Chapter 9

Chapter 9

I haven't slept at all. For the past hour, I've been sitting here looking up at the sky, waiting for it to change color. It's dark at first, with only a few lingering clouds separated by wide stretches of clear sky, like grazing land for stars... but the stars aren't really shining tonight. They seem further away, and colder, like they're made of glass.

Bit by bit, the first hint of grey develops, a seagull grey that spreads in feathery swaths and eventually swallows the stars.

Brendan had another bad attack earlier. I kept talking and talking, and he actually calmed down again. Now I'm hoarse, and I haven't seen him for two hours.

Everything's still. Night transitions into day, accompanied only by the raindrops falling to earth from the treetops. The grey brightens, and soon the sky is streaked with fingers of salmon pink and peach, stretching out further and further. A bird starts singing, a mournful song that seems to fill every corner of the forest. After a few minutes, it's a choir. Later, the ermine races past again, without looking at me.

Tentatively, I rotate my stiff wrists and ankles. Every movement hurts, and I notice for the first time that the hard landing on the forest road left marks. My knees are scraped, and when I run my hand over the painful spot on my forehead, I feel a lump. No wonder, the way Brendan threw me to the ground. I pull the neckline of my wet blouse down to inspect the blue-green bruises on my upper arms, from where he grabbed me. And there are still patches of fading yellow near my elbows, too—must be left over from his first chloroform attack.

I don't want to look at them. I pull the neckline up again and take a few deep breaths of cool, resin-scented morning air, before fishing the key to Brendan's restraints from my shorts pocket.

I roll it back and forth in my hand, and then try to unlock my own handcuff with it.

"I told you," I hear Brendan say out of nowhere. "It only unlocks mine."

His voice startles me so much that I nearly have a heart attack. He's standing as close as his chain will allow. For the first time, he doesn't look perfect. He looks weakened and tired; there are bluish rings under his eyes, and the skin on his palms is ragged.

I bite my lower lip. Is there any way of knowing what he'll do when I give him the key? He might still be planning on locking me in the box, as punishment for wanting to run away. Right now, when he's acting so normal, it almost feels like last night was a bad dream.

"What happens when I give you the key?"

"I unlock our cuffs."

"And then?"

"And then you should shower." A faint smile flits across his face, as fleeting and jittery as the ermine.

I follow his gaze down my own body. I'm flecked with mud from head to toe. But the word "shower" makes me remember the clothes, the whole reason I panicked. I'm scared to bring it up, scared of the answer I'll get, because it may make him seem more insane than ever. Then again, what could possibly top last night?

"Are you going to punish me by putting me in the box?" I ask in a challenging tone.

"Lord, no, Lou!"

"But you threatened me with it."

"I thought maybe locking you in there would be for the best if I... I mean... if that kind of thing happened." He raises his shackled hands in a strangely helpless gesture.

I force myself not to look away. "What are you going to do then? You're going to do something, right?"

"I'd be lying if I said I wasn't." He squats down, at eye level with me, and regards me for several seconds with an expression I'm not sure how to interpret. "I don't remember what happened last night."

I stare at my feet.

"Flashbacks, they're called. Reliving an old traumatic experience. Ever heard of them?"

"On TV," I say quietly. "But I changed the channel." At least there's a name for what happened. Back then, the story hadn't interested me, it hadn't had anything to do with me or my life.

"There are different forms of flashbacks. Afterwards, I never remember what I did during them. They start with everything turning black-and-white. Everything gets darker, and seems like it's moving away from me. Eventually, it's like I'm trapped inside myself, I'm not aware of my surroundings anymore."

He doesn't say anything else, and after a minute or two, I raise my eyes. He's staring at his scraped palms. "Must have been a bad one," he says. "I tried to break free, didn't I?"

I nod.

"Once during a flashback I beat someone unconscious because I thought he was..." He hesitates. "Someone else. That's why I chained myself up. I didn't want to hurt you."

"You never want to," I murmur, narrowing my eyes. "And yet you do. Constantly."

He hangs his head. "I'm sorry, Lou." His voice sounds so ashamed, I nearly believe him. Reflexively, I run my hand over my arm; even that soft touch is enough to make my bruises hurt.

"Then why do you do it?" I hiss over at him.

He jerks his eyes up again. "You just can't run away. There's no point anyway. I'll always catch you. The old cat-and-mouse game."

I'm about one second away from swallowing the key, marble ring and all, just to see the look on his stupid face.

"There are a couple of things that... bring that out in me. Triggers, we call them."

Aha. So me running away is a "trigger." Okayyy. "Um, are there any others? Seems like something I probably ought to know."

He stands up, lips pressed into a white line. "Yeah, but I don't want to talk about them. Now give me the damn key already."

"You sound so mad. I'm not giving them to you when you're this angry."

He sighs impatiently. "You're still scared."

I look at him with what must be wide eyes, because his expression softens, his features smooth out. "I could never do anything bad to you. What can I do that will make you believe me?"

"Let me go," I grunt.

Another fleeting, ermine smile flickers on his face. "One-zero for you. But you know perfectly well that that's not going to happen. Now throw the keys here so that I can reach them."

I wonder why he's so impatient. I could stall for time, because maybe, just maybe, someone will actually come by. The thought makes my heart beat a little faster. "What if someone finds us here?" I say in a tight voice. "People are looking for me. Maybe the cops will fly over in a helicopter."

"Maybe. Maybe not. The police think you ran away. Same as hundreds of other teenagers every year. So I don't think they're going to go to all the trouble of searching these deserted woods."

"You're lying," I snap. "Of course they're looking for me. That's why you wouldn't let me watch Find Me !"

"I'll let you listen to the news if you want. You're not in it anymore. What do you think your friends told the cops?" He gives me a sharp look, and doesn't wait for me to reply. "Your brother's so strict, he doesn't let you do anything... you said yourself that you wanted to take the bus home. Or somewhere else. Trust me, the police have better things to do than run around looking for a rebellious little teenage girl. Give me the key, and I'll let you read the papers from the first couple of days after you disappeared."

Helpless, furious tears spring to my eyes, but I don't want him to see them. I stare at the side of the RV, at the letters spelling out Travel America . "That's blackmail," I say in a strangled whisper. "That's not fair, and you know it."

I hear the chain clinking as he moves. "I shouldn't have mentioned it. But you can go on waiting, of course. Until we're both too exhausted to move. Which will be quicker for you than me." I look back at him. He's sitting stick straight, shoulders back, like he's suddenly completely recovered from the long night. "This territory is almost 200,000 square miles and has a population of 30,000. Nobody's going to save you here."

Exhausted, I rest my head on the camper, squeezing the key in my hand. I'm so miserable I could die. The worst part is, I believe him, and there's no sense lying to myself about it.

I turn back toward him and scoot as far forward as possible. He's maybe twenty feet away now—it shouldn't be too hard to throw him the key. Or it wouldn't be for someone less tired and hungry and wet and exhausted and depressed. I can't bring myself to throw.

My hand is trembling. Come on, Lou!

But what if he's lying? What if he locks me in the box after all? For days, weeks... a memory shoots through my mind. You should be dead, buried in the ground!

"You're really not going to put me in the box?" I ask again.

"Nope." His dark eyes shimmer gently, almost caringly. But he looked the same way when he was warning me about the bears. I have no way of knowing when he's lying and when he isn't.

"But you're going to do something else. You said so earlier!"

"True." He's still looking at me.

"What?"

He sighs. "I won't lie to you. I hadn't planned on keeping you chained up permanently, but I suppose I'm going to have to for a while."

I toy with the keys in my hand. I'm freezing, I'm starving, I'm ungodly tired. And I really, really have to use the bathroom, and I'm not sure how much longer I can ignore it—and I certainly don't want Brendan watching me pee. Maybe stalling is only going to make things worse. Maybe it'll piss him off so much that he'll hurt me after all. Or maybe he's just pretending, waiting for the moment he gets his hands on the key.

I lean against the camper again with my shoulder and look up. A couple of crows glide over the pine-green treetops. Way overhead, I see the jet trail of an airplane. Everything's quiet. No sound of helicopter blades anywhere, no car engines, no voices. Nothing but forest and sky, Brendan and me.

Against all reason, I wait. Brendan doesn't say anything; after a while, he sits down on the ground and starts rotating a pair of rocks around and around in his hand. Time floats by like a bird, silent and weightless. The sky turns to steel blue as the sun rises. The heat licks the moisture from the ground. I squeeze my thighs together, because the pressure in my bladder is almost unbearable.

When I can't take the heat anymore, I roll underneath the camper. I briefly consider peeing my pants down here, but I think I can still hold it for a while.

I keep waiting. Tiny bugs crawl over my arms and legs. I flick them away at first, but after a while I give up. My lips are starting to crack. I try to work out how many people per square mile there are here, if it's 200,000 square miles and 30,000 people. I divide 200,000 by 30,000, but the result doesn't start with a zero, so it must be wrong. I try 30,000 divided by 200,000. Then I rotate onto my stomach as best I can with the handcuff and draw the equation in the dirt, but when I get a zero after the decimal point, I quit in frustration. Zero point zero something. The 30,000 people probably all live in one or two towns, and everywhere else is pretty much uninhabited. I think back to that rusted-out tractor that nobody even bothered to tow away so it wouldn't block the forest road.

Canada. This has to be Canada. The US has states, not territories. Especially not such sparsely populated ones. I'm pretty sure, anyway.

But why would I believe anything Brendan says? That thing about the population might not be true at all. I close my eyes.

"If you're trying to provoke me," Brendan says abruptly, "it's about to work." I see him kick a rock through the air with one dark biker boot.

"I'm waiting for someone to come rescue me," I call from underneath the camper.

"Not gonna happen."

"We'll see about that."

"Yeah, we will."

I keep waiting, but Brendan's creaking footsteps and the rustling underbrush when he briefly disappears into the woods are the only human sounds, besides the ones I make myself. Other than that, all I hear are the light and dark twittering of the forest birds, the drawn-out cawwws of the crows, the buzzing bees, and the spruce trees groaning in the sunshine. Once in a while, I see something small and soft dashing back and forth in the trees. Could be the ermine again, or maybe a marten or a chipmunk. Hundreds of white butterflies flutter amid the strips of lilac-colored willow herb scattered at the feet of the spruce trees.

If we really are in Canada, there are grizzlies here, too. It's weird: I didn't think about bears once last night. There were so many other things to be afraid of. Now the idea's in my head, but they seem a lot less scary than they did a few days ago. Maybe because I was underneath the camper, so I know the bear would have attacked Brendan first.

The light gets thinner; the shadows lengthen. A woodpecker jabs at a tree somewhere nearby, a monotone hammering sound that comes and goes. Still no sign of other human life out here. I begin to accept the fact that nobody will ever find me. Not alive, at least. Every bone in my body hurts; my bladder is aching, and hunger is eating a hole in my stomach. I've barely eaten anything in seven days now. I didn't touch a bite at breakfast yesterday. The only thing I ate was a sandwich Brendan brought me when he took a short break. I haven't had much to drink, either.

I've never felt so alone in my entire life. The waiting is shriveling my hopes, leaving an emptiness that fills my every pore. And yet my whole body is leaden, like I've inhaled iron. I could keep stretching the wait out, of course—I've heard people can live for two days without water. Maybe even three. But I wouldn't make it that long, not under these conditions, the drugging, the fasting. I remember that endless, lonely stretch of road, where only five cars passed us the whole day. Five! And I think about Brendan, whose pacing sounds more and more impatient with every passing hour. I hear him cursing softly. If I don't give him the key back until the very last moment, right before I die of thirst, I'll definitely feel his wrath. Besides, I really don't want to pee my pants.

It's late afternoon when I crawl out from underneath the camper, stiff-limbed. I don't even ask Brendan whether he's going to do something to me, whether he's going to lock me in the box. I don't want to think about anything anymore.

Brendan is silent as well, though his expression is one of relief.

I crawl as far forward as I can. This time, I don't think before I throw, I just do it. Without looking at him.

The key flies past Brendan, but he picks it up. I stare at the ground, listen to the locks clicking. Once, twice. Heavy footfalls in my direction.

Suddenly I'm terrified after all, pressing myself against the camper, shaking, yanking at the handcuff.

"I'm not going to hurt you," he barks furiously. He squats down beside me and unlocks the handcuff. A winged patch of sweat is spreading across his T-shirt. It reminds me of the watercolor butterflies Jay and I used to make by putting globs of paint on the paper and then folding in half. Except it's black, not colorful.

When Brendan stands up, I briefly imagine the butterfly spreading its wings and lifting Brendan into the air. Carrying him far, far away. Then we'd both be free.

"Come on, up! You need to drink something." He grabs my arm. I can't help gasping in pain.

He releases me immediately. "What's wrong?" he asks, brow furrowed.

"I can do it myself." I scramble to my feet, using the side of the vehicle for support. I definitely do not want him to see what he did to me.

"What's wrong?" he repeats. "Are you hurt?"

"No!" I fold my arms. He has no right to know how I feel. Everything about me that he doesn't know already, I don't want him to find out. I want to protect that information from him. Even the injuries that he gave me.

He grabs my wrist; his jaw juts out. "I don't believe you. Let me see."

"I banged my arm," I say evasively. "It's no big deal."

"Banged your arm, hm." He rolls up the sleeve of my blouse. I don't fight him, since I know he's going to win. There's no point in resisting pointlessly over and over, just to remind myself of how helpless I am.

"Oh, shit," he breathes when he reveals the blue-green bruises; a couple of spots are nearly black. "Both arms?"

I nod and stare past him at an alpine rose bush with dark rosehips.

"That won't happen again," he says through gritted teeth. "Never. You have my word, no matter what happens."

"Don't make any promises you can't keep." I yank my arm away and unroll the sleeve again. "But even then... do you seriously think these bruises are worse than everything else you're doing to me? Trust me, you could beat the crap out of me, rape me, whatever, I wouldn't care as long as you dropped me off by the side of the road afterward."

He flinches like he's been slapped. For a moment, I think he's going to punch me in the face. I suppose that's when he remembers the promise he made two seconds ago.

"You don't know what you're saying. You're completely out of your head. Go on, get inside." He points to the side door with his chin, hands balled into fists.

I don't need to be asked twice. I cut a wide berth around him as I climb back into my dungeon.

I wait until I'm in the shower to peel myself out of my clothes. My shorts get caught on my scraped knee, tearing the skin open all over again. Blood runs down my leg in thin rivulets, and the wound burns a little, but it's almost like it's happening to someone else.

There's no driving away the emptiness in my soul. At this point, I wouldn't even care if Brendan came in and saw me naked. Anyway, he already has, if it's true about him putting me on the toilet. I toss my clothes out of the shower onto the floor, slide the plastic door closed and turn on the hot-water tap. Soon, the tiny room is filled with steam. I let the water run over my head. It's hot, almost scalding, but the pain helps.

I soap up with the shower gel and the shampoo Brendan gave me. The shower gel smells like herbs; the shampoo, like moss. I wonder whether there's a way to get water hot enough to burn grief out of your insides. Or memories out of your head. I want to wash everything out of me, but most of all, I want to wash the images of my brothers from my mind. Not the ones I'm always picturing, but the ones I won't let myself picture, and they still won't go away. The images of their faces when they realize that I've disappeared. Like, really disappeared, not run away. I know they don't actually believe that. They may have considered the possibility at first, but once they realized I wasn't at home, they must have known something bad happened to me. They know how much I love them. Even Ethan knows that, despite what I said to the contrary. I would never run away. My eyes fill with tears under the spray, which is getting progressively hotter. I picture Ethan checking his watch and looking worried when I don't return from the visitors' center. Walking through the dark campground, calling my name. Cringing in fear at the thought of what may have happened to me.

Deep sobs well up from within me and wrack my body. I can't hold them back. I don't think I've ever cried so desperately in my life.

I pull the showerhead down and hold my face right against the hard spray, wishing the water could dissolve me. The heat is breathtaking, chokes off my sobs. I want to drown.

I'm so sorry, Ethan. I'm so sorry I told you I hated you. I'm sorry I went with him. I'm sorry he's got me captive and you're worried to death back home. I'm sorry I can't give you some sign of life. I'm sorry I always gave you so much trouble...

There are so many "I'm sorry'sin my life. So many.

The spray abruptly shuts off. The sudsy grey water on the floor of the shower is past my ankles.

I stare as though hypnotized at the barely dripping showerhead, sure that this is Brendan's way of forbidding me from burning myself.

"You used all the water in the tank," he calls from the other side of the door. "It'll be a minute before I can fill it up again."

His words pass straight through me. I take the towel I hung on the doorknob and wrap it around myself.

"You all right?"

I nod, although he can't see it.

"Louisa. Everything okay?"

Nothing will ever be okay again. I take a few long breaths. My skin is lobster red. It's weird: I'm in pain, like terrible-sunburn pain, but I don't feel anything. Everything seems backwards.

Brendan flings the door open and stares and me like I'm a mutant. Then he shakes his head, but doesn't say anything. I notice a scratch across his forehead. Probably from me. It should make me happy, but it doesn't. Finally, he returns to the kitchen.

I walk to the back part of the RV on autopilot, fold the door closed, and sit on the bed. A stoic calm settles over the emptiness inside me. I rummage through the pile of clothing I ripped from the closet, fishing out shirts one by one until I find something that isn't a replacement for a top I own back home. A black boat-neck T-shirt. He may have picked it because he likes that style, I guess, but even that makes no difference to me anymore. I keep poking around until I find some knee-length jean shorts. With shirt and shorts in one hand, I climb onto the bed and open the overhead cabinet. I give the underwear a quick once-over. Simple stuff, no lace, no ruffles. Most of the bras and panties are plain white and exactly my size. I pluck out one of each at random, unwrap the towel and get dressed.

Then I just sit there, staring straight ahead. All my senses are deadened.

At some point Brendan comes in holding a tray. He makes sure I eat a bowl of oatmeal and drink two glasses of water. After that, he rubs some kind of brown tincture on my right wrist and then re-dresses it. I have no idea when or how the old bandage came off. I didn't notice how badly it hurt until now. But even this pain doesn't affect me. It's happening to someone else.

"Hopefully it doesn't get infected," I hear him murmur. He bandages my left wrist, too. Just to be safe, he says. I understand what he means. Just to be safe, because I'll be wearing the shackles from now on. And the skin around my left wrist is already reddening.

Once he's done with my wrists, he rubs a salve on my upper arms and elbows. It smells like pine needles and rosemary. After that, he disinfects the scrapes on my knees.

I guess he doesn't have anything for my soul.

When he finishes, he returns the first-aid stuff to the kitchen. Then he comes back, removes the cuff from my wrist, and puts it on my ankle. He attaches the other side to the iron chain, which is still hanging on the wall, firmly anchored.

He gives me a questioning frown from the frame of the folding door. "You weren't serious about that earlier, were you?" His arms are crossed.

Instead of answering, I mess with the fabric of the T-shirt. It's kind of therapeutic to twist and squeeze the material, pretending it's Brendan's neck.

"That you wouldn't care if I raped you and beat you half to death if I would drop you by the side of the road afterward?" His pupils are pinpoints. I see the color of his irises for the first time: dark brown, not black. He shakes his head in disbelief. "I must really be a monster."

I close my eyes and try to ignore him.

"I just want to have you with me. That's all."

That's all. Yeah, right.

"I won't touch you again—especially not in the way you think I would. Not as long as you don't want me to."

I would love to ask him if he actually buys his own bullshit. If he's seriously planning on keeping me with him forever, eventually he won't be able to stop himself. Eventually my grace period will run out, that's a given. Tomorrow. The day after tomorrow. Next week. Next year. Depending on what his testosterone levels are like.

"I'll wait until you're ready. I promise."

I look at him. His eyes are shimmering, a mixture of longing and skittishness, as if he's been waiting for this day to come with both anticipation and dread. It's an expression I've never seen in his eyes. But before I can figure out what it might mean, the shimmer fades, and he's as confident as ever.

"That's never going to happen." My voice cracks. "Ever."

He gives me that same intense look, the one that squeezes the air out of my lungs every time.

His pupils flow outward, like midnight-black ink in a glass of water. Without taking his eyes off me, he uncrosses his arms and holds his tattered wrists up in front of my face. They're both completely red and raw, but the left one still has that braided armband with the silver coin on it.

It dangles down sadly, like a tear that refuses to fall.

"This time," he says in a dark voice as I stubbornly stare at the coin instead of at his wounds, "you were lucky. I was able to chain myself up in time. I might not make it next time. So think carefully about whether you want to try and run off again."

He glances at the chain. "Assuming I ever give you a chance to try."