MY FIRST LOOK AT at the new girl that Jack pushes through the cabin door ahead of him reveals that she is slim, with hair as black as mine but long and wavy. She is perhaps a full decade younger than my twenty-seven, and her skin is pale to my dark brown. She is hyperventilating.
She hasn’t, I think in that moment, experienced anything like this before.
The girl doesn’t even see me, seated on the floor with my back to the wall in the usual spot, when her golden-brown eyes—wide and wild—flare across the room, down at her bound hands, and back at Jack like he is the stuff of nightmares.
He is, I remind myself.
Jack half pulls, half pushes her in my direction. He is a burly, muscular white man with short brown hair and giant feet that seem to stomp even when he isn’t wearing the boots he is now. Not that I hadn’t developed the ability to sense him even when he is silent, the way one always knows which way is up.
“Calm her down,” Jack said, shoving the girl to the floor beside me, cutting the rope around her wrists and cuffing them to the metal loops on the wall instead.
“Welcome home,” I murmur, and he pecks me on the lips before going out again. He has been gone for more than a day, but this time, when he drops the packs he carries and slings his hunting rifle over one arm, I know he is only going out to catch our dinner.
The moment the door closes behind him, the girl starts babbling desperately, her words barely hushed, “We have to get out of here! We have to call the police. We have to—”
“Hush,” I whisper, and the girl is startled enough to pause. She follows my gaze to the door, but after only a moment, begins again.
“Is he coming back? What is he going to do to me? Are you his prisoner too?”
This, despite that I am clearly shackled the same way that she is. But the girl trails off, her eyes widening as she sees what’s on my other side. She cranes her neck, her eyes bulging like some exotic bird, and her mouth forms an “o” of horror and disbelief.
Sylvia is on my other side, or what’s left of her. It has been nearly six weeks now, so there is little left but a somewhat-articulated pile of bones and teeth and hair. The beetles and maggots are gone, thankfully. When Jack changed his mind about her, it was as if he never saw or heard from her again. As if he didn’t hear her pleas and protestations of love, didn’t see the gauntness that sharpened her once beautiful features day by day until she looked dead, didn’t move her corpse when she actually did die with one final exhale like a butterfly taking wing.
“Breathe,” I say at last, for Jack is far enough now and the girl is still hyperventilating. “You are safe for now,” I say, and the girl stares in disbelief. But I continue before she can, telling her what Praya, my own predecessor, once told me. “You are here because he wants you to love him. He sees us out there, in a relationship with someone else—” and here my eyes stray to hers for a moment in pity, for I know she must be in love “—and it makes him jealous. Angry. He takes us. He wants a home here, a wife. If you take care of him, he’ll take care of you.”
“He’s a monster,” the girl hisses, as if I have forgotten.
“Never say that aloud,” I tell her, my eyes on the floorboards. I fix my gaze on a darker patch, where blood fell. “You must remember the truth, tell it to yourself each day, each moment, with each lie, but never say it aloud, or you will die,” I say to her, and her gaze passes over to Sylvia’s skeleton again.
“How long have you been here?” she asks in a hushed voice, her breath still coming in hiccups but steadier now.
But it is not, I think, my time here that has taught me these things, nor luck that has allowed me to both live and retain some sanity through the deaths of Praya, Sylvia, and another. I think of my mother, of the nightmare of my childhood. I think of her lies, of how they drove me crazy. I think of how I escaped, how the truth revealed itself day by day like following Gretel’s pebbles to the horror of the witch’s house. I think of the moment I learned that my mother had given me Stockholm Syndrome, and how everything had changed.
“Eight months,” I reply.
For a long moment, she can only stare in horror.
“We must escape,” she breathes.
“Don’t try,” I advise her. “Not unless something changes. He is coming,” I say, though I am not sure if I can actually hear him yet, or just know.
“What is your name?” she whispers, and my lips almost twitch into a smile at the idea that such things matter.
“Shakisha,” I say.
“Erin,” she replies.
And then Jack comes home.
#
That day eight months ago had been the happiest of my life. My eyes had strayed as often to the ring I had so carefully chosen sitting perfectly on Anya’s finger as to her smiling face, to those bright blue eyes that seemed like a gift too good to be true.
Maybe that’s what Jack had thought. Too good to be true. Shouldn’t be true. Or at least, not for someone else.
I proposed to her on a beach, the wind twirling her brown hair away, her lips soft and sweet and smiling. We had both been topless — her, slathered in sunscreen, me, not needing it — and the sun had warmed my skin as much as her yes had warmed my heart.
Jack was one of a dozen people who’d gotten on the bus with us and left at the end of the day. Anya and I had been holding hands, pressed side to side, lost in each other’s eyes, talking non-stop. When we reached my house at the outskirts of the city, Jack didn’t get off with us. No one did, and we thought nothing amiss. He must have gotten off at the next stop, I had later surmised as I’d run over that day a million times in the long cold dark of the winter.
He had slipped behind us as we were opening my door. Held a cloth to Anya’s mouth behind me as I stepped inside; I turned only as she crumpled. Taking me was easy—I wish it hadn’t been—but I was staring at Anya in horror, and I only had a second to react.
I didn’t.
I woke up in the back of Jack’s truck with my hands bound, my mouth gagged, and a tarp thrown over me. And my life had changed.
He wouldn’t get angry if you would stop upsetting him, I remember my mother lying so many times.
He needs you, she had said as she let my father lead me to his bedroom.
I knew my heartless mother would make similar lies now. Knew she would speak of attracting Jack’s attention that day on the beach, of not resisting when he’d taken me as meaning consent, of Jack being kind and better than I deserved.
But I knew, too, that these were lies.
#
Perhaps it is because it is Erin’s first day — the third new girl I have known — that makes me think of the only time Jack acknowledged Anya’s existence, one day in my own first week. I had been saying her name over and over, whispering it like a madwoman, but knowing it was the key to my sanity, the key to protecting my mind for a second time.
“Forget about her,” Jack had said at last. “You can love me instead. I won’t hurt you if you love me,” he said, for all the world like someone who was sincere and caring and would never think to kidnap someone.
“Shakisha,” Jack says now the moment he comes in the door. He comes directly to me, and I hide my fear. He has returned too early.
“Come,” is all he says. He unshackles me and leads me outside, the rifle still over his shoulder. Neither of us so much as glance at Erin, though she squeaks once when Jack reaches between us.
I follow him obediently through the trees, my brown feet bare on the damp earth. It is not often that Jack allows me outside, and I take a breath of fresh spring air with gratitude. The leaves above me are a bright, new green.
“Here,” says Jack at length, and I guess almost before I see them.
He has traps, huge traps large enough to catch a human. It is something he tells all of us in our first week.
The person caught in this one is half decayed, the metal teeth of the trap still clamped deeply into what’s left of their leg.
I see Sylvia rotting beside me.
We both stop a dozen paces from the corpse, but Jack waves me forward.
“Tell me how old the body is,” he says.
I know, in this moment, that I am in danger. I know that this could be a trap, and that Jack might leave my lying dead like this person in front of me just as I knew all the moments when my violent, alcoholic father had the chance to kill me growing up, but I know too that obeying Jack without hesitation is my best hope for living.
And for Anya, I want to keep living.
“Three weeks,” I guess after a moment’s speculation, comparing the body to Sylvia’s in my mind, clenching my teeth against the nausea. That’s when I see it — a necklace, half a heart, around the mottled, half-eaten neck of this person. I know the other half. Realize that this was Sylvia’s partner, come to rescue her a month too late. Ryan, she had told me more than once, non-binary, a sweetheart, in her words.
“Why?”
Jack’s voice pulls me back from the edge.
“The beetles,” I say. “They’re all over, and the maggots are declining. And the bones are visible: at the eyes” — they were gone — “the nose, and starting on the limbs.” One splotchy green, bloated arm and leg were missing from some happy carnivore. “There’s not much mold, and the teeth haven’t fallen out yet.”
“Two weeks,” Jack corrected, but he smiled. “It’s faster out here. Moisture and warmth both speed up decomposition. By four there’ll be nothing but bones and hair. What if it was buried?” he asked, like he were some ordinary schoolteacher or even a parent, as if we weren’t looking at a real person who was dead because of him.
“It would take longer,” was all I could say, but I was thinking, How many people has he buried? How many bodies don’t I know about?
“It takes four times as long underground,” he said, walking forward and crouching by the body as if it were an interesting animal track. The fluids and acids that had leaked from the body had blackened the soil around it, killing the closest plants. “Twice as long in water,” he added, and I suddenly thought of the nearby river, wondered if it was deep enough.
He stood and walked a couple steps back toward the cabin, then paused and gestured for me to join him. He looped his arm around my shoulders, and I put an arm around his waist. My answers had pleased him, for now.
“Beetles don’t like sunshine,” he continued conversationally as we walked back. “If that body wasn’t in the shade, they would have left the skin on to shield themselves while they ate.”
I had to reply to this, but for a moment I could only feel the chill of horror inside of me, could only see the half-eaten face of Sylvia’s lover and of Sylvia herself, swarming with maggots and beetles.
“Speaking of eating,” I said, my voice normal, “What would you like for dinner?”
“There’s a deer in the snare. I’ll bring it back. Roast it tonight, smoke as much as you can, make a stew with the leftovers?” he suggested, half in question, and I nodded and smiled as we stepped inside. Jack went out again, and I began preparing what I would need.
For a moment, with him gone, I could let my fear show. I could let the tears blur my vision, but not fall down my face. I could let my breathing become unsteady, my gut churn within me. I could clasp a hand to my mouth in horror and devastation.
This is the truth, I reminded myself. This is who he is. Remember the truth.
When Jack returned, I greeted him with a warm smile and a kiss on the cheek.
#
Erin lasted all of three weeks. A record, as far as I know.
She didn’t listen to me. In a way, she was right. In a way, she wasn’t.
She was helping me clean the cabin, and Jack had just gone to the outhouse, when she ran. Only a few days before, Jack had removed the constant shackles from her ankles. She had become quiet, if jumpy, her eyes the size of a desperate person’s, but even I had thought she might be adjusting.
Then, she bolted. I shouted; raced after her. Saw her disappear into the trees.
Hesitated for one moment of impossibility, hesitated because it was like watching myself run away, like watching Anya run away.
And then I shouted for Jack. When he stumbled out of the outhouse, I bolted after her.
I had a head start, and ran for all I was worth, knowing that anything less would cast me under suspicion, but still Jack outpaced me, his face frighteningly blank.
Erin surprised us both. Her long slim legs had clearly been trained for running, and we ran so long a spark of hope flared in my chest that she might actually make it. I knew there was at least one town nearby, but after eight months, I still knew nothing more than that — in what direction, how far, or even if we were still in Ontario.
I didn’t fall far behind — Jack was never quite out of sight — but when I arrived, hardly able to breathe, Erin was already unconscious on the ground, Jack pummeling her into the dirt.
He hesitated when I arrived, and then got off of her. “Fetch my gun,” he said seriously, looking down at her, his breath coming in gasps. Then his eyes flicked up at me, down, and back up again.
“I’ll get it,” he amended, his expression changing in an instant to a normal friendliness and concern. “Watch her. If she wakes up, un-wake her.”
“Of course,” I say, a hand still pressed to my side, half doubled-over, my legs trembling beneath me, and he headed back. I eased myself onto a log, and listened to him leave.
When he was gone, my heartbeat didn’t slow. I looked in the direction Erin had been running. Tried to see something, anything, different than the forest around me, but I didn’t. For all I knew, if I ran that way, there was nothing for a hundred kilometers.
Don’t try, I had told Erin on her first day. Not unless something changes.
But something had changed.
But was this tiny chance of escape worth risking my life, worth becoming Sylvia or Praya all over again? I could stay here, stay with Jack. He liked me, cared for me as much as he cared for anyone. Maybe that life was worth it, if it was the only one I could have.
I had been here before: here, on the boundary between truth and lies, between an abuser and myself, between a life and captivity. I thought of my father, my mother, the nightmare of my abusive childhood. Having my life at risk was not something new.
I took an unsteady breath.
And bolted.
My feet pummeled the leaf-strewn ground, going the same way Erin had. Almost from the first step, I regretted it: I thought I’ll die now with a sad resignation, even as I feared how. If I found a cliff, I could jump off of it head first. If I found water, I could hyperventilate and then swim down, hold my breath and drown by passing out. I knew these things as someone knows where a fire exit is.
Because maybe, from the first time my father made me scream with his pounding fists and my mother told me it was my fault, maybe from that day I had always been someone who would die by being killed. Maybe I had survived longer than anyone would have, should have, among the people I had known.
But I thought, too — as I ran through the pain in my side, the weakness in my limbs from never quite enough food, the terror in my heart — of Anya. Of how she had changed my life. Of how she had taught me that life could be easy, and that there were people out there who would believe me without question. Of how, between her and my therapist, I had begun to believe in a world where I no longer needed to be afraid. Of how Jack reminded me of home, but how it had been years since I had decided that home was the last place I wanted to be.
I heard the faintest sound of his bellow in the forest behind me, like a tremor in the very air, and now I was crying. For me, yes, and the likelihood of my death. But also for Jack, and the strange kindness he had shown me, and for Anya — the reason I had been captured, and the reason I had to try to escape.
I broke through the trees and tumbled down a short drop off into shockingly cold water. Gasping, I picked myself up, my whole body trembling. And I saw — across a wide river, there was a town of some sort. And in that town, people.
I’m not a good swimmer. I’m particularly not a good swimmer after running more than I’ve run in my life. It might be fairer to say that I half-drowned my way into the centre of the river, shouting for help with any air I could muster between coughs. But then someone was there, swimming me the rest of the way. A second someone, pulling me up onto the bank. A third someone, asking me questions and murmuring words of comfort. I was gasping, coughing, laughing like a madwoman on my knees, but I looked back.
I reflected on many aspects of my kidnapping in the months of relief and adjustment that followed. I told my story too many times — to police, to Anya, to my therapist — and yet each telling was different, as if I stood on a different compass point, and each brought new meaning and new questions. Sometimes I spoke with blunt practicality — this is what he did to us, this is what he said — but sometimes I tried to lend words to the unspeakable truth instead: to the nightmare, the miasma, the importance of truth and yet how truth could shift and twirl like the world through a kaleidoscope until you forgot that you’d forgotten it. I tried to describe the dark comfort that that place had made me feel for knowing exactly what to do and how to act, for feeling just like my mother, just like my childhood, just like everything I had walked away from in choosing to heal and love and hope.
Of how some part of me looked at Jack and recognized him, and knew that it would be easy to become him.
But for all that reflecting, for all those nights of insomnia and days of breathless joy and gratitude with Anya, it was that final image of my escape that stayed with me the clearest. Of Jack, stumbling to a stop on the opposite shore, reaching out a hand toward me while strangers held me close, a look of utter heartbreak on his face.
— FRANCES KOZIAR
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