It was quiet, but as I started up the stairway, Mrs. Lofter was coming down. “Your mother is finally asleep,” she said. “Come get me if she wakes up too soon.”
“Of course,” I said. I watched her descend. “Of course I will,” I whispered.
On my way back to my room, I paused at Kaylee’s door. Something made me want to open it and look in. Maybe I needed to remind myself that she was gone.
When I opened the door, I was in shock myself. Move over, Mother, I thought.
Someone, probably Mother, had put everything back exactly how it had been before I had torn Kaylee’s room apart.
14
Kaylee
It had been a long time since either Haylee or I or both of us had been locked in the pantry for something we had done to displease Mother. Even so, the silence we had suffered back then was not anywhere as intense as the silence Anthony was imposing on me now. We had hated being shut up in the dark when Mother did it to us, but we’d known we would be let out. There had always been an end in sight. It frightened me to think that in his madness, Anthony would never come back, never unlock the door. I was, in the most terrifying sense of the words, shut up in a coffin just like his mother in the bedroom above me.
He was right about how I would be keen to hear the sound of his footsteps. After a while, I couldn’t help but listen for them, for some sign of life, even his life of madness. I wondered if I, too, would go insane. Would I reach the point where I would want to hear him walking around his house and pray to hear him on the stairs outside the basement door? Would I grow so tired of talking to myself and walking around in circles that I would look forward to seeing him and listening to him talk to me, no matter what frightening things he might say? How horrible would it be to become that desperate? In what deranged state of mind would I be? This place, despite the furniture, the music, and the books, was destined to become the medieval dungeon I had first imagined.
It was difficult to move around anyway. My feet hurt, and my legs ached, and I hated the sound of the chain dragging behind me over the floor. I slept a lot, not for long periods but in spurts, and every time I woke, I woke with a start, sitting up quickly and listening hard. Was he home? Had someone come? I was getting to know every creak in the house, every moan in the pipes, and the different sounds the breeze or wind made sliding across the two windows. I endured the stings from the soles of my feet and stood on a chair for hours at a time, peering out between the boards that covered those windows, sometimes until it grew too dark to see anything. I was dreaming that the driver of that pickup truck had seen me and had finally worked up the courage to get involved with what looked like someone abusing a young woman.
To keep from going completely nuts, I played the music he had brought down, music I called Haylee’s music. I kept it going most of the day and even into the night. There were things to read, mostly children’s stories, some of which both Haylee and I had read or Mother had read to us when we were very young. I tried to be creative with the food he had left me, and as it dwindled, I realized I should ration certain things. I hated wearing his father’s robe. It stank and make my skin itch. I finally decided to wash it and hung it in the shower. While it dried, I walked around with two towels wrapped around me.
I was diligent about caring for my cuts and bruises. Except for my vigils at the window, I tried staying off my feet for long periods of time, which was why I dozed so much. After the fifth day, I realized I hadn’t brushed my hair once. When I looked at myself in the mirror, I almost didn’t recognize the image staring back at me. I pictured my sister standing beside me, looking at the same image over my shoulder.
You’re getting what you always dreamed of having, dear Haylee, I thought. Right now, no one would call us identical twins. People might not even call us sisters. You would have no trouble getting anyone to believe you were the prettier one.
Maybe it was the solitude combined with the dreariness of my surroundings, but I thought my eyes looked like weakening lightbulbs. The excitement and pleasure, the curiosities and interests that brightened the candle of life were so subdued in me that I sometimes thought I was looking at a wax replica of myself. It resembled me, but it was lifeless, listless, almost comatose.
Meanwhile, Anthony was true to his threat. He must have been on that job he had described as being a good distance away. I didn’t hear him come home until late in the evenings, and as if he was carrying out his determined punishment of me, he practically tiptoed when he walked on the floors above. I had to strain sometimes to hear him. My only amusement was to try to determine where he was standing. I realized where the bedroom with the coffin was situated above me and heard him go in there often. He seemed to remain there for a long time each time. Maybe he even slept in there beside it.
After nine days, I had run out of milk, eggs, and bread. I was eating handfuls of dry cereal for breakfast. There was no fruit left, nor was there any cheese. For dinner, I ate out of a peanut butter jar, scraping out every bit. The juice was gone, too. I knew my energy level was diminishing. My sleep, which had occurred in spurts, was becoming longer and longer naps, sometimes taking up half the day. Finally, I had no interest in reading anything, and I stopped playing music. I no longer went to look out the window through the boards, either.
Loneliness was never sharper, a knife that cut deeply into my heart and made me ache inside and out. I began to imagine that Haylee was here occasionally. She visited to see how I was doing, and whenever she came, she was always dressed in something pretty and sexy, her hair perfect, her makeup just the way she always wanted it to be, despite Mother’s warnings about it being too much.
Of course, she was always smiling.
She never spoke. She just stood there looking at me.
“You knew this was going to happen,” I told her. “Are you satisfied?”
She didn’t respond.
“Why did you do this? Why?” I screamed. When I screamed very loudly, she left, and I went back to sleep, thinking that if Anthony would come home just once when she was here, he would see that there was a Haylee after all.
I wondered if he had ever sneaked down to check on me late at night. If he had, he certainly would have seen how low my food supplies were. How bad would he let things get? Soon I would have nothing. I began to believe that he had completely forgotten about me, that he had told himself it had all been a dream, I wasn’t here. It threw me into another panic. Maybe this was what had happened with another girl he had captured and kept down here, and one day he had come down and found her dead. If she hadn’t starved, she might have committed suicide. Was that my destiny, too?
The nightmares became more vivid, and they weren’t confined to sleeping at night, either. It got so that every time I dozed, I’d have one that involved me dying here, my fingers covered with the dried blood that had come from my desperate scratching at the door. When I thought about all this, especially the possibility of dying down here, it would make me shiver so much with fear that I had to wrap the blanket around myself.
The worst part of all this dreary thinking was the fear that I might die and he might bury me somewhere and no one would ever know what had happened to me. He had already done away with my clothing and would clean away any possible trace of me. I would disappear. Mother would go to her own deathbed still hoping that I would come home. Daddy would end up the same way. Whether Haylee would suspect that I was dead and gone I did not know, but I imagined she would ease her conscience by telling herself that I was off living as Anthony’s wife and by now had a family of my own.
My friends and teachers would forget me eventually. Oh, maybe once in a while someone would bring me up. “Remember Kaylee Blossom Fitzgerald and how she simply disappeared? I wonder what became of her.”
People would shrug. There were many other things to think about, happier things, and besides, what good did thinking about Kaylee Blossom Fitzgerald do anyone?
Imagining all this gave me the idea of writing a dia
ry so I could prove my existence. Time had become blurred for me. I had no idea what day it was, and after a while, I had trouble remembering exactly how long it had been since I had been abducted. I would just use numbers to signify the passage of time, I thought. It didn’t matter that I didn’t know if it was Tuesday or Wednesday. I recalled movies in which prisoners kept in dungeons for years marked time by scratching lines on a wall. I’d better not do that, I thought. Keeping track of the days would only heighten the pain associated with how long I was here. Why do it? What did the number of days matter now? They all ran together. I was in a day that had no limits.
What I planned to do instead was write about what had happened to me in as much detail as I could and then find a place in the basement to hide it so that years and years from now, after Anthony was dead or gone, someone might stumble on it and then contact whatever family I had and give them the diary. At least they would have some closure that way. It was depressing to plan how to help those who loved and remembered you and no longer to think of ways to help yourself. But what choice did I have?
I was surprised at how exhausting it was to write a couple of pages in the notepad I had found. It was a child’s notepad, with different cartoon animal characters at the top of each page. The paper itself had yellowed with time. Sitting there thinking about what to write was becoming a chore in and of itself. I was afraid of falling asleep with the pad in my lap and Anthony finding and destroying it, so as soon as my eyes began to close, I stopped and hid the pad behind the food cabinet. There was just enough space between it and the wall for me to slide it in. The following day, I’d get it out with a butter knife, convinced that he would never find it if I kept it hidden there.
One morning—I guessed it was morning, since I had fallen asleep in the dark, and when I woke, there was light streaking through the boards—I looked at myself in the mirror and realized I had lost significant weight. There was a vacant darkness around my eyes, and my cheeks were a little sunken. My lips were pale, and my hair was so twisted and dirty I resembled a hag on the streets of plague-ridden London. My complexion was colorless. I thought I could see the tiny blue veins through my cellophane skin.
I truly am dying, I thought. I’m wasting away. The light within was dwindling. It’s not my imagination. I panicked and charged across the room as quickly as I could. With all the strength I had left, I began to pound on the door. I screamed until I had no voice, and then my legs gave out and I sank to the floor. I regained consciousness a few times but remained there, staring at a few dozen small brown ants that were working diligently, gathering up minuscule food crumbs and bringing them as a team to their hole between the floor and the wall. It occurred to me that they could outlive me. In any case, they could come and go as they pleased. They could even find their way outside. Imagine envying an ant, I thought, and felt myself smile.
In moments, I was asleep again at the bottom of the basement door, which was where Anthony found me. I had no idea how long I had been lying there, but I felt my body being moved and opened my eyes to see him carrying me to the bed. He laid me out gently and stood looking down at me. He was in and out of focus for a few moments. My lips were so dry that I couldn’t speak without pain.
“I think you’re ready,” he said, and smiled.
He braced me up on the pillow, moving me around as if I were no more than a rag doll. I felt him brush strands of hair away from my eyes.
“Hello in there,” he sang. He pretended to knock on my skull. “Hello. Anyone home? Come out, come out, wherever you are.”
I closed and opened my eyes. He was simply standing there and smiling. I was so confused. For a few moments, I thought maybe it wasn’t Anthony. Maybe it was someone who had finally come to rescue me.
He put up his hand like a cop stopping traffic. “Don’t go away,” he said.
Then he left and returned a few minutes later with jars of baby food, napkins, and a spoon. I watched curiously as he undid the tops of the jars and dipped a teaspoon into one. He brought it to my lips. I felt like I was outside myself, watching all of this happen to someone else.
“Open,” he said, poking the spoon gently against my lips, and I did.
It tasted like sweet potato. Nothing had ever tasted better. He gave me another spoonful and then held a third spoonful just a little bit away from my lips. My whole body wanted to lunge at the nutrition.
“Now, before you get this, I’d like to hear you say, ‘Thank you, honey.’ Go on. Say it.”
I looked at the spoonful of food and then at him. “Thank you, honey,” I said.
He smiled and fed me another spoonful and another. “I’d like to know how much you love me,” he said. “You can say, ‘I love you so much.’ That would be nice.” He waited.
“I need some water. I can’t talk,” I said in a raspy voice.
“Oh, right. Sorry.”
He rose and got me a glass of water, but he didn’t give it to me. He held it near me.
“How much do you love me, sweet Kaylee? You can do it. You can make some words.”
“I love you so much,” I said. My throat hurt. It felt like it was torn inside.
He brought the water to my lips. “Drink slowly, slowly. You’re doing so well.”
Doing so well? Was he seeing me? How could I be doing well? I was only a foot from my grave, so exhausted and defeated that it looked inviting.
“Don’t worry. We’ll build you up again, and then we’ll have our honeymoon,” he said. “We’ll have music and great dinners. I’ll bring you something beautiful to wear. That’s right, something that fits you. Now that you’re back and you realize how much we love each other, I’ll get you many beautiful things, jewelry and shoes, everything that makes a woman feel like a woman.”
He spoke the way a parent might speak to a little girl, telling her a story, and as he spoke, he fed me some more until the jar was empty. He opened another jar of some chicken mixture and fed me that. I drank and ate, listening to his description of how we would begin a perfect family life.
“We won’t have just one kid, of course. That was my parents’ mistake. I shoulda had a brother or a sister. It’s important. Sometimes I sit in a park not far from here and watch the mothers and fathers and their children play together and think, why can’t that be us? Of course, now it can. Someday soon we’ll be in that park with our kids.
“Okay,” he said when I had finished the second jar. “We got to go slow. I know how this should go when someone’s been away a while and then comes back. It’s sorta like a resurrection. It’ll take at least three days.”
He laughed, and then he checked my feet and nodded.
“Coming along,” he said. “You did take good care of them, but it will be a while yet, so we got to keep you from doing too much for a while longer.”
He gave me some more water, and then he went out and up the stairs. I sat enjoying the feeling of some food in my stomach. When he appeared again quite a while later, I had fallen asleep, probably for hours. This time, he was carrying bags of groceries.
“I didn’t want to go out and shop for all this until I thought you were ready,” he said.
I couldn’t believe how happy I was at the sight of him and the food. I watched him putting it all away as he went on about our future. If it wasn’t being forced on me, I thought, it wouldn’t be so terrible a future, with a dedicated husband whose main concern was his family. Was my father’s main concern his family? How could he leave us? No matter what my mother had done, why didn’t he think of us first and then himself? Was he sorry now? If he hadn’t left, I might not be here. Was he blaming himself? Did his guilt wear on him? Was he crying for me?
Anthony was going on and on about the changes he would make in the house, changes to accommodate more children, repairs he would make once we had reached a point he called “our graduation,” the point when we could move upstairs.
“I know I said we never would, but this place is too small for us, especially when we
have more than one child, especially. Mother told me that would be okay.”
Mother told you? I thought. When? Was it when you had another girl down here?
Or did he believe she had just told him? Was he talking every night to his dead mother in that coffin? Was that really why he kept it in her bedroom? I didn’t think I was capable of feeling more terror, but suddenly, that thought was like the icing on a cake of horror.
“Don’t think I don’t have the money to do all this, either,” he said. “I haven’t spent a tenth of what I have, and who could I spend money on before I had you anyway? My mother never wanted much, and I wouldn’t buy my father a toothpick. You know, my mother used to steal money out of his pockets when he came home drunk. ‘He’ll only waste it,’ she told me. Just her and me knew where she hid it, too. And he never realized she was taking his money. He was always too drunk to remember what he did and didn’t have. We were a good team once, me and my mother. I bet you wish you had a mother like mine. I know you do. You said so. Well, you don’t got to think about her anymore. Just think about us. Okay?”
He looked at me, holding up a fresh loaf of bread in his right hand and a package of ham in his left. How good that would taste, I thought, and nodded.
Why am I listening to him? I really am going crazy, I realized. I’m being led down a path of insanity that he has cut through the maze of his everyday life, and I’m no longer fighting it.
I should have hated myself for even nodding at him and forcing a smile. But what else could I do?
It surprised me that I wanted to live and be well again at any cost.
Anthony had left the door open, and suddenly, of his own volition, Mr. Moccasin strolled back into the basement. I was happy to see him. He could have stayed upstairs, but he wanted to be down here with me. I held out my arms, and the cat came to the bed, leaped up onto it, and curled up beside me.
Anthony watched with a broad smile on his face. “Mr. Moccasin knows who he should love. I’ll give you some more to eat, let you rest a bit, and then we’ll look into cleaning you up,” he said.