“Will you do this with me?” Ted asks. Then he leans forward, touches my hand. I wrap my fingers around his before he can pull away. He doesn’t try to, though. He holds my gaze with his eyes and holds my hand with his. His skin is dry. Papery. But it’s my father’s skin. My dad’s.
“Will you listen to me read this, Fern? Please?”
Excerpt from Chapter Five of Behind the Red Door: A Memoir by Astrid Sullivan
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.
That’s when it happened—the moment that instigated Lily’s violent removal from 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. It became caught between the black rubber and the shirt he wore beneath, and the more he tried to shake it off, the tighter the handle clung.
I almost told Lily to run. He was distracted, his concentration pinpointed on fixing the handle and the glove. It was a problem so incongruently slapstick to our setting that it made me forget what he told me would happen if she tried to escape. Here he was—no longer a dangerous abductor, capable of killing a girl, but a man whose kidnapper costume had gotten caught on a bucket of shit.
I kept my gaze on Lily, who stared at the man as he fumbled, and suddenly she flinched. No, not just a flinch—her entire body jolted, as if she’d been zapped by a live wire.
I don’t know what she saw. And it kills me that I’ve never been able to ask her. But here’s what I’ve always believed, the only answer that makes sense: 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.
twenty
Why’d you stop?”
I’m scratching my wrist, waiting for the rest of chapter five, where the man yanks Astrid back, pulls me by the hair, drags me out of the basement. I’m bracing myself for Astrid’s desperation, the fear that burst from her body like another hand that tried to reach me. But Ted is silent now. Inspecting me.
“Because this is the climax of your fear,” he says. “This is the moment that matters.”
“But the stairs. Him grabbing me.”
“No. It’s this. What did you see?”
A bead of sweat hurries down my back. “I don’t know. I’m not sure I saw anything. She seems— She sounds like she’s just guessing.”
Ted keeps his eyes on me, his chair pointed toward mine, but he raises the hand closest to his desk and types a word without ever breaking our stare. Six clacks.
“Say that she’s not,” he says. “Let’s explore it at least. Go back to the moment you saw something.”
“I can’t. I don’t remember that.”
“You’re not letting yourself remember it.”
“That’s not true,” I argue. “I’ve been trying for days to remember everything.”
Ted crosses his arms, glances at the ceiling. “Dissociative amnesia helps a person survive trauma,” he says. He sounds so bored he could be reading from a textbook. “It allows the individual to move through life without being crippled by the memory of whatever they experienced.” He leans forward, elbows on his legs. “But you don’t need that anymore. You’ve already moved through life, and you’ve done so beautifully. You’re all grown up, Fern, and I’m immensely proud of who you’ve become. Social worker and all.”
I know I should feel his last sentence as a jab, another dismissal of the work I do, but I feel warm instead. And the warmth is softer, more soothing, than the heat pushing down on me from the ceiling. I could sink into the comfort of it. I could make a bed of this chair.
But I shift. Listen to the seat creak beneath my weight. Dr. Lockwood