I was collateral.
Eli taking my pictures, following me. A warning: We know who she is. We are watching her. A threat.
And my mother, where was she in all of this? If they were taking pictures of me, they knew where to reach her.
Because they had her. “Mom,” I whispered.
I went back to Jan’s office. Tore through that box again. Sat between a heap of papers and reports, trying to find her. Digging deeper, growing more frustrated, my breath coming in short pulls. It took a moment to realize I’d been crying.
“You’re going to wake everyone up.” Cole stood in the doorway, eyes roaming over the mess I’d made.
“Oh.” I looked around the room. Wiped my eyes with the back of my arm. “Shit,” I said.
He laughed. “Looking for something in particular?” he asked.
“They think she was never kidnapped,” I said, begging him to argue.
But he didn’t. “Is that what you think?”
What did I really know? The police painted one picture; my mother, another. “She was seventeen, and she had a terrible home life, and she wanted to escape, it’s true. But she also taught me how to escape being captured. She was obsessed. She…” I looked up at Cole. “She had to have been held. She was held against her will, with spiders she could not escape.”
He shrugged, and it almost made me smile. “Okay, so it doesn’t matter then, the stories they tell. You know.” As if it really was that simple. And maybe it was. “You want some company down here?”
“No thanks,” I said, actually smiling now. “Hey, Cole?”
He turned at the doorway.
“I was wrong about you,” I said.
He smiled, and it was sad. “Yeah, well, I was wrong about you, too.”
He left me with the heap of papers, and I started cleaning up after myself when I found it—that study on fear.
I read through it once more, wondering: What was truly buried inside of me? A fear so deep, it was the iron gates, and I was the ivy that grew around it. I did not exist without its foundation. It was the place from which I grew.
The scent of harsh chemicals as she lay tied up in a basement, with spiders crawling over her skin. A scream that nobody could hear. A life that, a year later, and before she escaped on her own, was reduced to nothing more than an article buried at the back of a newspaper.
The fear: that we could disappear, and nobody would find us.
And wasn’t that what I was afraid of, too? That nobody knew I lived behind the bars. Nobody saw me. I faded to nothing in the halls. I could be taken, and who would’ve missed me? Who would’ve noticed? I’d have to fight my way back, because nobody else would do it for me.
Nobody else would do this for my mother, either.
—
I lay on the couch, the springs of the thin mattress digging into my back, imagining all the places she could be. Hidden, taken, hurt, buried. Too many possibilities, out in the vastness.
I sent Ryan a text instead of calling, because it was the middle of the night and I didn’t want to wake him: How many missing people are never found?
My phone rang immediately, and I answered it before anyone else could hear, pulled the sheets up over my head, carving out a piece of the world with just the two of us.
“Want me to come over?” he asked.
“I can’t sneak you in. There’s not even a door to my room.”
“That wasn’t a no, I’m realizing.”
I smiled in the darkness. “Good night, Ryan. Sorry I woke you.”
“Swear to God, I can be there in five minutes flat. Just say the word.”
I laughed under the sheets, the words spilling out. “Oh God, I love you.” And then I choked on my tongue. Figuratively. Metaphorically. Died, either way.
I pushed myself to sitting. “Oh God oh God oh God. I didn’t mean to say that.”
“Oh. Okay, I guess you can take it back, but that would hurt.”
“I mean, I didn’t mean to say it on the phone. Just blurt it out like that.” Seriously, Kelsey? Seriously? “This is one of those things, isn’t it? That scares people off? That makes people hang up the phone and pretend it was a bad connection. Oh God, did you already hang up?”
“Kelsey, it’s okay. I hung upside down in your car. I was trapped in your basement. Words aren’t going to scare me off.”
I paused, tried not to die of embarrassment. “Okay.”
“It’s three a.m., these things happen.”
“Misguided declarations of love?”
“Honesty. And honestly, I’d tell you the same, but I’d prefer to do it when you’re not having one of the worst days of your life, and I want to say it to your face, with you standing in my room. Wouldn’t hurt if you were in my clothes again. I’m saving myself.”
The silence stretched between us, filling itself with promises.
“I mean it, then,” I said. “I don’t take it back.”
“I mean it, too.”
“But you didn’t say it.”
“But I will.”
—
“Is that Ryan Baker’s car?” Emma asked as Cole handed me his keys.
I waved from the driveway. Ryan’s arm was hanging out the window, and he waved back. “Morning, Kelsey. Emma.” After a pause, “Cole.”
“Seriously?” Cole asked. “He’s going to escort you to school? This is ridiculous.”
Emma tossed her bag into the backseat. “I’d think it was romantic if he hadn’t ditched my friend for her.”
But it wasn’t romantic. It was terrifying. Because Ryan thought something could possibly happen between here and school. Because he didn’t trust that Eli wasn’t still out there, watching. He didn’t believe the police line, either. He felt the danger everywhere.
We were, all of us, trapped in my mother’s world.
Cole turned to face me. “You’re going to tell me why he’s doing this, right?”
I pulled out my phone, showed him a picture of Eli. “Ever seen him before?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“If you do, you should call the police, okay?”
Cole’s jaw was set, and Emma was watching us closely from the other side of the car, just out of earshot.
“Please, Cole. Just promise me you’ll call.”
“Should we be worried?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
Emma groaned from the other side of the car. “How long will you be staying with us again?”
I didn’t know. We were supposed to talk this weekend. What happened to seventeen-year-olds with missing parents? Who had no other living family? Where the people who housed her did not want her to stay?
Were they the ones ultimately taken, or hidden, or kidnapped? Were they the ones lured away, because there was nothing worth staying for? I shivered in the breeze.
Cole peered over his shoulder. “Your boyfriend doesn’t like me,” he said.
I shrugged.
He got in the car.
—
It was becoming a new sort of typical day, a routine, a cycle that I worried we would never break.
Another day to and from school with Emma and Cole, Ryan following behind.
Another day with no other news of my mother.
Another day of me looking over my shoulder, scared to walk to the bathroom alone, terrified of what lay outside the walls that held me.
I was becoming like her. Like my mother. Step by step, little by little, the fear was chipping away. And I couldn’t break free. None of us could.
This was never going to stop. Did I have to depend on Ryan escorting me to and from school? And keep Jan and Cole and Emma in constant danger?
It was the same thing I felt hanging from the car, and being trapped in my basement. I felt it starting up then, and it had never stopped. I had only been prolonging the inevitable.
I had to be ready. Something was still coming. We were in the middle of it, still. Hanging, slipping, falling in slow motion.
Friday. Another day, same routine.
“Oh look, it’s your shadow,” Emma said, tossing her bag into the backseat again.