We're back with you, live on the six o'clock news. The family of a nursing student who was abducted on Friday evening from her Sacramento home, while her fiancé and young brother were bound and locked in separate rooms, spoke today.
They cut to a clip of my mother, sobbing in front of a bank of microphones. Pete and Carter stand solemnly behind her, rubbing her shoulders. “She's a good person. She was—is—going to be a nurse. She has plans to do good things…help people. Please, I beg you, just let her go. You can just drop her off and disappear. We don't care. We just want her back.”
A man dressed in a beige officer's uniform takes the podium. He introduces himself as Sheriff Andrew Hunter-Ridgefield. He makes a brief statement that they are doing everything they can to look for me. He looks young for the position, and I wonder if he has what it takes to find me.
I look around for Johnny, but he's not there. They must have thought this would be too much for him.
I crawl towards the screen to get a closer look at Carter, the jubilance he carried on his face, no matter how tired he was, entirely gone. The chain yanks at my leg, keeping me feet away from the screen, so I am left reaching, but unable to touch the pixels that form my family. I had been complaining days ago about the burdens of a mother who made me become a mother to my own brother. A boyfriend who was almost perfect, but I had the audacity to believe not perfect enough. I fantasized about a monster over him, and now the fantasy is real. Maybe this is what I deserve.
The image of my family's press conference cuts away and back to the anchors.
Police are looking for this man.
On the screen is an almost comical sketch. It's a guy with a black mask. Two eyes and lips peek through. It's black and white, so there's nothing to indicate the color of his eyes. It could be anyone.
Police believe this is the work of the Night Prowler, who has plagued central California for about five years, first prowling and ransacking homes. However, police now believe in the past year, a rash of home invasions and rapes is the work of this same intruder who has grown increasingly violent.
It is believed he is roughly six feet tall with an athletic build. He may have a black sedan. It is estimated he is likely in his 20s. If you have any information regarding this case, please contact the Sacramento Sheriff's Office at…
Once the last sentence is being uttered, the man comes back downstairs and pulls the antenna off the set. Everything dissolves to snow and frantically I beg. “No! No!” I want to keep watching different news stations, see my family, and just be continually assured that I haven't been forgotten. But he doesn't give a shit and wheels the TV out of reach.
“Why did you do that?” I yell. “What was the point, huh? Am I ever going to see them again?” I ask.
He doesn't answer, but he pulls another water bottle out of his pocket and rests it right in front of me. Without further acknowledgement of my existence, he finishes cleaning up my mess, leaving a bucket and toilet paper in its place. Then he heads back up the stairs, closing the door behind him, and plunging me back into a world of solitude.
When my mother died and left me this ranch, I sold most of the animals. I didn't want to take care of all that myself, especially now being free to focus on the unpopular hobby I had picked up at a young age. While she was alive, there was always the chance that she would know; put two and two together. Figure out I wasn't always doing the things I said I did. And having her here, my fiercest protector, I felt obligated not to push the envelope too far. But then she died, and it was like a gasket blew in me.
Urges I had suppressed boiled to the surface. Anger stewed in me from being left alone. I began to crave access to the world I had shunned with her, a world she both protected me from and robbed me of, but I couldn't do it the way everyone else did. I wanted to taste, smell, and feel the things I had only watched until this point. I started doing the things her presence kept me from doing. Despite her faults, she reined me in somehow, and when she died, the strap snapped.
Now here's the ironic part: I got rid of most of the animals, only to find myself keeping the neediest of them all: a human woman.