“Sara, are you asleep? We need to talk sometime. You can’t stay in there forever.” Three more knocks.
The dark seems to circle around me tighter until it feels like a python coiled from my ankles to my chin. I wake up feeling like this all the time. Like I’m being suffocated. I wake up feeling like I’m dying, gasping for breath, and it isn’t until I’ve managed to catch my breath and remember where I am that I wish the dark would just finish the job already. Just suffocate me and be done with it.
The dark constricts more tightly around me, and when I choke out loud, I realize why I feel like something’s choking the breath out of me—I’m picturing him. In my mind, I’m holding on to the picture of him on the sidewalk with his hands in his pockets, staring at me like we had forever.
We did have forever. For all of thirty seconds before someone stole it because we were both fools to believe in the promise of forever. The only promise is that there is no promise. Forever can be destroyed as easily as a blade of grass can be trampled. Forever is fragile. Forever is fleeting. Forever is finite.
Forever is gone.
When I clear the image of him from my mind, I feel the black recede. When I bury the image in the dusty, dark attic of my memory, I feel the black almost disappear completely.
“Sara? Just talk to me. We can work this out. Everything can go back to the way things used to be, I know it.”
His voice doesn’t sound as evil as it used to. Without travelling through the film of panic, I think I’ve translated his tone more accurately—it’s sadness I hear. After everything, I’m better equipped to identify it.
I haven’t spoken to him in days, maybe weeks. I gave up shouting at him and screaming for answers. I gave up demanding to be let go and threatening that he’d be found and locked away for good.
I gave up.
I guess I was finally ready to give up the rest.
“Yeah?” My voice is hoarse from underuse. It’s strange how it can become the same after hours of screaming, but I guess silence is its own kind of scream. “I’m awake.”
I feel another piece of me crumbling away into that void, but it doesn’t stop me. I’m going to fall apart either way—I might as well do it with the chance of finally getting out of this hell like he’s been promising from the beginning. I’ll earn my freedom . . . by imprisoning the old me.
Outside the door, he is quiet. When I hear him clear his throat, it sounds like he has to dislodge something from it.
“I’ve missed you so much.” He clears his throat again. “I’m sorry I had to put you in there, Sara, but I couldn’t have you getting away from me again. I know you were confused when you left with your mom. I’m not angry. I’m just happy you’re back.”
I feel tears well in my eyes, but I force them to seep back into wherever they came from. Jade was crying, but she was gone. Or about to be.
“Me too.” My hollow voice echoes in the small space. Already I don’t recognize it.
“I’m going to open the door and let you out, but you have to promise you’re not going to try running away again. You have to promise that if I let you out, you won’t try to escape.”
I hear the key clicking into the lock, but it hasn’t turned over yet. He’s waiting.
When I close my eyes, it’s dark. It used to feel the opposite. That was part of the reason why I slept so much. Now though, it’s darker when I close my eyes. “I promise. I won’t run.”
I couldn’t run if I wanted to. Those muscles have been turned into mush from the feel of them.
He’s still waiting. I know what for, but in order to say it, I have to build that wall between lives a little higher. I have to make it a little thicker.
“I promise”—the word tastes bitter in my mouth—“Dad.”
He sighs, then the key turns. He’s come in before to change my bucket and drop off fresh supplies, but he’s always ordered me to tuck into the corner and close my eyes. He isn’t demanding that right now.
Is this my reward? All of it or part of it? The chance to catch a glimpse of light—to see something other than black—makes my body rock with a sob. Light. After being held captive by weeks of dark, the slightest flicker of it would light up my whole world.
When the door opens, I’m blinded by light. I have to cover my eyes because it’s daytime for the first time when that door’s been opened, and I feel like the sun’s blasting five feet in front of me. I never knew light could be just as blinding as its counterpart, but I’ve been learning lots of lessons lately.
Even though I can’t see it, I feel it. It’s subtle warmth. It attaches to my skin until I can almost feel it seeping deeper.
The rush of fresh air hits me next. This I’m used to, and it hits me as powerfully as ever. I don’t realize how putrid my world is until I realize what the outside world smells like. I don’t realize how dead I smell until I catch a whiff of life.
I sigh as the fresh air clears out the stale, then I notice the light slicing inside dim some.
“Is that better?”
It’s the first time he’s spoken to me without the door between us. His voice is familiar in that “distant dream” kind of way, but I can’t say from where or if it’s just familiar because every wire in my brain has become crossed and frayed.
“Yeah.” I shield my eyes and attempt to blink them open. It’s still blinding, but I can’t close my eyes to the light again. After being robbed of it for so long, I can’t look away just because it’s too painful.
I hear him step closer, but my eyes are having a hard time adjusting. I can see bright white light and a dark shadow, but that’s all. There’s no detail. No color.
“Everything’s going to be different now, Sara. You’ll see.”
Hearing his voice like this reminds me of the night he took me. I want to slink away from him, but I make myself stay where I am.
When I hear a sharp, rattling sound, I shiver. It sounds cold. Unfriendly.
“This is for your own good, Sara. I know you didn’t want to leave, but teenagers can be impulsive.” The rattling moves closer. “This will keep you from giving in to those impulses.”
When I feel my hair lift, I flinch back. I haven’t been touched in weeks, and his touch is strange and almost awkward feeling. Giving my hair a sharp tug, he pulls me back.
When I cry out, he sighs but doesn’t say anything else. Now that he isn’t blocking most of the light streaming into the little room, it’s blinding me again. Even when I close my eyes, I still see strobes flashing.
“What are you doing?” My voice quivers, and my body is close to following.
He’s still quiet, but when I feel something cold and hard ring around my neck, I panic. I fight against him and it, but I’m as weak as I knew I would be . . . and weaker.
The fight bubbles out of me after a few seconds, then my body goes limp, seeming to sink into that heavy ring being locked around my neck. I don’t even have the strength to lift my hands to inspect what’s there, but I already know. It’s not a necklace. It’s not a noose.
It’s a collar. A metal one that feels at least an inch wide and so heavy I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to rise with it on. A chain dangles from it, and to what it’s attached, I don’t know. All I know is that I’m stuck. The door to this dark room has been removed, but it’s only been opened into a darker world.
I hear him move away once everything’s been fitted into place. I think I’m going to throw up. I think I wish that door had never been opened. I think feeling free to move about a small space on my own is better than being collared like a wild animal.
“I promised I wouldn’t run away.” I slump against the wall behind me and realize I can’t bend anymore.
“And I promised that I’d never let you leave again.” He moves out of the room. “This way, we’ll both be able to keep our promises.”
When I curl back onto the mattress, the chain rattles. The collar cuts into the side of my neck, and I know I’ll never be able to sleep
with it on. At least when I slept before, I could escape this world and trespass in the other.
I can’t bend anymore. I’m already broken.
I HAVEN’T LEFT my room in two days. I haven’t left the house in seven.
My parents don’t know what to do. I don’t know either.
Ever since the meeting with the detectives and finding out about the end of my chain being locked to absolutely nothing, my sense of reality, my perception of freedom . . . it’s all changing.
The closer I get to accepting I was tied to nothing—free to go whenever I figured that out—the more confined I feel. The smaller my sense of safety shrinks. The longer I think about it, the more scared I become. How am I supposed to know what’s real and what isn’t when nothing is as it seems?
How am I supposed to be free of the past when I hadn’t known what freedom felt like the moment Earl Rae slid that padlock free?
I don’t want to leave the house. I don’t want to leave my room.
Here there are no cameras or uncomfortable questions or people to stare at me. I’m safe.
At least I think I am. I’m not sure if I remember the way safe feels anymore.
“Jade?” My mom’s muffled voice comes from outside of my door. “You need to come out, sweetheart.”
“I’m not ready.” I curl lower into the rocking chair and draw the stuffed elephant tighter to my chest.
“You can’t stay in there by yourself. It’s not healthy.”
I double-check the lock on the door. It’s still turned over. “I spent months in a dark closet, crying on an old mattress and shitting in a metal bucket. Don’t tell me what is and isn’t healthy.”
“Jade!” Dad’s voice booms followed by a hard pounding. “Come out. Enough of this. Now.”
I don’t say anything. I just keep rocking, staring at the same patch of carpet I’ve spent all morning watching. I’m pretty sure it’s where Torrin kissed me for the first time. I keep trying to conjure up the image, but I can’t get a firm enough grip on it. The moment it starts to surface, something pulls it back down.
All I can remember is that we were laughing about something and then, the next second, we were kissing. I don’t remember what he was wearing or where my hands settled on him, but I remember his hands weaving into my hair and pulling me toward him, holding me close.
I remember these shadows like the girl in them is someone else because she’s so different from the one slumped in this rocking chair that they can’t be the same. I replay the shards of the memory like I’m jealous of the seventeen-year-old version of this girl and think about how I’d trade my life for hers in an instant . . . then I kill that wish. I don’t want her happiness to come to an end any sooner than it already did.
I might have been that girl, but there’s too much poison in me now. It killed her off, and she can never come back. I’m stuck with this. Me. Whoever that is.
“Don’t make me kick this door in, Jade, because so help me God, I will do it.” My dad’s voice quivers as he pounds on the door again. It seems to shake the whole room.
“Just do it then. Go ahead. You wouldn’t be the first person to take away my freedom.”
The pounding stops, and I think I hear Mom cry, but I cover my ears because I’m so tired of tears. I’m so tired of knowing I’m responsible for them. I’ve heard so many, late at night when they think I’m asleep, that I’ve started wishing my family had found me dead. At least they’d have had some measure of peace once my body was laid to rest.
At least they could move on. But now, alive, I’m dragging them under with me.
I’m still covering my ears when I hear more knocking, but this kind is different. It isn’t the same thud of knuckles on wood—it’s lighter. Clearer sounding. I lower my hands and look in the direction it’s coming from—my window.
When he sees he’s caught my attention, he stops tapping at the glass and waves. When he smiles, my chest seizes. I haven’t seen Torrin in days. Seeing him now, even through a sheet of glass, makes me feel like everything’s going to be okay. I feel like that for a few seconds.
Then I notice his priest’s collar, then my neck burns with phantom pain, and I realize the sheet of glass separating us isn’t the smallest thing keeping us apart.
When I stay in the chair, he lifts his hands like he’s waiting for me to say something. Or do something.
Torrin and I used to climb the roofs to each other’s bedrooms so much as kids that my dad had threatened to grow thorn bushes on this side of the house when we became teenagers. He planted them the day we went on our first “date” to the pizza parlor on Lake Washington. Except he didn’t realize the climbing rose bush he’d planted was a thornless variety. It didn’t keep Torrin from climbing up here, and when they were in bloom, he always snagged a rose on his way up. So yeah, Dad’s plan had totally backfired.
How nice it must be to wind up with roses when you were expecting thorns.
After a minute, Torrin shrugs and takes a seat. He doesn’t turn away though—he just keeps looking at me through the pane of glass.
I don’t last more than a minute before shoving out of the rocking chair and moving toward the window. After unlocking it, I lift it. When I step back so he can climb in, he doesn’t move.
“Can I come in?” he asks.
He isn’t ordering. He isn’t demanding. He isn’t forcing. He’s asking.
“You can come in,” I reply.
When he climbs inside, the air moves in my room like the heaviness of it is escaping out the window. He leaves the window open and stands in front of me. The last time Torrin and I were in my bedroom together behind a locked door, he laid me down on my bed and kissed me until I felt that spot where this world recedes and the curtain to the other side starts to lift.
He glances around my room for a moment. I wonder if he’s thinking the same thing. I wonder if he knows the exact spot where we had our first kiss, cross-legged and laughing on the floor.
“So I noticed you’ve been avoiding the world lately.” He backs into the closet doors and leans into them. My bed’s in the opposite corner.
“The world can just kiss my ass.” I settle the stuffed elephant back onto the rocking chair.
Torrin notices it, something flickering in his eyes. “Do you want to talk about it?”
My exhale comes out in a huff. “No.
“Good.” He claps and continues. “So let’s move on to the reason I scaled your roof.” He holds my eyes, not letting them wander away from him. “Why have you been avoiding me?”
I wander my room, not sure where to go now that he’s here. I’m not sure where I fit now. I’m not sure where I fit in his life.
“You know why,” I say quietly. “Could have saved yourself the scaling.”
“I want to hear you tell me why.”
“Why?”
“So I can change your mind.” His hands slide into his front pockets, and the sunlight catches on his dad’s watch and casts golden beams through the room. It lights up like someone just lit a million candles at once. “I can’t do that unless I know exactly why you don’t want to see me.”
“Because I don’t want to drag you into my mess of a world any more than I already have. Because I don’t want to smear you through the mud on the media’s march to burying me. Because I don’t want to hurt you—again—and because I want to protect you.”
“I can protect myself from them.”
I shake my head and cover my chest with my hand. “To protect you from me.”
Torrin’s jaw hardens. He works it loose the moment after. “I don’t need protection from you.”
“Everyone needs protection from me. There’s something dark in me now, Torrin, and I can’t get it out. It’s growing, spreading, and I don’t want it to infect the people I love.”
He pushes off the closet doors and crosses the room before I know he’s coming. “There is nothing dark in you, Jade. Nothing.” He backs me into the wall and stares at me, unblinki
ng. “There is light and good in you. There always has been. There always will be.”
“That’s gone. He took it from me.”
“No, he didn’t.” Torrin’s hand slams into the wall beside my head. “It’s still there. You had to bury it to keep it safe, but it’s still there. You’ll find it. I know it.”
I want to believe him, but that doesn’t make it true. “You can’t find what isn’t there, Torrin.”
“Dammit, stop talking like that,” he says, his jaw tightening. “It’s there. I know it.”
“I’ve tried. I can’t find it.” Even as I say it, I start to feel differently. It’s because of him being so close, saying what he is in the way he is. He’s the tether that keeps me from floating away.
His eyes lower to mine. “I’ll help you find it.”
I feel my heart again. My lungs. Everything else. I feel them waking up after a week. “What makes you so sure you can find it?”
“Because when I look in your eyes, I still see it.” His other hand fits against the wall. “Because when I’m close to you like this, I can still feel it.” He leans a little closer, and I feel something too. “It’s there, Jade. It’s not gone. He took ten years of your life—ten years.” The corners of his eyes crease as an emotion fires in his eyes. “Don’t hand him the rest of it by believing that kind of shit.”
I’m so surprised by his sudden outburst I’m kind of shocked right out of whatever grey patch I’ve been hovering in. The constraints around my chest start to loosen. “You just said shit. Again.”
His brow cocks. “So?”
“You’re a priest. Again.”
The corner of his mouth twitches. He leans in and winks. “I’m not a very good one, remember? I forget the small stuff all the time.”
His hands are stationed around my head, his face aimed right in front of mine. I feel . . . alive. “Like cussing?”
“Like cussing.” His shoulder lifts. “And other things.”
“What other things?”
He leans in even closer, until I can see the flecks of pewter in his light eyes. Then he shoves away from the wall. “You’ll know them when you see them.”