Drawn Into Darkness

by Nancy Springer

  “Eat,” Justin whispered so softly I could barely hear him.

  “Can’t,” I whispered back.

  “Drink?” he asked. “Milk?”

  I knew I should try to stay strong and hydrated. “Okay.”

  He slipped one hand under my head and lifted it in the cradle of his elbow. With the other hand he guided a glass to my mouth, tilting it until I tasted milk. I sipped a few swallows of it, then pulled away.

  He took the hint, laying my head back on the mattress. “How about some more cereal?”

  “No, thanks.”

  As if I might change my mind in a few moments, he stayed where he was.

  “Go back to bed,” I whispered, “before that pervert wakes up and wonders where you are. He makes you sleep with him, doesn’t he?”

  Justin might have nodded, but I couldn’t tell. I felt his body sag heavy on the mattress, saw him, or the dark shape that was him, curl up and slump over.

  “Better go,” I breathed.

  Without a good-bye he got up and left me.

  I looked up into darkness and tears ran down across my temples and trickled into my ears. My stomach hurt, trying to process food amid bile and stress, but that wasn’t the cause of my tears. Nothing Stoat could do to me would ever make me weep; I promised myself that. I had a great deal of useless pride, even after the divorce had flattened me. Especially then. But Justin and a few Frosted Flakes made me want to bawl like a baby.

  I shied away from thinking the word “kindness.” It was treacherous. Even Stoat could be kind.

  He demonstrated that in the morning. Striding into my room—my prison—he said, “Hey, there,” just like a truly nice guy, pulled the gag out of my mouth, and asked without a hint of sarcasm, “Did you sleep well?”

  His gently smiling face astonished me so much that instead of glaring at him, I gawked.

  “You ain’t speaking to me?” His smile waxed even more saintly. “I can understand that. Come on and use the bathroom.” He released my feet first, and I could have kicked him in the head, but I just stared. After he released my hands, he did draw his omnipresent handgun from his waistband as I struggled to get up from the bed, but he stood back and gave me all the time in the world to get my stiffened body up and walking.

  Oddly, his unexpected patience made me more afraid of him, not less. In the bathroom, even after I had pulled my pants back up, I still felt trembly all over. I took my time washing my hands and trying to finger-comb my hair, at which point I realized I had somehow become reluctant to look at myself in the mirror. I could not meet my own eyes.

  I could not bear to see my own terror, I told myself. But then I realized I was rationalizing what was really—shame? Of all the stupid—what did I have to be ashamed of? I had done nothing to be ashamed of.

  Yet facing the mirror and the look in my own eyes forced me to acknowledge damage beneath the skin. Physically, Stoat had not hurt me much—yet—but already I had been crippled. Stoat was in the process of diminishing my selfhood, taking away my spirit, reducing me to a joyless middle-aged child who was dependent upon him for life itself.

  This was not good. He must not see it in me.

  I stood in front of the mirror and stared at myself straight in the eye until I had to lift my chin and grin.

  From right outside the doorway Stoat demanded, “What the hell is taking you so long?”

  I let go of the grin but tried to keep my chin up as I went out to face him.

  “Feeling better?” he asked viciously. Yet his gun barrel motioned me not back toward the bed but in another direction, and I found myself entering a small kitchen that seemed a lot like the rest of the house, everything orderly, everything impeccable, everything cheap and without character. “Have a seat,” he said as we approached the generic tube-legged table topped with scrub-worn Formica. “I always say the key to a good day is a proper breakfast.”

  Good day?

  Again he seemed absurdly serious. Justin, manning the stove, served up toast, fried Spam, and scrambled eggs without letting me meet his eyes.

  “Eat up, Lee Anna. Enjoy it,” said Stoat sincerely, almost compassionately, laying his revolver on the corner of the table beside him. Well out of my reach.

  Because I wanted to stay on the tube-legs-and-plastic-seat chair, as opposed to the much more formidable bed, I did manage to eat. Slowly, but Stoat seemed all patience and goodwill this morning.

  “Justin, you gotta stay home from school today, boy. One look at your face, people will be asking who pissed on your Cheerios.”

  School? Right, it was Monday, but—but normally Justin went to school? Why hadn’t he told a teacher he was abducted? Why hadn’t he contacted his parents?

  Justin looked at Stoat and whispered, “You gotta go to work?” as if he was scared of being left home alone with me.

  “Yes, boy, I gotta go to work because it’s spring break down in Panama City, the T-shirts are flying off the shelves, and if I don’t show, my ass is grass and my boss is the lawn mower.” He grinned at his own trashy wit. Justin tried for a smile, appearing anxious to please, but Stoat leaned back, crossed his arms, and studied the boy. Then, to my unpleasant surprise, he turned to me.

  He stared straight into my eyes, and my pride made me stare straight back at him even though there was nothing to see in there. He challenged me. “You think I’m lower than a snake’s asshole, don’t you?”

  I couldn’t truthfully say no, and I didn’t feel safe saying yes, so I said, “You seem hollow.”

  “Huh. Well, maybe that’s from spending nearly my whole life not able to be what I am. Ever since I was a teenager, I knew I wanted to do it with little boys, but I stayed celibate for my parents’ sake till they passed away. Justin, here, he was just a cute little brat when I grabbed him. I thought he was eight or nine years old. How was I supposed to know he was a late bloomer? My mistake he only stayed prime a few months before he shot up on me, and now look at him. But it’s not his fault I’m fixing to get me a replacement. See, I like to think straight about things, Miss Lee Anna. You being here and putting us all in this predicament is nobody’s fault—it just happened and we got to deal with it. Now, I don’t believe in no heaven or no hell or any of that afterlife crap, so I intend to get what pleasure I can out of the rest of my life. Do you understand?”

  Did I understand? Hell, no, he was a pedophile. And things were looking all too much like the rest of his life took precedence over the rest of my life, but I couldn’t say that, because talking about it might make it too true too soon. I was having a lot of trouble coming up with an answer.

  “Didn’t you hear a word I said? Are you stupid?” Jeez, one silent moment and he’d flipped from chatty nice guy to threatening psycho.

  “As you said, you’re a thinker,” I replied as calmly as I could. “You’re way ahead of me. I need time to consider your point of view.”

  “Huh.” He seemed somewhat mollified. “Well, you’re gonna have all day.” He picked up his pistol. “Back to bed with you, Miss Lee Anna.”

  FOUR

  My request for a blanket had been denied. “What for? It ain’t cold.” Maybe Stoat was afraid I knew some kind of Houdini escape I could perform under cover of a blanket. Maybe he enjoyed making me lie there for hours on end, physically and emotionally uncomfortable with my legs immodestly spread. Maybe he just didn’t want to be bothered.

  Hell, he didn’t matter. Justin mattered.

  Staring at the ceiling again and feeling the age lines in my face deepen, I tried to think how best to approach Justin. Wanting to rescue him was just fine, but I couldn’t do it until I’d rescued myself, which probably meant talking him into helping me. But in my experience, most teenage boys would rather sit on a fire ant hill than talk with a motherly woman.

  I could hear Justin doing chores. First the breakfast dishes, judging by the sound of running water and the clatter of plates, and then—whump of pillows being plumped—making the bed he shared with “Uncle Steve,
” a thought that made me feel sick. Don’t go there, I told myself; the anthill syndrome went double in regard to talking about personal things. If I ever got to talk to Justin at all. What would be the best way to lure him into my room and get him talking? I could start fussing through my gag—

  Justin walked in, sat down on the side of my bed, pulled the gag out of my mouth, and slipped it down beneath my chin. “How are you doing?” he asked. “Can I get you anything?”

  So much for fire ant hills and most teenage boys. My mouth and throat felt strangely dry. “Um, I’m okay,” I managed to croak.

  Justin nodded. “I know it’s not real comfortable. Uncle Steve kept me tied to this same bed for the first month.”

  The first month!

  “He would come home in the middle of the day to check on me,” Justin added. “He told his boss he was taking care of a sick dog. He’s not a bad guy, really.”

  What? If Stoat wasn’t a bad guy, then would somebody please define—

  But I didn’t say that. I felt eggshells under my verbal feet. One false step, one wrong word, and I’d lose Justin. Even clearing my dry throat would be a bad idea at this point.

  In the lightest tone I could possibly manage, I asked, “How do you figure that?”

  “Well, he lets me watch NASCAR. He brings me stuff I like to eat, like Oreos—he doesn’t care about them, but he gets them for me. And the brand of cereal I like, and—and clothes and stuff. Last year he even got me a Christmas present. A PlayStation.”

  I wanted to scream or laugh or cry—he sounded so ludicrous, thankful for Oreos and a PlayStation while Stoat the insult to goats kept him as a sex slave. Needing time to contain my outrage and prompted by my raspy throat, I asked, “Could I have a glass of water?”

  “Sure.” Justin headed toward the kitchen. As soon as he had left the room, I aimed a silent, primal scream at the ceiling, then tried to think. I knew I would get nowhere unless I figured out Justin’s point of view. Which wasn’t easy. Why was he still living with the man who had abducted him?

  Justin came back with a coffee mug with the Gators logo on it, and before giving me the water, he cautioned, “Just sip a little. If you wet the bed, Uncle Steve will beat . . . well, that’s what he did to me if I couldn’t hold it—he beat me. And sometimes he made me stand against the wall while he threw the knife at me like in the circus. But I don’t know what he might do to you.”

  Justin’s tone was so matter-of-fact that it rendered me speechless. He sat on the bed, lifted my head with one hand, and held the cup to my lips with the other. Heeding his advice, I drank only a little, then nodded, and he laid my head back on the mattress again.

  Trying to keep my tone as no-drama as his had been, like, hey, I just want information, I asked, “Did he ever get you with the knife?”

  “No. He has a real good aim. I know he meant to miss me, to scare me.”

  “And how did he beat you, with a belt?”

  “No. He just beat me up, slammed me around, broke my ribs, knocked me out sometimes. I thought he would kill me.”

  Again, I enforced a no-fuss, conversational tone. “Why didn’t he?”

  “He planned to. He almost did.” Justin set the cup on the bedside table, his face turned away from me, and for a moment I thought he was going to leave. But he didn’t. I don’t flatter myself for any cleverness; I think he just really needed to tell his story. Two years, and who had he been able to tell? Nobody.

  Still without looking at me, he said, “He kept me and messed with me until his boss got tired of him and his sick dog. No more taking off in the middle of the day, his boss said, or he’d lose his job. Kill the damn dog. So that night he got out the gun and told me to get in the truck. He took me way out in the swamps someplace and—and maybe I should have just let him kill me.”

  “It’s not that simple, is it?” I said, remembering how it had felt after the divorce, the suicidal thoughts, some petty vengeful part of me wanting to die but no match for Schopenhauer’s “irrational will to live,” aka Darwin’s “survival instinct.” Whatever you call it, that invisible and unmeasurable phenomenon is amazingly strong.

  “You got that right. Even though I knew all the things he’d keep on doing to me, I still begged him to let me live. I promised I’d never call the cops or contact my parents or run away. I promised I would take his name and be his family, and I told him he could—he could do whatever and I’d never tell. He took a big risk, believing me and letting me live. I’m grateful for that.”

  But the words sounded flat, and Justin still didn’t face me.

  “I can understand,” I said, and at the moment it was true. I knew how grateful I was going to be if I got out of this mess alive. “But what about your parents?”

  He shifted his gaze downward, plucking invisible bits of lint from the edge of the mattress. “They don’t want me.”

  “You could have fooled me.” I kept my voice as neutral as I possibly could; I mustn’t argue with him. “It costs big money to advertise on TV—”

  He interrupted with some force. “They want their sweet little boy back. They don’t want me.”

  “I think you’re sweet,” I responded impulsively and quite truthfully. This was the boy who had risked a beating to come feed me Frosted Flakes in the middle of the night.

  “You’re crazy!” Deep and sudden anger blasted him up off the bed and out of the room, leaving me blinking.

  • • •

  Part of the reason I make stupid blunders in my personal life is that I use my mind to block my emotions. Most of the time when I was a kid and especially when I was a teenager, my parents didn’t want any trouble out of me, trouble meaning door slamming, back talk, or blubbering. My father was an English teacher and an Anglophile; he wore brown tweeds and worshipped Kipling. Stiff upper lip, white man’s burden, a rag and a bone and a hank of hair, the whole repressed, bigoted, misogynist charisma, and he never saw anything funny in my favorite joke: “Do you like Kipling? I don’t know; I’ve never kippled.” Father kippled constantly.

  Mother, who was also a teacher—kindergarten—escaped being woman as enemy, a rag and a bone and a hank of hair, simply by externalizing her inner child of the past. Her existence was a strong argument for Descartes’ essential self that does not change over time. Hers was the happy child of the ever and always. Her version of the stiff upper lip curved in a perpetual smile. Pollyanna, move over. There was no situation to which Mother couldn’t find a bright side. Or, to put it another way, no dark sides were allowed, which made me yearn to go Goth. But as different as Mom and Dad seemed, they were essentially the same. Neither of them particularly approved of PMS or any other mood swings or fashion or mascara or hair.

  So acting like a teenager was counterproductive and I didn’t try, for the simple reason that I was chickenshit when it came to confronting my parents. On a conscious level I perceived myself as way smarter than other kids butting heads with their families because of their snits and crushes and fads. I detested girlish giggling and painted toenails. I cherished my high SAT score, my National Merit Scholar status. I eyed the dark side of existence, contemplating life on a distant and cosmic level. Rather than plan my own insignificant role in the great unknown, I let myself get drawn into a conventional marriage with a man who, I realized too late, might as well have been my mother with a penis. Rather than face the desolation and humiliation of the divorce, I moved away. Rather than embrace my loneliness, I went knocking at a peacock blue cottage, and now, shackled to a bare bed with a gag in my mouth, I did not want to feel panic anymore and I did not want to cry and above all I did not want to accept that I was probably going to die.

  So I concentrated on remembering my college psychology courses, searching my mind for any insight into pedophilia. I found none. I did recall, however, something about laboratory rats and random reinforcement. Performing their task, sometimes they received a treat and sometimes an electric shock, but they kept at it, pathetic, subservient littl
e beasts. Justin was experiencing random reinforcement, and Stoat had Justin right where he wanted him, scared stupid and eager to please.

  I also remembered something-or-other syndrome, hostages bonding with their captors, although the only example I could call to mind was Jaycee Dugard, kept for years in her captors’ backyard. Why hadn’t she escaped? Too scared. And if the person who had the power of life and death over you was occasionally nice, wouldn’t you want to make nice too? Become friends, stay alive? If Stoat offered me a deal, however sick, cleaning the toilet while dancing naked or whatever, wouldn’t I go for it?

  Yes and no. I’d agree, but every minute I’d be looking for a way to escape, even if I knew he would kill me in some very unpleasant manner if he caught me—

  But what if I were just a child?

  The thought made some visceral understanding move in me, because my salvation as a human had come from being a mom. Each birth had been baptism by my own blood, each baby a redemption by sudden, utter, overwhelming love—really, my only experience of ever falling in love. I had raised two sons, and I remembered what it was like for boys around thirteen, fourteen years old, still thinking in terms of absolute rules without compromise, still believing in a kind of magic whether white or black, still thinking the world revolved around them, that they were the axis of the universe. But that also meant everything that went wrong was somehow their fault. At that age a boy was still vulnerable, still very much a child, but trying to act like a macho man, to be one of the gang, and if he showed tender feelings, somebody was sure to call him a sissy—

  Oh, my God.

  All in a moment, and with a stab of pain as if the knowledge had raped my heart, I understood Justin. He couldn’t contact his parents because he had not yet been a parent himself. He honestly thought he deserved punishment for having gotten into trouble, or even worse, that Mom and Dad must not love him or want him anymore. He felt smelly and slimy, like garbage, toilet paper, worse than worthless. He did not know that, even after the passing of time, he was still a victim. He knew only that the worst thing in his world was to be so fundamentally screwed.