Chapter 32 Steffani
I stare at the photo tacked to the refrigerator: a girl with long, pin-straight hair.
She’s sitting on the front steps of the cabin, a sun-bleached quilt wrapped around her shoulders, a mug of coffee nestled in her hands.
Her wool socks are rolled down around the tops of her hiking boots.
She’s grinning, but it looks like someone yelled, “Smile!” right before snapping the photo, and she only did it because it was expected.
She looks like the man who kidnapped me—same dark hair, same dark eyes. A sister, maybe, or a cousin.
I catch a ripple of my reflection in the stainless-steel door. Come to think of it, she looks a little like me, too.
“I have to step out for a bit.” When I turn around, the man is standing in the doorway, keys dangling from his fingers. He glances over my shoulder at the photo, and I wait for him to tell me who she is. “Do you need anything before I leave?”
He’s leaving me alone? With no locked doors, with a—I check the kitchen wall to make sure that, yes, I really saw a phone, a fucking landline phone, hanging on its receiver. I could call the police. Tell them how he drugged me, locked me in the shack. How he planned to kill me tonight.
Except then I’d lose out on my only chance to free myself from my dad; I’d be right back where I started. Not going to happen.
“Ice cream?”
He smiles. “In the freezer.”
The front door slams behind him.
The freezer makes a suction cup noise as it opens, cold air puffing onto my face.
He has pint after pint stacked on his shelves.
Not the shitty stuff, either; these have a fancy foreign-sounding name I’m not sure how to pronounce.
I twist one around to find the price tag and almost gag.
Fuck me, this man’s even crazier than I thought.
I peel off the lid, grab a spoon, and step into the den. It’s dark; he didn’t bother flipping the lights on before he left. I blindly search for the switch on the wall. It’s got to be here somewhere—
“Montana.”
The ice cream slips out of my hands, splatters across the floor.
“Long way,” my dad says, and I can hear an armchair creaking under his weight. “You came a long way this time, Steffani. I had to bust my balls to find you.”
Fuck. Fuck. I don’t know the layout of the house, don’t know where the escape routes are. This wasn’t supposed to happen now. I’m not ready.
“I told you to come home,” he says. “I told you if you weren’t back by the end of the week, I’d have no choice but to come get you myself.” He holds out his hands as if this is all my fault. “Well?”
“I…”
“You’re what? You’re sorry? You should be.
All these years, I’ve worked my ass off to keep you safe.
I watched over you when you were with those fucking—” He sniffs and rubs the back of his hand across his nose.
“Those motherfuckers the state gave you to. I stayed close by to make sure none of them hurt you. To make sure none of those men touched you. Even when the police dragged me away in handcuffs, like a fucking criminal, I didn’t let that stop me.
” He looks up at me, and that’s when I realize his eyes are wet.
“And they didn’t, right? No one laid a fucking hand on you, did they. ”
No one except you, I want to say, but that’s not what he means. I shake my head. “No.”
“No.” And that’s when he reaches around to his back pocket and takes out the pack of cigarettes.
I wrap my arms around myself. All the patchy little scars glimmer on my skin, a constellation of pain.
He taps one out and props it between his lips, lighting the tip.
It’s the first time I’ve been able to see his face clearly.
He’s the exact opposite of the man who brought me here: greasy craters pockmarking his nose, drooping jowls, close-cropped gray hair covering the rolls at the back of his neck.
He takes the cigarette out of his mouth and puffs a billow of smoke into the air between us. “I’m a bit confused here. Help your old man out. That fellow who just left.” He taps the end of the cigarette, ash crumbling onto the carpet. “He’s letting you stay with him?”
I nod.
He looks around the cabin, taking in the brick fireplace, the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves.
“Nice place,” he says. “Nice place you’ve got here.
Except no one’s going to let you stay for free.
” Another puff of smoke. The tip of his cigarette burns orange, then red, then blue.
“So what’s the plan, Steffani? You gonna spread your legs for some man old enough to be your father? That how I raised you?”
“You didn’t.”
The words are out of my mouth before I can think them through. My dad stills. His posture is easy, relaxed, but there’s not a single ripple of motion through his muscles. “Excuse me?”
Reflex kicks in, and my knees start to buckle.
There’s a script to this exchange: I cower in the corner, curled up in the fetal position, and sob while he thrashes me to within an inch of my life.
When he’s done, I bandage myself up and wait for the rerun.
My dad’s abuse plays in syndication at this point; I’m surprised there isn’t a laugh track behind it.
But something’s changed. Less than an hour ago, I looked death head-on, sat in the passenger seat of his car, and sure, I might’ve been scared shitless, but that didn’t stop me from bargaining with my life. Anything if it meant getting one over on the man sitting in front of me.
He’s going to kill me.
But that doesn’t mean he gets to win.
“You didn’t raise me,” I say, dropping my arms to my sides.
“I’ve only known that man”—I gesture toward the front door, so he knows exactly who I’m talking about—“a few days, and he’s already given me a better home than you ever could.
He doesn’t beat me, doesn’t burn me. You know why?
Because he’s a good man.” That’s not what my dad cares about, though, so I add, “And besides—”
His eyes narrow into paper cuts. The end of his cigarette, clamped between his fingers, has been crushed into a spitball.
“I’ve already fucked him. And his cock is huge.”
Before I can register what’s happening, my dad’s barreling toward me, all hard-packed muscle and unbridled rage, and knocks me flat on the floor.
The cigarette lurches toward my face. I don’t know if he was aiming for my mouth, like the sadist’s version of washing it out with soap, but he misses, jams the tip into my collarbone.
I can feel the skin charring and peeling away.
“You fucking—” he starts, but he can’t get the rest of the sentence out.
Instead, he grinds the ash into my skin and starts again. “You fucking—”
“Fuck,” I grit out from between clenched teeth, “you.”
I ball up my knuckles and punch him right in the throat.
The cigarette stutters down my chest and drops to the floor.
He wheezes, breath coming out like shreds of grated cheese, and his grip relaxes.
I slip out from under him and race toward the door.
Warm summer air rushes up to greet me as I stagger out of the house and across the front lawn.
I’m almost to the trees when my head’s yanked back by fingers tangled in my hair.
I tumble to the ground. Tears well in my eyes, not from pain but frustration. So goddamned close.
He straddles me, pins me down with his bulk. “You fucking cunt,” he spits, at last finding the word he was looking for in the cabin.
His hand wraps around my throat and squeezes. My mind goes blank. What should I do now? What can I do now? He pulls out a pocketknife and, with one hand, flips the blade open. He holds it in front of my face, light swimming across flat steel.
He presses his face into my scalp and inhales deeply.
“I’m sorry you don’t think I raised you right.
I tried my best. I really did before those fucks from CPS came and took you away.
But whatever I tried to jam into that empty head of yours—” Here, he pulls my hair hard, and the sound of strands snapping echoes through my skull.
“Didn’t take. I get it. Some girls are slow learners. Your mom was, too.”
He positions the blade at the center of my chest and presses the tip in. Right where that first cigarette nailed me all those years ago. In fact, when he swivels the blade on its perfect compass point, I’m convinced it must be the exact same spot because the nerve endings feel numb.
I imagine myself suspended in midair—except instead of plummeting off a bridge, I’m floating through the soft pine needles, into the blackened sky where it’s cold and quiet and still.
I’m watching my dad slice through my skin, but little does he know I’m long gone.
I’m shooting for the stars, baby; I’m hanging the moon.
Maybe this is the only way out.
Maybe this is how you break free.
Or maybe, a voice whispers, this is how you lose.
It’s not my voice, I realize. It’s the man’s.
The one who kidnapped me. It drags me back into my body, and the knife blade, which has skidded down the length of my chest, has gotten, holy fucking shit, so much sharper.
I turn my head desperately from side to side, trying to figure out if the man’s actually here, or if I’m hallucinating him in my dying moments.
It’s no good if you want to die.
That’s when I notice the rock next to my hand.
And that my dad’s grip on my wrists has slipped. He’s so focused on cutting me up, he’s forgotten about holding me down.
I grab for the rock.
When it smashes against my dad’s temple, I can feel the force of the blow vibrate through my entire body.
Right up my elbow into my shoulder. My dad jerks back; blood cascades, a liquid curtain, down his forehead and into his face.
“You—” he starts again. But this time, he’s unable to get the rest of the words out not because of his piss-poor vocabulary, but because something’s stuck in his throat.
Blood trickles out the corner of his mouth.
Both of us look down at the same time to find a large red splotch spreading across his shirt.
My head whips up just as the man pulls his screwdriver out of my dad’s back.
Gore drips off the business end. “If you want me to let him go,” he says, his voice soft and soothing, “I will. He could still live.”
My dad staggers upright, mouth twisted in anger. “Fuck you!” He swivels around, but the man jams the screwdriver in between his ribs. Another blood patch forms on his shirt.
The man cocks his head. “Well.” He twists the screwdriver, and my dad lets out an agonized gurgle before the tool comes loose. “Hypothetically, he could.”
My dad brings his hands down to staunch the wound, blood spilling out from between his fingers. He stumbles toward the man, who pulls the screwdriver back but doesn’t go in for the kill. He’s waiting for me, I realize. I’m the one who gets to make the choice here.
My dad must realize that, too, because he turns to look at me. “Steffani,” he says, blood sluicing down his chin and onto the bib of his shirt. “Steffani, everything I’ve done has been for you.”
He takes a step toward me, holds out his hand. His palm is coated in syrupy blood.
“It’s just you and me.” His face softening, he smiles at me with pink-streaked teeth. “Just you and me until the end.”
Part of me wants to run to him. Not to backhand him across the face or punch him in the gut. To hug him. To wrap my arms around him the same way I did when I was little, before the bad times started, and have him lift me into the sky, high enough so my fingers can skim the sun.
I don’t, though.
I’m done with running.
“What happened to Mom?” I ask, and his smile takes on a sharp edge. There’s blood in the water now, and it’s not his.
“She ran off with another man,” he says, then presses his thumb to his lips and adds, “Or maybe not. Maybe she went back to her relatives in Portland. Maybe she tried talking to the police, but they didn’t believe her.
Maybe she’s selling herself on the street; maybe she overdosed on crack, and no one cared.
Maybe she’s dead. And maybe—” A fresh stream of blood slips from his mouth. “Maybe you’ll never find her.”
Not if you kill me. That’s what he doesn’t say. If I want to know what happened to my mom, then I not only need to spare his life, I need to call an ambulance.
I need to save him.
I try my best to summon a memory of her.
Of the two of us cutting photos out of AAA guidebooks.
Our closet door covered with scotch-taped photos of Santorini and Kyoto and Yellowknife.
Her finger tapping the postcard of Red River Bridge in Washington, her gentle whispers: “We’re going there together. Just you and me. Just you wait.”
“You’ll never know,” my dad says.
“Well.” The rock still rests heavy in my hand. I lift it up, and for the first time, his confidence falters. “I’ll live with not knowing.”