Authors: Koethi Zan
So she spent the next five years down there, thinking and remembering and regretting.
It must have been too much for her, because Tracy and I watched her fall apart in that cellar. Bit by bit, the darkness started to overtake her, and there was nothing we could have done, even if we’d wanted to. She had a complete breakdown over those last three years, and it accelerated rapidly toward the end. Her mind deteriorated before our very eyes.
She had long since stopped making sense when—and this was even more dangerous for her—she stopped taking care of herself. It didn’t take long for her to look dirty and disheveled. For her face to be smudged with muck from the cellar floor, for scattered clumps of matted hair to burst out all over her head. For her to smell. And Jack didn’t like that.
Some days, though, she scared us as much as he did, as she sat hunched over, mumbling unintelligibly there in the dark. She would huddle up on her mattress, clutching her knees, and rock back and forth, her eyes closed, her voice soft as she whispered to herself for hours.
I didn’t try to make out what she was saying. I didn’t want to know.
Honestly, it was a relief that she slept so much, because when she was awake, you couldn’t help but keep one eye on her at all times. It was exhausting. You never knew when a violent outburst of tears was coming. Or worse. I sometimes thought that even Tracy, her erstwhile protector, seemed a little afraid of what she might do. At any rate, toward the end, we both stayed as far away from her as we could manage in such close quarters.
If you had asked me back then, I would have said that, of the three of us, Christine would be the one who would never recover. That she was the one whose psyche was battered beyond repair. I would have predicted she would be totally devastated from this experience forever, unable to have any semblance of a normal life if we made it out alive.
It just goes to show, you never can tell. I had never been more wrong about anything in my life.
CHAPTER 12
Tracy and I arrived in front of Episcopal, an imposing town house that had been impeccably maintained. A sea of adorable, perfectly turned out children headed out the door, escorted by nannies and emaciated trophy wives. A line of black Town Cars waited outside.
We stood close by, watching, but not so close that we would make the staff uncomfortable. Tracy nevertheless got a few looks, so we crossed the street, pretending to be deep in conversation.
“Do you see her?” I asked, my back turned from the scene of Upper East Side perfection.
“No. She probably has one of her teams of nannies pick up her children,” Tracy remarked with irritation.
“She has a team of nannies?”
“I guess that’s not fair. I’m speculating. Oh wait, I think that’s her coming from a couple of blocks away. Hard to tell because
these women all look the same. Hurry, let’s intercept her before she gets too close to the school.”
We ran down the block, and by the time we got to Christine, we were both winded. We must have looked ridiculous, all red faced and breathing hard. Instinctively, she jumped back from us as we came to a sudden stop in front of her.
Her hair was the most shimmering shade of golden blond I had ever seen, and her face, whose skin had always seemed translucent, now glowed with health. Her teeth were in perfect even rows, and her cornflower-blue eyes looked as though they’d been dyed for effect. She was impossibly slim, and every stitch of her casual clothing looked immaculate, as though she had just stepped out of the display case of a Madison Avenue boutique. I looked down in dismay at my travel clothes from my flight that morning: jeans, T-shirt, and hoodie.
“Christine!” said Tracy triumphantly, seeming almost happy to be reunited after all these years. I felt a pang of what had to be jealousy, which was erased when I saw that Christine definitely did not feel the same way.
Christine pulled herself up tall and said haughtily, “As you know, I don’t use that name anymore.”
“Oh, right,” said Tracy. “I keep forgetting about the cloak-and-dagger names. What is it now? Muffy? Buffy?”
Christine looked Tracy up and down this time, obviously annoyed.
“My friends know me as Charlotte. Really, Tracy, why don’t you go back to one of your protests, or whatever, and leave me alone? And
you
”—she turned to me and then, unable to find the words, immediately back to Tracy—“I’m surprised to see you two together.”
I decided to get straight to the point. “Jack comes up for parole in four months—”
Christine held up her hand in the air, cutting me off midsentence. “I don’t want to hear it. I don’t care. I actually really don’t. I have told McCordy that that is his problem and let the justice system do what it may. If they can’t manage to get a raving madman locked up in a straightjacket in some rubber room, then they are clearly incompetent buffoons, and nothing I can say or do is going to help them. I want nothing to do with it.”
“You don’t care if he gets out?” Tracy jumped in. “Don’t you have daughters? Aren’t you worried about them? Haven’t you read his letters? The guy is still obsessed with us. What if he makes a beeline for your door when they let him out? I don’t think they’d like to see him showing up on the steps of The Episcopal School.”
Christine looked at Tracy with a steady gaze, her voice firm.
“No, I most certainly have not read any letters from that monster. I told McCordy he could keep them. You think I would want those in my
home
? And as for my daughters, I will get them each a personal bodyguard if necessary. But I don’t think that is a realistic concern. Jack may be crazy, but he is not stupid, and I can’t imagine he has enjoyed being locked up. And now, if you will excuse me—” She started to push past us, but Tracy blocked her way.
“Fine, fine, you want nothing to do with it. We get that. But tell us something—if we go back to the university, to talk to people there about his work and his life there, who should we talk to? What should we do there?”
Christine stopped walking. At first I thought she was going to turn in the other direction and run, but she didn’t. She looked at each of us in turn, as though she finally recognized us as members of her species. Was she letting herself remember? Surely she couldn’t have blocked it all out as completely as she made it seem. She couldn’t be that strong, entirely recovered, able to handle anything, including Jack’s release. But then Christine had always been a person of extremes—unpredictable in a way that put me ill at ease.
I thought I saw a hint of sadness flicker across her face, and then she shut her eyes for a moment, her lips twitching ever so slightly. When she opened them again, she shrugged with an air of resignation.
“Well, what about that woman who testified at the trial? The one who had been his teaching assistant when we were there? Isn’t she a professor there now? Aline? Elaine? Adeline? Something like that.”
So Christine had followed the case. She knew a little more about it than she’d let on. Tracy was nodding. I pulled out my notebook and started writing.
Christine paused. “And there is one thing that I have thought about over the years. I suppose now is the time to bring it up. Jack had what I suppose you could call a friend there. I sometimes saw him at the cafeteria with another professor in the department. Professor Stiller. I never took a class with him, but they seemed to hang around together a little bit. I mean, it could be nothing, but—”
“Thanks, C,” Tracy said, using the name she’d used sometimes back in the cellar. “That’s something. I’m sorry … I’m sorry we—”
“Whatever,” said Christine. “Just—well, good luck.” She seemed to be relenting for a moment. Then she pulled herself upright again and said quietly, “Just please leave me out of it.”
As we walked away, I saw Christine rush up to another elegantly dressed mother and give an air-kiss greeting. Then she walked off with her, chatting merrily, as if her dark and hidden past hadn’t just collided with her on the sidewalk.
CHAPTER 13
The first time I was allowed upstairs was almost magical. I had been held captive for one year and eighteen days when I was finally selected for that honor. I had begun to think I would die in that cellar without ever seeing any more sunlight than the sliver that sneaked in through the boarded-up window. I almost didn’t care why I was being led up those cellar stairs in chains, as I counted off the steps in my head.
I remember my surprise when I had my first look at the living areas of the house. I had imagined, for whatever reason, a rundown 1970s aesthetic. In fact, while the furniture was not new, it was classically nice, some heavy antiques from the Empire period, lots of dark woods and high cathedral-beamed ceilings. Solidly upper middle class. Well designed. Tasteful.
The space had an ethereal glow to me, as a light wind delicately
blew through the open windows. It was damp out. A soft rain had just finished falling, and the leaves dripped slightly. I had been through periods without food and evenings filled with electrical shocks. I had been tied up in various unseemly positions for hours, until my muscles ached and burned. But I could almost forget all that for the delicious pleasure of feeling the air on my skin again. I looked at Jack Derber with gratitude. That’s what it does to you.
He didn’t speak to me for a long time but merely pulled me along through a hallway with several doors. Barely turning my head, for fear of seeming resistant, I peered into the kitchen at the back of the house, an immaculately clean room, cheery even, with a flowered dish towel draped over the edge of the sink.
That caught my eye for some reason. This dainty little hand towel that he must have used carefully and, I knew, meticulously to dry the dishes … he … this same person who had made me suffer so much, who had ripped my life out of its socket and put me in this hell also dried his dishes and put them away every night. It seemed to me he lived in accordance with an orderly and regular routine, and our punishment was just a part of it. For him, just an ordinary part of his ordinary day, and then at the end of a weekend, he’d drive back to that bustling college campus and go about his business, as if nothing had happened.
That first time, he led me into the library. The room seemed enormous, with high ceilings and walls lined with expensive-looking oak bookcases, the shelves brimming with volumes. Each one was covered in an off-white binding, so I couldn’t tell much from their spines. They were labeled in some way, and even though, over the next several months filled with trips upstairs, I stared at them to take my mind off the pain he was inflicting in that room, I could not decipher their titles. The words were in English, but I seemed to have lost the capacity to comprehend even that.
In the middle of the room, there was a large rack I would later
find out was a reproduction of an actual medieval torture device. It was set up to look like a novelty item, a decorative piece, a joke. But it was no joke. When we were upstairs, we would go on the rack.
On a good day, he simply did what he wanted with your body. And you could bite your lip or scream or do what you needed to bear the pain and humiliation.
On a bad day, he talked.
There was something about his voice, something about the way he modulated his tones for you, that made you almost believe for the first instant that he was filled with empathy and warmth for your plight. That he really hated to have to do all of these distasteful things to us, but he really had no choice. He had to keep on, for the sake of science, for his studies. Or sometimes it was for our sake, so we could understand something beyond the physical world.
Maybe I wasn’t smart enough at the time, or hadn’t read enough to understand what he was talking about, but now I know some of the references he made, in his long, rambling speeches: Nietzsche, Bataille, Foucault. He talked a lot about freedom, a word that made me cry when he said it, even on days when I swore to myself he couldn’t do anything to get me to shed a tear. I am stronger than this, I told myself. Most days I wasn’t very strong. But in the end, I think I was.
Over time I got the sense that he wasn’t driven by uncontrollable urges. Torture was simply fascinating to him. He was in awe of what it did to us and how it made us respond. As we writhed there before him, he studied, yes, studied, how long we could fight back tears. He was interested in why we so badly didn’t want him to see us cry. He’d ask us about it. He’d probe. And yet we were afraid to tell him the truth about anything.
He knew how arbitrary shifts would disarm us and fill us with fear. And he liked to see the fear. He would change roles in an instant,
from father confessor to maniacal devil. He laughed sometimes, out loud, with sheer glee, when he’d see the fear seeping into our eyes.
And it was impossible to hide everything all the time. He figured out quickly how much I was suffering over Jennifer. Not knowing what was going on in her head all those days in the box. I wanted to ask him how she was holding up, but I didn’t want to reveal just how much she mattered to me, so I said nothing for months. He knew, of course. He knew how close we were, that we were not random co-eds sharing a cab home that night. Maybe he had gotten Jennifer to reveal some details, or maybe she called out for me to help her when she was on the rack. I would never know.
But he knew enough to use her against me. He would ask me, as if he wanted me to make a noble choice, if I could take just a little more pain, a little deeper cut, if it would help her. And I did. I took as much as I could, squeezing my eyes shut tight each time the blade approached my barely-healed skin. When I eventually begged for mercy, he looked at me with disappointment, as though I were admitting that I didn’t love her enough, that I wasn’t able to protect her from what he was, quite unfortunately, going to have to do to her now.
I started hating myself for my weakness. I hated my body for what it couldn’t handle. I hated myself for begging and bringing myself low before this man. I dreamed at night of smashing his face, of rising up like a banshee, screaming, hysterical, full of strength.