Jasmine

by Bene, Jennifer

  Worm food.

  “She shoulda got down on her knees in the Valley. Sucked a few dicks, took a load or two to the face.”

  Lurch looks at me, eyes bulging, disconcerted by my crassness. I give him a bland smile.

  “She’d probably still be alive.”

  * * *

  I don’t head back to my office. Instead, I head out to Naja’s on the boardwalk in Redondo. It’s a nice day, and I’ve got time to kill.

  It had been a long shot to think that something would turn up, and I could walk away from this assignment. The file told the story with a few more details than I’d gone over in Detective Ressner’s office, but not much. Miss Sloane Finley had come to California to make her way into movies, like every other stupid young woman that somehow thinks it’ll be different for them than it was for the umpteen-million girls before her. She’d failed, because that’s how this story plays out. Her options boiled down to three: get discovered, do porn, or fail and go home. Option one was a non-starter from the get-go, all-American girl or not. Nobody skips into LA and gets discovered. She could have gone with option number two, but even that was a long shot. In the day and age of Pornhub and celebrity sex tapes, even the number of jobs available to pretty young women who don’t mind ‘sucking a few dicks, and taking a load or two to the face’ are fewer and farther between than they used to be. So, Sloane Finely chose the only real option she’d ever had, sans staying a sales associate at Barnes and Noble forever — she headed home.

  I grab a stool at the long ‘U’ shaped bar at Naja’s, order an Artifex, and turn, staring out over the white crescents of light dancing on the wave edges beyond the surf.

  This is nice. A month or two of this I can deal with.

  The bitter taste of hops hits the back of my throat, and I’m aware it’s a pretty little lie I’m telling myself. A US Senator is involved in this now, and even though I know Sloane Finley is as dead as my soul, I will not be able to wait this one out here on this stool or sitting in my office watching Netflix.

  No, instead I will have to pretend to do a job that I know is both futile and pointless. I know the statistics by heart. They drum at the back of my head like a dull rumble of thunder: 68,000 women twenty-one years of age or older disappeared just last year in America. From year to year the figures are a rollercoaster of bleak numbers that has long since eroded my spirit like acid to metal. 20,000 unidentified bodies. That’s the number — both male and female — that are found every year. Bodies like the one that might wash out of a gully in some rural backwater in West Texas someday. Bodies that will never bring closure to the families of those people who simply disappear off the face of the Earth.

  I drain back the last of my first beer, order another, and I try. I try like I’ve been trying for ten years now. Empathy. Care. Concern. Hope. Anything. I look for the tiniest spark, an ember on which to blow to summon even the slightest interest in what I’m being paid to do — find Sloane Finley.

  I take another sip. Come on, Mason. You can do this. Care. Care about Sloane Finley.

  I wait. The ocean watches and waits with me.

  Nope.

  She’s dead. A stupid fucking girl who did something dumb, and as I sip my beer, feeling the sun beat down… I just couldn’t care less.

  Six

  Her

  Thursday is sweeping, dusting, and mopping.

  I don’t fight chores anymore. Defiance doesn’t even occur to me, especially after this morning. I fought him once early on, told him to go fuck himself, and my reward for that moment had ended with being lashed to the post, his belt flailing me until I thought my skin peeled.

  ‘Those whom I love I rebuke and discipline. So be earnest and repent. Revelations 3:19, Jasmine.’ I remember those words too, one of my first memories of him quoting scripture to me.

  When I finally woke up this afternoon, sore and aching, I’d wondered if maybe he was going to leave me alone the rest of the day and let me skip the chores after what he’d done to me. Of course, I was wrong. Daniel had come back into the bedroom just to tell me to get dressed and start on my tasks for the day.

  All of my clothes are in the drawers, and I should probably feel lucky that I have the three I do for myself. Except that half the clothes — or maybe more because I’m starting to lose track — aren’t mine at all. No, the clothes he took from my car when he brought me here were tossed in with the other things that were already in the drawers. The other girl’s. The real Jasmine. Hers and mine all mixed together. The combination is the sum total of everything that I own in this prison.

  Except I own nothing. Not anymore. Everything here is his, including my body.

  No, that’s not true.

  There’s one thing I still have control over. Under the counter, there’s two small pink disks in my bag and this morning I’d dialed one open to the next pill in sequence, popped one out, and swallowed it dry. When he first dragged me here, I’d managed to convince him they were medicine I needed. It was clear he didn’t have a fucking clue what birth control looked like, and those little white pills have become the only evidence of his ‘God’ I’ve seen here. I watch them like a hawk, keep count of them with the fervor of a zealot, because each pill spells out another day to live. To plan.

  When they end, so do I. One way or another.

  I can’t let those dark thoughts intrude right now, I can’t think of my failed escape attempt, because I have tasks to do. Of the three chores I have today, dusting is first, and this old ass house has nothing in the way of seals. There are cracks under the doors, in the windowsills, and the dust blowing in from the dry Texas landscape outside is a constant battle.

  Even though I’m sore, and my feet remind me with every step of just how badly I fucked up, I finally finish dusting the sitting room downstairs and move into the family room.

  ‘Family room’ — what a fucking joke.

  These people had no entertainment. There is no phone, no television, no computers, nothing. There’s not a single thing here that has any access to the outside world, which means I don’t, because I have no idea what he did with my cellphone after he took me.

  For all I know it’s still sitting in the dirt beside my car, battery long since dead.

  I have to stop myself from thinking about the missed calls I probably have waiting for me. The voicemails from my mom, my dad, Trish. If I think about them, about anything but escaping from here, I know I’m going to lose it.

  Chores, focus on the damn chores.

  I’m dusting his creepy family photos, the ones where no one is smiling, when I notice that I accidentally put on one of her shirts this afternoon. It’s a dull, faded red, the white lettering and cloverleaf emblem cracked. Stockdale High 4H Club. ‘Born to Lead’. A part of me wants to go back upstairs, yank it off, exchange it with one of my own… but I don’t. I have to be numb right now, it’s the only way I can handle this shit, and any energy I’d spend on exchanging a perfectly good t-shirt for another — to make a point only I would acknowledge — is energy I just don’t have.

  The massive bookcases covering one wall of the family room exist purely to collect dust because they have absolutely nothing of interest in them. Just books on ranching and the Bible and Concordance, whatever the fuck that is. I used to wonder how he was able to quote so much of that Bible scripture crap to me, but it didn’t take me long to understand. These people had no need for entertainment beyond reading about how to raise and kill cattle, and what their fucking God directed them to do with their lives. He’s probably done nothing but read the Bible from the day he could recognize the words.

  And he’s fucking crazy because of it.

  I’m on the last bookcase when the duster catches on something. My mind is on autopilot so when the feather snags it yanks the tool out of my hand before I can think to seize it, and it falls to the floor with a clatter. Shaking myself out of my haze, I kneel down to grab it, but as I lean down I notice something I haven’t before. On the lowest shelf
there is a thin white volume with a tall narrow spine, black block lettering running up the length. It’s the first word that catches my eye — STOCKDALE. Even as thick as my brain is running today, that word reminds me of the shirt I’m wearing. I skim the remaining lettering and my breath freezes.

  STOCKDALE HIGH SCHOOL YEARBOOK.

  Without thinking, I pull it free from the surrounding books. I don’t know why I’m doing this, but at the same time I know exactly why I am.

  Find her.

  I crack it open, and it’s like a million other yearbooks that came before it, just like the ones sitting in my old bedroom back at my parents’ house. I quickly flip the pages, finding photos of him towering over the other players on the football team, a monster even in high school, and then I come to the class photos. They start with the freshmen, but I have this gut feeling, and I skip ahead, past the freshmen and sophomores. Juniors. I pause for a second, staring at the new title page, then begin scanning names. Like most yearbooks, it goes by last names first, which makes my search a little more difficult because he’s never mentioned her last name. Only her first. The name he calls me.

  Jasmine.

  I search carefully, but there’s nothing in the juniors, so I start in on the seniors. His photo stands out to me, but I flip past it, knowing that she must be in here somewhere. Halfway through doubt creeps in. Maybe I’m wrong. Fuck, maybe there never was a real Jasmine. Maybe all of this is just some distorted fever dream of his fucked-up mind. A creation he made of his perfect wife, and I’m the latest one he chose to make the idea a reality. Even as I’m thinking this I continue turning pages and at the three-quarter mark my heart stops.

  I see the name and the picture at the same time. My ears ring with blood. It’s nothing so dramatic as if saying I felt like I was looking in a mirror. That would be the stuff of horror movies, or some Stephen King novel. No, Jasmine, the real Jasmine, is not me. And yet it’s all too easy to see the twisted alterations his mind has made. Her hair is a lighter brown. Higher cheekbones, a sharper nose. Her eyes are deep green, not my hazel, and so serious looking.

  Jasmine Turner.

  She stares out at me from the glossy page. A young woman who is not me, and yet in his twisted mind is me. He wanted her, obviously couldn’t have her willingly, so he took her. Killed her. And then waited for the opportunity to take someone as close as he could find to fill the gap. That’s the story I build in my head as I study her face, one that’s a repeat of thoughts I’ve had so many times before. All of the why me’s. Why I’m here. Why he took me that day on the side of that road when all I was doing was taking…

  “Jasmine.”

  I scream, dropping the yearbook as I whirl on my heels, back pressing into the bookcase. The shelves embed themselves into my skin, filled with all those books on cattle and God and now an empty slot where one had been that contains a picture of a girl who should be here instead of me.

  I was so wrapped up in what I’d discovered I never heard the footfalls of his boots. I don’t know how that could be, because he’s so big, and I almost always hear him when he’s moving about the house. But I didn’t. I watch him closely, waiting for it. Waiting for the disapproval, the commands, the walk to the barn.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I…” I drag in a desperate lungful of air. “I found… I was just looking…” I can’t make the words come together to finish the sentence as I stare up at him, and then he lowers himself. I cower backward, trying to bury myself further into the bookcase, away from him. He makes no sudden movements toward me as he picks up the yearbook, glances at it, and then at me. Tears well in my eyes for what I know is coming. I tell myself I won’t plead with him, but in the same breath I realize I will, when the time comes, when those leather straps wrap around me, pulling me tight against the barn post.

  He looks down at the yearbook, flipping through it in silence, but there is one page that folded over when I dropped it, and he flips to it. It’s the page with her picture, Jasmine’s photo.

  “You were so beautiful. Even then.”

  I swallow. His voice is gentle, tender, as he stares down at the page. Staring at her. I want him to look up at me. I want him to look at me and realize I’m not her, not the girl in that book. I want him to recognize it, to ask me who I am. I want to tell him my name is not Jasmine for the millionth time, and have him fucking listen. I am Sloane, Sloane Finley, and I do not belong here. I should be in California with Trish, going to another audition that they won’t pick me for, or back home in Indiana listening to my dad complain about work. I should be home, anywhere but here, and I want to stab my finger at that picture and scream ‘I am not her!’

  “Do you remember the first time you came over?”

  Fuck. He’s looking at me and smiling. Like an actual human being. A real expression, and I can’t speak, but I manage to shake my head.

  “I do.” He gives a quiet, almost playful chuckle, and my head spins, going light. No. No, he can’t do this. He can’t show emotion, act human. Not now.

  Not after this morning. Not after everything.

  “I remember the day because your momma brought you with her, and then she and Momma got to talking in the kitchen. And then Momma told us to go outside and play, but you asked if we could go play in the room with all the books, and she said okay, but not to make a mess or touch the pictures.”

  He looks at me, and his grin is genuine, real, and this is surreal, and I want him to stop.

  Daniel glances back at the yearbook, still smiling. “You were always reading those books of Daddy’s. Anything you could find about cattle, livestock, animals, any of it. Daddy sure did think the world of that. ‘That there is a good girl, Daniel. You’d be wise to take note of it.’ That’s what he said. No lie.”

  I need him to stop. I need him to shut up. I don’t want to hear this, any of it.

  “I remember this,” he says, turning the yearbook toward me so I can see.

  It’s Jasmine. A blue 4H jacket draped over her shoulders, open to a pale red shirt underneath that I think I’m wearing right now. My stomach twists as I see how happy she looks with her arms around the neck of a calf, chin resting on it. She’s smiling, and holding a ribbon with a big number one in the center.

  “I swear to you I think Daddy was more proud of you winning that than he was of any game of mine,” he says softly, and it’s as if the air is being sucked out of the room. “I’ve always loved you, Jasmine.”

  There’s some kind of emotion in his voice, and if he weren’t so fucking evil the words might even be sweet. But they aren’t. They’re words meant for a woman who isn’t me. The woman whose shirt I’m definitely wearing. They’re meant for the girl on that page who isn’t here anymore, who’s probably dead, whom he’s trying to make me become. But I won’t. He will not do this to me, he can’t make me think of him as anything other than the monster he is.

  I close my eyes, shake my head, and whisper, “I’m not Jasmine.”

  He ignores me. He’s always done that. Back in the beginning I would scream it at him, beat at his chest while I shouted my name, my real name, even as he would gather me in his arms and crush me to him to silence me.

  “I knew even back then you’d be my wife. That we would live together with God’s blessing, that we would become one flesh as He tells us in Genesis.” He closes the yearbook and gently places it back where I pulled it from. “Together, Jasmine. We will build our family here together.”

  Standing, he moves toward me, and I scoot back, flinching as his hand closes on my arm. He takes no notice of it, pulling me toward him even as I stiffen at his touch.

  “Ours will be a fruitful union, Jasmine. We will be as the Lord teaches us in Psalm 127, verse three. ‘Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord, the fruit of the womb a reward.’” He holds me tight to his chest, his arms encasing me like a cage.

  I feel his fingers on my skin, but they don’t chill me nearly as much as his next whispered words.


  “I cannot wait for you to grow round with our child.”

  I grit my teeth. No. No, that will never happen. Those two little pink disks of white pills in the bathroom will make sure of that. And before those run out, I will find a way out of here. I will make goddamn sure of it. Because I will not allow his fucked-up little plan to come to fruition. I will not let him use my body, my womb, to create his perfect fucking family.

  I’ll kill myself first.

  Seven

  Him

  Jasmine has been so meek and obedient today. She did her chores without complaint, scrubbed her blood from the floor of the barn without argument, and I am filled with pride in her. She is a good wife, and I know there is no sin in feeling proud of her. God guided my hand rightly to administer the punishment I did this morning, just as he guided her to stop and wait for me. To not be tempted by the outside world and the Devil’s whispers.

  Thank you, Lord, for thy guidance in all things.

  I want her to know I am proud of her, and as I lead her upstairs I decide just how I will show her my gratitude for her obedience — I will cook her dinner tonight and allow her to rest her feet.

  Jasmine hesitates at the door to our bedroom, her lip caught in her teeth as she stares at her hands, and the sight makes me smile. I’m sure she expects us to return to bed together, but my plan will also bring her joy.

  “Put this on,” I tell her, pulling a dress from the closet to drape it over the chair.

  “Why?” she asks softly, and I pause, uncertain why she’s asking. Is it because I did not take her as I am sure we both want? Or is it because I have dictated that dresses and skirts are necessary only for the Sabbath? Whichever it is does not matter, for hers is the duty to obey.