Ten

TEN

He didn’t have to forcibly remove me from the house because I knew he would and having a breakdown at this point wasn’t going to help. I had belonged to him, and now he was showing me how absolute that was by disposing of me like any other piece of property that had become of little interest.

The car he’d given me was a silver Mercedes, and truly it was a gift because what was the likelihood I’d bring it back? I dumped everything but the CDs into the trunk on top of a car emergency kit. A small shovel clattered when the journal hit it.

It took forever to get out of the driveway. It really did seem to go on forever. Part of me wondered if it was all an elaborate test to make me come back, but then I’d seen the absoluteness in his eyes, and there was no reason to show me my helplessness. I knew it; I’d taken it into the deepest part of my being, and I’d accepted it. No further object lessons were needed.

The car didn’t have a global positioning system, something I found odd. I ripped the this journal belongs to page out of the red leather book and started writing reverse directions, like a trail of bread crumbs, recording where I went so I wouldn’t get lost.

After a couple of lucky and arbitrary turns, I came to a busier road. At least I’d found civilization again and

could ask for help if I needed it. Though I wasn’t sure I wanted to deal with the possibility of being recognized as that self-help guru that had gone missing. So I kept going until I found the interstate.

When I finally got there, I discovered I was about thirty miles from home. Not starting from the interstate but including the bumble where I’d been. I’d assumed I was thousands of miles away from home in some remote location. To learn I’d been just thirty miles away from my house the whole damn time made me crave the freedom I’d thought I’d given up.

I’d been listening to one of the Middle Eastern CDs. The music hadn’t calmed me so much as made me want to turn the car around, but I didn’t. There was some tiny screaming sliver of me that still wanted to be free. Finally, I couldn’t stand the drums any longer.

I took the disc out but resisted the urge to break it, some part of my mind still convinced I might want to listen to it again someday in the future when the wounds weren’t as fresh. I turned on the radio and remembered it was Halloween.

I expected the date to make me feel giddy. Instead, driving through suburbia I found myself disconcerted by all the sensory input. The decorations. The kids running around in costumes at afternoon parties. I found myself bizarrely frightened of the imaginary creatures which within hours would be going bump in the night.

I couldn’t go to my house first. It was a rental, and somehow I doubted anyone would have kept up the rent for the almost six months I’d been missing. As I drove down the Magnolia-lined street my parents lived on, the radio ceased being background noise.

“A memorial service was held yesterday for self-help guru, Emily Vargas, as police still have found no leads to her mysterious disappearance. When contacted for comment, the family expressed a need for closure and would offer no more . . . ”

I nearly swerved off the road. They’d erased me. Just like my sister. What kind of family waits only six months before burying an empty box to just get on with it?

Surely most would wait a year, maybe even two. I understood how hard it had to be considering losing Katie like they had, but it felt like rejection, as if I had no place left in the world to go to.

I drove past the house and went to the cemetery. I searched the family plots until I found mine. It was surreal and more upsetting than I expected it to be, and I couldn’t help but feel completely betrayed by my family for acting so selfishly, for not thinking about how this might make me feel after what I’d experienced. How did they expect to explain it to me if I was ever found?

There were still-blooming flowers all around the grave, the dirt fresh and piled high. Some crazy part of me wanted to dig the coffin out, if in fact there was one. If there wasn’t, I couldn’t imagine what it was they’d seen fit to bury.

I tried to picture my family and friends wearing black, sobbing over my supposed death based on the fact that my parents couldn’t carry the torch just a little bit longer, and I was disgusted.

I stared at the gravestone. Emily Vargas: devoted friend, loving daughter, inspiring leader. My death was marked as the day before, the day of the funeral.

Goddammit!

I kicked at and scattered the pile of dirt. What the hell gave them the right to just kill me off? It was inconvenient for me to exist and be missing?

I don’t know if it was what they’d done, or if it was because of the inability to act out for so long, but the rage flipped in me like a switch. It was something I’d forgotten I had. I didn’t know I could feel anger like that; I hadn’t felt it in so long.

I threw flowers and arrangements as far as I could and fell to my knees digging into the dirt, clawing at it, as if clawing to get inside. It was the reverse of being buried alive. Maybe I should be in there and not out here under the open sky with the birds chirping and everything so innocent and bright.

I’d once seen a movie about someone buried alive that somehow escaped their coffin and clawed to the surface. They were buried in a pine box, but even so, one would think the weight of the dirt would make escape impossible. If the work of digging to a box was this difficult, I couldn’t imagine the reality of digging out of one.

Even though my progress was insignificant, I continued to dig. I didn’t care how impossible it was, I had to get in there. I remembered the emergency kit and retrieved the shovel from the trunk of the car, thankful for a master who was compulsively prepared for any traveling contingency.

As I continued to dig with the small shovel, I worried the police would show up. Surely they kept a closer eye on cemeteries on Halloween. But it was early afternoon, and the troublemakers wouldn’t be out until after the sun had gone down. I thought about kids out making mischief stumbling upon my dug-out grave and having a ghost story to pass around.

I finally got to the coffin. I had the momentary fear I would open it and see my body in there, that I really was gone and somehow didn’t know it yet. But when I opened the lid there was no body, only things of mine. Old ballet shoes, journals, photographs. Things that became me in the absence of a body to put in the earth.

Now, out in the fresh air, looking at what was meant as evidence of my passing, I couldn’t let myself think the word master. But I had nothing else to call him, except the monster who had taken me. In the end the most monstrous thing he did was let me go. Especially in light of the fact that everyone else had let me go, too.

I wanted to get in the car and go back to him, throw myself on his mercy and hope that at least one person in the world still wanted me. But I knew I wouldn’t. He’d broken me, but he’d been so strangely gentle about it that somehow I was still me inside.

I wasn’t a shell, a hollowed-out zombie of a human being, though at this moment, with graveyard dirt covering me virtually head to toe, I looked like it. For whatever reason, he wanted me to be free, and I’d been trained to obey. I could keep going if I thought of it as obedience.

I gathered my stuff from the coffin and took it to the car. I’d found a twenty-dollar bill in my pocket, so I stopped at a drive-through for some food. My master must have slipped money into the jeans before he’d tossed them to me that morning.

Thinking of how well he took care of me ripped me apart inside, and I had to hold back the floodgates because I was in public. The girl at the drive through looked at me oddly as I paid for my cheeseburger meal.

“I’m a zombie,” I said dully. I almost laughed at my own joke.

The light bulb went off over her head as she looked down at her clothes and remembered it was Halloween. She was about seventeen with blonde hair that had pink streaks in it and going for a slutty Punky Brewster effect with her clothing. Probably she was passing it off as a costume because she didn’t have the nerve to wear it any other day.

“Oh, right. Clever,” she said. “The dirt makeup looks real.”

I smiled, biting back the urge to say it was real dirt. I ate in the parking lot, then started the car again. I needed to get cleaned up, but I knew I didn’t have a house to go to except for my parents’ place, and I wasn’t ready to see them just yet.

I hadn’t been in the house for long when I’d been taken, and still had my storage unit. It had held all the things in my house before they went into my house, and I’d paid a year in advance because you never know when you might need a storage facility.

I hadn’t been sure the new place would work out. I blame my mother for this insane level of over-planning. I have no other excuses.

My storage unit, like all of them at the ultra-modern facility, worked by a combination keypad, and I was the only one who knew the code.

My fingers trembled as I punched it in, then drove the car into it like a garage and turned off the ignition. I’d known from the moment I got out the door I wouldn’t call the police. I would never tell them anything that had happened, or lead them down the winding roads to the house that had been my prison.

I sat in the car, going through the things that had been buried in the coffin, reading the journals, looking at who I’d been, or who they’d simplified me down to in order to fit me into a box, and it struck me how much they didn’t really know anything about me. Whether it was by my own omissions or their lack of observation I would never know.

My house was fifteen miles away from that of my parents, and it was that way because it was the opposite end of town, as far as I could get and still be in the same place. The storage facility was only five miles from their house, which made walking much easier.

Once the car was taken care of and I was walking down the streets through the residential neighborhood, the enormity of my situation hit me.

Kids were running down the streets beside me all dressed up like pumpkins and pirates and ghosts, shrieking and laughing, their candy pails swinging from their arms as exhausted parents tried to keep up with them.

It was too much. Everything was too loud. Even the drive-through had been difficult. To have a human being speak to me. To have any set of eyes on me but his . . . it was unnerving, an invasion. It made me feel naked and exposed.

Over months of being with him, my prison had become my sanctuary, and now that I was free, the world was my prison. There was nowhere left to run.

No one paid much attention to me as I walked. I’m sure part of it was that the sun was setting behind the trees, and the stark afternoon brightness of a few hours before was long gone. I wasn’t recognizable as Emily. Anyone who saw me didn’t look horrified or shocked. I was just wearing a costume like everybody else.

It was full dark when I reached my parents’ house. Their porch was lit with the typical Halloween array, a giant lit-up pumpkin, bats hanging from the porch, a bloody scarecrow lying over a bale of hay in the front yard.

They really had just erased me, had some kind of psychotic fit that allowed them to shut that door and open another one. To lay me to rest and the next day give out candy to neighborhood kids and do the normal Halloween things without it necessary to give me a second thought. It was obscene.

I’d seen them when Katie had died. I knew it was because the only way they could survive was to behave like this. Still. To not openly grieve and mourn, to instead hide and bury and erase. It wasn’t the way normal human beings behaved toward those they were supposed to love. Even if those they loved were only a memory now.

When I knocked, my mother shouted from behind the door, “Ted, get that!”

I heard something fall and break, a stream of curses, and then the door flew open. My mother’s irritation turned to shock.

“Ted!” she screamed, as if her shouts could protect her from the daughter who wouldn’t die and be gone forever like a good little girl.

My father came to stand behind her in the doorway, “Donna, what is it?” His face went pale when he saw me, looking morbidly as if I’d crawled out of my grave.

I wanted to say it served them right for burying someone who wasn’t dead in the first place, but it wasn’t my dad’s fault, not really. He just went along with whatever my mother said to do.

Finally, I found my voice. “Mom . . . ”

“You’re not real,” she said. It wasn’t said like someone who actually missed their daughter and was thrilled to have her home. It was said as if my appearance on her doorstep screwed up her 12-step plan to deny I’d ever existed. Such was the way of the Vargas clan.

Perhaps I should have gone somewhere else. But it was a perverse revenge, and I was unwilling to play this morbid scene out with anyone who didn’t deserve it.

“I’m real, mom.”

“But we didn’t bury you. You’re covered in dirt.”

My father stood behind my mom, his hands on her shoulders, steadying her as if he controlled anything in that house.

“No, you didn’t bury me. Did you not think that maybe I wasn’t dead, or was that not convenient for you?”

I understood they must have suffered when they’d thought they’d lost me. The sleepless nights, the fear for my safety. But it didn’t change the fact that they’d buried me to make their lives easier, so they could go on when I hadn’t had that luxury.

Then the tears started. Not mine. I was fairly certain I didn’t have tears left to cry. I’d used up my lifetime supply, and from now on my sobs would be verbal rather than wet. No, it was my mother crying. I was hurting her feelings.

“How could you say such a vile thing to me? We were worried sick. Where were you? What happened to you?”

Now it was time to accuse me. I’d not yet been invited into the house. I was still standing on the porch next to a giant plastic illuminated jack-o-lantern with a goofy grin on his face. A trail of trick-or-treaters stopped me from speaking.

“Trick-or-treat!” they caroled out, their treat bags held out like little beggars. One of the girls was dressed up like a witch. She’d managed to wipe off some of her green face make-up, and the wart was about to fall right off her nose.

My mother grabbed me by the arm and pulled me inside before giving the kids candy and sending them on their way. She shut the door and whirled on me.

She looked ridiculous wearing a pink bathrobe and slippers because Halloween was the one day of the year she could get away with being a slob. She had the bowl clutched in her hands so tightly I thought the glass would shatter and the candy would go flying onto the floor like a pinata. Her hands had gone white from gripping, and her face matched her hands. And yet . . . she was angry, not afraid.

“Where have you been?” She said it as if I’d been out playing hooky or something. Like I would disappear for months without a word on a joy ride and then come back looking like I did just for the hell of it.

I opened my mouth and then shut it again. Now that I was back, everyone would want to know. The police would want a statement, as would the media and all my friends and family. They felt they were entitled to know. I’d been gone, throwing their lives into a tailspin, and now I owed it to them to tell them, at least something. At least the barest, most TV movie-of-the-week version.

But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. To be forced to tell what had happened felt like rape, another violation and another choice that wasn’t free. I’d exposed every inch of my body and soul to one man for months, until force became voluntary. I wasn’t doing it again just in a different form.

Besides, I thought it was reasonable to think that once you bury someone, you give up rights to hearing their story. I wasn’t going to forgive them easily.

“I can’t talk about it,” I said. My voice quivered. I’m sure they thought it was trauma, but it was anger.

My mother nodded in understanding; my father still hadn’t said a word to me. Oh he loved me, in his way. He just wasn’t good at expressing it.

“I need to get cleaned up,” I said. After hours of dirt caked on me, I was becoming less and less appealing.

“You can use the guest room and bathroom, and wear some of my clothes. I’ll make you something to eat,” my mother said.

I wished I’d brought the clothes from the Mercedes, but I didn’t want any evidence that would help the police find my captor. It was irrational. I should want him locked up forever for what he’d done, but I didn’t. The thought of him locked in some cage turned my stomach.

I stopped off at my mother’s closet and got a T-shirt and some jeans in my size, which was six sizes ago for my mother. But like most women, she kept the hope alive that someday she’d get back into her skinny jeans.

The guest bedroom had previously been my bedroom. I wondered how long it had taken after my disappearance for them to start the erasing process? Packing my stuff up and redecorating the room.

The last time I’d been in this room had been a little more than a year ago. At that time it had remained untouched from my childhood, as if my parents expected that one day I would age backwards and they’d need it again.

There had been Barbie dolls and toys, as well as nail polish and posters of then-current rock stars, items from a room gone from childhood to teen. It had stood as some sort of unnatural shrine to keep me there, even after I’d freed myself from my cage and gone to college and then created a life of my own.

Now it was all gone. I wondered if they’d had a massive yard sale, or if it was all in storage somewhere, or up in the attic, out of sight out of mind. Now it looked like a country bed and breakfast. White wicker furniture and soft pale lavender carpet.

There was a delicate white crocheted bedspread and a border on the wall of wisteria, then the bottom half more pale lavender, stripes on white. An antique lamp and an old-fashioned alarm clock stood on the nightstand. There was not one shred of evidence I’d ever been there, as if it were my parents who had a crime to cover up.

I’d taken my shoes off at the door, so as not to track dirt into the bedroom. The bathroom had that same hollow guest feeling. Like the bedroom, it was warm and cozy but it looked like it belonged in a magazine, not that anyone could actually live in there. If I couldn’t find a friend to stay with until I got my stuff back and figured out, then I’d be stuck staying here in this warm sterility.

There was no trace of the bathroom of my childhood. It was a hunter green with lots of houseplants and ivy wallpaper that looked like it was randomly crawling over the walls. The linoleum had been taken up and new tile put down. The shower curtain was transparent.

I stepped out of the dirty clothes and turned on the water. After the first day he’d shaved me, it had been spelled out that any stubble would send me back to the bad cell. The promise of three weeks loomed over me as threatening in my mind as a sentence to death row.

One night I had stubble. He almost took me to the cell, but I begged him to watch the video so he’d know I’d obeyed him. He must have done so because when he returned, he’d nodded as if everything were okay.

Standing in the shower now, with the water pouring over me, I could feel the stubble. It would be normal, expected even, for me to leave it alone and let it grow, like some arcane and hidden secret proof of my freedom, but I couldn’t do it. Instead, I grabbed a razor and shaved, knowing I’d never let that hair grow out again even if no one ever knew about it either way, or why I did it.

After I was clean, shaven, and my hair was washed with mango-scented shampoo, I leaned my forehead against the wall and cried. Yes, I still could.

Out in the entryway I’d held it together. I’d had to keep myself from flinching when I’d heard my mother’s voice grating like fingernails on a chalkboard. And for once, my father’s silence had been appreciated.

I wondered if I would ever get used to hearing human speech besides my own again. I’d heard human voices on CDs I’d been given, but they were singing. Singing always seemed disconnected from reality, since aside from musicals, people don’t just randomly burst into song.

I got out of the shower, dressed, and then went to sit on the foreign bed. Probably the same mattress that had always been there, but who knew? Despite being hungry, I stayed there until my mother knocked on the door.

“Honey, I’ve fixed you something to eat. Come on into the kitchen.”

She’d shifted gears, and now she was prepared to deal with my existence again. When I got to the kitchen, I had to stop the scream from coming out of my mouth. I’m sure she thought it was the logical thing to do, that it would somehow comfort me. She couldn’t have known it would never comfort me again.

“Emmie?” My childhood nickname. “Honey, I made you some chicken noodle soup. It always made you feel better before.”

Before. Not now. And never again. How exactly did one explain an inexplicable phobic reaction to chicken soup?

“I’m sorry, I can’t eat this,” I said. It was as if his punishment followed me, and I wondered what I’d done to displease him.

Rationally, I knew my mother was just doing what made sense to her, what she’d always done. The one food Band-aid that had always worked before. Unfortunately this food was now a knife, not a bandage, and cutting on me more wouldn’t make it better.

“Why the hell not?”

I knew she was trying to believe I was being difficult. She was still holding onto the diminishing hope that I hadn’t been horribly tortured, that instead I’d gone off irresponsibly on a trip or had a late quarter-life crisis.

“I can’t talk about it,” I said, “I just can’t eat that.”

She started to open her mouth again, but my father stepped in, in one of those rare and miraculous instances where he doesn’t let her get away with just anything.

“Donna, I think if Emmie doesn’t want chicken noodle soup, she can have something else. We’ve got some leftover spaghetti.”

“That’d be fine, Dad.” I was relieved.

The last thing I needed was a shouting match with my mother because I couldn’t fit either the image of someone desperately grateful for chicken noodle soup, or that of some rebellious teenager. My mother lit a cigarette and sat in front of the television.

Soup was her entire repertoire. I guess being in the cell I’d overly romanticized it. When you’re someone’s prisoner, the idea of mom is idealized. All neurotic and annoying behavior is swept under the rug in light of that need to just be safe.

I followed my dad into the kitchen, unwilling to deal with her. I wasn’t about to explain to them about the soup. For one thing, I had no idea how to edit it down into some parent-safe version of the events. And for another, even if I could, they would suspect what had gone on, and I couldn’t handle the idea that my parents might suspect, even in the most vague way, the things that had gone on between my master and myself. That was private.

My dad busied himself in the kitchen, taking the spaghetti out of the fridge and loading up a plate for me. “You want garlic bread?”

“Yeah.”

I helped myself to some tea out of the fridge.

“You okay?” he asked. He didn’t look at me. I could hear the catch in his voice. If he cried, there was no hope for any of us.

“I’m fine,” I said. It wasn’t true, and I couldn’t exactly express that the largest reason it was a lie was because I was free. I didn’t think he had the proper wiring to understand that one.

He just nodded. “Your mother was worried. We both were. She may be acting a little funny, but she just doesn’t know how to process some things.”

“I know.”

And I did know. The tragedy of both my parents was that neither of them was a bad person. They had always loved me and my sister. They just couldn’t always cope with things. Although I suspected that the not coping came largely from my mother’s side of the camp.

When the microwave dinged, I took the plate and plowed through it like a starving woman. It was my first real food of the day. I didn’t count fast food, and I hadn’t had breakfast.

My father stood in the kitchen for a few minutes more, watching me. It was obvious he wanted to say something else, and I knew what it was. He wanted to know which version of reality was true. Had I been someone’s prisoner, so he could be distraught? Or had I just run off, so he could be angry? But he remained stoic as ever.

With the dirt that had covered me, one might assume something at least resembling what had happened. But if I’d had a mental breakdown and run off somewhere, only to come back and discover a fresh grave with my name on it, the results would have been the same. They were better off not knowing. They’d be better off angry.

The doorbell rang again. More kids. I put the empty plate in the sink and headed for the door. I wanted to do something normal. Even if my heart wasn’t in it, I wanted to participate in some inane activity like giving candy to random neighborhood kids in costumes.

My mother had been halfway to the entryway when I stopped her and took the bowl of candy from her hand and opened the door. But it wasn’t cherub-faced little princesses and miniature goblins that greeted me. I had believed I’d been discreet, that no one had recognized me, but I’d been wrong.

The glass bowl shattered on the porch and the candy went flying.

A crowd of journalists had assembled on my lawn with bright lights and cameras and microphones. Some of them with little squares of paper that they were furiously jotting notes down on. Perhaps noting my state of dress, my facial expressions, whether or not I looked abused or if I’d lost or gained any weight.

I squinted out into the sea of eager faces, people for whom my trauma equaled their paycheck. I could hear camera shutters clicking, could see the video cameras trained on me, and I wondered if he would be watching the news back in his fortress. Just another piece of video surveillance. Just another way he could spy on me.

“Miss Vargas.” It wasn’t one voice, it was several, all bleeding together, running on a loop.

“Why didn’t you go to the police?”

“Were you kidnapped? Is the perpetrator still at large?”

“Emily . . . ”

“Miss Vargas, were you held against your will?”

“What happened?”

“Can we get a statement?”

“Miss Vargas . . . ”

I shut the door and locked it. The nightmare had begun.