The Captive

by Fiona King Foster

  IN THE AFTERNOON, they came to an old paved road running south-southwest. It could only be Highway 12, which meant they had drifted too far east and hit the road sooner than Brooke had meant to.

  “Let’s stay in the bush,” she called to Milo, even as the girls were crying out in triumph, running onto the pavement.

  “That’s crazy,” Milo said, bending forward to relieve the weight of his backpack. “The road is faster. We need to get to Buffalo Cross. We’re running out of food.”

  “If they don’t find us at the farm, they could be going back south, traveling this road.”

  “They who, Brooke?” Milo asked, exasperated.

  “Yeah,” Cawley mumbled. “They who?” He was leaning against a guardrail post at the edge of the road.

  The girls were now a distance ahead, Holly’s red scarf swinging with her skipping steps.

  “All right, the road,” Brooke said. “But catch up with the girls. They’re too far away.”

  “Brooke, I know you’re stressed,” Milo said, straightening up. “Don’t forget Stephen was high when he told you there were more people coming. It’s possible you’re worried about nothing.”

  Milo moved off after the girls. Cawley was still leaning on the post, watching Brooke.

  “I’d be fucking worried if I was you.” He drew phlegm noisily back into his throat, coughed it into his mouth, and spat on the ground between them. Then he stood and hobbled on.

  THE HIGHWAY SURFACE was in decent repair. Brooke spared a grateful thought for the long-ago road crew that had blasted a smooth passage through these hills. After the woods, their progress felt like flying, even at Cawley’s limping pace. They passed half a dozen homes, all abandoned, the lawns armpit-deep in grass and weeds. Most people preferred the security of towns now, unless, like Brooke, they had some reason to seek solitude.

  The sky stayed clear, a blue so deep it looked painted. Birds scattered from the trees ahead of them. Wind ruffled the branches. Brooke heard coyotes bark and cry in the distance, and knew they must still be some distance from Buffalo Cross; coyotes would hunt in the daytime only if there were no humans living nearby.

  They walked the highway until dusk with no sign of Buffalo Cross. Brooke resisted the temptation to push on; arriving in a new town at night was unwise. They followed an overgrown driveway to a gravel pad where there must once have been a mobile home. It was gone, carried off by whoever had lived here; only the porch stoop with its iron railing remained, and a garage built of cinder blocks with a poured concrete floor.

  When Brooke pried the garage door open, she found it dry inside. Now she faced a dilemma: keep Cawley closer to them than she’d yet allowed—the garage was a standard twenty-four feet to a side—or tie him outdoors, in which case she’d have to stay out all night too, to watch him. She thought she could manage the lack of sleep, but it was cold, and she’d eaten almost nothing, saving the food for Milo and the kids; she’d started shivering as soon as they stopped moving.

  “Tie him to that for now,” Brooke told Milo, gesturing at the steel track that ran along the inside of the automatic door.

  Once Cawley was secured, the girls came in and poked curiously through what the people who lived here had left behind.

  “Check it out.” Holly held up a small aluminum saucepan from a bin of odds and ends.

  “Tea,” mumbled Brooke, sitting down with the rifle in her lap. Hot, strong tea might take the edge off the hunger and fatigue that had been combining into a headache all afternoon. The building was far enough off the road that they could probably chance a fire.

  Holly opened Brooke’s backpack and pulled things out, studying each with the flashlight.

  “Sweet potato, cranberries. What’s this? Peanut butter? Oh, miso paste. Oats. There’s a recipe for savory oatmeal I could do, only we don’t have the walnuts and spinach. But at least it would be hot.”

  “That’s all our food,” Brooke said.

  “Brooke,” Milo said under his breath. “Let her.”

  “I wish I had my books.” Holly opened the miso paste to sniff it.

  Brooke was too tired to argue. She closed her eyes. She would open them again in a minute, to keep an eye on Cawley while Milo made a fire. She listened to him and the girls leaving the garage, gathering brush outside, talking. It was time to lift her eyelids, but they were so heavy.

  She heard a familiar melody. Outside, Milo was singing the girls a song they liked, a long-ago dance hit about breaking up. Brooke doubted Holly and Sal had ever heard the original song; they only knew Milo’s version, peppered with blank spots where he’d forgotten the lyrics. Brooke remembered the video. Robin had showed it to her: a young woman, thin arms overhead, shaking impossibly lavender hair.

  ROBIN HAD NEVER STOPPED going online every chance he got, pirating Wi-Fi from the exchange station or the hospital when they were in town. Brooke didn’t know what he used it for, but his facility had proved helpful. When, in defiance of their parents’ scorn, they bought the sweet-eyed foal Star—because it had become too cumbersome chainsawing through overgrown cottage roads to make way for a vehicle—neither of them knew how to ride, so Robin had found them an online tutorial.

  Brooke remembered sitting under the awning of the Shaw Station hospital with her brother, watching the Hollands’ aging laptop slowly buffer the riding video while Star grazed on a nearby median. Robin flipped to another window, and Brooke recognized his e-mail account. They’d all had them in school—the teachers had made them memorize their passwords. Brooke hadn’t thought about hers since. It probably still existed somewhere on the Internet, though there wouldn’t have been anything more in it than the first few childish messages she and her siblings had sent each other in class. (Hi! What’s new? This is cool! See you at home!)

  Robin’s inbox, on the other hand, was full.

  “Who’s writing to you?” Brooke asked.

  “People,” he said. He quickly scanned the list of messages, then switched back to the riding video.

  “What people?”

  “Just people.” He hit play on the video.

  “Robin,” Brooke said, reaching out to pause it. “What people?”

  It turned out Robin had been photographing the keepsakes he rescued from the cottages and posting them to an online list. Sometimes the buyers were the original owners, or claimed to be, but his biggest customer was a kitsch dealer who drove out monthly from the city to pick up entire lots. Brooke had noticed that the pile of curiosities in Robin’s closet had stopped expanding, but she’d assumed he was finally throwing some of it out.

  “What in the fuck is a kitsch dealer?” she asked.

  “She has a store. She loves anything from here. Especially if it’s old or unusual, or corny. Like anything with a saying on it. Mugs, hats, whatever. She calls them artifacts.”

  “Artifacts?”

  “I know, I know,” Robin blushed.

  Brooke was dumbfounded when Robin told her how much the kitsch dealer would pay for what was essentially garbage. He was making ten times more from porcelain Dalmatians and novelty hats than from salvage. It bothered Brooke that her brother was having regular contact with someone from the city—she hadn’t forgotten the way he’d fawned over the cottager with the toothpaste-colored car—still, she had to admit she was impressed. Maybe Robin hadn’t toughened up the way Edmund wanted him to, but maybe he didn’t need to; he’d found another way to survive.

  BROOKE WOKE UP in the dark, blinking her watery eyes. Milo and the girls were talking somewhere in the distance. She saw the flickering orange light of a fire through the garage door. They had let her sleep.

  She could just make out Cawley’s shape where he was tied to the steel track. He had been sitting before; now he was standing. What was he doing with his hands? He’d better not be pissing inside, Brooke thought foggily. They’d be stuck with the reek all night.

  Then her ears registered the grating sound: plastic against steel.

  She felt fo
r the rifle in her lap and struggled to her feet, listing with head rush.

  “Stop,” she said. Her mouth was still asleep and it came out barely audible.

  Cawley turned as she got within reach of him. He made a sudden movement, holding his arms up in front of his face and then bringing them down, fast, toward his body. It was a bald, brutal move: he was trying to break the lock of the zip tie with sheer force. Had he worn it some of the way through with friction on the steel door runner? Brooke couldn’t see.

  “Milo!” she called, but her voice was still stuck in her throat, too quiet.

  She couldn’t restrain Cawley and hold the gun at the same time. She checked that the rifle’s safety was on and moved the sling across her chest to the other shoulder. Hands free, she lunged for Cawley’s wrists. He jabbed forward with the knuckles of both hands and caught her in the nose, stunning her. She tasted blood in the back of her throat. At least she knew his wrists were still tied. His ankles, too: he was teetering to stay upright. Brooke grabbed the lead rope that connected him to the wall and tried to pull him down. Cawley fell back against the garage door with a crash but managed to stay upright. Again, he lifted his arms and brought them down fast. This time, Brooke heard the tie snap.

  His arms were free.

  He grabbed at her, trying to reach the gun. Brooke dodged. She shrugged out of the sling and caught the rifle by the barrel, swung hard, and hit him full in the jaw with the wooden stock. Cawley was knocked sideways and, tripped up by his bound ankles, landed hard on one elbow, shouting in pain. Brooke straddled him and tried to loop the lead rope around his wrists to replace the plastic tie. He thrashed from side to side, preventing her from getting a hold, and threw her off him. She kicked him in the injured knee, climbed onto him again, and this time passed the rope around his elbows. She looped and cinched it tight, hauling back against the elbow he’d smashed on the concrete floor.

  “Bitch,” he spat. “Lay the fuck off! I’ll tell them, I swear!”

  Only now did Brooke realize that she could see. The garage wasn’t dark anymore. A flashlight illuminated her and Cawley, casting their steep, garish shadows up against the wall.

  “Help her,” a tense voice said. Holly.

  Then Milo was next to Brooke, kneeling with a length of insulated wire from one of the piles near the door. He wrapped Cawley’s wrists tight with the wire, knotted and double-knotted it, and then got a new zip tie from Brooke’s bag.

  Milo’s fingers were shaking, Brooke noticed. She took the slim strip of plastic from him and held it around Cawley’s wrists, which were pink and raw from the bond he’d just broken. She fed the tapered end of the new tie into its mouth and locked it.

  “We heard the noise,” Milo said, still kneeling next to Brooke. “Are you hurt?”

  “I’m fine,” she said, wondering how long they’d been standing there, how much they’d seen. Brooke wiped blood from her upper lip.

  Both girls were plastered against the wall beams of the garage, wide-eyed.

  “Take your sister outside,” Brooke told Holly.

  “Right,” Holly said, pulling Sal by the sleeve. “Come, Salamander.”

  “What happened?” Milo asked.

  “He broke his zip tie,” Brooke said, eyeing the sharp edge of the door runner where Cawley must have managed to weaken the plastic. “We can’t keep him in here overnight. It’s too dangerous. He’ll have to sleep outside.”

  Milo didn’t move. He was staring at her. He looked almost frightened.

  “What?” She checked her nose with a sleeve. The bleeding had stopped. “What’s wrong?”

  “What did he mean? Who was he going to tell what?”

  “Please don’t ask me,” Brooke said, holding Milo’s gaze.

  “Brooke, you can trust me. Whatever it is. You know you can.”

  Milo had forgiven a lot, over the years. Harsh words, cruel silences, storms of anguish that she’d never explained. Once, when Brooke had been whimpering in her sleep, he’d taken hold of her shoulder to wake her and she’d punched him, hard, before she was properly awake. He’d never asked her to explain these things, and once the shadow passed, he never brought it up again. Every time she’d lashed out at him, or let a black mood overtake her, she had shrunk from the reprisal she was certain must come, and every time, his forgiveness had surprised her. It was as if he’d never learned to hold a grudge.

  But this would be too much. It had to be. She felt tears sting and blinked them back.

  “Please,” she said again. She gathered the rope and led Cawley outside.

  ONE NIGHT, when Brooke handed over her and Robin’s salvage earnings to Emily, her mother informed her that Anita needed help the next day. Callum couldn’t do it—Pauline was newly pregnant and he had to take her to a clinic near the border for an ultrasound.

  “Rob’s still stripping a place on Lake Clear,” Brooke said before Emily could suggest anything else for him. Robin was thirteen; his voice was just changing.

  Emily waved her hand, unconcerned. It wasn’t Robin she wanted.

  The next morning, Brooke joined her sister.

  A local dealer—a legal secretary in her former existence—was claiming for the second time to have been robbed, and had nothing to cover her debt.

  In the past month, Callum had brought in a partner, a soap factory near the border where the Hollands had sold glycerin for years. The factory owner had agreed to be a transfer point for bulk shipments to Callum’s new contacts in the city. In response, Frank Jr. and Delia were trying to consolidate their hold on the market in town, bringing in new and younger dealers, and terrorizing anyone who worked for the Hollands. Anita suspected the legal secretary of defecting.

  Brooke and Anita rolled up the woman’s driveway in Anita’s hatchback. Anita laid on the horn. The house was two stories, with pale gray vinyl siding. A woman in her early forties came out onto the lawn. Two children peeked out after her from behind a glass-covered screen door. The younger one was a toddler, Brooke saw, the older maybe eight.

  “Hold the door,” Anita told Brooke, nodding at the house.

  Brooke climbed the steps to open the door for the kids. She had her hand on the latch when she heard something behind her. It sounded like the air going out of a cushion.

  She turned. Anita had a length of pipe in one hand and the dealer was sprawled on the lawn. The woman was coughing, trying to speak. Anita raised the pipe and brought it down on her back. Brooke was too stunned to move until the latch jiggling in her hand and the squeak of a hinge beginning to open brought her back to her senses. She realized all at once what Anita had meant when she told Brooke to hold the door.

  Brooke tightened her grip on the latch and pushed the door closed. The children cried out, wild-eyed, the toddler sobbing with fear. Their hands pounded the glass, but Brooke held firm. Anita hit the woman again with the pipe, and again, and Brooke braced her leg against the porch railing, pushing with all her strength to stop the children from getting through the door to their mother.

  Brooke came home that day gray-faced and silent. The others treated her solicitously; when she pushed her dinner away, Emily said, “The first time’s never easy.” As if Brooke was the victim, and the beaten woman her affliction.

  That first night, when Brooke was so sick and bewildered, Robin told her about the calm place. He’d read about it online; he said it had been taught to kids in war zones, to help them cope with trauma.

  “I’m not a kid in a war zone,” Brooke said, affronted.

  “It can be anything,” he said. “Just close your eyes and picture a calm place.”

  Robin was looking at her expectantly, and she was tired, so Brooke closed her eyes. She pictured green woods, gray mist. After a moment, whether it was working or it was just a relief to have her eyes closed, she did feel a bit better. Something in her spine settled and released with a soft crack.

  After that, Brooke was appointed Anita’s right hand in the growing turf war with the Cawleys. She d
id what her family told her to do—she kicked in doors, shot locks, shouted down hallways. She blackened eyes. She cracked ribs. “Get Brooke,” they said, and Brooke came: she fixed; she erased. But the calm place protected her; she saw what she had to do through soft gray mist, each task a series of actions that did not connect to her or to her life. She could do it, and not feel it.

  The days passed. Robin was making money, so Edmund and Emily left him alone, and Brooke was satisfied. Some days were easy, even happy. Other days, she returned from the calm place and found her life so mean and ugly and sad that she was sure she could never belong anywhere decent; she would ruin whatever she touched.

  ONCE MILO HAD TIED Cawley’s lead rope to the front steps of the absent house and Brooke had made sure there was no rough edge he might use to break his bonds again, they joined the girls at the fire.

  Holly and Sal had been talking, but as their parents approached, they descended into a wary silence. Brooke saw a glance pass between them.

  “Sorry you had to see that,” Brooke said.

  “Why were you brushing our tracks when we left our campsite this morning?” Holly asked.

  Sal lifted a hand to rub the base of her thumb against her closed lips, a trick Milo had taught her when her adult teeth started coming in and she was too old to keep sucking it.

  “I don’t know,” Brooke said, straight-faced. “Just habit.”

  “Like how you don’t remember learning the thing with the landmarks?”

  “Let’s not give Mom the gears tonight, okay, Hol?” Milo said. “She needs a break.”

  But Milo didn’t argue when Brooke said she would take the watch again. He led the girls into the garage. Brooke stayed at the fire, adding wood to the embers and listening as her family settled down to sleep. The flashlight in the garage turned off, their voices continued quietly for a little longer, and then it was silent.

  Once or twice in the night, Brooke nodded off. Each time she woke, the darkness beyond the fire was quiet and still. Clouds advanced from the north, a soft blackness overtaking the stars one by one, winking them out.