I wake up in the middle of the night. I hear the even breathing of the other girls. Jonah could come by at any time; I know he’s already checked us at least once. His visits are random, so there is no way to avoid them.
But I can’t wait any longer. I’ll have to take a chance.
I slip out of bed. Emily’s bed is right next to mine. I put my hand over her mouth. She tries to bolt up, terror in her eyes, but I speak quietly, rapidly, in her ear.
“It’s Gracie. Don’t worry. I just want to talk to you.”
She shakes her head, her eyes fearful.
“Just for a minute.”
“He’ll come.”
“I’m going to get you out of here.”
She shakes her head. “No. Don’t say that. It’s dangerous.”
“Why? Has he done anything to you?”
She turns away. “No, nothing. It’s just that…he pays attention to me. Special attention. He watches me, all the time.”
“I came to find you, Emily. Your mom, your dad…they’re frantic. They miss you.”
Emily starts to cry. I feel her shudders as she tries to keep her sobs inside. I’m actually glad to see her cry. It’s so much better than that blankness.
“It’s okay,” I say, even though it’s so obviously not.
I can see tears on her cheeks from the light cast from the watery reflection on the wall. “I’m glad you’re here. But Gracie…”
“What?”
“Don’t do it. Don’t try to get away. Promise me.” Her eyes are frantic.
“Shhh,” I say, as if Emily were a little girl. “Go back to sleep.”
Torie approaches me the next morning as I’m looking through the bookshelves. I can’t imagine having enough concentration to read, but I don’t know what else to do.
She stands a little too close for my personal comfort.
“Maybe I didn’t make myself clear,” she says. “Keep your mouth shut and you’ll do okay here.”
I shrug. Her gaze is so hostile. Why should I give her ammunition?
Her face is in my face. “Don’t say your real name to him,” she warns, spitting the words out. “Don’t ever do it again.”
Just what I need—to get snatched by a madman and then get bossed around by another girl. “Look,” I say, exasperated, “I’ve been kidnapped by a psycho who makes up crazy rules according to some insane scenario in his head. I’ve got enough problems without having to listen to you, too. Don’t you want to get out of here?”
“Listen up,” she says. “This is a sweet spot compared to where I came from. Most of us here are the same. This is better than home. You’re not going to take it away from us. One of these days, I’ll figure out a way to leave, but until then, I have everything I want here. Just what do you want to send us back to? Our families?” She snorts. “The streets? Keep quiet and don’t make him crack up.”
I’m listening, but I’m also seeing her. Smoking a cigarette on a street corner. Crouching down in the cold. She had been homeless.
I see that things that have happened to her have made her capable of anything. Kendall is right to be afraid of her.
But I also know one thing. I can’t show her my fear. “And what do you think will happen if he does crack up?” I ask. “It’s scary inside his head.”
“It’s scary inside my head. Don’t forget that.”
I see a man, sitting in an armchair, smiling up at Torie. Her hair is shorter and blonder. Her smile is strained. He reaches up and, with his foot, rubs her leg.
The vision derails me for a moment.
“Look,” I say to her, “There’s no telling what he could do to us.”
Torie snorts. “He’s a millionaire. He’s famous. What’s he going to do?”
“He’s kidnapped kids,” I say. I can’t believe that she is this stupid. “He committed about a thousand felonies. They can put him away for life. Do you know what that means? He has nothing left to lose.”
Torie looks at me as though I’m the one who’s stupid. “Rich people don’t go to prison. Don’t you know that?”
Jonah approaches us, his hands in his pockets, smiling. “I’m glad to see you’re getting along already.” He looks at me. “You know, there’s a garden. We all planted it. Tomatoes, herbs, lettuce.”
I don’t know what he expects me to say, so I say the conventional thing. “That’s nice.”
“So we have fresh produce sometimes,” he says. “I just wanted you to know that. Sometimes I overreact. That doesn’t mean I don’t love you.”
A small boy lies in a bed, crying.
Sometimes I hurt you. That doesn’t mean I don’t love you. When you do bad things, that hurts me, too. But you still love me, right, Jonah?
“When I do bad things, that hurts you, too,” I say.
Jonah blinks. “Exactly,” he says. “Come and help me pick lettuce.”
I follow Jonah out the kitchen door. It’s good to be outside. The fog has lifted, and it’s a bright summer day, warm enough to be in a T-shirt. I could almost feel hopeful on a day like this. If I weren’t stuck on an island in the middle of nowhere with no way to get off.
Still, the sun is warm on the skin of my arms and my face, and it drains some of the anxiety from my muscles. We walk along the back of the house, and Jonah strikes off on a path between the trees. From here, you can’t see the wall. Strangely, I am not afraid to be alone with him. Not now, anyway. Somehow I know he won’t hurt me…at least, not yet.
“The garden is this way. I sited it so that it gets the most sun. Had to truck in some super-duper soil. You know, Lizbet was the sister I was closest to.” He says this last part quickly, running into the discussion about topsoil, stripped of any emotion, just matter-of-fact.
“I mean, Nell was the special one. The rest of us…we didn’t protect each other. We told on each other, as a matter of fact. But we all protected Nell. I was closest to Lizbet, though.”
“Where is Lizbet now?”
“My father wasn’t a monster.” Jonah stops. We are in the middle of a glade, and it’s cooler here. He picks up a pine branch and begins to strip the needles. “I don’t want you to think that. He and my mother left San Francisco because they didn’t like the atmosphere there. Everyone thought they were weird for having twelve kids. So they moved to the foothills of the Sierras for a while. I remember that. I was ten when we moved here. He said the family was the core of society, and if we made the perfect family, we could show the world how to live. He really believed that. Perfection was everything to him. He encouraged all of us to reach our potential. He shipped in my computer stuff. It wasn’t like he didn’t want us to succeed. He just wanted us to be special.”
“Is your dad still alive?” I ask.
He looks around vaguely. He scratches his arm with the tree branch. His skin is pale, as if he never goes outside in the summer. He has a face people wouldn’t remember. He’s not handsome, but he’s not bad-looking. There’s no distinguishing feature in his face. Everything is in proportion, everything makes sense. But his eyes don’t focus on the world.
“I don’t see any of them now,” he says.
Jonah is speaking to me now as an adult. I realize that this is why I felt such a disconnect with him. I remember him on the boat. It’s solar-powered! I’m glad you can come over! Sometimes he speaks like a teenager. And sometimes he speaks like he is, like a man. He slips from one to the other.
“I just want you to have a nice meal,” he says to me, with such simple directness I suddenly wonder if I’m the one who’s crazy, and he’s completely sane.
“You said you’d bring me back if I didn’t want to stay.” I figure I can at least try this when he seems so reasonable.
He cocks his head and smiles. “But you haven’t given us a chance.”
“I’m not Dora,” I tell him. “I don’t have an alcoholic mother. I’m not looking to be saved.”
He nods. “But you belong here anyway. Don’t you?” He takes a step closer to me, and I step back. “There’s a hole in you,” he says. He touches my collarbone, and I try to control my instinct, which is to shudder. But the touch is light and fleeting. “Here. Inside you. I can see it. You’re like me. All of you, you’re all like me.”
“There’s a lot of pain here,” I say.
“That’s why this will work. All it takes is time.”
He starts walking again, and I follow as if tethered to him on a string. We break through the trees into a clearing.
The garden hasn’t been weeded or watered. Some of the tomatoes have fallen off the vine and lie on the ground, split and rotten. Flies buzz over the pulp. Jonah stands, hands on his hips, looking at it. He begins to slap his thigh rhythmically.
“They were supposed to take care of this.”
“We’re all supposed to work together for each other.”
“There’s some nice tomatoes left.”
“We’re supposed to help each other.”
His voice is strained and cracking. He is slapping his thigh harder now, slapping it with the branch he still holds in his hand. I start to back up.
“We’re supposed to work together!” he screams. “How is this going to work if they don’t listen! It’s all their fault, and they won’t try hard enough, and it’s all about that, isn’t it? We have to share. If only they could see that. How much harder can I try? They make me sick, they make me so mad!”
I have heard this voice before. I have heard this rant in my vision. I have seen this dark energy spill over in a torrent, and it is scarier in person.
He throws down the branch and picks up the hoe. He begins to hack at the garden, the tomato plants, the lettuces, the herbs, slamming the hoe into the ground, into the plants, over and over. Tears are running down his face. The hoe is flying in the air, a weapon now.
The rage came on so fast. How could I have not realized how dangerous he was? The danger was there, beneath the surface, beneath the khakis and the glasses and the smile.
I turn and run. I run through the forest, afraid he is following me, but I am alone with the whispering trees. I hear my breathing, frantic, and my footsteps on the hard ground. My footsteps pound out what I already know:
I have to find a way out.