question was a pointless one. I knew why he had chosen me. It was because I’d walked away from the safety of my home, from all those witnesses who would have guarded me. It was because I’d been an easy target.
If only I’d been the pious girl my parents had wanted.
A week into my captivity, I stopped eating the food he brought me, stopped sucking down the too-sweet soda. I tried to make myself holy with fasting. The man seemed perturbed by this. He held the sandwiches closer to me. Then he let them pile up, as if convinced I would decide one day to eat them all at once. When the meat began to rot, I threw them in my waste bucket and he had no choice but to take them away. Still, every day another can of soda I opened only for a few survival sips; every day another sandwich I left untouched. My stomach hurt with hunger. It growled and then it roared. But I needed to atone, to finally deny my body its basest desires.
And on the seventh day of my second week, things finally changed. Instead of a sandwich, the man brought me a girl. I ended up calling her Lily, once I understood what she meant to me—but on that day, when he brought her down the stairs, she was still nameless. She had ropes tied tightly around her wrists. She had hair the color of toffee. She was small and fragile as a bird. And suddenly, for the first time, when I looked at the top of the stairs, the red door appeared to shine like light through stained glass.
nine
Something stabs me. A little pinch of pain. I look at my finger and find a bead of blood on the tip.
I’m in Mara’s studio, packing it up like she asked me to, and there’s a broken bowl on the counter that lines one wall of the main room. She might have been saving the pieces for a project, but she’s not here to tell me that, so I’m throwing them away. I thought I was being careful, but one of the smaller shards must have pricked me.
The cut is tiny, barely a cut at all, and I won’t go back into the house to wash it out—because in the house is Astrid’s book. I don’t want to see it, or read it. I’ll pack up pottery and tools and stacks of photographs, and I will not think about what I read last night. Or how, each time I fell back asleep, I dreamed of Astrid—only this time, I dreamed her in a concrete room. A room I, too, was in, with ropes around my wrists.
But those dreams have to have been a lie. They were just my anxiety making the terrible things that happen to other people feel like real possibilities for my own life. How many times have I heard of someone’s rare disease and been convinced I had it? How many times have I seen an accident on the news and been sure that Eric was in it?
The girl named Lily could not have been me. Because there’s no way that a person can forget being abducted, being locked for days in a basement, or even a red door as bright as the one on the memoir’s cover. So I had to have been wrong last night when I was certain I was the witness. And my nightmares—they were always just nightmares. Just synapses firing. Just a vague and meaningless image only recently contorted by a face I saw on the news.
And yes, I was in Foster at the time of Astrid’s kidnapping. But so were thousands of people.
And yes, I remembered the kidnapper’s clothes. But Dr. Lockwood’s voice in my head had been right; I must have read about them somewhere.
Early this morning, I huddled over my phone, slogged through the agonizingly slow and stuttering service to reread Astrid’s Wikipedia page. And there it was. The kidnapper wore all black: boots, rubber gloves, waders, and a welding mask.
It’s a quick detail, only one sentence. I must have skimmed the line the first time around, then promptly forgotten it for the story’s greater horror: how he injected her with a drug to steal her more easily, how he locked her beneath the ground.
Then there was this other paragraph in the Wikipedia page: Sullivan writes in her memoir, Behind the Red Door, that she was kept in the basement with another girl,