Here and Gone(37)

Louise blinked and said, ‘I hear you.’

‘Good,’ he said. ‘Now let’s get some sleep.’

He watched her close her eyes, then he closed his own, his arm around his sister, her warm body pressed against his. Sleep came like a shadow, slipped over him, and he knew nothing more until the trapdoor opening overhead pulled him awake.

Sean blinked up at the rectangle of light and the silhouette of Collins descending the steps, a bag of food in one hand.

‘I think Louise is sick,’ he said.

Collins set the bag on the floor and came to the side of the mattress. She hunkered down and reached across to feel Louise’s forehead, then down inside her top. Louise barely stirred at her touch.

‘Goddamn it,’ Collins said.

Sean sat up on the mattress. ‘You need to get medicine for her,’ he said.

‘I don’t know if I can get any.’

‘What if she gets worse?’

‘All right,’ Collins said, standing up. ‘Make sure she takes plenty of water. Take the blanket off her, maybe take her top off, try to cool her down. I’ll be back later.’

She turned and walked back toward the steps. Sean called after her.

‘Deputy Collins?’

She stopped, looked back over her shoulder.

‘Thank you,’ Sean said.

Her eyelids flickered. She turned and climbed the steps, locked the trapdoor without replying.





18


AUDRA’S MIND ACHED. The world had stretched so thin she imagined she could tear a hole in it with a fingertip. Everything moved in jerks, either too slow or too fast, and everyone spoke in jumbles of sound. Part of her knew it was exhaustion, but the other part felt she moved through a dream, that none of this was real. That it was happening to some other woman in some other town, as she watched it all play out like a strange television show.

She had lain awake through the night watching the red light on the camera, waiting for it to blink out, fearing that when it did, they would come again, put a gun to her head. At moments she wondered if that had really happened at all. Had she simply dreamed it, one of those nightmares that follows you into waking? But she did fall asleep at some point, only to wake again, like dragging herself up through tar, her heart hammering, lungs unable to grab the air they needed.

When she opened her eyes, Whiteside stood over her.

He hunkered down next to the bunk.

‘You’ve got to let them go,’ he said. ‘They’re gone, and that’s all there is to it.’

Paralyzed, she couldn’t raise a fist to strike him.

Part of her mind asked, am I dreaming? Is he really there?

His hand came into her view, the fingers open as if reaching for a glass of water. They slipped around her throat. Pressure. Just a little. Enough to hurt.

‘Don’t think I won’t,’ he said. ‘If I have to.’

Then he let go and stood upright, turned, left the cell.

Alone again, she gasped, her heart suddenly beating hard and fast. Chest rising and falling, grabbing at air.

She couldn’t tell how long it took for the waves of fear to ebb away, only that the sun had risen over the world outside, coloring everything around her in deep blues and grays.

After a while, Audra became less certain that Whiteside had been there at all. He might have been a phantom of her sleep-deprived brain. Another piece of her sanity breaking and falling away.

Perhaps that was the point. To get inside her head, break her from within. Make her crazy, keep her scared. Because scared is easy to control. Just as Patrick had done all the years they were together.

Her husband had made her doubt every single facet of her being, kept her constantly off balance until she barely knew up from down. Every morning, he’d berate her for her hangover. Every evening he’d come home with another bottle. One day telling her how pathetic she was for needing the pills, the next day getting another prescription filled for her.

It had started the evening after her defeat, when she gave Sean a bottle of formula for the first time. Patrick had come home from work with a bottle of white wine. He held it out to her as she fed their son.

‘What’s that for?’ Audra asked.

‘If you’re not breast-feeding,’ Patrick said, ‘there’s no reason why you can’t have a drink.’

‘I don’t want it,’ she said.

She hadn’t touched alcohol since she’d discovered she was pregnant, had sworn she wouldn’t touch it again after the baby was born. Too many nights had been lost to the blur. She wasn’t going to get pulled into that mire again.

Patrick shrugged and nodded. ‘Okay. It’ll be in the fridge if you change your mind.’

If she had possessed the clarity of mind to ask why he’d brought home the bottle of wine, why he wanted her to be drunk again after all these months of sobriety, things might have been different. But she didn’t ask. She was too broken for rational thought.

The night feeds came and went, Audra’s mind dimming with each one, sleep seeming like a strange and vague notion, not something she could actually indulge in. In the morning, Margaret appeared, volunteered to take over and let Audra rest. Audra tried to resist, but Margaret’s insistence and Patrick’s hard stare won out. She handed Sean over to his grandmother and went to the bedroom, where she dreamed her milk had poisoned him, made him sick, and she woke with an aching sorrow that did not leave her as the day dragged on.