“And she’s the one who taught you how to crochet, isn’t she?”
“Yes,” I whispered. I tilted my face up to his and smiled. Then I looked off to the side, like I was replaying a memory in my mind. “When there was a breeze blowing in the evening, she liked for me to push her out onto her front porch. She loved to sit there, crocheting and waving to neighbors as they passed by. She taught me all sorts of stitches that summer.”
“Did she get better?”
My expression drifted to sadness. “No. She was taking tons of pills throughout the day to help her, but she was terminal. At the end of the summer she had to move in with my grandparents. My grandfather worked on Saturdays, and that was also when my grandmother had some sort of meeting for some club she belonged to. So I was sent to spend Saturday mornings with Aunt Celia, watching her until my grandmother got back. We sat in the living room and crocheted together. Once she got too sick to crochet, she’d tell me stories as I sat and crocheted for her. She died that winter.”
“She was your shelter in the storm.”
“Yes.”
He rubbed his hand across my shoulders as he deliberated. “All right,” he said after a moment. “Make a list of what you want me to get. There’s a craft store not too far away from where I’m headed. I’ll pick the stuff up this morning.”
I gave him a huge smile as I reached around him. I hugged and squealed at the same time. “Thank you!”
“I can be quite reasonable when you open up and talk to me, Mia.”
I nodded solemnly at him. Pfft. You mean when I close myself off and lie to you. I couldn’t believe I had pulled it off. And I really couldn’t believe that he hadn’t tried to argue with me and turn my story into a horrible experience instead of an enjoyable one. I guess the memory of a dead woman didn’t hold any threat for him. It’s not like he could think that I’d want to leave him in order to get back to her. Plus, I think a part of him hadn’t wanted to rock the boat anymore than I did. While I did think that a part of him had enjoyed torturing me, I also thought he enjoyed having someone cook, clean, and provide sex for him even more.
“Your dad’s friend that taught you to paint and gave you the summer job, he’s someone you equate with Celia, isn’t he?”
Shit, I thought our conversation was done. “Yes. He’s someone else who taught me things without berating me for not being perfect.”
“Is painting all he taught you?”
“Yeah, pretty much.” Where was he heading with this?
He became very still. “Pretty much? Did he teach you anything that maybe, as your father’s friend, he shouldn’t have been teaching you?”
Ah, light dawned. I stiffened in his arms and shook my head as much as my position would allow, “No. It wasn’t him.”
“Then who was it?”
Double shit. Let’s just say that Asshole hadn’t been… pleased, to find out that I wasn’t a virgin the first time he’d forced himself on me. He had tried to get me to give him the name of who had gotten to me first, but I’d refused. There was a night he’d even tried to beat it out of me. That’s when I’d gotten a bit rebellious and started listing all the names of the bullies and drug dealers in my high school. My fear had been that he would return to my hometown and make my boyfriend disappear. So I’d started listing the names of all the boys who deserved to disappear. But Asshole hadn’t enjoyed the idea that there had been more than one and that’s when he decided to knock me unconscious.
I couldn’t give him Jared’s name. I literally feared for his life. So, as I always did, I made it sound like it had been a horrible part of my past. “I don’t want to talk about him,” I whispered.
“Mia,” he said on a sigh, “I have a right to know who your first was.”
Since the tears had worked so well the first time, I let them begin to flow again. “No. Please don’t make me stir all that up! I don’t want to talk about him! Please?!”
He tightened his hold and shushed me. “All right, all right. We’ll just lump him in with the vast majority of your family.”
I made my muscles relax against him and I shivered with a sudden chill, “Yes, please, thank you.”
“I didn’t realize your relationship with the guy was as bad as your relationship with your parents.”
“My memories of him are better left buried, please. He wasn’t what you are to me. And I had no idea that someone like you would be coming into my life. Can we not just leave it at that?”
“Yes, of course.” He kissed the top of my head and gave me one last squeeze. “All right, enough of this. Quick, make up that list for me and I’ll go to the stores and be back in about an hour, hour and a half.”
I sat up and stretched over him to pick up the notepad and pen he kept on his side of the bed. “Hmm,” I jotted everything that I could think of to get me started on the first afghan. I’d remained stretched out across him as I wrote, hoping that my actions would further distance his mind from the previous topic. A moment later I put the pad and pen back, shifted, and handed him the list.
He smiled with amusement over my little antic, grabbed the note with one hand and my ass with his other, then he stretched up and kissed me as he rolled the two of us over. He smiled when he pulled away and got up, “I’ll be back.”
“See you later,” I called out as he left the room.
A moment later, I heard the front door shut. I remained in the same position until I heard the car engine start and his tires pull out of the driveway. That’s when I finally breathed a sigh of relief and sat up on the bed.
I hated when he asked me about my boyfriend. I didn’t like to think about Jared very much, mainly because I didn’t want to think about what he might be doing now. He was probably dating someone else, being Mr. Wonderful for her now. My parents had told me that I probably wouldn’t end up marrying my high school sweetheart, but I had never actually believed them. Now I did. I’d been trying to let him go in my mind, but memories of Jared sometimes felt like the warmest, coziest things I could think about.
But those memories were mine, and Asshole wasn’t going to mess with them. I could have made up some stories for Asshole’s benefit, but that had felt like it would belittle what Jared and I had shared. It was easier just to let him think whatever he wanted, whatever made him feel better about himself. Telling him the truth was absolutely out of the question. Because, as with everything else, the truth wasn’t what he wanted to hear and was therefore unacceptable to him.
I got up and readied myself for the day. Then I went downstairs to put together a brunch for the two of us.
There was no Aunt Celia. I’d learned to cook by watching my mother, grandmother, and two aunts cook in the trailer by the river a few miles downstream from here. The cleaning was all my grandmother, she was a stay-at-home wife who couldn’t sit still. She’d cooked, cleaned, and babysat young grandchildren all the time. The crocheting had been my mom and both of my grandmothers’ doing.
You know, all my life my parents had tried to instill honesty in me. I’d never needed to sneak around, doing stuff behind people’s backs. I’d never had to, I was a good kid, and I’d been allowed to pretty much do whatever I’d wanted.
Ultimately, that’s what had done me in the first time I had tried to escape. I hadn’t been deceitful enough. All I’d done for the past year is lie. And the more I did it, the better I got at it. It was one more piece of my personality that had been altered because of this mess I was in, and was therefore one more reason to wonder if my friends and family would still love me as much when I got back to them.
I did find a small victory over the exchange Asshole and I had shared. It seemed as though I had perfected the gesture of the hand raise. Holding my hand up to him had started as a defensive move, offering me an opportunity to, hopefully, fend him off and recant my statement. Over time, it had unconsciously become a sign of ‘hold your horses and hear me out before you freak’. Now it had become my sign for ‘relax and chill dude, I’m
not about to set you off’.
Suddenly it dawned on me that it was a gesture of power. He respected my raised hand, just like I respected his cocked eyebrow. It seemed as though I was slowly developing a way to counter him, to be heard. True, I had to play his game, on his terms, to do it. But I was making more and more progress towards him trusting me.
And the whole thing about being allowed to crochet was a power play on my part, too. I had wanted to know if he would just continue to storm right over anything I said, or if he was truly sticking to his idea of a clean beginning. I had been trying to figure out exactly how much leeway he was now willing to give me in letting me become a person again. Besides, I did need something to do to help pass the time.
That afternoon found me sitting on the porch swing, totally engrossed with trying to remember how the pattern went for the afghan I wanted to make. I was trying to work from memory, and that caused me quite a few frustrated moments of having to rip out stitches that I’d just got done hooking.
Asshole was standing at the end of the pier, repeatedly stabbing a worm with a fish hook. His trip to the store had been about obtaining a fishing pole, a stocked tackle box, a filet knife, and some fresh bait. - The bait he had purchased at the convenience had, to his horror, died in the fridge.
He’d offered to let me go sit at the end of the dock with him, but I really didn’t want to catch a flying hook in my scalp, thank you. I’d been around plenty of beginning fishers and plenty of kids trying to fish, as well. It could be a dangerous thing to stand too close. Hooks ended up tangled in hair, buried in the wood of the dock, or in the flesh of innocent bystanders, as people tried to master the art of casting. I had assured him that while I appreciated his offer, I really thought I’d be more comfortable sitting in on the porch.
I kept stealing glances at him, to see how he was making out. How much focus could it possibly take to put a worm on a hook? Mr. I-Must-Be-Pristinely-Clean-At-All-Times had great difficulty in picking a wiggly worm out of the Styrofoam cup filled with dirt. Now I was feeling sorry for the poor worm that was unfortunate enough to be Asshole’s first victim. He must have stuck the thing at least ten times.
My God, if he was mutilating the worm, what the hell was the first fish he attempted to filet going to end up looking like?
I kept double crocheting as he kept stabbing. He was finally satisfied with his hook placement and shifted his concentration onto casting. The man really did have coordination when it came to many things, but not with this. I almost shook my head as I watched, but caught myself. I didn’t want him to see me out of his peripheral vision.
He kept swishing the pole through the air, like he was going to cast, but then he didn’t release the line until the pole reached the end of the arc. So the line just ended up plopping down into the water, right at the end of the dock. Over and over again I watched this go on.
I could have gone down there and offered to teach him, but he did so enjoy thinking he knew more about everything than I ever could. Who was I to take that pleasure away from him? Besides, he might just succeed in catching himself with the hook. I certainly wouldn’t want to interfere with anything that might cause him pain. Not only all of that, but if I let on that I knew how to fish, he’d only ask me where I had learned it. And then I’d have to make up yet another story for him.
He’d finally decided to alter his tactic and had begun to release the line sooner, much sooner. Yep, it was hook flying time. I definitely would have caught one in the head if I were sitting down there. Have you ever seen someone catch a hook in their face? I have, it’s not pretty. I had to divert my attention once he hooked the tackle box, or I would have burst out laughing.
That’s when I saw the boat. There still hadn’t been too many boats out on the water yet, but those who liked to get a jumpstart on the season were slowly starting to appear. And the particular boat that was approaching now was definitely one from the marina. The boat was easily recognizable, it’s not like there were very many orange boats around. Orange, open bowed, with white seat covers, everyone called it ‘The Pumpkin’. The driver didn’t have to get close enough for me to see him in order for me to know that old Pat was navigating.
Pat wasn’t really looking at anything on shore. His attention was focused solely on the water. Ugh!
This had to be the perfect example of the definition of frustration.
Please look, please look, please look, I mentally begged. Please, Pat, please! I want you to see me.
I wanted to jump up and down. I wanted to scream and wave. But when you’re out there on a boat, you don’t hear anything or anyone on shore over the sound of the motor. He was only going to see me if he looked. And he was almost going to have to be looking for me specifically, in order to recognize me on the porch, because of the distance.
When I had first spotted him, my breath had caught because I was so excited. I really had thought that he was here, out riding around, because he was looking for me. How very egotistical.
I have to admit, as I sat there looking at him, I was pissed. Pissed at him, and pissed at myself. The truth was that he was probably doing what all boat owners did at the beginning of the season. He was taking his boat out on a test run to make sure everything still worked and ran properly after sitting in dry dock all winter. He was focused on himself and his task. And I had to remind myself that he had every right and obligation to do so.
I’d been so busy trying to will Pat to look at me with my hidden stare, head down and eyes looking out over the top of my sunglasses, that I had stopped watching Mr. I’m-Suddenly-A-Fisherman. At least, that was, until he screamed.
“Aaaaaaaaaah!”
And it had been such a high-pitched, girly sounding scream, too.
I jumped up and raced to the corner of the porch that was closest to the pier. The sight would have made my heart pound… if Asshole could have found it in himself to stop screaming like a little girl. It ended up looking almost funny. I say ‘almost’ because of what was now hooked onto the end of his pole.
He had somehow managed to catch a water moccasin. How the hell had he managed to do that?
I had never before seen Asshole lose his composure so completely. Now to be fair, I couldn’t blame him. I’d have been screaming like a girl, too. Water moccasins were aggressive, poisonous snakes. And this one was enraged.
Asshole kept flinging the pole around, like he was going to shake the snake off. The snake had twisted itself around the line and was probably somehow hooked. And it was now darting its head back and forth, snapping at him.
“Oh, please bite him,” I whispered. “Please, please, please, please!” I was almost squealing under my breath. If he got bit, I was out of here. Asshole could writhe on the pier, or fall into the water, for all I cared. My plan was to run into the house, grab his keys, and take off for the police station with his car. I could always yell out to him that I was going for help.
I quickly glanced at the water to see where Pat was throughout this whole mess. Apparently he was close enough to the end of the pier, and the scream had been loud enough, for Pat’s attention to be captured. I saw him standing up at the wheel, watching the fishing fiasco. “THROW THE POLE INTO THE WATER!” Pat yelled.
No! Don’t help him out! I turned to look back at Asshole, Don’t freaking listen to him!
“THROW THE POLE!” Pat yelled again as his boat got closer.
No! Get bit, get bit. For God’s sake, get bit!
“WHAT?!” Asshole yelled as he continued to thrash the pole around.
Bite him, you freaking snake, bite him! I had a white-knuckled grip on the banister and was up on my tippy-toes, watching this mess play out.
Pat cupped his hands around his mouth. “THE POLE! THROW THE POLE INTO THE WATER!” he all but screamed.
No! Shut up, you old son of a bitch!
Asshole spun himself in a circle and threw the pole as far out over the water as he could. And the damned snake went with it.
Sh
it!
“YOU ALL RIGHT, BUDDY?” Pat called out.
“YEAH, THANKS,” Asshole called back.
And Pat cruised on by, never having looked around to spot me. Double shit.
Seriously? ‘Buddy’? Hadn’t my story been passed around yet? Hadn’t the police told my parents? Surely they would have called around to the people that they knew who started going down to the marina early. Hadn’t they all emailed Asshole’s picture around by now? Come the freak on!
Asshole was walking back up the pier, shaking himself like he had the willies along the way. It was almost as if he could feel the snake slithering around on his body.
I just stood there, watching him make his way along the wooden planks, glaring at him from behind my black sunglasses.
He walked across the grass and up the porch stairs. He paused at the top of the steps and stared straight ahead, not bothering to look at me, “Do. Not. Laugh.” He then kept on walking, going inside and on up to the bedroom.
No. Freaking. Problem.
I turned back towards the water, bent to rest my forehead on the banister, and folded my hands on the back of my neck. Who the hell felt like laughing after that? All I really wanted to do was cry.
Chapter Nine
Boat Trip
Spring blossoms had given way to early summer blooms. More and more boats were beginning to fill the waters. The booze cruise sightings were underway. And I was willing to bet that by now, I had officially missed my high school graduation.
I had waited for the police to come storm the castle. I had hoped that a couple officers would go knocking door-to-door down this road. What I wouldn’t have given for that cop to appear on the doorstep, me open the door for him, and let him drive me to safety. But it never happened.
Lulling the Kidnapper Page 10
