Hold Me Close(97)

Effie was lucky Karen hadn’t called an ambulance. Or the police. As it was, Effie could barely string more than a few words together. She took the tea and warmed her hands on the mug, though of course she didn’t sip.


“It might’ve been better if he’d died then.” Karen’s voice shook a little, and she drank a gulp of tea. “Someone would’ve come in. Found you sooner.”

“Someone found us anyway, thank God.” Effie blew on the tea and let the steam bathe her face.

“I asked my mom, when he went to prison, if there was something he’d done that had made her divorce him. I was almost thirty by then. Married, two kids. I’d allowed my dad to see the kids. Never alone, like I somehow knew without knowing, but still...” Karen shuddered and shook her head. It took her a long minute to speak again, but Effie let the silence hang between them without trying to fill it. Karen got up to wipe her eyes with a paper towel she tore from the rack beneath the cabinet. She stayed where she was, leaning, before she cleared her throat. “He took you and that boy to replace me and my brother. And I finally got out of my mother why she left him. She’d found diaries, drawings. Sick things of what he’d intended for us. He wanted to keep me safe, so I didn’t become a whore. And my brother was somehow a replacement for him, to do things he wasn’t able to do. He was impotent or something. I just... I didn’t want to ask her more than that.”

Effie pressed her hand to her mouth. She wanted to hate Karen. She wondered if Karen hated her.

“He never touched me,” Effie said. “I know that we testified something different in court. I know it’s what everyone thought. But he never actually touched...me.”

Karen looked sick to her stomach. She breathed in and out a few times, then shook her head. “I’m so, so sorry. He was a sick man. I’m so... If there was something I could do, I would do it.”

Effie looked toward the basement door, shut but not locked. She gave Karen a faint smile. “You’ve done a lot.”

Another silence spun out, longer this time. Karen came back to the table, but not to sit. She took her mug and dumped it in the sink, rinsed it and put it on a dish towel on the counter. It was a signal, Effie thought. Time for her to go.

“What ever happened to the boy? The one who was with you? Is he okay?”

There was a question without a straightforward answer. Effie hesitated, then decided there was no point in launching into a life history. “Yeah, he’s fine. We keep in touch.”

“Well, you look like you’ve done all right, anyway,” Karen said. “You look...good.”

“Sure, other than totally losing my shit in your basement, I’m great.” She’d meant to joke, but Karen flinched. Effie stood. “Sorry. I was trying to make light.”

Karen wouldn’t meet her gaze. She wiped her eyes again with the paper towel, then crumpled it into a ball she shoved into her pocket. “I wanted to make sure there was nothing left of what happened down there. He’s dead. There’s no reason for anyone, ever, to remember anything he did.”

Except there was every reason. There was Effie. And there was Heath. They lived it, survived it, and they’d done it together. They were the only two who knew what it was like.

Effie didn’t say that, though. It wouldn’t do any good to castigate Karen for what her father had done. If smiling blandly and leaving meant Karen got to go on with her life without carrying more of a burden than she already did, well...there were times when giving someone else what they needed meant doing just that.

So that’s what Effie did.





chapter forty-three

“I never wanted this for you. You know that.” Effie’s mother stroked her hair off her forehead with gentle fingers. “As a mother, can’t you imagine how it was for me? How horrible and terrifying, and how I did what I could to keep you safe, because I’d failed you so miserably?”

“It’s not your fault that Stan Andrews took me, Mom. I never blamed you.” It’s a tiny lie—the blisters from the shoes, that Effie had blamed on her mother. But not the abduction itself. Not for real.

Effie leaned against her mother’s shoulder with her eyes closed, thinking of all the times she’d done this when she was young. Of how often Polly had leaned on Effie’s shoulder this same way, how she sometimes still did, but how mostly she’d started leaning away more often than moving close. Polly was growing up.

“But you have to understand something,” Effie said and looked up at her mother’s face. “What we went through...it can’t be erased. We can push it to the past and get over it and move forward, but it happened. And, Mom...if I tried to pretend it didn’t, that would negate what was probably the most influential experience of my life. What happened in that basement made me who I am.”


Her mother hitched a broken sob and shook her head. “But I don’t want that to be what made you who you are. I want me and your father to have made you who you are. I want your other life experiences, the good things, to outweigh all that bad.”

Effie put her head back on her mom’s shoulder and said nothing for a moment or so. Her mother stroked her hair the way she had when Effie was young. If she kept her eyes closed, maybe she could pretend she was ten years old again. Eight. Six. Maybe she could be a toddler in pigtails, a birthday balloon in each hand and cake smeared on her face.