by Lisa Gardner
We called it Liberation. An ongoing campaign to get our lives back. My mother gave away clothes that were never really her. I painted my childhood bedroom butter yellow and resolved to be more appreciative of everyday beauty.
Let’s just say my mother is doing better with the campaign than me.
When I reappear, she has heaped the muffins on a plate in the middle of the rolling butcher block piece that serves both as my kitchen-prep island and sole dining table. She has also poured two glasses of orange juice and cut up fresh fruit. Given my refrigerator held mostly bottles of water and cartons of stale takeout, she went to the corner store while I was showering.
Which, of course, compels me to turn around and check the front door locks. I snap the bolts home. When I return to her, I know my expression is disapproving, but I can’t help myself.
“Muffin?” she says cheerfully, gesturing to the plate.
I take one. Suddenly, I’m famished. I eat two muffins, then devour half the bowl of fruit. My mother doesn’t say anything, but picks at her own food. She probably ate hours ago. Waiting for me. Worrying about me.
Now, she’s working on playing it cool.
“Samuel says you killed a man,” she says at last, waiting game obviously up.
I pick up my plate, carry it to the tiny sink. “Self-defense. I won’t face any charges.”
“You think that’s what scares me?”
She’s standing right beside me, and despite her best attempts at deep-breathing exercises, I can tell she’s agitated.
It hurts me. It does. I don’t know how to be her little girl anymore. I don’t know how to turn back the clock and undo what was done. I can’t feel what I can’t feel. I can’t be what I can’t be.
But it pains me, this look on her face, this worry in her eyes. It kills me to know that the person I am now hurts the mother who’s never done anything but love me.
“I didn’t plan on what happened,” I hear myself say. “But I was prepared. And I handled the situation. This guy, he’s hurt other girls, Mom. But not anymore. He’s done.”
“I don’t care about other girls,” she says. “I care about you.”
She hugs me then, hard and fierce. The way I know she’s always hugged me. And I force myself to stand there. To not flinch, to not go rigid. To remind myself these arms are my mother’s arms. Her hair smells like my memories of my mother’s hair. This is the woman who tucked me in at night, and read me stories, and offered me warm milk when I couldn’t sleep, and made me cinnamon toast when I was sick. A million tiny moments.
But it’s all detached now. This is what I can’t tell her, can never completely explain. The memories don’t feel like mine. All of this, all of what was, feels like something that happened to someone else, home movies from somebody else’s life.
Jacob Ness wanted a completely compliant companion. So he broke me down, physically, emotionally, spiritually. Then, when I was nothing, just a raw, helpless mound of human clay, he remolded me into being exactly who he wanted me to be. He became my world, my center, my guiding star.
And then . . . That last day. Those final few moments.
The story I told once and will never repeat.
He’s gone now.
And I am lost. Forever untethered. Until my mother’s hug feels like the comfort of a stranger.
My own brother ran away from the person I’ve become. But my mom is more stubborn.
“You can come back home,” she says now, an old argument. Fosters dependency. She knows it, and hastily adds, “Just for a visit. A few days. We could make a girls’ weekend out of it.”
“I’m fine.”
“Going out alone to a bar on a Friday night?”
“I can take care of myself. Isn’t that the point?”
She draws back. She can’t talk to me when I’m in this mood, and she knows it. Again, the worry on her face, which I feel as a fist in my chest.
“Flora.”
“I know you don’t like my choices,” I hear myself say, “but they’re my choices to make.”
A winning argument in my mother’s world, and she knows it. I watch her inhale deeply. Exhale slowly.
“If you won’t come home this weekend,” she says presently, “then tell me when.”
I accept her compromise. We pick a date, two weeks from now. I need to rest now, I tell her, but she’s welcome to stay.
She shakes her head, though. A city apartment is no place for a Maine farmer. She prepares to leave, driving back another three and a half hours. A seven-hour round-trip to spend one hour with her daughter.
These are the things mothers do, she tells me as I watch her turn and walk downstairs.
When she’s gone from sight, I close my front door. I work my locks. I turn back to my sunny, charming, battle-scarred apartment.
And I do exactly what I told my mother I would do. I head to bed.
* * *
I SLEEP. I don’t always. Usually slumber comes fitfully for me. But now, fresh off my most recent kill . . .
I sleep like the dead.
When I wake up, the sun is gone, my room is dark, and I know immediately that I’m not alone. I can feel a draft against my cheek, the muted hush of an intruder’s shuffling footstep.
Then, from just outside my open bedroom door. A shadow, dark and menacing. I open my mouth to say, who’s there?
Except, of course, I already know.
The world is filled with monsters.
I need to move, leap out of bed, assume the defensive.
Instead, I make the mistake of inhaling.
Then, all I hear is the distant sound of laughter, right before the world goes dark again.
Chapter 12
THE HARDEST PART ABOUT BEING HELD CAPTIVE? You’d think it would be the starvation, punishment, degradation. The unbearable thirst for water, maybe. Or the relentless pain of a pine box pressing against your shoulder blades, flattening the back of your head.
Or perhaps the moment you realize you don’t know how long you’ve been gone anymore. The minutes, hours, days have become a blur, and you can’t remember now . . . Has it been a week, two, three? Is it still spring, or is it now summer? And what about Easter? Did Easter happen while you were gone? The annual brunch at your mother’s house? Did your brother eat your chocolate bunny?
You try to hang on to these thoughts because they connect you to a larger world, some piece of reality where you’re still a real person with a real life.
But the truth is, these moments are hard to remember, so inevitably you let them go. You think less and less of home and the person you used to be and the person you’ll never be again. You just are.
You’re bored.
Which becomes the toughest burden to bear. There’s no friendly conversation or polite chitchat. No places to go. No people to see. There’s no TV to entertain you with mindless blather, or a radio to engage you with a catchy song, or a smartphone to entice you with an exciting new text.
You exist in a sensory-deprived void, where you hum just for the sake of having something to hear. Where you take turns counting by twos and threes and fives just so your mind has something to do. Where you gnaw on your fingertips just to have something to feel. But even this can only kill an hour or two a day.
You sleep. Too much. You don’t mean to. You understand you probably shouldn’t; it would be better to remain alert. But you’re tired, you’re weak, and you’re bored. Oh so bored! Sleeping becomes the only thing left for you.
I told myself stories. Children’s books I remembered from school. Bible stories from church. In the beginning, I whispered them out loud. But my mouth was so dry and parched, the words got stuck in my throat. So after a while, I played the stories like movies in my mind. Not fantasies of my rescue, or images of my family and friends—that would hurt too much. Just fables, legen
ds, fairy tales. Anything with a happy ending that would pass the time in my head.
But mostly, the stories put me back to sleep. So I would doze, on and off. Growing more and more disoriented, until at last, the sound of footsteps pounding down the stairs. A door squeaking open across the way. The rattle of the padlock, so wonderfully close to my ear. Then, at long last, the wooden lid would be lifted. He would appear.
And I would live again, saved from my boredom by the very man who’d put me there.
* * *
“TELL ME ABOUT YOUR FATHER,” he demanded one day. He lounged on the sofa in dirty underwear, alternating smoking a cigarette with taking long pulls from his beer.
I sat naked on the floor, where I was allowed to remain longer and longer after our various sessions. Of course, the pine box remained in full view. I would sneak glances at it from time to time, as if contemplating a scary mask or coiled serpent. The object of my abject terror. And yet, from this vantage point, nothing more than a cheap wooden coffin.
I didn’t answer right away. I was too engrossed in combing my fingers through the dirt-brown carpet, which turned out to be not one shade of shit brown but many.
He kicked my shoulder with his foot, demanding my attention. “Tell me about your father.”
“Why?”
“What the fuck, why? I asked. You answer.” Another kick, this time to the side of my head. His thick yellow toenails were long and ragged; one sliced my cheek.
I didn’t move away. By now, I knew it was pointless. Instead, I kept my gaze on the carpet. So many individual threads woven into one color pattern. Who would’ve thought? I wondered if it was difficult to make carpet. I wondered if I could pull out enough strands that it would be possible to choke myself with them.
“I don’t remember him,” I said at last.
“When’d he die?”
“I was a baby.”
“What happened?”
“An accident. His truck rolled.”
“What was his name?”
I dug my torn fingernails deeper into the matted carpet. I could feel dust and dirt and small rocks. The fibers were so short, too short, really, to serve as much of a death weapon. Pity. And yet I still couldn’t stop touching it. As far as entertainment went, dirt-brown carpet was as good as the room got.
I still didn’t know where I was. A basement, I thought, because the only windows were set up high, and it always sounded as if someone was descending a staircase right before he barreled through the door.
I didn’t think Florida had basements. Or not many. Did that mean I wasn’t in Florida anymore? Maine had basements. Maybe he’d brought me all the way back to Maine. I was just down the street from my mother. If I could summon the strength, the energy, the good fortune to crawl up out one of those high windows, I could walk back to my mother’s farm. And just like that, I’d be home again.
He kicked me again.
“Do you have a father?” I asked.
“’Course.”
“Do you remember his name?”
“Nah. Too busy calling him Dickhead to learn the real thing. He was a trucker, though. Like me.”
“You’re a trucker?” I couldn’t help myself; I looked up in wonder, the discovery of personal information finally pulling my attention from the filthy floor.
He caught the look on my face and laughed. “Well, shit, what’d you think I did in my spare time? Gotta work. Love nests don’t come free.”
“Are we still in Florida?” I asked. “Is it still spring break?”
He just laughed again, took another pull of beer. “Gonna take off soon,” he offered conversationally. “Big job this time. Could be gone as long as a week.”
The look he gave me was calculating. But I didn’t consider that. I was too busy feeling the blood drain from my face. A week? Seven whole days? All alone in the box? My brain shut down. My bloody fingertips dug painfully into the carpet. A week?
“Molly,” he said. He wasn’t smoking anymore. Instead, the burning cigarette dangled from his fingers as he stared at me.
“What?”
“Your name is Molly. What’s your name?”
I opened my mouth. I closed my mouth. I honestly didn’t get it. Every muscle and bone in my body hurt. I wanted to escape the pain by going to sleep. Except I couldn’t sleep. Because he was here, and I was out of the box, and the carpet contained half a dozen shades of shit brown, and this was as close to an experience as I was gonna get. Better than movies or video games or texting. The feel of grimy carpet beneath my fingertips. A real adventure park.
“What’s your name?” he commanded again.
“Um. Molly?”
“Not like that. It’s an answer, not a question. Come on now—what’s your damn name?”
“Molly,” I stated with more conviction, starting to catch on. So he wanted to call me Molly. Whatever. Molly, frankly, was hardly the worst thing that had happened to me.
“Now. Your father’s name?”
I paused. And for just one second . . .
It’s Sunday afternoon. I’m all dressed up. I’m standing at my father’s grave, holding my mother’s hand while she cries silently, my brother standing stoically on her other side.
“He loved you kids,” my mother is saying, fingers tight around mine. “He would be so proud . . .”
And just like that, I couldn’t say the name. I could picture it engraved on the black granite marker, but I couldn’t give it up. My daddy was nothing but a legend, a myth once told by my mother to me. But he was mine, and I had so little left.
The man kicked me again, back of the neck. I whispered:
“Edgar.”
In response he slammed his foot against me harder, this time catching my ear. “Liar.”
“I’m not—”
“Fucking idiot.” He waved his cigarette at me. I watched the glowing end nervously. I knew what it could do. “Your father’s name. I mean it!”
“Edgar,” I murmured again.
“Fucking liar!” he roared as he came off the sofa. “Name, name, name, give me the fucking name!”
“Molly, Molly, Molly,” I tried.
He whacked me on either side of the head as I cowered with my face against the carpet. I thought, frantically, crazily, I should pull out some of those brown threads. Grab them between my fingers and twist. I could tuck them behind my ears, take them with me back into the box. Oh, the hours of entertainment ahead.
“Give me his fucking name!” the man was still screaming at me. “Last chance, girl! Or I walk out that door, and you’ll never see me again. Hell, you’ll never see anyone again. You’re gone, don’t you get it? You’re just another stupid drunk girl who disappeared on spring break. Think anyone knows where you are? Think anyone cares?”
My mother, I thought. But I didn’t say anything. I kept her to myself. Just like my father’s name, and my brother’s face.
“I’ll stick you back in that box,” he was threatening now. “I’ll lock the lid and that’ll be that. You’ll die down here. Rot away. Become just another stench in this room. And no one will ever know. Your family will never see you again. Never even identify your body.”
I was crying. He hit me harder. But it wasn’t the beating that had me undone. It was the thought of him locking me in the box and then taking off. Of me dying all alone in a coffin-size box.
Like my father rotting away beneath the earth.
When I was a little girl, I used to think my father could see everything. Like Santa Claus, or God, I suppose. My father wasn’t a real dad at all but an all-knowing ghost, and I would look for him in the sunlight dappling through trees, in the shadows of the deep woods.
“Daddy,” I would whisper. And always, always, always, I knew he was there. Because, according to my mother, my father had always loved the forest.
“Ernesto,” I whispered.
But the man was now too busy beating me furiously to hear.
I curled up tighter against the dirt-brown carpet. “Edgar,” I shouted suddenly. “Evan. Ernesto. Eli. Earl.” I made them up, quickly, frantically. Another game to pass the time. Names that begin with E.
Yelling the names again and again. Because the shit-brown carpet was composed of so many threads, and so was I, and I couldn’t afford to give anything more away. There was too little of me left, and my father’s name was part of that. A highly polished granite marker in the ground. A small but precious memory.
Eventually, the man wore himself out. He stopped beating and kicking, falling to the floor instead. He lay beside me, breath ragged from his exertions. We remained side by side in silence.
“Damn shame,” he said shortly.
I didn’t respond.
“I mean, considerin’ how nice I was planning on being and all. I mean, hell, taking you with me.”
I couldn’t help myself. I stirred, shifting slightly against the grimy floor.
“A week in a big rig. Maybe it’s not for everyone. I mean, I would definitely have to take the box, being your first outing at all. But still. You’d be on the road. Maybe I could let you out at night. You know, versus seven days shut up alone here. Maybe even eight, nine, ten days. A delivery takes as long as it takes. Man’s gotta do his job.”
“Water?” I couldn’t help myself. Seven days alone was terrifying enough, but a possible ten days without water? I’d never paid enough attention in science classes, but I was pretty sure no one could survive that long.
“All the more reason to join me on the road,” he informed me. “All the more reason to give me a name.”
I lifted my head at last. I stared at him. His hard-lined face. His unshaved cheeks, his crooked tobacco-stained teeth. He was ugly and awful. He was powerful and divine, even more so than a ghost dad in the woods.
And I knew then, just as he no doubt knew all along, what I was going to say next.
“Everett. Everett Robert Dane.”