He brought me to the bed and unloaded me gently. Then he stood back and looked down at me, shaking his head.
“What have you done to yourself? You don’t want to look at your beautiful face. And these feet. You’d get nauseous if you could see them,” he said, lifting them to look at my soles. “You’re going to have a tough time walking for a while. Uggies, like my mother used to say. I’ll get a warm washcloth and the disinfection stuff and some bandages. You made quite a mess of your dress, too. You ripped it at the shoulder, you know. I told you that was one of my mother’s nicest dresses.”
He seized my left wrist and looked at the watch he had given me.
“Lucky it’s not scratched,” he said, but he unfastened it and put it in his pocket. “You don’t deserve any of her good things yet.”
He pulled the dress up roughly over my arms, leaving me stark naked. I covered my breasts with my arms and crossed my legs.
“Wow, look at that bruise on your right leg. What a mess,” he said. “You’re going to be achin’ for days.” He tossed the dress to the floor and went into the bathroom.
I was crying so softly that I didn’t realize it until some of my salty tears reached the scraped parts of my right cheek and burned. I turned onto my side. He was back with the washcloth and grabbed my shoulder to turn me onto my back again.
“Just lay still,” he ordered. He knelt and began to wash off my feet first, mumbling under his breath. “I did something like this to myself once,” I heard him say. “I was running away from my father. My mother let me play in the little inflated pool she had bought me, and I was running the hose. He came home and screamed about wasting the water. We got a submersible pump here, ya see, and he was always complaining about wasting water. So he rips the hose out of my hand and smacks me one good one across my right arm and my back with it.
“Shit, that hurt something awful, but it frightened me more than anything else. I got up and out of the inflated pool and started running away. I didn’t know where I was going. I just wanted like hell to get away from him. I ran over the gravel drive, too. My mother scooped me up before I went too far, but I did damage and had to have her do for me what I’m doing for you now.
“She tore into my father, of course, but her curses and complaints were water off a duck’s back to him. He took out a knife and cut the hell out of my inflated pool. I was too frightened to cry, but I was hurting and cried when no one was looking. Took days to get me to walk anywhere near normal. Be the same for you, if not longer. This is a helluva lot worse.”
He smeared the disinfectant over the cuts and scrapes and wrapped a gauze bandage around my feet. He taped it and then started on my right arm and shoulder. I tried not to look at him, but he kept seizing my chin and turning me toward him.
“You’re lucky I know what I’m doing here. I took one of them courses in first aid. I was going to join a volunteer ambulance squad once but decided not to. Too many big shots were already in it.”
He put some smaller Band-Aids on me, covering some of the other scrapes and cuts, and then returned everything to the cabinet in the bathroom. I lay there with my eyes closed, trying to deal with the pain and aches that seemed now to be coming from all sides of my body. I opened my eyes at the sound of the chain.
Oh, no, I thought. “No, please!” I cried.
“Yes,” he said. “We gotta go back to this, unfortunately. You ain’t as ready as I thought.”
He fastened the cuff around my ankle. I was hugging myself tightly. He stood back and looked at me.
“Even now, you look pretty to me,” he said, smiling and shaking his head. Then he turned angry again. “We’ll have to put off all the work on the floor and curtains and stuff. You’re not going to be much help, and I want this to be something we do together. This is a big disappointment, Kaylee. I don’t like setbacks. What you got to say for yourself now, huh?”
“I want to go home!” I wailed. “Let me go home.”
He shook his head slowly. “Why would you say such a thing? I told you, you are home. Now, get yourself under the blanket. You’re going without dinner tonight. You sleep and start healing, see? Move,” he ordered.
I sat up and, because of the pains shooting up my legs and down my right side, gingerly turned on the bed so he could pull the blanket out and then toss it over me. I closed my eyes and turned onto my left side. He walked away and began putting his tools and equipment in a corner, mumbling to himself. I could hear him arguing with himself. He slammed things and cursed. His anger appeared to be growing. At one point, I thought he punched the wall. Every sound made me wince. Suddenly, he returned to the foot of the bed. I cringed in anticipation of his doing something worse to me.
“I’m going out for a while,” he said. “Right now, I can’t stand the sight of you. The disappointment’s making me sick to my stomach.”
I didn’t open my eyes until I heard him leave. With the chain back on me, it didn’t matter if he remembered to lock the door behind him or not. I could feel Mr. Moccasin hop onto the bed and sprawl out beside me.
“We’re trapped, you and I,” I said. “Forever.”
He began to purr. I wished I was a cat, too, and unaware of how miserable I was. Despite the pain, I felt exhaustion climb up and over my body, seeping into every pore and through every muscle. I had bounced hard between different emotions. That and my physical effort sapped the energy from me. Sleep was very welcome. Right now, it was my only means of escape. The oncoming night shut down what little light came through the boarded windows. Darkness enveloped me. I drifted slowly into something that resembled unconsciousness more than sleep and didn’t wake again until I heard the door being opened roughly and Anthony cursing. He turned on the light by the kitchen sink.
I didn’t move or open my eyes again. I heard him banging things around, and then it grew quiet, so quiet and for so long that I wondered if he had left again. I was too curious to pretend to be asleep, so I turned and saw him looking down at me at the foot of the bed. He was stark naked. His mouth was open dumbly. He looked surprised to see me. It was as if in that insane mind of his, he had forgotten that I had
run away or even that I was here. The chill that went through my body overwhelmed the pain. He stumbled around to his side and pulled up the blanket. I could smell the beer. He reeked as if he had taken a bath in it. It soured my stomach. Whatever he said was garbled.
I cowered in anticipation. It took a while, but I finally felt him reach for me under the blanket. He seized me by the wrist and held on to me tightly. I was waiting for him to do more. I thought he was surely going to punish me with sex, but he didn’t move. Minutes went by, and then his grip softened. His hand moved up my arm and settled on my shoulder. He stroked me surprisingly softly, affectionately, but I still cringed.
“We need a baby. Once we have a baby, you’ll never want to leave me,” he said. He patted me as if he wanted to reassure me. “But we can’t make a baby when you’re in pain. I know that. My mother told me that. A woman in any kind of pain won’t give birth to a happy baby, she said. A baby remembers its mother’s pain. You’ll get better. When you’re healed enough, we’ll make our baby.”
Why would his mother tell him such a thing? Had he beaten some other girl? Was it possible that I wasn’t the first one imprisoned down here? Was his mother as insane as he was? Could she have known? The possibility that I wasn’t the first made what was happening to me even more terrifying.
He drew his hand away, and moments later, I heard his breathing, heavy and regular. Not long after, he snored and choked. He woke up many times during the night, and every time, he would reach for me as if to assure himself that I was still there. With that and with my pain, I didn’t sleep much. He woke in the morning with such a shudder that the bed trembled. I had my back to him, but I knew he had sat up. He pulled the blanket off me and gazed at me. I didn’t speak. I didn’t move.