I am much nicer to the oncologist. She got my file from the hospital in Seattle and ran the yearly tests that I’d missed during my imprisonment. When she gives me the results she sits on the edge of my bed. It reminds me so much of Isaac that I feel overwhelmed. When she is finished she tells me that I am built to fight; emotionally and physically. I actually smile.
A few days later I am driven to the police station in the back of a police car. It stinks of mold and sweat. I am wearing clothes that the hospital gave me: jeans, an ugly brown sweater and green chucks. The nurses tried to comb through my hair, but eventually they gave up. I asked for scissors and hacked through the rope of it. Now it barely touches my neck. I look stupid, but who cares? I’ve been locked in a house for over a year eating coffee grounds and trying not to die of hypothermia.
When we reach the police station, they put me in a room with a cup of coffee and a bagel. Two detectives come in and try to take my statement.
“Not until I can speak to Saphira,” I say. I don’t know why it’s so important for me to speak to her first. Maybe I think that they won’t hold true to the bargain, and they’ll keep me away from her. Finally, one of the detectives, a tall man who smells like cigarette smoke and says his s’s too softly leads me by the arm to the room where they are holding her. He tells me his name is Detective Garrison. He’s in charge of this case. I wonder if he’s ever seen action like this before.
“Ten minutes,” he says. I nod. I wait until he closes the door before I look at her. She’s ruffled. Her lips are bare of their usual deep red, and her hair is pulling out of a low ponytail. She’s leaning her elbows on the table, her hands clasped in front of her. It’s her typical shrink pose.
“What’s wrong, Saphira? You look like an experiment gone wrong.”
She doesn’t look surprised to see me. In fact, she looks downright peaceful. She knew she’d get caught. She wanted to. Planned it, probably. The realization throws me off. I momentarily forget what I came here to do. I make my way over to the chair opposite her. It screeches against the floor as I pull it out.
My heart is racing. This isn’t how I imagined this going. Her face blurs in and out of my vision. I hear screaming. No. It’s my imagination. We are in a quiet room, painted white, sitting at a metal table. The only sound is silence as we sit contemplating one another, so why do I want to reach up and cover my ears?
“Saphira,” I breathe. She smiles at me. A dragon’s smile. “Why did you do this?”
“Senna Richards. The great fiction writerrr,” she purrs, leaning forward on her elbows. “You don’t rememberrr Westwick.”
Westwick.
“What are you talking about?”
“You were institutionalized, my dear. Three years ago. At Westwick Psychiatric Facility.”
My skin prickles. “That’s a lie.”
“Is it?”
My mouth is dry. My tongue is sticking to the inside of my mouth. I try to shift it around—to the roof of my mouth, the inside of my cheeks, but it sticks, sticks, sticks.
“You had a psychotic break. You tried to kill yourself.”
“I would never,” I say. I love death. I think about it all the time, but to actually act out a suicide is unlike me.
“You called me from yourrr home at three o’clock in the morrrning. You were delusional. You werrre starving yourself. Keeping yourrrself awake with pills. When they took you in you hadn’t slept in nine days. You were experiencing hallucinations, paranoia and memory lapses.”
That’s not suicide, I think. But then I’m not so sure. I lift my hands off the top of the table where they are resting and hide them between my thighs.
“You were saying one thing overrr and overrr when they brought you in. Do you rememberrr?”
I make a noise in the back of my throat.
If I ask her what I was saying I’m acknowledging that I believe her. And I don’t believe her. Except that I can hear screaming in my head.
“Pink hippo,” she says.
My throat constricts. The screaming gets louder. I want to reach up and put my hands over my ears to quell the sound.
“No,” I say.
“Yes, Senna. You were.”
“No!” I slam my fist on the table. Saphira’s eyes grow large.
“I was saying Zippo.”
There is silence. All consuming, chilling, silence. I realize I was baited.
The corners of her mouth curl up. “Ah, yes,” she says. “Z, for Zippo. My mistake.”
It’s like I’ve just woken up from a dream—not a good one—just a dream that concealed a reality I’d somehow forgotten. I’m not freaking out, I’m not panicking. It feels as if I’m waking up from a long sleep. I’m compelled to stand and stretch my muscles. I hear the screaming again, but now it’s connected to a memory. I’m in a locked room. I’m not trying to get out. I don’t care about getting out. I’m just curled up on a metal cot, screaming. They can’t get me to stop. I’ve been like that for hours. I only stop when they sedate me, but as soon as the drugs wear off, I’m screaming again.
“What made me stop screaming?” I ask her. My voice is so calm. I can’t remember everything. It’s all in pieces; smells and sounds and overwhelming emotions that were there at once, making me feel like I was about to implode.
“Isaac.”
I jar at the sound of his name. “What are you talking about?”
“I called Isaac,” she says. “He came.”
“Ohgodohgodohgod.” I bend over at the waist, hugging myself. I remember. I’ve been falling, and now I’ve finally hit the ground.
Flashes of him coming into the room and climbing into the cot behind me. His arms wrapping around my body, until I stopped screaming.
I moan. It’s an ugly, guttural sound.
“Why did I forget all that?” I’m still treating her like she’s my shrink; asking her questions like she’s sane enough to know the answers. She’s your zookeeper. She tried to kill you.
“It happens. We block out things that thrrreaten to break us. It’s the brain’s best defense mechanism.”
I’m struggling for air.
“This was all an experiment to you. You took advantage of your position. Of what I told you.” All my gusto is gone. I just need answers so I can get out of here. Get out of here and go where? Home, I tell myself. Whatever that is.
“Do you remember what you asked me in our last session?” I stare at her blank faced.
“You asked, ‘If there were a God, why would he let these terrible things happen to people?’”
I remember.
“With free will comes bad decisions; decisions to drink and drive and kill someone’s child. Decisions to murder. Decisions to choose whom we love, whom we spend our life with. If God decided to never let anything bad happen to people, he would have to take away their free will. He would become the dictator and they would be his puppets.”
“Why are you talking about God? I want to talk about what you did to me!”
And then I know. Saphira locking me in the house with Isaac, the man she believed was my safety and salvation, controlling the medicine, the food, what we saw, how we saw it—it was all her experimenting with free will. She became God. She’d said something once in one of our sessions: Picture yourself standing on a cliff where you not only fear falling, but dread the possibility of throwing yourself off. Nothing is holding you back, and you experience freedom.
The cliff! Why hadn’t I seen it?
“Do you know how many people there are just like you? I heard it every day; pain, sadness, regret. You wanted a second chance. So I gave it to you. I gave you not the person you wanted, but the person you needed.”
I don’t know what to say. My ten minutes are almost over.
“Don’t make out like you did this for me. You’re sick. You’re—”
“You are sick, my dear,” she interrupts. “You were self destructing. Ready to die. I just gave you some perspective. Helped you to see the truth.”
“What’s the truth?”
“Isaac is your truth. You were too blinded by your past to see that.”
I’m breathless. My mouth hangs open as I stare at her.
“Isaac has a wife. He has a baby. You act like you care so much, but you did this to him, too. Made him suffer for no reason. He almost died!”
Detective Garrison chooses that exact moment to come back. I want more time with her. I want more answers, but I know my time is up. He leads me to the door by my elbow. I look back at Saphira. She’s staring into space, serene.
“He would have died without you, too,” she says before the door closes. I want to ask her what she means, but the door swings closed. And that is the last time I ever see Saphira Elgin alive.
Detective Garrison is kind. I think this case is above his pay grade. He’s not sure what to do with me—so he tries to feed me doughnuts and sandwiches. I eat none of it, but I appreciate the sentiment. There are six people in the room with me; two of them leaning against the wall, the others sitting. I give them my statement. I tell a tape recorder what the last fourteen months looked like; each day, each hunger pain, each time I thought one of us would die. When I am finished the room is quiet. Detective Garrison is the first to clear his throat. That’s when I dare ask about Isaac. I’ve been too afraid up until now. Thinking his name alone hurts me. Hearing someone speak about him feels … wrong. He’s been with me for all this time. Now he’s not.
“Dr. Elgin got him over the Canadian border and took him to a hospital in Victoria. Took him is an ambitious word,” he says. “She dropped him outside the Emergency room and drove off. He was unconscious for twenty-four hours before he finally started to come out of it. He grabbed a nurse by the arm and managed to say your name. The nurse recognized your name right away due to the media buzz you caused when you disappeared. She notified the police. By the time they got there Isaac was able to talk. He told them you were in a cabin somewhere near a cliff, but couldn’t give them much more than that.”
I am quiet.
“So he’s okay?”
“Yes, he is. He’s with his family in Seattle.”
That hurts and brings me relief. I wonder what it was like meeting his baby for the first time.
“How did she do it? Get both of us to that house? Cross borders? She must have had help.”
He shakes his head. “We are still questioning her. She took Isaac to the hospital in an RV. She was in the same RV when she tried to cross the border back into Alaska. When they searched her vehicle they found a false floorboard with a space large enough to hold two bodies. We think she drugged you and put you both in there. We don’t know anything about help, we’re still questioning her.”
“Back into Alaska?” I ask. “She was coming back for me?”
He shakes his head. “We don’t know.”
I slam my fist on the table, frustrated. “What do you know?”
He looks affronted. I try to soften my face. This isn’t his fault. Or maybe it is.
“How did you find me, then?”
“The Canadian police put out an APB on her vehicle. She was picked up at the border. She gave us the coordinates to the house where she was keeping you.”
“Just like that?”
He nods.
“I don’t get it.”
“The house is on a large portion of land that she owns. Actually, large portion is an understatement. She owns forty thousand acres. Her late husband owned oil wells. He was also a conspiracy theorist. He published some books on Armageddon survival. We think he built the house out there as a result of those theories.”
“You know all of that, but you don’t know what she was going to do with me?”
“It’s easy to find information that is already there, Ms. Richards. Extracting information from the human mind proves a little more difficult.”
Maybe I underestimated soft s Detective Garrison.
“My mother…?” I ask. He cocks his head, his eyebrows drawing together. “Never mind.” Perhaps she had no part in this. Perhaps Saphira found her and read her book without ever contacting her.
“I want to go home,” I say, suddenly.
He nods. “Just a few more days. Bear with us…”