Maybe. But Delilah decided that she couldn’t count on anyone else. She could only rely on herself, and she needed a plan.
So far, as hard as she tried, she had none.
The chain kept her anchored to the wall. The man was strong. She remembered the force of him coming at her in the cornfield, the way his arms encircled her as if she were a baby doll. He’d picked her up as if she weighed nothing. She thought about the creaking and complaining the old wood floor made under the force of his boots. She’d chided herself for not fighting back when he grabbed her, but even if she had she wouldn’t have been able to fight him off. She had to get free of the chains and find a way to slip past him. Or find a way to escape while he was gone. But how?
If she did, if she managed somehow to escape, then what?
Would he come after her and kill her? She decided that even that would be better than living as a prisoner. But then she considered the rest of his threat, that he would murder her entire family. Her mothers, her brothers and sisters, even her baby brother Jayden, only two and still in diapers.
Could the man really do that?
When she thought about how easily he’d taken her, plucked her up not far from her own back door with her whole family inside the house unaware, she feared that he could.
I have to protect my family. I just have to.
Yet being confined to the room, chained to the wall, was torture.
Off and on she’d wondered about the sister the man told her about, the one who’d come all the way from Dallas to look for her. He’d said her name was Clara, but Delilah didn’t know of a sister with that name. Who could she be?
She couldn’t think about those things, she decided. More than anything, Delilah hated the blindfold. No matter what he did to her, she needed to get it off. Her dried tears saturated it and made it rough against her skin. She tried to turn her face and angle her right shoulder up to push it, but she couldn’t reach far enough to make any progress.
Despite the awful smell of the cushion beneath her, Delilah pushed her face into the rough fabric, bringing her nose down toward her chest. At first, nothing. But she kept at it, even though it scraped her skin. After four such attempts, the blindfold budged. Not a lot, maybe half an inch. But it moved.
Resting on her knees, she reasoned that to nudge the blindfold farther, she needed something to hook it on. Over the time she’d been held captive, Delilah had sometimes felt something round like a button attached to the cushion beneath her, something that dug into her skin.
Delilah scrunched forward and used her cheek to hunt for it, but felt nothing. She shimmied to the right, searched and again failed to find anything that might help. Finally, on her sixth attempt, it happened. Something hard pressed into her cheek.
Delilah sat back and thought for a moment, then crouched. Pushing as hard as she could, she ground her face into the unforgiving fabric toward the button. On the third try, the lower edge of the blindfold latched on just above her right cheek. Once she had it secure, she rolled her chin toward her chest. As she prayed it would, the blindfold edged up. A few attempts and she had her right eye uncovered.
After days of darkness behind the blindfold, it took a moment for Delilah’s eye to adjust to the dim light. When it did, she realized the cushion beneath her was about two inches thick, about the width of a twin mattress but shorter. It was filthy—dirt and grease were ground into the beige fabric. In one corner, a stain had cured a nasty-looking brown. Whatever caused it had dripped over the edge and onto the side.
Delilah sat back and stared at the stain. The color reminded her of a time when she sliced her right thumb while chopping onions. Mother Ardeth washed the wound with something that stung and then pressed a salve made of feathery yarrow leaves on it. That usually worked, but that time the cut wouldn’t stop bleeding. Mother Naomi retrieved the sewing kit and threaded a needle she dipped in alcohol. Holding back tears, Delilah held Sariah’s hand as Mother Ardeth pierced the soft, delicate skin and pulled the thread through, tugging the cut closed. Still the wound oozed. By morning, the white gauze bandage had cured that same ugly shade of brown.
“Blood?” Delilah murmured, staring at the stain. The air suddenly felt chill, as if someone had opened a refrigerator door. “That’s blood.”
A sinking feeling deep within her, she turned away from the cushion, not wanting to look any longer. Instead, she gazed about the room.
The walls, the floor—everything was a dull gray, dirty and bare. One wobbly-looking bent willow chair sat in the center of the room. That, a bucket the man had given her to use as a toilet, and the pad beneath her were the only contents. She turned her head to the right and saw the outline of a long narrow window, a sheet of plywood nailed to the frame to cover the glass. Daybreak seeped in around the edges.
As Delilah turned to her left, the blindfold threatened to slip back down over her eye. Hurriedly, she crouched back down. Again she hooked the cloth on the button and pulled. Once she had the right side fairly secure above her eyebrow, she swiveled her head and repeated the maneuver with the left side. Tighter and more difficult to maneuver, it eased up slowly. She had both eyes uncovered when the button’s thread snapped. Caught in the blindfold, the plastic button dug into her forehead. Delilah didn’t care.
For the first time in days, she could see.
Delilah sat up again and looked
