The Never List (2 page)

That night was no different. Before we had even arrived on campus, we had researched which car service in town had the best record for accidents, and we’d set up an account. We had it billed directly to our credit cards just in case we ever ran out of cash or had our wallets stolen. “Never be stranded” was number thirty-seven on the list, after all. Two months into the semester, the dispatch guy recognized our voices. We only had to give him a pickup address, and moments later we would be safely shuttled back to our dormitory fortress.

That night we went to a private party off campus—a first for us. Things were just getting going at around midnight when we decided we’d pushed the limit far enough. We called the service, and in record time, a beat-up black sedan arrived. We noticed nothing out of the ordinary until we were in the car with our seat belts fastened. There was a funny smell, but I shrugged it off, deciding it was within the realm of the expected for a local livery company. A couple of minutes into the ride, Jennifer dozed off with her head on my shoulder.

That memory, the last of our other life, is preserved in my imagination in a perfect halo of peace. I felt satisfied. I was looking forward to life, a real life. We were moving on. We were going to be happy.

I must have drifted off too because when I opened my eyes, we were in total darkness in the backseat, the lights of the town replaced by the dim glow of stars. The black sedan was hurtling forward on the now-deserted highway, with only the faint trace of the horizon ahead. This was not the way home.

At first I panicked. Then I remembered number seven on the
Never List: Never panic. In a flash, my mind retraced our steps that day, pointlessly trying to figure out where we had made a mistake. Because there had to have been a mistake. This was not our “fate.”

Bitterly, I realized we had made the most basic and fundamental error of all. Every mother taught her child the same simple safety rule, the most obvious one on our own list: Never get in the car.

In our hubris, we’d thought we could cheat it—just a little—with our logic, our research, our precautions. But nothing could change the fact that we’d failed to follow the rule absolutely. We’d been naïve. We hadn’t believed other minds could be as calculating as ours. We hadn’t counted on actual evil as our enemy rather than blind statistical possibility.

There in the car, I drew three deep breaths and looked at Jennifer’s sweet sleeping face for a long, sad moment. I knew as soon as I acted that, for the second time in her young life, she would wake up into a life utterly transformed. Finally, with great dread, I took her shoulder in my hand and shook it gently. She was bleary-eyed at first. I held my finger to my lips as her eyes focused and she began to process our situation. When I saw the look of realization and fear dawning on her face, I whimpered almost audibly, but stifled the sound with my hand. Jennifer had been through too much and suffered so hard. She could not survive this without me. I had to be strong.

Neither of us made a sound. We had trained ourselves never to act impulsively in an emergency situation. And this was definitely an emergency.

Through the thick, clear plastic partition dividing us from the driver, we could see very little of our abductor: dark brown hair, black wool coat, large hands on the wheel. On the left side of his neck, partially hidden by his collar, was a small tattoo that I couldn’t quite make out in the dark. I shivered. The rearview mirror was angled up so we could see almost nothing of his face.

As quietly as we could, we tested the door handles. Safety-locked. The window mechanisms were disabled as well. We were trapped.

Jennifer slowly leaned down and picked up her bag from the floor, keeping her eyes on me as she rummaged in it silently. She pulled out her pepper spray. I shook my head, knowing it was of no use to us in our sealed-off space. Still, we felt safer having it.

I dug into my own purse at my feet. I found an identical canister and a small hand-held alarm with a panic button. We would have to wait it out, in silence, in terror, with our shaking hands clutching our pepper sprays and sweat beading our foreheads despite the October chill outside.

I scanned the interior of the car, trying to come up with a plan. And then I noticed it. There were small open air vents in the partition on my side, but those in front of Jennifer were connected to some kind of homemade metal and rubber contraption. Valves were connected to a pipe that disappeared from our view into the front floorboard. I sat very still, gaping at this intricate mechanism, my mind racing but unable to grasp a coherent thought for a moment. Finally, it sank in.

“We’ll be drugged,” I said at last, whispering to Jennifer. I looked down at the pepper spray in my hand with regret, knowing I’d never be able to use it. I stroked it almost lovingly, then let it drop to the floor, as I stared back up at the source of our impending doom. Jennifer followed my glance and registered at once what it meant. There was no hope.

He must have heard me speak, for just seconds later, a slight hissing sound told us we were about to get very sleepy. The air vents on my side slid shut. Jennifer and I held hands tightly, our other hands gripping the outer sides of the faux leather seat as the world slipped away.

When I came to, I was in the dark cellar that was to be my home
for more than three years. I roused myself from the drugs slowly, trying to focus my eyes in the sea of gray that swam before them. When they finally cleared, I had to shut them tightly again to stop the panic that threatened to take over. I waited ten seconds, twenty, thirty, and opened again. I looked down at my body. I was stripped naked and chained to the wall by my ankle. A chill prickled up my spine, and my stomach lurched.

I was not alone. There were two other girls down there, emaciated, naked, and chained to the walls beside me. In front of us was the box. It was a simple wooden shipping crate of some sort, maybe five feet long by four feet high. Its opening was angled away from me, so I couldn’t tell how it was secured. There was a dim bulb hanging from the ceiling over us. It swayed just slightly.

Jennifer was nowhere to be seen.

     CHAPTER 2     

Thirteen years later, anyone who didn’t know me—and let’s face it, no one did—might think I was living the dream life of a single girl in New York City. They might think everything had turned out all right for me in the end. I had moved on. Gotten over it. Survived the trauma.

Even all that early work in probability had paid off, and I had a stable, if not very glamorous, job as an actuary with a life insurance company. I found it somehow fitting that I now worked for a company that made bets on death and disaster. Not only that, but they let me work from home. A virtual paradise.

My parents couldn’t understand why I had moved to New York City so quickly in the first place, while I was still recovering and especially considering all my fears. They didn’t understand how much safer it felt to have crowds of people right outside my door
at all times. In New York City, I tried to explain, there is always someone to hear you scream. And better still were the glorious advantages of a doorman building in a city that never slept. There I was, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, surrounded by millions, yet no one could reach me if I didn’t want them to.

Bob at the front desk would buzz up, and he knew that if I didn’t answer, it meant I didn’t want to see anyone—no matter what. He would bring me my food deliveries personally, because he felt sorry for the crazy woman in 11G, and because I gave him triple what everyone else did at the holidays. In fact, I could stay home all day, every day, and have every meal delivered and every errand outsourced. I had raging Wi-Fi and a premium cable television package. There was nothing I couldn’t do from the privacy of the well-appointed junior six my parents had helped me buy.

The first years out had been madness, literally and figuratively, but thanks to five sessions a week with Dr. Simmons, the therapist they’d provided for us, I had been able to go back to college, get a job, and function passably in the real world. But as time went on and the relationship with my shrink stagnated, I discovered I couldn’t move beyond a certain point.

And then I went into reverse. Retrenching. Slowly, imperceptibly. Until I found it harder and harder to leave my apartment at all. I simply preferred to stay safely in my own cocoon in the midst of a world I perceived as spinning out of control. A world whose evils were driven home to me more each day as I documented them with increasingly sophisticated software.

Then one day the buzzer rang, and Bob said it wasn’t a delivery but a flesh and blood man. Someone from my past. I shouldn’t have let him up, but I felt I owed this particular visitor at least that much. That’s where it all began again.

“Caroline.” Agent McCordy was rapping at my door, while I stood frozen to the spot on the other side. I hadn’t spoken to him
in two years, since the last letter came. I wasn’t ready for another communication from that other life.

It was when that last bit of correspondence from the prison had arrived that I had stopped going out entirely. Just touching something he had touched, reading something he had thought, was enough to send me spinning into that circle of despair and fear I thought I’d left behind. Dr. Simmons had started making house calls at that point. For the first month afterward, though she wouldn’t say it, I knew I was on quasi-suicide watch. My mom flew in. My father called every night. I was invaded. And here it was, beginning again.

“Caroline, can you open up?”

“Sarah,” I corrected, through the door, annoyed that he was following protocol, using that other name, the one I reserved for the outside world.

“I’m sorry—I mean, Sarah. Can you let me in?”

“Do you have another letter?”

“I need to talk to you about something more important, Car—Sarah. I know Dr. Simmons has talked to you about this a little already. She said I could come by.”

“I don’t want to talk about it. I’m not ready.” I paused, but then, feeling it was inevitable, I methodically unlatched the three deadbolts and the regular lock on the door. I opened it slowly. There he stood, badge in hand, held wide open to me. He knew I’d want to confirm that he was still official. I smiled at that. Then I folded my arms, defensively, my smile disappearing, and took a step back. “Why does it have to be me?”

I turned, and he followed me into the room. We sat down across from each other, but I didn’t offer him anything to drink for fear he’d get too comfortable and stay awhile. He looked around.

“Immaculate,” he said with a slow smile. “You never change, Sarah.” He took out his notebook and pen, placing them carefully on the coffee table, at a perfect ninety-degree angle.

“Neither do you,” I said, noticing his precision. I smiled again, despite myself.

“You know why it has to be you,” he began slowly. “And you know why it has to be now. This is it.”

“When is it?”

“In four months. I came early to prepare you. We can prepare together. We will work with you every step of the way. You won’t be alone.”

“But Christine? Tracy?”

“Christine won’t speak to us. She won’t speak to her social worker. She has completely cut us off. She married an investment banker who doesn’t know about her past or even her real name. She has an apartment on Park Avenue and two daughters. One started preschool at Episcopal this year. She won’t go near this.”

I had some vague knowledge about Christine’s life, but I could never believe how thoroughly she had managed to cut the whole experience out of her existence, to isolate and excise it like the cancer it was.

I should have expected it, given that Christine had been the one to suggest we change our identities when the press couldn’t get enough of our story. She had walked out of the police intake with a purpose, as though she hadn’t been starved for the past two years and hadn’t been crumpled in a corner crying for the past three. She didn’t look back. Didn’t say good-bye to me or Tracy, didn’t fall apart like Tracy did, didn’t hang her head in defeat, battered from the years of humiliation and pain. She just walked.

After that, we knew only the outline of her story through the social worker who met with us all, and who each year tried to get us together on the questionable theory that we could help one another recover. The message back from Christine was that she had already recovered, thank you very much. And good riddance to us all.

“Tracy then.”

“Tracy is coming, but you have to understand it can’t be Tracy alone.”

“Why not? She’s stable, brilliant, articulate. You could even call her a small-business owner of sorts. Isn’t that legit enough?”

He chuckled. “I suppose she is a productive member of society. But she isn’t exactly the local greengrocer. More like your local radical feminist activist. And because that journal she publishes focuses on violence against women, she might just appear to have her own agenda.

“And yes,” he went on, “she is articulate. After all those years in grad school, she’d better be. But in these circumstances she manages to go on the offense. She doesn’t exactly inspire the pity we need the parole board to feel. Not to mention that she has a shaved head and forty-one tattoos.”

“Wha—”

“I asked. I didn’t count.” He paused. “Carol—”

“SARAH.”

“Sarah, when was the last time you left this apartment?”

“What do you mean?” I turned away from him. I looked around at this prewar gem bathed in white as though it shared my guilt in some way. A little heaven of my own making. “It’s so beautiful. Why would I want to leave it?”

“You know what I mean. When did you last leave? To go anywhere. To walk down the block. To get fresh air. To exercise.”

“I open my windows. Sometimes. And I exercise. You know. In here.” I looked around. All the windows were shut and locked, despite the beautiful spring day outside.

“Does Dr. Simmons know this?”

“She knows. She isn’t ‘pushing me beyond my own boundaries,’ she says. Or something like that. Don’t worry. Dr. Simmons is all over it. She’s got my number. Or numbers, as it were. OCD, agoraphobia, haphephobia, post-traumatic stress disorder. I still see
her three times a week. Yes, I see her here in this apartment; don’t look at me like that. But you know, I’m an upstanding citizen with a solid job and a lovely home. I’m just fine. Things could be much worse.”