A Door in the River

by Inger Ash Wolfe

After six days in the motel, Earl had appeared and led her to the car he’d brought her from the airport in. She knew from talking carefully to Tania during their lessons that her destination was a place that was called “the rooms” and that she would stay there a long time. No effort now was made to hide her in the car or prevent her from seeing where she was going. Clearly, they never intended her to reappear in the world again.

  She hadn’t seen the outside world since she’d arrived in Canada a week before. Then Earl pushed her head down and put her back into the car. As he was pulling away, she saw the name of the motel. Forty Winks. Forty lashes was more like it. She hoped she’d never lay eyes on it again. Forty minutes south of the motel, he changed to narrower, rural roads and eventually into farmland. He continued on to a house at the end of a long straight road. It was an older house, a nice brick country farmhouse set back from the road and surrounded by fields and other farmhouses. He brought her out, holding her wrists behind her, and unlocked a set of doors. There were two men inside, guards, she quickly realized, men she heard called Gene and Bobby. Bobby took her from Earl and led her downstairs. A door at the bottom of a set of steep steps opened onto the basement. There were rooms here, some with closed doors. There was a living room with two couches and a television attached to one of the walls. Two girls, one of whom was the girl called Timmy, were sitting on one of the couches. Evidently, Timmy’s English, and perhaps her obedience, had permitted her re-entry into the general population. She looked beautiful now, and she had a new dress.

  Bobby snapped his fingers and both girls rose. He made Timmy sit back down and passed Larysa to the other. “Show her to her room,” he said, and the girl took Larysa gently by the arm.

  “Come,” she said.

  “I am Cherry,” she said.

  “Kitty,” she replied, knowing doing anything but playing strictly by the rules at this point would be suicide.

  “Your English is good.”

  “I learn to speak in high school, and I take … I was take courses in English. French also.”

  “I wish I can speak like you.” She led Larysa to a door that went into a hallway off the living room.

  “How long have you been here?”

  Cherry laughed softly. “My life. How it feels. But half-year now.” She led Larysa down another set of steep stairs. The air became cold and musty.

  “Here we are.” Cherry opened a door and showed Larysa into a room made of dirt. There was nothing here but a row of doors standing in a wall that went from the floor to the ceiling of the earthen space. Someone had dug this room out. In the wall to their right, there was a concrete frame in which a heavy steel door had been mounted. “This was Gina’s room,” Cherry said, showing Larysa to a door. “Now is yours.”

  “Gina got out?”

  Cherry just looked at her, and Larysa finally realized what happened to the girls here. Perhaps some of them, like Tania/Timmy, were pulled back from the brink by good luck, but now she didn’t want to know what had happened to Gina. What happened to her was something Cherry knew, but it wasn’t time to tell the new girl that. She would have a long time to live with the truth. Her heart sank farther as Cherry let her into the room. There was a filthy mattress on the floor, a steel rod that had some other girl’s clothes still hanging on it, and a small side table with two drawers in it up against the wall. Here, the walls were made of earth, too.

  “What do I do?” she asked.

  “Wait. Wait until someone wants you.”

  “When?”

  “Any time,” said Cherry. Then, safe in the clay-walled room, she switched to Russian: “If you cooperate, you eat. If you don’t, you starve. This place is for men who do whatever they want to a woman. Hard or soft, gentle or vicious, you will meet them all. Outside, they are other people. In here, they do whatever they want. They come from all over. One day, there were Germans here. If someone likes you, they will deliver you to them. Hotels, warehouses, homes. Wherever they want you, you go. No one knows you are here. You may choose not to live, many girls have chosen not to live. But if you want to live, you must do your best and avoid pain and suffering.”

  “How do they get away with it?”

  “Nothing like this would ever happen in Canada …”

  She gave Larysa some threadbare sheets. “Try to keep a part of yourself safe, Kitty. One day, they may find us, and it would be better to be alive then.”

  “My name is Larysa,” she said in English, holding her hand out in thanks, but her gesture was cut short by a slap.

  “My name Cherry. Your name Kitty. You never say name again. Your Larysa is dead.” She turned smartly and walked back to the door. “I wish you luck,” she said in their mother tongue, “and if you do not have luck, I wish you a speedy release.”

  She left and closed the door. Larysa heard her walking slowly back down the hallway. When the hallway was silent, she remained standing in the middle of the dirt room where a girl, or any number of girls before her, had once lived.

  In the second week, she was visited on almost a daily basis by Mr. Sugar. He had her in one of the rooms on the floor above. Then, in the third week, he had paid enough to have her brought to him. Sugar did not let her out of the house, not that week, nor the next, nor the week after that: for almost a whole month he lay on top of her, tortured her, doing whatever came to his blackened imagination. Every inch of him imparted some awful scent or flavour, and it was all she could do not to vomit on him.

  But she had decided she wanted to live. So she did what she was told to do. And she acted as if she liked it because that was the price of avoiding the rest of her fate.

  After these three weeks, she was suddenly brought back to the rooms and told that Sugar had been outbid. Outbid? She was baffled by this idea. But with this, the whole depraved order of the place was laid bare to her. They weren’t mere whores here, no. They were prize lots, given to the highest bidder, for a week at a time. Sugar had become complacent and missed out; Terry Brennan had stepped ardently into the fray and claimed her. But he would not have her at the house. For his two weeks, before Mr. Sugar won her back, Brennan came to the rooms, only once asking for Larysa to come to the house, a day, Larysa now understood, that his wife had been out of town. If not for that visit, she would never have found where Brennan lived.

  She had worked hard at figuring out how she was going to find Mr. Sugar’s house. He’d requested that she be blindfolded on the drives out, but he had never taken any care to hide how he made his money. He owned an energy drink company called Power Up Beverages. The motel manager had let her use the office internet and she searched for corporate information on Power Up. His fridge had been full of the products the company made, and he was always guzzling one down. The president’s name was Carl Duffy. There was even a picture of him, the smiling pig. She plugged his name into a directory and found an unlisted number, but another directory turned up an address and Google Maps confirmed the topography she remembered from looking out the windows of the room he’d kept her in. The house had been high on an escarpment overlooking a lake. Gannon Lake. She was even closer than she’d thought: it was less than twenty kilometres from the motel. But to get there, she could not hitchhike, and neither could she dawdle about it. There was only one viable option: she would run there.

  She hadn’t run a distance longer than five kilometres since her injuries. A half-marathon, in her best days, would have taken her an hour forty-five, but she imagined a run like this, cold, would take her three hours if she wanted to have any strength when she got there.

  She printed out the map and folded it up. She thanked the manager and told him she’d be back for another night. She didn’t tell him there was little or no chance that he would ever see her again. But if someone was onto her, having someone else who could offer her pursuers a good lead might buy her much-needed time. In her room, she changed into the clothes she’d been wearing the night she left Henry Wiest in the parking lot, clothes he’d brought for her: a pair
of sweatpants with the word CANADA on them and a T-shirt. She’d wrecked these clothes walking in the woods, but they were the best clothes she had for running. She set out, heading for the smaller roads behind the town, and before she was through the first kilometre, she’d taken off the tennis shoes and thrown them into the scrub. She’d trust her naked feet to get her there. Back when she’d been serious about running, she’d met a lot of barefoot marathoners who swore by it. It felt okay, if she stayed on the paved part of the road. By the time the sun was past its noon height and she was running past farms and fields, she had settled into a rhythm.

  As she ran, she began to hear a voice in her head. Not a crazy voice, just her own voice, as if being broadcast directly into her mind from outside of herself. It was saying, You are good, you are good. You have done nothing wrong. You are an angel. She saw the killing she’d done in a new light and something inside her, like a weight, went down into her belly and settled and she began to run faster, with more power. The guilt and horror streamed off of her, and she began to understand why Henry Wiest had had to die, why Terry Brennan had to die. Why Carl Duffy, once he had given her what she wanted, would die. All of them had stepped out of the natural order, and removed her from it as well, and now they were all subject to new laws. Laws that did not obtain in the real world, where people had names and relationships. In this other world, the laws said she could eradicate anyone who had witnessed, participated in, or caused her shame. She had known love and obeyed its laws, which were trust, openness, abandon when it was called for, generosity, selflessness. The new laws demanded the opposite: secrecy, caution, selfishness, and righteous anger. She was a certain kind of angel. She ran in Larysa’s body, but she felt with Kitty’s soul. And in Kitty’s soul, there was a surfeit of murder.

  In her pocket, however, there was a folding knife. The good, heavy knife that Henry had given her. It was in her sidepocket and it tapped her as she ran, over and over, like a crop against horseflesh. The rhythmic urgency of her footfalls paired to the metronome of the knife pushed her. Along this road were little fruit and vegetable stands with trust boxes lying on the rough-hewn tables. She grabbed an apple at one, a bell pepper at another. She had brought a single bottle of water with her, and she drank from it slowly, pacing herself with the slap of her feet against the pavement, counting to a thousand and then taking a mouthful.

  Within an hour, she had covered half the distance and it was mid-afternoon. She took a risk at a corner store at the base of the road that led up into the escarpment and stopped there for a sandwich and asked to have her bottle refilled. The man who served her noticed she was barefoot, but he didn’t say anything, and she was in and out in five minutes. After that, the land began to rise at the base of the lake, and her energy flagged momentarily. Then she thought about how close she was to completing her mission here, and she drew herself up and ran harder.

  She was running in cover, taking paths through the woods when she could still see the road, running on loam and moss. Somewhere she’d cut her foot on a piece of wood, or a stone, but she felt no pain at all. She was perilously alive. Maybe this was the end of her life. She was running to her death, rushing to it. She knew what Mr. Sugar – Duffy – was capable of. Her little hunting knife would be no match for him. She wouldn’t be surprised if his arsenal extended beyond chains, locks, prods, and gags. When he’d won her back the week after Terry ran out of money, he’d turned up the torture, putting cigarettes out on her skin, slapping her, crushing her with his disgusting body. “Now Kitty is home,” he’d said to her, and never before had the word home seemed so lifeless.

  He was planning on keeping her forever, and he could afford it. There were special offers for people like Carl Duffy. People like Carl Duffy liked to have souvenirs. Who knows how many girls he’d had from Bochko before her, how many keepsakes he had. She had thought perhaps Terry had exercised that right before quitting her and she’d had to know for sure, which was why she’d visited him. But now she knew she’d gone to see Brennan because he had to be punished. Carl Duffy would have what she was looking for, and she would see the blood spurt from his throat before she took it away from him.

  The map told her she was just a few kilometres northwest of Kehoe Glenn. She had no worries that she would fail to find Mr. Sugar at home; he ordered all his food off a website. It was brought to the door three, four, five times a day. He sent out for breakfast, for fresh coffee, for snacks. She had watched in raving hunger as he devoured pizzas, Chinese food, and burritos in front of her. He would toss her a crust or a noodle and she’d have no choice but to accept these scraps. After his meals and entertainment, the huge man would often lapse into sleep and leave her manacled for hours.

  She’d only escaped the threatened permanence because Sugar had been careless and that Henry man had been a fool. Chance was the only way she was going to get out, and chance had favoured her. She ran up onto the escarpment, feeling her blood surging in her veins. She was an animal now, a machine, an agent of deliverance. Carl Duffy was about to die, and she was about to be free. It was August 15, a Monday evening in her twenty-sixth year on earth.

  ] 26 [

  Monday, August 15, morning

  The morning after Wingate’s underground ordeal, Hazel woke to a quiet house. She’d had a fitful sleep as her legs had jumped and woken her repeatedly. She’d wanted to go right back out, to mobilize whatever was needed to get those girls out of there, but both Wingate and Greene had convinced her they needed a better plan than that. And backup. And the aid of the Queesik Bay Police Department.

  Cathy had gone to Greene’s wife’s B&B, but Emily would have nothing to do with it and insisted on sleeping in her own bed. Now, at 8 a.m., Hazel opened her mother’s room and called to her. There was no reply: it was early, and her mother had taken to sleeping late. But Hazel noticed that her breathing was strange. It was shallow and raspy. She went closer to the bed and called to her mother again.

  “Jesus Christ, Hazel, what time is it?”

  “Eight in the morning. I have to go in.”

  “Fine. Go in. Have a blast. Leave me alone.”

  “You’re breathing funny.”

  “Honestly, Hazel,” she said, and her intake of breath was accompanied by a small whooping sound.

  “Let me see you,” her daughter said, but Emily just settled back under the covers. Hazel sat on the bed and reached for her, and started pulling, and to her surprise, her mother shot up in bed with an unbuttoned look of rage on her face.

  “JUST GO TO WORK!” she shouted, but Hazel wasn’t paying attention to her mother’s words. Her skin was almost yellow and her eyes were lividly bright. She was in the grip of a high fever. Hazel thought she saw a tinge of madness in her mother’s eyes.

  “Oh my god, Mum. You’re sick.”

  “I know I’m sick –”

  “No, you have to get up. I’m taking you to the hospital.”

  “Get me a couple of aspirins and stop meddling. Where is your father? I work all week, I expect to sleep in!”

  “Mother, get up!”

  Emily shook her head in exasperation and threw the covers back. “Get out of the way.”

  Hazel got up off the bed, and her mother stood, surprisingly steady. She walked to the bathroom in the hallway. Hazel heard her peeing and flushing, then the water in the sink ran. When she came back in, it was clear the little journey had taken all of her strength. Emily sat heavily on the edge of the bed.

  “What day is it?” she said querulously. Then she pitched forward and Hazel had to lunge to keep her from falling off the bed.

  There was no choice about how to spend the morning, even though, at this moment, Forbes and Wingate were meeting Greene at the station house. Hazel was already forty minutes late for the meeting when she was able to call in from the ER. They’d told her to take her time, but that was the very thing it felt they’d already run out of.

  “Ketones,” Gary Pass had said. “That’s the sweet smell.”

>   “What does it mean? What’s happening to her?”

  He explained that she hadn’t been getting enough nutrition, that her body had been cannibalizing itself. She’d come very close to being gravely ill, but they were pumping her full of fluids, and she would recover.

  Had she missed all of the signs? Her mother had been tired, depressed, she wasn’t eating much, but she’d been present, more or less. Hadn’t she? Or, Hazel wondered, was I too distracted with the case? The diagnosis of myeloma had come in Saturday morning. Pass had called her with the news, and it was only two days later. How could she have declined that much in forty-eight hours? Pass reappeared in the hallway mid-morning and beckoned to her quietly.

  “She’s more alert now,” he said.

  “Is she happy about it?”

  “Ecstatic.”

  He held the doors open to the ICU, and Hazel went in before him. He came around and led the way to Emily’s curtained space. Her mother’s eyes were closed, her head turned away. Dr. Pass left Hazel there and drew the curtain.

  She called to her, but there was no response, so Hazel took the seat beside the bed and looked at the nape of her neck where the hospital gown drooped. Her mother had always had a strong neck, a neck to support her bullheadedness, and from where Hazel sat, it looked like a tiny machine shot through with cables. Small hairs stood up on it. Hazel had wrapped her little arms around that neck, she’d smelled her mother’s cascading hair as she clung to her with her legs circling her waist. It was hard to imagine that body capitulating to anything. It had withstood so many insults, so many setbacks.

  She leaned forward and put her hand on her mother’s shoulder. “Mum? Are you awake?”

  Emily shrugged the hand off her shoulder and Hazel withdrew it into mid-air.

  “Don’t be upset with me. What did you expect me to do? Let you die in bed?”

  Silence. Hazel let her have it. She slumped back in the chair and waited. “I don’t want you to die,” she said, almost under her breath. “I could take … twenty more years of your mulishness, your forked tongue, your shitty cooking, your game shows, your wattled friends … I could take a lot more of it, Mother. All you have to do is sign on. Gary says the myeloma will move so slowly you could live to a hundred with it.”