The Companion

by Katie Alender

  In real life, that wasn’t an issue. I woke to the sound of myself screaming, and once I had started, I couldn’t stop. I could sense the beast there, stalking me, in this dark and sterile and unfamiliar room.

  I screamed and screamed. And then I realized that no one could hear me.

  CHAPTER

  29

  WHEN I WOKE, my eyes fixed on the window, where I could see the rolling green hills through the metal bars, and for a moment I thought, What a pretty view.

  Then I stumbled into the awareness of what was actually happening, and I jumped off the bed as if someone else was in the room with me.

  It was real. I was locked in—and that realization brought the sinking despair of powerlessness and hopelessness. Say Laura wanted me dead—all she really had to do was just not come back, right? Sure, I had a little bit of water. But eventually you die, even with water.

  I paced around in circles for a while before deciding to try to preserve my energy, in case I got the chance to fight back.

  The one bright spot was that, while I was completely tired and my throat was desperately sore, the rest of my body felt almost normal. I was hungry and thirsty, but I didn’t feel the nausea or dizziness that had been hanging over me for four days.

  This seemed to indicate, obviously, that Laura had drugged me. And with the recurrence of my nightmares came the realization that she had been drugging my nighttime tea all along. Now that I knew for sure what it felt like to wake up with chemicals pulsing through your body, I recognized it—that sleepy-strange dizziness, the unfocused confusion.

  Her system was bound to fail sometime. All she’d been trying to do was get me to behave, and look where that had gotten us. I’d been miserably pondering the idea that I might have been okay at Copeland Hall if I had just minded my own business and been a better orphan. But there was no such thing as being a good-enough orphan for Laura. Not even her own daughter could meet her impossible standards. Not even her own sister.

  The day wore on, and I did what I could to fight off the hunger and a bleached kind of boredom that left the stage wide open for every worst-case scenario to run on infinite repeat in my head. I was coping all right, I told myself. Could be worse. Could be worse.

  At one point, I found Kiley’s phone unexpectedly tucked into my pocket, and while there was no signal, I had to maintain hope that I might eventually get to one. But when I switched it on, I found it only half charged, so I quickly shut it off again and hid it in the desk drawer.

  Laura left me alone until the sun began to slide down toward the hills, at which point she knocked lightly and came in, pausing by the door. “Just so you know,” she said, “every entrance and exit in the house is locked. You might find a way out . . . but you might not. So if you hurt me in any way, you’re endangering Agatha, who’s currently very well secured behind a door only I can open. Understood?”

  I nodded.

  She sighed. “I am so hurt and offended, Margot, that I didn’t sleep well last night, and it’s your fault. It’s hard to believe that while I was making plans for our family that included you in a position of honor, you were undermining us.”

  I opened my mouth to speak, but she held up her hand. “I think it’s time that you worked on your manners. I’ve brought a book with me—a very significant book to my family. And one of the first lessons is that children should be seen and not heard.”

  She handed me a small blue book with a fabric cover. The author was Loretta Seaver Copeland, and the book’s title was:

  Philosophical Foundations for Personal Morality:

  The Rights and Responsibilities of the Privileged Class

  “You should read it,” she said. “Or perhaps you have already, as I found it hidden in your bedroom drawer. I think you’ll learn quite a bit from it. It will probably do you good.”

  Oh, perfect. The book about how all teenage girls were basically evil. Of course Laura would see this as required reading. I set the book down next to me on the bed and suddenly realized that if she had searched my room, she would have found my other secrets: the key, the origami money, Lily’s journal.

  This was bad. So bad.

  She turned to leave.

  “Laura—”

  “I think you’d better go back to calling me Mrs. Sutton,” she said. “That type of familiarity doesn’t suit me when it comes from someone outside my family circle.”

  She turned to leave again.

  “Mrs. Sutton,” I said. The words were like shards of glass on my tongue. “Would it be possible to get some food, please?”

  She looked at me appraisingly, but there was a hint of approval that I assumed was directed at my manners. “Page two hundred and fourteen,” she said. “Second paragraph. Copy it twelve times. I’ll be back shortly, and if you’re finished, I’ll leave you something to eat. If not, you can try again tomorrow.”

  Tomorrow?

  She handed me a small notebook and a child’s pen. It was fat, round, plastic.

  Before I even flipped to the page, I knew what the text would be:

  The proof of virtue is the ability to obey in the face of inner resistance. A demand for obedience performed against the will is the ultimate test of rectitude. A child is led to righteousness by the lantern of his parents’ steadfastness and must by firm hands be molded into a creature of exemplary humility and worth. Abandoned to the darkness of parental deficiency, the child’s quality of character will assuredly be as weak as a lily grown in shade.

  I did my best to copy it, but I grew tired and my hand began to cramp. Still, I managed all twelve times before Laura came back. She carried a tray that held two plastic bottles of juice and a covered plate of food that smelled amazing.

  She set it on the foot of the bed and held her hand out for the notebook. Then she proceeded to peruse my work.

  “Your penmanship is unacceptable,” she said. Then, before I figured out what was happening, she had set the juice bottles on the bed but taken the tray of food. The door locked with a click.

  I sat in disbelieving silence.

  No food?

  But how long had it been since I’d had a real meal—one I hadn’t thrown up?

  I grabbed the first juice bottle and chugged it, although sadly I didn’t appreciate the taste because my mind was stuck worrying about food. I craved the second bottle, too, but made myself save it. I might need those calories.

  I sat feeling helpless, then reached for the notebook and pen and wrote the paragraph twelve more times, forming the letters as slowly and neatly as I could.

  Sometime later—it was dark outside—she came back.

  “I fixed my work.”

  I was so hungry that my stomach had begun to growl every minute or so, with a sound like a lion yawning.

  She looked it over and held out a granola bar.

  “Thank you,” I said, tucking it into the waistband of my pants. “Thank you. I’m very hungry.”

  She smiled. “Well, I can help you with that. I’ve brought your medicine.”

  “What does it do?” I asked.

  “It’s medicine,” she said, like I was an idiot. “It helps you.”

  “With what?” I asked.

  “Various things,” she said. “I pride myself on seeing very clearly in what ways I can personally help a person—a child, I should say—advance in his or her moral journey. Look at what I’ve done for Agatha. I’ve saved her from her own destructive instincts. I’ve made her safe. And I can do the same for you.”

  She said all this in a reverent, almost prayerful voice.

  “Please,” I said. “I just want to go. If you let me go, I won’t say anything.”

  She looked me up and down. “No medicine tonight, then?” she said, and swooped out of the room.

  The door had locked before I realized that she had taken my other juice bottle. The
one I had saved so carefully.

  Out of everything that had gone wrong, that was the thing that broke me. I collapsed to the floor, sobbing.

  That night, the nightmares were the worst I’d ever had. I was chased down by horrific, distorted versions of my family. I awoke throwing up every last crumb of the granola bar.

  * * *

  I HAD NO energy to do anything but lie on the bed. My lips were cracked and bleeding. My legs and arms buzzed but felt weak—too weak to help me escape. So this was what she was going to do? Starve me to death?

  She came in the door, and I didn’t even turn my head to look at her.

  “Margot,” she said. “I’ve brought you something.”

  Food? Maybe it was food. I tracked her movements with my eyes. She came closer and set down a covered plate. Next to the plate was a bottle of water.

  “I want you to take this,” she said. “It will help you feel better.”

  Maybe if I behaved, she would bring me food. When she held a pill out to me, I took it and put it in my mouth while she uncapped the water. I took a swig and swallowed.

  Laura looked on with an expression of joyless gratification. There was no real emotion inside her, I realized. Just performing motherhood, performing happiness, performing sadness. Maybe the anger was real, but maybe it wasn’t. Maybe she was the kind of evil that feels nothing, not even the pleasure of tormenting.

  “Do you see?” she asked. “I’m a good mother. A good mother.”

  I couldn’t have begun to comment.

  “Page ninety-six,” she said, handing over the blue book. “Third sentence. Fifty copies, please.”

  Then she left.

  I looked at the plate and died a little bit inside.

  On it sat a single dry slice of toast.

  Still, I tore it to pieces and shoved it in my mouth.

  Then I flipped the book open and grabbed my pen.

  Page 96, third sentence:

  There is no luckier fate for a child than to be trained up by parents who have the strength of will to remain firm in the face of childish weakness.

  Lucky, I thought. Yeah, okay.

  I was asleep by the seventh repetition of the sentence.

  Instead of a simple bad dream, I woke up to see a tall, thin demon staring down at me. She had long fingers with pointed talons, and her skin was blue-gray and covered in scars—jagged hash marks. Remembrances of the lives she’d taken.

  She was Death. And she was here for me. I wanted to move, but I couldn’t force a single muscle to obey me. So I lay in stark terror, unable even to scream, while she dug her talons into my back and neck and limbs.

  Finally, I woke up. On the bed next to me was another pill—this one yellow, round, medium-sized; and half a bottle of water.

  Laura had been in here while I was asleep.

  Shaking with hunger, I took the pill and drank the water.

  Before long, the shaking had been replaced by a feeling of being utterly warm and secure. I was so relaxed that when Mrs. Sutton came in, I smiled at her. She smiled back at me and forced another pill down my throat.

  “Good girl,” she said indulgently, ruffling my hair like I was a dog.

  * * *

  I WAS AWAKE . . . I guess.

  I tried to close my eyes, but doing that actually took more effort than looking. I didn’t look at anything—well, nothing that would have appealed to the old me. But the new me was calmer, easier to please. New me found a small dark spot on a ceiling tile and kept a very close eye on it.

  Laura came in. She shone a light into my eyes and spoke to me, but her words were muffled, like my ears were full of cotton.

  She helped me sit up in the bed, and sitting was easy. Anything was easy when you were just doing that one thing. It was when you tried to change what you were doing, or combine it with something else—thinking, for instance—that it got hard.

  “I think we have the dosage just right,” she said. Then she began to feed me tiny bites of food. Which was fine. I may have been hungry at some point, but now I didn’t care. I drank some water. At her urging, I got up and used the toilet. Then I got back into bed. “This is lovely, Margot. Don’t you feel peaceful? It’s going to be so easy for you to be a good girl now. You’ll see.”

  Yes, easy. It was so easy.

  “Here you go,” she said, sliding a pill onto my tongue and chasing it with some water. “Sleep well.”

  No dreams that night. Only darkness.

  CHAPTER

  30

  SHE CAME BACK later, humming cheerfully, and slipped another pill into my mouth. Then she fed me small bites of plain chicken and helped me use the toilet.

  “Oof.” She stood back and sighed. “You need a shower. Can’t you smell yourself?”

  A short time later, she told me to get up off the bed. The lack of politeness didn’t bother me—it was much easier to understand direct orders. With her hand on my arm, we shuffled down the hall to the main upstairs hallway. We went into the larger bathroom, and I sat down on the chair in the shower while she washed my hair and sprayed my body down.

  Just like she did with Agatha. I was just like Agatha now.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t know what was happening . . .

  It was that I didn’t care.

  Afterward, she took me back to the sickroom and put a pair of pajamas on me.

  “Tomorrow,” she said, “we’ll get you dressed in the morning—the way I do with Agatha.”

  Okay, I tried to say, but my mouth wouldn’t cooperate.

  “It will be a lot of work, caring for both of you at once,” she said. “But you know me, I like to stay busy.”

  All I could do was stare, and that fact seemed to please her.

  “Hang on,” she said. “Wait right here. I’ll be back with a pair of socks.”

  I was alone. The door was open. Could I run? Yes. But where would I go?

  Somewhere else. Anywhere else, obviously. But . . . nah.

  * * *

  I SAW MOTION out of the corner of my eye. But it wasn’t enough to make me turn my head and look.

  Then a new face appeared in front of me.

  A new-old face, that is.

  Agatha? Yes. Agatha.

  Her hands touched my cheeks, my hair, as her eyes searched my expression.

  It’s okay, I wanted to tell her. It’s okay.

  I wondered what she had wanted to tell me all those times. Now I knew what it was like to be her.

  If you wanted something badly enough, you could push through this fog. But it was the wanting I just couldn’t wrap my head around.

  Her hands gripped mine, and I felt her slip something smooth and cool into my palm.

  Suddenly, there was a commotion at the door.

  “What are you doing in here? Bad girl!” Laura yanked Agatha out by the arm. “Bad, bad.”

  I saw Agatha wince under her mother’s severe touch, and something inside me stirred.

  “Back to your room,” Laura was saying, and she dragged her roughly away.

  When Laura returned, she was carrying a short stack of clothes for me to put on. After that, she seemed distracted. She ordered me to lie down and then closed the door to the room.

  I closed my eyes and tightened my fist around the object Agatha had given me. This would be a good time to rest.

  Except there was an image I couldn’t get out of my head. It was Laura grabbing Agatha, shaking her. Agatha closing her eyes and pulling back slightly, like a young child afraid of being hit.

  I cared a little about that. Just a little. But enough, it turned out, for me to make the halting walk over to the desk and put Kiley’s phone in my pocket.

  Then I lay down and fell asleep.

  Caring was so exhausting.

  * * *

  A LITTLE W
HILE later, Laura came in with another pill. She watched me swallow it, then patted my pillow and told me to lie down, that she’d be back in a while.

  I lay back obediently. But then I felt something in my hand. Something small and smooth. I’d been holding it the whole time, and Laura hadn’t noticed.

  It was a tiny container of colorless liquid, and the scent was lemony, but less “mmm, lemons in bloom” and more “lemon-fresh bathroom scent.”

  I stared at it.

  Agatha had risked getting herself in trouble to give it to me.

  I uncapped it and drank the contents.

  You only live once.

  * * *

  A FEW MINUTES later, I felt a spasm in my stomach. I’d been lying still, staring at the ceiling, drifting in and out of consciousness. Then all of a sudden my throat convulsed, and I was choking—gasping for air. I flipped onto my side, lifted the pillow, and vomited on the bed. Then I put the pillow back and lay down again, dizzy and confused.

  My head wasn’t clear by any means, but there was an awareness there that hadn’t been present before.

  I could land on a thought and follow it to its logical conclusion: Agatha had wanted me to throw up. And now I felt better. Agatha was helping me. She wanted to save me from her mother.

  How nice, I thought. How lovely.

  And then I fell asleep.

  I woke when the sky was pink and raw—though I had no idea if it was dawn or dusk, and I could feel a difference in my body. Now with the most recent dose of tranquilizers purged from my system, the desire for survival was creeping back in. I really did kind of want to save myself . . . if it wasn’t too much trouble.

  I mean, maybe it wouldn’t work. But it was worth trying.

  I climbed out of bed. My muscles were tight and sore, my head thick and aching.

  I could move, though. And that was something. I checked to make sure my phone was in my back pocket. Then I walked to the door. It was locked, but when I hip-checked it, it popped open. So Laura had only locked the bottom knob, which meant she didn’t consider me a flight risk anymore.