Just when the panic begins to set in, that perhaps this really is a march to my slaughter, there is the sound of another door opening. It slams shut behind us.
Night sets me to my feet. He folds the blanket over from behind to keep my face covered, but expose the bindings, which he loosens and removes. I moan from the relief and shake off my arms. He takes the blanket off, but it's so dark I might as well have my eyes closed.
He slaps me on the ass, which sends me forward a bit before pulling the door open. In any other circumstance, it could be considered playful, but everything he does is designed to belittle. I try to peek outside, but it's like a pool of black ink. The kind of dark you forget exists when you live your nights by the glow of street lamps and TVs playing through your neighbor's windows. From the chorus of crickets coming through the door, I am sure we must be in the middle of nowhere.
“Where are you going? Wait!” I can't believe I'm begging him not to leave, but that basement has been my cocoon and suddenly he's thrust me from those walls and is leaving without a word. The insecurity frightens me.
He flips a switch beside the door before slamming it shut. A few latching sounds follow. I'm too disoriented by the sudden bright light to pursue his whereabouts. Besides, what I see shocks me. I'm in a tiny windowless cabin. Well, it's more like a shed, but it's freshly painted white, down to the wooden plank floors. On a twin bed, its head pushed up against the center wall, pristinely made with white sheets and covered with a pastel-toned quilt, there is a pale pink nightgown, one that looks a lot like the white one I wore when I was taken. The one he cut up, and me along with it, and used to bind and gag me. Next to that are two newspapers and a note. I run to them almost as quickly as I did that first meal, desperate to understand my new surroundings.
This is your new home. You are expected to use the attached facility to clean and groom yourself daily so you are always ready for me.
I've seen your room at home. You don't have as much here, so I hope you can keep it tidy. Maybe if you had less clutter, you would have noticed the things I had rearranged and took from your room in the weeks before my final arrival.
I gasp, remembering the moon necklace and the photo. During the saddest, lowest times, when I was starving, I thought of how grandma said she would look at the moon and think of me. I sobbed, wishing I had that necklace to hold onto, to feel like the only person who ever really understood me was somehow still connected to me. This son of a bitch had to have taken it. I know it was in the jewelry box. I have to get it back.
As usual, your composure and compliance will mean a pleasant experience for you. Acting like a bitch means that that won't be the case. Then again you like it rough. I don't care. I'll get what I want either way. I like it when you don't fight. I like it when you do. This is for you, not me. Though I will admit there are traits about you that attracted me to you out there—that flush in your cheeks, your lush hair, your healthy body. I'd prefer for you not to be starved and sullen. But it won't stop me, as you have already experienced. So, let’s agree that it's in your best interest to make the most of your time here. It's in my best interest to keep you looking like the girl I first took.
Eat. Rest.
Your quality of life is entirely dependent on the choices you make.
After the initial moment of rage, I snicker at the sardonic tone in the note before flicking it onto the bed. It's oddly…human. All this time, he's been a caricature of a kidnapper. Just elements of this idea of a person. But here, I hear a bit of the real asshole in him. That smug son of a bitch. I eagerly grab the two newspapers that he made no mention of in his note. Since he showed me the segment on TV about my kidnapping, I have had no concept of how my family or the outside world is reacting. I had time to think about his intentions since that day. My verdict is that since he won't talk to me, at least in not any way that a normal human would converse with another, it was his way of explaining the direness of my circumstances. That I was his captive, that he knows who my family is, and that the police seemed to be clueless about my whereabouts.
The paper to the left is dated the day after my kidnapping. On it is a recent picture of me. Carter took me to the coast for an overnight trip a few months ago. This picture was one we took along one of the bluffs. My hair is windswept and I'm smiling.
NURSING STUDENT KIDNAPPED IN TERRIFYING HOME INVASION the headline reads. I flip to the article, reading about how Carter had given up on the bedroom door when he realized he couldn't get enough leverage while being hog-tied. He screamed and screamed until a neighbor—the very ones I tried to scream to when I was taken—heard him when one stepped outside for the morning paper.