The cuffs, he was fairly certain, didn’t even touch the floor.
He flipped over and felt them. He ran his right hand over them. He didn’t bother touching them with his left. The pain from his missing fingers radiated out and throbbed with his pulse; he doubted he would be able to feel anything less defined than a railroad spike. The small details of the plastic cuffs? Forget it.
The fingers of his right hand raced around the plastic. He could picture the cuffs in his mind: white. Tiny ridges along their exterior. Both loops meeting in the middle. Threaded through a pair of holes in the head. The holes would have a locking mechanism inside that allowed for the captors – Aaron, Elijah, and Theresa – to close the cuffs. The locking mechanism only worked one way, a stiff piece of plastic inside it catching on the ridges that ran along the cuffs and allowing them to tighten but not loosen. That meant that ordinarily the cuffs would have to be cut off, unless –
The phantom cries of his daughters had made it hard for Ken to concentrate. Now they disappeared. Everything disappeared. There was only the darkness, thick and nearly impenetrable.
The darkness was the thing that was keeping him captive. The only thing.
He turned to his stomach again, and began to crawl.
10
Crawling with bound feet in the dark.
Not the way Ken wanted to be spending his minutes. But he had no choice. He had to be on his stomach, hands outstretched, waving back and forth as he moved forward.
His Doc Martens had thick rubber soles – the only reason Coach Picarelli hadn’t made a meal of his feet back at the high school – but they couldn’t get purchase. Not with him pushing inch by inch with his toes. The leather tops of his shoes just slid across the steel floor of the boxcar, and he ended up inchworming his way across the space.
His hands moved like wiper blades, back and forth, back and forth. After a moment he squeezed his eyes shut as well. It was already pitch black, but he felt oppressed by the darkness. It weighed on him. He had heard that losing your sight resulted in increased acuity to your other senses, but this prison-darkness just numbed him. Depressed him. Closed eyes had to be better. Self-imposed blindness better than the black of imprisonment by a friend.
Eyes closed, feet bound, he scrunched and then lengthened, folded then telescoped.
Maggie would laugh if she could see me.
He thought of his wife’s ridiculous laugh, that high, breathy gasp of a laugh that had always enchanted him. It almost brightened the darkness behind his eyes.
Only she wouldn’t laugh. Because she has to know the kids are in danger. And she’s terrified.
If she’s not already dead.
Fold, then extend. Fold, then extend.
His fingers crashed into something. The end of the boxcar. And all he had felt was bare floor.
Panic started to rise in the back of his throat, his heart pounding with more than the exertion of this perhaps pointless exercise.
You don’t even know if this will work.
It has to work.
Despair was so easy.
And the easy way is so rarely the right way.
Wasn’t that what he had always told his students? A million years ago, an age ago, when the world had made sense and kids had come to him with their decisions to give in to boyfriends who wanted to have sex with them or peers who wanted them to do drugs or any of a thousand other problems that teachers were not paid to deal with but so often did.
Had he meant it? Not just for them, but for himself?
He rolled over, and kicked himself around a hundred and eighty degrees. Hard to tell in the darkness, but he thought he was facing the opposite direction, angled slightly so he wouldn’t just retrace his path.
He inched forward. Hands wiping back and forth. Back and forth.
The right way is rarely the easy way. The easy way is rarely the right way. Right rarely easy, easy rarely right.
His left hand touched something.
Three fingers curled around it. Pain as they did, but Ken smiled. Tears fell from his eyes. He wiped them away.
No time to cry. Crying was easy.
And easy was rarely right.
11
For a second Ken worried that what he felt wasn’t what he wanted. Worried that it was something else entirely. Or worse, that it was a piece of what he wanted, but the wrong piece.
He gagged down panic. Reminded himself that his left hand had questionable sensory abilities. Traced it with his good hand. Two bent curls of plastic. A shattered nub in the middle of one of them.
The remains of the cuffs that had bound his wrists.
He tried not to get excited. Too many things had gone wrong, too many moments had seemed promising only to turn into situations even worse than the ones that had gone before.
The screams came back.
The train twitched again. What was happening out there?