Eleven

ELEVEN

Ileft my family to handle the media and the random people who kept popping by insisting we were the closest of friends and they needed to see how I was, when really, most of them had the most fleeting and peripheral impact on my life.

They just wanted to rubberneck. These people built up our association so they could watch with morbid fascination the undoing of one Emily Vargas.

I had no choice but to talk to the police. I’d already decided I wouldn’t turn him in. The idea of the man I’d called master being locked up was more distressing to me than anything else I’d experienced.

I would have loved to have refused to talk, but then I’d be obstructing justice. Justice. As if anyone but me had any horse in that race. It was a crime against me, not the police, or the state, or the country. To force me to comply was just one more type of enslavement. So I did what I had to do. I lied.

I told them I never knew exactly where I was, but that one day he tied me up and blindfolded me, drove for what seemed like several hours, and then dropped me off on the side of a highway. By the time I got through the ropes and blindfold, he was long gone. I told them I’d found out, through hitchhiking, that I was in Nebraska and took rides from several people until I got home.

Of course, this was announced on the evening news along with a plea for anyone who’d picked up someone meeting my description on the route I’d described, to please call in with any additional information. A few people called.

Whether they were crank callers trying to get fifteen minutes of fame, or people who had picked up a hitchhiker and thought it was me, it was enough to cause the investigation to grind to a halt. There just wasn’t enough information to find anything.

I’d burned the clothing and shoes I was wearing, feigning naiveté and talking about how it was just too much, and I needed to get rid of the memories. No one knew about the storage facility.

The year lease was coming up, and I’d have to pay another year or switch to monthly soon. I wondered how long I was prepared to pay to shield my tormentor from punishment and if this wasn’t just another way for him to hurt me.

Once the business with the police was finished, I fell into a listless pattern of television watching. A few friends came by, but I didn’t have the energy or will to ask to stay with any of them. That felt too much like moving on with my life. My life had ended with him.

Everything was still too loud. Too much stimuli from too many sources. I longed for that nice, quiet room with the soft Middle Eastern drumbeats that thrummed through my body as the whip came down. To feel his weight covering me, his mouth on mine.

I’d forgotten how frantic the world was, how desperately quick everything moved, each person racing against their own clock. I was letting myself go, not taking care of my appearance.

I knew my career was over permanently. How could I ever motivate or empower anyone ever again? What else was left for me?

Strangely, though I didn’t care about my hair or makeup and wore a grungy T-shirt and shorts most days, I continued to compulsively shave my pussy bare every time I took a shower. It was my last remaining connection to my master.

At night, my hand would drift between my legs to stroke myself off. I don’t know whether I was trying to go back to him or whether I was just using an old insomnia cure, pleasure to induce sleep.

When I did sleep, he was always there. Even dreams of the bad cell most would consider nightmares held an odd sort of comfort because I knew he was watching and not far away. He’d come for me.

I’d wake around nine in the morning and then force myself to go back to sleep until I was getting up at two and three in the afternoon, all in the effort to stay unconscious as long as possible so I didn’t have to face the cold reality freedom had turned out to be. Three weeks went by like this until my mother took matters into her own hands.

“I’ve made an appointment with Doctor Blake,” she said one morning, “You know how much she helped me after your sister died.”

I stared at the television, watching an afternoon rerun of a trashy talk show. I didn’t take my eyes from the screen because I knew I wouldn’t be able to hide my contempt.

Sure Dr. Blake had helped her, which was why she hadn’t once mentioned I’d even had a sister since she died. Until just this moment.

“Did you hear me?”

“Yes, I heard you,” I said.

“Well, are you going?”

“Oh, so you’re asking me now?”

She sighed loudly and tapped her foot on the floor. I rolled my eyes. I didn’t want more drama.

I’d been hoping to just curl up and die, but since that wasn’t happening, I was going to have to do something. If Dr. Blake couldn’t help, maybe she could keep me doped up. That was the next best thing.

“Sure, Mom. I’ll go.”

The shrink’soffice was exactly as I’d remembered it. It was in the city, in a high-rise building on the fifth floor. Elevator music straight out of the fifties played nonstop, the same few songs over and over.

It was like a psychotic Prozac-addled pastiche. If you weren’t crazy going in, you were almost certain to be crazy coming out. I sat in one of the dark navy leather chairs and flipped through a magazine.

I’d had to convince my mother to let me drive. If I were suicidal I would have done it already. I didn’t have some pressing need to swerve into oncoming traffic. I wasn’t sure anyway how one could kill themselves if they were already dead.

I read the same article featured in every issue of trendy women’s magazines about shocking sex secrets. Maybe I was jaded, but every one of these articles shared the same tips in just a different order. And far from being shocking, or even a little naughty, they were tame and seemed the product of a stunted sexuality rather than the type of things written by a sexually vibrant and liberated woman.

There was one other person in the room, a middle-aged balding man waiting to see the other doctor in the office. He kept muttering to himself, and when I listened closely I could hear he was counting. I had no idea what he was counting, but I knew he was going to have some kind of fit if the rug remained crooked. He’d stared at it nonstop since my arrival.

Occasionally, he’d reach out his hand as if tempted to straighten it. Then he’d pull it back quickly. I wondered if he was wearing a discreet shock collar for behavioral modification.

Before I could observe more obsessive-compulsive behavior, my name was called, and I left elevator music hell to join Doctor Blake in her office.

She was even older than I remembered from when my sister had died. I guessed she didn’t plan on retiring. She’d go straight from this office to her grave, and God help the poor soul who tried to make it otherwise.

“It’s good to see you again, Emily.” She said it without it seeming to click in her mind what she was saying. Seeing me again almost guaranteed I was going in some way off the beam.

It amazed me someone so highly trained in human behavior couldn’t see her own. But I smiled politely and took a seat. The smile took more energy than I expected, and I was grateful to have a couch to collapse onto.

“I understand you’re having a hard time dealing with what’s happened to you.”

I stared blankly at her. Was this the part where I was supposed to pour my soul out to her? Just because it was expected?

“Do you want to talk about it?” she asked, pulling a tape recorder from her desk drawer.

“I would prefer it if you didn’t record our sessions.”

I was uneasy about it for several reasons. Partly my semi-celebrity status. Recordings were more damning than notes. And also because it made it all too real.

She looked as if she might protest, but then her lips met in a firm line and she nodded, placing it back in the desk before retrieving a yellow legal pad.

“Very well then.”

She arched a brow at me as if questioning whether I would now take issue with her making notes.

I had intended to sit on the couch, but I laid down on it instead, pulling my feet up with me. On the outside I’m sure this behavior indicated some willingness on my part to surrender to the therapy process, but it was really a way to hide. Lying down, I could look up at the ceiling and not meet her eyes.

“Shall we begin?” she asked.

“Actually, I just thought maybe you could give me something; write me a prescription. Valium, Zoloft, Prozac, anything.” I wanted something to numb me out, make things blur around the edges a bit, but I didn’t say that.

“Emily, now you know that’s not how I operate.”

Then I was going to have to find someone who did. With all the outcry at shrinks who doled out prescriptions like legal and politically-correct drug dealers, surely I could find someone to give me my fix of normal.

She sat patiently waiting, her pen poised, her attention rapt. I laid there for several minutes, the silence stretching between us. I kept waiting for her to say something. She kept waiting for me to say something. It was a battle of wills. I glanced occasionally at the clock on the wall as the minutes dragged on much more slowly than they ever had, even in the bad cell.

I wondered if I could use up my entire session like this. A complete hour of blissful silence. There was a time the prospect would have been deeply uncomfortable to me. I wouldn’t have been able to resist the urge, the need, to fill the silent spaces with words.

Finally I did speak, but it wasn’t because of discomfort with silence. I don’t know what it was. It was the office, her patience, the comfortable couch, and the almost hypnotic lulling of the ticking of the wall clock. It was as if a trance had come over me, some sort of psychological possession that made me intent to spill, if not my secrets, then my feelings about them.

“I don’t fit anymore,” I began. “I don’t know where to go from here. There is my life before, and my life now, and there’s no bridge between the two. There is no way for me to go back to who I was.”

“What about your life when you were where you were?” She avoided words like captive and imprisoned.

I stared up at the ceiling. I’m sure another five minutes passed before I spoke. “I can’t tell you about that. It’s private.”

“What can you tell me about?”

I shrugged.

She decided to switch to a more direct question and answer approach, something easier and requiring less explanation on my part.

“How many people had you?”

“One.”

“Male or female?”

“Male.”

“You want to go back to him.”

It wasn’t a question. I bolted up from the couch and stared at her. Despite understandings of the victim/tormentor relationship, most people refused to accept someone wanting to go back after they were free.

“Yes,” I said.

“Emily, you’ve got your masters in psychology. You know what this is. You know it’s not real.”

Was that true? It was one thing to pontificate about nameless strangers, it was another to experience it. It was difficult to imagine that in my position Dr. Blake would see things in the same way she saw them right now.

Of what use was it to struggle to keep everything the same? People changed. Did the catalyst matter? I shrugged again.

“Can you tell me anything of what happened while you were with him?”

I shook my head. No, I couldn’t talk about that. It felt like betrayal. And I hated she knew that was why I couldn’t talk about it. I could feel her pity from across the room.

Poor confused Emily.

“I’d really like some drugs,” I said.

It was nearing the end of the session, and no progress had been made. For a brief moment, I imagined myself lying in a tub full of warm water while a peaceful buzz flowed over me, the bathwater going pink like Valentine’s Day from my blood. Her voice cut off the fantasy.

“I’ll tell you what. I’m going to give you some homework. I would like for you to keep a journal this next week of as much as you feel you can share, and we’ll discuss it during next week’s session. If you can do that for me, then we’ll talk about prescribing something.”

Blackmail.

It was the socially-approved equivalent of blow me, and I’ll get you some of the good stuff. But I only nodded.

She was scribbling furiously on the yellow legal pad as I got up to leave. I had no idea what brilliant insights she felt she’d gleaned from my psyche in such a short period. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

Since I had the car, I drove to the bookstore and picked out a journal. What the hell? I would go through my journal back in the Mercedes and copy the least revealing and private entries. I was sure enough emotion and trauma had gone into writing them.

I’d immediately rejected the notion of giving her the original journal. Besides being too personal, she might hand it over to the police as evidence. It was more violation than I could accept. I didn’t need more strangers trying to peer into the most private parts of me.

By the time I got to the storage facility, the sun was going down. I sat in the Mercedes crying as I copied journal entries while listening to the music I’d missed having for weeks.

I’m not sure how much time passed sitting in the car. Although the storage facility wasn’t on the main drag, I knew I took some measure of risk sitting there with the garage-style door open and the car running to play the music.

I copied several sections into the journal I’d just bought. It was heavily censored, but compared to today’s session I was pouring my heart out. It would be enough to get me medicated, then I’d switch doctors.

I didn’t need someone prying into my head, taking me apart bit by bit so they could put me back together again the way they felt I was supposed to be.

When I got home, I slipped the censored journal under the mattress of the bed in the guest room. Dinner was on the table, and my mother didn’t say a word to me as she dipped food out onto my plate.

No, Where have you been? Why didn’t you call? I thought you’d driven into a lake or something. She was gritting her teeth, but she was holding it in.

“Why the hell didn’t you call? Your appointment was for an hour. You didn’t think maybe I might need the car for something?”

Or not.

I didn’t say anything. Instead, I picked up my plate and took it to the guest room and shut the door. I clicked on the TV with the remote and scooted back up on the bed leaning against the wicker headboard.

I knew I was behaving like a twelve-year-old, but I’d learned from experience it was better to steer clear of my mother when she was in this mode.

I pulled the journal out from under the bed again. It was light brown with Celtic knotwork. I traced a finger over the delicate design with one hand, as I absently shoveled chicken casserole into my mouth with the other. I’d filled about thirty pages of the book, surely enough for homework and drugs.

I Love Lucywas playing on low in the background. The canned laughter filtered over to me on the bed.

For a moment I thought about turning him in. What if? I was still angry with him for throwing me away. Shouldn’t he be punished for that? Even if it seemed like he was being punished for something quite different? He’d know the real reason.

I tried to imagine the look on his face when the squad cars pulled into his driveway. Would he be remorseful? Ashamed? Shocked? Accepting? Would he adjust to imprisonment as well as I had?

I wondered again if he believed freeing me had been a cruelty or a kindness, if he thought he’d done something wrong in taking me. I wondered if he regretted letting me go, and if he ever thought of me or dreamed of me as I did him. Surely my obsession couldn’t now be greater than his.

Would I be in trouble for lying and obstructing justice? Would someone lock me in a cell no matter how brief the time, thinking it was okay because I hadn’t told the truth to the all-powerful police arm of the government?

Or could I play the fear card? He terrorized me too much to speak. I was afraid he’d come for me again. I didn’t know.

But although the revenge fantasy was appealing for a moment, it quickly faded, replaced with the same feeling I always got when thinking of him as anything but omnipotent. Anxiety.

The next day was different. I don’t know if it was seeing Dr. Blake or if the reality of my freedom had finally sunk in, but I started to get things together. I looked for an apartment, a small one. I had enough in the bank to see me through a year maybe while I tried to figure out what to do with the rest of my life.

I would adjust and be okay. I’d find my place in the world again, and this would just be something I’d experienced, but not something that had changed the core of who I was. I could be cured. I’d go through all the standard trauma responses, and then at the end of it I would be a survivor.

I could be unbrainwashed. It would require new conditioning, but it could be done. I could be free of him forever, mentally as well as physically.

It wasn’t minor fame that gave me the money to take care of myself now, but extreme responsibility with my finances. I’d always been a saver instead of a spender. It was part of why this step scared me.

But I had to act. Otherwise, I was going to wither away and die in my parents’ house in the creepy room with the white wicker furniture and the paper border wisteria dripping down from the edges of the ceiling.

I was too cowardly to kill myself, though I’d had fleeting fantasies. My master had thrown me out with finality, and my life with him was over. The only thing left to do was act.

To anyone observing this tragedy, I was a brave little soldier. Emily Vargas, the inspiration to kidnapped women everywhere. Such strength to so quickly begin putting the pieces of her life back together after all the horrors she must have suffered spending months at the hands of a madman.

I’d been invited already on a few talk shows to share my story, but I’d declined. No one was getting an exclusive. No one was getting the story period.

Everything seemed normal on the outside. But no one was there to hear me wake up crying in the middle of the night, reaching out for the comfort of a man’s body that wasn’t there. I dreamed only of him. Nothing else. There seemed to be nothing I could do to purge him from the darkest corners of my mind.

Thanksgiving came. Almost four weeks away from him and I couldn’t even begin to not want him. I went to my parents’ house for the obligatory turkey dinner. It was always a big deal. My cousins and uncles and aunts, my parents. My remaining set of grandparents on my dad’s side. And of course friends, including Bobby White, the guy who’d grown up two houses down from me and had always had a crush.

Before being taken, I’d finally consented to one date with him. Just to see, as he’d said. He was seated at the main table directly across from me, staring at me over the large shiny basted turkey that looked like it should be in a food magazine.

I looked down at my plate. I couldn’t stand to see the mixture of pity and self-absorbed disappointment that his one shot with me was probably gone for good.

My mom, as always, was the spokesperson for Thanksgiving. Granddad was the patriarch, but both he and Dad were men of few words, and mom had never had that problem. Like me. Or like I’d once been. I stared at my plate, tracing the filigree pattern around the edges with my finger, trying not to hear her as she said what she was thankful for, my safe return.

Various family members exclaimed their agreement, and I never felt so distant from them. Who were these people? I was a stranger here. We shared blood but not much else, and I wondered why we continued to get together every year like this. Like some bizarre mockery of the family unit.

Dinner went quickly and then there was pumpkin pie. I took my pie on a paper plate and went to sit on the couch in the living room. Several family members attempted polite conversation that skirted delicately around the facts of my absence. It was as if I’d been away at Summer Camp.

Four weeks before, every one of these people had been wearing black and attending my funeral, and now, here we were as if none of it had happened. The denial seemed to stretch out to all my family, to all I knew. Or thought I knew.

I sat with the paper plate propped on my knees as their voices turned into one big white noise machine. I felt the couch dip beside me but kept my focus on the pie. If I didn’t acknowledge whoever it was, maybe they would go away.

Or at least just be fucking quiet.

“You’ve got more whipped cream than pie,” Bobby said.

I glanced over to see him sitting beside me, his paper plate propped carefully on his lap mirroring mine, except for the modest amount of whipped cream, as if indulging in more would be a mortal sin.

“Yeah,” I said and looked back at it.

I’d tried begging out of Thanksgiving dinner, telling my mother it was too much, too soon. It was partly true. It was too much, but I didn’t think a timetable made a difference in the grand scheme of things. It would still be too much five years from now. I’d been irrevocably changed, and no one wanted to accept it, not even me.

They all wanted to believe with enough therapy and enough time, my world would be lovely again. I’d be their golden girl again, but despite my brief forays into fantasy land, I knew it wasn’t true.

Mom had insisted I come. Everybody would feel bad if I wasn’t there. And we wouldn’t want that. I’d been avoiding them all for weeks. They missed me. Etc. etc. I’d caved because you always caved with my mother if you knew what was good for you. She wouldn’t leave you alone to make a decision. She’d just harp until she got the answer she wanted. I regretted giving it now.

Most of the family was crowded in the other room around the new giant screen plasma television watching football. None of them were football fans, and most of them knew nothing about the game. They sat and watched football because it was what families did on Thanksgiving, or what they thought they were supposed to do.

We were all doing what we were supposed to do, and I wondered if even one of us was doing what he wanted to do. I glanced up to see Bobby staring at me intently. Well, one person was doing what they wanted to do.

Good for Bobby.

“Are you going to be okay?” he said.

“Yeah,” I lied.

Part of me hated him right then. Either he was too clueless to understand the nature of my captivity made it completely inappropriate for him to bring it up, or worse, he was hoping to score points as the knight in shining armor who comforted me. I couldn’t deal with being a pawn in his fantasy right then.

He reached out and put his hand over mine. I jerked away and scooted to the far end of the couch. I couldn’t stand for anyone to touch me. Or at least I couldn’t stand for anyone but one person to touch me.

“Sorry,” he mumbled. “Jeez Emmie, that fucking bastard fucked you up good, didn’t he?”

“Don’t say that!” I was shocked by the vehemence of my voice.

“Aw, hell. You know I didn’t mean anything against you. I just wish I could get him alone in a room, you know?”

I couldn’t meet his eyes because I knew he’d see the anger boiling just beneath the surface. There was a chance he’d think the anger was directed at my captor. But there was a chance, however small, that he wouldn’t.

“Emmie?”

“Yeah,” I said, acknowledging his empty threat toward my master.

I don’t know why I was angry. Bobby wouldn’t have a shot in a room alone with him. I knew I hadn’t just built my captor up in my mind as physically stronger than he was because of how helpless he’d made me.

I’d seen his well-muscled body many times, felt his weight on me, the strength of his grip. I knew. He’d rip Bobby to pieces, and I couldn’t decide whether that idea upset me or not. It upset me a lot less than the idea of Bobby hurting him.

“Alright, well, um . . . I need to really get going. But if you ever need somebody to talk to, you know where I am, yeah?” He was edging toward the door.

“Yeah.”

He looked at me another long moment before turning and walking off with his empty paper plate. His shoulders slumped. I had been right. He’d had a picture in his head about how his love would heal me or some other similar romantic bullshit. He’d be my rescuer. But what if I no longer wanted to be rescued?

One by one family members and friends trickled into the room to have a word with me, to tell me how much they’d missed me, how glad they were I was safe. If I needed anything . . . By the time they’d all paraded through, I was crying and couldn’t stop. I waited until they left, and then I got in my car and went home.

My mother had seen me upset and seemed to regret persuading me to come. I’m not sure if it was because some perfect, mythic Thanksgiving was ruined or she really felt bad. We never spoke of it.

That week I put in resumes at several places. My publisher called, but I had no intention to continue writing, at least not self-help books. “Maybe a memoir,” they said. I said, “Maybe,” but didn’t mean it. I was done. It was time to move on to something else.

The day of my next appointment with Dr. Blake, I sat in my apartment looking at all my stuff. The bookshelves with my books lining them, a couple bags of fan mail that had piled up while I’d been away. This was freedom. This was what I wanted, what I’d yearned for, for months. Or at least until I knew it wasn’t possible and I’d given up the hope.

I didn’t think I could ever do public speaking again. I wasn’t sure if I could write, at least not that sort of book anymore, the kind that changed people’s lives for the better and made them go after their goals and believe in themselves. All of it now seemed like pat phrases and cheap pop psychology. How had I taken my knowledge and boiled it down to such black-and-white simplicity?

Maybe I would go into research like I’d originally planned. Don a lab coat and stay out of the spotlight. As I rode the elevator up to the fifth floor for my session, I held out the fragile hope everything hadn’t ended for me.

“You look a bit better this week. I take it the journaling was helpful? Cathartic maybe?”

I nodded, a nonverbal lie. I looked better because I was employing the fake it til you make it technique, acting as if I were fine in the vain hope it would make it so.

I handed her the journal and stretched out on the couch while she flipped through it.

“This is more than I expected. I’m very pleased.” She said it as if I were a dog eager for a biscuit.

I didn’t care one way or the other about her approval, but I smiled anyway. It was easier to just go along.

If I went along and cooperated, she’d write me a prescription at the end of the session, and hopefully a combination of drugs and life itself would make me free of him. Happy.

I waited while she read and felt suddenly self-conscious. Though I hadn’t revealed everything, or even the most graphic things that had happened during my enslavement, it was enough. It was far more intimate a portrait of those days than I would share with anyone who wasn’t offering drugs to numb it all down to a pleasant fuzziness.

Finally, she closed the journal and looked up. “Thank you for sharing this with me. Would you like to tell me why it’s all written in third person, though?”

I don’t know why I said it, I just blurted the first thing that came into my head. “It’s not about me. It’s just a story.”

I was less shocked at having said it, and more shocked that it was true.

I had dissociated. Every sexual encounter I’d written as if it had happened to someone else.

I closed my eyes and went back, remembering, seeing his eyes, his hands on my body, not someone else’s. I expected to feel revulsion, fear, panic, disgust, but what I felt instead was much more disturbing. I felt the heat surge between my legs, the wetness of my panties, and full-on arousal.

I was barely there through the rest of the session, on autopilot, responding as the doctor expected, until the session was over and it was time to write a prescription. She scribbled something on the prescription pad and handed me the journal, telling me to keep up the good work and she’d see me next week.

I stopped off at the bathroom on the way out, ashamed of my physical reaction in the doctor’s office and what I was about to do, but I needed release. I locked the door behind me and unzipped my pants, letting them fall in a whisper to the floor. I leaned forward against the door, one hand pressed against the cold metal, anchoring me as I brought myself to orgasm with the other.

His face was in my mind as I came, stifling a moan. I pulled my pants back up, my fingers trembling as I buttoned them. I washed my hands in the sink. The soap smelled like the soap from my elementary school. I didn’t look at my face in the mirror. I didn’t want to see my eyes.

After getting my prescription filled, I wandered through the city. I left my car in the parking garage and took a cab. Before I knew where I’d asked the driver to take me, I was sitting in front of the Atlanta Zoo.

I paid the fare and shoved the prescription bottle into my bag. I’d expressed, not primarily depression, but anxiety in Dr. Blake’s office, a skittish jumpiness around loud noises, too many people, social situations.

And the truth was, I’d so often stayed in the house watching television because going out made me nervous. I’d managed to have a burst of courage for about a week to get out of my parents’ house, but it was coming quickly to an end.

And so I had a bottle containing a two-week supply of Xanax. Not quite Valium, but who’s complaining? My hand gripped the bottle nestled in my purse for comfort, and I went to the zoo.

I stopped off at one of the little cafeterias and had lunch, fattening greasy fried food. Chicken, potato salad, baked beans. Staples of the south. Comfort food. I wandered, observing the animals in their cages.

I hadn’t been to the zoo as an adult. It had always bothered me watching animals in cages like a creepy voyeur while acting like it was good clean fun. But I could identify with their plight now, and I didn’t feel nearly as bad for them as I would have at one time.

None of them seemed distressed. I couldn’t quite believe they didn’t know what was going on, but at the same time, they seemed okay with it. Safe. Secure. Knowing they were taken care of, that they didn’t have to face the big bad world and participate in the cruel dance for survival as others of their kind did.

Some of them were lying around; some of them were playing and doing goofy antics for the crowds that had gathered, especially the bears and monkeys. They always tended to perform.

A large group of children on a school field trip rushed to the monkey cage near where I stood looking on. I jumped and moved out of the way, unable to deal with the sudden noise and flutter of activity. Each of the children had a brightly-colored balloon tied around his or her wrist. A woman about my age shouted to quiet them.

“Blue balloons need to go with Miss Patti to The Wild Planet Cafe for lunch. Red and yellow balloons stay where you are.”

More children ran up then with green balloons and a haggard Miss Patti for the shift change. I slipped into a man-made cave nearby that was air-conditioned and had videos. My pulse raced as my anxiety crept higher. They were only children, but it felt like a close brush with death.

I focused on one of the screens to distract myself, my hand skimming over the surface to find a knob to turn up the volume. The video showed a crowd of angry PETA members protesting the cruelty of keeping animals in cages at the zoo. Painted signs and morally outraged faces filled the screen.

A voice-over began to play. “In our modern age, some are concerned about the practice of keeping animals caged. Although this is a valid concern, unfortunately once an animal has lived in captivity for so long, it’s more cruel to release them back into the wild. They no longer have the survival skills. This is more true for those born into captivity, but is also true for adult animals who haven’t always been with us.”

I glanced back over at the monkey cages, and one of the chimpanzees showed his teeth to me. It looked like a smile, and I wasn’t sure if I was trying to give him human characteristics or if it really was an expression of happiness. Then he screeched a couple of times and went off to play with the others.

I waited for the children to move on to the next exhibit, and when there was a clear path I went to a less crowded area. I stood on a bridge with dozens of dispensers of duck food you could get at a quarter a pop. I gripped the railing and gazed into the dark water, taking slow, measured breaths.

Was this how it would always be? Such anxiety and agitation out in the open air? Would I add agoraphobia to the ever-growing list? I dug through my purse for the pill bottle. My body shook as I deposited a pill into my hand. I was about to pop it into my mouth when I stopped and stared at it.

Then for no reason I can explain, I dropped the little oval lie into the lake. A duck went for it but then swam away. My hand tilted slowly until the rest of the lies tumbled out and then dropped like tiny pebbles into the water. A crowd of ducks swam over, pecking at the pills, then left them swirling, squawking and upset they’d been tricked. I knew the feeling.

I dug in my pocket for a quarter and cranked the machine where the duck food was. The ducks deserved to have what they wanted and so did I. It no longer mattered to me what anyone else expected. Like my master, I had become separated from society.

I wasn’t a part anymore, and the old rules no longer applied. They only applied if I wanted to be a part, and I found that I didn’t. Of what use would a life based on a past reality be? I wasn’t the same woman anymore, and I no longer wanted to be free.

I regretted now digging up the coffin the month before. Emily Vargas should have stayed buried. I sprinkled the duck food into the water and went to get the Mercedes.