I dug my fingernails into my hand. The room came back into focus.
“For how we can make things work.”
“Interesting, but I’ve been doing a little thinking myself. It’s become clear I have to make some decisions and I don’t think you’re going to like the options.”
Time to roll the dice. I slowly got to my feet. The room began to spin again. I braced my hand on the wall, closed my eyes, took some deep breaths. When I opened my eyes back up, The Freak was staring at me. No expression.
Hand clutching my stomach, I staggered over to sit on the stool next to him.
“I guess I can understand that. You’ve gone to a lot of trouble and I’ve been a lot of trouble, right?” Eyelids at half-mast, he nodded his head slowly.
“The thing is, the last time we tried…some of the things I said? That wasn’t really me. I just thought that’s what you wanted, what would make you happy.”
He still wasn’t showing much expression, but he was looking intently into my eyes. The best liars stick close to the truth. I took another deep breath.
“I was really scared, of you and of the feelings you were bringing up in me, but I didn’t know…” He lifted his chin from his hand and sat up straight. I was going to have to talk faster.
“I get it now, I just have to be honest with you, with myself, and I’m ready to do that.” I prayed for the strength to say the next words. “So I’d like to try again. Please give me another chance, please.” I waited through a long pause, then braced myself as he got up from the stool.
“Perhaps I should give this a little more time, Annie. I wouldn’t want to make a hasty decision.” He stood before me with his arms out and his head cocked to the side.
“How about a hug?” His smile didn’t reach his eyes. I was being tested. I stepped into his arms and put mine around him. “Christina is fine,” he said. “We spent a delightful afternoon looking at houses. She sure knows her real estate.”
I finally exhaled.
“I can feel your heart beating against me.” He squeezed me harder. Then he released me and said, “Let’s get some food in you.” He left the cabin but came back moments later carrying a brown paper bag.
“Lentil soup, freshly made at my favorite deli, and some organic apple juice. The protein and sugars will help.”
After The Freak warmed up the fragrant soup, he brought a steaming bowl and a glass of juice over to me. My frantic hands reached for the soup, but he sat down beside me and placed the bowl on the table in front of him. Tears came to my eyes.
“Please, I have to eat, I’m so hungry.”
In a kind voice he said, “I know.”
He brought a spoonful up to his mouth and blew on it. I watched in agony as he took a sip. He nodded his head once, then dipped the spoon back in the bowl. He blew on it again, but this time brought the spoon toward my mouth. As soon as I reached for it, he paused and shook his head. I placed my hand back in my lap.
The Freak slowly spoon-fed me the soup, blowing on every mouthful first and stopping once in a while to feed me sips of the apple juice. When half of the soup and juice was gone he said, “That’s probably all your stomach can handle right now. Feel better?”
I nodded.
“Good.” He glanced at his watch and smiled. “Time for your bath.”
This time when he led me out of the bathroom to the bed and began unzipping my dress from behind, I knew what to do.
“Please don’t touch me—I don’t want to do this.”
With his chin digging into my shoulder, he nuzzled my earlobe. “I can feel you shaking. What are you scared of?”
“You—I’m scared of you. You’re strong and you’re going to hurt me.” My dress fell to the floor and he moved in front of me. In the candlelight, his eyes glowed. He stood before me and traced his middle finger around my neck.
The finger traveled down to right above my pubic bone and paused.
My skin crawled.
“Describe your fear to me.” His voice lingered over the word “fear.”
“My knees—they feel weak. I feel sick in my stomach. I can’t breathe. My heart, it feels…it feels like it’s going to burst.”
With his hands pressed into my shoulders, he walked me backward until the edge of the mattress hit the back of my knees, then shoved me hard, so that I fell onto the bed. I watched as he ripped off his clothes.
I crawled across the bed, but he dragged me back by my ankle. Then he was on me, tearing my pan ties and bra off. It all happened so fast. He was hard, then he was inside me. I screamed. He smiled. I gritted my teeth, squeezed my eyes shut, counted his thrusts—struggling when he faltered—and prayed.
LetitbeoverLetitbeoverLetitbeover
When he finally came, I wanted to pour bleach on my crotch and scrub with boiling water until I bled, but I couldn’t even get up to wash. When I asked, he said, “That’s not necessary, just rest.”
In his postcoital afterglow, he lay there stroking my hair and said, “I’ll take some chicken breasts out of the freezer tomorrow.” He pulled me close against him and nuzzled my neck. “We can make chow mein together, okay?” He cuddled me until he fell asleep.
His wetness was still between my legs, but I didn’t cry. When I thought of Luke a sob almost broke free, but I bit the inside of my cheek, hard. I whispered, “I’m sorry,” into the dark.
I’ve watched shows about women who stay married for years to guys who keep beating the crap out of them—worse, they don’t just stay, they try desperately to make the guy happy, which of course never works—and I’d want to be sympathetic, want to understand, but I just never got it, Doc. Seemed pretty simple to me. Pack your shit and tell the jerk goodbye, preferably with a boot to his ass. Oh, yeah, I thought I was one tough cookie. Well, all it took was five days of being left alone for this cookie to crumble. Five stinking days, and I was ready to do whatever he wanted. And now I get to be paraded around as a heroine. Heroes dive into burning buildings and save children. Heroes die for the cause. I’m not a hero, I’m a coward.
I have to do another interview tonight, look at some perky blonde with her Chiclet smile who’s going to ask, “How did you feel up there, were you scared?” No shit, Sherlock. They’re no better than him—just sadists with a bigger paycheck.
Interesting that hardly anyone asks how I feel now, not that I’d tell them. I just wonder why nobody cares much about the after—just about the story. Guess they figure it stops there.
I wish.
SESSION SEVEN
Hard to believe it’s already the third week of January, isn’t it, Doc? I’m just glad all the Christmas and New Year’s hoopla is finally out of the way, which reminds me, did I ever tell you about Christmas with The Freak? You know, I don’t think I ever did get around to sharing his not-so-good word on all things red and green. Well, one day he sat me down and told me it was December but we wouldn’t be celebrating Christmas, because it was just one more way society tries to control people.
It didn’t stop there. I got to listen to an endless rant about the evils of Christmas and how society has taken a myth and blown it up into a money grab. The last thing in the world I’d wanted to do was celebrate anything with The Freak, but by the time he was done talking about every shitty aspect of the holiday I would’ve helped the Grinch steal Christmas myself. Actually, that’s what the jerk did. He stole Christmas from me. Along with a lot of other stuff, of course. You know, like pride, self-esteem, joy, security, the ability to sleep in a bed, but hey, who’s complaining?
Well, at least I tried with the tree…. Maybe next year will be different. Like you told me, I need to allow for the possibility I won’t always feel the way I do now, and it’s important to take note of small signs of progress, no matter how insignificant they may seem. Today when I stepped out onto my front porch I caught the scent of snow in the air and for a couple of seconds I felt excited. We haven’t had any snow yet this year, and as soon as there was even an inch out there Emma
and I used to tear around in it. She’s so damn funny to watch. She runs, slides, pounces, digs, and eats it. Always wished I knew what she was thinking. Probably, Bunnies, bunnies, got to get the bunnies. Sometimes I’d toss a handful of treats into the snow so she’d actually find something.
Afterward I’d have a hot bath, make a cup of tea, snuggle up by the fire with a book, and watch Emma’s feet twitch as she reenacted the fun in her dreams. All those memories came back, and I felt good. Like I had something to look forward to.
The good feeling left as soon as I remembered last Christmas, though—trust me, spending an entire winter inside a place with shuttered windows takes “cabin fever” to a whole new level. And then, by the middle of January last year, I was four months pregnant.
On the mountain, I lived for the moments when I got to read—The Freak had good taste—and I didn’t even mind reading out loud to him. While those pages were turning, I was somewhere else. And so was he. Sometimes he kept his eyes closed, or he’d lean toward me with his chin in his hand and his eyes glowing, and other times, during intense scenes, he paced around the room. If he liked something, he’d place his hand over his heart and say, “Read it again.”
He always asked me what I thought about what we’d read, but at first I was hesitant to express any ideas and tried to paraphrase his opinions. Until the time he slapped the book out of my hand and said, “Come on, Annie, use that pretty head of yours and tell me what you think.”
We were reading The Prince of Tides—he liked to mix up the classics with contemporary novels, and they usually featured screwed-up families—and it was the scene where the mother cooks up dog food for the dad.
“I was glad she screwed him over like that,” I said. “He deserved it. He was an asshole.”
The second the words were out of my mouth, I panicked. Was he going to think I was talking about him? And “asshole” wasn’t exactly ladylike. But he just nodded his head thoughtfully and said, “Yes, he didn’t appreciate his family at all, did he?”
When we read Of Mice and Men, he asked if I felt sorry for “poor dumb Lennie,” and when I told him I did, he said, “Well, isn’t that interesting. Is it because the girl was a slut? I think you were more bothered about the poor puppy he killed. Would Lennie be so deserving of your sympathy if she were a nice girl?”
“It would be the same either way. He was messed up—he didn’t mean to.”
He smiled and said, “So it’s okay to kill someone as long as you don’t mean to? I’ll have to remember that.”
“That’s not what I—”
He broke into laughter and held up a hand, while my cheeks burned.
The Freak was careful with the books—I was never allowed to place them facedown when they were open or dog-ear a page. One day when I was watching him carefully stack some books back on the shelf, I said, “You must have read a lot as a kid.” His back stiffened and he slowly caressed the binding of the book he was holding.
“When I was allowed.” Allowed? A strange way to put it, but before I could decide whether I should ask about it, he said, “Did you?”
“All the time—one of the bonuses of having a dad who worked at the library.”
“You were lucky.” He gave the books a final pat and left the cabin.
When he paced around, ranting about a character or plot twist, he was so articulate and passionate I’d get caught up in it and reveal more thoughts of my own. He encouraged me to explain and defend my opinions but never flipped out, even when I contradicted him, and over time I began to relax during our literary debates. Of course, when reading time ended, so did the only moments I didn’t dread, the only activity I enjoyed, the only thing I did that made me feel like a human being, like myself.
Every night I lay in bed imagining The Freak’s sperm crawling up inside me and willing my eggs to hide. Since I’d been on the pill when he took me, I hoped my body was messed up and I’d be rescued before I could get pregnant. But I also thought I’d get my period right after the first missed pill, and that didn’t happen until about a week after he was finally able to rape me.
One morning we were in the shower, doing the routine, me facing the wall as he stood behind me washing my legs, up and down and between them. Then he stopped abruptly. When I turned around, he was just standing there looking at the cloth. There was blood on it, and when I looked down at myself, I saw blood on my inner thigh. His jaw clenched and his face reddened. I knew that look.
“I’m sorry—I didn’t know.” I cringed against the wall.
He threw the cloth at me, got out of the shower, and stood silent on the bath mat, glaring at my crotch. The curtain was half open and water dripped onto the floor. I thought for sure he’d flip out over that, but he reached back in, moved the showerhead so the water hit me, and turned the tap to cold—I mean suck-the-wind-out-of-you cold.
“Wash yourself off.”
I tried not to scream, the water was so cold. He picked up the cloth from the shower floor and threw it at me.
“I told you to wash yourself off.”
When I thought I was done, with the cloth in hand, I said, “What do you want me to do with this?”
He motioned for me to give it to him, examined it, and handed it back.
“Do it again.”
When there was nothing left on the cloth, and I was practically blue, he let me get out.
“Don’t move,” he said. I wondered if my shivers counted as movement. The Freak left the room for a couple of minutes and came back with a scrap of material.
“Use this.” He threw it at me.
I said, “Do you have any tampons or anything?”
He put his face close to mine and slowly said, “A real woman would be pregnant by now.” I didn’t know what to say, and his voice rose. “What have you done?”
“There’s no way I could—”
“If you don’t do your job, I’ll find someone who will.”
While he watched, I got dressed and put the stupid rag in my underwear. My fingers were so numb I couldn’t get the row of buttons done up on the dress, and as I fumbled with them, he shook his head and said, “You’re pathetic.”
My period went on for six days, and every morning he waited outside my cold shower until I handed him the cloth with no blood on it. The entire bathtub had to be wiped down with cleaning fluid before he’d have his shower. He made me put the used rags in a bag, which he took outside and told me he burned. We skipped bath time too, which was fine by me—it was six days he didn’t lay a hand on me.
During the afternoons he made me study books on how to get pregnant. I still remember the title of one, The Fastest Way to Get Pregnant Naturally. Yeah, that was The Freak, because, you know, abducting a woman, locking her in a cabin, and raping her is real natural.
As soon as I stopped bleeding, he was trying to knock me up again. I prayed my body would know his sperm was sick and reject it, or all the stress and fear would make it hard for me to conceive. No such luck.
About three weeks later, I knew my period was due and hoped every twinge in my belly was cramps. Every time I went to the bathroom, I prayed to see blood in my underwear. After four weeks, I knew. Judging by my little wall calendar, I figured I’d gotten pregnant around the middle of September, about two weeks after my period ended.
I hoped to hide it from The Freak, but one morning I woke to the sensation of his hand caressing my belly.
“I know you’re awake. You don’t have to get up right away today.” He nuzzled my shoulder. “Look at me, Annie.” I turned to face him. “Good morning,” he said with a smile, then looked down at his hand on my belly.
“My mother, Juliet, the woman who raised me, wasn’t my biological mother, she adopted me when I was five. The whore who gave birth to me was supposedly too young to raise a child.” His voice was tight. “She wasn’t too young to spread her legs for whoever my father was.” He shook his head and in a softer voice said, “But then Juliet changed my life. She lost he
r own son when he was only a year and still nursing. She had so much love to give…. It was she who taught me family is everything. And you, Annie, losing half your family so soon, I know you’ve always wanted one of your own—I’m glad I’m the man you chose.”
Chose? Not quite how I’d put it. Even before The Freak abducted me, I wasn’t sure how I felt about having kids. I’d been pretty happy living the in de pen dent career woman’s life and I never was the type to walk into a roomful of kids and go, “Wow, I gotta get me one of these.” But here I was, knocked up, brewing some demon child. And here he was, talking about his mother, giving me a chance to get inside his head and learn more about him. Part of me was scared to rock the boat, but I had to think long-term gain.
“You said her name was Juliet. Did your mom pass away?”
The smile left his face. He rolled over and stared up at the ceiling.
“She was taken from me when I was just eighteen.” I waited for him to elaborate, but he looked lost in thought.
I said, “She sounds like she was someone very special. It’s nice you were so close. My mom never abandoned me, like your real one did, but the doctors kept giving her drugs after the accident, so she was pretty messed up. I had to go live with my uncle and aunt for a while. I know what it feels like to be alone.”
His eyes flicked to me, then away. “What was it like, living with these relatives? Were they kind to you?”
I did some therapy in my twenties to deal with my feelings about the accident and to work through my issues with Mom—fat lot of good that did me—but no matter how many times I told the story, it never got easier. I hadn’t even discussed those feelings with Luke.
“My aunt is my mom’s sister, they’re always trying to one-up each other, but she was nice enough, I guess. My cousins were older and pretty much ignored me. But I didn’t care.”
“Didn’t you? I bet you cared a lot.” There was no mockery in his voice. “Wasn’t there any other family you could stay with?”