Closing Costs

by Bracken MacLeod

  Focus.

  She grunted at the intruder. He looked at her again, with less patience than before. She grunted again and made a movement with her head like she was trying to shake off the gag. Take it off, please, she was trying to say. He furrowed his brow and seemed to be trying to make sense of her muted request. As obvious as she thought it was, he didn’t seem to be taking the hint. She did it again, tilting her head in a come-here motion that took all of her will to perform, not because her head hurt—though it did, badly—but because the last thing in the world she wanted was for this man to come any closer.

  The man stepped away from Evan. She nodded and pled with her eyes. He smiled that terrifying smile and said, “You wanna say something?”

  She nodded.

  “If I take this gag off, you going to be a good girl?”

  She didn’t know what he meant by that. She’d already figured out that screaming would be no help. With only one marginally close neighbor who was out of town for the long weekend, she could scream her head off and no one would come to help. Maybe he meant something else. Spitting or biting. She was smart enough not to antagonize a man when she couldn’t even lift her arms to protect herself. No, she wouldn’t spit or scream. She nodded.

  “Okay, then.”

  With his left hand, the man picked a corner of the duct tape on her face loose, and yanked. It came halfway off, catching at her lips. She yelped and jerked in the chair, her arms wanting to come up so she could paw at her face to see if she’d lost skin, if she was bleeding, but the tape around her wrists held. The man paused and then ripped it the rest of the way off. Her face stung brightly and her lips felt numb, like she’d been punched in the mouth.

  He took a step back, his brow furrowed, holding the tape out like he might slap it right back on. Nelle could see he didn’t realize that he’d hurt her. He didn’t see her pain. She pushed the cloth out of her mouth with her dry tongue, gently letting it fall in her lap. She spit it out demurely, not to avoid offending her captor, but because she didn’t want it to fall on the dirty cement floor. If he was going to end up shoving it back in her mouth, she didn’t want it to be covered in grit and whatever else was underfoot.

  Inhaled deeply through her mouth, the cool, musty air of the basement was the most satisfying breath she could remember ever taking. She breathed deeply again and said, “I’ll be good.” It came out as a hoarse whisper. Her tongue was dry, and her throat hurt. She tried to swallow so she could repeat her promise a little louder, except there was nothing in her mouth to swallow. She tried again anyway, forcing a bit more volume. “I’ll be good.”

  “Right. Because if you try anything, I’ll make you regret it.” He held up the piece of tape in one hand and made a fist with the other. His hands weren’t delicate. They looked like they were used to being thrust against things. Like he was the sort of man who got angry and punched walls, punched other men—Nelle knew for a fact he punched women; she was living proof. He continued, sticking a thumb out from the fist and jabbing it over his shoulder at Evan. “I’ll make you regret it, and I’ll make him pay for it.”

  Nelle looked at Evan. His lids weren’t fluttering anymore. His head hadn’t moved again. Maybe she’d imagined it. It was possible that it was a trick of the dim cellar lights and one of her dizzy spells. She wanted him to wake up, but she wanted to be the first one to speak to him when he did.

  “Can I have . . . some water?” she said. Her voice was still a croak, but it was audible. “I’m thirsty.”

  “A drink?” the man said, as if she’d asked for something unreasonable.

  She nodded. When he stood there, saying nothing, she added, “I’ve been good.”

  He smiled. “Hard to be bad when you’re tied down and have a pair of panties stuffed in your mouth.”

  She looked at the ball of cotton in her lap and saw it was indeed a pair of her underwear. A pair she’d bought recently that were cute and relatively inexpensive. She’d yelled at Evan for being too rough taking them off of her during foreplay when she first got them. She didn’t want him to tear them. Women’s underwear like that didn’t come in packs of eight like his boxer briefs. She felt a tinge of embarrassment and anger. She tried to conceal the signs of either feeling but couldn’t hide her hot ears filling with blood.

  “I’m being good,” she said. “Please, may I have a drink of water?”

  The man looked around. His eyes alighted on a stack of plastic red Solo cups they’d bought for the housewarming party a few weeks ago. He grabbed one off the stack and scanned the basement. She wondered what he was looking for, until she realized he was searching for a faucet. There was a spigot at the bottom of the water heater that’d release filthy, scalding hot water, and there was the pipe that led to the washer hookup, neither of which would pour a drinkable glass of water. She said please again. “You have to go upstairs.”

  He shouted, “You want a Perrier? Want me to squeeze a fucking lemon into it?”

  She flinched. “No. I . . . just . . . There’s no tap down here.”

  His back straightened, and he gave her an exasperated look. He stood; his breathing quickened as if merely talking to her was making him angrier. She got the sense her existence made him angry.

  “I know that!”

  He stomped up the stairs. She listened to him in the kitchen. When she was certain he was out of earshot, she whispered to her husband, “Evan, can you hear me?” While his eyelids fluttered again, he didn’t move; he didn’t wake up. The water upstairs began to run. “Please wake up, Evan. Please, please wake up.” She willed him to snap his eyes open and lift his head to her.

  The clank in the pipes above her head as the water shut off made her flinch.

  “If you can hear me, bebê, maybe just keep pretending to be out, okay? If you can hear me, work at the tape, but don’t let him know you’re awake.”

  The man came stomping back to the landing at the top of the stairs. Nelle watched him coming down but tried to look at Evan out of the corner of her eye, wanting a sign that he’d heard her. If he gave her one, the man might see, so she hoped he’d stay still almost as much as she yearned for him to blink, just once, to let her know he’d understood.

  “Here.” The man held out the Solo cup, sloshing water onto his thick fingers. She hadn’t noticed the reddish-brown stains under his fingernails and in the cracks of his knuckles before. The horror on his hands made her want to shrink away, but she couldn’t. Not after she’d asked for the drink. She craned her neck forward to remind him that she needed help. He stepped closer and tipped the cup toward her lips. She took a big gulp of the water pouring out. It splashed against her face and a little went up her nose and she sputtered but kept swallowing as it spilled down her chin and onto the front of her shirt. The man stepped back and set the cup on the steps. “Only a little. Too much and you’ll have to piss.”

  Her face grew hot with embarrassment at being spoken to like a child. Of course, she’d have to pee eventually. She’d gone to the bathroom before getting in the shower, but she’d also had a cup of coffee right before that. Chances seemed fifty-fifty that he’d let her wet herself right there in the chair rather than free her so she could use the bathroom upstairs or even squat over a bucket here in the cellar. While she wanted to be free, pissing in her pants seemed like a better option than being cut loose and having him follow her to the bathroom. Better than undressing, even partially, in front of him.

  Then again, the only way to fight was to be cut loose.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “That’s nice.”

  The wetness of her shirt chilled her a little. She felt gooseflesh raise on her arms. The man seemed unaffected by her discomfort; he just stared. She felt exposed with the wet fabric clinging to her while he stared.

  “What do you want from us?”

  “I want you to shut the fuck up. Keep talking, and I’ll seal you up again.”

  “If I knew what you—”

  The man go
t up faster than Nelle could process what was happening and slapped her across the mouth. The crack of his open hand on her face echoed through the cellar.

  She tasted blood, and her neck hurt from being whipped around by his blow. She wanted to apologize, say I’m sorry. She was afraid he’d hit her again if she did, so she just sat there.

  “Did that hurt?” he said. “You learn something from it? Now, imagine how much worse this feels.” He tented his fingers next to the knife he’d set next to her phone on the book box. “You got me?”

  Nelle nodded.

  “Good girl. That’s what I thought. You have plans this weekend?” She raised her eyebrows in reply. He gave her permission to answer the question.

  “No.” They hadn’t made plans for the weekend. Patriots’ Day coincided with the Boston Marathon and the start of spring break for Massachusetts schools, meaning the roads would be snarled in all directions. The Mass Pike was the world’s longest parking lot on a normal Friday night, let alone at the head of a long weekend and a major annual sporting event. So, rather than dinner with friends or a drive to the Cape for a long weekend, they’d settled for grilling in the back yard and opening a lot of wine and maybe a hike or two in the woods behind the house if it was warm enough and didn’t rain. A “staycation” to avoid the stress of having to compete with other people in order to get away from other people. And also to keep that low profile they promised they would and always seemed to fall a little short of doing.

  “No, what?”

  Nelle felt a tinge of contempt gnawing around the edges of her fear. Did he want her to call him “sir”? As if it wasn’t enough that he’d beaten her and taped her to a chair. She was helpless and frightened, and he could do anything he wanted to her. And still he wanted more. He wanted her to concede his supremacy. The urge was there. Go fuck yourself. Just three words. And then, his reply. Delivered with fist or knife or gun. Her chances of getting out of this got weaker every time he hurt her. There would come a time when he wasn’t satisfied with slapping her, or punching her, and his hands might wrap around her throat. And then it was all done. All for want of a single syllable. Sir. The utterance was compliance; it was submission. But, she told herself, she could pretend subservience for a while.

  She said, “No, sir.”

  He frowned and undid his belt buckle. “Maybe next time, you won’t have to think so hard about it.”

  18

  Evan tried to listen, tried to figure out who their captor was, why he was doing this to them, but if he knew the man, he couldn’t place him—not through his semiconscious haze and the throbbing in his head. Evan picked up pieces of what was being said, but couldn’t track the whole. Things were becoming clearer, but nothing was entirely clear.

  He heard the man shout at Nelle and felt a swell of anger that made his head hurt more. He wasn’t one of those spouses who got bent out of shape anytime someone spoke to his wife sharply. Nelle could be headstrong, and sometimes she was too direct for some people’s liking. But he didn’t jump in to fight her battles like a white knight; she could take care of herself. Except this wasn’t just some asshole stranger on the street who didn’t like how she drove. Evan wanted to stop the guy from yelling at her again . . . or worse. Worse seemed like an inevitability. No. Didn’t seem like. Worse was definitely coming.

  He’d heard Nelle tell him to “work at the tape.” He tried to focus, to find a way to make sense of what his body was telling him. But he felt dizzy and unstable, while at the same time, heavy and rooted to the spot. Not rooted. Tied down. Taped down.

  A groan escaped his mouth. He couldn’t help it. No. Not his mouth. He couldn’t open his mouth. It was taped, like his hands and feet. The groan rose up from his throat and escaped through his nose. He couldn’t hold it back. What was the other thing Nelle had said? “Don’t let him know you’re awake.” Easy. I’m not awake. But he was waking. And once the groan was out, he wanted so badly to take it back that he thought he might’ve moved again, as if he could reach out and grasp the sound in his teeth before anyone caught hint of it drifting away from him.

  She’d said other things to him, but by the time he’d risen up enough from the darkness to listen, he’d missed much of it. She implored him to work at the tape, and not let the man know he was awake. Nothing else. It felt wrong, pretending to be unconscious. But then, he wasn’t pretending, not entirely. He was only half awake. Still, feigning a blackout made him feel cowardly. It made him feel afraid too; it was the old nightmare all over again.

  When he was six or seven years old, he’d watched a Godzilla movie with his dad one night and then gone to bed and dreamed that a gargantuan monster was coming for him. In his dream, he hid behind the sofa, in the closet, under the bed, but the monster always peered through his windows with a giant, jaundiced eye and beheld his vulnerability. Once seen, he would run to another hiding spot, and then another, until the monster ripped the roof off of his house and little Evan had to run across a wide open plain to escape. There were no wide open plains where he’d grown up in New Haven, Connecticut, but in the dreaming world, his house was all that existed for miles, maybe eternity. Him, his house, the monster, and no one else to save him as he ran. The giant thing came lumbering after him, the earth shaking from its weight and speed, and just as he felt its hot breath on his neck, the threat of being devoured in a single agonizing bite realized, Evan would awake in a pool of sweat—sometimes piss—his eyes wide with fear and heart racing. The thing in the night had almost eaten him alive again.

  But it was just a dream.

  The memory of it coalesced around his mind, drawing clouds that obscured the reality beyond his eyelids. He was alone in the expanse, and there was no escape, because how could you hide out in the open from something that was so much bigger, faster, hungrier than you could ever imagine? How could you escape the monster that was the perfect embodiment of your helplessness?

  Evan tried to banish the nightmare and find the clarity he needed to run out of the dream house, out into the open, and get away. But what he needed was to get out of the endless void and back into his mind. He needed to run into the house, not away. Nelle needed him.

  Wake up wake up wakeup!

  19

  “Oh, look who’s comin’ around.” The man looked at Evan. He finished slipping his belt out of the loops and folded it over in his hands, snapping the two half lengths of leather together. The sound echoed in the cellar, bouncing off the concrete foundation walls, somewhere between a whipcrack and a gunshot. Despite knowing the sound was harmless, Nelle flinched. The man’s gesture was a promise of harm. With what he’d done already, nothing he threatened was empty.

  “Leave him alone,” she snapped, trying to draw the man’s attention away from her husband. She hadn’t wanted his attention a second ago, but she couldn’t bear watching him fix on Evan.

  He took another step, so she called out, “Leave him alone!”

  He paused and looked over his shoulder at her. His eyebrows raised in surprise at how clearly she had communicated. The expression on his face under that surprise made her mouth shut so forcefully that her teeth clacked together. Nelle shook her head in frustration. She wanted to scream at him, but . . . Gun, knife, belt. You have to be smarter than him, she reminded herself. You can’t outfight him or outrun him. You have to outsmart him. And that means staying calm.

  “Did you say something?”

  She answered him with less volume, but similar urgency. “Leave him alone, please.”

  He smiled. “No.”

  The man lashed Evan. The long strip of leather slapped against her husband’s thighs, making another loud snap, though not as loud as the first. It was the long groan of muffled pain that came from Evan’s throat that echoed in her ears loudest. Her stomach did a flip, and she thought this time she was definitely going to vomit. The man lashed Evan’s chest, and Evan’s head whipped upright instead of lolling, his eyes tightly shut against the pain.

  And then he
opened his eyes. Wide and panicked. Nelle felt a small part of her give up at the look of fear in them. If he was afraid, what hope was there for her? He was the rock she clung to when things were too hard to bear alone.

  The intruder glanced at Nelle, a broad smile on his face. A lifetime of resentment and bitter anger swelled up in her. Hate so strong, she thought she might not ever feel anything again. She repeated herself. “Leave him alone, you fucker!”

  The man’s smile faded. “What did you call me?”

  Nelle wanted to tell him that she knew he heard exactly what she’d said. You fucker. Instead, she furrowed her brow and stared, letting her gaze communicate for her.

  He got the message. In two long strides, he was at her, swinging the belt. It slapped at her shoulder, and pain flashed like fireworks. He hit her again. Neck. Shoulder. Breasts. She shut her eyes, buttressing herself against the pain, waiting for the next blow and the next. What had she done? Her mind scattered as she lost sense of what part of her body he was striking. And then she heard the jangle of the buckle; it muted and she felt the belt loop around her neck. Her eyes snapped open as it tightened. The man held the long end of the belt out and up like a hangman holding a noose, and he pulled. Her vision narrowed as he cut off the air to her lungs, the blood to her brain. The buckle pinched at the skin of her neck, a clear point of sharp pain in the dullness of strangling.