He doesn’t pull away from me, but his body is stiff. He’s a statue, it seems. I’ve done that to him.
“It’s okay,” he says.
“It’s not.” I take his hand and squeeze it. I want to wring out the pain that’s oozing through him right now. A slow, abundant poison.
“I don’t know why I said that,” I say. “I know you’re only trying to help.”
He nods but won’t look at me. “I am,” he says, “but I get it. You told me last night you needed to stay, and I shouldn’t have pushed.”
When his eyes finally meet mine, there’s a wince in them. It’s slight, but it makes me squeeze his hand again. And again and again.
“I know you haven’t been feeling well, either,” he continues. “So I’m sorry.”
I shake my head. How could I have made this man, this incredible man—who sings Disney songs with the kids at the hospital, who endures all my panic with incomparable patience—think he needs to respond to my cruelty with an apology of his own?
“Is that any better, by the way?” he asks.
I’m rubbing my thumb over his hand, as if I could massage my poison from his veins. “Better?”
“Your period. The cramps.”
There’s another wince in his eyes as he says it. Even subtler this time. He doesn’t want me to see. Doesn’t want to burden me with his disappointment, the same way I didn’t want to burden him with my anxiety over trying for a baby in the first place.
I could make him happy. I could remove that wince right now.
But I was right, wasn’t I, to be so anxious? Haven’t I just proven how easy it is to hurt someone you love?
And Astrid—didn’t she show me what it takes to keep someone safe? How strong you have to be. How fearless and unflinching.
I am none of those things. Not yet. And I can’t bring myself to let him down.
“Yeah,” I say to Eric, managing a smile. “My period’s lighter today. I’m feeling much better.”
sixteen
Something terrible is about to happen to Lily. To me.
I’ve just started the next chapter in the memoir, and I’m afraid of reading it and not remembering.
I’m afraid of remembering, too.
I still have dreams about the last time I saw Lily. They’re more like filmstrips, though—flickering, sepia-toned frames where she sees what she sees, screams the way she screams, and I can only watch and listen.
My hands shake as I hold the book, as my eyes drift farther into chapter five.
When he came down the stairs that day, everything was still normal. Or as normal as anything can be when you’re a prisoner. He had a routine we came to expect, and at first, that day was no different. He brought down the food and the Sprite, set it all in the usual place, and then he reached for the waste bucket.
The waste bucket. I shiver as I read those words. She hasn’t mentioned it much, but how awful that must have been. How degrading and inhuman.
That’s when it happened—the moment that instigated Lily’s violent removal from the basement.
Violent removal? My heart pounds as I recall what Rita said: “Jesus, the way things ended for her in the basement.”
The handle of the bucket got caught. He always looped his arm beneath it and let it dangle from the crook of his elbow, but on that day, Lily’s last, the handle snagged on the end of his glove.
She describes how he struggled with it, tried to unsnag it, but that only made it worse. And in all his fumbling, I saw something. Astrid doesn’t know what. I don’t know what. But she says I saw something and I flinched.
No, not just a flinch—her entire body jolted, as if she’d been zapped by a live wire.
But what was it? What would make me jolt like that?
Astrid has a theory.
She saw a feature of the man that I never did, something that revealed this alien-looking creature—no skin but the fabric of his clothes, no head but his welder’s mask—to be an actual human being. Something that made clear that this man really was a man, not just a monster from a nightmare.
And then she screamed so loud I felt the sound of it vibrating in my ribs.
But I don’t remember this moment. I can’t remember what I would have seen. So maybe she’s wrong. Maybe it was just my voice coming back to me. Maybe, after all those days of silence, the only way I could speak was through a scream.