NOW
“I’m sorry I didn’t get to see you yesterday,” Mark said as he came through the container door.
He was dressed in jeans and a Billabong T-shirt I didn’t recognize, and carried a tray with a pot of coffee, two mugs, a plate of biscuits and a small pot of honey. Outside, rays of sun slit through the forest. I could smell the scent of loamy earth and decomposing bark through the half-open door.
I thought of my naivete in coming here and how I’d let hope override any critical thinking I might have done. For instance, why would you have faked your death if all you’d wanted to do was leave your wife—unless something else had been going on? And why did I think I could fix his problems when I didn’t really know what they were? Instead, I had made up stories to fit what I’d wanted to be true and not what had been right in front of my eyes.
Mark set the tray on the steamer trunk. “I thought we could have coffee and talk.” His eyes seemed sunken in his head.
“You look tired,” I said.
“I didn’t sleep much. I have a lot to think about.”
I thought that locking up your wife in a steel box should have been enough reason for insomnia; however, I didn’t say that. Instead, I told myself to be the fox.
“Angela told me about the guy showing up in town,” I said.
“I don’t like it that he came right after you did.” Mark slumped into the upholstered chair. A long red scratch ran across the back of his left hand. He still wore his wedding ring.
“Nobody followed me, if that’s what you’re thinking.” I’m not sure why I felt so defensive. It wasn’t my fault his boss and his boss’s partner were after him.
“We just can’t be too careful,” he said.
“There were stories on TV and online about you jumping,” I said. “The police said it would have been a miracle if you’d survived. Hardly anyone does.”
“Which is exactly my point,” he said. “They couldn’t just say I was dead, could they? No, they all have to cover their asses. There was even a witness, for God’s sake.” He rubbed his forehead. His voice sounded peevish.
“I still don’t know how you did it.”
He told me that he’d gotten the idea from a movie and that he’d purposely waited for a car—a Prius, as it turned out—hefted himself up on the railing as the vehicle approached, then dropped to the ground as it passed. Angela had been driving right behind the Prius and he’d scrambled into the back of her pickup, which had almost rear-ended the witness’s vehicle when the driver slammed on the brakes.
“If the cops had had enough balls to say I was dead, I wouldn’t have to worry about Rick or his goons following you.”
“Maybe it’s not as bad as it seems.”
He blew out a breath. “Remember I told you about Tyler, the guy who stole a pound of product?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “So, not long after it happened, Rick asks Tyler to take this motorcycle out for a test drive, and at seventy miles an hour the handlebars detach. Basically, they had to scrape Tyler off the pavement with a shovel. Rick tells the cops it’s a terrible accident but handlebars don’t come off bikes unless someone loosens them or puts in a bad bolt.”
He must have seen my eyes widen because he said, “Now you get what I’m up against.”
He leaned forward, filled two mugs with coffee and handed me one as if we hadn’t been talking about narco assassinations and drug deals. “That’s why I couldn’t let you leave. It was just too dangerous.”
I took a sip of coffee. An idea formed.
“I’ve been thinking,” I said.
“Oh?”
His eyes met mine and I forced a smile. I needed to make him believe I was sincere.
“I was upset when I said those things about getting a lawyer and calling the cops,” I said.
He took a long pull of his coffee. “More than upset. You were pretty much out of control.”
I snuffed out a flash of anger. Be the fox, I reminded myself.
“Whatever. It just seems like we should be able to work this out.”
He cocked his head. “Go on.”
“I was thinking if you could manage some cash and a little child support, I think I might be able to hang on to the house. Then, when five years are up, like Inspector Hardy, the one who investigated your case, told me, I can ask for a death declaration and Rick and his pals would have to believe you’re dead. I wouldn’t file for divorce. You’d be officially dead and you could be with Angela like you want. We could both get on with our lives. I wouldn’t tell a soul.”
I sat back on the bed, expecting him to say he was glad I’d come to my senses. Instead, his eyes darkened, and for a moment I felt the slightest tingle of fear.
“So you’re going to take my son away from me. Is that what you’re saying?” he asked.
Too late, I realized my mistake, but I backtracked quickly. “We could make a visitation schedule. Summers with you. The school year with me. How about that?” I asked even though I had no intention of letting Xander live here.
“And I’d have to wait five years for that to happen so you could declare me dead?” Mark set down his coffee mug with a deliberateness that sent a chill up my spine. “I think what you’re really saying is that you won’t even try to open your mind to this life, to me. That you’d rather go back to scrubbing toilets and living the big capitalist lie because of some outdated view of what a family is.” Mark shook his head. “You were always afraid of change. But I didn’t realize until now how closed off and repressed you are, how pedestrian your thinking is. And you wonder why I looked for something more.”
One of the legacies of growing up in a household where you believe you’re not good enough to be loved is that you tend to feel less-than whenever anyone says something bad about you. But not now.
“If being repressed means I don’t hang around with drug dealers or think it’s fine to screw other people when you’re married, then yeah, that’s me. And if the big capitalist lie is making sure my son has health care and enough to eat and a roof over his head and doesn’t get killed by some meth dealer, then I’m all for it. And in case you’ve forgotten, you were all for it too when those two producers wanted you to do their movie.”
Mark stood. “Why are you making this so hard?”
“Why are you such an asshole?” I stood too.
He looked away and then back at me. I could tell he was trying to stay calm. “Listen. All I want is for you and Xander to have more happiness than you’ve ever had before. All I want is for you to be free like I am but you won’t even try. Christ,” he said. He turned and started for the door.
I went after him. “If you want me to be free, why are you locking me up?”
He shoved open the container door. “Maybe because you need to figure out why you’re so stuck on a life that doesn’t work anymore, why you believe the lies of society instead of the truth your husband is telling you.”
He shook his head and stepped outside into the sunlit day.
“Wait. You can’t just leave me here.”
“I can leave you here, and you should have thought of that before you made your threats,” he said.
For a moment, I didn’t recognize him, this man I’d once loved and worshipped.
“I’m your wife, not your enemy, Mark.”
“Then act like it,” he said. “I won’t let you take Xander. I want both of my sons here with me.”
He turned and slammed the metal door shut, closing off the sun like a curtain had fallen.
Both of your sons? I thought. So that’s why Rudy had called Mark “Dad.”
I ran to the window and watched him stride toward the house. I knew I’d blown my chance of leaving by challenging him and by not thinking things all the way through. My fingers trembled against the windowsill and I wished I could suck back my words. You were never supposed to make your captor angry. I had learned that in prison, where confrontation with a guard or refusing to speak in a session just made things worse. I turned and leaned against the container wall, seeing the dank space and imagining spending months, or maybe even years, here. I sank to the floor, trying to calm my breath, to slow the beating of my heart. I closed my eyes and slowly counted to one hundred. When I opened them, I saw the answer.
While I had been under the bed, I’d noticed that the mattress was set on an old-fashioned web of woven wire and that some of the cables were rusted and snapped. I thought if I slid back beneath the bed, found those broken wires and untangled them, I might be able to use them to get out of here. I heaved a breath, lay on my back and slid beneath the bed frame. The light was dim and I used my hands, running them over the weavings until I felt the sharp spike of a broken wire. I unwound the metal lengths, feeling the tickle of dust on my skin and wondering how many more spiders lived here. Were there black widows in Alaska? I didn’t want to know the answer to either question.
I tried to work quickly but it still took me a while, the wire stabbing my fingers with a dozen tiny pricks. Finally, I managed to unwind two pieces of wire, which I planned to wrap around my toothbrush handle. In prison, girls had always been making things out of toothbrushes: shivs, tattoo needles, blades for those who were into cutting. My plan was to use the wire to strengthen the toothbrush, slide it through the crack and, if it was long enough and strong enough, lift the bar so I would be ready to escape. Or if that didn’t work, maybe I would sharpen the end and turn it into a weapon. I had to do whatever was necessary. Mark’s visit had made that clear.
I came out from under the bed, slapped the dust—and any wayward spiders—from my clothes and hair and started to work. Every now and then, I’d stop and look out the window. Angela was at the far end of the garden. I never saw Mark or the boys.
I took the pieces of wire and wrapped them around the toothbrush handle to give it strength. When I tried to shove it through the door slot, it was too thick, however, and I had to unwind one of the strands, leaving a piece of wire that snagged and bent when I tried to push it through the crack.
I heaved a sigh of frustration and rewound the whole contraption, wrapping the excess wire around the bristles, and tried again. This time, the bar lifted an inch, then an inch and a quarter. My fingers strained against the toothbrush and the weight of the metal shaft. All I needed was another half inch. I grunted, leaning against the door for leverage.
The action, however, caused the toothbrush to slip and the metal bar crashed back down.
I cursed and hurried to the window to see if anyone had heard. Angela was still working in the garden and Mark was still missing. I rubbed the cramp out of my fingers and tried again: lifting, straining, trying to ignore the way the wire cut into my flesh. The bar moved upward an inch, an inch and a half. I was almost free.
I bent my knees and used my whole body to push upward.
The toothbrush snapped and the bar clanged back into place.
I wanted to scream. Instead, I turned and leaned my back against the door and tried to convince myself I would find another way out. I remembered the time Mark and I had gotten turned around while hiking in Washington State. I’d started to panic at the thought of dying in the woods without water or food and he said, “You’re in a room with no windows or doors and all you have is a mirror and a table. What do you do?”
I told him it wasn’t a time for riddles and couldn’t he see that we were in serious trouble? He smiled instead and said, “You look in the mirror and see what you saw and then you take the saw and cut the table in half and two halves make a hole and you climb out.” Then he’d waited as if he thought I would laugh.
“What the hell, Mark?” I’d said.
“What I’m trying to tell you is there’s always a way out. You just have to throw out all the old, tired ideas and look at things through new eyes.”
So we hiked to the top of a ridge and waited until dark, when Mark somehow used the stars to figure out which way was north. He lined our position up with a distant peak, and the next morning, we trekked two hours in that direction until we came to a narrow road and hitchhiked our way back to our car.
It was one of the things that had first attracted me to Mark: his ability to find a path different from the one most people followed. It was like he always stood on some high place where he could see all the possibilities laid out below him, and he would choose the one that might not be the most apparent but worked best for what he needed. Of course, that was before I had found out he’d taken a path that included a mistress and a drug ring.
I told myself that, like with Mark’s riddle, I needed to keep my eyes open to whatever opportunity arose, think differently and, meanwhile, keep my true feelings hidden.
I drank some water, ate the breakfast Mark had brought, read some Kai Huang and watched the coming and goings at the farm: Angela hoeing weeds, the chickens scratching in the dirt and the sun tracking across the little valley. To an outsider it might have looked like the perfect answer to a life of complications and struggle. The isolation, however, felt dangerous to me. Even when I’d lived on the ranch with my parents, town was only a twenty-five-minute drive away. Now it was as if the forest had swallowed me alive.
I vowed to do anything to escape.