Pulling Me Under

by Rebecca Berto

  I woke here before. Has it been minutes, hours, days? I must be having the same dream.

  Ella. Why has her name popped into my thoughts? Is she okay?

  Oh my God.

  It hits me. I don’t know where she is and I should know this but I don’t. Ouch. My head hurts from the image.

  My hair sticks to my skin. It literally sticks to my face. It feels as if there is an oozy substance smeared against the side of it.

  This can’t be a dream, though I’m in the same sort of confused state I would be if it was. I try thinking where I am, what has happened to get me here, but the pain in my head is screaming. It’s much too loud for me to think. I have a banshee wedged in my head.

  Something whirs beneath me.

  Another jerk. I grip onto consciousness by remembering the pain, relishing it. Because what else is there if I can’t hold onto this? The rumble around me gurgles on itself, splatters, then cuts out. The jolt sends my head up again. For a moment I lie in a motionless existence, floating through space.

  Then the crash comes.

  Ella.

  I expect the blackness before it calls for me.

  • • •

  “Out, bitch.”

  The hiss in his voice sinks the banshee, the marshmallow air, the pounding, everything I feared into my imagination. My body aches. I want to be dreaming. I can’t understand this.

  I’m not caught. I hate the darkness and now it’s taunting me with this. I can’t remember what happened between running and here because I fell, hit my head and suffered concussion.

  This doesn’t happen.

  This.

  Can’t.

  Happen.

  A stream of light floods my face as he moves to the side. I shy back.

  The night is swollen, complete in the transition from blocking out the day. So, where is the sharp light coming from? I squint my eyelids and see the floodlight against a corrugated wall.

  “I said out!” Brent roars.

  I jump. I would have launched to my feet and held a salute to my forehead but something scratchy binds me together. I’m a helpless bundle. What sick game is he up to? I’m burning like Joan of Arc, I’m drowning in anxiety like the Katie who lived months ago.

  He has tied me together.

  I can barely believe the words I’ve thought. Ella sleeping in Liam’s spare bed. Nancy calling to tell me something is wrong. These things flash in my mind.

  I try thrusting upright but my efforts translate to moans and wriggles. Brent’s face twists like a pretzel. He pulls me out by a tight pinch under the loose skin of my arm. I bite the material in my mouth. I will be quiet. He won’t hurt me if I’m quiet. My muffled scream drowns out my thoughts and all my other senses. It obviously drowns out his patience, too, because it earns me a wallop over the other side of my face.

  Reality begins to seep through. A freezing liquid filling my brain, my blood vessels, my tingling fingers. This hurts too much to be a dream. The dread cutting me open from inside, thinking about Ella, is too, too real. Nothing is appearing randomly like in dreams.

  We’re standing on a slab of concrete, surrounded by wild grass as far as my eye will focus. The sticky ooze at my temple stings as the chill in the night hits me.

  Over my shoulder, the warehouse from which the floodlight is hanging sits about two stories high with a flat, matching corrugated roof.

  My calves are the only part of me not in pain; they are loose and all fuzzy inside. Warm air circulates around them from the car. But I know the heat from the exhaust is only a temporary relief. The chills continue to crawl over my shoulders and bare arms. My red silk dress is a dull shade under the film of dirt and scuff. It’s probably maroon now.

  “I’m warning you: if you try and run, I will kill you.”

  My breath quickens. Brent produces a teethed knife from the back of his belt. It has a curved end. He drives it at my legs, even before I can process that a knife is coming toward me. I tense, my lungs are pockets of plastic.

  Oh. Oh. Oh.

  Then my ankles spring out from each other and a wad of itchy yarn falls at my feet. I sigh.

  It isn’t my time. Yet.

  I don’t get time to move in the opposite direction. He’s quick to pinch the loose skin under my arm again and drag me forward with a fistful of my own hair.

  “Where are we? What are you doing to me?” I say, audible to another ear only as wheaaa arr he? Wha arr who mng o me? I sound pathetic. As if I’m two-years-old and have a lump of food in my mouth.

  A sickness stirs in my gut. I’m thrashing against the trunk of the car but I’m standing here and I’m on a rollercoaster.

  The vomit is coming up so quickly; hot, clumpy. I try to stop him pulling me, but it’s to no avail. I need to sit and wash it away with a glass of water but they aren’t luxuries I’ll get. The sickness turns into a hot train pushing up my esophagus. I mumble to let me stop but he doesn’t so much as flinch.

  It’s too late. It bubbles up my chest, my throat. The liquid burns. Then it explodes.

  It can’t quite make it out of my mouth. Some splatters on the path in front of us, some on part of the right side of him closest to me. Some of the vomit clings to the cloth gagging me. The taste almost makes me want to heave again. By some miracle, none of the splatters make it onto my body, only on Brent, the floor and back inside my mouth. I cough the rest of it up when he rips something at the back of my head, taking a chunk of hair with him as the cloth falls slack.

  It feels like a concrete pipe passes through me. It impales me in between the point where the two halves of my ribcage form an upside down “V”. I splatter some more. It hurts to breathe this time, and again and again after that.

  “Just to remind you not to scream,” he chuckles, “in case you thought you could.”

  I hang limp as he drenches my face in water and the sheer volume forces me to gargle and spit. I swish some of the remaining liquid to freshen my mouth.

  He drags me to a wide metal door. The rows of ribbed lines disappear behind the wall, revealing a dark entrance to the warehouse. I can’t make out much besides crates of boxes. It hurts to hold my core upright. He will take me anyway.

  Another rope secures me down once we stop. I want to coil up and rock myself to sleep. It hurts to sit. At least I can rest my back against the stack behind me.

  “How pretty,” Brent says, flicking up the heart on my chest, then letting it smack against my raw skin. “This is so Liam that it makes me sick.”

  He imitates a heaving action with his mouth then walks off and flicks something as two overhead floodlights inside open up.

  Brent is pacing back and forward, snarling like a dog with lockjaw. The sound is familiar. He grunted the sound as my hands went purple under his weight and he thrust down onto my pelvis.

  At this moment, I feel Brent replacing Marco and Cooper in Tim’s bedroom that night in my memory.

  I scream. I plead more sincerely than I ever have before but Brent’s propulsions on me become stronger. I feel a rip. I empty my voice box as my ears fall deaf.

  Brent suspends mid-pace. “I said . . . shut the fuck up!”

  I remember the big, round eyes striking me like a knife’s blade. I can see his pupils clearly now. The eyes are fully dilated. It’s strange seeing the black against the white, with no humble medium separating them. I miss staring into his sky blue irises. I want my brother back. This pretend vision scares me.

  His fingers tremble. He stomps over to me. I shake against the packs behind me but the weight would easily weigh ten times what I do. Fear quickens my heartbeat, as if the blood drumming in my head could burst me free. Why is he coming? His path diverts to the side, however, and I follow his hurried footsteps with my eyes.

  He yanks
out the knife from his belt and uses it to slash open a box from a crate a few columns across from me. I don’t dare breathe too deeply.

  He pulls out a clear plastic packet filled with white powder. He slashes that too, then pushes the knife into the contents and sprinkles them onto the flat cardboard of the box next to him.

  “What’s hap—p—pening? What are you d—doing?”

  “What did I say? You speak if I tell you to.”

  “What did you do to Ella? Is she okay? Where is she?”

  Brent’s response? He rolls his eyes. This makes me sicker than if he came over and struck me. I just need to know.

  He pulls his wallet from a rear pocket and empties the contents adjacent to the powder. Money and paper fall out. He chooses a twenty-dollar note from the selection and rolls it up. My memory flicks back to movies where I’ve seen this done before.

  But then I remember seeing this. Cooper doing this with Brent after he kissed me under the monkey bars. When Brent woke up again.

  If only I found the key to this trigger earlier I’d have a clue to help me see Cooper and Marco didn’t hurt me.

  Easily, the roll angles toward the contents, providing a passage inside him. He snorts and most of it is gone. I was right; this isn’t Brent. It wasn’t Brent that night either, or me. Rather, a macho-I’m-invincible persona possessed him and rendered me senseless.

  A couple of sniffs and coughs incorporated, and he shakes his head back to life. Keen eyes. They say, I’m ready to go.

  He resumes the pacing. “Okay, okay, I’ve been rude. Let’s discuss what we both know. I’m the teacher and you can be my student. I’d like to see you grovel. Really want something from me for once.”

  I can’t speak. I have so many things to say. I need to speak to him and I can’t say anything.

  “Go!”

  The moonlight floods on him. A shadow casts across the width of the warehouse. The column figure lifts a limb. It points at me. “I said speak!”

  “I’m—I’m sorry,” I choke, a lump catching the words prematurely. “I don’t know what to do.”

  “You know the game; a question for an answer. You’re very lucky, because I’m being just so damn nice.” He picks up a chair lined in a stack near the roller door and walks it over to me. He places it near the end of my feet and swings his leg over the base. He rests his hands loosely over the backing.

  “Now, speak!” He aims the blade tip at my face, so close I can see the brushed metal.

  “Why did you hurt my daughter?”

  “Ella?”

  No shit. “Yes, your niece,” I say, for effect.

  “She’s not my niece. She’s my nothing. You’re my nothing.” He comes so close I can smell his sweat, alcohol and something else mixed into his hot breath. Can see the beginning of stubble on his chin. “See, I’ve wasted three decades trying to get you to love me and I give up, Katherine.”

  I draw back a rising sob. I want to say a thousand words at once. “It was you, all along. You knew Coop wasn’t capable of raping me because it was you.”

  “Come on now, Kates. I know you passed your high school English exam with flying colors. Your teacher wouldn’t be pleased to hear about this and neither am I. That wasn’t a question.”

  “Why, then. Why did you do it?”

  He nods, too pleased with himself. “It’s simple: Coop didn’t deserve you. I deserve you. I’ve loved you every fucking moment. He was all over you. Marco thought he deserved you too. I’ve been waiting my whole life. Then Coop took you to the side of the house after we came back from the park thinking that he was in with a chance, tried feeling underneath that sexy dress of yours. You said no, but he didn’t listen so I ripped him off, took you upstairs. You were so shaken, Kates. I made you a drink to calm you down.”

  A sickness stirs in the pit of my stomach. Not like before, no. This is real, but it isn’t. This feeling is a slow and sticky Band-Aid, ripped off hair-by-hair.

  “You were hyperventilating, you had too much attention; there wasn’t enough space to relax. I helped you. Then I tried touching you, kissing you. You didn’t understand that you wanted me as much as I wanted you, being so drunk and all, so I helped you understand. All these years of sexual tension. I was sick of waiting. You have no idea how good it felt after all those years of patiently waiting.”

  “You monster! All of this time, you were practically my big brother.”

  “Wrong kind of love. No one,” he pauses, “will ever have loved you as infinitely as I did.”

  “How could you do all this?”

  “Ah, now you’re getting the gist of the game.” Brent grins, waving the knife at me. He slides off the chair before sending it crashing against the corrugated wall. The crash reverberates through the solid concrete. He slowly turns and crouches by my side.

  “That night we caught up for coffee: I thought you had your mind set on some stupid fantasy about Cooper raping you. As if I would let him do that to you. Come on, now. But you took it too far. Didn’t Rochelle ever teach you it’s rude to read other people’s private messages? Oh yes, that slut of a friend, Nancy. Hopeless liar—”

  Unlike you.

  “Now you know I couldn’t take a chance. I hope you understand. Where’s your precious Liam now? Not here to kiss your sorry ass, I bet. What, he thinks he can just step in and claim you?”

  “He never . . . we never did—”

  “Manners now!”

  I stifle a sob, closing my eyes and picturing Ella’s soft little hand reaching out for me. Soon, darling. Soon I’ll be with you.

  “You’ll be with me again, yes?” Brent asks, sketching my jawline with the knife and scoffing when he runs it by my earrings. It stings when it clips the edge of my chin.

  “Y—yes, of course,” I agree, blurting it out too fast. I realize too late I was still thinking of Ella.

  He snorts, wiping his nose along his wrist, speaking almost too fast to comprehend. “Question time isn’t over,” he sings, dealing another blow to my gut like a homework handout.

  I go on without hesitation. I don’t know how many more blows it’ll take before I blackout again. I’ll stall until someone comes. Someone will help me. This isn’t happening. “This isn’t you, Brent. Please . . . ”

  He leans in closer, resting a tensed arm against the crate behind me. He examines me as if he were a bird, eyeing off his prey. He seems satisfied. His knife is curt against the goose bumps on the crane of my neck. “Not a question . . . ” he croons again.

  His thumb and pointer finger thrust my head back against the crate. Starting from my jaw his nose and bottom lip run up the side of my face, breathing hot air past my ear as he travels.

  Lips brushing my temple, he moans. “So . . . ” He presses his lips fully against my temple, and traces his fingers along my bust as he finishes, “So fucking sweet. Like candy.” He draws back to make sure I’m looking. “You don’t mind, do you?”

  I stay frozen until I can attempt to shake my head.

  My mind is a book and my fingers are flicking the pages two, three at a time. We need to talk, and definitely not go where he was taking this. “C—Coop. Why did you bring him to my party?”

  Brent’s icy blue eyes just hold me stiff under his glare. I’m helpless to remove myself from his scrutiny. His lips turn up after a while. He looks down to a dirt stain on my dress and along my left side, where I can feel a curl or two dancing near my eyes, falling over my dress where my strap once was.

  The look is satisfied and I’d agree with him. What the hell does he have to lose answering this question? I’m at his mercy.

  “Good bloke, that one. Too goody-two-shoes, if you ask me. He needed a drill to put together this idiotic set of drawers for Tiffany, so I said Liam had a couple. Apparently Coop’s old man stole
his power tools too. For cash.”

  Brent cracks up in laughter as if he’s told the funniest joke possible. The way his shoulders seem to naturally heave in and out as he goes on and on, how natural although irrational, tells me he’s telling the truth.

  I’d been begging for it from Coop but he’d been telling me the truth all along. Not only about why he came past Liam’s, but about his father and probably about Ella.

  I’m starting to think the document Tim ran into was a fake. No one but Cooper seems to know about the extent of Brent’s drug dealing, and I’d bet my last dollar, they’d have their own arrangements to make their extra cash—or lack thereof—look legit to passers-by.

  “Can you untie me? I won’t run, I won’t scream. We can talk. Can you do that?”

  “Wrong question.” He traces the curves of my dirty dress down to where the puffs of the skirt end, and pushes the trimming up my thigh. “Well, not that kind of talking anyway.”

  I close my eyes, picturing Liam holding me again. He tells me he loves me and he’ll never let anything bad happen to me. I know he’ll find me. He’s so darn sticky I’ll kill him myself if he doesn’t get me out of here alive. I try to repeat to myself Ella is fine, fine, fine but this will not work. My mind is telling me it’s not true and I should believe the feeling that Ella’s probably already dead. If only I listened to my gut the first time.

  I realize I don’t love Ella; it’s more. It’s never been just “love”. I can feel her now I’ve recovered from my PTSD.

  From the moment she was born I’ve been attached. I don’t love my arms; I don’t love Ella. She is me. She is my life. My chest lightens up a little and I can breathe a smidgen easier. If I’m still alive then she must be too. I can’t die because I’m afraid part of her will die too, because she is me and I’m her and she’s relying on me to be okay.