Still Missing

  Seventeen seconds, eighteen…that bead was slow.

  “I doubt any of them could see, as I could, that she’d taste like a green apple, the kind you think is ripe until you take a bite. And your friend Christina, with her long blond hair always pinned up, always businesslike. There’s more to her than meets the eye.” I lost track of the bead of water.

  “Yes, I know about Christina. She’s a Realtor too, isn’t she? Quite a successful one, I understand. I wonder why you surround yourself with people you envy.”

  I wanted to tell him I wasn’t jealous, I was proud of Christina—we’d been best friends since high school. She taught me everything I know about real estate. Hell, she taught me everything I know about a lot of things, but I kept my mouth shut. This guy would use anything I said to screw with me.

  “Does she remind you of Daisy? Daisy was cotton candy, but Christina, mmmm…Christina. Bet you she tastes like imported pears.” My eyes met his. He began soaping my feet. I was sick of being played with.

  “How did your mother taste?” I said.

  The hand on my foot stilled and tightened. “My mother? Is that what you think this is all about?” He laughed as he plunged my foot underwater, then he got the razor from the cupboard.

  This time when his hand gripped my leg I began to count the lines in the tiled wall. When the cold blade of the razor slid down my calf, I lost count and started again. When he made me stand up, so he could shave everything, I divided the tiles by the number of cracks in the grout. When his hands spread lotion on me, he hummed a song and I counted drips of wax down the sides of the candles.

  I took inventory of whatever I looked at. I’d multiply and divide the numbers. If another thought or a feeling crept into my mind, I kicked it out and started again from the top.

  While he tried to rape me for the second time, I didn’t move, didn’t cry, just stared at the bedroom wall. If I didn’t react, he couldn’t get it up. Help had to be on the way, I just had to tough it out until it showed up. So no matter what he did to me, I counted or thought about planes while I lay there like a rag doll. He gripped my face and looked right in my eyes and kept trying to force his limp penis into me. I counted the blood vessels in his eyes. His dick got softer. He yelled at me to call him by his name. When I didn’t, he pounded his fist into the pillow right next to my ear, screaming, “You stupid, stupid bitch!” with each blow.

  The pounding stopped. His breathing slowed. On his way to the bathroom he started to hum.

  While he showered, I clutched the pillow over my face and shouted into it. You sick fuck! You limp-dicked asshole! You picked the wrong girl to mess with. Sobs went into the pillow next. The second I heard the shower shut off I flipped the pillow over, placed it back under my head dry side up, and turned my face to the wall.

  Unfortunately, failure didn’t discourage him. Each time it started with the same routine, bath time—which was when he liked to talk the most—followed by shaving, a lotion rubdown, then the dress. I felt like a Broadway performer: same stage, setting, lighting, and costume night after night. The only thing that changed was his increasing frustration and what he did about it.

  After his third failed attempt, he slapped me twice in the face so hard I bit my tongue. This time there was no satisfaction, bitter or otherwise. I muffled my sobs with the pillow, sucked on my bloody tongue, and dreaded the end of his shower.

  The fourth night he punched me twice in the stomach—my breath whooshed out of me, and the pain shocked me as much as it hurt—and once in the jaw. That pain was excruciating. The room dimmed. I prayed for everything to go completely black. It didn’t. I stopped crying into the pillow.

  The fifth night he flipped me over, knelt on my hands, and ground my face into the mattress so hard I couldn’t breathe. My chest burned. He did this three times, always stopping right before I passed out.

  Most nights ended with him getting up, his face expressionless, and then I’d hear the shower run for a while. After he got back into bed, he’d cuddle me and talk about something trivial—how natives cured meat, what constellations he saw on his nightly patrol, which fruits he liked or disliked.

  But one night he lay down beside me and said, “I wonder how Christina is. She’s so calm and self-possessed, isn’t she? I wonder what it would take for a woman like her to lose control.”

  I struggled to catch my breath as he wove his fingers through my stiff hands and softly rubbed his thumb against mine.

  As he snored beside me the idea of his hands anywhere on Christina, or of her feeling one second of the terror I was feeling, tore at my insides. I couldn’t let that happen. My current plan wasn’t working, unless my goal was to get myself, and possibly Christina, killed. It was taking too long for me to be found, and he wasn’t going to turn to me one day and say, “This doesn’t seem to be working out, so I’m going to take you home now.” I might have gambled longer with my own life, but not Christina’s.

  I was going to have to help him rape me.

  Understanding his behavior was critical. I dredged up everything I’d ever read about rapists, every TV show I’d ever seen about them—Law & Order: SVU, Criminal Minds, a couple of A&E specials—mostly focusing on what rapists like and under what circumstances they kill their victims.

  I remembered that some rapists need to think the victims enjoy what they’re doing to them. Maybe The Freak was able to delude himself into thinking I was actually turned on, but still couldn’t get it up because on some level a little voice of doubt was creeping in on him. Right now it was making him impotent. If it got louder, I’d be dead.

  The next night in the bath, I said, “You’re very gentle.” He stared at me hard and I made myself look into his eyes.

  “Really?”

  “Most men, you know, are kind of rough, but you have a nice touch.”

  He smiled.

  “I’m sorry I’ve been difficult, I just wasn’t sure, you know, at first, but I’ve been thinking maybe…maybe it’s not too late for me to start a new life.” How much should I hesitate? If I was too positive he’d never buy it.

  “Difficult?”

  “I mean, it will take a while for me to get used to everything and all, but I’m beginning to see that maybe I could like it up here. With you.”

  “You think so, do you?” He dragged out each syllable.

  Forcing myself to make eye contact again, I tried to convey as much sincerity as possible.

  “Yes, I do. You understand a lot of things most men don’t.”

  “Oh, I definitely understand a lot of things most men don’t.” His face broke out in his award-winning smile. Bingo.

  When he rubbed lotion on me, I said, “I really like that scent.” His smile grew even bigger.

  After I put on the dress, I twirled for him and said, “It’s exactly what I would have picked out.”

  Back on the bed I moaned for him and kissed him back, but cautiously, as though I were awakening to his touch. His pants sped up and I counted the seconds between them like contractions. Inside, I died.

  With his breathing heavy and his face flushed, he lay on top of me. Worried he would lose his erection—and then lose control—I reached down and fondled him before things could turn ugly. It had to be done.

  Deep inside myself I curled into a ball and hid from my own words as I whispered, “I’ve waited for this moment.”

  His arms tensed and his face turned dark with rage. He clamped his hand down on my throat. His hand tightened as I clawed uselessly at it.

  “I could kill you at any second, and you talk like a whore? You should be terrified. You should be begging. You should be fighting for your life. Don’t you get it?”

  He finally released my throat, but my relief was interrupted by a blow to my stomach. He pounded my body with his fists, against my breasts, face, crotch. I struggled, but his fists were everywhere at once. The blows rained down until I couldn’t feel them anymore. I had passed out.

  It’s strange, Doc, when
The Freak called me a whore and beat me, I felt pain but no sense of outrage, because I wanted him to hurt me. Even while my body struggled against him, my mind cheered him on. I deserved the pain. How could I say those things? How could I touch him like that?

  I did a lot of things on the mountain, a lot of things I didn’t want to do and a lot of things I didn’t want to believe I was capable of doing. But that time? When I wonder how I became the zombie I am now, how I could have gotten so lost, it always traces back to that moment—the moment I put my soul on the shelf to make room for the devil.

  SESSION SIX

  Yesterday, I sat in a church for a while. Not to pray—I’m not religious—but just to sit in the quiet. Before the abduction I’d probably passed that church a thousand times without noticing it. We’re not exactly a churchgoing family, my mom and stepdad were usually too busy sleeping their “religion” off on a Sunday morning. But I’ve gone a couple of times over the last few months. It’s an old church and smells like a museum—in a good way, a survived-lots-of-shit-and-still-standing kind of way. Something about the stained-glass windows works for me too. If I were to get all deep on you, I could say the idea of all those broken pieces being made into something so damn pretty appeals to me. Good thing I’m not that profound.

  The church is usually empty, thank you, God, but even if there is someone else inside, nobody ever talks to me or even looks at me. Not that I would make eye contact.

  When I first came to after The Freak beat me unconscious, my whole body hurt, and it took a long time for me to lift my head enough to look around. Waves of nausea passed through me. The right side of my chest burned every time I took a breath. One eye was closed up pretty good and the other one made things fuzzy, but I could see outlines. He was nowhere in sight. Either he was sleeping on the floor or he was outside. I lay still.

  The bathroom was calling, but I didn’t know if I could move that far, plus I dreaded his catching me going for an unscheduled pee. I must have passed out again, because I don’t remember anything until I woke from a dream in which I was running on the beach with Luke and our dogs. When I remembered where I really was, I cried.

  My bladder burned—if I waited much longer I was going to pee in the bed. God only knew which offense would piss him off the most. There was no way I was putting that dress back on, so I crawled naked to the bathroom. Every few seconds I paused, waited for the black dots in my vision to go away, then crawled another few inches, whimpering the whole time. He would have loved it.

  Petrified to use the toilet in case he came in, I squatted over the drain in the bathtub. Leaning my head on the side wall, I tried to breathe in the perfect amount of air that wouldn’t hurt and prayed I didn’t die in there. Eventually I crawled back into bed and passed out again.

  My head ached, but it was a distant throbbing, like background noise. I still didn’t know where The Freak was, and terrifying images of his abducting Christina raged through my mind. I prayed that my attempts to manipulate him hadn’t just sent him straight to her.

  I wasn’t sure how long I’d been slipping in and out of consciousness, but I thought it had been at least a day. When I got back some strength, I made my way to the door. It was still locked. Shit. I hung my head under the tap, washed the stickiness I assumed was blood off my face, and drank my fill. As soon as the cold water hit my stomach, I clung to the sink and puked.

  When I was finally able to move without getting dizzy, I searched the place again. My fingers explored every crack and bolt. Standing on the kitchen counter, I kicked the shutter so hard I thought I’d torn the muscles in my leg. My feet didn’t even leave a mark. I was hurt bad and couldn’t remember the last time I’d had any food, but I still would’ve taken my chances on the mountain, except there was no way out of the damn cabin.

  To keep track of how many days I’d been missing, I pulled the bed away from the wall and pressed my fingernail into the wood until it left faint marks. If there was light through the little hole in the bathroom wall, I figured it was morning, and if it was still dark I waited until it brightened up, then made another mark. Two marks since he’d left me alone. To keep myself on some sort of schedule resembling The Freak’s, I peed when I couldn’t hold it any longer, and then only in the bathtub with my ears peeled for any sound. Too scared to have a shower or bath in case he came home and caught me, I avoided both, and whenever the hunger pangs got too bad, I filled myself up with water. I pictured everyone back home at candlelight vigils and imagined all my friends holding meetings, or handing out flyers with my smiling face on them. My mom must have been going crazy. I could see her at home, crying, probably looking beautiful—tragedy agreed with her. Neighbors would be bringing over casseroles, Aunt Val would be fielding calls, and my stepdad would be holding her hand, telling her it was going to be all right. I wished I had someone telling me that. Why hadn’t anybody found me? Had they given up? I’d never heard of anyone going missing and being found weeks later. Unless the missing person was a corpse.

  Maybe Luke was on TV pleading for my return. Or would the cops question him? Wasn’t it always the boyfriend they suspected first? They were probably wasting time on him when they should be looking for The Freak.

  I worried about Emma and who was taking care of her. Were they feeding her the right food for her sensitive tummy? Were they walking her? Mostly I just wondered if she thought I’d abandoned her, and that always made me cry.

  To comfort myself I played memories of Luke, Emma, and Christina like home movies in my head: pause, rewind, and repeat. One of my favorites of Christina was the two of us on our candy bender. She came over to play Scrabble last Halloween and we decided to break open one of the bags I’d bought for trick-or-treaters. One bag turned to two, then three and four. We were both so stoned on sugar our Scrabble game just dissolved into a mess of dirty words and hysterical laughter. Then we ran out of candy for the kids, so we had to turn off all the lights. We hid in the dark and listened to fireworks, giggling our asses off.

  But then my thoughts always turned to The Freak and what he might be doing to her now. I’d imagine her at the office, maybe working late, and then I pictured The Freak waiting outside in the van. My powerlessness enraged me.

  As another day went by and I put a new mark on the wall, I stopped feeling any cravings for food, but the feeling that The Freak was coming back continued. And if I wanted to survive, I needed to be ready. My previous attempt at seduction had nearly gotten me killed, so I had to figure out why he flipped out when I pretended to be turned on.

  Was he a sadist? No, he wasn’t sexually aroused by beating me. He was reenacting something. This guy had a pattern. It started with the bath—maybe his version of foreplay?—and then it got rough later. What the hell was his deal?

  He said women don’t want nice guys, we all want to be treated like garbage, and then, when I was too overt in my attempts at seduction, it enraged him and he called me a whore, said I should be fighting him. He must think a “nice” woman secretly wants an aggressive man who’s rough with her and overpowers her, but in his mind only a “whore” would actually show she likes it—a nice woman would resist. So he probably didn’t feel like a real man unless I was scared of him.

  He was trying to please me—with fear and pain. And the more I didn’t react, the more he thought he had to hurt me. Holy shit. He was a rapist who thought every woman had a rape fantasy. At last I knew what he wanted—I had to struggle and show him my pain and fear.

  If there’d been anything in my stomach to vomit up, I would have. Somehow, the thought of allowing him to see my real feelings was worse than pretending I liked being raped.

  On my fourth day alone it became harder to distinguish my dreams from my reality as I slept more and woke less. There were times I’m sure I was hallucinating, because I was wide awake yet I could hear Luke’s voice and smell his cologne, but when I opened my eyes there was nothing but those damn cabin walls.

  I realized I was so weak I might fo
rget my plan, so I created a rhyme to help myself remember. I chanted it over and over as I slipped in and out of sleep.

  The Freak is insane, he needs fear and pain. The Freak is insane, he needs fear and pain.

  By the fifth day, I began to be afraid he wouldn’t come back before I starved to death. I spent most of the day on the bed or sitting with my back to the corner, waiting for the door to open and chanting my rhyme, but I kept nodding off. I think it was early evening but I was so weak it felt later. Then the lock on the door clicked and he walked in.

  I was actually glad to see him—I wouldn’t starve. I was especially glad to see he was alone, then I wondered if Christina was unconscious and tied up in the van.

  He closed the door and stood staring at me. His image swam in front of me.

  The Freak is insane, he needs fear and pain….

  Body and voice trembling, I said, “Thank God, I’ve been so scared. I—I thought I was going to die here all alone.”

  His eyebrows rose. “Would you rather die here with company?”

  “No!” As I shook my head, the room spun. “I don’t want anyone to die. I’ve been doing thinking…” My food-deprived brain struggled to remember words. “Doing some thinking about…things. Things I want to tell you, but I need to know…” My chest tightened. “Christina, is Christina okay?”

  He sauntered over to one of the barstools, sat down, and rested his chin in his hand. “Don’t you care how I am?”

  “Yes, yes, of course, I just thought—just wanted to know…” The Freak blurred and came into focus, then blurred again. “I messed up. Messed up bad. Last time.”

  His eyes narrowed and he nodded.

  “But I have a plan. See—”

  “You have a plan?” He sat up straighter. What the hell was I saying?