Which presents my next challenge. Even if I get the door open, how do I get out of the room? I doubt my tether is long enough. My handcuffs will have to go. Mine and hers, I decide. So we can work together.
Or she’ll run away. From me.
I feel bad. I don’t know why. I’m not sure how I ended up here. I don’t know what’s going on. A girl brainwashed into calling herself Molly. The delivery of pine coffins, a regular blast from the past.
Someone coming in and out of this room, and again, I never wake up, never respond to the disturbance. Because I’m drugged. Or because I’m expecting them?
I shake my head. Hard. No.
I have nothing to do with this. I don’t hurt people.
Only Devon Goulding, screaming as he clutched at his burning skull.
Only a beautiful girl who threatened to take Jacob from me.
That memory comes from nowhere. Hastily I push it away.
“Survivors do what survivors have to do,” I mutter in the dark. “Don’t second-guess your choices.”
I wish Samuel were here. I could use his calming presence in the dark.
Stacey Summers, I think in the next instance. The video of her abduction. Big guy leading her away. Proof positive someone else is involved.
Second rational thought: I’ve spent the past few weeks going all around town, various bars, restaurants, college hangouts, asking questions about Stacey Summers. Maybe I came closer than I realized to discovering the perpetrator involved. And maybe that person became suspicious, looked me up.
My story is hardly private. Please, four hundred and seventy-two days locked in a coffin? The press loved it. No aspect of my degradation, no salacious detail of my captivity, was spared front-page glory.
Not a single person understands what I went through. And yet everyone knows my story.
The nightgown, my stupid flimsy nightgown . . . I try thinking about that. Had Jacob bought me a lacy, satiny nightgown? He bought me some clothes, a summer dress. What do I recall, what did I ever mention out loud . . .
I start to shiver. Goose bumps up and down my arms. I’m going to vomit. I’m going to be ill . . .
I drop the pine shard, my breathing ragged, my hands shaking uncontrollably.
I find myself on my knees, head hanging low, trembling even more violently now and fighting the urge to be sick.
I know something I don’t want to know.
The past does matter. The past has everything to do with this.
Except I can’t afford to stop and think about it. Because the past is the past, and the only way out of this room is to move forward. Deep breath. Forget coffins, and nightgowns, and Jacob Ness. Forget everything.
I’m Flora 2.0. I have training, I have skills, and I’m going to get the fuck out of here. Save myself. Save Stacey Summers.
So, wooden sliver in the door frame. Proceed.
I want to go home.
I want to see my mother with her ugly flannel shirts, the silver fox charm nestled at the base of her throat. I want to throw my arms around her, and even if it won’t be a hug the way we used to hug, or feel the way it used to feel, I want it to be good enough. I want her to know I miss her. And I love her. And I’m sorry.
She worked so hard to get back a daughter neither of us understands at all.
She still works so hard to love me.
I wedge the pine shard into the seam around the door. Slowly but surely, I shimmy it up until I encounter resistance.
The door latch. Okay, this is where the magic needs to happen.
I pause, consider the next steps.
Best-case scenario is that I somehow succeed in suppressing the latch and pushing open the door. At which point . . .
Wounded girl can walk out. Me, I’ll only make it as far as my leash.
And we’ll be encountering . . . how many people? What kind of threat?
Not me, I insist. I am not the bogeyman in the dark. I didn’t kidnap Stacey Summers, no matter what she thinks. I certainly didn’t kidnap myself. I mean, just because I don’t remember anything after my mother left, don’t know anything about how I got into this room . . . No psychotic breaks here.
I’m not the monster.
Of course, once, a long time ago . . . My heart is beating faster again. I find myself sitting on my heels. Suddenly, all I can think of is Jacob.
Nobody wants to be a monster.
It’s true. Nobody does want to be a monster. Not even me.
And yet . . . and yet . . . and yet . . .
Now is not the time, I remind myself again. I’m getting out of this room. That’s the deal; that’s the mission.
But first there’s the matter of handcuffs.
Finally, something I’m good at. I leave the door, wooden piece still jammed into the frame. I wiggle backward to the mattress, where I give up on subtlety and, using both hands, tear at the fragile cover. I rip down long strips of thin covering. The material, old and frayed, hardly puts up a fight.
Inside, I find stuffing. It smells musty, maybe even faintly herbal. I have a sense of déjà vu, as if I should know what I’m smelling. Italian cooking? But that’s not right. I move on, registering the crumbly feel. Foam padding, I deduce, that’s disintegrated with age. I keep digging.
The mattress is thin. The kind meant to top a cot, or be used for one of those Ikea chairs that folds out into a bed, that kind of thing. It’s possible it’s just a giant slab of foam. But it didn’t feel that way, lying on it. It had sections and lumps and nooks and crannies.
Even cot mattresses can have coils and springs for durability. Especially in a college town like Boston, where half the apartments are furnished by Ikea, it’s possible this mattress started out in someone’s dorm before being repurposed here.
I keep digging, and sure enough . . .
Metal. Wire. Coiled inside the foam. Everything is a resource. This mattress is my resource. And I’m going to use it to get us out of here.
I’m weak, shaky, stupid with stress. It takes me much longer than it should to find the end of one of the bound coils and slowly but surely straighten it. I don’t know if I can pull it out. I don’t think I’m that strong in my current state. So I go with reworking one end of the coil.
I have these gadgets at home, see. Fashioned from plastic, they look like tiny little black clips. Except they’re not. They’re universal handcuff keys. Available from most major Internet retailers. Usually, before I go out, I tuck them in my hair, the world’s shortest bobby pins, where they’re accessible for emergency situations. Silly me, however, I never thought to sleep with them behind my ears, meaning they aren’t with me now.
But I can remake them. I’ve used them enough. I know them that well. And the thinness of the metal mattress coil is just about right.
My fingers slip in the dark. I gouge the side of my hand with the wire, hiss with the pain. But I keep going, even as I stab another finger, jab my palm, slice open the back of my hand. Both of my hands are slippery with blood by the time I deem my homemade gadget about right.
I take a break. Wipe my hands on the carpet. Steady my breathing.
“What are you doing?” the girl asks in the dark.
“Why? Still scared of me?”
“The door isn’t locked. I didn’t lock it.”
“But you unlocked it.”
“Had to. Open the door. Check on you. Those were my orders.”
“From whom? Who told you?”
“You know,” she whispers. “You know you know.”
“I’m not the one calling the shots here,” I insist, though I don’t know why I bother.
“Door is closed,” she whimpers. “No getting out from the inside. I tried, I tried, I tried. There is only the dark. And bad things happen in the dark.”
“You ever spend time in a pine coffin?”
The girl doesn’t answer.
“We can all survive more than we think,” I inform her. “And I don’t plan on being a victim ever again.”
Not when I can be the monster.
I position my cuffs over the hooked mattress spring and get down to business.