I hadn’t yet begun to accept what had happened to me. If fact, it took a long time to accept it. It was just too crazy. I mean, I had gone to bed just like every little kid, only to be wakened with a knife at my throat. I had been taken from my home, which was supposed to be the safest place on Earth. How did this happen? How had this man been able to break into my impenetrable fortress and steal me?
I couldn’t quit thinking about my family. I couldn’t imagine how they were feeling. Were they okay? What was going on at home? I particularly worried about my mom. I pictured her driving around our neighborhood, looking for any clues. I loved my mom so much and couldn’t imagine how worried she must be. I thought back on the time when my little brother had dislocated his arm (it really wasn’t my fault, family legend aside) and my poor mom, who had just returned home from running errands, became almost overcome with worry and rushed him to the hospital. My brother was fine once the nurse popped his arm back into its socket. But thinking back on that, I knew she wasn’t going to handle my disappearance very well.
I felt deeply homesick. I tried to remember what our living room looked like, with its decorated walls and intricate rug. I knew my parents had been thinking of putting our house up for sale. What if they moved? How would I find them if they were gone?
But surely, I thought, my parents were looking for me by now. Others were probably looking too. Someone had to be close. I mean, it wasn’t like we had hiked to Wyoming. I wasn’t that far away! Maybe they would rescue me! Surely they would find me. Eventually I would be found.
But they hadn’t found me yet.
And since they hadn’t, I had to find a way to live.
I looked at my surroundings inside the tent. Thick pads for the man and the woman, a thinner pad for me. Horrid flower-print sheets. A dirty plum-colored comforter with dark fabric on one side and a lighter shade on the other. (I decided then and there that I didn’t like the print one bit.) Two feathered, poufy pillows. Two hard cot pillows stuffed along the top of the tent.
This was my new home.
The thought made me feel sick.
It was getting very hot now, the tent holding in the sunlight like a greenhouse. Lifting up the cable to keep from tripping, I followed it out of the tent. My two captors were there. I looked around. No one spoke to me. I was still dressed in the linen robe. Still bleeding and in pain.
I examined the steel cable, looking for any means of escape. Unlike the night before, I wasn’t waiting any longer for God to part the trees or move the mountain. Given the slightest chance, I was going to run. But the steel cable was now tight around my ankle. I examined it more closely. Wound steel. Tight. Strong. Thin as a pencil. The cable was tethered to another steel cable that had been bolted between two trees, allowing me a little bit of movement around the camp, just enough to stretch between the fire pit on the up-canyon side and the depressing dugout on the other. Maybe twenty feet of movement in any direction. In that space there was one tent. A couple of rubber basins. Buckets. A couple of coolers filled with food and containers filled with water. The cable wasn’t long enough to reach more than a few feet into the dugout. There was a hole in the ground on the other side of the fire pit that a bucket, used as a latrine, was dumped into.
Twenty feet. One tent. This was now my world.
My captors continued to ignore me. Moving carefully, I walked over to another upside-down bucket and sat down in the sun. I was crying again, huge tears running down my face. Neither of them tried to comfort me. I cried on.
“This is your time to cry,” the woman eventually said. “This is your wedding day. So go ahead and get it out. But know this: you can’t go on and cry forever. Pretty soon, you’ll have to stop.”
So I sat on the bucket and cried all morning long.
At one point, I remember looking at a tiny branch of a mountain oak. Sometime before, the man had taken an ax to clear the campground, cutting back a couple of small trees and branches. A stump had been left jutting out of the bare ground and the man had used it to tie down one of the corners of the tent. A small sapling had started to grow out of the side of the stump. A few leaves. A single branch, smaller than my pinky finger. I stared at the sapling as it struggled to find a place to grow. Over the summer, I would stare at that tiny tree for hours, admiring its determination. Its mother tree had been cut away, leaving it as the only spot of green surrounded by bare dirt and plastic tarps and tents. Its bed was hot and dry and dusty. Yet it kept on fighting to survive.
I resolved once again: Whatever it takes to survive!
Eventually, the man looked at me. “You will call me Immanuel,” he said. He nodded to the woman. “You will call her Hephzibah.” I turned to look at her. It was an ugly name. Harsh and unnatural. It seemed to fit.
“Shearjashub,” he called me, pointing in my direction.