Katarina

by Alona Jarden

"Well, that will be a problem. The results are stored in a bank vault as part of my will, and you can only access it with my escort."

  "They won’t open the safe for me? Even with your signed power of attorney?"

  "That was my instructions to them, but maybe you can pull out the results with a police warrant directly from the laboratory where it was taken?" I helped the young lawyer understand the steps he had to take and he agreed to them.

  On his advice, I didn’t reveal the whole truth to the police. My lawyer went out to find the lab results and I was returned to the surveilled interrogation room.

  I hoped that I would be able to explain to Kate what my motives were for such an unclear decision when she came back to me.

  Having no choice, I stared at my reflection in front of me in the mirror and went back to the memory of the day the most perfect thing I had ever done, came home from the hospital.

  "Well, what do you say?" Her mother, the most beautiful woman alive, whispered to me, "What do you say about the perfect creature we brought together into the world?"

  "I'm amazed at her, my beauty." I kissed her on her cheek. "I'm amazed at you for the gift you brought me."

  "This is my gift for the both of us." She smiled and looked up at the little baby who was sleeping comfortably in her cradle.

  It was the first time I had really looked at her. She was only a few days old at the time and had already captivated me. I knew I would spend the rest of my life trying to make her and her mother happy, but I also knew that our love wouldn’t always be enough.

  "My love, I have something important to tell you and I know you will be disappointed to hear it."

  "Now, when I see my daughter sleeping with my own eyes, I cannot be disappointed anymore," I replied without looking at her. I just went on scanning my daughter's beautiful features and fell more and more in love with her.

  "We're going to call her Katarina." I turned to her in astonishment, feeling so insulted.

  "No, we're not."

  "I'm sorry, but that's what we decided."

  "We who? We talked about it and we agreed to call her Kate."

  "We talked, my love, but things change."

  "What do you mean, 'things change'? Who changes things for us? Who has the right to do so except for us two? This is my daughter and yours!" I raised my voice and my daughter's weak sobbing made it clear that I had made a mistake in doing so.

  "This is our daughter. She will always be that, but I am sorry to insist that her name will be Katarina."

  "Her name will be Kate."

  "No. She will be called Katarina." Her eyes expressed the difficulty she experienced in our conversation.

  "Over my dead body." I turned my back to her and walked out demonstratively.

  My daughter had not been called Kate, but it also hadn’t happened over my dead body. Only five and a half years after she was born, I managed to make things right and called her by the name that was always intended for her. The name my love and I had chosen for her, but all this wasn’t supposed to be revealed to anyone else.

  What I shared with my lawyer should have been enough for the police to know that Kate was, and remained, my biological daughter. It should have been enough to make it clear that if the false adoption papers had made me the chief suspect in her kidnapping, they would have to quickly re-route their searches, and I hoped they would.

  It should have been enough, and I saw no reason to share any more truths with them at that point in time.

  Chapter 23

  Andrew

  I closed my eyes as my hands slid along the curve of her body. I guess that’s how I was used to touching her. In my dreams, with my eyes shut.

  I breathed heavily and prayed to God she wouldn’t ask me to stop, as I hadn’t thought I would be able to do that. The touch of her soft skin felt just as I had imagined it, and my fingers wandered from one spot to another, memorizing her as if I would never experience serenity again.

  "I never really believed I'd find you, Kate," I mumbled out breathlessly as my lips lightly parted from hers for a moment. I was amazed at how, even though I had kissed her before, the contact between our bodies felt as if it occurred for the first time.

  "And I can’t believe that I…" She didn’t finish her sentence and a sensual moan she'd let loose too close to my ear distracted my thoughts.

  I buried the words I had formulated and punctuated so deep inside me years ago. I stifled the need to tell her how meaningful that kiss was for me and allowed myself to do the last thing I thought was right for us.

  My lips traveled south on her soft, addictive body. To her cheek, to her chin, to her neck… All the places I had done my best to avoid until that moment. I slid a long tongue along her silky neck, then covered it with little pecks before placing my lips close to her collarbones.

  She wore one of the large T-shirts I had bought for her, but I hadn’t chosen them in the department store with the intention of crossing their boundaries easily in mind. Although, I was very glad I could.

  "Hmm..." She loosened her muscles as she lay beneath me on the sofa and turned her eyes toward me, causing my heart to skip a beat.

  I focused my gaze on her. All of her.

  Inch by inch, I scanned the girl who had disappeared from my life with shrieks of grief. The girl who had now come back to me and was kind enough to lend me her ear, rather than thrusting her foot deep into my ass.

  She spread her legs or, maybe, they parted of their own free will, and I placed my body above her. I still couldn’t believe that I was the one who was leaning over her when, in fact, I knew perfectly well how devastating our actions were to the part of the process she still had to go through.

  Every kiss we shared was bound to cause tremendous damage to what little progress we had already made, and would put my plan's continuation in doubt. But I didn’t find the strength to stop, or even slow down.

  I had consulted with so many experts when I designed the steps for her. Of course, I hadn’t shared with them the main motive for my questions. I spoke under the false pretense that it was all research for my thesis, an excuse that allowed me to summon up the greatest experts in hostage psychology. One thing had kept coming up while talking with each and every one of them. One rule that I swore would be unbreakable during my two week plan.

  "When referring to male abductees, creating a romantic connection can help in building trust between the female abductor and the male abductee," Professor Nihan, head of the Department of Kidnapping Research at the University of Michigan, explained. He continued almost immediately, with, "However, with regards to female abductees, there will always be a vivid fear that the abduction will deteriorate into rape."

  "Always? Will there never be cases where the abductee understands that sexual assault is not on the table?"

  "I don’t believe so," he shook his head. "For women, rape is always a real danger, Mr. Costa." He looked very determined as he went on, "A woman will always suspect that the man sitting in front of her wants to touch her, certainly if she sits there against her will."

  "So, a romantic relationship that develops in captivity is...?"

  "Is the beginning of the end for the trust between the kidnapper and the kidnappee."

  "And you claim that this will always be the case?" I hoped he would leave room for me to maneuver.

  "Always," he emphasized the word, thus defining the first rule I would set for Katarina's abduction.

  I’d decided that as long as she remained a prisoner in my custody, I wouldn’t dare to allow a romantic relationship to develop between us so that, hopefully, after the truth was revealed, the situation could change.

  Yet, there I was. My head whirled as her fingers fit between my hair and my tongue danced happily around her little navel. She tensed and released her stomach muscles and the path of pleasure along which I had marched slowly began to reach the point of no return.

  "Wait a minute... Kate... Kate... I think we're making a mistake," I blew ou
t in frustration as I played gently with the rubber strap of her pants.

  "Don’t tell me that you just came to this understanding." She didn’t seem to share my level of frustration, even though she obviously shared the same opinion of our actions, and pushed her sensual body closer to mine.

  "I'm serious, Kate. I think we should stop now." I looked up and immediately found her gaze looking down at me.

  "Are you kidding me? What kind of a fucking sick game are you playing, Andrew?"

  "I'm not playing any game." I pushed myself up so I could sit beside her and quickly went on to explain myself. "I'm clearly attracted to you, but you keep making me lose control of myself."

  "I have news for you," she stood abruptly to her feet, adjusting her clothes with quick, smoothing actions while trying not to look directly at me. "It looks like you're not losing anything. If anyone is losing something, it's me. I seem to be losing my standards. But don’t you worry about yourself. Unlike me, it seems you're in total control."

  "Kate, please understand that…"

  "Oh, I understand just fine," she waved her palms at me. "This is probably just another part of your stupid plan, Andrew. Thank you very much. Thanks for making me feel even dumber than I did before."

  "Wait, no. I swear it's not!"

  "First you kidnap me, then you tie me up, then you intrigue me with partial details and only then do you let me go. Now what? Is this the sick stage where you trick me into sleeping with you, hoping to make me fall in love with you?"

  "No, Kate." I was so sorry I had let any of this happen. "That's the last thing I want to do." I wondered what the hell I could say to fix the mess I was in.

  "Are you regretting me again? Am I, once again, the last thing you want to do?"

  "Kate, you're twisting my words."

  "News flash, psycho. The tables have turned. Now I'm the one who's sorry. I'm sorry I forced myself on you!"

  "Stop doing that! Of course I want to sleep with you! I mean… That's not what I… It's just that…" I swallowed hard. "I don’t want to hurt you or to make you think that…"

  "Stop," she waved her hand in front of me, telling me to shut up, and demanded the right to the last word. "This stupid game between us ends today. It ends now. Right now. From this second on, I'll decide what to do and when. Me and only me!"

  "So I guess you're going to go now?" The pounding of my heart grew stronger.

  "I don’t give a fuck what you do or guess, Andrew. From now on, I decide what I do."

  "And what are you going to do?" I asked tensely.

  "I'm going to tell you that this was a mistake." She gestured with her finger at me and then at herself. "A mistake I will never make again!"

  A moment later, the slamming of the door to the room in which she was staying made it clear how angry and hurt she was. I hadn’t needed a master's degree in psychology to understand what I had done to deserve that. I’d written a whole thesis about it, and in each of its many pages I’d detailed how a romantic relationship between us would be a turning point to the worst. So, I left her alone, hoping with all my heart we could find our way back from this crisis.

  Night fell on our fourth day in the cabin and, because she was so mad at me, once again, I gave up on the guided imagery session I’d had planned. A session that was supposed to remind her of her mother.

  I quietly stepped into the kitchen, climbed silently onto the counter, stretched a long arm over the kitchen cabinets, and pulled out from behind the wall of tin cans I’d placed there, the shoebox.

  "Goal for the first day: to see her response to the sound of her real name and make sure she knows that I don’t mean her any harm."

  I reread the goals I had set for myself before I set out on this adventure and tried to see how I could minimize the damage I had done, re-planning my steps again.

  "Goal for the second day: to provoke Katarina and make her wonder about things she took for granted.

  Added goal: to make her feel that I wasn’t interested in her in a sexual way."

  I blew out in frustration as I accepted that I had already achieved my added goal for the second day of her abduction, only to throw away its results at the end of the fourth day with a lusty loss of control.

  I went back to the sofa in the living room, placed the shoebox on the table in front of me and spent a few minutes digging through the fragments of memories I had collected over the years. I took out the picture of her in her mother's arms, taken on her first day of kindergarten.

  I couldn’t help but look more closely at her mother's beautiful features and was astonished by the resemblance they shared.

  I was too young to know her mother well, but as an adult, I learned, from the smile that was complementing her face, how full of pride and happiness she was. A smile that didn’t, in any way, hint that her life would be brutally cut off within a few weeks after that photograph was taken.

  After a painful trip down memory lane, I took out the plastic bag I'd avoided looking at for all these years.

  A police caption was affixed to the front of it, indicating that it was a certified copy of evidence, and I took a deep breath, knowing the horrors that waited for me in its contents.

  The images that had bothered her sleep for years were the same ones that had been waiting for me when I dared to go downstairs and look for her all those years ago, but I was too late.

  She’d called for me, and I hadn’t come. She’d called my name and had asked me to save her, but I froze and, when I finally came to my senses, she had been gone.

  I slowly opened the plastic bag and pulled out the first picture. Within seconds, that dreadful day came back to me, more vivid than ever before.

  "No! I don’t wanna! I don’t want to go! Andrew! Andrew, save me!" I heard Katarina shouting from downstairs.

  She had gone down there after we both heard her parents shouting in a very strange way. She wanted to know what the meaning of the noises we heard was. She told me to wait, and then never came back.

  "Katarina?" I gathered the nerve to stick my head out of her bedroom and called for her aloud, but there was no one there to answer.

  It was only after everything around me was completely silent that I descended one step at a time until I reached the entrance floor.

  The door to the house was wide open and I quickly closed it, recalling so very well how Katarina's father got angry with us every time we left it like that.

  "Katarina?" I prayed she would answer me as I went into the living room, but she wasn’t there. No one and nothing was there but complete and utter silence.

  Dead silence…or, maybe, just death.

  "Police department, what is your emergency?"

  "Um..." I wondered how I could describe the emergency and if it was even correct to call it mine. "My best friend's parents are dead."

  "What do you mean 'dead', cutie?" the dispatcher changed her tone of speech. "Where are you now?"

  "I'm at Katarina's house. She's my neighbor."

  "And you think that her parents are dead?"

  "Yes."

  "Why do you think that, honey?"

  "I see them. They have blood coming out of their bodies and they're not moving at all."

  "Can you give me your address?" she asked, then continued after she said that a police car was on its way to me, "Can you tell me exactly what you see around you?"

  "Blood, there's a lot of blood here."

  "Are there any other adults around you? Can you see someone who can help?"

  "There are adults, but I told you, they are all dead already."

  "And Katarina? Where's your friend?"

  "I don’t know," I replied, looking around with a heavy heart.

  The dispatcher stayed on the line and talked to me until the police broke through the front door, which I made sure to lock properly. Later on, as I grew up and learned the philosophy of an initial response to those suffering from such trauma, I realized that she had tried to distract me from the situation I was
in. But, as a child, I remember being surprised that she was interested in my various hobbies. Still, I answered her questions while staring into the horror that laid before me.

  Even after long hours, during which the police tried to figure out who was responsible for the massacre in Katarina's kitchen, I couldn’t supply them a sufficient answer. I hadn’t seen the face of the man who’d taken her from me.

  The police officer called my parents to take me home and, from that night on, whenever silence surrounded me, I kept hearing Katarina, asking me to save her and froze over and over.

  I failed to fulfill her request back then, but vowed to do so, one day, in the future.

  I suddenly felt the need to make her look at herself in her mother's arms. I took the picture out of the shoebox again, got up from the sofa, and paced, determinedly, to her room. The difficulty she experienced wasn’t going to fade away, and I decided not to let it hold me back from doing what I knew would be right for her.

  I adjusted the rhythm of my knocks on her door to the rhythm of my fearful, beating heart and swallowed hard.

  "Kate?" I waited for her to answer and went on when she never did. "I'm coming in, Kate," I announced my intentions without asking for permission and slowly opened the door.

  "It seems that I no longer need your God damn sessions, psycho." She looked at me with fierce, red eyes. It was clear she had been crying. "Whether it was a mistake or not, you pushed me onto a path and you need to accompany me to its end."

  "That's why I'm here, Kate. I came in because I wanted to ask you if you would be willing to..."

  "No," she interrupted me, waving an unbelievably accurate drawing of her beautiful mother around. "You're done asking me questions, Andrew. I'm the one who's asking you." She blinked and a lonely tear found its way down from her eyes, crashing onto the bed. "Tell me, Andrew. Tell me who my mother was."

  Chapter 24

  Kate

  He stood there for a few seconds, looking at me as if he was stunned. I didn’t know whether it was my lack of cooperation that caused him to be so shocked or my ability to remember my mother's face, without him even giving me the slightest guidance to do so.