After leaving her house that day, he went over to his new girlfriend’s place. She lived just down the road, a new girl in town. By default that made her sexy.
These were some of the things she thought of in the tub. Not a bath, no water involved. Just her and the ceramic, a cold kiss on the shoulder blades.
The kitchen was comforting in the same, cold way with the addition of space to move around. She wondered if that space would be ruined because of Jeremy’s presence.
Violet decided to head downstairs to the kitchen anyway. She popped her head back into Ben’s room to invite him along, and promised to bring him a snack when he declined.
Sunshine streamed in through the kitchen windows. Violet was stunned by the way its light softened everything like butter. The walls radiated the same shade as the sun and the effect was comforting. It was then she noticed Jeremy sitting at the table in the corner.
“Oh,” she said. “Hi. I can’t believe you have a kitchen like this.”
At least he wasn’t hiding away somewhere, peeking at his video surveillance. She tried to clear her head of the thought.
“Do you like it here?” Jeremy asked.
Violet tried not to cringe at the inappropriate question, but fully believed he had no idea how offensive it was.
“Do I like it here,” she repeated with her head down, and something of a sadistic smirk on her face. “I’d rather be at home, if I’m honest.”
“Oh,” he said in such a sadder way than her Oh had been seconds earlier. “Yeah. Well, I guess I should’ve figured.”
“But, it’s a beautiful home,” she added. “It’s really nice to see the sunshine. I can feel its warmth on my skin, even from in here.”
Rays of it beamed down on her arm, lighting up little blonde hairs. She had hairier arms than average, she thought.
Jeremy appeared to be appeased. “Well, I’m glad. Are you hungry?”
Violet shook her head. “No. I just wanted to be in the kitchen.”
She glanced around the room and hesitated. Slowly, she slid downwards while leaning against the cupboard doors, ending on the floor with her legs bent like triangles enveloped by her arms. It felt really nice. There was no reason she should feel comfortable enough to do so in his presence, but she couldn’t resist. She craved the ceramic tiles underneath her, and the feeling of safety that came with it.
“Jeremy,” she said, in a conscious effort to speak his name as many times as she could, “What are the ground rules here?”
“What do you mean?”
She pursed her lips. “You know what I mean. We can’t just go from being locked up in a dungeon – sorry – to being able to run around wild. Right?”
“Well, I mean, I do want you to be able to run around in here, as much as possible.”
“But that’s my point,” she explained, “I don’t know how much is possible. If this were real life, I could walk down the hall right now, open the front door, grab my car keys and drive off to get myself some ice cream. I could go to a friend’s. I could go for a drive with some music on and the windows down and see where the road took me. These are all things I could do, and I would do, if I were able to run around ‘as much as possible.’” She paused. “But I’m guessing that you’re not going to be okay with all of that, are you.”
Not a question.
“You’re right. I’m sorry,” he said. “But you can move around the house whenever you like. You can go in and out of your room whenever you want to, go to bed whenever you please and wake up when your body wants to.”
She itched as she heard her body on his lips.
“What about outside?”
“Outside,” he said seriously, with a nod of his head. “Well, this is a big property. Basically, you can roam around it as much as you like. I don’t know if you noticed on the way in, but there are a lot of trees out there and a lot of acres.”
She could tell this was meant to be comforting, but instead it made her feel anxious. She hated the thought of her staying long enough to conquer the acres of land surrounding the place.
“Do you think I’d be able to take a walk right now?” she asked.
“Right now? Wow. Um, yeah I guess that would be fine. And if you get lost, you have your tracking device so I know where to come find you.”
“Thanks,” she said. “I just really want to stretch my legs, you know?”
“Yeah, I know. Can I come with you?” he asked timidly, the way you ask a question you know you won’t like the answer to.
“I don’t think so. No. I sort of want some time to just think about things. But I promise I won’t run away. You don’t have to worry about that.”
Ben was still upstairs and there’s no way she’d leave without him. But it didn’t mean she couldn’t start to evaluate their options.
She grabbed an apple, ran one up to Ben, and asked if he wanted to come along. He said no. Violet paused in the doorway. Could she really leave Ben alone in the house with Jeremy? What would she do if she came back and Ben was missing? Or crying because of some invisible and irreversible injury Jeremy had inflicted on him? Her heart began to pound as her brain conjured countless images of what could go wrong.
After a deep breath, she decided she would go. She had to trust Jeremy, at least pretend to, for now. He wouldn’t hurt Ben, not while she was out for a walk. That would be cheap. He wouldn’t do that. She knew little about Jeremy, but she knew he wouldn’t do that.
Violet descended the stairs again and waved goodbye to Jeremy who hadn’t moved from his perch in the kitchen.
When she stepped outside, she paused on the porch for a moment to take it all in. First, there was a porch; a beautiful one that wrapped around the entire house. Second, the house was surrounded by the greenest, most vibrant looking grass. Trees of all kinds and sizes and shapes, bushes, shrubs, flowers. There were gardens. Fresh, dark dirt that had been watered recently. Dew soaked leaves on stalks and herbs. It was the land of someone who loved it.
She walked along the side of the house towards the back. Her breath stalled in her throat when she saw just how far the trees went. She couldn’t see the fence, but she could see the miles of land before it. She fought the urge to call it lovely. In any other circumstance, it would be.
Violet tried to clear her head again. She wanted to make an emergency sign that people could read from above. It had been some time, but there might still be people looking for them. She hoped their mother was, at least. It wouldn’t be preposterous to think that a helicopter might fly overhead and see a sign for help.
It was a disadvantage to know nothing about the property. She had no idea which areas Jeremy wasn’t likely to visit. She didn’t want him to stumble on her SOS sign, but she’d need a large clearing where the three letters could be seen from a great height.
I need him to come with me, she realized.
She returned to the front door. There was a back door but she didn’t know if it would be unlocked or where it would lead. All decisions made in this house should be ones that erred on the side of caution, she figured.
“Hey Jeremy?” she asked loudly from the front foyer.
“Yes?” He still hadn’t moved.
“I know I said I wanted some time alone. But do you think you might be willing to give me a tour, show me around a little bit? I just want to make sure I don’t get lost or anything.”
He nodded enthusiastically and was out of his seat before she’d even finished asking. “Sure I can,” he said. “Do you want some sunscreen? Bug spray?”
“Just some sunscreen, yeah, that would be great.”
Appearing with sunscreen in his left hand and a hat in his right, he passed Violet the bottle.
“I think I’ll grab an apple for the road, too,” Jeremy said with a smile, excited at the chance to be a tour guide around his garden.
“Do you know what kind of flower that one is?” he said as they stepped outside, pointing to a batch of bright blue blooms with five petals
and a yellow centre. She did.
“Forget-me-nots,” she said.
“You’re right. Do you know how they got their name?”
Violet shook her head, trying to hide her irritation. This wasn’t the kind of tour she’d asked him along for.
“There’s a legend that a long time ago, a knight was gathering a batch of blue flowers to show his lady how much he loved her. They were walking along the riverbank but all of a sudden there was a flash flood, and the knight was swept away by the current in his heavy armour. They say he tossed the bouquet back to her, and shouted, ‘Forget me not.’”
“That’s a very sad story,” Violet observed.
Jeremy looked at her then as if to say, Is it? She supposed it was beautiful in a way as well.
“The Queen of England ordered them all to be exterminated in the U.K., did you know that?” he asked.
“No. Why would anyone do that?”
“I’m not sure. I think it’s because they’re too beautiful. Flowers were supposed to be modest. These ones were too boastful.”
“What kind of person banishes something because it’s too beautiful?” she asked. “That’s crazy.”
Jeremy delighted in her involvement. They walked deeper into the garden, down a hill. He wished he had an interesting fact for everything they passed by. He wanted to keep talking to her, teaching her, making her stop to wonder about things she never would had before.
He doubted he had enough tricks up his sleeve. He had rehearsed telling her about the forget-me-nots hoping that he would get the chance to show her around. He was out of material.
Violet walked along quietly beside him, looking way up, straight down, and all around her.
“Can you show me your favourite places?” The instant she said it out loud, she cringed. It sounded too obvious to her, but Jeremy didn’t notice. He veered them to the right and stopped in front of an old structure too small to be a barn.
“This is the gardening shed. There’s a tractor mower, all sorts of gardening tools, and a whole lot of mice.”
“Mice?”
“Yeah, all kinds of them. Every time I open that barn door, they scurry out all over the place. I’m always afraid I’m going to run them over.”
It wasn’t usually so easy for Jeremy to talk to people. He rarely said out loud the things running through his head.
Violet smiled quietly. “The Mouse House.”
“That’s a great name for it. The Mouse House, I like that.”
“That’s what my grandparents call their shed.”
Jeremy smiled in a quiet sort of way.
“Where is my car?” she asked. Now that she was outside and her car was nowhere in sight, she felt the right to know.
“It’s in the barn over there,” he pointed. “I parked it in there. I hope you don’t mind.”
His politeness drove her insane. If he was going to keep them there against their will, he should at least have the decency to stop apologizing uselessly. If he’s so sorry, she thought, shouldn’t he just let them go?
“Why would I mind?” she said sarcastically. It was only her car, her licence plates, her method of transportation. Why should it matter if he locked it away? He was doing the same with her body.
They kept walking towards a beautiful vine-covered gazebo at the end of a stone walkway.
“You really take good care of this place,” she commented.
Jeremy paused, remembering that Violet still thought it was his property, his home. Another set of lies he would have to keep. He was, however, the one who maintained the garden, and he did put a lot of time and effort into it.
“Yeah,” he said. “I do. It makes me feel productive, like I’m doing something good with my hands.”
“Tell me…” she trailed off then continued. “Tell me something about yourself. Something I don’t know.”
It was the sort of pick up line she saw straight through when it was used on her, but she needed to figure out more about the way Jeremy worked.
“Something you don’t know?” He didn’t make any great effort to conceal his pleasure. “Well, that should be easy. I don’t really talk about myself that much. I mean, I’m doing more of that with you than I have with anyone in a really long time.”
So he was a loner. There might be no one who ever came to visit. This made Violet sad, for her and Ben, but also for Jeremy. Someone should be there for him, it just shouldn’t have to be her.
“Okay. Here’s something. One year I got a Power Rangers backpack. I was young, grade three I think. I’m pretty sure it was second-hand. I can’t even remember who gave it to me. Probably a woman named Mrs. Cassidy, she always seemed to look after me for some reason. Anyways, I had this backpack and I loved it. I went to school with it one day, and I should’ve known better.”
Violet looked at him with new eyes. She knew where this was going.
“The kids liked to tease me. I wasn’t always the cleanest and I didn’t have the best clothes. Sometimes I wouldn’t have a lunch. I know I was weak, and I guess I made myself an easy target, but I was never mean to any of them.
“So I brought this backpack to school, and we’re lined up outside before the day started, and I’m at the end of the line. I usually was. But all of a sudden I felt a shove from behind, and I smashed into the boy in front of me. I hit my nose on the back of his head and it started to bleed right away. I got some blood on his shirt. I turned around to see who had pushed me, but they were gone. Everyone was laughing.
“The boy I crashed into, his name was William Bellamy. He was a normal kid, he teased me along with the rest of them but he’d never been that bad. I said sorry and was really hoping that would be the end of it. But he turned around to look at me, touched the back of his head and felt the blood. I said I was sorry again, but he just got so angry.” He shook his head. “I think he was worried he’d be made fun of for having my blood on him.” Jeremy began to fidget with the memory.
“He started to yell, calling me an idiot. He spotted my new backpack. I hadn’t had one before, I just used grocery bags to bring my things with me.
“He spun me around. He grabbed at my bag and just started to pull. It made no sense to me. I tried to tell him to hit me instead, to leave the bag alone, but I’m not even sure I said it out loud. He kept pulling and I kept trying to lean my body in so that the straps wouldn’t break, but he pushed me away. The left strap snapped. He just laughed. Not even one person tried to help.”
His eyes were unfocused. Violet kept thinking he’d end his story, but he kept going.
“After the strap broke, he just grabbed the other one off my arm and threw it on the ground. He jumped on it, over and over. I had an orange in there for lunch, and he squished it so that the whole inside of the bag was sticky and full of pulp.
“I cried. It was the worst thing I could have done. I should’ve pushed him back. I mean, I’m not a violent person, but I think that kid deserved a shove. I just stood there and cried instead, I couldn’t help it. I’d only had that backpack a day, and I was so embarrassed to see Mrs. Cassidy and tell her why it was already broken.
“When I started to cry, he pushed me again. Everyone was still laughing and watching, and I think he could sense that. I think he got caught up in it. He pushed me to the ground and kicked me once, in the gut. That was it, just one kick, like I was a sack of dirt.”
“That’s awful,” Violet said softly.
“Yeah. And the worst part was I still had to wear that backpack. Only one of the straps was broken and it was still better than using a plastic bag. But every kid remembered what had happened to me every time they saw it. Whenever I would unzip it, I would catch a whiff of orange. I tried to clean it out but the smell stayed forever, this rotten, sour citrus smell.
“Maybe I should’ve just thrown it out, I don’t know. After all was said and done, I got pissed off. Really mad. It drove me crazy that he thought he had the right to do that, and it drove me even crazier that I had l
et him.”
They had covered a lot of ground, but Violet was surprised to feel more interest in Jeremy’s story than in her new, expanded, surroundings.
“I’ve been bullied my whole life,” he continued. “After school it got a lot better, there weren’t kids talking about me right in front of my face. But the older people get, the more secretive they get. I still turn around sometimes and see people whispering about me. I don’t know what it is that makes me so fun to whisper about, but there’s something.”
“Do you have anyone to talk to?” Violet asked.
“No. Not really. There’s no one around very often. I’m out here by myself most of the time. Before today, even you didn’t really talk to me much.”
This shouldn’t have made Violet feel guilty, but it did.
“But it’s nice… It’s nice saying things like this out loud. There was one other person who would listen to me, but I had to pay her, and it didn’t work out,” he said with a weary smile.
Violet had no idea if he meant a prostitute or a therapist, and didn’t care to find out.
“Well, I don’t mind,” she said. “I like it. It’s nice having someone to talk to. All I’ve had is Ben, and I don’t really want to say anything that’ll scare him, and he wouldn’t understand a lot of the things going on in my head, so… I appreciate having someone to talk to as well.”
She didn’t fully mean it. She did like having someone to talk to, but she was learning that it was uncomfortable finding out so much about her kidnapper. He should probably remain a stranger, kept at arm’s length. But she could use this to her advantage, she was sure of it. This was a very lonely man who might be driven to aggression, but only if provoked. That was her guess. Her plan was to keep him pacified and feeling as if she didn’t resent him for keeping them there. Somehow, Violet thought, she’d find the strength to do it. If not for herself then for Ben.
“Thank you,” he said. “Thanks.”
The rest of their walk was in silence, both having said more than they planned. He continued to lead her around the property on the grassy areas easiest to walk over.
Once, We Were Stolen Page 11