A Perfect Canvas

by Kevin Adkisson

  Chapter 18

  Paige didn’t want to die, but she thought death might be preferable to what Edward had planned for her. A life of captivity. A life of servitude. A life of pain and disfigurement. She already knew what that was all about.

  “We’ll have to discuss your scars at length,” Edward said forking a small piece of fish into his mouth, swallowing. “Knowing the history behind your scars could help inspire me to incorporate them into a design.”

  Paige averted her eyes. No way was she going to let Edward inside her mind by talking to him about her scars.

  When she was twelve, a bump formed on her thigh under her panty line. She didn’t think much of it, just another weird zit popping up in a weird spot. It was somewhat swollen and sore, a not yet ready to pop zit. But a few days later, it was still there, and it hadn’t formed a head. And it hurt. It hurt all the time.

  She tried cleaning it with soap, acne cream, lotions. She tried washing it with peroxide and rubbing alcohol. She even lathered it with Neosporin. But nothing seemed to help. In fact it only grew larger, hurt more. Finally, she tried the natural solution.

  She squeezed the large bump as hard as she could. She squeezed and tears flowed. The bump seemed to have a direct connection to the pain center in her brain, lancing a fire of agony up her thigh to the back of her skull. But it popped. Drained. And the relief she felt was unlike any she’d ever felt before. She could sit without pain. She could walk without pain. She could move without pain. It was over, or so she thought.

  A week later another bump sprung up a few inches from the first, which had never really healed. The skin around them itched, felt warm to the touch as if something in her thigh was being cooked on low heat.

  Over the next few weeks more cyst-like lesions appeared in and around her perineum.

  Every morning, before school, she would sit on the edge of the bathtub, crying, as she popped the nasty oozing sores, some larger than her thumb. If she didn’t pop each cyst-like alien, they could burst as she walked between classes, soiling her clothing and leaving her smelling of rotting flesh. But some sores wouldn’t pop no matter how hard she squeezed, wouldn’t burst even after she’d pierced them over and over again with a sewing needle. Instead they ruptured while she sat at her desk or on the bus ride home. The smell of the green discharge nearly made her vomit.

  The disease Hidradenitis Suppurativa caused her Apocrine sweat glands to swell. Swell until they exploded.

  One boy at school teased her ceaselessly. He would tell her she smelled like a dead lizard. “Why don’t you go home and take a bath?” he would say. “Take a bath! Take a bath! Take a bath!” he would chant on the bus ride home.

  Paige lived with pain. Paige lived in tears. Paige lived alone.

  When Ms. Whyte finally discovered her secret, she was forced to show her mother her sores.

  Her mother took her to the doctor, but the doctor told them it was a hygiene problem. Paige was mortified. She showered and scrubbed and soaped, but nothing helped. The experience created an obsession with cleanliness and bathing that she hadn’t been able to shake since. It wasn’t until years later that she learned that Hidradenitis had nothing to do with hygiene.

  She tried everything the doctors suggested from changing her diet, to lotions and crèmes, to antibiotics. And when something seemed to miraculously help, it never lasted more than a few days. Nothing really helped. The sores and pain always returned. She saw doctor after doctor only to learn that she often knew more about the disease than they did, and she didn’t know much beyond the fact that the disease was an incurable, orphan illness that affected such a small percentage of the population that little or no research had been done on it. The doctors could do nothing for her.

  It wasn’t until she was in college that her sores suddenly vanished. She was one of the lucky sufferers of the condition. It had, thankfully, gone into remission for reasons unknown, but not until she’d been scarred horribly in the worst possible way. Everyday her scars reminded her that the disease could return at any moment, without warning.

  She would bite off her tongue before she’d tell Edward one word about her disease.

  “Your scars have an intriguing quality,” Edward said. “I’ve never seen anything quite like them, and, as you might imagine, I’ve seen just about every kind of self-mutilation you can conceive of.”

  Thank God he thought they were from some form of self-mutilation and not her disease. There were many things she could stand, but this man having all the details about her condition wasn’t one of them. She couldn’t imagine what humiliation she would suffer if he knew. Luckily, since he didn’t know what caused her scars, if it came to her being forced to tell him something, she would simply lie to him, tell him what he wanted to hear.

  “When I return,” he continued pushing his plate away and standing. “I’ll want you to explain to me why you hurt yourself in that location.”

  When he returned? Was he going to leave? She found it hard to believe he would do that. No doubt he was playing with her. Surely he wouldn’t leave, but a small flash of hope surged through her at the thought.

  The blonde woman cleared the table and began washing the plates, bowls, and utensils. Steaming hot water hissed into the sink.

  “What you’re doing isn’t right,” Paige told him. “You can’t do this to people.”

  Edward smirked, walked up close to her, ran his hand through her hair. Paige pulled away from him. The restraints bit into her wrists.

  “There are cultures scattered throughout the world where tattoos, scarification, and body modifications are the norm,” he said. “Most of the procedures performed, especially in Africa and the Middle East, are carried out on someone who has no real choice in the matter. I reject the idea of a morality limited by geography as ludicrous.”

  “It isn’t right to mark someone like that. Against their will. No matter where it happens.”

  Edward slammed his fist down on the table. “Against their will? What about my will? Their will has no more value than my own, especially if my will saves their life.”

  Trying to reason with him was pointless. She knew that. She saw it in the determined set of his jaw, the confidence in his eyes, the matter of factness in his tone. But she couldn’t help herself. She had to try.

  “Your will hurts people,” she said. “It doesn’t save lives. Just because it’s what you want doesn’t give you the right to hurt other people to get it.”

  He pointed an accusatory finger at her. “But wouldn’t you do exactly that? Aren’t you here precisely because of what you wanted? There isn’t any real difference between emotional scars and physical ones.”

  In a twisted way she thought Edward had a point even though he couldn’t know it, could he? She had put her decision to paint ahead of Eddie. Sometimes he could be a little self-centered and controlling, but he was also loving. He cared about her, and she knew it. He just wanted the best for her. And she really loved him. He’d done so much for her, helped draw her out of her shell.

  If it hadn’t been for Eddie, she’d probably never gotten over her intimacy issues. After her first boyfriend snapped nude photos of her and showed them to all his friends, made fun of her scars, she left him and took the photos with her. Kept them to remind her what had happened. She became afraid of men after that, of letting her guard down, of getting hurt. She’d thought being intimate with a man and their learning about her condition--something she wasn’t comfortable sharingcould only result in their making fun of her and eventually leaving her.

  She’d been rejected too many times because of her scars, scars that the rest of the world would never see. Sure, the men that rejected her were shallow, but as she’d learned, more often than not, men in general were shallow, but Eddie wasn’t. He’d been the first man who tried to really know her. When she’d met him, having a serious long-term relationship with a man was a ris
ky dream she could only wish for. Eddie broke through her wall of solitude. He’d shown her what was possible. He’d shown her that someone who loved her wouldn’t care about her condition. She should have at least talked to him before accepting Edward’s offer to run the gallery. He deserved that much.

  Edward raised his hand up, put it around her throat, and shoved her head back against the chair. She sucked air into her lungs. Edward peeled back her bandage. The tape pulled at her skin.

  She looked down at her chest as best she could, but it was difficult to see with her head pinned to the back of the chair. She was anxious to get a look at the damage he’d done to her.

  Edward’s lips curled in disapproval.

  The sound of running water from the sink stopped, and the blonde woman glided over, stood beside him. She carried a black old-fashioned doctor’s satchel. She opened it.

  Edward released Paige’s throat, reached in and removed a pair of scissors. Then he snipped at her chest, pulled globs of bloody gauze off her with the scissors.

  Paige looked down at her cuts. Blood oozed from those she saw, and they looked deeper than she’d expected. She couldn’t tell what image, if any, the cuts formed.

  Taking out a small cloth and spray bottle from the satchel, Edward dabbed at the cuts with the cloth and said, “You’re bleeding more than I like. This will sting.”

  He sprayed and a fine mist dotted her chest.

  It did not sting. It burned. It burned so deep she felt it in her back, as if acid were burning a hole completely through her, as if someone was grabbing the handful of skin between her breasts and was yanking it off her body. She coughed the air from her lungs. She thought she was going to pass out from the pulsing pain of it.

  She jerked at the leather straps holding her arms and clenched her teeth together so tightly she thought her jaw might break. It was far worse than when he’d cut her. Nearly worse than the eruptions of her aliens.

  “You’re doing very well,” he cooed to her.

  She wanted to spit on him. She wanted to curse him. She wanted to kill him. But her body was locked in pain and her mind was pierced. She could do nothing.

  When the pain eased enough that her body and brain began communicating something beyond just pain, she realized she was covered in sweat.

  Edward patted her chest with a damp cloth, cooling and soothing her skin with each lingering touch. The blonde removed a jar from his satchel and handed it to him. He dipped his fingers into the jar.

  “This will be much less intense,” he said.

  Paige’s whole body flinched as he dabbed at her wounds with a greasy Vaseline-like substance sending sharp pangs of pain through her chest. When he finished, he looked at her with smug satisfaction then taped a new bandage to her chest.

  “Now I have to get ready,” he said taking her head in his hands, kissing the dampness from her eyes. “Eddie is expecting me, and I wouldn’t want to keep him waiting.”

  Paige blinked away his kisses. Shook her head to get his hands off her.

  What did he mean Eddie was expecting him? Was Eddie involved in this? He can’t be. He’d called her and warned her to be careful. He wouldn’t have called if he were involved. Would he? Eddie hadn’t even known who Edward was. Had he?

  Her heart collapsed taking hope with it. If Eddie was involved then she had no reason to believe she would ever be rescued. She could think of no one else who would search for her. Not even Tabitha. Her best friend had a nomadic mindset and wouldn’t even begin to worry about her safety for a couple months. More likely Tabitha would see it as an opportunity to make the moves on Eddie.

  Eddie couldn’t be involved with Edward. He just couldn’t.

  Edward pushed open one of the stainless steel doors and stepped into an enormous bathroom. The robed woman followed him and closed the door behind them.

  Paige sat alone. She wanted out of this place, out of this chair, away from that man. It was time to act.

  She bent over and tried to reach the strap with her teeth, to manipulate it, but the angle was wrong. Her mouth would move no closer than several inches away.

  She jerked up as hard as she could with her right wrist. It was her strongest arm and was held by the restraint with the most slack. The leather held.

  Her anger welled up inside of her, filling her arms with strength. She leaned forward, put her back into it, and jerked up again. Still the leather held. But it would not win. It could not win. She wouldn’t allow it.

  Grabbing the front of the chair’s armrest and leveraging her weight by pushing her back against the chair, she pushed up on the strap, keeping a constant pressure against it. The leather went taut, still held, but the hole where the metal pin of the buckle pierced the strap widened ever so slightly.

  Ripping it open enough for the pin to fall out, thus releasing the buckle and freeing her, could take all night. But it had stretched a bit, and that was something. Something that renewed her hope.

  There was additional slack in the restraint as well, and Paige used the extra room to bend her wrist and angle her fingers down to pull up on the edges of the strap. Rotating it around the armrest, she brought the buckle up so that it sat on her wrist like a watch with the face on the inside of the wrist. Maybe she could just unfasten it. But she had to get a grip on it first. If she let off the pressure, the buckle would slide back towards the ground. When it rubbed against the end of her fingers, she made a grab for it, but missed. Gravity pulled the buckle down before she could grasp it.

  Anger born out of frustration willed her forward. She was close. He’d underestimated her. She might have missed on the first grab but she now knew it was possible to reach the buckle, and she would, even if her arm broke with the effort.

  She rotated the restraint again, and it moved back toward her fingers.

  Paige glanced at the steel doors. Edward and the woman were still in the bathroom. Maybe he was keeping himself occupied with the blonde woman. Paige didn’t want to think about how. She heard no sounds coming from inside the bathroom, and she wasn’t sure what that meant. She took it as a sign he wasn’t hurting her. She hoped he wasn’t hurting her.

  But at the same time she didn’t want Edward to come out for at least a few minutes longer, long enough for her to get free. The best thing she could do to help both of them was to get free and find a weapon.

  Paige concentrated on using the ends of her fingertips to pull the leather strap up. It moved. The buckle was closer to her fingertips. She pushed the strap up again, and the buckle moved up a little more. It was at the tip of her fingers. She grabbed it. So much for the easy part. Wiggling her body forward in the chair, she pulled the strap as close to her hand as possible. It didn’t move much. She had to lean forward to keep the buckle in her hand.

  Edward and the woman had to be close to finishing. She wished she heard them, and then thought better of it. What were they doing? Showering, toweling off, dressing? Don’t let him be raping or killing her. Whatever they were doing she knew she probably only had a few more minutes at the most. Not much time.

  Paige took the buckle between her fingers and tried to slip the leather out of the buckle with her thumb. Her hand shook with effort. The buckle slipped, and she nearly dropped it. If she had, the buckle would have slipped back down towards the ground forcing her to start over.

  This wasn’t working.

  Her fingers were damp from the heat of the room and the struggle. She slid her knee up as far as the restraint on her ankle would let her and used it to hold the leather strap around her wrist in place. She turned her open palm toward her face and blew on it with several deep breaths. She opened and closed her hand rapidly in order to dry her sweaty fingers and to loosen them up.

  Her heart thumped away against the wounds on her chest sending pulses of pain through her. She glanced at the steel doors. No sign of Edward or the woman.

  Paige grabbed th
e buckle again and eased the strap out of the buckle with her thumb. She pulled back hard, and the restraint fell to the floor with a clatter. Her arm was free. Thank God.

  Quickly, she unbuckled her other arm and then both of her ankles. She got to her feet, swayed dizzily, and nearly fell over. Her legs wobbled as if they hadn’t been used in days.

  Holding on to the table for support, she shook one leg and then the other to force the blood back into them. She took a couple of timid steps, and the world solidified under her feet.

  She darted to the couch, snatched up the blanket, and wrapped the thin covering over her shoulders, around her naked body, like a makeshift robe. She saw nothing in the living area she could readily use as a weapon. The kitchen was her best bet. A knife would be great, but she would settle for one of the nice heavy copper pots hanging above the counter.

  That was the plan. Get a weapon. Get out of the house. Get help.

  A few dozen steps and she stood in the kitchen, but there were no knives in plain view. She reached for a drawer, yanking at the first one. It wouldn’t open. She tried another, and it wouldn’t open.

  Paige yanked at the cabinet doors, the cupboards, and more of the weathered buttery yellow drawers, but not a damn one would open. She put her foot up on the counter and using all her weight yanked at the handle. It should have popped free from the cabinet drawer with all the force she was putting behind it, but nothing happened. The drawer remained closed.

  They were all sealed tight, as if glued shut. She looked closer at the material. Rapping her knuckles on one drawer then another, the sound was more metallic than wooden. The cabinets, cupboards, and drawers weren’t wood. They were metal. They were painted to look like wood.

  It didn’t make any sense. She’d seen the blonde woman open several without any trouble at all. She hadn’t used any trick that Paige had seen, and there were no locks on any of the cabinet doors. She was running out of time.

  Paige reached for one of the larger copper pots, one large enough to inflict serious damage while not being too unwieldy. As she grabbed the pot, she saw a padlock through the handle, securing it to a metal frame. What kind of person padlocks his pots in place? She gave the pot a good yank then another, but the lock held it fast. The copper should have bent, but it didn’t.

  She turned back to the kitchen counter. A juicer, a bread machine, a coffee maker with one of those cheap plastic coffee pots, and a microwave, sat on the kitchen counter. She grabbed the bread machine thinking it would be the heaviest, inflict the most damage, but it wouldn't budge. She looked closer. It was bolted down.

  She grabbed the other appliances, one after the other, but none of them moved. They were all bolted down.

  Forget finding a weapon. Get out.

  Knowing which door Edward had taken into the bathroom, Paige rushed to the other. It had to lead out. She turned the handle and pushed at the door. It wouldn’t open. It was locked. No big surprise, but she’d had to try. She looked at the window above the kitchen counter, tried opening it, but could find no lock. No way to open it. What was she going to do? Nothing was what it seemed.

  The bathroom door opened.

  Edward stepped out, smiled his sick smile. A smile she now equated with pure evil.

  He didn’t look a bit surprised or distraught at her escape from the chair. His hair was mildly damp, slicked back, and he’d changed into a long sleeved black turtleneck and black slacks. One hand was in his pocket.

  She pulled the blanket tighter around her, took a step back at the sight of him.

  Paige stood cornered between the doors. She was out of his reach but cornered.

  No sign of the blonde.

  “It’s about time you got up,” he said.

  She didn’t answer. Sliding with her back against the kitchen counter, Paige slowly sidestepped away from Edward and the bathroom door. She grabbed the plastic coffee pot off the coffee maker, wishing it were full of steaming hot coffee, and brandished the pot at him like a weapon.

  Edward chuckled, and then took a short step toward her.

  She leapt to one side, away from him, to the middle of the kitchen where there was lots of room for her to maneuver. He wouldn’t find her submissive this time. She’d fight with everything she had.

  Edward stepped to the other door, looked over his shoulder, and considered her for a moment. “Perhaps I should return you to the tree?”

  “No.” she said, backing away from him until her bottom bumped against the table in the dining area.

  He put his hand on the door handle, turned it, and cracked open the door.

  How had he opened it? He’d used no key. Unbolted no lock she could see.

  “What a person can do, they should do,” he said. “What can you do?”

  She had no idea what he meant. Was he challenging her? Did he want her to attack him? She saw another room beyond the door, but she couldn’t see what was inside. His body blocked her view. She saw white walls and light, perhaps from a window.

  She considered the odds of rushing him, catching him off balance, and pushing past him but decided that it would be best to wait. It seemed to her that he wanted her to attack him so she didn’t. If he was actually going to leave the house, and it looked to her like he might, then she could find a way out after he was gone. It would be safer.

  “I’ve been lenient because this is new for you,” he said, his eyes cold. “People take time to adapt. But the next time you fail to answer me when I speak to you I will make you spend the night on the tree. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.” She didn’t want to provoke him. She just wanted him to leave.

  “As difficult as it may be for you to accept it, you want this,” he said. “You long for a higher purpose. You long for someone to truly take responsibility for your life.”

  He opened the door, stepped out.

  “If you have a need, make do,” he said.

  Then he closed the door behind him.

  Paige heard the click of the lock. She hurried to the kitchen window to see if he was really going to leave. She couldn’t believe it. If he was leaving then he wasn’t just crazy, he was stupid. She’d be long gone before he made it out of the driveway.

  A light from the porch allowed her to see Edward standing outside the house in his long black overcoat.

  He looked at her through the window and waved at her like the happy husband headed to work. He strode out of the light, toward a garage, and a few minutes later a black Jaguar rolled out, its headlights cutting through swirls of dirt kicked up by the wind. Paige ran into the living room and watched the lights of the car as it turned out of the driveway and sped down the road away from the house.

  She looked around the room, spotted the rocker beside the couch. She knocked it over and kicked at one of the rocker legs with her heel. Pain slammed its way up her ankle. The leg of the chair bent away from the seat. It was good hard wood.

  She kicked again and the rocker broke away from the legs of the chair. She picked it up, swung it at the floor, knocked one of the legs free. Then she picked up the leg and gave the air a testing swish with it. It felt heavy in her hand.

  Now she had a weapon. Now things had changed. Now it was time to get the hell out of this place.