Chapter 40 Before
Before
The days congeal quickly into a routine.
Food appears three times a day. The meals are fresh now.
Emily’s cooking, mostly. She’s a good cook, though it’s not like I had much of a basis of comparison before my diet shrank to a rotation of tuna, chicken, and dried fruit.
I don’t remember vegetables being such a delicacy, in any case.
When Melinda brings the food, she brings vitamins, too. I decide it’s a good sign that she’s worried about my health, but I can’t get complacent.
Someone’s always around. I try not to ask to use the bathroom too much—-I don’t want it to start to annoy them.
I shower every day, with one of the girls guarding the door.
Andrew stays away entirely, but I catch him staring from the end of the hall sometimes.
Liam is eager to help—-too eager, and they can all see it.
We have our ritual at night. Two knocks, two in return, a few words exchanged. I thought I was doing it to draw him in, but each night, I lie awake in buzzy anticipation of that small moment.
It’s been over a week now. Over a week and no decision, but our time pretending that this can go on forever is officially at an end.
“I have to go,” Liam says as I curl on my side, his voice muffled from the other side of the wall.
“Go where?” I ask.
“Back to work. I only had a couple weeks off,” he says.
This is it. Because it’s not just Liam who will need to go. Melinda has her work, Andrew has, well, whatever the hell Andrew does with his free time, and Emily will need to get back to school.
They haven’t made a decision yet. I can’t bring myself to believe that’s a good thing. If they wanted to let me go, they could have by now.
“Don’t leave,” I say. “Don’t go without me.”
“I have to,” Liam says, and I hear him draw away from the wall.
His father thought Liam was weak. That only a weak man could want to make a living pretending to be other people.
Mason Hill was a man who saw kindness and gentleness as weakness, of course, but he wasn’t wrong.
Liam is weak. I thought I could use that.
Manipulate him into letting me go. But he isn’t strong enough to do what I need him to.
He didn’t promise to save me. He hasn’t promised anything at all. He’s surrendered already. Convinced himself there’s nothing he can do.
I wonder if he thinks he’s kind. If he thinks he’s a good person.
I think he knows he isn’t. I see the way his pupils dilate, the way his hands shake.
His words get slow, get tangled. I don’t know what he’s on.
Probably any number of things. He’s been taking more each day.
Blunting the knowledge of who he is. What he’s doing.
If any of them were good people, I wouldn’t be here. But it hurts him that he isn’t, and that still might be enough to save me.
The next morning, it’s Emily who brings breakfast. Steaming pancakes, real maple syrup, a pat of butter starting to melt. She sits in the chair at the desk to watch me eat, as they always do. They aren’t anywhere close to trusting me.
“We look alike,” she says suddenly as I shovel pancakes into my mouth. I straighten up, made mute by the mouthful of food. She has her hands trapped between her knees, her shoulders drawn up near her jaw. “I didn’t see it before. You were—-you looked like an animal.”
I blink. She’s like this. Quiet one minute, then suddenly blunt. I swallow down my food. “Thanks? I guess?” I say. “I mean, you’re very pretty. So I guess it’s a good thing, looking like you.” I try for a smile, but she doesn’t return it.
“I look like my mother,” she says.
Lizzie, Lizzie—-
“I know.” The pancakes are like glue on my back teeth. They stick in my throat.
“You look like her, too.”
“Yeah.” I look down at the plate. The butter is a greasy, malformed lump on top of the pitted pancakes. Syrup oozes down the side. Suddenly I’m not hungry. “Emily. Can I ask you something?”
She’s silent. I look up. She shrugs one shoulder, which I take to be permission.
“The lock on the door. It only locks from the outside,” I say. She doesn’t move, doesn’t respond. “How long has it been there?”
“I don’t know. Always,” she says, without particular inflection.
“Your father. Did he ever . . .” I don’t want to ask her. If I’m allowed to keep my horrors locked within me, so is she. But I need to understand her.
She seems to consider for a moment. “After she died, he was destroyed. He loved her so much. She saved his life, you know. She said he saved her, but it was the other way around. She saved him from drink and despair, that’s what he always said. She was his saint. His everything.”
“Emily . . .”
“He used to stand at the end of my bed at night,” she says.
Her tone is steady, too controlled. “I’d wake up and he’d be there, crying.
He’d beg me to forgive him and I didn’t know what it was for, but he’d put his head in my lap and I’d run my fingers through his hair and tell him that he would be all right.
He would say he loved me so much. That he would never hurt me. I knew it was true.”
The back of my throat is sour with bile. He took us because we looked like his wife. Like his daughter.
I speak softly. “He called me Lizzie sometimes.” All the time.
What is your name? Every time, it was a test. Defiance earned me black eyes, busted lips. I learned to answer with a laugh: Lizzie, silly. It’s your Lizzie, don’t you recognize me?
Oh, I was good at that. Good at him. He was simple. Easy to please, if only I let him devour every part of me that mattered. Growing up with a person like that . . . it’s a terrifying thought. What would that do to a girl?
Emily rises. She reaches for the plate. “Are you done?” She doesn’t meet my eyes.
“Yeah,” I manage. I hold it out. “Sorry you have to wait on me hand and foot.”
“That’s all right,” she says. She lifts her gaze, and her eyes lock with mine. “I mean, it’s not like you’re going to be here much longer.”
She says it lightly. Not like a threat or a condemnation. Still, it makes my limbs go cold. She walks out, closing the door behind her, and I stare at the space where she was.
He would never hurt me, she said.
Suddenly I can’t remember where the emphasis had been. He’d never hurt me? Or He’d never hurt me?
Living with someone like that—-what would you have to become, to endure it?
The lock slides shut.