“If you won’t come home this weekend,” she says presently, “then tell me when.”
I accept her compromise. We pick a date, two weeks from now. I need to rest now, I tell her, but she’s welcome to stay.
She shakes her head, though. A city apartment is no place for a Maine farmer. She prepares to leave, driving back another three and a half hours. A seven-hour round-trip to spend one hour with her daughter.
These are the things mothers do, she tells me as I watch her turn and walk downstairs.
When she’s gone from sight, I close my front door. I work my locks. I turn back to my sunny, charming, battle-scarred apartment.
And I do exactly what I told my mother I would do. I head to bed.
*
I SLEEP. I don’t always. Usually slumber comes fitfully for me. But now, fresh off my most recent kill . . .
I sleep like the dead.
When I wake up, the sun is gone, my room is dark, and I know immediately that I’m not alone. I can feel a draft against my cheek, the muted hush of an intruder’s shuffling footstep.
Then, from just outside my open bedroom door. A shadow, dark and menacing. I open my mouth to say, who’s there?
Except, of course, I already know.
The world is filled with monsters.
I need to move, leap out of bed, assume the defensive.
Instead, I make the mistake of inhaling.
Then, all I hear is the distant sound of laughter, right before the world goes dark again.
Chapter 12
THE HARDEST PART ABOUT BEING HELD CAPTIVE? You’d think it would be the starvation, punishment, degradation. The unbearable thirst for water, maybe. Or the relentless pain of a pine box pressing against your shoulder blades, flattening the back of your head.
Or perhaps the moment you realize you don’t know how long you’ve been gone anymore. The minutes, hours, days have become a blur, and you can’t remember now . . . Has it been a week, two, three? Is it still spring, or is it now summer? And what about Easter? Did Easter happen while you were gone? The annual brunch at your mother’s house? Did your brother eat your chocolate bunny?
You try to hang on to these thoughts because they connect you to a larger world, some piece of reality where you’re still a real person with a real life.
But the truth is, these moments are hard to remember, so inevitably you let them go. You think less and less of home and the person you used to be and the person you’ll never be again. You just are.
You’re bored.
Which becomes the toughest burden to bear. There’s no friendly conversation or polite chitchat. No places to go. No people to see. There’s no TV to entertain you with mindless blather, or a radio to engage you with a catchy song, or a smartphone to entice you with an exciting new text.
You exist in a sensory-deprived void, where you hum just for the sake of having something to hear. Where you take turns counting by twos and threes and fives just so your mind has something to do. Where you gnaw on your fingertips just to have something to feel. But even this can only kill an hour or two a day.
You sleep. Too much. You don’t mean to. You understand you probably shouldn’t; it would be better to remain alert. But you’re tired, you’re weak, and you’re bored. Oh so bored! Sleeping becomes the only thing left for you.
I told myself stories. Children’s books I remembered from school. Bible stories from church. In the beginning, I whispered them out loud. But my mouth was so dry and parched, the words got stuck in my throat. So after a while, I played the stories like movies in my mind. Not fantasies of my rescue, or images of my family and friends—that would hurt too much. Just fables, legends, fairy tales. Anything with a happy ending that would pass the time in my head.
But mostly, the stories put me back to sleep. So I would doze, on and off. Growing more and more disoriented, until at last, the sound of footsteps pounding down the stairs. A door squeaking open across the way. The rattle of the padlock, so wonderfully close to my ear. Then, at long last, the wooden lid would be lifted. He would appear.
And I would live again, saved from my boredom by the very man who’d put me there.
*
“TELL ME ABOUT YOUR FATHER,” he demanded one day. He lounged on the sofa in dirty underwear, alternating smoking a cigarette with taking long pulls from his beer.
I sat naked on the floor, where I was allowed to remain longer and longer after our various sessions. Of course, the pine box remained in full view. I would sneak glances at it from time to time, as if contemplating a scary mask or coiled serpent. The object of my abject terror. And yet, from this vantage point, nothing more than a cheap wooden coffin.
I didn’t answer right away. I was too engrossed in combing my fingers through the dirt-brown carpet, which turned out to be not one shade of shit brown but many.
He kicked my shoulder with his foot, demanding my attention. “Tell me about your father.”
“Why?”
“What the fuck, why? I asked. You answer.” Another kick, this time to the side of my head. His thick yellow toenails were long and ragged; one sliced my cheek.
I didn’t move away. By now, I knew it was pointless. Instead, I kept my gaze on the carpet. So many individual threads woven into one color pattern. Who would’ve thought? I wondered if it was difficult to make carpet. I wondered if I could pull out enough strands that it would be possible to choke myself with them.
“I don’t remember him,” I said at last.
“When’d he die?”
“I was a baby.”
“What happened?”
“An accident. His truck rolled.”
“What was his name?”
I dug my torn fingernails deeper into the matted carpet. I could feel dust and dirt and small rocks. The fibers were so short, too short, really, to serve as much of a death weapon. Pity. And yet I still couldn’t stop touching it. As far as entertainment went, dirt-brown carpet was as good as the room got.
I still didn’t know where I was. A basement, I thought, because the only windows were set up high, and it always sounded as if someone was descending a staircase right before he barreled through the door.
I didn’t think Florida had basements. Or not many. Did that mean I wasn’t in Florida anymore? Maine had basements. Maybe he’d brought me all the way back to Maine. I was just down the street from my mother. If I could summon the strength, the energy, the good fortune to crawl up out one of those high windows, I could walk back to my mother’s farm. And just like that, I’d be home again.
He kicked me again.
“Do you have a father?” I asked.
“’Course.”
“Do you remember his name?”
“Nah. Too busy calling him Dickhead to learn the real thing. He was a trucker, though. Like me.”
“You’re a trucker?” I couldn’t help myself; I looked up in wonder, the discovery of personal information finally pulling my attention from the filthy floor.
He caught the look on my face and laughed. “Well, shit, what’d you think I did in my spare time? Gotta work. Love nests don’t come free.”
“Are we still in Florida?” I asked. “Is it still spring break?”
He just laughed again, took another pull of beer. “Gonna take off soon,” he offered conversationally. “Big job this time. Could be gone as long as a week.”
The look he gave me was calculating. But I didn’t consider that. I was too busy feeling the blood drain from my face. A week? Seven whole days? All alone in the box? My brain shut down. My bloody fingertips dug painfully into the carpet. A week?
“Molly,” he said. He wasn’t smoking anymore. Instead, the burning cigarette dangled from his fingers as he stared at me.
“What?”
“Your name is Molly. What’s your name?”