Hold Me Close

by Megan Hart

  “Yeah. I can see that.” Dee nodded and sipped her coffee.

  She didn’t mean to ask, but the words came out anyway. “Dee...when you told me about him getting out of prison...”

  Dee looked embarrassed. “Yeah, that was crappy. I’m sorry.”

  “No. It wasn’t. It’s not true, I don’t think,” Effie said. “But if you could tell me where you heard it, so I could look it up?”

  “Oh. Shoot. Well, I heard it from one of the moms. I’m trying to remember who.” Dee bit her lower lip, frowning. “I can’t think of it, or where she heard it. But I’ll ask around, okay? If you really—”

  “No, that’s okay,” Effie cut in quickly with a small laugh and a wave of her hand. “I’ve heard for years, off and on, that he’s getting out. It’s never true. I’m sure it’s not this time, either.”

  Awkward silence. Dee still looked embarrassed. Effie didn’t quite know how to fix it. At last, Dee shrugged and smiled.

  “So, tell me about this dating site. Think I should join up?”

  chapter fourteen

  Effie is down to her last piece of paper in her drawing pad. She’s worn her colored pencils to nubs and the charcoal pencils that were in her backpack are entirely used up. She tries to shade a line with her fingertips the way Madame Clay taught her, but the paper tears, and with a sigh, she crumples it into a ball and starts to toss it into the trash can before thinking again and smoothing it instead. She adds it to the small and precious pile of paper they hoard for the bathroom. They hide the spare paper under the mattress, behind the dresser drawers, under the couch cushions. Somehow the indignity of having to use scraps of paper for the bathroom is worse than the awful food or the bad lighting or the relentless monotony. It makes them into animals.

  Heath looks at the picture, then at her. “You drew me?”

  “Yeah. The nose is all wrong, though.” Effie gestures at him. “I couldn’t get it right.”

  She studies him. Locked in these three small, dank and often dark rooms, at the mercy of a crazy, moody man, Effie would never have thought she could be bored, yet she is. The days have blended into one another, which is why she started keeping track with the hash marks on the wall beside the bed. She thinks she’s been here about two weeks so far, but it could be longer. The only way to really tell for sure is that every morning the orange lights come on and every night they go off, except sometimes it feels as if the day lasts forever and other times it’s definitely much shorter.

  Twice since she woke up here the blazing white overhead lights have come on, and the man who insists on being called Daddy brought them food. A half a jug of water. The first time, he also brought two glasses of chocolate milk he forced them to drink. It made them both fall asleep. The second time, he gave them each a shot of “vitamins.” Effie knows it was a sedative. Maybe she’d rather be unconscious than awake. It passes the time.

  Effie has asked Heath a few times about escape, but he won’t give her the details about what happened when he tried it before. There has to be a way out of the basement, but though she cuts her feet by navigating the other room, there are no windows that she can find. The door, of course, is locked. There’s always a warning before Daddy comes into the basement, the music and the bright lights coming on overhead. They could jump him, couldn’t they? Force him to let them out. Next time, Effie thinks and stifles a yawn. She’ll do it the next time.

  “Try again,” Heath says.

  “I can’t. I’m out of paper. And pencils.” She holds up the drawing pad, flipping through the pages to show him.

  Heath snags the book from her and sits on the rickety chair to slowly page through it. Every so often he pauses to look at one page longer than the others, and Effie tries to figure out why but can’t. She doesn’t see anything special in the pictures Heath seems to like best—a rose with a bee circling it, a bowl of fruit, a stop sign. The ones Effie is most proud of, the castle and the koi pond, he barely glances at. Finally, he looks at her.

  “You’re good.”

  “Thanks.” She shrugs and scoots back on the bed to rest against the wall with her knees drawn to her chest.

  They have spent most of their time in the bedroom because the small living area is so dark and the couch out there has springs poking through the cushions. In here, at least, the orangey light from the wall sconce is better and the bed provides a softer place to sit. Effie could tell you the exact dimensions of this room. Ten short paces in one direction, ten slightly longer paces in the other. None of the walls seem to align. Everything’s skewed. If she looks too long at the corners, she’ll get a headache. Everything is an effort.

  Heath reaches the end of the sketchbook, closes it and hands it back to her. Effie clutches it to her chest for a moment, remembering when all the pages had been fresh and clean. She’d wasted so many of them, but how was she supposed to know she’d end up here?

  “We should hit him with something,” Effie says.

  Heath looks around the room, then at her. “There’s nothing to hit him with.”

  “I could stab him with a pencil,” Effie says. “If I hadn’t already used them all up. I was so stupid!”

  “He doesn’t look strong, but he is.” Heath frowns. “You’d have to do it in the eye or something. How good is your aim?”

  Effie closes one eye to keep his face from blurring. Both eyes are gritty. Sore from rubbing them. “I don’t know. Why aren’t you trying harder to think of a way?”

  “He said he’d kill...”

  The searing bright lights come on overhead. The music starts, but it’s not the same song. This one’s not that soft-voiced, high-pitched one about sailing; it’s harder edged. She knows it after a minute, though. “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” by the Beatles. Effie laughs, confused, but the sight of Heath’s face stops her.

  “What?” She was hot a moment ago, the basement is almost always too hot or too cold, but her skin crawls and bumps into gooseflesh now. “What’s wrong?”

  “Go get under the covers. Pretend you’re asleep.”

  “But what...”

  “Go,” Heath says as he backs up into the living area, already turning away from her. “Please, Effie, just do it.”

  The rasp in his voice convinces her. Effie hops into the bed and pulls the blankets up over her ears. Beyond the doorway, she hears Daddy saying something, but it’s not in that too-bright and jovial voice he’s used every time before. He sounds worse than angry. He sounds as if he’s gone...dark.

  “Sister, Sister, Sister. You stay in here,” Daddy says from the doorway. “You be a good girl now and stay where you are. You won’t like what happens, if you don’t.”

  Nearby, there is a woman’s voice. She sounds drunk. Laughing, but slurred. Effie sits up, meaning to get out of bed and run, run to this new person, because surely whoever it is will save them. Before she can, though, there’s a crack of flesh on flesh and a low, soft cry. Daddy’s voice, louder.

  “Don’t just look at it, boy. Put your face in that goddamned mess and eat it.”

  Another rise of drunken laughter. Another sound of slapping. A moan, it sounds like pain but could be something else.

  Effie pulls the covers over her head and turns herself to the wall. Her parents weren’t much into going to church, and Effie’s not even sure she believes in God, but she prays now.

  Whatever he’s doing, please, oh please, don’t let it happen to her.

  Please, oh please, don’t let it happen to her.

  When the sounds get louder, she plugs her ears with her fingers. It lasts forever, whatever it is, until her stomach is sick with anticipation and she has to press a hand over her mouth to keep herself from gagging. Her eyes are closed, but she can tell when the bright lights go out, leaving her in the pitch-dark again.

  She waits and waits, but Heath
doesn’t come into the room. Effie does not want to get out of bed, but she makes herself. Bare feet on the cold floor. She takes each step, sliding and shuffling so she doesn’t accidentally step on something that could hurt her, reaching with tentative hands into the blackness until she finds the door frame. She stops.

  “Heath?”

  At first, no answer. She’s sure he’s gone or, worse, dead out there on the floor in the dark and if she stumbles forward she will land on his cooling body. Effie shakes. Her fingers grip harder into the wood. She calls his name again, voice catching, and this time, he answers.

  “I’m here.”

  “Are you okay? Did he hurt you?”

  “I’m okay.” There’s a scratching on the concrete. “Go back to sleep.”

  Heath has always let Effie sleep in the bed while he takes the lumpy, stinking couch. She should go back and dive beneath the blankets again, but she can hear him crying. Low, strangled sobs.

  Effie has found her way to the bathroom and back in utter darkness enough times by now to know where to walk to avoid the sharp things set into the concrete, but this time she eases her way to the couch. She can’t see more than shapes and shadows, but she can hear Heath breathing. She can smell him, too. Both of them stink. You’d think they’d get used to it, but so far she hasn’t.

  “It’s cold out here. Come to the bed.”

  “No,” he says immediately. “You take it. I’m...”

  “Heath. Come to the bed.” Effie finds him with her hands. He’s shivering. He’s naked. She pulls away, startled. Embarrassed. Then, with more determination, she puts out her hands again and finds his shoulder, his arm. Finally, his hand. She links her fingers in his. “Where are your clothes?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She thinks about this. They could stumble around in the dark, trying to find them, or they can wait until the morning lights turn on and find his clothes then. For now, he’s cold and shaking and something bad has happened to him.

  Effie tugs Heath’s hand. “Come on.”

  Together, they make their way into the bedroom. She urges him into the bed and makes him get in first, facing the wall. She lets him be the little spoon and curls herself around him. She’s never been in bed with a boy before. She’s never seen a naked boy, never even kissed a clothed one, but when she presses her face to Heath’s bare back, all Effie can think is that he needs this, and needs her.

  Heath is crying again. Effie is quiet at first, but she has to know. “I heard a woman. Won’t she help...?”

  “Her name is Sheila. He gives her drugs so she’ll do...things. He likes to watch.”

  She wants to ask what sorts of things but is too afraid. “Won’t she help us, Heath?”

  “He said if I ever tried to escape again, he would kill her.” Heath’s voice is flat and darker than the basement could ever be. “Not me. Her.”

  “He wouldn’t! And if we got out, he wouldn’t have the chance to.”

  Heath shifts a little. “I think he would. And I’d have to live with that for the rest of my life, that she died because I tried to get out.”

  “We have to get out, Heath,” Effie says.

  “Someone will come looking for you, Effie. Nobody gave a damn about me, but you... Your parents are looking for you. They’re going to find us.”

  Effie isn’t so sure. “Will she... Would she tell anyone about us?”

  “I don’t think so. He tells her I’m his son,” Heath says. “And she’s so out of it, she believes him. And she doesn’t know about you.”

  “Next time, I’ll come out there. I’ll tell her who I am. She’ll have to help us—”

  “No!” Then softer, “No, Effie, you can’t. He will kill her. I know he will.”

  Heath doesn’t say anything more. So she holds him, quietly, until they both sleep. She wakes when the bright lights come on. The sailing song filters through the speakers, and disoriented, she struggles out of bed to find herself alone. Heath is in the living room, fully dressed.

  Daddy comes with food. He is wild-eyed and frantic with hilarity, telling joke after joke. He praises Effie. What a good girl she is. What a good, good girl.

  He’s brought soap. He’s turned on the water in the bathroom so they can shower. He’s brought books, magazines. Chocolate candy. It’s like Christmas morning, and he’s some kind of demented Santa. He focuses on Effie, ignoring Heath, and by now she knows it’s better to laugh when Daddy tells a joke, so she does, even though it feels like glass grating in her throat.

  Daddy has brought her a dress, pink with ribbons and bows, appropriate for a much, much younger girl. White stockings. The outfit would be complete with black patent leather shoes, she thinks, but of course there are no shoes down here.

  “Go take a shower, Sister. Be Daddy’s pretty girl,” he tells her with that wide, horrible grin that wrinkles his face and makes him a troll.

  The hot water feels so good she stays in the shower longer than she should, taking more of her turn than is fair, but it feels so freaking good to be clean, really clean, that she can’t help herself. When Effie comes out of the bathroom, Daddy is gone. Heath stays in the bathroom even longer than she did. When he comes out, his eyes are red-rimmed.

  They don’t talk about what happened. Together, without a word, they sort the goodies Daddy left, hoarding the things they know they’ll need later. At the creak of the floorboards overhead, they both look up. Heath shakes his head.

  “He won’t be back down for a while.” From next to the bed, he pulls a box Effie hadn’t noticed before. “Here.”

  “What is it?”

  Heath shakes his head. “Just open it.”

  It’s an art kit. Paper, brushes and a watercolor palette. Stunned, Effie stares at him. “What is this?”

  “I told him to bring it for you.”

  “When?” Effie asks.

  “Last night.”

  She doesn’t understand. “Why would he...?”

  “Because,” Heath says in a dull, expressionless voice, “he always brings me what I want. After.”

  “And you asked him for this, for me?” Effie, an only child, is used to getting almost everything she’s ever wanted from her parents. Christmas and birthdays were sometimes embarrassing, she got so much loot. She’s never had anyone do something like this for her, though. Never.

  Effie closes the kit’s lid. She thinks about the wealth Daddy had brought them this time. “Heath...what did you have to do?”

  In reply, he turns away, and Effie doesn’t ask again.

  chapter fifteen

  Effie hadn’t been active on LuvFinder in months, though she hadn’t hidden or deleted her profile. She simply didn’t answer the messages that pinged her inbox three and five at a time from men who obviously liked what they saw. She took a good selfie, that was all she could think when she scrolled through the “Hey” and “Hello, there” and paused occasionally to read a “Hi, Gorgeous.” She had made herself invisible for the chat function, though, so nobody would bother her in the few minutes every couple of weeks that she bothered to check in.

  She’d logged in now to show Dee how easy it was to use the site. “You can chat, like instant message, right here on the site. You can set yourself to invisible. That’s what I did. Otherwise, you’re getting pinged nonstop while you’re trying to do other stuff.”

  “Or you’re not,” Dee said ominously.

  “You’re a female. You’ll get pinged.” Effie laughed. “If there’s a green dot next to the username, that person is online. Pretty standard. And here’s where you see who they match you with, but you can also do custom searches. And here’s where you see who you’ve been chatting with, and you can keep track of your dates and rate them. Privately. They can’t see your rating and you can’t see theirs. Thank God.”
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  “Ugh, can you imagine?” Dee said. “I wouldn’t want to see my rating.”

  Effie shook her head, scrolling through her own ratings. “No, me neither... Oh.”

  Mitchell was online. Two nights ago, he’d kept her up until just after one in the morning, making her laugh. They’d planned to go out again soon, and he texted her at least every other day, though he hadn’t yet today. It hadn’t occurred to her to wonder if maybe he was still dating a lot of other women. Effie tried to think if it bothered her, the idea that she wasn’t the only woman he was pursuing. It wasn’t as if she had the right to be upset. She was glad now, though, that she’d set herself to invisible, so he couldn’t see that she was online.

  Quickly, before she could dwell, Effie logged out and pulled up a new page so Dee could start filling out her own profile. The other woman had about ten different selfies to choose from for her LuvFinder profile picture, but none of them were quite right. Effie took up her phone and started snapping, asking Dee questions to get her reactions. Snap, snap, snap.

  “There,” she said. “There’s the one.”

  She turned the phone to show Dee the shot that was going to work. Dee’s head, thrown back in laughter, her dark hair tumbling over her shoulders. It was an incredibly sexy and fun picture. With a few edits using a photo app, Effie played with the colors and smoothed some rough edges.

  “It’s not cheating. It’s enhancing,” she explained and emailed the photo from her phone so Dee could upload it to her profile.

  Dee was still hesitating before hitting the submit button that would take her profile live. “I don’t know, Effie. I’ve heard some nightmare stories.”

  “Just keep this in mind. You don’t have to go out with anyone. You’re not obligated to be nice. And if someone doesn’t return your messages, you’ve just saved yourself a whole lot of wasted time.” Effie leaned over Dee’s shoulder to study the screen. “C’mon. Do it.”

  With a sigh, Dee clicked her mouse, and within seconds, the LuvFinder site populated her “matches” section with suggestions. Giggling in much the way their daughters were doing from the other room, Effie and Dee scrolled through the possibilities. Effie saw a few names she recognized from her own suggestions list. She steered Dee away from one or two of them but recommended a few others.