I could recall it, the man might grapple with Astrid. His mask might slip as he holds her back, giving me a glimpse of his face.
But why didn’t she describe that struggle, the man’s arm around her waist? Why didn’t she mention me at all?
Maybe she’ll portray it as a flashback. Render that day a nonlinear tale. I return to chapter three, sweep my eyes all over the pages, look for the word grabbed, the word witness, the word waist. Because I know I saw it happen. I was in the same place at the same time, I remembered exactly what the man wore, and I—
Here’s the name Lily. The name Rusty said belonged to the witness. I ended up calling her Lily, Astrid writes, once I understood what she meant to me.
I puzzle over the sentence until it dawns on me: if she only saw me glimpse the man snatching her from the street, only knew me as a scrap of hope to hold on to in the basement, she wouldn’t have known me as Fern. She would have had to invent me, the witness, nearly from scratch. And though it’s not my name, I see the letters of Lily like a stamp that proves my existence. For the tiniest of moments, I relax. Let out a ragged breath. But then I focus on the words themselves. The sentences that conclude the chapter, that want to captivate the reader so completely they don’t even think before they turn the page.
Only I can’t keep going. I’m frozen.
I don’t know how much time passes. I don’t know how many keys I hear Ted press. At some point, I blink. Shake my head. Snap the book shut. Toss it away from me, only for it to bounce against the foot of my bed and splay back open like an invitation to continue. But I can’t keep reading it. I won’t even look at those words again. To do so would be to admit the possibility that what Astrid wrote is true.
And it’s not. It can’t be. It simply isn’t possible.
I know that memory distorts, rewrites. That entire experiences can be repressed. But the thing she said really happened—I know she’s wrong. She has to be. Because that’s something I could never forget.
Excerpt from Chapter Three of Behind the Red Door: A Memoir by Astrid Sullivan
When I opened my eyes, there was darkness.
It was a kind of darkness I’d never known before, one so thorough I had to touch my face to make sure my eyes weren’t actually closed.
My tongue was fuzzy. My head throbbed. It felt as if someone was trapped inside my skull, banging their hands against bone, desperate to find a way out. I tried to prop myself up, but my arms shook so badly they struggled to bear my weight. When they collapsed beneath me, I fell back onto a surface that was firm but forgiving.
I closed my eyes again, though it made no difference. I could have slept with them open.
* * *
When I awoke for the second time, there was light. And a staircase. And a bright red door. The light was from a bulb at the top of the stairs, and it was almost obscene the way it hung from the ceiling, large and round and naked like a breast that could blind. It wasn’t enough to illuminate the entire room, but it showed me what mattered: I was in a basement, on an air mattress, with a chain attached to my ankle, long enough for me to walk around but not escape. There was a window, too—a rectangle of grimy, cobwebbed glass too high for me to reach. It was boarded up, from the outside, with a piece of wood that looked so solid, I didn’t even bother to scream.
Not at first, anyway. The screaming came a few minutes later, after he stomped down the stairs to bring me food. I saw his boots first—black like the rest of what he wore. Then his pants, which were waders, then rubber gloves, which stretched up his forearms. And finally, instead of a face, instead of something human and identifiable, he wore a welding mask, which made him look more ridiculous than menacing.
I could gauge nothing from his height or build. He seemed relatively thin, but it was difficult to tell beneath the waders that were bulky on his torso. I later told the police that he was between five ten and six feet tall, but even