Chapter 23
Chapter 23
I awaken to the hum of the generator and the sound of the coffee maker burbling on the counter. I blink, bleary-eyed, and sit up.
“Hey, sleepyhead.” Brendan smiles at me. He’s standing in the hall, toasting our last few frozen pancakes as though nothing unusual happened last night.
“Hey yourself.” It hurts a little to talk, but other than that, everything seems okay. Well, my body feels like one big crisis zone, but for the first time, I’m not worried about it. Not after last night.
“What time is it?”
“Afternoon.”
I slide out of bed and walk over to Brendan slowly. He’s still wearing the same clothes as last night, but his hair’s neatly combed and tied back in a short ponytail. I catch a glimpse of a gauze bandage underneath one sleeve of his hoodie, and there’s a Band-Aid on his forehead.
He wraps his arms around me gently, and I lay my head on his chest. We spend a few minutes just standing there, silent except for the humming generator and the dripping coffee machine. Everything around us is the same, but things between us feel new—deeper, heavier, more solid. Not fragile like glass anymore. I know I’m not going to have to weigh each word to make sure it won’t destroy our relationship. I nestle against him, as secure as a moth that’s found a safe spot to hide. I never want to come out.
When the coffee maker stops running, we let go of one another. Brendan lifts my head with his fingers and peers at my neck. He doesn’t say anything, but his eyes speak volumes. I slip into the bathroom and immediately notice five long, red marks on my skin. Instinctively, I run my fingertips over them. They’re not too bad—they’ll probably be gone in two or three days at the most. Brendan’s words, on the other hand, I’ll never forget. The things he went through are still echoing inside me like a dull pain. I was wrong. He’s not weak, he’s strong. Otherwise he couldn’t possibly have survived all of that.
I splash some water on my face and comb my hair, and then go into the back room to put on fresh clothes: clean underwear, long jeans, my white blouse, and the pale-yellow scarf with the tiny multicolored hearts to hide Brendan’s finger marks.
When I return to the front, Bren gestures to the set table with a smile. “Sit!” He switches the generator off. To my relief, he doesn’t say anything about the scarf.
I slide onto the bench. “Why are the curtains drawn?” I ask. This is new. Even the ones dividing the main room from the driver’s cab are shut.
“I wanted you to be able to sleep as long as possible. I mean, by the time we went to bed, the sun was already up.” He smiles again, but this time he averts his gaze. “Plus I thought this would be more romantic.”
“So you want to spend the rest of the day in here with me, hm?” I tease him, not taking my eyes off him. Why won’t he look at me?
But then he does, with a wink. “I can think of a couple things I wouldn’t mind doing with you...”
I wink back, but the weird feeling stays with me. Head propped on my hands, I regard the blue dishes with the little vanilla-colored roses. Something’s different, even though everything’s the same. Everything except the drawn curtains.
I glance around again, and then I realize what’s bothering me. “Where’s Grey?”
Brendan pours two cups of coffee and sets them on the table before stacking the pancakes on a plate. “He’s in the passenger seat. Probably better if we let him rest, he was puking all morning.”
“He threw up? Is he sick?”
Bren sits down beside me, and having him close calms me down. I’m not sure why exactly I need calming down. It’s just this weird feeling. “Don’t worry about it. Probably ate something bad in the woods. I’ll have to start giving him meat soon, or who knows what half-rotten dead things he’ll start finding to chew on.”
I smile. “You want to do that regurgitating thing, knock yourself out. I’m still gonna pass.” I lean against him affectionately and sip my coffee. For some reason I’m not hungry. After a while, I realize Brendan’s not touching his food, either. The funny feeling in my stomach flares up again. “You didn’t sleep at all, did you?” I glance at Brendan from the side. His face is positively ashen, and the whites of his eyes are shot through with fine red lines. “If you spent the whole morning mopping up wolf puke, you can’t have slept.”
“Yeah, you’re right.” He nods at the pancakes, the maple syrup, and the lemon cookies. “Eat something, Lou, please. You need your strength.”
There’s a note in his voice I can’t quite place. It’s not just his usual worry. There’s something decisive in it, too. And pained. But maybe he’s simply wrecked after the long night and the work-intensive morning.
I try to smile away the weird feeling in my stomach. “Well, you eat too, then.”
“Okay.”
The longer we spend chewing in silence, the more I get the sense that Brendan’s keeping something from me. Once I’ve choked down half a pancake, I set the rest back on the plate. “What’s wrong, Bren?”
He lowers his hand in slow motion, staring at the pancake as though it’s the most interesting thing he’s ever seen. I pluck it out of his fingers and slap it onto my own plate. “Tell me!”
“Okay.” He reaches across the table to take my hands in his, squeezing them so hard that a sense of foreboding rises in my sore throat. “That day on the river, when you didn’t call to those guys for help... you made a decision that was right for you in that moment. It may have actually been wrong, but it felt right at the time, I don’t know.”
“It’s still right.”
He smiles, but he looks so lost that I nearly burst into tears right then and there. “Maybe today it is. Maybe it is for you. But what about for your family? What about your brothers?”
I swallow hard. Deep down, I know he’s got a point, but I don’t want to hear it. Not after yesterday.
He grips my fingers even more tightly. “What if our relationship falls apart five years from now? Then I’ll have stolen part of your life, kept you from going to college or starting a career. You’ll hate me.”
“I could never hate you,” I choke out. I’m not sure what he’s getting at, but whatever it is, it feels horribly wrong.
He takes our interlaced fingers and presses them to his own cheek. “I believe that you love me, Lou. Don’t get me wrong. But what if you only love me because you were so lonely? What if it’s just the kind of love that victims have for their kidnappers?”
I withdraw my hands from his. “What do you want to hear, Bren? How am I supposed to answer? I can’t be sure about any of that. All I know is that I love you. I liked you the minute we met at the visitors’ center. I could just as easily have fallen for you without… this.”
He gives me a penetrating look. “I’m not sure if you’re capable of making good choices right now, Lou. Which is why I decided to choose for you.”
“Choose what? What do you want?” My voice breaks.
He presses his lips into a thin, white line, but the shimmering tears in his eyes are what scare me the most. “Maybe is yes, and someday is today.” His lower lip trembles, and he bites down on it so hard that it starts bleeding.
It takes me a minute to figure out what he means. “You... want to... let me go? Today?” All at once, my throat is so tight that I can’t breathe—even worse than yesterday. It’s like I’m underwater, watching Brendan’s words swim past me from beneath the surface of a lake. I can see his lips moving, but I can’t understand what he’s saying. None of this is really happening. I’m imagining the whole thing.
“Lou? Lou... are you hearing what I’m saying?”
I shake my head briefly and look up at Brendan, at his red eyes and his firmly set lips. I know he thinks he’s doing what has to be done. But I also know it’s wrong. “You can’t just send me away,” I blurt out. “I’m not going.”
He stands up. My first instinct is to threaten to tell on him if he sends me away, but we both know I would never do that.
Without saying a thing, he draws back the divider curtain in front of the driver’s cab. For a second, I think maybe I’ve lost my mind. I stare outside, paralyzed. No spruces, no pines, no birches. No forest at all. Just a huge, grey parking lot with a couple of beat-up, forgotten-looking station wagons. A blackbird hops across the asphalt and picks up something I don’t see. Suddenly, I feel totally and completely lost.
“Bren...” I whisper. “How... I mean... what...” I can’t form a coherent thought. Dazed, I get up and go to the window over the sink, and then open the curtain... revealing more cold, grey parking lot beneath a cold, grey sky. In the distance, I see a long, flat concrete building, and what look like human figures in front of it. It strikes me as unreal, not part of this world. Not part of mine, anyway.
“I spent the whole day driving. You... you were dead asleep, you had no idea. I wanted to surprise you.”
My vision blurs. “Grey didn’t eat anything bad,” I say absently.
“He got carsick.”
I turn to look at him. I want to scream at him, but then I see that he’s covering his eyes with his hands. “Wh-why... Bren? I don’t understand...”
He comes over and embraces me, holding me tight. He’s shaking, and his heart is racing. “You don’t know?”
“Yeah, I do.” A tear runs down my cheek. “But why today already? Why now, after everything that happened yesterday?” Just the thought of leaving him makes me freak out, the same way that I freaked out in the beginning at the thought of being trapped with him forever.
“The question is, if not today, when?” He takes my face in his hands, caressing it with his eyes. His pupils are as big as they were that first day. “I’m afraid I’ll change my mind if I don’t let you go right away. Like, right now, you know?”
“ Now ?”
He runs a thumb across my cheek. “There’s no other way.”
“No...” Each word he says is another cruel blow to my unprotected soul. I can’t just leave now, so totally unprepared, so totally alone.
He rests his forehead on mine. Oh, God, when he lets go of me, I’m going to shatter into a thousand tiny pieces, and nobody and nothing in the world will ever be able to put me back together. Including me. But I know that moment’s coming. It’s inevitable. Maybe this is how things have to end. Maybe it was meant to be like this.
“Lou.” He’s never spoken my name more tenderly. “Trust me. It’s better this way. One day, you’ll know that this was the right decision. Maybe not for today, but for all of the other days that come after it.”
“What about you?” I ask in a strangled voice. “What happens when you have another flashback?”
“After tonight... I’ll just imagine you’re with me.” He carefully releases me, and I really do shatter, even though I’m just standing there stiffly. A crack opens up inside me, and then a thousand more spider out from the first. It’s like my soul is bursting. “You’ve done so much for me already, Lou. So much.” His voice echoes along the cracks. I feel empty, hollowed out. “All I can do for you is let you go. And that’s what I have to do. Because I love you.”
He walks to the door and opens it wide. The air outside smells unfamiliar: concrete, trash, and people instead of spruce needles and wood. I still can’t move. “You need to go before I change my mind.” His voice sounds so lonely. So empty. And suddenly I understand how hard this must be for him, how much this is costing him. It’s a hundred times harder for him than for me. I need to pull myself together for his sake, regardless of how I feel.
“I’ll tell everyone I ran away,” I say mechanically.
“Your brothers will hate you for that.”
“Ethan, maybe.”
“You can tell them the truth. The police will never find me.”
It’s not just fear of the police finding him, though. It’s also the thought of what they would turn our story into. I couldn’t possibly make Bren out to be a monster—I would always add that I fell in love with him. I picture myself in the police station. I can see the looks on the officers’ faces now. So you’re saying he never raped you that whole time? Come on. You had sex with him willingly? Surely he must have threatened you. Consenting isn’t the same as not fighting back, you know that, right?
No. Listening to those questions would kill me. It would be like they were trying to destroy what Brendan and I had. I don’t want reporters to turn this into a bunch of lurid stories. I don’t want them pestering me to reveal everything I know about him. What Bren and I had together will stay our secret forever. It’s too precious. And if that means Ethan hates me for supposedly running away, I’ll just have to deal with it.
I gaze at Brendan, terrified of leaving him. I’m more afraid of this than I’ve ever been afraid of anything. But I have to be stronger than him now. I swallow my tears and my fear. I need to act strong for a few more minutes, that’s all. Until I’m out of sight. “Where are we exactly?” I ask, trying to sound objective.
“We’re in British Columbia.” He reaches into the overhead cupboard and pulls down a backpack. “Money, food, fresh clothes, newspaper articles.”
It hurts to see how well-prepared he is again.
He points through the door. “There’s a mall and a bus stop about a quarter-mile that way. They have Greyhound lines to all the bigger cities, and you can transfer from there. I packed you a list of stations and departure times, I Googled them for you on the ol’ Samsung.”
“You have a cell phone?”
“I don’t get any reception up there, Lou. Anyway, it’s better if you don’t hear anything from me for now.”
“Right.” Not crying is the hardest goddamn thing I’ve ever done.
He smiles. His eyes are full of tears. “You’ll understand soon.”
“Promise me something?” I gaze across the grey parking lot and can’t possibly imagine what I’m going to do out there.
“Depends.”
“Will you come back to Sequoia next year on June 25th? To the visitors’ center?”
He gives me a blank look.
“That was the day you first kidnapped me.”
He lets out a strange, short laugh. “I know that.”
“If we still love each other then, we can spend the summer together,” I say hurriedly. I need something to hold onto.
“I don’t know if that’s a good idea, Lou. It would be better for you to just forget me. And it would definitely be better for me to forget you.”
“Think about it,” I whisper. With that, I take the backpack from him and walk down the stairs. For one crazy moment, I wish he would grab my arm and haul me back inside, slam the door, and chain me up. I wait for a moment, but nothing happens. “Bye, Bren,” I murmur without turning around. I don’t want to hug him again, I don’t want to kiss him again, I don’t want to see Grey again. It would break my heart, and I can’t let myself cry. I have to be strong for Brendan one last time, so I simply put one foot in front of the other. Right, left, right, left, again and again, the way I did the night I tried to run from him.
I can feel him watching me, sense him crying. In my mind, I hug him tightly. I keep my shoulders straight and my head held high, but inside I’m dying.
I’m vaguely aware that there are suddenly other people everywhere: chattering voices, rumbling car engines. The smell of exhaust, corn dogs, and French fries. It’s like I’ve landed on a different planet. I look around, but I can’t see anything. It’s too much for me to take in any details. Too many people, too many voices, too much noise. A wave of fear wells up inside me, and I’m not sure why. A moment later, I bump into someone else.
“S’cuse me,” I stammer quickly. I vaguely make out the shape of a woman.
She takes my upper arm gently. “Honey, are you okay? Do you need help?” The warmth in her voice sends everything crashing down. I feel my lips starting to tremble. But before I let myself fall apart completely, I have to know one thing.
“What day is today?”
“September 6th, honey. You’re so pale, you don’t look too good.”
I stare through her, tugging unconsciously at a strand of hair. September 6th. I was only with Brendan for two and a half months. It feels like it was a lot longer. Almost as an afterthought, I realize I’m seventeen now.
“Do you want to sit down?”
“I want to go home,” I manage to get out, and then I burst into tears.