Drawn Into Darkness (6 page)

J
ustin came for a stealth visit in the middle of the night, as I had expected he might. He brought plastic bags of ice, laid one on my swollen lips, and held the other against my cheek, whispering, “I'm sorry. I'm sorry.”

What for? He hadn't done anything wrong. I shook my head emphatically, the ice bag slipped off my mouth, and I mumbled, “Did he beat you too?”

“No.”

“Good.”

“Why didn't you tell him I forgot about the gag, it was my fault?”

“Justin, none of this is your fault.”

He put the ice back on my mouth, so I didn't say any more. But I wished I could get it through his head that he was the victim in this scenario, not the scapegoat. I wished I could sit up and demonstrate. I wished I could bash a bedpost into pieces, then ask him whether it was the bedpost's fault that it was broken, whether the bedpost had made me hurt it.

“How's your gut where he kicked you?” Justin whispered.

“Mmmm,” I grunted dismissively, although the truth was I hurt like hell. I shrugged, or tried to. It's hard to shrug with your arms stretched above your head.

“You're no wuss.” Justin got up and padded out of the room without explanation. After a short time he came back, took the ice off my mouth, and dropped pills into it, whispering, “Ibuprofen.”

I swallowed, with the help of some water from a glass he held to my bruised lips. And the kid was not just taking care of me out of the goodness of his heart, I sensed; I felt as if, for the moment at least, Justin was totally on my side against Stoat. So I said what I had not dared to say before.

“Justin, why not just call 911? Get us both out of here?”

“There's no phone.”

I had kind of figured that, as I had never heard one ring. “There's my cell phone, in my house on the kitchen table. Or else maybe in my handbag.”

“Stoat has the key to your house.”

“He's asleep.”

Justin sighed, kneeling beside the bed and leaning against it as if to explain life to a kindergartner. “It's not like he keeps it in his pants pocket. Maybe it's under his pillow with his gun. Maybe hidden in the suspended ceiling somewhere. He hides things. He already has your purse and your cell phone, but I don't know where he put them.”

“Oh.” I lay with hope leaching out of me.

“I would call 911 if I could, to get you out of here,” Justin murmured after a while, “but if I did, Uncle Steve would take me someplace else and beat me silly, maybe kill me.”

“No, he wouldn't! He'd go to jail and the police would take you back to your parents.”

Justin said, very low, “I don't want to go back to my parents.”

Aside from exhaustion, the reason I did not gasp in disbelief and protest was because Plato believed in timeless norms, but Heraclitus had said nothing was constant except change, and Descartes could only just manage “I think, therefore I am.” In other words, because philosophy had taught me no rules were absolute. If anybody believed all kidnapped children longed to go back to their parents, well, here was the kid to prove them wrong.

Trying to keep it light, I quipped, “I thought you said your parents didn't beat you.”

“They didn't! There's nothing wrong with my parents.”

“Then why—”

“They don't want me back! They just think they do.”

“But, Justin—”

“Listen, Miss Lee Anna, just go to sleep, okay?” He left me.

I didn't think I could possibly sleep, yet I did. I awoke to see daylight at the windows. It had to be morning. Tuesday. I felt my face and ribs aching from having been beaten, I needed to go to the bathroom, and I truly with all my heart loathed that bed I was shackled onto.

The bastard had done the same thing to Justin for a month. A
month
. All alone, nobody to keep him company. How had the kid not gone crazy?

“Nothing wrong with my parents,” Justin had said. Did it follow, then, that he thought there was something wrong with
him
?

Day looked kind of dim, my two useless windows showed wet spangles, and I heard the sound of rain falling on the roof, a sound I usually found pleasant. But at this point I didn't like it. You could have brought me lobster Newburg and I would not have liked it.

The door opened, and mentally I braced myself against the possibility of Stoat, but it was just Justin with a glass of milk in his hand. “Uncle Steve left for work already,” he said, obviously reassuring me although I thought I had hidden my fear.

On his knees at my bedside, he lifted my head with one hand and guided the glass to my mouth with the other. “All we have besides milk is Dr Pepper and Mountain Dew. Neither of those are good for you.”

I sipped obediently, then said as best I could through my swollen lips, “I bet you also have Jack Daniel's.”

“Not me. Uncle Steve. I'm not allowed to touch it.” Justin did not seem to get that I was trying to joke.

“Well, it wouldn't go so great with milk anyway.”

The kid remained utterly solemn but not blank, not expressionless; far from it. He looked completely human and nearly sick with concern.

Setting the milk aside and standing, he said, “You can't chew on cereal with your mouth messed up like that. Peanut butter sandwich?”

“Applesauce?” I suggested.

“Sure.” Like an eager waiter at an upscale restaurant he strode off, and when he came back, he brought me an applesauce sandwich. Applesauce between two slices of insipid white bread.

I tried not to laugh, if only because my ribs hurt, but I guess he could see I was amused. “Duh. This isn't what you meant.”

“I'll eat it. Looks good.”

I managed to down part of the applesauce sandwich, after which he fed me more applesauce from a bowl with a spoon. Then he brought soap, water, and a terry cloth dish towel, very carefully washed and dried my face, and with a gentle finger spread Neosporin on the worst of the damage. “I'm glad you can't see yourself,” he muttered.

“What? You're not going to bring me a mirror?”

“No!” Then, after a moment's thought he added, “You have a weird sense of humor, don't you?”

“Yeah. I do.”

“Do you want me to change those wrappings on your wrists and ankles?”

“Are you joking?”

“No.”

“Well, only if you feel like it.”

Apparently he did feel like it, and as he went through the considerable trouble of gently soaking the gauze away from the scabs, I began to wonder why. Formulating some theories, none of them very pleasant, I began to feel the invisible leaden sensation on my chest gaining weight. But I said nothing to Justin until he had finished his self-assigned job with salve and fresh gauze. Then he left with the breakfast detritus, and I could hear him doing dishes in the sink. If he hadn't come back into my room—my prison—I would not have called him.

But he did come back in, to sit wordlessly on the edge of the bed.

“So why did Stoat skip my potty break this morning?” I asked. “Is he so mad at me he wants me to bust wide open?”

Justin shrugged, looked down, didn't answer.

Just for something to say I remarked, “It's raining like a cow pissing on a flat rock, isn't it?”

“Uh-huh.” A barely audible answer.

“Is it supposed to go on like this all day?”

No question could have been more banal, so Justin's reaction took me completely by surprise. He opened his mouth but made no sound except a weak gasp. His face went chalk white, and he swayed as if he might faint.

“Justin!” Reflexively and of course quite unsuccessfully I tried to grab him, jangling my shackles.

“I'm all right,” he whispered, both hands flat against the mattress to brace himself.

“Justin, what's wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“Justin, tell me. I'm going to have to pee the bed and get beat up again, is that it?”

Startled, he looked at me with haunted eyes, then lowered them. “Sure, that's it.”

“No, it's not.” The lie was as transparent as a ghost. “Justin, tell me.
Look at me.
Whatever it is, just spit it out.”

He faced me, his smooth skin nearly as gray as the day, and he forced out a few struggling words. “It—it's supposed to rain all day and night.”

“So?”

“So—you asked what he's been waiting for.”

Before I could respond with more than dumb shock, Justin ran from the room.

•   •   •

Charles Stuart “Chad” Bradley, driving from one prospective client to another in his red Ram pickup truck, felt profoundly alone, and not just because of the monotonous slash pine plantations for miles all around him, not just because of the immensity of the relentlessly blue sky, not just because of the long, straight, empty road before him. He felt alone and lost in his life. In the mornings Amy stayed in bed so she would not have to speak to him. Even Dixieland Trucking could no longer hold him steady during the long days. Driving gave him too much time to think, and his thoughts disturbed him. So much so that, impulsively, he pulled off the road beside a cotton field, took out his cell phone, and thumbed a number he normally called only once a year, at Christmastime.

“Yo.” The old man sounded a bit blurry. Chad wondered whether his father had been drinking.

None too affectionately he asked, “You sober, Dad?”

“Chad! I was sleeping. I work nights now.” Anxiously, as if he expected to hear that someone had died, Pop asked, “Is everything all right?”

Chad responded with a mirthless laugh.

“Okay, stupid question,” said his father, sounding awake and focused now. “I thought maybe something happened, like maybe they found Justin.”

“No such luck. I don't think they ever are going to find Justin, which is why I called you.”

“Come again, son?”

To be so gentle, Dad had to be sober. Sure, he had been saying for years now that he had stopped drinking, but despite wanting to believe, Chad had sardonic thoughts. Hey, look at the pigs flying. Would wonders never cease?

He could not help sounding snide as he responded, “I called to ask you for advice in your area of expertise.”

“Which is?”

“Forgetting about your son and leaving your family.”

“Whoa. What the hell is going on, Chad?”

“Nothing. Same as before. Wearing me down.” Chad figured his father knew the score, albeit long-distance; plenty of checks had arrived from Birmingham. Dad would probably have done more, like maybe come to lend a hand, if he'd thought Chad would let him. “I'm over my head in debt. Amy won't work at anything except spending money, mostly to find Justin, who is almost certainly dead—” Chad's voice broke up like a bad cell phone signal, but he turned the pickup truck back on for the sake of cold air-conditioning and forced himself to keep talking. “My son's gone, and I barely got a wife or a family anymore. All me 'n' Amy do is fight, and the twins keep to themselves. At least they've got each other. But I—I feel like I've got nothing anymore. Less than nothing. I just want to walk away. Like you did.”

A pause. Then Dad drawled, “Now, don't that just take the cake? Ain't Kyle and Kayla the same age you were when I left? Which I have been told hurt you so bad you still haven't forgiven me?”

True enough. Chad still felt the same old pain and anger, and he still thought his father had some damn nerve trying to get back into his life decades later. Childish resentment edged his voice as he said, “Dad, I'm asking you for help now.”

“I hear you. I'm just having trouble believing you.”

Now, wasn't that just too damn perfect? His father didn't believe him either.

Chad hardened his voice. “Believe me. I want out. I want to know how you got the guts.”

“It wasn't guts, Chad—it was rotgut whiskey. Liquid stupidity out of a bottle. Ruined my liver and my life, and you know damn well it was as wrong as wrong can be.”

“Right or wrong, I got to do something to get out of this situation. If there was a cliff handy, I'd jump off it.”

“I've felt the same way. It'll pass. Are you at work?”

“I was.”

“You still are. Do as I say, not as I done, because I fucked up bad and it ain't no honor to either of us if you follow in my footsteps.”

“Dad—”

“Son, it's taken me a lifetime, but now I have a chance to do right by you and I don't want to blow it. I need you to do as I say, not as I did. I haven't earned the right to say I love you, but goddamn, Charles, I care about you. Now, are you going to get back to work?”

After a long pause, Chad mumbled, “I guess.”

“Good. And after work, you going home to your family?”

“Whatever.”

“Whatever yes or whatever no?”

Chad raised his voice, peevish now. “Yes, I'll go home. Today.”

“Good. Call me again tomorrow if you need to. One day at a time is the best anybody can do, ever. I promise I will not pray for you, son.”

Chad actually laughed out loud. Damned if his father didn't share something in common with him besides a set of chromosomes. Both of them felt the same way about religion. Being prayed over was a bitch.

T
he rain pounded against the windows now and ran down in water snakes.

Rain like that would wash out tire tracks on a dirt road, footprints at the end of the dirt road, even blood. Even lots of blood.

Stoat, the obsessively tidy pedophile, had chosen his time to be a cautious, methodical murderer.

It made sense. It made so much sense that I sweated and clenched my hands and not quite voluntarily peed my pants, flooding the bed I hated with my own watery relief and revenge.

Feeling both worse and better, I wondered where Justin was, and what he was doing or thinking.

I badly wanted to talk with him, to coax him or persuade him or manipulate him or shame him, whatever it took, and somehow force him to rescue me. And himself.

I could have called, “Justin!” and he would have come into the bedroom to see what I wanted.

But I clenched my teeth against calling him and I did not do it.

Stoat had made him a victim. I would not, could not, must not victimize him yet more.

•   •   •

I cried a little, cursed under my breath, stared at the ceiling, and thought about Susan Sontag finding metaphor in fashionable forms of death, then of Socrates, examiner of the good life, hefting his cup of hemlock. How had he lived that legendary last day? How could I best live my last day, disregarding the outcome, thinking only in terms of doing a good job of it? Lying in urine put me at a disadvantage. I thought of my sons and hoped they would never find out that detail of my final hours, then worked out a tentative plan to make sure. Thinking of my children made me think of my ex-husband, and I found myself mildly pleased to discover that I no longer cared about him one way or the other. The opposite of love, quoth Confucius or somebody, is not hatred but indifference. With Stoat's help I'd gotten over my divorce in record time.

Big whoop, because now how much time did I have left?

Like unbleached muslin, time started pleating for me, moments stretching far too long yet passing far too soon.

After what seemed forever and was probably a couple of hours, Justin came into my room on his own, looking like a sleepwalker, as if his feet had brought him there involuntarily. He struggled to look at me and could not quite manage. He struggled to speak and hauled the words out, low and wretched. “Um, do you want some lunch?”

I considered carefully before responding. “I guess not. I'm hungry yet I don't think I could eat. Does that make any sense?”

“Oh, yeah. Been there.”

“It's not a good place, but I'm from Missouri, you know?”

“Huh? I thought you were from Pennsylvania.”

“Nope. Missouri, because Missouri loves company.” Giving up on my weird sense of humor, I softened my voice. “Please stay awhile, Justin, if you can stand the smell of pee.”

“Does it bother you? I could bring the spray from the bathroom.”

“No. Don't go away.”

He sat on a dry edge of the mattress near my head, looking not at me but at his hands lying curled and dormant on his cutoffs. His classically perfect hands had long oval fingernails; my fingernails grew wider than they were long, shaped like muffins, ridged like cupcake cups, crumby. To hell with Freud and penis envy; I had a lifelong case of fingernail envy, seeing so many men with absolutely perfect ones that nobody except me seemed to notice.

Justin had great fingernails. Justin had long, strong, capable hands and I should not, could not, must not suggest any action he might take with them.

He blurted, “Are you scared?”

“Hell, no. I'm too terrified to be scared. But Stoat's not going to mess around with me, is he?”

“Probably not. He's not into torture unless he's in a really bad mood. What I meant was, are you scared of maybe going to hell?”

Hell? Didn't Justin know he was already being tortured and living in hell? I very nearly laughed. A kind of snort escaped me, and Justin turned to see what was funny.

“There's more than enough hell in life,” I explained, or tried to explain. “No, I don't believe in heaven or hell or any kind of an afterlife.”

“You think there's nothing after we die?”

“Just the same poetry we share with any animal. We disintegrate—we mix back into the earth and nurture plants and trees, which drink sunlight and make air for our great-grandchildren. Somewhere down the line the earth, too, will die and disintegrate and maybe in zillions of years some of it will find another life. Someday some of my atoms might brighten the petal of a zinnia or the core of a nova. Everything's recycled as energy or matter. You're made of stardust, Justin.”

His eyes had widened. “I never heard anything like that.”

“Haven't you? To me it makes a lot more sense than resurrection or reincarnation.” The rain pouring on the roof and slithering on the windowpanes sounded wondrous to me for a moment, cosmic. Heraclitus said that no one ever stepped into the same river twice. New rain nourished the soil or ran in rivers to the sea, returned to the sky by evaporation, gathered into clouds, and rained again, a vast symbol of—so much. Symbols by their nature cannot be fully named.

Justin had relaxed into fascination. “Did you make all that up, or do you really believe it?”

“I don't just believe it. I
know
it. Empirically.”

“Right, like I understand what that means.”

“It means from actual experience of physical fact. And here's another thing I know empirically, Justin. I know that your mother loves you.”

That blindsided him. He stiffened but kept staring at me.

“Your mother loves you and she always will love you and she will never forget you and she will never stop searching for you.”

He responded with anger to save him from tears. “Yeah, like you can prove that.”

“I
know
it, because I'm a mom and I know what the love of a mother is like. It's a passion for the person who came out of your own body. Nobody male can imagine the strength of it. I have two sons. I love them with all my heart and I always will. Nothing they could ever do or say could make me not love them.”

“Stop it.” His voice husky, Justin slid off my bed to stand up, to flee.

“Okay, I'll stop. There's just one more thing, Justin.”

He faced me narrow-eyed, on guard.

“Does Stoat ever tell you he loves you?”

His face hardened. “A few times. In bed.”

“He's a liar. What he does to you in bed is not love.”

“I figured.”

“Yet I bet you feel something for him, don't you? You have a big heart. It's impossible for you to live with somebody and not get attached to him, right?”

Justin's rigid face contorted. “What are you trying to prove?” he yelled.

“Just that you're human.”

“And what am I supposed to do about it?”

“If you do anything, it's completely up to you.”

“Damn it, why aren't you begging me to cut the ropes off the bedposts or something?”

I took care to speak exact truth. “Because I am a mom and I am starting to love you too, Justin.”

He gawked, gulped, then ran from the room.

•   •   •

Throughout history, female philosophers are few and far between. It would seem that women generally have had better things to do than ponder how many incorporeal bodies can caper on the head of a pin, or how many existentialists it takes to change a lightbulb. Searching my mind for a feminine Socrates to comfort me (Socrates himself wouldn't do; he, like Stoat, hated women), I found myself baffled. Raging Ayn Rand, hell no. Simone de Beauvoir, too hung up on Sartre. Mary Wollstonecraft probably wore a corset. Hypatia—

Hypatia might empathize.

In ancient times just as today, women were not supposed to be philosophers, of course, but Hypatia was, so a kind of exemption was made in her case. She was not a woman. She was something more, at one with the divine being she called the One. Her students, all male, were not allowed to fall in love with her. When one of them had the temerity to do so, she showed him a diaper stained with her menstrual blood and reminded him that earthly beauty is an illusion. And that took care of that, I'm sure. Talk about attitude.

Hypatia referred to the One as best discovered by “the Eye buried within us” and urged a return to the teachings of Plato and Aristotle. These tales of her survived; however, most of her thoughts did not, because the fourth-century Bishop of Alexandria put out a hit on her, ordering a group of fanatical monks to haul her from her chariot, divest her of the white cloak of a philosopher, strip her naked, and either beat her to death or, some accounts say, attack her with sharpened seashells. Then her writings were burned along with her body. In history as written by the Christian church, Hypatia never existed.

Whatever Stoat did to me, I reflected, would be mild compared with what had happened to Hypatia.

Nevertheless, dead is dead. Especially if one doesn't believe in the afterlife.

I doubted whether Hypatia had reached any deep philosophical insights during her last moments.

And I doubted whether I was going to reach any either, but all the rest of the day, lying on that mattress as if waiting to be stretched on a rack, I occupied my mind with a vain attempt. At wisdom. Or consolation. Or at least a worthy quotation upon which to hang my metaphorical shroud.

Death be not proud; carry my shroud.

Do not go gentle unto that good night . . . as if I had a choice?

“Though boys throw stones at frogs in sport, the frogs do not die in sport, but in earnest.” Plutarch. Who the hell was Plutarch? I ought to remember. . . .

Something similar in Shakespeare.
King Lear.
“As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.”

Ashes, ashes, all fall down.

Dust to dust. Dust in the wind; all we are is dust in the wind. . . .

Soughing outside my thoughts and my room I heard plenty of wind, but saw no dust. Just rain, lots of it. Rainsnakes on the windows.

Then came the familiar asthmatic roar of the generic white van. Cough of silence, in front of the house rather than alongside. Slam of doors, first vehicle, then house.

Stoat was home.

But darkness would not come for hours yet.

I hoped Stoat would ignore me until then. But my own hope made me so angry at myself, him, and fractal theory (ridiculously random, how I had gotten into this fix) that I would not go gentle after all. I yelled as loud as I could, “Stoat!”

I heard a thunk as his cowboy-booted feet fell off the coffee table. I heard him swear. I heard, then saw him run into my room. “Where's your gag?”

“How should I know? You never put it back on me.”

“Phew!” Short attention span; he batted at the urine-scented air with one hand. “You wet the bed!”

“What did you expect? I understand you plan to kill me tonight.”

Thoroughly distracted from the wet mattress, he blinked a few times, but kept the blank look on his face and in his eyes. “That's none of your business.”

Although painfully aware of the utter absurdity of this statement, I managed to keep a straight face. “Yes, it is, because I'd like to write a letter to my sons first.”

“What for?”

“Tell them I'm dead. You like things orderly, right? If your mother was dead all of a sudden, wouldn't you want to know?”

“I suppose so.” The mention of a letter seemed to have swung him to the opposite extreme from the Stoat whose fist had split my lip only yesterday. He seemed slightly harried, like a fussy clerk troubled by a complicated business transaction. “But you can't tell them about me.”

“Of course not. I wouldn't want to get you and Justin in trouble. I'll let you read what I write.”

“Huh.” He stalked off, but returned in a few minutes with his pistol, aiming it at me with one hand while he unshackled me with the other. “Okay, potty time, then supper. Tie a towel around your stinking self.”

•   •   •

It did not surprise me that Stoat would not be distracted from suppertime routine no matter what the extraordinary circumstances.

Supper was canned beef stew, presumably bought by Stoat, who therefore should reproach no one, yet the man criticized Justin, saying he had failed to microwave it evenly to the proper temperature. I had no way to verify or disprove this because I did not taste any. The concept of imminent death had solidified and lodged in my throat, preventing me from eating. Stoat frowned at me as if I were being unreasonable.

“Now, why ain't you eating? You know I ain't gonna hurt you much,” he said. “Like you noticed, I like things neat and tidy, so I don't mess up people more than is necessary. I don't want no fuss and I'll make it quick. I told you before, you was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, so it ain't nobody's fault. Even if you do have a big mouth and you did wet the bed.”

I nodded soberly but did not trust myself to say anything lest I begin to laugh hysterically, his assurances seemed so ludicrous. Then I thought of the way he had fired the gun three times, killing Schweitzer, and how the dog had screamed, and my gut heaved, but there was nothing to retch.

Stoat frowned harder and took my bowl of stew away. “Put that back in the pot,” he told Justin. “No use wasting good food.”

Justin obeyed silently. He hadn't eaten much or said much and he wouldn't look at me. Common sense told me not to hope for any help from him. He had given up most of his selfhood in order to survive.

After the dishes were cleared away, it was still light outside. There was still a little time. I managed to move my mouth and form words. “A letter to my sons,” I said slowly and laboriously. “I need to write my sons. I need paper, a pen, an envelope, and a stamp.”

Seeming genuinely flummoxed, Stoat retorted, “What you think this is, some kind of office supplies store?”