Glancing over, I looked at Barzee. She was on her hands and knees, sucking water off the tarp.
Once we had quenched our thirst and filled every container that we had, Barzee told me to get the soap. “We’re going to shower in the rain,” she said. We scrubbed ourselves, then wearily went to bed.
The next morning came but Mitchell didn’t. We lay on our beds all day.
“Is he ever coming back?” I asked Barzee.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Has he ever done this before? Has he ever left you for so long?”
She slowly shook her head.
“Do you think—”
“I don’t know!” she snapped at me.
Day five. No food. Hot and hazy. I hardly had the strength to move. Barzee and I sat around and talked, but only just a little. I felt too tired. Too weak. I lay in the tent and dreamed all day of food.
Day six. I felt so weak and dizzy it was almost impossible to walk to the bucket to get some water. I lay on my bed and stared up at the gray tarp. I felt like all my hope was slipping away. My life was nothing but sand through my fingers, water through my palms. I knew I had to eat or I would die, but I didn’t know what to do.
On day seven, Barzee seemed to lose her mind. Struggling to stand, she walked over and pulled out the recipe book that she had painstakingly put together over so many years. She looked at it with dry eyes, then started to tear out the pages and shred them on the ground. I watched her curiously. She ripped and scratched until she had torn out every page. I looked at the scattered pieces, the perfect cakes and salads, the delicious pastas and desserts. I wanted to chew on every piece of paper. I wanted to stuff them in my mouth. But a sudden breeze came up and blew them all away. In final desperation, I crawled to the trash pile in the back of our tent and sorted through it one more time, looking for anything that I could eat. Every last shred of food was gone. I struggled back to my bed and collapsed.
I lay there, waiting. What I was waiting for, I didn’t know.
Thinking of my situation, I almost laughed at the irony. After everything that I had lived through, the kidnapping, the knife at my neck, the daily rapes, the different moves, the months of abuse from my two captors, it seemed almost laughable that I was going to die of starvation in my tent.
For the thousandth time I wondered where Mitchell was. Was he ever coming back?
As I lay there, I started to wonder if this really was the end. Then I started to think about my family. No, that’s not right, I thought about my family all the time. But as I lay there, I thought back on all the good things in my life, deciding that I had been very lucky. Almost all of my fifteen years of living had been about as perfect as one could hope for. Sure, the last eight months had been pretty terrible, but everything before had been near perfect. I thought about my beautiful mom and imagined how she would take care of me if she were with me then. I thought about my dad, who was strong and capable of fixing any problem I might have. When it came to a great family, I felt like I had won the lottery, and that included my brothers and sister, my grandparents, my aunts and uncles … I couldn’t have asked for a more caring, loving family.
So I began to thank God for my life, my family, and the blessings that I had received in my short life. Then, not knowing if I could make it another day, I tried to think of things that I had done wrong and to ask God for forgiveness.
When I had finished my prayer, I lay still and waited to die.
It was in that moment that, far off in the distance, I heard singing. Had heavenly angels come to get me? No, this was something else. It was loud and off-key, and the melodies were completely mixed-up. It took me a second to realize that it was Mitchell. I was almost disappointed. He was about as far from a heavenly host as you can get!
Mitchell came panting and stomping into camp. Neither Barzee nor I had the energy to greet him. We waited until he stuck his head inside the tent. “Food?” we started begging.