Hampshire. She fought panic. Her toes tingled to life. They burned from the heat.

  The news cut into the radio broadcast, and the top story was about Jamie Williams. He was in the hospital in critical condition. “In other news,” the announcer said, “a home invasion in Somerville has resulted in a missing persons’ case. The local woman is described as white, thirty-six years old, with black hair and glasses. She was wearing pajamas and is four foot nine.”

  “Nine and three quarters,” Hester whispered.

  “An Amber Alert has been issued for the woman’s three-year-old niece, who is also missing.”

  Hester forgot about the trunk and the cold. She forgot to be frightened. She forgot that somehow, no matter what it took, that she’d survive this. The announcer’s words flowed through her. They grabbed at her heart and twisted it. And she was on top of Gabe, pounding her fists into his chest. The car swerved. He managed to pull it to the s
ide of the road and stop.

  “What did you do?” she screamed. “What the fuck did you do with her?”

  Gabe twisted her arms behind her back and pinned her to the passenger’s seat so that the fabric ground into her cheek. “Sit still and be quiet,” he said into her ear. “Or I’ll put you in the trunk. Understand?”

  His glove covered Hester’s mouth, and nearly sealed off her nose. She could barely get any oxygen. Gabe let up a bit and then stared out the window.

  “Where is she?” Hester asked.

  “I don’t know,” Gabe said.

  And in that moment of fear, of panic, of rage, Hester knew he was telling the truth.

  CHAPTER 25

  “Do you remember anything else?” Angela White asked Wendy Richards. “Did he say anything or do anything that might tell you where he went?”

  Wendy had changed into a t-shirt and yoga pants. She sat at the foot of her bed with her head resting in her hands. Felicia nestled in beside her, a protective arm draped around her shoulders.

  “He changed,” Wendy said. “He morphed into a different person right in front of my eyes. How could I have been such an idiot?”

  “You didn’t do anything,” Felicia said.

  “She’s right,” Angela said. “You can’t blame yourself for this. And you were lucky Felicia was in her office when I called. We might not have gotten here on time.”

  Wendy sat up and rubbed her temples. Her hair spilled over her shoulders. “All I knew was that he went to Columbia and rowed crew.”

  “Anything else? Did he have a job? Any friends?”

  Wendy shook her head. “It was like he was a blank space that I could fill with whatever I wanted him to be.”

  “Do you have any idea where he might have gone?”

  “He lived in Somerville,” Wendy said. “That’s about all I know.”