Leo

LEO

NOW

Around the same time you disappeared, some other lady did, too. They found her. Except that by the time they did, she was already dead.

For a while, cops thought it was all connected. They were wrong. Now the lady’s husband is in the slammer. He’ll be there for a long time, twenty to life, ’cause they found her bloody clothes in a Dumpster behind where he worked.

That night the lady cop calls Dad on the phone. He takes it into another room because he doesn’t want you to hear what she’s saying. But when I ask, he tells me. Turns out, the people who took you were dumb enough to use their real names, because there is a real Eddie and Martha Cutter living in Michael, Illinois. Eddie and Martha own a house on Calhoun Street. They’ve owned it twelve years. The lady cop texts Dad a picture. It’s not the nicest house because half of its shutters are missing and there’s mildew on the white siding. The trees grow out of control, nearly hiding the house. The inside is ten times worse. It’s filthy. The carpet is stained. There’s water damage on the walls, turned black with mold. There’s standing water on the floor. Dirty dishes pile up in the kitchen sink.

The only problem is that Eddie and Martha are not living there anymore because when the cops went to investigate, the house was abandoned. “Detective Rowlings is trying to locate their family, to see if they know anything about their whereabouts.”

I’m wondering what happens if they try and come here.

There are no pictures of the basement. The lady cop told Dad about the conditions they kept you in, but Dad can’t tell me because he’s too busy crying his eyes out.

Your friend Gus was nowhere in sight. There was blood in the basement.

You get the idea.

There’s more urgency about getting your memories back. The lady cop doesn’t come right out and say it, but she thinks hypnosis is bullshit. But Dad looked into it and said that if they can relax you enough, you might just remember something your mind has been keeping from you.

The night before the hypnosis, we’re all getting ready for bed. You’re in your bedroom, Dad’s in his. From the hall, I hear you making noise in your room. I wonder what you’re up to in there. I go to see. You’re not so hesitant when you open the door, like maybe you’re getting the hang of Dad and me.

“What are you doing in here?” I ask, looking around. The lights in the room are off.

“Nothing,” you say. You’re sheepish. You don’t want to tell me.

“You must be doing something.”

“It’s something stupid,” you say.

“Like what?”

“Just a game I play.”

“What’s it called?” I ask.

“It don’t really have a name.”

“How do you play it?”

You don’t want to. But you show me, anyway, after a while of me begging. You think I’m going to make fun of you for it. I don’t. Instead, I play your game with you. It’s not super dark in your room because of a light from down the hall. So you close the bedroom door, trapping both you and me inside. Still, it’s not black. Outside your window the moon is bright.

“It’s better when you can’t see nothing,” you tell me.

“Why’s it better?” I ask.

“It just is. That’s how the game is played. We got to close our eyes,” you say, to make up for the lack of blackness. You tell me to keep my hands at my sides. “It’s cheating,” you say, “if you feel with your hands first.”

We stand with our backs to one wall. The object of the game, you tell me, is to be the one to get closest to the opposite wall without running into it. We can’t use our hands.

I try. I fail. I feel like a fish out of water trying to walk with my eyes closed. I can’t even walk in a straight line. I plow into the bed frame and give up. This game is dumb, but I don’t tell you that.

But I watch as you keep going. You stop within a centimeter of the wall, like you had some sixth sense that it was there.

“How’d you do that?” I ask.

You tell me it’s one of those things you got real good at: finding your way around in the dark.

“There wasn’t no light where they kept us,” you say. “None at all. When someone takes your eyes away from you, you figure out how to get by on other things.” So that’s what you did. You learned to survive on your other senses and on instinct. It’s pretty cool.

“Wanna play again?” you ask.

I don’t. Not really. There’s a stinging pain in my thigh from where I ran into the bed frame. Chances are good it’ll bruise. I don’t feel like doing that again.

Still, I shrug my shoulders and say, “Why not?” ’cause I can tell it’s what you want to do.