“I’ve done everything for you,” he says. We’ve reached the top of the stairs and he yanks me forward. “Since we were kids, I’ve taken care of you. And now you just want to leave me?” Each word lashes from his mouth, and he doesn’t sound like himself.
I hear the quick unlatching of a lock and a door swinging open. I know where I am, in the hall just down from his bedroom. This is the closet—the one he keeps locked for reasons I’ve never understood. He releases his hold on my arm, and I feel the white-hot pain of circulation rushing back down to my fingertips. Then… he shoves me inside the closet. I stumble and reach out to brace myself for whatever is in front of me, but my forehead slams into a sharp wood corner. Blood seeps into my eyes.
And for the first time, I think: Maybe he’s going to kill me.
I touch my forehead, feeling the sticky warmth on my fingertips, and it smells like metal.
“I won’t let you leave me,” Levi says now, his voice softened slightly, as if I should understand. “I won’t let you take my baby.”
My jaw quivers; the warmth of blood runs down my legs where they scraped open against the stairs, and along my temple, makes me dizzy. “Levi, please,” I say, but the door slams shut and the lock slides into place from the outside.
I am in a closet, caged.
His footsteps move away down the hall, followed by the thud of his heavy boots on the stairs.
* * *
My palms slide along the closet walls, locating the shelves, the line of coats hung from metal hangers, this narrow space where I am now confined.
I find the door, but there’s no knob on this side, only a smooth wood surface. I lean my shoulder against it with all my weight, but it doesn’t move. Not even an inch.
I hear the bang of the back door and I know Levi has left the house.
My knees burn where he dragged me up the stairs. My head throbs, and I press my hands against the door, willing it to open—but I’m starting to realize, there’s no way out of here until Levi unlocks it from the other side.
I sink to the floor, drawing my legs up to my chest—my heart beating too fast, the air sick with the stench of fresh blood. I think of all the times I slept folded in Levi’s arms, the times he kissed me on the forehead as the warmth of dawn crept through the curtains of his bedroom window. How I trusted him. How I imagined us walking through the community together as the years wore on, our hair turned white-gray, but our hands always folded together.
But now I see: These were the imaginings of a teenage girl, a girl who fell in love with Levi in a meadow buzzing with fattened honeybees, wildflower fluff drifting lazily through the warm breeze, cool blades of grass poking up between my toes. I fell in love with him easily, and now I have allowed him to break me.
I am a stupid woman. Believing in stupid, impossible things.
I press my palms over my eyes and squeeze, making everything even darker. A black so black it feels like I’m tumbling forward through the floor of the closet. I dig my fingers through my long hair, catching on the knots, pulling them free. My mind feels like a bruise that will never heal.
The blood at my shins and temple has started to set, no longer rushing, but clotting over—becoming scabs. The body heals quickly, an efficient machine, but the heart is worthless at such things. It burns long after the hurt has worn away.
I drop my hands and blink up at the pitch-black closet, but the darkness has melted slightly. Bled into the background. Shadows take shape, as though I am waking from a dream and trying to orient the familiar objects in a room.
The wool jacket hanging above me.
The pair of blue overalls, stained muddy at the knees.
The wood shelf at the back.
These things come into focus as if looking through pond water.
I blink several times, trying to settle my gaze on the pair of overalls above me, but my vision turns grainy whenever I focus on any part of it for too long: the hem of the legs, the two silver buttons on the chest, the metal hanger it’s draped from.
And yet, I can see overalls.
Not clearly, but they’re there.
With aching legs and a throbbing head, I push myself up from the floor and touch the heavy jean fabric, pressing it between my thumb and forefinger, to be sure it’s real. Not just a cruel trick of the dark.
I release the leg of the overalls and scan the small, square room.
The more I blink, the more things become clear. As if whatever clouded my eyes is being washed away from my retinas. I reach my hands out to the shelf where I hit my head when Levi pushed me in, I feel the sharp corner, and my forehead throbs with the memory, the impact.
My body is bruised and bloodied and sore, but my eyes are beginning to see, so I push away the pain.
On the shelf are rows of books.
My fingertips slide across the spines, some thin and hardly measurable, others are thick with indented lettering. I haven’t read a book since I was a teenager, since before I lost my sight.
I bring my face closer to the books, making out the letters: letters that form words that form titles. My brain is slow to recall the formation of these symbols, how they become sentences that tell an entire story—a narrative. For so long, I’ve absorbed information through the sounds of the trees and the direction of the wind and the unique exhale from someone’s lungs.
Now, my mind is trying to sort through these stamped letters and deduce their meaning.
Their titles:
How to Govern a People by E. S. Warren
A Return to Simple Living and Native Farming by Allison Carmichael
The Art of War by Sun Tzu
Mastery of Magic and Ancient Card Tricks by Bert Ferny