Don't Look for Me(39)

Sometimes I don’t sleep at all, and so there is no waking up. My mind reels through the night of the storm. Through the mistakes I made. I swim in a pool of self-loathing, for Annie’s death, for Nicole’s pain, and for what I have now done to my family by walking down that road, trying to escape my life. I bathe in the agony that I feel I deserve, and my suffering soothes the guilt. I cry and shake but then accept my penance as I stare into the darkness.

But that is not the worst of the mornings. On the worst of the mornings, I wake up with Alice entangled in my arms because she is very good at sneaking. She likes to be locked in the room with me. And he allows this because somehow he knows I will not hurt another child. He is good at sneaking, too. At sneaking Alice into my room.

On those mornings, he comes to collect her, opening the gate, closing it again. Locking it shut.

I try to think that this invasion of my bed, my body, is helping me, giving me power. The more Alice needs me, the more power I will yield over her.

And power is just what I need over this little girl, my little prison guard. As long as I am a good mommy to her, there is no talk of finding a new mommy. There is no talk of Nicole.



* * *



I have come to call the man Mick. It is the name Alice gave him that night in the truck. Mickey Mouse. And for that split second, I had let myself believe he was harmless like that, like a cartoon character. I let him lead me back into this house when I might have tried to run away, into the woods. I did not know that would be my last chance to escape.



* * *



In these seven days, I have learned a lot of things about Alice and her life in this house.

She has lived here since before she can remember. She told me she was born here, in that dark laundry room with no windows, but I have no proof of that one way or another and I will not make any more assumptions.

Her first mommy lived here until last spring. Alice has a calendar and knows how to keep track of time. She has books from a homeschool program, but there is no internet here so she does the work on paper. Mick collects her work at the end of each day and tells her he sends it off to the program and they keep track of her progress.

“Look!” she said to me one day, showing me a handwritten report. It was written by Mick, I was certain.

I studied the report.

“You did very well!” I said to Alice.

The report said little more. Your work is complete and was very good.

We pass things through the bottom panel of the prison grate. She brings me food and things to drink other than the water I can get from my bathroom sink.

She is serious about her school work. She is almost at a middle school level, which tells me she is smart and that Mick, or someone else, has been guiding her through the material. The subject matter is easy for me to teach. Simple algebra. Grammar. Earth science. The challenge comes from her impatience when she gets stuck. She is quick to anger and I am learning how to manage her moods.

When she is not doing schoolwork, she watches television shows on an iPad. Mick downloads new shows for her when he leaves the house and she watches them many times. She does not like the days when he takes her iPad with him. It makes her anxious.

The shows are familiar to me, like Mickey Mouse. She also has movies, some of which are too mature for her, but I say nothing. It is not my job to be her mother.

It is only my job to be her second mommy.

“You’re a good second mommy,” she tells me. And when she tells me this, I feel a heat inside my body. Because on other days, she tells me different things that make my blood cold.

“If you can’t be a good second mommy, we will have to get a new one.”

It is in these moments that I question what I might be capable of doing.

I have learned that the phone was never dead.

There is no phone line connected. I asked Alice about this and she said she uses it all the time. I asked her how. She said she plays pretend with it. I asked her what kind of sound it makes.

“There’s no sound on a phone unless someone calls you, silly. Didn’t you ever have a phone?”

“I have a cell phone. And you’re right. If you just hold it to your ear it doesn’t make any sound. But a phone like the one in the kitchen is not a cell phone. It’s an older kind of phone and when you pick it up, it usually makes a sound.”

This made her angry too. “There’s no sound! I told you that. Phones don’t make sounds.”

That’s when I knew there was no landline.

No internet. No phone line.

Mick and Alice live off the grid. Except for the electricity and the gas. I wonder about this. I wonder who pays those bills and what name holds the accounts. I wonder who owns this property. And why no one came here to search it after I disappeared. The article he showed me said they went door to door.

When Alice calmed down, she considered things.

“You might be right about the phone,” she said, shaking her head. Then she lowered her voice to a whisper even though we were alone in the house.

“But it’s only because he works in a secret job. No one can know where we are.”

I also asked her then, and every chance I’ve had before, how they knew things about me and my family. How they knew I would be passing through, and that I had lost a child, that I had two other children. That I was so lost in my grief I might actually agree to live with them and be Alice’s new mommy.