in a corner I couldn’t reach, and I turned it into something that helped pass the hours, that distracted Lily with the satisfying click-click of the marbles hitting one another. I made up clapping games, like the ones I used to play in elementary school, only I made the words sillier, less sinister. (As girls, even our games were laced with threats: “Miss Mary Mack,” who never came back; “CeeCee, My Playmate,” with the cellar that becomes a dungeon. You’re not supposed to think about the lyrics, but still, there they are, singing forth from little lips: I’ll scratch your eyes out and make you bleed to death. No wonder girls aren’t expected to grow up into women who love each other.)
The games kept Lily from crying, from staring, statue-still, into the distance, unable to move or blink. She still never spoke. She still never chanted along to my made-up songs as we slapped our palms together—but sometimes, she smiled, and in those days, that was all I cared about. Her smile gave me breath and purpose and life. How fulfilling it was to be the protector, I was learning, to be the one who had to stay strong. How beautiful it was to know I was needed, beyond the prayers and bent knees I could offer up to God.
fifteen
I’m huddled on my bed, reading Astrid’s book, as Eric and Ted argue downstairs. I’m trying not to hear what they’re saying, trying to focus on the words on these pages, but Eric isn’t holding back.
“How could you be so irresponsible?” he yells. “Your twelve-year-old daughter tells you she’s been imprisoned in a basement and you barely do anything about it? What if the person who took her had come back for her? Huh?”
“The police didn’t think that was an issue,” Ted fired back. “Are you implying, Dr. Eric, that you know better than the police?”
Ted wasn’t home when we got back last night. He wasn’t clacking in his office. Wasn’t grumbling over Brennan in the kitchen. The house was a kind of quiet that made me uncomfortable. Made me itch. After a while, Eric and I squeezed into my twin bed together, struggled to share a sweaty night of sleep, and I don’t know when Ted got back. The clunking fan muted the silence of his absence.
“It’s not up to the police to care more about your daughter than you do,” Eric says.
I turn the fan on now, even though it’s mercifully cooler today. I can still hear their voices going back and forth, and though I can’t make out the words anymore, their tones alone are distracting. Like the ache I’ve been feeling in my ribs ever since their argument started.
I hold the book closer to my face, make it a shield.
Now, here it is, in permanent ink on the page. Here is the story of how Astrid renamed me—and why. When I read how I swallowed my own voice, suffering from a fear so much greater than Ted’s Experiments or Cooper’s attacks, I grip the book even harder. The girl who saw everything, Astrid called Lily in the prologue. The girl who saw everything but never said a word. Understanding swells in my lungs as I suck in a breath. She meant it literally. Not that I never came forward to tell someone what I’d seen—but that I never even spoke.
And Astrid didn’t only rename me; she carried me through the darkness, too. Look at this, she said, pointing to her freckle, transforming it into a constant I could count on. Reading about it now, I shiver. It’s a memory in this memoir I finally recognize.
So what else is there? What else?
As I learn about the ways she cared for me—how she combed my hair, cleaned me of dirt, broke my sandwich into bites—I feel another ache, deeper than the one in my ribs. It’s like I miss her, even though these moments aren’t familiar to me at all. It’s like she was a temporary sister, and I’ve lived all these years never knowing what I lost.
But the ache isn’t just gratitude. Isn’t just love and admiration for a woman I don’t even know. It’s this agonizing, miraculous fact: Astrid protected me in that basement more than I’d ever been protected at home.
“She needed to be left alone! She didn’t need some doctor poking at her.” Ted’s voice booms up the stairs, breaks through the fan’s white noise. I close my eyes for a second. Then I turn