“You have no idea how happy I am that you’re here. It’s so damn sad to have only yourself to cook and bake for,” he said. “It’s as bad as an artist creating a picture and not having anyone to look at it. Sure, you can be happy about what you’ve done, but it’s pleasing someone else that matters most, don’tcha think? That’s what Ma used ta say. Whatcha think? She was right, right? My ma was full of wisdom. Pop used ta say, ‘Your mother’s so brim full of sagacity that words come pouring out of her ears and eyes.’ I had to go look up sagacity in the dictionary. I think I told you my father was a big reader, right? He didn’t have much more formal education than high school, but he liked to read anything and everything. He’d read the back of a cereal box if there was nothing else around. He wasn’t much of a talker, though. I guess he was shy that way, but get him mad, and he’d give you a what-for that could go on for hours, even days.”
He paused and smiled. “Look at me going on and on about myself and my parents when you didn’t even have a chance to say good morning. Excitement’s no excuse for bad manners.”
How could he think I was going to say good morning? The moment I awoke, I vowed not to speak to him. Perhaps my silence would convince him that his fantasy romance would not happen, and he would give up and turn me loose. Was that hope a bigger fantasy? Was I deliberately naive because I was afraid of facing the truth that I was trapped and so well hidden that no one might find me? I could be here for years. The night had passed, and no one had come to rescue me. Surely my mother and my twin sister, Haylee, were frantic by now, but I knew the police usually wanted to wait to see if a person had deliberately disappeared, run away. It was typical of teenagers.
And yet Haylee could certainly convince them that this wasn’t the situation in my case. By now, as reluctant as she was and as guilty as she would be because it was all her fault, she would have to show them her Internet correspondence and explain how she had sent me on an errand that surely led to my abduction. She’d have to confess that our going to the movie was a ruse, that we—and there was no way I couldn’t confess to having gone along with it—were planning for her, not me, to meet her Internet boyfriend.
She’d have to explain that once we were in the theater, she’d suddenly had a terrible stomachache and thrown up in the bathroom, then sent me to tell Anthony she would not be able to meet him as they had planned. She might have a full-blown flu and still be sick to her stomach, but I was confident that Mother would force her to explain it all to the police. They would have come quickly to that closed-down coffee shop and maybe located someone who had seen something. If not, by now, Haylee would have surely shown them what she had on her computer.
Mother, I thought—what a panic she must be in by now. There wasn’t one day since we were born that Haylee or I was somewhere without the other, even if it meant the other had to sit and wait and be bored. All our dentist and doctor appointments were made back-to-back, alternating between my being first and her being first. For the first time in a long time, I was glad Mother was so intense about us being together. Right now, I’d be the last to complain about her considering us two halves of the same perfect daughter.
“You can get up and go to the bathroom,” Anthony said when I didn’t respond. “Don’t forget to wash your hands. If I ever forgot, my mother would seize me on my ear and spin me around to go back and do it. She’d do that in front of my friends. Even when I was eighteen!”
I did have to pee, so I rose slowly and, dragging the chain behind me, went into the bathroom with no door. He could look in and see me, but he was busy preparing our breakfast. I saw that he had put new soap, toothpaste, and a toothbrush still in its packaging in the cabinet above the sink. There were also other typical bathroom items like aspirin, dental floss, Band-Aids of all sizes, itch cream, disinfectant, and other things to treat toothaches. There was a rack beside the sink with clean towels and washcloths. Beside that on the rug-covered floor was a basket for laundry.
What the bathroom did not have was a mirror. Right now, I didn’t want to look at myself anyway. I was afraid I might just scream and scream.
After I washed and dried my hands, I came out and gazed around the basement apartment again, an apartment he claimed he had lived in from the age of twelve, something that he said made his friends jealous. He had his own apartment and all that privacy. Perhaps, however, his parents simply wanted him out of their sight. Listening between the lines of things he said, I imagined they hadn’t been pleased with how he was turning out, so they had shoved him downstairs—especially, from the sound of it, his father.
The only two windows down here were boarded up on the outside. The walls were paneled in light wood. There was an old, heavy-cushioned brown sofa that looked worn like old family furniture, a small dark-wood coffee table all nicked up, and a dark-wood bookcase on the wall behind the sofa. Besides books, there were little figurines and toys on the shelves, model planes and model cars, things you would find in a little boy’s room. Next to the shelves were drawings pinned to the walls. They looked like the drawings a child would make of mountains and trees. In many of them there was a cat that resembled Mr. Moccasin. How old could he be? If it was him in the pictures, he would be an old cat, unless those drawings were recent, which would be frightening because they were so childish.
The concrete floor was partially covered with thick, tight area rugs in faded colors. They also looked like hand-me-downs. Directly in front of me was a metal sink, a counter with a linoleum surface, a small two-door refrigerator, and an oven and range with a teapot and a saucepan. There was a cabinet above it, and beside it was a closet without any doors. The shelves were stocked with boxes of cereal and rice, cans of soup, and other things, and on the counter was a bread box. All the pipes and wires were visible, looking like it was all just thrown together.
The bed I had been forced to sleep in was a double with a metal headboard, two large light-blue pillows, and a light-blue comforter that did look brand-new. It had a lilac scent. There were two wooden side tables that looked like a lighter oak wood, and a dark-wood dresser with half a dozen drawers. There was another tight area rug as well, but it was a lot more threadbare than the rest.
He had set the small dark-wood kitchen table. There were only two chairs, one on each end, not matching, both with ribbed backs and seats that had the color washed out of them. He was pouring orange juice.
“I hope you’re hungry,” he said. “I’m starving.” He pulled out what was to be my chair. “Madame,” he said.
I stood there staring at him. He really was acting as though I wasn’t a prisoner but a guest instead, and that frightened me almost more than anything else.
“Madame,” he repeated, raising his voice with more firmness.
His smile was sliding away like a thin sheet of ice. His dull brown eyes looked like they darkened and his sharply cut chin tightened, the tension rippling down his neck and emphasizing his Adam’s apple. I thought I had better go to the table.
“Comfortable?” he said after I sat.
I stared down at the table and didn’t speak. My heart was pounding so hard I thought he might be able to hear it.
“Drink your juice,” he ordered, the sharpness in his command revealing his growing annoyance with me. “The French toast is ready.”
He stood over me and took a step closer. My throat ached from the crying I had already done. Even though I had finally fallen asleep beside him, I was quite exhausted, my whole body as tight as a fist the whole time and most of the night. It felt like my blood had frozen. With my hand trembling, I reached for the glass of orange juice. He stood there waiting for me to drink from it.
“It’s freshly squeezed,” he said. “I bet your mother didn’t give you freshly squeezed every morning.”
She did often, but I wouldn’t speak. I drank all the juice, and he returned to the stove and brought back a platter of French toast with a small white pitcher shaped like a cow full of maple syrup that you could pour out of th
e cow’s mouth.
“I bought this for my mom when I was ten,” he said. “With my own money I earned helping. But my father thought it was too silly to put on our kitchen table, so I brought it down here. You don’t think it’s too silly, do you?”
I simply stared at it. We actually had one like it in our house.
“Yeah, I knew you’d agree,” he said, as if I had replied. “This really smells good, don’t it?” He served a few pieces of French toast to me and then put the maple syrup right in front of me. “Use what you want.”
He poured us each a cup of coffee.
“Milk and sugar? I drink it black.”
When I didn’t respond, he put the milk and the sugar bowl closer to me and then began to pour maple syrup on his own French toast. My stomach was still in knots, but I couldn’t resist the aroma, and although I hated to admit it, it did look good. I poured some maple syrup on mine. He laughed as it came out of the cow’s mouth.
“My father thought anything that came out of it was cow puke. He was a hard-ass sometimes, like I told you.”
I began to eat, convincing myself that I needed my strength if I was ever going to find a way out of here. But I was also afraid I would heave up anything I swallowed. I knew instinctively that if I did, he would probably become enraged.
“This is great, isn’t it?” He smiled and spread his arms as if he was about to embrace the whole world. “Just look at us, our first breakfast together. Freshly squeezed juice, delicious French toast, organic syrup just as you preferred, and fresh brew. I don’t usually eat like this for breakfast, even on weekends, but every morning will be special now. Every day and every night will be, too!
“So here’s the plan,” he continued, leaning over the table toward me, his voice full of what sounded like a little boy’s excitement. His bushy eyebrows lifted as the dark creases ran quickly along his forehead, looking like thin stains of motor oil. “You’ll clean up. Normally, I’d help, but I’ve got to get going. I’m never late for work. Mother taught me that tardiness is a sin. I was never late to school, either, and one year, I didn’t miss a day, no sick days. I got a certificate for it. I’ll show it to you later, or maybe I’ll pin it up on the wall now that there’s someone else to look at it.”
He sat back, nodding and smiling as if I had not only agreed but agreed excitedly. He leaned forward again, slapping his hands together.
“So. I have three different kinds of cheese in the fridge, turkey slices, mayo, mustard, whatever, and a fresh loaf of honey wheat bread. There are sodas and juices and lots of fresh fruit, too. Make your lunch when you’re hungry.”
I almost spoke to ask how I would know what time it was. There was no clock in here, and he had taken my watch, but I didn’t want to utter a word. Stick to the plan, I thought. Stay mute. Haylee hated it when I did that to her. I’d make silence work for me. Eventually, it had to work. He’d grow tired of talking, even though right now he ignored my silence, pretending I was speaking.
“I was thinking of eggplant parmesan for dinner with some angel hair pasta. Sound good? Yeah,” he said after a sufficient pause. “I thought you said you liked that. You probably wonder how I became such a good cook. When you’re on your own for so long, you either become a good cook or you starve. I never told anyone, but I took some lessons from a chef I know.
“We’ll have a fresh salad, of course. I’ll stop at the supermarket on the way home. Anything special you’d like to eat this week? You told me about pizza, and I promise we’ll have pizza at least once a week. I can pick up some on the way home during the week, or we can make it a special Saturday night thing. Any ideas for dessert tonight? You told me you like anything chocolate.”
He paused as though he was listening to me speak.
“So that’s it,” he said. “Leave it up to me. Surprises are fun.”
I closed my eyes and pushed the plate away. Despite my need for energy and strength, I couldn’t eat much after all. When I opened my eyes, he stared at me, sipping his coffee. Then he continued to eat.
“You told me this was one of your favorites for breakfast,” he said, his tone of voice strained with annoyance. “I hope you didn’t make up stuff about food, too, Kaylee.”
He was still calling me Kaylee. Why?
A terrible, dark, and very frightening realization was dawning on me. When Haylee had started her forbidden Internet romance, maybe she had used my name instead of her own. I first thought that she had mentioned me and he had simply confused our names because they were so similar, but now I was thinking that during their Internet courtship, Haylee had never told him that she was an identical twin. I didn’t think she had even mentioned having a sister. Perhaps he wasn’t lying about that after all.
When I had gone to meet him on her behalf when she had become sick at the movie theater, he’d accused me of making up a story, playing a joke on him by telling him I wasn’t the one he’d met over the Internet. I told him that my sister was the one with whom he had developed an Internet relationship. Why did he think I would be joking about that, especially then? Why didn’t he take me seriously?
All I could think was that she had made up things when she talked with him on the Internet and then admitted she was joking so often that he was used to that. But why had she never revealed that she was an identical twin? Why wouldn’t she have anticipated that he wouldn’t believe me when I told him I wasn’t her, that I wasn’t the one who had started this Internet romance? Why wouldn’t she expect that he would think it was just another one of her jokes, the whole thing, including pretending her sister was sick in a movie theater? Why didn’t she warn me that this might happen? Why did she send me to that dark, deserted meeting place without telling me he thought her name was Kaylee? Was she too ashamed?
All of this had come from her plan to deceive Mother. I knew that I should have risked Haylee hating me months ago and told Mother that she was carrying on this Internet relationship with a man much older than us. Now that I saw him in person, I didn’t think Haylee knew how much older he was, because the picture of him she showed me on her computer was obviously a picture from when he was much younger.
When I met him and insisted that I wasn’t the one on the Internet, he simply laughed, and then he grew angry. Of course, there was always the possibility that he did know but didn’t want to believe it, or maybe he thought I had told him a story about an identical twin because I had changed my mind about being with him. The reason didn’t matter. He wasn’t going to change his mind now. As far as he was concerned, he had met the girl he had seen and spoken to for so long on the computer, the girl he had planned to capture and keep.
I had tried to run away and get back to the movie theater, but he’d rendered me unconscious with something electrical and then whisked me off in his van on a street so dark and deserted I had no hope that anyone had witnessed it and gone to the police. I could have gone up in smoke for all it mattered. I awoke in this basement apartment, wearing a nightgown over my naked body and an ankle bracelet with a chain embedded in the wall. There was enough length to permit me to get to every part of the apartment and a little way up the stairway outside the door, but I was like someone’s pet kept from wandering off. He was probably afraid that if I could get into the house above, I could use a phone or break out and run for help.
He wiped his lips with his napkin, gulped down the remainder of his coffee, and stood up.
“Got to go,” he said. “Believe me, I hate to leave you so soon. We’ve got so much real acquainting to do, huh? In days we’ll know more about each other than we ever could with that computer talk. I betcha in a week it’ll be like we knew each other for our entire lives, huh?”
It was then that he told me how to feed and care for Mr. Moccasin. He said he would change his litter box when necessary. He approached me and stood staring down at me. I tried not to look at him, but he stood there so long without speaking that I had to glance up at him. He smiled.
“I think it would b
e nice if you kissed me good-bye every morning when I leave for work, Kaylee. My mother always kissed my father and wished him a good day. It’s important to have someone at home waiting for you, thinking about you, someone you can think about, too, huh? And just think . . . you’ll have something to look forward to, my arrival. I’ll bring you a surprise every day. I promise. You told me how much you love surprises. So whatcha say? A sweet good-bye to carry me through the day? And then, when I come home from work, you can run to the door and greet me with a kiss, too. It’s like putting a frame around a beautiful picture of us.”
He held out his arms. I cringed. He shook his head.
“You’re a lot shier than you made out with all that flirtatious talk,” he said, and leaned down to kiss my cheek. “Okay. I’m off to see the Wizard.” He laughed and knelt to pet Mr. Moccasin. “You take care of her while I’m gone, Mr. Moccasin.”
He looked around.
“Be sure you do a good cleanup,” he said sharply.
I realized his eyes could click and his whole demeanor would change from friendly and loving to harsh and mean instantly. He turned and started out, pausing at the door to look back at me, smiling.
“I hafta keep telling myself you’re really here. It’s a dream come true, a dream I’ve been having all these weeks, and a dream I know you’ve been having, too. Like you said, you’ll be free to be yourself now.”
He blew me a kiss and walked out. I heard him go up the stairs and out an upstairs door.
The silence fell like a cold, hard rain. I actually began to shiver and got up to wrap myself in the comforter. As bizarre as it was, everything really was clean and fresh, scented perhaps to make it all seem like it had been in the fresh air and sunshine, or that we were.
During the first hour or so, I simply sat on the bed and waited, praying that Mother and the police would soon come. After that, I got up a few times and went to the window to listen. Once I went out the door, and this time I made sure Mr. Moccasin didn’t follow me, because when I had done it the night before, I had left the cat out on the short stairway and Anthony knew I was trying to escape. He wasn’t going to sleep beside me the first night, but then, after he had realized what I had done, he had decided to do so.