Then I heard your car.
I started running back toward the Separates. But you came around the corner before I’d reached their shelter. I went back to the edge of the rocks anyway, and waited.
You stopped the car and turned off the engine. You got out and leaned against the hood. You peered at the boulders, looking for me. You’d seen me running; I was sure of that. You could probably see me there, too, shivering against the rocks, trying desperately to soak in some of their heat.
“Gem?” you called.
After a moment, you went around to the passenger door and opened it. You took out a sweater, came back, and held it out.
“Come back to me.”
I stayed quiet. I didn’t want to go back to you. I didn’t know what you would do. I pressed my arms into the rock and willed myself to stop shaking. The tips of my fingers were turning blue.
“There’s no way out,” you called. “I’ll wait here all night if I have to, all week. You can’t escape me.”
You felt your pockets, took out a ready-made cigarette and started to smoke. The smell of burning leaves wafted toward me, hanging in that cold night air. I pushed myself against the rock, tilting my head away from the scent. I tried to curl my fingers into a fist, but they were so stiff with cold that it hurt.
Once again, I’d been trapped by you; it was only going to be a matter of time before you flushed me out. I slid down the rocks and sat on the sand, digging my hands into its still-warm particles, desperately trying to soak up heat.
You saw me move. You came right up to the fence, leaning your palms against it, and peered at me. Then you went to the car and came back with wire cutters. Moonlight fell on your skin as you worked, glowing on half of your face. You cut a small slit in the fence. Then you pulled the wire back until you’d made a hole large enough to step through, curling it like a wave.
I didn’t struggle. I didn’t do anything. My body went limp. In the house you wrapped me in blankets. You put something hot in my hands, which you made me drink. But my body and my brain and my insides had frozen solid and nothing would thaw them. I had slipped down, down into a dark, dark, empty place. You were saying something to me, your voice muted. I didn’t want to surface. The truth was too hard to hear.
There was nothing on the other side of those boulders, only more of the same.
Wherever I went, you’d only catch me.
I couldn’t get away.
I closed my eyes. Behind my lids it was dark and calmer and I sunk into it. I didn’t move or make a sound. I retreated, stepping back through my mind, through the couch and floorboards, until I reached that dark, cool place underneath the house where I curled up in the dirt. There, I waited for the snake to find me.
There was nothing else I could do
…. only wait for the dreams.
I slept.
Mum was nearby, stroking my forehead and shushing me. She spoke quietly, her words a lullaby. She put something around my shoulders and wrapped me into her. I felt her arms surrounding me, her breath sweet like sugared tea.
The next time, I was older. I was home sick from school. Mum had her laptop set up on the kitchen table, her phone by her elbow. I was on the couch, wrapped up and warm. I didn’t want to watch the Teletubbies and Mum wouldn’t let me watch the talk shows.
“Can we play a game?” I asked her.
She didn’t answer.
“Hide-and-Seek?”
After a while I got up off the couch and tiptoed to the utility closet. I scraped the heavy door across the carpet and stepped into the darkness. The air was warm and moist, and smelled like my school blazer when it got wet. I found a place in the corner and waited, imagining I was at the bottom of the sea…. I was in the belly of a ginormous creature.
I could hear the tap of Mum’s keyboard through a hole in the wall. But at any moment she would stop typing and come find me. I knew she would. Sometime soon she would wonder where I was.
I sank farther down into the darkness of the utility closet … waiting….
Then I was in a hospital. There were machines plugged into me, beeping quietly. I couldn’t open my eyes, but I was awake. People visited: Anna and Ben, people from school. Dad sat beside me and brushed the back of my hand. He smelled like smoke, just like he used to smell when I was little. There was a nurse nearby, saying it was important to keep talking to me. Another nurse dabbed my forehead.
I reached out at Anna, clawing at the air near her face. But she didn’t see me. I tried to scream, tried begging them to stay, all of them. But my mouth wouldn’t open, and the noise remained in my throat.
When I opened my eyes, they vanished. The only person left was you.
I didn’t talk to you. I just lay on that bed in the plain wooden room and looked at the walls. My voice had shriveled up and disappeared and I didn’t know how to find it again. I forgot about the notches on the bed. I tried to forget about everything.
Sometimes you sat beside me. Sometimes you tried to talk, but I didn’t look at you. I tucked my knees into my chest and clasped my hands around them.
Then I’d remember.
I’d start with waking up, with the feel of my thick down duvet around my shoulders and the softness of flannel pajamas on my skin. If I concentrated, I could almost hear the whir and the grind of Mum making her morning coffee. I smelled the bitter richness of the grains boiling on the stove, the way the aroma used to waft under the crack in the door and into my bedroom. The clunk of the central heating kicking into gear.
Then Dad was up and banging on my door. He always lectured me over breakfast, about getting good grades and about which universities I should start looking at in the summer. I shut my eyes and tried to see his face. I gasped a little when I couldn’t. What shape were his glasses exactly? What was the color of his favorite tie?
I tried for Mum next but even she was hard to see. I could remember her red dress, which she liked wearing to gallery openings, but I couldn’t remember her face. I knew her eyes were green, like mine, and her features delicate … but somehow I couldn’t put the pieces back together.
It frightened me, this amnesia, and I hated myself for it. I felt like I wasn’t worthy of being anyone’s daughter.
But I could remember Anna. And I could remember Ben. I spent hours thinking about him, imagining he was there with me, my fingers in his floppy, sun-bleached hair. When I shut my eyes, he was in the bed beside me, keeping watch.
He was spending the summer surfing, in Cornwall. Anna had gone with him. That summer was the first one Anna and I had spent apart, ever. I wondered what they were doing in their beach hostel, sitting on the sand every day … such different sand from mine, so much softer. I wondered if they even knew I was gone.
When I opened my eyes again, you were next to me, biting the skin at the side of your fingernails. After a moment, you saw me watching.
“How are you feeling?”
I couldn’t answer. It felt like my body had turned to stone. If I even moved my lips, I would crack.
“I can make you food,” you tried. “A drink?”
I didn’t blink. I thought that if I stayed still long enough, you were bound to leave.
“Maybe … maybe we should change the sheets?”
You angled yourself a little toward me. You reached across and pressed the backs of your fingers against my forehead but I hardly felt them. Right then, you were a million miles away, existing in a parallel universe, some sort of dream. I was back home, in my bed … any moment I would wake up and get ready for school. It was Ben sitting beside me, not you. It couldn’t be you. You sat back on the chair, watching me.
“I miss those words of yours,” you said.
I swallowed; it hurt my dry throat. You looked at me, your eyes resting on my lips.
“I know how this works,” you said. “I went silent once, too.” You found some rough skin on the corner of your finger and moved it back and forth with your thumb. “People thought I’d never spoken, like I w
as … what do you call it? Mute. Some of them thought I was deaf, too.” You chewed the bit of skin free. “That was right back after I found this place.”
My eyebrow twitched then, and you saw.
“Got you interested now?” You rested your head back against the wall. There was a drop of sweat traveling down your cheek, running over your faint scar. “Yeah, that’s right,” you said, nodding, seeing where I was looking. “I got that when I was silent, too.” Quickly you wiped the sweat away, your hand lingering on the puckered skin. Then your finger and thumb moved together and you flicked at your cheek. I jumped at the sound. “A net can hit skin so quickly,” you said, “so easy to make a mark.”
You stood up and went to the window. I shifted, turning my head a little so I could see you. You noticed.
“Not so dead, then,” you murmured. “Not so gone.”
Sometime later you put a thin, faded notebook on the bedside table. After you’d left the room, I picked it up and flicked through it. The pages were blank. There was a pencil on the table, too, its lead sharp. I jabbed it hard into the soft skin between my forefinger and thumb. It hurt. I jabbed again.
I tried to draw them, all of them … Mum, Dad, Anna, and Ben. I wanted to remember. But I’ve never been very good at art. The faces I drew were shapeless strangers, a mess of lines and shades. I scribbled jagged black lines over them all.
So I tried words. They were always more my thing anyway. Mum and Dad could never understand it, how I was so good at English and never very good at math or art like them. But even words didn’t flow too well, not then. They certainly didn’t make much sense. Anyone reading them now would think I was on drugs or something, the way those words jumped about.
I tried a letter, but I couldn’t get past “Dear Mum and Dad.” There was too much to say. And anyway, I didn’t know whether you would read it.
So I wrote the only words I could think of: imprisoned, confined, detained, constrained, incarcerated, locked up, interned, sent down, abducted, kidnapped, taken, forced, shoved, hurt, stolen …
I scribbled lines over that piece of paper, too.
I couldn’t sleep any more. There was a pain in my bladder, and everything was stiff. I wanted to move. Cautiously, I tried bending my knees. I scrunched my toes tight and ran my tongue over my dry lips. My arms felt weak as I pushed myself away from the mattress, my legs shaking as I tried to stand.
I put on new clothes from the drawer. The shorts were loose on my hips, my stomach thin. I went into the bathroom and peed into the long drop. Then I turned the tap on. It chugged into life, spurting out hot, brown-speckled water. I washed my face, then stuck my head under the tap and gulped. In that tiny cracked mirror, I watched the water drip off me. My eyes were slightly swollen, my nose peeling from the little sun I’d seen. I looked older somehow.
You were in the kitchen. Your head was low to the table, looking at handwritten words on sheets of loose paper. You glanced up at me, then went back to what you were doing. Small glass vials were spread out around you; some of them with liquid inside, some empty. You picked up one with a yellow lid and squinted to read the label. You held the container to the light from the window, then wrote something down. The previously locked drawer was hanging open, but I couldn’t see what was inside. There was something that looked like a needle on the bench nearby.
My stomach kind of flipped. Everything around you pointed to one thing: drugs. Perhaps drugs you’d used on me, perhaps ones you were yet to use. I stepped back from the kitchen. You didn’t look up. For once you were more engrossed in something else.
I walked through the small porch area, past the batteries and boards lined up against the wall, and stepped onto the veranda. I looked at the floor while my eyes got accustomed to the brightness. When I could look out without squinting too much, I took a few steps and leaned against the rail. I stared across the sand to the Separates. The fence you’d made was still up, the boulders as still as ever within it. From where I stood, no one would guess at the greenness and life that those rocks contained; no one would believe the birdsong. Those rocks were secretive and strange. Like you.
I glanced at the cloudless blue sky. There were no planes up there, no helicopters. No rescue missions. Lying in bed, I’d had the idea of writing “help” in the sand, but I realized then, it was a pretty stupid idea if no one ever flew over anyway. I turned to see the rest of the view: horizon, horizon, Separates, horizon, horizon, horizon … nowhere to run.
I heard your steps on the wood and the snap of the door before I saw you on the veranda.
“You got up,” you said. “I’m glad.”
I stepped back.
“Why today?” You looked genuinely curious.
But I was full up with sadness. I knew that if I opened my mouth, it would all come spewing out. And I didn’t want you to have anything from me, not even that. You kept trying, though.
“Nice day,” you said, “hot and still.”
I backed up into the couch. I grabbed its arm, making the wicker strands crunch.
“Do you want food?”
I stared straight ahead, looking at the craters in the rocks.
“Sit down.”
I did; don’t know why. You had that tone in your voice, I guess, that tone that would be stupid to argue with, the tone that made my legs weak with fear.
“Why don’t we talk?”
I drew my feet up. A tiny breeze had started blowing the grains around. I looked at the sand that was starting to swirl in front of us, a few feet ahead.
“Tell me about something, anything—your life in London, your friends, even your parents!”
I flinched at the sudden loudness of your words. I didn’t want to tell you anything, let alone about them. I clasped my arms around my knees. What would Mum be doing right now? How upset were they that I had disappeared? What had they done to get me back? I gripped my legs a little tighter, trying to force their faces from my mind.
You didn’t say anything for a while, just stared out at the land. I watched you from the side of my eye as you pulled at your eyebrow with your forefinger and thumb. You weren’t comfortable, hovering on the edge of the veranda. I knew what you were thinking, though; you were trying to come up with something new to talk about, something interesting to entice me out of my hole. Your brain was sweating with the effort. Eventually you leaned your elbows on the railing and let out a low sigh. You talked with a voice so quiet.
“Is it really that bad?” you asked. “Living with me?”
I opened my lips and breathed out. I waited at least a minute. “Of course,” I whispered.
Perhaps there was something more to those two words … some sort of a need to connect, wanting to use my voice rather than risk losing it. Because that’s what it felt like then, when that wind was up and blowing the sand around; it felt like it could blow my voice completely away from me, too. I was disappearing with those grains, scattering with the wind.
You heard my words, though. You nearly stumbled off the veranda with shock. You frowned as you composed yourself and thought about my response.
“It could be worse,” you said.
You left your sentence hanging. What could be worse? Dying? It couldn’t be much worse than being in the middle of nowhere, looking out at nothing … never able to get away from it. And, for all I knew, I was waiting to be killed anyway. I shut my eyes against it all and tried remembering life back home. I was getting better at that. If I took my time, I could easily spend a few hours imagining every tiny thing I used to do in a day. But you weren’t letting me dream, not then. Soon I heard you kicking the tips of your boots into the railings. You started banging out a rhythm. I opened my eyes. This wasn’t like you. Normally you moved like a cat.
“At least there are no cities,” you said finally. “Out here … no concrete.”
“I like cities.”
Your fingers tightened around the railings. “No one’s real in a city,” you snapped. “Nothing’s real.”
I shifted in my seat, surprised at your sudden anger. “I miss it,” I whispered. I buried my head into my knees as the reality of how much I really did miss everything set in.
You took a step toward me. “I’m sorry about your parents,” you said.
“Sorry about what?”
You blinked. “Leaving them behind, of course.” You perched on the other end of the couch, your eyes piercing into mine. “I would have liked to have brought them … if I’d thought it would make you happier, that is.”
I moved away, as far into the other end of the couch as I could.
You scratched at the wicker strands. “It’s better like this, just you and me. It’s the only way it could work.”
I scanned the sky again, trying to work out my thoughts. I swallowed my fear.
“How long had you been planning it?”
You shrugged. “Awhile, two or three years. But I’d been watching you for longer than that.”
“How long?”
“About six years.”
“Since I was ten? You’ve been watching me since then?”
You nodded. “On and off.”
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