Chapter 39 Anna
Anna
Anna watches the window, the garden beyond the bushes that partially shield her view unmoving but for the stirring of the wind.
Her stomach groans, but the emptiness is good; it is a reminder that all of this is coming to a head. She is hungry because she has fed the fluffy gray cat several tins of her canned supplies, and now she’s had to cut back herself to avoid being fully out when she is next resupplied.
When she is free, she will cook a whole roast chicken, she promises herself, and eat the whole thing in one sitting with her bare hands.
If she gets free.
She hasn’t known the day of the week for certain since she arrived, but she knows roughly how long she’s been down here; she started counting the days when she woke up in the room, marking them off on the bare floor beneath the loose carpet tile at the foot of the bed.
She doesn’t know how long she was unconscious after falling down at Simon’s house; she only knows that when she woke up, she was here, wherever here is.
Simon visits every third day. He used to come every day but that has petered out.
Some days their time together can look, sound, and almost feel like it did when their relationship was real. As if, Anna thinks, this were just their home and she were a trad wife but without a kitchen or floral dresses.
Perhaps that was the dynamic that Simon always wanted.
Anna knows to play nice, stay soft, loving—that is her only value here, the only thing keeping her alive.
She listens attentively when he talks to her, she lets him kiss her, fuck her; and she kisses him back as if she means it.
She has become very good at dissociating, playing her role. There are no visible seams in her performance. She has tried fighting him and the situation, and it always, always ends badly for her.
Melissa’s fate, what he did to her, is no longer a secret between him and Anna. He talks about Melissa openly now. And Anna knows what her fate will be if she chooses to “end” their relationship.
Sometimes Simon does not talk to her when he comes, he merely dumps a bag of supplies, and leaves; this scares her more than when he stays, because she knows he will eventually get bored of dropping off supplies and she will no longer be required.
But that time has not come yet.
Sometimes he stays for hours, to talk, or cry, in long, rambling, apologetic speeches. She listens and holds him through it because that is her function, trapped forever in this confessional booth where she can’t ever judge or leave.
She knows no one is looking for her by now, apart from whoever owns the cat, and that to everyone she knew she has already slipped off the face of the earth; the next step into oblivion would simply be a question of logistics for Simon.
She knows, because he reminds her, how easily she disappeared and that all she has is him.
She fantasizes about ways to kill Simon.
The edge of a can, ground glass in a drink.
But the last attempt didn’t work, when she waited until he fell asleep after fucking her and hit him hard in the skull with the cistern lid.
Head bleeding, he broke her leg and her collarbone, split her lip, and disappeared for a week.
It was very hard to convince him she was sorry, that it was a moment of madness, that she still loved him. Very, very hard.
She knows there will only ever be one more chance. She won’t survive another “almost.”
After last time she couldn’t stand properly for two months, her leg broken or fractured—without an X-ray, there was no way to know. But she healed, even if she walks with a limp.
She tried everything to escape in the early days: every method, every loophole, the door, the window, him; she screamed herself hoarse.
When she smashed the window, he threatened to brick it up but she knew she’d go mad without being able to see outside.
Her only view of the world was through that thin strip of glass that looked out onto a beautiful sheltered garden.
No one heard her screams, anyway. She’s stayed alive this long by knowing how to read the room.
And now she knows she was right: if she had kept trying the window, she wouldn’t have one now for a cat to get in.
Simon doesn’t appear to have any suspicion, or if he does, then he’s gotten very good at hiding it.
His recent visits have been blessedly uneventful. He has not been intimate with her, though he has been in high spirits. Anna can’t help but wonder if he knows about the cat or if he has met someone else and if either means her time is nearly up and someone else will be brought down here.
Anna doesn’t know where this basement room is; all she knows is that this is definitely not Simon’s basement, that was a brick-lined wine cellar—besides, the garden view here is different.
If her three-day estimate is still correct, Simon is due here today. Sometimes he comes in the daytime, sometimes late into the night, waking her. She never knows.
The cat has not come back, even though she recorded the video two days ago now.
She tells herself they are coming, they are trying to track her down, combing the surrounding streets and basements.
She can only hope Simon doesn’t notice, doesn’t hear, or ask, or find out what is happening, but worries surface, as the hours bleed on, that no one is looking, no one is coming.
Someone must have seen the recording, she tells herself.
But the police are not smashing down her door, they are not spilling into her room, to wrap her in blankets, and tell her it’s all going to be okay as they lead her up to the daylight.
There is a chance that no one has even seen what she recorded. There’s a chance no one will watch back the cat’s footage unless he goes missing and they need to find him.
If the cat returns, then she needs to keep him here, she realizes, because then someone will come looking for him, and they will find her.
Anna thinks of the cat: his soft blue-gray fur, his round face and warm amber eyes, how he fearlessly jumped down into the basement.
She fed him a precious can of her tuna so he would stay and keep her company.
His warmth, his trust, the living, breathing presence of him were enough to give her fresh hope.
She’d scratched her plea for help into his collar, with the bent edge of a tin lid, a desperate afterthought, before shooing him away, terrified of Simon arriving and finding him.
She knew, of course, what an incredible long shot it was—but it was something to do in a world of very limited options.
And then, like a miracle, the beautiful cat returned a day later and she had needed to shoo him away to save being caught. Then he returned again on the fifth day and she had found the camera around his neck. The live camera.
Someone saw her words, she knew it; someone was trying to help her.
They have to find her. Simon cannot be allowed to be the last person to see her, to touch her, talk to her. It is getting harder for Anna to pretend that this isn’t going to end the way Melissa’s life did.
She looks up sharply spotting movement by the window, a soft, round blue-gray face looking in. Around his neck Anna sees the camera is gone, her heart sinking. In its place is the cat’s old collar, with a carabiner that holds a small AirTag disc hanging from it.
Her heart sinks. Tears, hot and stinging, rise and slide down her cheeks. Maybe they saw her video and thought it was a prank, threw the whole thing away.
Anna looks to the door; Simon is not here yet. It might be safe to let the cat in, even just for five minutes.
She heads over and cracks the window, and he slips in with a warbling meow, rubbing his soft fur against her ankles while she recklessly opens another tin of provisions for him. At the table, he eats as she tries to work out her next move, and if there even is one.
As he eats, his cobbled-together collar disc thwacks against the tin. Anna notices something strange on it, peeling away from the back.
She reaches over and turns the disc: taped onto its back is a tightly folded scrap of paper.
A message. A message.
Anna leaps up, quickly peeling the note from the disc, unfolding it to read:
Will send police. Need location. Remove this GPS tag. Keep it there. You are going to be okay.
Anna is gasping, sobbing, tears rolling down her cheeks, the note trembling in her hands.
Someone knows. Someone is coming. It is almost over.
She hastily wipes her tears away, practical thoughts flooding her brain: Simon could be here soon—today is visiting day.
She fumbles the disc off of Blue’s collar and stumbles to the corner of the room, lifting the loose carpet tile to slide the thin disc underneath.
Then, satisfied that no bump is visible, she carefully lifts the cat off the table, carries him safely back to the window, and deposits him outside the window’s bars.
“Go home,” she whispers. “I love you but go home. No more food. Go.”
She shoos him away and shuts the window, but the cat does not budge, instead licking the last of the food from the fur around his mouth.
But Anna has no time. She turns back to the table, grabs the creased note, and pops it into her mouth, chewing vigorously, until she spits a white pulp ball out into her hand.
She chucks it into the toilet bowl and flushes, the little wad disappearing in a swirl of water.
She washes up the tin and places it in the trash, and when she looks back at the window, the cat is gone, too.