“Mom. Look at me. Mom, I’m fine. Nothing’s broken. Nothing hurts. See?” I needed to get out of this room before she had me walking her through it all. “I just want a shower,” I said. “And a nap.”
I handed her my hospital forms, knew she’d spend an hour looking over everything, researching the hospital coding on her own, reading up on potential head injuries—an outlet for the fear. But she didn’t, at first. She stared at me, picking me apart, her hand brushing over the chemical burn scars on the back of her shoulder again. I grabbed her hand to get her to stop.
She has no memory of her abduction, just the fear that came with her when she left. Taken from her home just outside Atlanta, Georgia, in the spring of her junior year of high school, she escaped from wherever she was held more than a year later, with no memory of her time there.
An entire year. Gone.
Sometimes I’d catch her staring at me, like she was trying to see something more. Pick me apart, like she could read the fabric of my existence.
Nobody knew anything about the man who had held her. Well, that’s not entirely true. We knew some things. We knew he was most likely white, with brown eyes, and taller than average.
This was what I could deduce from the fact that my mother had blue eyes and I did not. And from the fact that I was paler than her, even though I spent a lot of time out in the sun in the backyard. And I already towered over her. Maybe he had freckles, too.
So. There were some things we knew.
Subtract the half of me that was her, and what was left?
“Don’t tell me it’s not that bad,” she said. She put her hand to her mouth, shook her head, pulled me toward her. “I don’t know what I’d do,” she said, hugging me for eternity. “The car is gone. It could’ve been—”
“I’m safe,” I said, my chest constricting.
—
Back in my room, down the opposite hall, I tried to take comfort in the four walls, and the bed, neatly made. The mountains out the window, which used to keep us safe.
The car was gone, my mother said—it fell. It fell, and it was gone, like I would have fallen, like I would’ve been gone, had Ryan not pulled me out.
I peeled off my clothes, and I stood in the shower, bracing myself against the wall, and I began to cry.
I remembered how peaceful it had been, the emptiness. The quiet of the unthinking mind, at rest. Listening to someone else’s words, and believing them, before I became myself again. Before my mind started working overtime, beginning the vicious cycle. I latched on to fears, the beautiful familiarity of them. And they crawled like spiders across my skin, until the only solution was to give myself over to them, in stillness.
And now here I was, revisiting the fall, as I would be all night, relentless and unstoppable.
Maybe it was ingrained in my DNA, and I had no hope of overcoming these moments, and everything Jan said was pointless. Maybe I learned it from my mother, the way we locked our doors, remained behind walls, constantly demanding confirmation of our safety. Maybe it was her fault I’d be up all night, staring at this wall.
Not like Ryan, who I imagined going out with friends, celebrating his daring survival with underage drinking, and Holly and other girls draping themselves over him, calling him a hero, and him being all It was nothing. Just some trigonometry. A little muscle, that’s all.
And me, staring at the empty wall, like it was the darkness over the edge of the cliff. Just me and my breathing, replaying it over and over, seeing how close we’d come—one missed grip, one second of slipped concentration. The crease across the skin of my fingers, throbbing and raw.
The thought would circle and dig and circle some more, until I felt empty without it.
How close we’d come.
How close to gone.
I stayed home from school the next day, which wasn’t my mom’s idea, exactly, but I didn’t get out of bed Thursday morning, and she didn’t ask me to. We had to wait for the insurance money before replacing the car, and Jan was looking into the bus situation—but in the meantime, nobody mentioned anything about me and school. It seemed to be an agreed-upon decision, especially since I didn’t have a new phone yet, which meant Mom couldn’t track me if she wanted to.
I wondered if anyone had recovered my phone, my bag, my key ring with the purple clip that I’d hook through my belt loop for safekeeping. If it was all still at the bottom of the cliff, inside the car, wedged between crushed metal and deflated air bags.
I dreamed the same thing whether I was sleeping or awake—an endless fall, with no bottom. The car too slick, or my fingers too slow, and the air rushing up as I plummeted into darkness.
I’d just read a short story for English about a man sentenced to death by hanging over a bridge, and as he fell, the rope broke, and he escaped—falling into the river, swimming to evade capture, making his way home—only to feel the noose tighten when he finally arrived. The whole escape a fabrication of his mind. A slow and inevitable demise. That whole time, he’d just been falling in slow motion.
I sat in the dim light of my room and stared at my fingers, at the red line and the swollen skin, like proof.
I wasn’t falling. I’d held on. I’d made it home.
I was in my bed, surrounded by my four walls, with the sound of my mom banging pots and pans around in the kitchen, which was yet another stress-relief strategy via Jan. And one of my least favorites. She’d serve up casseroles big enough for eight people, and we’d have to eat them for an entire week, and she’d apologize, knowing it was terrible, but eating it anyway.
To be fair, cooking did tend to relax her—keeping her hands busy, her mind occupied with a list of ingredients, a simple task to focus on. If it worked, if she broke free of whatever was haunting her, she’d eventually cave and let me order pizza or Chinese for delivery.
This was not one of those times.
For two days, she called me out for meals—the casserole crisp where it should be soft, soggy where it should be crisp—and I slunk back to my room after. She didn’t argue. I wondered, if I went to her office, if I’d find the pictures from the accident up on the computer screen. Or if this time it would be something worse.
She had a bad habit of seeking them out, robberies and kidnappings, missing children and acts of violence. Even before her kidnapping, her life had been a struggle. It must’ve been so easy for her to only see the dangers. This was something I didn’t tell Jan about. I didn’t know if it was making her worse—more fearful of the world beyond our walls—or whether it might help. If it reminded her: she had escaped, when so many did not.
I stared at my fingers again. I had lived. And so had she.
—
Mom knocked on the bedroom door as I was waking on what I thought was Saturday morning, but when I checked the clock, it was already after noon. “Jan’s here,” she said. Code: Get out of bed. Look alive.
It was a big deal if Jan was here for a session on a weekend. Her husband worked as some sort of consultant and traveled during the week, so they tried to keep weekends free, for family time. If Jan was here on a weekend, there must’ve been a reason, and that made me nervous.
The last few days had blurred together—I’d been in the same pajamas for at least a day and a half. I opened the windows to air out the room, but left the outside metal window grate closed. I had a key so I could swing the bars open, also for safety reasons (in the event of a fire), but for now the locked bars were what I needed. I changed out of my pajamas and splashed water on my face.