back, more surprised that he’d spoken than by the threat itself. It was the most he’d said to me in a long time. But once again, his voice was muffled by the mask, and only a whisper at that. If I heard it again, I know I wouldn’t know it.
* * *
I named her Lily.
Lily after Lilith, from Jewish folklore. In those stories, it is Lily, not Eve, who is the wife of Adam. And it is Lilith who leaves Adam when she refuses to bow down to him just for being a man. For this, she is classified as a demon.
We didn’t learn about her in CCD, of course, but I looked her up while listening to my Lilith Fair CDs, and when I read her stories, I pictured her walking away from the Garden of Eden with both middle fingers piercing the air. Her exit was a blistering fuck-you. It said: a land that demands you suppress your desires is not a land worth living in.
I thought about Lilith a lot in the basement, even before Lily came. I wanted to believe that she was right. I wanted the idea of her to give me hope, the way she had whenever I talked to Bridget late at night, when the phone was a sad substitute for hands and lips and breath. But Lilith had been wrong, hadn’t she? Hadn’t I left my own Garden—all that lush grass, those tablecloths that swayed in the breeze like the skirts of angels—and hadn’t I ended up in hell?
It was Lily who turned things around for me. Lily who made me see the magic in Lilith again. Because I had walked away, yes, I had set certain things in motion—but what could this girl have done? She was so small, so innocent, and he’d taken her, too. Maybe it didn’t matter, then, all the ways I’d made myself vulnerable. Maybe it only mattered that a man had seen that vulnerability and circled it like a vulture, instead of honoring vulnerability for what it is: a kind of bravery, a kind of strength.
I named her Lily because she needed a name. Because she wouldn’t speak, not even to tell me who she was. I named her Lily as a reminder, to both of us, that we did not deserve our captivity. That it was men doing what men have done since the beginning of time, the beginning of women. Containing us. Chaining us. Like Father Murphy had tried to do that day at my party. So whenever I said Lily’s name in that basement, it was like I was saying a prayer. To whom, I don’t know. Not God, I don’t think, who, after all, is another man.
I said her name often. When she folded into herself like a fetus, and all I wanted was to be the womb that kept her safe, “Lily,” I said, “come here.” When she cried instead of ate, her sobs the only sound she made, “Lily,” I said, “it’s not so bad; look, I’m eating it too.” When her panic seemed to freeze her in place, “Lily,” I said, “look at this, see this freckle under my eyebrow? As long as you can see it, everything’s okay.” When she started to climb the stairs, and I remembered the masked man’s threat, “Lily,” I said, “please, he’s going to—” But I could not tell her what he was going to do. I could only reach out to her with pleading eyes and arms.
I broke her sandwiches into tiny bites, plopped them into her mouth that, eventually, opened for me like a bird’s. I combed her hair with my fingers. I kept her from scratching at the faded rope marks on her wrists. I used my nails to slide the dirt out from underneath hers. I rubbed her back in gentle circles as she laid her head in my lap. I told her that the light at the top of the stairs was a sun shining just for us, that we were our own planet, that all that dirt and dust was ours to discover, not fear. When the man came down to bring food and soda and clothes, I kept her hidden behind me and I stared at him like Lilith would. Like a woman capable of walking away.
I invented games for us. I made a fort with a broom and a sheet and our mattress, and I called it our castle. Lily found a bag of marbles