by Cole McCade
“Sometimes,” he said as one knot fell free, “fear is a powerful aphrodisiac.”
“So is Stockholm’s Syndrome.”
Another of those brief, gravelly chuckles. “That too.”
The other rope around her ankle fell away, and then he rose, circled the chair, and caught the last knot binding her wrists. A single pull, a rasp of nylon and she was free; it was on the tip of her tongue to ask why he was letting her go, what he meant to do, but that mattered less than her moment. Her moment, and she tried to lunge forward, tried to break free, but her arms were frozen stiff, muscles locked, and her legs were rubber that didn’t want to hold her up, sore and refusing to obey her commands. She pitched forward with a cry, struggling to even stand, but after hours bound in place her limbs refused to obey, and whatever thought she’d had for bravery, for daring, dissolved in the face of helpless human limitations and the horrible, glaring reality of her own weakness.
She collapsed to the floor, elbows and knees thudding, concrete cold against her naked skin. Priest had been right: it wasn’t like the stories. It wasn’t like the TV shows, the movies, the glorified dramatizations where eventually the brave heroine was crafty enough to steal her moment and run. Real people didn’t work that way; real people couldn’t endure the things the stories said were possible. And she was real, and hated it, and wondered if she was just another statistic, another faceless person who would never make the news for finding the bravery to escape her captor because in the end, in the hard ugly truth of things she never wanted to look at with her eyes wide open…most people never did.
Like the man lying dead across the floor, the runnel of his blood spiraling in macabre art across the floor, coiling inches from her nose. He’d never had even a moment to fight.
She couldn’t end up like that.
Curling in on herself, she told herself this wouldn’t be her only chance. Told herself that if she fell, she only had to get up again—and next time she would be ready. Next time she would be strong enough. But when rough, warm hands enveloped her, she struggled, kicking out with legs that didn’t want to work and thrusting away with arms that threatened to snap like twigs.
“No,” she gasped, struggling and twisting. “No, don’t, I—”
“Shhh. Zutti, zutti. Hush.” Priest picked her up—gently, so gently lifting her, cradling her against the breadth and warmth and firmness of his chest until the floor fell away and he turned and she couldn’t see the body anymore, couldn’t see those vacant, awful eyes whispering you’re next, you’re next. “Don’t look,” Priest soothed as he carried her toward the bed. “You’re tired and upset. I’m only putting you to bed. You cannot sleep in that chair.”
“But—”
“No buts. You have had a very upsetting night.”
Because of you. But she was too exhausted to speak again. Too exhausted to fight, when if this night had been a thousand years then these moments alone had been a lifetime, and she was weary, so weary, old and brittle in her bones.
When Priest laid her in the broad white bed, she didn’t protest. When he tucked her nakedness under the covers, she didn’t fight. When he settled on the edge of the bed, watching her, his presence oppressive and inescapable, she only turned her back on him, curling up on her side and making herself small and closing her eyes. Staying vigilant wouldn’t make a damned bit of difference. Any choice he said she had was an illusion. Waking or sleeping, he would kill her when he was ready, or toy with her at his whim. She didn’t have the strength to fight back yet. But she would.
She would.
And even though she didn’t want to, she slept.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“S-P-I-R-A-L,” WILLOW SOUNDED OUT, WRITING each letter down carefully in her first-grade primer. Black lines striped the pages, spaced far, far apart so she could make her letters large and looping, with dotted lines down the middle like the divider lines in the middle of the road, telling her where a curve should go and how high to make her cross-bars and where to dot her I. “Spiral.”
Hers was the only voice in the kitchen, but not the only voice in the house. She kicked her feet against the rungs of her chair; her toes wouldn’t touch the floor yet, but if she kicked and kicked and spelled out loud the clack-clack-clack mixed with the sound of her own voice might drown out the shouting from the living room.
“You had no right,” her father bellowed, loud enough that Willow imagined the pictures trembling in their frames, shaking with fear, and she kicked faster and ground her pencil into the page so hard it made dents and dug up little shiny crumbles of pencil lead. Once Erin-the-Girl had smugly told her, in her I’m-smarter-than-you voice, that it wasn’t really lead. It was something called graff-ite, and she had gotten graff-ite all in her lunch sandwich along with wood scrapings and shavings when Erin had emptied her pencil sharpener all over the inside of Willow’s Transformers lunchbox.
“Didn’t I?” Uncle Wally snapped back, and that was the worst of it. Uncle Wally, cotton-candy-sweet Wally, didn’t sound like candy anymore. He sounded like iron and steel and hard, angry things, like the rattling of all his stick thin skeleton bones. “How are you supposed to raise a child alone like this? I can take care of her. I can take care of you both. I just want to be there for her and you. Please, Joseph. You need help, but you won’t let us help you. You forced my hand.”
“I’m not raising her alone. Miriam will be back. She always comes back.”
Silence. Horrible silence, and Willow knew what Uncle Wally would say because it was something she knew, too, something she had always known from the first time she’d looked up into those green eyes and said Mama and wished Mama would laugh for her.
Mama’s not coming back. Not this time.
“Joseph…” Wally made a pained sound. “I’ve not even heard from Miriam in two years. For all we know she’s off in the Australian outback and—”
“And that’s your reasoning?” A crash, a slam of something heavy smacking down, a sound she recognized as papers, many in a big and heavy stack like when teacher dropped graded papers on her desk at the start of the morning. “That’s your reasoning for trying to have me declared incompetent?”
“I-N-C-O-M-P-E-T-E-N-T,” Willow whispered, but didn’t write it down in her primer. Incompetent was a big-girl word, at least a third-grade word, and she didn’t know what it meant but she should be proud of herself for sounding it out. But it tasted bad, tasted like tears, and she didn’t like it. She didn’t like it at all. “Incompetent.”
“My reasoning is that it shouldn’t be on a little girl to be your caretaker!” Wally’s voice was the thunder that could call the sky down. “Willow is a child. What happens if you fall? If you hurt yourself? If you suffer a serious episode? She’s six. Is she supposed to make your meals and clean your bedpan?”
But I want to take care of Daddy. She screwed her eyes shut tight tight tight, as if she could make them hear the words in her head so loud they would stop fighting. Like Daddy takes care of me.
Daddy huffed like he’d been hit, and she imagined his breath coming out in a big cartoon puff. “It’s not that bad—”
“It will get that bad,” Uncle Wally bit off, saying each word like he was sounding it out for the class, every syllable as crisp as folding white paper. “You can’t afford treatment. Not on disability. I will help with every penny I have as long as you will take it, but for the love of God, please…think ahead. You’re her father. Think of what’s best for her.”
“Taking her away from her family is not what’s best for her.” The raggedy, crumpled sound Daddy made hurt Willow’s chest in that heavy place behind and below her heart. “I’m her father. She’s my daughter. You think I don’t want to love and protect her? You think I don’t want to care for her? You think I can’t?”
There came a rough thump, and the walls shook again. Willow held her pencil tight until the No. 2 stamped on her palm and the wood creaked; she stared at her primer but couldn’t really see it, the
big round-edged letters of her vocabulary words nothing but meaningless humps and swoops.
“I can,” Daddy swore, soft but harsh. “And I will. Nothing will stop me from that.”
“You may not have a choice.” Wally’s voice grew softer, as if he was moving away. “I’m her family, too.”
“You stopped being family the second you tried to steal my daughter away.”
“Joseph—”
“Get out,” Daddy snarled. “I will not have some fucking faggot trying to steal my child.”
Willow closed her eyes tight. That wasn’t Daddy talking, she told herself. Because that didn’t sound like Daddy’s voice. Daddy was all love and tired patience, and even when he was angry it was angry at things and never at people. He was never angry at people, because if he was angry at people then one day he might be angry at Willow and call her bad names, too. Call her bad names the way Erin-the-Girl called her bad names. Call her bad names like he’d called Wally a bad name, and she didn’t know what faggot meant but it was ugly and awful from the way nastiness dripped like rusty bad tap water from Daddy’s voice when he said it. She didn’t know how to feel when she loved Daddy and loved Wally, but didn’t love when Daddy said mean things that made it sound like Wally’s specialness was something bad, bad, bad.
No one said anything. She thought maybe they had stopped fighting, maybe those bad words had made them realize they were being terrible and scary, but she was wrong. She was wrong, because now the fighting was quieter, and as tense as a swingset chain drawn taut and twanging with the force it needed to lift a small body up and cast it into a terrifying unknown.
“I thought you were better than that,” Wally said softly.
“Fuck.” Another bad word, ragged and low. “Walford, I’m sorry. That was—I—I shouldn’t have—I didn’t mean—”
“People say how they truly feel when they’re angry.” Wally’s voice had never had such steel in it, and Willow imagined his face like wax, hard and cold and set. “Is that how you see me? A child-stealing faggot?”
Daddy growled. “Don’t you fucking dare. Don’t you turn this back on me. You started this. You came into my home and tried to—”
“Tried to do what was best for Willow.”
“You don’t get to decide that,” Daddy said. “You don’t get to come in here and label me some kind of cripple, some kind of pity case, and take my life away like I get no fucking choice in the matter. I’m sick. I’m not incompetent, not an invalid, not anything you want to label me where you get to treat me like I’m less than human. I want you out of my house.” When Wally said nothing, Daddy’s voice rose louder, a roaring shout and another thump, a rattle. “Now, Walford!”
“I’ll leave once I’ve said goodbye to Willow.” Stiff. Quiet. Calm. Willow knew that kind of calm. That kind of calm that was really upset, and telling lies by pretending to be something else. “I hope for her sake you are correct, Joseph.” Wally exhaled loudly. “And for your own.”
Footsteps. Willow opened her eyes and scrubbed at her face, at her stupid wet face, because now she had to be a big girl. She thought she was going to have to be a big girl for a very long time now, and maybe there was no more being a little girl anymore. Not when right now she had to pretend, like a big girl, that she hadn’t heard all of that. Had to pretend that she didn’t think Daddy was right and Uncle Wally was right, and Daddy was wrong and Uncle Wally was wrong, and they were both only seeing one thing or another the way adults had when if they would stop being mean it would all be okay.
She took a big-girl breath and stiffened her big-girl spine and made herself stare at the page until the letters came clear again and she could read.
“C-R-I-M-S-O-N,” she spelled off the page, and dragged the C against the paper in a curve that tore up little shreds of paper. The pencil shook in her hand, and the point snapped. She closed her eyes and bit back a wail, a scream of hurting frustration that would taste like pencil shavings and graff-ite if she let it out, then reached for the pencil sharpener. Uncle Wally strode quietly into the room, stopped in the doorway, and looked at her. She looked up, worrying the inside of her cheek with the two wobbly teeth on the right side that were promising to fall out soon. He had a redness around his eyes that she didn’t like, and the kindly wrinkles in his face were strange, like plastic all bunched up and ready to be thrown away.
He caught her looking and offered a sad smile, and crossed the room to lean over her chair, looking down at her homework. “What word are you trying to spell, sweetheart?” he asked, a choke in his voice like he’d swallowed bad things.
Don’t go away, Willow thought, but at six she was already learning not to say so many of her inside thoughts out loud, because inside thoughts made people unhappy. So she only smiled, and answered, “C-crimson.”
“Crimson is a good word.”
He reached into his pocket. She thought maybe he was going to do the scarf trick; he was wearing that shirt with the lace ruffles at the wrists, the ones that bloomed out past the sleeves of his coat like carnations, and whenever he wore that shirt he was hiding the scarves somewhere to make them fountain out whenever she was sad or hurt or scared or needed to laugh and laugh and laugh. But instead of the scarf he withdrew a small polished stone: like a pyramid with soft edges, in a shade of pinkish red like the light inside a beating heart, so smooth it looked slippery to the touch. She could see all the way through it like water, staining Uncle Wally’s fingers behind it—and when the afternoon sunlight and kitchen light spilled through it, it made spangles of colored sparkles on the table and floor like spilled Kool-Aid.
For a moment, as Uncle Wally bowed and offered her the stone as if he was presenting jewels to a queen, she forgot the cold scary feeling in her chest, like her soul was being ripped in half and each piece carried away with one of the special men in her life. And as he smiled, she smiled too, and clapped her hands together as he said, “This is a shade of crimson, don’t you think?”
“What is it?” she breathed, started to reach for it, then pulled her hand back as if it might well burn her. Maybe it wasn’t for her; maybe it was for little girls to look at, but not touch. “Is it a ruby?”
“It’s beach glass.” Wally pressed it into her palm with that smile that made his eyes crinkle like crepe paper, and folded her fingers over it. “Usually beach glass is green or blue, sometimes yellow or brown, but this one is just for you. Red like my fiery little Willow.”
She looked down at the wonderful thing in her palm, only to frown at an awful thought she didn’t want.
But I don’t like red.
Red was the bad color. Red meant bad things, and she couldn’t help but feel strange and hurt and quiet and alone that Uncle Wally didn’t know that. He knew her, better than anyone else, better than even Daddy, and he didn’t know that red was bad and made her feel like she was going to lose something.
But she was losing something. She was losing him.
She closed her fingers over the glass and curled it against her chest. “It’s pretty,” trickled out, and his face fell.
“You don’t like it.”
“I do,” she said, and it was one of those big-girl lies everyone told, those big-girl lies that would make other people feel better, and she found her big-girl smile so Uncle Wally wouldn’t be sad. “I really really do like it. Will you bring me more?”
The smile didn’t come back into Wally’s eyes, but he clasped his hands in hers and squeezed them tight and so warm warm warm, the bit of glass caught between them. “Every time I see you, precious darling.” He faltered, then looked down at their hands. “That…might not be for a while.”
She bit her lip and glanced over her shoulder, toward the living room. “Daddy’s really mad, isn’t he?”
“Yes, sweetling. But it’s my own fault.”
“Why is he mad at you?”
“Maybe because I love you too much.” He squeezed her hands. “You’ll understand when you’re older.”
&
nbsp; She pouted. “I want to understand now.”
“No, darling dearest.” With a sigh, he pulled her into his arms and hugged her tight. “You really don’t.”
Behind them, Daddy cleared his throat. The sound made Willow think of a gorilla at the zoo, huffing and chuffing and warning it was angry and wanted to fight. She didn’t like thinking of Daddy that way, but that was what Daddy was right now, because Uncle Wally went stiff and let her go. He stood, looking over her head at Daddy, and nodded coolly.
“Joseph,” he said, then offered Willow a strained smile. “I’ll see you soon, my little weeping Willow.”
“Not if I can help it,” Daddy growled.
Stop it, Willow said, but if she said stop it she’d have to choose between Daddy and Uncle Wally and no chance of ever seeing Wally again, and so she said nothing. She didn’t want to make that choice. She didn’t want to even think about that choice ever again.
So she only looked down at the little bit of glass in her hand, turning her palm red as a little wet pool of blood—while the front door creaked and squealed, and Uncle Wally walked away.
CHAPTER TWELVE
WHEN SHE WOKE, IT WAS to the heavy weight of something draped over her, and the choking panic of something constricting around her neck.
She jerked; gut-deep wrongness told her she wasn’t where she was supposed to be, wasn’t in her bed, but she didn’t know where or why or how until she registered the coolness of sheets against naked skin. She didn’t sleep naked. She never slept naked. A body pressed against her back, smothering and hot, and oh God oh God oh God that heat brought with it impressions: flash of red blood, terror-filled eyes, rope biting into her skin and a searing tongue teasing her clit in little knots of pleasure and shame and fury until it was all too much, flashing by like a film reel snapped and going wild, and she closed her eyes to shut it all out with a whimper.
Priest’s arm was wrapped around her, his slow, sleeping breaths against her nape.