Maybe it was the solitude combined with the dreariness of my surroundings, but I thought my eyes looked like weakening lightbulbs. The excitement and pleasure, the curiosities and interests that brightened the candle of life were so subdued in me that I sometimes thought I was looking at a wax replica of myself. It resembled me, but it was lifeless, listless, almost comatose.
Meanwhile, Anthony was true to his threat. He must have been on that job he had described as being a good distance away. I didn’t hear him come home until late in the evenings, and as if he was carrying out his determined punishment of me, he practically tiptoed when he walked on the floors above. I had to strain sometimes to hear him. My only amusement was to try to determine where he was standing. I realized where the bedroom with the coffin was situated above me and heard him go in there often. He seemed to remain there for a long time each time. Maybe he even slept in there beside it.
After nine days, I had run out of milk, eggs, and bread. I was eating handfuls of dry cereal for breakfast. There was no fruit left, nor was there any cheese. For dinner, I ate out of a peanut butter jar, scraping out every bit. The juice was gone, too. I knew my energy level was diminishing. My sleep, which had occurred in spurts, was becoming longer and longer naps, sometimes taking up half the day. Finally, I had no interest in reading anything, and I stopped playing music. I no longer went to look out the window through the boards, either.
Loneliness was never sharper, a knife that cut deeply into my heart and made me ache inside and out. I began to imagine that Haylee was here occasionally. She visited to see how I was doing, and whenever she came, she was always dressed in something pretty and sexy, her hair perfect, her makeup just the way she always wanted it to be, despite Mother’s warnings about it being too much.
Of course, she was always smiling.
She never spoke. She just stood there looking at me.
“You knew this was going to happen,” I told her. “Are you satisfied?”
She didn’t respond.
“Why did you do this? Why?” I screamed. When I screamed very loudly, she left, and I went back to sleep, thinking that if Anthony would come home just once when she was here, he would see that there was a Haylee after all.
I wondered if he had ever sneaked down to check on me late at night. If he had, he certainly would have seen how low my food supplies were. How bad would he let things get? Soon I would have nothing. I began to believe that he had completely forgotten about me, that he had told himself it had all been a dream, I wasn’t here. It threw me into another panic. Maybe this was what had happened with another girl he had captured and kept down here, and one day he had come down and found her dead. If she hadn’t starved, she might have committed suicide. Was that my destiny, too?
The nightmares became more vivid, and they weren’t confined to sleeping at night, either. It got so that every time I dozed, I’d have one that involved me dying here, my fingers covered with the dried blood that had come from my desperate scratching at the door. When I thought about all this, especially the possibility of dying down here, it would make me shiver so much with fear that I had to wrap the blanket around myself.
The worst part of all this dreary thinking was the fear that I might die and he might bury me somewhere and no one would ever know what had happened to me. He had already done away with my clothing and would clean away any possible trace of me. I would disappear. Mother would go to her own deathbed still hoping that I would come home. Daddy would end up the same way. Whether Haylee would suspect that I was dead and gone I did not know, but I imagined she would ease her conscience by telling herself that I was off living as Anthony’s wife and by now had a family of my own.
My friends and teachers would forget me eventually. Oh, maybe once in a while someone would bring me up. “Remember Kaylee Blossom Fitzgerald and how she simply disappeared? I wonder what became of her.”
People would shrug. There were many other things to think about, happier things, and besides, what good did thinking about Kaylee Blossom Fitzgerald do anyone?
Imagining all this gave me the idea of writing a dia
ry so I could prove my existence. Time had become blurred for me. I had no idea what day it was, and after a while, I had trouble remembering exactly how long it had been since I had been abducted. I would just use numbers to signify the passage of time, I thought. It didn’t matter that I didn’t know if it was Tuesday or Wednesday. I recalled movies in which prisoners kept in dungeons for years marked time by scratching lines on a wall. I’d better not do that, I thought. Keeping track of the days would only heighten the pain associated with how long I was here. Why do it? What did the number of days matter now? They all ran together. I was in a day that had no limits.
What I planned to do instead was write about what had happened to me in as much detail as I could and then find a place in the basement to hide it so that years and years from now, after Anthony was dead or gone, someone might stumble on it and then contact whatever family I had and give them the diary. At least they would have some closure that way. It was depressing to plan how to help those who loved and remembered you and no longer to think of ways to help yourself. But what choice did I have?
I was surprised at how exhausting it was to write a couple of pages in the notepad I had found. It was a child’s notepad, with different cartoon animal characters at the top of each page. The paper itself had yellowed with time. Sitting there thinking about what to write was becoming a chore in and of itself. I was afraid of falling asleep with the pad in my lap and Anthony finding and destroying it, so as soon as my eyes began to close, I stopped and hid the pad behind the food cabinet. There was just enough space between it and the wall for me to slide it in. The following day, I’d get it out with a butter knife, convinced that he would never find it if I kept it hidden there.
One morning—I guessed it was morning, since I had fallen asleep in the dark, and when I woke, there was light streaking through the boards—I looked at myself in the mirror and realized I had lost significant weight. There was a vacant darkness around my eyes, and my cheeks were a little sunken. My lips were pale, and my hair was so twisted and dirty I resembled a hag on the streets of plague-ridden London. My complexion was colorless. I thought I could see the tiny blue veins through my cellophane skin.
I truly am dying, I thought. I’m wasting away. The light within was dwindling. It’s not my imagination. I panicked and charged across the room as quickly as I could. With all the strength I had left, I began to pound on the door. I screamed until I had no voice, and then my legs gave out and I sank to the floor. I regained consciousness a few times but remained there, staring at a few dozen small brown ants that were working diligently, gathering up minuscule food crumbs and bringing them as a team to their hole between the floor and the wall. It occurred to me that they could outlive me. In any case, they could come and go as they pleased. They could even find their way outside. Imagine envying an ant, I thought, and felt myself smile.
In moments, I was asleep again at the bottom of the basement door, which was where Anthony found me. I had no idea how long I had been lying there, but I felt my body being moved and opened my eyes to see him carrying me to the bed. He laid me out gently and stood looking down at me. He was in and out of focus for a few moments. My lips were so dry that I couldn’t speak without pain.
“I think you’re ready,” he said, and smiled.
He braced me up on the pillow, moving me around as if I were no more than a rag doll. I felt him brush strands of hair away from my eyes.
“Hello in there,” he sang. He pretended to knock on my skull. “Hello. Anyone home? Come out, come out, wherever you are.”
I closed and opened my eyes. He was simply standing there and smiling. I was so confused. For a few moments, I thought maybe it wasn’t Anthony. Maybe it was someone who had finally come to rescue me.
He put up his hand like a cop stopping traffic. “Don’t go away,” he said.
Then he left and returned a few minutes later with jars of baby food, napkins, and a spoon. I watched curiously as he undid the tops of the jars and dipped a teaspoon into one. He brought it to my lips. I felt like I was outside myself, watching all of this happen to someone else.
“Open,” he said, poking the spoon gently against my lips, and I did.
It tasted like sweet potato. Nothing had ever tasted better. He gave me another spoonful and then held a third spoonful just a little bit away from my lips. My whole body wanted to lunge at the nutrition.
“Now, before you get this, I’d like to hear you say, ‘Thank you, honey.’ Go on. Say it.”