Abandoned

I believed him.”

“Did you fight him?”

She leans back and sighs. “It didn’t do any good. That was my plan, you see?” She nods, answering herself. “Yes, that was my plan. It was a good plan. I’d go along with him and watch for my opportunity.” She chews on her lip. It would look pensive on someone else, and perhaps the same instinct is behind it here, but Heather continues until her lip begins to bleed. A thin line of blood runs down her chin.

“Heather,” I say, reaching out to touch her.

She doesn’t look at me, but it startles her out of the behavior. “What?” she asks.

“You were talking about fighting back.”

She shakes her head. “It didn’t work.”

“What didn’t work?”

“Fighting back. He put me in the trunk of his car, but he didn’t tie me up or anything. When it stopped, I was ready. The trunk opened, and I was like, ‘hi-yaaaah,’ ready to go all kung fu on his ass, but …” She shakes her head again. Sighs. “He was ready. He sprayed pepper spray in my face and then he used a stun gun on me.” The little-girl wonder stamps on her features again and the baldness adds to it, making her seem even more vulnerable. “You know what the scariest part was? He never said anything. He sprayed me and he shocked me and then he dragged me into that place and”—she swallows hugely, whispers—“threw me into the dark.”

I go to ask another question, but she’s been fully captured by the moment. She’s not here, she’s there. I stay quiet and wait for her to continue on her own.

“Have you ever experienced perfect darkness?” she asks. “It’s hard to find. Douglas and I went on a trip to Carlsbad Caverns one time. They take you waaaay underground. At one point in the tour they talk about that, about perfect darkness, and then they turn out all the lights. It’s incredible.” She marvels at the memory. “You can’t see anything. There’s no ambient light of any kind. There’s nothing for your eyes to adjust to. Just blackness.” Another huge swallow. “The darkness in my cell was like that. Heavy. It has a weight, did you know that?” She nods, more in a conversation with herself than with me. “Yes, it does. You can feel the dark when it’s complete like that. It slides against your skin. It gets into your mouth. You try not to let it, but if you close your mouth it just crawls in through your nose or your ears. You choke on it at first while you resist it, but it’s just too much. One big gulp, and you drown.” She twitches, twitches, twitches. “Except this drowning doesn’t kill you. It goes on forever and ever and ever. It’s like falling off a cliff for years.

“He didn’t do anything for about a day. Just left me there in the dark. Then he turned on the lights. So bright. Yes, they were. So bright. I couldn’t see anything, and I banged into a wall. Three blind mice, see how she runs.” She giggles. Picks at her arm. “I was staggering around and heard the door open and then he used the stun gun again. I felt a prick in my arm and I went to sleep.

“When I woke up, I was naked and shackled and in the dark. The shackle was attached to a chain, which was attached to a wall. I had ones on my ankles and ones on my wrists, four of them, one two three four, so I could move around about half of the length of the cell.

“There was a speaker—something—built into the room. Sometimes his voice would come out of the dark. ‘There are rules,’ he told me on the first day. ‘You eat every meal given unless you’re sick. You exercise every day, without exception. Start with push-ups and running in place. Failure to comply with any of these rules will result in punishment.’”

She glances at me, a sly, knowing glance. “I didn’t listen at first, of course. He brought some food and shoved it through a small opening in the bottom of the door, just like in one of those prison movies.” She stops talking and stares. Moments pass.

“Heather?”

She jolts and begins talking again, as though nothing had happened. It reminds me of a needle jumping the groove on a record. “The only time I’d see light was when he brought the food. He’d unlatch the opening and place the tray inside. I’d have to get down on my stomach to eat. I loved the light so so much. It was kind of him to give me that, don’t you think?”

My stomach rolls. She continues.

“I threw the food and he closed the opening. I sat there in the dark for a long time. Sometime later, I don’t know how long, the blinding lights came on again. I couldn’t see anything but white. He did the same thing as before, the stun gun and the needle. I woke up on my stomach, strapped to a table.” She scrunches into herself like an abused child, trying to present as little body surface as possible.

“‘You broke the rules,’ he said. ‘Now you have to be punished.’ He didn’t sound angry or anything. I really didn’t get that feeling at all. He sounded like someone who had a job to do. Yes.” Big nod, back and forth, happy to have put the right words to it. “He had a job to do.” She pauses. “He used a whip on me. It felt like white fire, like someone was pouring lines of gasoline across my back and lighting them up. I screamed right from the beginning.

“Once he was done, he put some greasy stuff on my back, over the cuts. ‘Next time you break the rules, the punishment will increase in duration by a third. And again the next time after that. And before you get any ideas— it’ll never get bad enough to kill you.’

“I tried to ask him a bunch of questions. ‘Why me? Why are you doing this?’ Things like that.” She pouts, picking at a forearm. “He wouldn’t answer me, no, he wouldn’t. He just threw me right back in that room in the dark.”

Again her eyes slide over to me, and again that sly smile intrudes. “I took another five punishments before I believed him.” The smile evaporates, replaced by wide-eyed wonder. “After that, I was a good girl. He never, ever hurt me when I was a good girl.”

She seems to have wound down. I give her a gentle push. “Were you in the dark all the time, Heather?”

She’s staring again.

“Heather?”

She jolts. “What? Oh yeah. Pretty much all the time. There was a toilet there; I had to find it in the dark and use it in the dark. The only way of marking time was meals. That’s how I counted the days. Three meals was a day, and I’d count that. The problem was, there were times he’d be gone for a long time. Then he’d leave me dried food to eat, divided up into meal portions.” She frowns. “I’d try and count the portions and divide by three and keep track of the days, but …” She sighs, her head falling forward in a gesture of futility. “I just lost track. Especially when I started talking to myself a lot and even more when I started talking to them.”

“Who is ‘them,’ Heather?” I ask.

Her smile is beatific. It erases the look of insanity and suffering from her features, replacing it with a kind of peaceful joy. “My boys,” she says. “The voices in the light that would comfort me. Without them … I don’t know.” She picks at her arm until it bleeds. “I might have gone insane.”

I feel my stomach rolling again, not in revulsion but in horror. My greatest fear, since I was a little girl, was exactly this: to go crazy and not know it. I remember seeing that movie about John Nash, A Beautiful Mind, and not being able to sleep afterward.

“Heather,” I ask. “Did you ever see the man who did this to you? Did you see his face or anything else that might help us identify him?”

The twitch in her cheek again, four times. She shakes her head. “Noooooo … all I ever saw was the dark, the dark and my light through the hole in my door.” She grimaces. “You can see the dark, just like you can taste it. Everything gets more acute. I have bat ears now, did you know that?” She startles me by emitting a few high- pitched squeals—her imitation of a bat—which then dissolve into cackles. “And my skin …” She runs her hands over her arms, and I watch goose bumps rise. “It’s all more sensitive.” She squints at me. “But I’m seeing now. Am I really seeing? Or is this a dream?” She picks at the bloody spot on her forearm. “It’s real,” I tell her.

She looks around, peering with care at everything in the room. She shrugs. “It doesn’t seem real.” She sighs, lies back. “I’m tired again. It’s sleep time.” She sits up suddenly, fearful. “Or is it eating time?” She reaches out to me, her hand shaking. “If I missed eating time, I’m sorry. I didn’t know. You won’t hit me, will you?”

I fight the welling tears and reach out to take her hand. “No one’s going to hit you anymore, Heather. I promise.”

She calms, but I can see in her eyes that she does not believe me.

“She’s not in any condition right now to give us more than that,” Alan observes.