Still Missing

to look forward to.

The good feeling left as soon as I remembered last Christmas, though--trust me, spending an entire winter inside a place with shuttered windows takes 'cabin fever' to a whole new level. And then, by the middle of January last year, I was four months pregnant.

On the mountain, I lived for the moments when I got to read--The Freak had good taste--and I didn't even mind reading out loud to him. While those pages were turning, I was somewhere else. And so was he. Sometimes he kept his eyes closed, or he'd lean toward me with his chin in his hand and his eyes glowing, and other times, during intense scenes, he paced around the room. If he liked something, he'd place his hand over his heart and say, 'Read it again.'

He always asked me what I thought about what we'd read, but at first I was hesitant to express any ideas and tried to paraphrase his opinions. Until the time he slapped the book out of my hand and said, 'Come on, Annie, use that pretty head of yours and tell me what you think.'

We were reading The Prince of Tides--he liked to mix up the classics with contemporary novels, and they usually featured screwed-up families--and it was the scene where the mother cooks up dog food for the dad.

'I was glad she screwed him over like that,' I said. 'He deserved it. He was an asshole.'

The second the words were out of my mouth, I panicked. Was he going to think I was talking about him? And 'asshole' wasn't exactly ladylike. But he just nodded his head thoughtfully and said, 'Yes, he didn't appreciate his family at all, did he?'

When we read Of Mice and Men, he asked if I felt sorry for 'poor dumb Lennie,' and when I told him I did, he said, 'Well, isn't that interesting. Is it because the girl was a slut? I think you were more bothered about the poor puppy he killed. Would Lennie be so deserving of your sympathy if she were a nice girl?'

'It would be the same either way. He was messed up--he didn't mean to.'

He smiled and said, 'So it's okay to kill someone as long as you don't mean to? I'll have to remember that.'

'That's not what I--'

He broke into laughter and held up a hand, while my cheeks burned.

The Freak was careful with the books--I was never allowed to place them facedown when they were open or dog-ear a page. One day when I was watching him carefully stack some books back on the shelf, I said, 'You must have read a lot as a kid.' His back stiffened and he slowly caressed the binding of the book he was holding.

'When I was allowed.' Allowed? A strange way to put it, but before I could decide whether I should ask about it, he said, 'Did you?'

'All the time--one of the bonuses of having a dad who worked at the library.'

'You were lucky.' He gave the books a final pat and left the cabin.

When he paced around, ranting about a character or plot twist, he was so articulate and passionate I'd get caught up in it and reveal more thoughts of my own. He encouraged me to explain and defend my opinions but never flipped out, even when I contradicted him, and over time I began to relax during our literary debates. Of course, when reading time ended, so did the only moments I didn't dread, the only activity I enjoyed, the only thing I did that made me feel like a human being, like myself.

Every night I lay in bed imagining The Freak's sperm crawling up inside me and willing my eggs to hide. Since I'd been on the pill when he took me, I hoped my body was messed up and I'd be rescued before I could get pregnant. But I also thought I'd get my period right after the first missed pill, and that didn't happen until about a week after he was finally able to rape me.

One morning we were in the shower, doing the routine, me facing the wall as he stood behind me washing my legs, up and down and between them. Then he stopped abruptly. When I turned around, he was just standing there looking at the cloth. There was blood on it, and when I looked down at myself, I saw blood on my inner thigh. His jaw clenched and his face reddened. I knew that look.

'I'm sorry--I didn't know.' I cringed against the wall.

He threw the cloth at me, got out of the shower, and stood silent on the bath mat, glaring at my crotch. The curtain was half open and water dripped onto the floor. I thought for sure he'd flip out over that, but he reached back in, moved the showerhead so the water hit me, and turned the tap to cold--I mean suck-the-wind-out-of-you cold.

'Wash yourself off.'

I tried not to scream, the water was so cold. He picked up the cloth from the shower floor and threw it at me.

'I told you to wash yourself off.'

When I thought I was done, with the cloth in hand, I said, 'What do you want me to do with this?'

He motioned for me to give it to him, examined it, and handed it back.

'Do it again.'

When there was nothing left on the cloth, and I was practically blue, he let me get out.

'Don't move,' he said. I wondered if my shivers counted as movement. The Freak left the room for a couple of minutes and came back with a scrap of material.

'Use this.' He threw it at me.

I said, 'Do you have any tampons or anything?'

He put his face close to mine and slowly said, 'A real woman would be pregnant by now.' I didn't know what to say, and his voice rose. 'What have you done?'

'There's no way I could--'

'If you don't do your job, I'll find someone who will.'

While he watched, I got dressed and put the stupid rag in my underwear. My fingers were so numb I couldn't get the row of buttons done up on the dress, and as I fumbled with them, he shook his head and said, 'You're pathetic.'

My period went on for six days, and every morning he waited outside my cold shower until I handed him the cloth with no blood on it. The entire bathtub had to be wiped down with cleaning fluid before he'd have his shower. He made me put the used rags in a bag, which he took outside and told me he burned. We skipped bath time too, which was fine by me--it was six days he didn't lay a hand on me.

During the afternoons he made me study books on how to get pregnant. I still remember the title of one, The Fastest Way to Get Pregnant Naturally. Yeah, that was The Freak, because, you know, abducting a woman, locking her in a cabin, and raping her is real natural.

As soon as I stopped bleeding, he was trying to knock me up again. I prayed my body would know his sperm was sick and reject it, or all the stress and fear would make it hard for me to conceive. No such luck.

About three weeks later, I knew my period was due and hoped every twinge in my belly was cramps. Every time I went to the bathroom, I prayed to see blood in my underwear. After four weeks, I knew. Judging by my little wall calendar, I figured I'd gotten pregnant around the middle of September, about two weeks after my period ended.

I hoped to hide it from The Freak, but one morning I woke to the sensation of his hand caressing my belly.

'I know you're awake. You don't have to get up right away today.' He nuzzled my shoulder. 'Look at me, Annie.' I turned to face him. 'Good morning,' he said with a smile, then looked down at his hand on my belly.

'My mother, Juliet, the woman who raised me, wasn't my biological mother, she adopted me when I was five. The whore who gave birth to me was supposedly too young to raise a child.' His voice was tight. 'She wasn't too young to spread her legs for whoever my father was.' He shook his head and in a softer voice said, 'But then Juliet changed my life. She lost her own son when he was only a year and still nursing. She had so much love to give.... It was she who taught me family is everything. And you, Annie, losing half your family so soon, I know you've always wanted one of your own--I'm glad I'm the man you chose.'

Chose? Not quite how I'd put it. Even before The Freak abducted me, I wasn't sure how I felt about having kids. I'd been pretty happy living the in de pen dent career woman's life and I never was the type to walk into a roomful of kids and go, 'Wow, I gotta get me one of these.' But here I was, knocked up, brewing some demon child. And here he was, talking about his mother, giving me a chance to get inside his head and learn more about him.