Take Me With You

by Nina G. Jones

  I gulp. “Okay,” I whisper. His hands travel down from my cheeks, to my shoulders, and then my hands. In an uncommon gesture of affection, he squeezes my palms. For a second I swear a see a glimpse of regret in his usually unwavering gaze.

  He grabs his pad and writes something. His expression goes solemn as he shows it to me.

  You need to understand. If we are discovered, I'm not going to prison.

  “What do you mean?” I ask, the calm he coaxed washed away with the white waters of fear.

  He grabs his pen, but then stops and looks me in the eyes again. He puts his fingers to his temple in the shape of a gun and pulls the trigger.

  “No,” I shake my head sternly. “I won't let you do that.”

  It would be better for both of us that way.

  “They won't okay? We are gonna get out of here,” I vow.

  He nods solemnly and I crawl to the floor of the truck, where he's placed some blankets and a pillow for my comfort.

  We drive around for a while, my view from the floor rarely changing. Sometimes I see nothing but the passing tree or a tall sign. Other times, nothing but sky and clouds. I figure I see the least when we are on the freeway. Sam keeps the radio on the stations he knows I'll like, and occasionally, he'll peek back to check on me and I give him a thumbs up. After a while, the anxiety subsides, and the steady rhythm of the car lulls me into a nap.

  It's only when that steady drone is broken up by intermittent bumps and jolts am I stirred.

  “How long have a I been asleep?” I ask, hoping to trick Sam into speech.

  He doesn't answer.

  “Can I sit up now?” I ask.

  No answer.

  I study the window, unable to see much from my angle except that we are surrounded by trees so tall I can't even see where they end. Their trunks are wide and a rusty brown. Sequoias. Though they nearly block the sky from view, I can see from the hazy rays of sienna peering through the trees, that the sun is setting.

  The truck stops abruptly.

  “Sam?” I ask, sitting up instinctively. He ignores me, slamming the door behind him as he steps out, and rummages through the back of the truck. That's when I get a better look around. We seem to be on a dirt road somewhere in the middle of a desolate forest.

  “What's going on?” I ask, an unsettling feeling balling the pit of my stomach.

  He walks over to the car and opens the door behind me. A pillowcase drapes over my head before I even have a chance to face him.

  “What are you doing?” I ask as I attempt to squirm away from him.

  He drags me out of the car onto the mud, throwing me on my stomach. He sits on top of me, pinning me down as I struggle underneath him. But I can't stop him from tying my hands behind me. He is a monster. This I always knew. But he wouldn't stoop so low. He wouldn't lie to me, make me think we could finally be free and then take it all away like this.

  “Please, Sam…” I beg, the caustic tears of betrayal burning my cheeks.

  I was so sure Sam wouldn't kill me. He needs me. I am the only person who knows him. I am his humanity.

  But all I can see is black, and I wonder if I am already dead.

  Once I have Vesper bound, I use my hunting knife to slice through her dress. A twinge of sentimentality flashes as I recall the way I ripped her nightgown the night I took her. But it's different now. My gut twists and turns in agony. I'm sick with regret as I strip her naked.

  I gave her so much of the truth. I figured I owed her that much. She wanted my story for so long, and I could finally let her have it. I knew she wouldn't tell, because she wouldn't be alive for much longer. But in the tapestry of all that truth, I weaved little lies. Lies that tasted bitter against my tongue.

  That my brother said we could both leave.

  That the only reason I needed her to lie down in the truck was that I didn't want her to be seen, and not that I also didn't want her to see where we were headed.

  That I told her I would kill myself so that she wouldn't be tempted to make a last minute run for it.

  Finally, that I told her, not with words, but with my eyes, that she would be fine. That I would take care of her.

  I tell lies all the time. I am a fucking lie. But she told me she had been thinking about running away with me. That she chose me. And I had to tell her that I could make that happen. That I could find her a new freedom, knowing the only freedom she would know is death at my hands—it's never pained me so much to deceive.

  I am no different from my mother, promising to take Vesp away from the danger, when I am the danger.

  “Sam, I thought you cared. I thought you wanted me. I thought we were going to be together,” she sobs. For once, I'm glad I can't speak to her. I slice into a trash bag and slide it over her head. I don't want anyone to find her naked, but I don't want her wearing the clothes I made. Maybe they could find a way to trace them back to me, even if my brother tries to divert the task force.

  She tries to run, but loses her balance and falls onto her face. It makes me sick to see the pathetic state she's in. To have fooled her so viciously. The one person who made me feel a little less like a monster.

  I walk towards her calmly as she kicks her legs against the ground, desperately trying to slither sway from me, blinded and bound.

  I pull her up to her knees, but she's limp, holding the posture of someone who has surrendered. Who has fought and fought and doesn't have another battle left in her.

  She whimpers, but it's more like a hum under the mask—quiet, melodic.

  I pull the gun out of my waistband and I press it to the back of her head.

  “Please,” she wails.

  My finger massages the trigger, but my hand trembles ferociously. I grimace and take a deep breath, trying to focus my eyes through the blur. With just a little pressure from my finger, she'll stop existing. She'll have come into my life, upturned it, leaving me haunted by her memory the way I have done to countless others. Now I'm on the other side. I'm the person whose life will never be the same.

  I've taken care of her for so long. She's been my ward. She has become my responsibility.

  No.

  That's bullshit. She's more than that. She is my obsession. She is my heartbeat. She is my prize. She is the only fucking one. She's not one of them. She's the other part of me. Killing her would be committing suicide.

  So I drop the hand holding the gun to my side and bow my head. If I am going to kill myself, then let it be the way it's supposed to be. Not the way Scoot fucking demands.

  “I'm sorry,” I whisper, afraid to say anything more. Afraid I'll start to stammer. Because I don't get that rush of lording over her here. She controls me.

  I walk in front of her, and pull off the pillowcase. Her eyes are wild and red. She's panting between the uncontrollable sobs. I drop to my knees to meet her eyes and I kiss her. The last kiss. The kiss that I'll feel on my lips for the rest of my miserable existence. Hiding. Searching for just a glimpse of that feeling again before I die.

  It's gentle, our lips barely meeting. She doesn't kiss back, she's too confused. So I pull back, unable to walk away, just wanting to taste her one more time.

  “You're leaving me here?” she asks, with the pitch of despair in her voice.

  I kiss her again, this time taking her face in my hands, tasting her tears, feeling her lips quiver against mine.

  I keep tokens of all the places I've been. People I've taken from. And that kiss is the token I'll remember her by. She's not like the others. I'll never give them back what I've taken. I reach into my pocket and clasp the little moon necklace I took from her around her neck.

  “Please don't leave me alone out here,” she pleads.

  She can hate me, that's the way it's supposed to be.

  I stand up and write her the last note.

  Do what you have to do.

  I watch her eyes study it. I make sure she digests it. Then I crumble in and put it in my pocket. I head back to my truck.


  “Sam?” she asks, as if she still believes this is all a bluff. I've toyed with her head so many fucking times, she doesn't even know when it's real. “Sam!” This time it's shrill, there's anger peppered through her voice. “Sam!” she screams as I slide into the driver seat.

  I drive on the path towards the service road, watching her chase me through the rear view mirror. She’s covered in mud, with her hands tied behind her back, barefoot. Her pleas grate on my ears, but when I'm far enough away, her voice stops carrying. Darkness has settled and she’s just a speck in my rear view mirror. I hit the brakes and turn back one last time. Just one more look. But I feel a dangerous pull. So I look ahead, turning my back to her.

  My name is Vesper Rivers.

  It used to be so easy to utter that sentence to strangers. I never thought about what it meant. All the fine details, the lines and the shadows that lie behind that name. Maybe because I was just a two-dimensional sketch of a person. Thick lines outlining my identity. A flat image.

  But now, there are creases and collections of small, nearly invisible grooves that come together to create depth and space. To make a picture so complex that depending on the angle from which I look at myself, I see someone different every time.

  Now, to say those words, to tell a stranger who I am, it's too much. It's too loaded of a confession. The park ranger will think he knows me, from the details in the news or the circumstances of my disappearance. But that's just me from one narrow angle. If he saw things from my side, he would be shocked.

  So I wait, filthy, shivering, sipping a warm cup of generic tea, still wearing the hefty bag Sam shrouded on me, and over that a fleece blanket, waiting for the one person other than Sam who knows the things I know. Who I don't have to lie to.

  A deer head floats on the wall across from me. A picture of the man who I first found running down the service road along where Sam left me, with his little girls and wife. This world feels like the artifice. The white-washed walls of my tiny shack, the lake, the unending forest—that was reality.

  I feel their eyes. The local police, watching me through the titled blinds on the door that gives me a false sense of privacy.

  I go through eight and a half cups of tea. One cup for every half hour I wait for Sheriff Ridgefield. It's all I would say no matter what they asked. I wouldn't give my name. I wouldn't say what happened. Only his name.

  I'm staring at the half-drunken mug of tea when the door opens abruptly. Our eyes meet and I can see the veiled panic. He's trying hard not to let me see it. From the sallow color of his face, to his sunken expression, it's clear the sheriff hoped to never see me again.

  He closes the door behind him. I look over at the half-turned blinds and he follows my gaze, twisting the pole to block out prying eyes. I grip my mug firmly as he tentatively pulls up a seat across the table from me. This is easier. This I can handle, not all the commotion of police and press, just me, a man, and a room.

  “I came out here as soon as they called. You were dropped off far away from home.”

  He means the single-level I was snatched from, in a sunny suburban neighborhood. The place where my boyfriend proposed to me. But that's not home anymore.

  I nod.

  He's smart. He's not saying anything. He doesn't know what I know. But he does know I hold his life in the balance. I understand now, the gravity of Sam's secret. It's not just a family being humiliated and shamed. It is generations of reputation and wealth tarnished in an instant. It's this man's future vaporized in one breath.

  Your brother.

  He took me.

  Every part of me.

  He gave me parts of him.

  Forced them to fit into me.

  Now I am stuck with them.

  Then he abandoned me.

  I am not the girl in the picture you have in your file.

  She has not returned.

  She's disappeared forever.

  “Are we alone?” I ask.

  He looks over his shoulder before leaning in.

  “For now.”

  “Sam told me everything,” I say. It's not a threat, it's not a pledge of allegiance to the officer of the law in front of me. It's just information.

  It's instant, the way he goes clammy. His skin going from a pale yellow to a pale gray. He swallows sharply.

  “But, I don't know anything,” I add.

  His chest sinks with a strong exhale.

  I lean forward, centering my eyes onto his. They're nothing like Sam's. They’re a reddish brown. It takes light for his eyes to shine. Sam's eyes seem to thrive in the darkness. “I don't know his name. I don't know where he took me. He never spoke. I was blindfolded the entire time. He blindfolded me and drove me around for hours before dropping me off. I'm sorry I can't be of more help.”

  I don't know why I do this. Why I protect the man who did the things he did to me. It's certainly not for the Andrew—Scooter—whatever his name is. I'm free now, out of Sam's influence. He all but gave me permission to tell my story. But if I tell everything I know, Sam will be locked away, and it will be the end. I'm not ready to tell our secrets. I don't want to share this view of me with the world. Let them see me the way the stories on the news say. I'm not done with Sam, even if he thinks he's done with me.

  Sheriff Ridgefield sits there for a few moments, weighing all the shit that's been thrust on his plate.

  “If you know nothing, then why did you ask for me?” His tone, it's hypothetical. As if to tell me this is what someone else will ask.

  “I don't know,” I shrug. “I don't know anything.”

  He sits back in his chair and blows out a huge sigh, wrestling with an invisible monster.

  “Why are you doing this?” he asks skeptically.

  I run my finger along the edge of the table. Dirt has impacted on its edges, like someone who has been living in the wild. They don't know how he bathed me, fed me, fucked me, held me. They don't know about the beautiful dresses and how they swirled when I danced to the music he brought me, how these once manicured hands flipped the pages of books he gifted me.

  “Even you wouldn't understand,” I mutter.

  He leans in, his face pained. “I had no idea, Vesper. Please understand that. I never thought he could do that.”

  I nod.

  “I can find ways to make sure you are taken care of …to make up for your …suffering.”

  “I don't want it. You're just going to have to trust me.”

  “Why are you protecting him?” he asks. “How can I trust you won't wake up tomorrow and tell everything? If I cover this up, I am sinking further into this pile of shit, you understand? All my chips are going into this. Is this what you really want?”

  “This isn't for him,” I assure the sheriff. “Or you,” I add, looking at my dull reflection on the pitted chrome poster frame behind him. “If you want to tell them, you go ahead. I can't stop you.”

  He scrunches his brow. “I'm going to take you to the hospital and then I'll interview you there. I'll transport you myself. It's a bit of a mess here. The police here want credit for finding you since you were found in their jurisdiction. Fucking Keystone Cops. So, I'm going to have to step out and do a little magic here.”

  I nod, sipping the cool, bitter tea as a distraction.

  “Vesper. I have a family. A little boy and a girl. Please.” I don't blame him for believing this is too good to be true.

  “Does my family know?” I ask. My return has seemed so abstract, this room a place of limbo. I didn't even think about them until he mentioned transporting me.

  He looks down. “The station called your parents, no one answered. We called your fiancé and he said they are out of the country and he'd try to reach them. He'll be the one meeting you to take you home.”

  A reunion with Carter looming, and I feel nothing.

  I remember once watching the news about a girl who had vanished. Her parents left the porch light on for her every night hoping she would return. They wouldn't move fr
om the house for decades, afraid they wouldn't be there for her if she came back. Of course, she never did.

  My mother is far away. In that way, things haven't changed. And there's something oddly comforting in that.

  When I see Carter after they examine me, I cry. I didn't think I would until that moment. I hadn't shed a tear since I rejoined the world. Not even as I was interviewed; recounted the things that had been done to me by an anonymous man. He had blindfolded me. He had always worn a mask so even during the few times I could see his face, I had no details. He never spoke. All I knew was the color of his eyes. Brown, I told them.

  I watched beads of sweat trickle down Sheriff Ridgefield's temple, belying his cool demeanor. On the way down, in the car, we didn't talk much. But we had decided that my insistence upon choosing him came from the fact that I saw his name in the newspapers I used as a toilet in the basement.

  The car was stuffed with tension. That used to make me nervous and chatty, wanting to fill in every jagged crevasse of silence so everything would feel round and smooth. Now, the tension of silence seems so trivial compared to the terror I have survived.

  I refused to let the doctor perform a gynecological exam. She insisted, even had the Sheriff come and try to talk me into it. He did--though I’m certain this was good news for him--but I grew hostile. I wasn’t going to let anyone invade me. They’d think it was because of the trauma. That’s what I want them to think. But it’s because I hold a secret inside of me, one that only Sam and I share.

  “Vesp,” Carter whispers tenderly as he rushes towards me. His eyes gloss with emotion and that's the moment when I erupt. I was devastated when I lost my grandmother. I cried for days. But after a while, the sharpness of the pain dulls, and you try not to think of the person. That helps the pain recede. Eventually, you stop thinking of them because you realize that's the best way for the pain to stop. Then one day, you can think of them, you can speak of them and it doesn't always stab at your heart and take your breath away. You think you're safe. I remember I thought I was. About two years passed since she had died. I had moved on. And then I was cleaning my room when I found a picture in one of my drawers. It wasn't a good one—the angle tilted, she's reaching out for something that's out of the frame, my leg is peeking into the shot on the floor beneath her. I'm probably sitting down, playing with something. It's of no significance, the photo. Nothing momentous. No one is posing. She's not even smiling. It's probably why it was discarded in a drawer. And yet, when I saw it, when I was unable to brace for the memory of her, for the void—grief shocked me and I found myself in tears.