I cry out because of what I think is coming. But nothing comes. It’s then that I acknowledge that there is no humming. The fence used to hum. My vocal chords are frozen, my tongue is stuck to the roof of my mouth. I unstick my tongue and try to lick my lips. But my mouth is so dry there is nothing to wet them with. I let go of the chain link and look over my shoulder at the house. I left the front door open, it’s swung wide, the one dark spot beneath the veils of snow. I don’t want to go back. The smart thing would be to go get more layers. More socks. I threw on one of Isaac’s sweatshirts before I left, over the one I was already wearing. But the air cuts through both like they’re made of tissue. I head back for the house, my leg aching. I throw on more clothes, stuff food in my pockets. Before I leave I climb the stairs to the carousel room. Kneeling in front of the chest, I search for the single puzzle piece that escaped the fire. It’s there, in the corner, overlaid with dust. I place it in my pocket, and then I walk through my prison for the last time.
The fence. I lace my fingers through the wire and pull up. In Saphira’s exit with Isaac, she might have overlooked turning the fence back on. If she comes back I don’t want to be here. I’d sooner die free, cold and in the woods than locked up behind an electrical fence, turning into a human ice cube in that house.
Isaac’s boots are big. I can’t fit the toes into the octagons that make up the pattern of the fence. I slip twice and my chin bumps down the metal like something out of a Looney-Tunes cartoon. I feel blood running down my neck. I don’t even bother to wipe it up. I am desperate … manic. I want out. I claw at the fence. My gloves snag on twisted pieces of steel. When I rip them away the metal catches the skin on my palm, ripping into the tender flesh. I keep going. There is barbed wire along the top of the fence, running in loops as far as I can see. I don’t even feel the spikes when I grab onto one and swing my leg over the side. I manage to get both feet balanced precariously on the far side of the fence. The barbed wire wavers against my weight. I sway … then I fall.
I feel my mother in that fall. Maybe it’s because I’m so near to the Reaper. I wonder if my mother is dead, and if I will see her when I die. I think all of this as I make the three-second spill to the ground.
One.
Two.
Three.
I gasp. I feel as if all the air in the world was pumped into my lungs, and then rapidly sucked out, lickety-split.
Right away I search myself. I can hardly breathe, but my hands are running over my limbs looking for broken things. When I am sufficiently comforted that this fall didn’t break anything, I sit up, groaning, holding onto the back of my head like my brains are falling out. The snow broke my fall, but my head hit something. It takes me a while to get all the way to my feet. I’m going to have a huge knot … maybe a concussion. The good new is if I have a concussion I’ll just pass out. No feeling wild animals rip my limbs apart. No feeling myself freeze to death. No eating tree bark and suffering the claws of hunger. Just a nice, bleeding brain and then … nothing. The bags of peanuts I put into my pockets are scattered around in the snow. I pick them up one by one as I bend my head back to look at the top of the fence. I want to see how far I fell. What is that—twelve feet? I turn toward the woods, my bad leg sinking low into the soft mounds of snow. It’s hard to get it back up. I have worked a nice little path to the tree line when I suddenly turn back. It’s only ten feet back to the chain link, but it’s an arduous journey. I look one last time. I hate it. I hate that house. But it’s where Isaac showed me a love that expects nothing in return. So, I can’t hate it too much.
Please, please let him live.
And then I walk.
I hear the beating of helicopter blades.
Whump-Whump
Whump-Whump
Whump-Whump
I force my eyes open. I have to use my fingers to pry them apart, and even then I can’t get them to stay cracked.
Whump-Whump
It sounds like it’s getting closer. I have to get up, get outside. I am already outside. I feel the snow beneath my fingertips. I raise my head. There is a lot of pain. From my head? Yes, I fell. Climbing over the fence.
Whump-Whump
Whump-Whump
You have to get to a clearing. Somewhere they can see you. But all around me there are trees. I’ve walked so far. I am in the thickest of thickets. I can reach out and touch the nearest tree trunk with my pinkie. Did I stop here because I thought it would be warmer? Did I just collapse? I can’t remember. But I hear a helicopter whipping the air, and I have to make them see me. I utilize the nearest tree trunk and pull myself to my feet. I stumble forward, heading in the direction I came from. I can see my prints in the snow. I think I remember a thicket just ahead. One where I could see the sky. It’s farther than I thought, and by the time I reach it and tilt my head back, I can’t hear the Whump-Whump quite as clearly as before. Not enough time to build a fire. I picture myself crouched in the snow whittling away at a pile of wood, and laugh. Too late to go back to the house, how long have I been out her? I’ve lost all concept of time. Two days? Three? Then I think it. Isaac is alive! He sent them. There is nothing to do but to stand in the clearing, head tilted up, and wait.
I am airlifted to the nearest hospital in Anchorage. There are already news trucks outside. I see flashes and hear slamming doors and voices before I am wheeled on the gurney through the back door and into a private room. Nurses and doctors in salmon-colored scrubs come rushing toward me. I am compelled to roll off the gurney and hide. There are too many people. I want to tell them that I’m fine. I’m a death escapist. There is no need for this many medical professionals or this many tests. Their faces are serious; they are concentrating on saving me. There’s nothing really left for them to save.
Nevertheless, needles slide into my arms over and over until I can’t even feel them anymore. They make me comfortable in a private room, with only an IV to keep me company. The nurses ask how I feel, but I don’t know what to tell them. I know that my heart is beating and that I am not cold anymore. They tell me that I’m dehydrated, undernourished. I want to say, “No shit” but I can’t form words yet. After a few hours they feed me. Or they try to. Simple food that my hollow stomach can handle: bread and something that is white and mushy. I push the food aside and ask for coffee. They say, “No.” When I try to stand up and tell them that I’m getting my own, they bring me coffee.
The police come next. All official looking. I tell them I want to speak to Saphira before I speak to them. They want my statement; they’re clicking the little buttons on the ends of their pens and pushing tape recorders at me, but I stare at them tight lipped until I can speak to Saphira.
“You can speak to her when you’re well enough to come in to the station,” they tell me. A chill runs through my body. They have her. Here.
“That’s when I’ll speak to you, then,” I tell them.
A day before I am discharged I am visited by two doctors; one is an oncologist and the other an orthopedic surgeon. The ortho guy holds up the x-rays they took of my leg.
“The bone didn’t heal straight, which is why you have pain when you put too much pressure on it. I’ve scheduled you for—”
“No,” I tell him.
He brings his eyes to my face. “No?”
“I’m not interested in fixing it. I’ll leave it how it is.” I open the magazine on my lap to signal that the conversation is over.
“Ms. Richards, with all due respect, the irregular fusion of your bone that was caused by the accident will be something that pains you for the rest of your life. You will want to have the surgeries needed to repair it.”
I close my magazine. “I like pain. I like when it lingers. It reminds a person of what they’ve lived through.”
“That’s a very unique perspective,” he says. “But not practical.”
I fling the magazine across the room. It flies with surprising force and hits the door with a healthy thud. Then I pull down my hospital gown—a
ll the way—until the scars on my chest are exposed. He looks like he might pass out.
“I like my scars,” I say. “I earned them. Now, get out.”
As soon as the door shuts behind him, I scream. The nurses come rushing in, but I throw my water jug at them. At the rate I’m going they’re going to put me in the psych ward.
“Get out!” I scream at them. “Stop telling me how to live my life!”
I am much nicer to the oncologist. She got my file from the hospital in Seattle and ran the yearly tests that I’d missed during my imprisonment. When she gives me the results she sits on the edge of my bed. It reminds me so much of Isaac that I feel overwhelmed. When she is finished she tells me that I am built to fight; emotionally and physically. I actually smile.
A few days later I am driven to the police station in the back of a police car. It stinks of mold and sweat. I am wearing clothes that the hospital gave me: jeans, an ugly brown sweater and green chucks. The nurses tried to comb through my hair, but eventually they gave up. I asked for scissors and hacked through the rope of it. Now it barely touches my neck. I look stupid, but who cares? I’ve been locked in a house for over a year eating coffee grounds and trying not to die of hypothermia.
When we reach the police station, they put me in a room with a cup of coffee and a bagel. Two detectives come in and try to take my statement.
“Not until I can speak to Saphira,” I say. I don’t know why it’s so important for me to speak to her first. Maybe I think that they won’t hold true to the bargain, and they’ll keep me away from her. Finally, one of the detectives, a tall man who smells like cigarette smoke and says his s’s too softly leads me by the arm to the room where they are holding her. He tells me his name is Detective Garrison. He’s in charge of this case. I wonder if he’s ever seen action like this before.
“Ten minutes,” he says. I nod. I wait until he closes the door before I look at her. She’s ruffled. Her lips are bare of their usual deep red, and her hair is pulling out of a low ponytail. She’s leaning her elbows on the table, her hands clasped in front of her. It’s her typical shrink pose.
“What’s wrong, Saphira? You look like an experiment gone wrong.”
She doesn’t look surprised to see me. In fact, she looks downright peaceful. She knew she’d get caught. She wanted to. Planned it, probably. The realization throws me off. I momentarily forget what I came here to do. I make my way over to the chair opposite her. It screeches against the floor as I pull it out.
My heart is racing. This isn’t how I imagined this going. Her face blurs in and out of my vision. I hear screaming. No. It’s my imagination. We are in a quiet room, painted white, sitting at a metal table. The only sound is silence as we sit contemplating one another, so why do I want to reach up and cover my ears?
“Saphira,” I breathe. She smiles at me. A dragon’s smile. “Why did you do this?”
“Senna Richards. The great fiction writerrr,” she purrs, leaning forward on her elbows. “You don’t rememberrr Westwick.”
Westwick.
“What are you talking about?”
“You were institutionalized, my dear. Three years ago. At Westwick Psychiatric Facility.”
My skin prickles. “That’s a lie.”
“Is it?”
My mouth is dry. My tongue is sticking to the inside of my mouth. I try to shift it around—to the roof of my mouth, the inside of my cheeks, but it sticks, sticks, sticks.
“You had a psychotic break. You tried to kill yourself.”
“I would never,” I say. I love death. I think about it all the time, but to actually act out a suicide is unlike me.
“You called me from yourrr home at three o’clock in the morrrning. You were delusional. You werrre starving yourself. Keeping yourrrself awake with pills. When they took you in you hadn’t slept in nine days. You were experiencing hallucinations, paranoia and memory lapses.”
That’s not suicide, I think. But then I’m not so sure. I lift my hands off the top of the table where they are resting and hide them between my thighs.
“You were saying one thing overrr and overrr when they brought you in. Do you rememberrr?”
I make a noise in the back of my throat.
If I ask her what I was saying I’m acknowledging that I believe her. And I don’t believe her. Except that I can hear screaming in my head.
“Pink hippo,” she says.
My throat constricts. The screaming gets louder. I want to reach up and put my hands over my ears to quell the sound.
“No,” I say.
“Yes, Senna. You were.”
“No!” I slam my fist on the table. Saphira’s eyes grow large.
“I was saying Zippo.”
There is silence. All consuming, chilling, silence. I realize I was baited.
The corners of her mouth curl up. “Ah, yes,” she says. “Z, for Zippo. My mistake.”
It’s like I’ve just woken up from a dream—not a good one—just a dream that concealed a reality I’d somehow forgotten. I’m not freaking out, I’m not panicking. It feels as if I’m waking up from a long sleep. I’m compelled to stand and stretch my muscles. I hear the screaming again, but now it’s connected to a memory. I’m in a locked room. I’m not trying to get out. I don’t care about getting out. I’m just curled up on a metal cot, screaming. They can’t get me to stop. I’ve been like that for hours. I only stop when they sedate me, but as soon as the drugs wear off, I’m screaming again.
“What made me stop screaming?” I ask her. My voice is so calm. I can’t remember everything. It’s all in pieces; smells and sounds and overwhelming emotions that were there at once, making me feel like I was about to implode.
“Isaac.”
I jar at the sound of his name. “What are you talking about?”
“I called Isaac,” she says. “He came.”
“Ohgodohgodohgod.” I bend over at the waist, hugging myself. I remember. I’ve been falling, and now I’ve finally hit the ground.
Flashes of him coming into the room and climbing into the cot behind me. His arms wrapping around my body, until I stopped screaming.
I moan. It’s an ugly, guttural sound.
“Why did I forget all that?” I’m still treating her like she’s my shrink; asking her questions like she’s sane enough to know the answers. She’s your zookeeper. She tried to kill you.
“It happens. We block out things that thrrreaten to break us. It’s the brain’s best defense mechanism.”
I’m struggling for air.
“This was all an experiment to you. You took advantage of your position. Of what I told you.” All my gusto is gone. I just need answers so I can get out of here. Get out of here and go where? Home, I tell myself. Whatever that is.
“Do you remember what you asked me in our last session?” I stare at her blank faced.
“You asked, ‘If there were a God, why would he let these terrible things happen to people?’”
I remember.
“With free will comes bad decisions; decisions to drink and drive and kill someone’s child. Decisions to murder. Decisions to choose whom we love, whom we spend our life with. If God decided to never let anything bad happen to people, he would have to take away their free will. He would become the dictator and they would be his puppets.”
“Why are you talking about God? I want to talk about what you did to me!”
And then I know. Saphira locking me in the house with Isaac, the man she believed was my safety and salvation, controlling the medicine, the food, what we saw, how we saw it—it was all her experimenting with free will. She became God. She’d said something once in one of our sessions: Picture yourself standing on a cliff where you not only fear falling, but dread the possibility of throwing yourself off. Nothing is holding you back, and you experience freedom.
The cliff! Why hadn’t I seen it?
“Do you know how many people there are just like you? I heard it every day; pain, sadness, regret. You
wanted a second chance. So I gave it to you. I gave you not the person you wanted, but the person you needed.”
I don’t know what to say. My ten minutes are almost over.
“Don’t make out like you did this for me. You’re sick. You’re—”
“You are sick, my dear,” she interrupts. “You were self destructing. Ready to die. I just gave you some perspective. Helped you to see the truth.”
“What’s the truth?”
“Isaac is your truth. You were too blinded by your past to see that.”
I’m breathless. My mouth hangs open as I stare at her.
“Isaac has a wife. He has a baby. You act like you care so much, but you did this to him, too. Made him suffer for no reason. He almost died!”
Detective Garrison chooses that exact moment to come back. I want more time with her. I want more answers, but I know my time is up. He leads me to the door by my elbow. I look back at Saphira. She’s staring into space, serene.
“He would have died without you, too,” she says before the door closes. I want to ask her what she means, but the door swings closed. And that is the last time I ever see Saphira Elgin alive.
Detective Garrison is kind. I think this case is above his pay grade. He’s not sure what to do with me—so he tries to feed me doughnuts and sandwiches. I eat none of it, but I appreciate the sentiment. There are six people in the room with me; two of them leaning against the wall, the others sitting. I give them my statement. I tell a tape recorder what the last fourteen months looked like; each day, each hunger pain, each time I thought one of us would die. When I am finished the room is quiet. Detective Garrison is the first to clear his throat. That’s when I dare ask about Isaac. I’ve been too afraid up until now. Thinking his name alone hurts me. Hearing someone speak about him feels … wrong. He’s been with me for all this time. Now he’s not.