Thirst.
I was ashamed.
My husband was lying to reassure me, and my mind was already gnashing its teeth at another need. It rose to take control.
“Thirsty,” I rasped.
I’d sipped some water that Gabe had in his truck when he picked me up. I thought I might have even nibbled a cracker. It was cloudy and indistinct, that whole period. Like when he found me, something inside me shut off. Stopped fighting and just went…blank.
My hard drive just powered down.
Gabe disengaged himself from me. Untangled limbs I hadn’t been aware of wrapping around him. Made his way into the bathroom. He returned less than a minute later with three small cups of water. “They’re the biggest cups I could find. I’ll go get you a glass while you work on these.”
He handed me the plastic cups. I took them with trembling fingers. They shook so violently I spilled half of the first one. “Sorry,” I muttered.
Gabe palmed my cheek. “Don’t apologize. You have nothing to apologize for.”
I nodded. My eyes drifted closed. Water trickled down my throat as my husband’s footsteps receded down the hall. A minute, or maybe an hour later, he was by my side again. Lifting my head, his big hand cradling my skull. P
He pressed a cool glass to my lips. I drank and I drank and I drank.
I’d never noticed that water had a flavor. Or maybe I had and just didn’t retain it. Like the scent of night air. I’d taken it for granted my whole life, but I knew I’d never forget it going forward. Water would be the same. Clean water especially. The wetness of it against my tongue, the flow of it down my throat. The lack of spice or herb or chemical as it coated the membranes on the inside of my mouth. If no flavor could be a flavor, water had it. But this water did have a flavor. It tasted like home. Security. Normalcy. It was familiar. Comfortingly so. And I drank of it. It filled my belly. Bathed my cells. I couldn’t drink enough for it to touch what needed soothing the most, though. Maybe that thirst, maybe that need, wasn’t able to be soothed. Maybe it was beyond helping. Beyond fixing. Like I was.
When I’d had enough, I pressed my head back into Gabe’s hand and he lowered the glass. There was a glow leaking into the room, seeping in around the curtains. It was light outside. Whether that meant morning or noon or dusk, I had no idea. I only knew that it marked a day, something I hadn’t been aware of in…well, I didn’t know how long.
But that didn’t matter at that moment. I couldn’t let it. Only one thing did, especially now that my thirst was slaked.
“Gabe?”
“I’m here, babe.”
I turned my face until my eyes met his. I held them steadily. I studied the shape of them—an exotic almond, turned up slightly at the outer edges. I stared at the ring of thick lashes that surrounded them, long curls that any woman would die to have. When we were first married, we would lie in bed on Saturday mornings, not bothering with clothes until well past noon. In our first apartment, sunlight would pour across the bed in wide slats, and I’d prop myself up on an elbow and count each lash that flashed jet black in the light. Now, they were a blur. A fringe with no individual members. They ran together, much like time and thought had, deep inside the brambles of my mind.
One thing that never looked any different, no matter the amount of light or drink or age, was the truth I could read in Gabe’s eyes. He’d always called me the human lie detector, but I doubted it was me as much as it was that he was a terrible liar. His eyes gave it away when he was trying to mislead or deceive. I’d always loved that about him.
Until today.
“Gabe, where is Dalton? Tell me the truth.”
“I told you he’d—”
“I heard what you said. Is it tomorrow?”
“Huh?”
“You said he’d be home tomorrow. You found me in the dark. Is it tomorrow?”
I could see his shadowy eyes flitting between mine. I knew he was wishing in that moment that he could lie to me. Probably wishing it as much as I was. But we both knew that wouldn’t happen.
“No, it’s not tomorrow.”
“When is it?”
“It’s the day after tomorrow.”
“How long have I been asleep?”
“Almost thirty four hours. On and off.”
I felt moisture gather in my eyes. Not much, but a little. A good sign for me. Not a good sign for my son. “Then where is he?”
Gabe dropped his head onto my forearm. Slid off the bed where he’d perched by my side. He withered to his knees like a dying flower.
I felt his shoulders shake more than I saw them moving. His sobs were silent, but they moved the bed. Like the tremor of a mild earthquake. Not enough to register high on the Richter scale, but enough to do untold damage to my insides. In my heart, I felt the foundation give way. The walls crack. The ceiling crumble.
“He didn’t bring him back.” Gabe’s voice was a splintered moan.
My heart thrummed heavily. Pounded so hard I thought my ribs might snap. “What do you mean?”
“He…he said he would bring Dalton back after he released you.”
“Where was he supposed to bring him? Here?”
“No, he was supposed to call again with a location. I was to pick you up at that clearing near the old ranger station at the edge of the national forest, and then the next day he was supposed to call with a location to pick up Dalton.”
My throat clamped down so hard it took me several tries to push words past the tightness. “And he didn’t call?”
There was silence. Long, taut, ugly, terrifying silence. It stretched on longer than I thought I could bear.
“No, he…he called.”
I dreaded the word, but knew it was coming. Something about Gabe’s demeanor, something about his eyes, something about an emptiness in the room that had always held such love—it all told me something was wrong. So wrong it would never be the same again. And it was something more than just me.
“Tell me,” I pleaded, my chest expanding with pain. A balloon swelling with air.
Gabe’s voice was small and miserable. “I don’t think you’re ready.”
I wasn’t. I knew I wasn’t. Just hearing the devastation in his voice, I was already falling apart. “But I have to know.”
“He’s…he’s going to keep him until we prove we aren’t going to the cops.”
Keep him.
He’s going to keep him.
That was all I heard. That was all I could hear. It was as though all thought, all movement, even breath, ceased to exist after those words.
“Jesus,” I whispered, curling into a ball. “Oh, Jesus, please.”
I felt Gabe’s shoulders shake again. I wondered why mine weren’t doing the same. I was sobbing, weeping, wailing on the inside. But none of it made it to the surface. My muscles, my nerves, my skin were paralyzed. I was dying, but only on the inside.
I heard a low whine. It pricked my ears from a distance. A long, long distance. It grew. Longer, louder, higher. It exploded into a siren. A roar. Like a banshee. It curdled the blood. Raised the hair.
It was coming from me.
Time had become such an odd thing since I was snatched from the airport. It held treasures and terrors. Short bursts of it, eternal lengths of it. It didn’t matter. It all felt the same—indeterminate and full of a confusing mixture of things that were and were no more. Things that existed in the vacuum where I was trapped. It was ugly and swirling. It had teeth that bit and fingers that strangled. It had come alive. And it had come for me.
When I woke, I didn’t want to wake. I begged my mind, my eyes, my body to go back to sleep. Sleep, where the monsters could be slain. Sleep, from where I could be awakened. I held on to the hope that I would wake up and find this had all been a fantastically detailed, gut wrenchingly realistic nightmare. Nothing more.
But the moment I opened my eyes, time slowed. The seconds stretched. And I knew that despite what I’d endured, despite what I’d done, the real pain had only just begun.
He’s going to keep him.
Those words were like finger knives. Slicing through flesh. Scraping against bone. They gutted me. They left me hopeless. Spent. Begging for death. But I knew death wouldn’t come. Whatever all this was—whatever the goal of this madman’s plan was—my death wasn’t it. That would be too quick. Too clean. No, whomever had my son wanted me to suffer. Why, I had no idea, but that much—only that—had become crystal clear.
My throat was on fire. That awful thirst had returned while I battled in my sleep. Rather than asking my husband, who I knew would be by my side, for a drink, I let it burn. It was only a paper cut compared to the absolute anguish in my heart.
Dalton.
“Shannon.” The whisper was tentative and close to my ear. “I’m here.”
“Make it stop,” I moaned.
“What? What is it, baby? Are you hurt?” His voice was immediately alert. I knew by the jostling of the bed that he’d sat up to look at me. It was daylight again. Or maybe still. And he was here with me. Again. Or maybe still.
“What is he doing to my baby?” To my ears, the voice sounded foreign. Tortured. Mad. Utterly and completely mad. The question was mine, though. One I couldn’t keep from running through my head.
I heard one garbled curse hiss from my husband’s lips. Then he pulled me roughly into his arms. We cursed the question together. Cursed the question, cursed the man. Cursed what we couldn’t understand. Cursed what we couldn’t control.
“Why did he take our son, Gabe? Tell me why. Tell me why this happened. Why us? Why Dalton? Why?”
The queries were endless. And ruthless. When I would’ve preferred not to think, not to feel, not to survive, they refused to give me a moment’s peace. I could think of nothing else. Nothing but my son and all the questions I had no answers to.
When Gabe said nothing, offered nothing, I shifted out of his arms. His silence was…heavy. Heavier than his thick arms around me. Heavier than his chin atop my head.
“Gabe?”
“Not yet, Shannon,” he pled.
What could be worse than the fact that our son was being held prisoner by a psychopath? What could he possibly feel the need to keep from me now?
Foreboding settled over me like a coarse, black cloak. What could be worse?
“Tell me.” When he paused, I attacked. “Tell me right now or so help me God—”
“Dalton wasn’t the target.”
“Wh-what?”
My husband wouldn’t look at me. Wouldn’t meet my eye.
Fury came to life in me. With a whoosh. Like a wildfire in response to a match. I was calm one minute, a raging inferno the next. “What did you do?”
The accusation was as sharp as a scalpel, and I wielded it brutally.
“Shannon…”
I pushed away from Gabe.
I shoved him away from me.
Then I slapped.
I punched.
I clawed.
He took it all. Only raised a hand to shield his face when I would’ve gone for his eyes.
“What did you do?” I could hear the echo of my scream. It chattered in the glass shade of the bedside lamp. It vibrated against the walls. I was surprised the windows didn’t burst into a spray of fine sand.
“It wasn’t me.”
That brought me up short—the way he emphasized the word “me”. I couldn’t quite grasp what he meant. Until I calmed down enough to look into his eyes. Really look.
“Then…then who?”
Gabe’s arms were bleeding. It oozed from cat-like scratches that lined his skin from wrist to bicep. But his eyes weren’t full of malice or anger. Only sorrow. For me. For our son. And for the truth he had yet to tell me.
I waited.
He said nothing.
He wasn’t going to answer me.
Then again, he didn’t have to.
Somehow, I knew.
“Me?”
Again, no answer. Just sadness in his eyes. And a hollow kind of sympathy.
“But…but why? Why me? What did I do? Why would he want me? Did he say?”
Gabe cast his eyes down, almost as though he couldn’t bear to look at me. When the next words left his lips, I knew why. “Shannon, was…was Lauren there?”
I jerked back as if he’d slapped me. If Gabe hadn’t caught me by my arms, I’d have fallen off the side of the bed, so violent and visceral was my reaction.
“Lauren? Wh-why would you ask me that?” His eyes flitted up to mine. Up then away. The action was brief but telling. A dense ball settled in the pit of my stomach. From it grew an overwhelming sense of apprehension. Fear. Disgrace. Now, it was me who looked away. Me who couldn’t bear the eye contact. “H-how did you know?”
Shame and guilt poured through me. Scalding. Burning. It threatened to drown me. I couldn’t breathe through it, couldn’t move within it, couldn’t get my head above the water line.
“He told me.”
I squeezed my eyes shut. It would’ve been enough that I’d have had to carry the weight of what I’d done for the rest of my life. That would’ve been enough to do me in. But knowing that my husband was aware of my crime, of my weakness, of my monstrosity was something I couldn’t face. Not then. Maybe not ever. “What did he tell you?”
When Gabe didn’t answer, I cracked my lids. Checked to make sure he hadn’t left the room. I couldn’t feel his presence, couldn’t feel his comfort, couldn’t sense him near. It was as if something cold and slimy had crept between us. Hunkered down. Dug in. Made a home.
But he was there. Sitting still as stone. Watching me. Something unfathomable in his eyes.
“Tell me what he told you.”
“The day you left for your trip, I wasn’t too worried when I didn’t get a call. You’ve done that before—gotten wrapped up in work and not called until the next day. But when the next day came and went with no word, I called you. When you didn’t return my call…that’s when I started to worry. I called the hotel and they told me you hadn’t checked in. I called the airline, every local hospital between here and the airport. I couldn’t find you anywhere. I picked up the phone to call the police, but it rang in my hand before I could. It was an unknown number, but I answered it, thinking it might be you. I thought maybe you’d lost your phone or something. But it wasn’t you, obviously. It was him.”
I watched a shiver run through Gabe. I knew how that felt. I could hear that voice. That mechanical voice. I could hear it as plainly as if it were playing on a loop recording from surround sound speakers.
“What did he say?”
“He…he told me that he’d taken you, and that he’d taken Dalton, and he warned me that if I involved the police I’d never see either of you again.”
All the muscles in my stomach twisted into a tight knot. I could perfectly imagine what it felt like to get that call. I’d gotten a similar one, only mine had been in person. I got to see a maniac standing by my child’s side. Hovering around him like the black shadow of death. “How did he get Dalton?”
Gabe went on like I hadn’t spoken.
“I don’t think I believed him at first. Maybe part of me thought it was a prank. Or at least I hoped it was. Dalton had stayed the night with Grace and she took him to day camp the next morning. The morning after you left. When he told me he’d taken Dalton, I didn’t even have time to dial the camp when Taylor beeped in. She was hysterical. Said Dalton had been playing on the playground with the other kids, but when she brought them all in, he was gone. She said she was getting ready to call the police, but she wanted to call me first, tell me what had happened. I was so stunned, I didn’t say anything at first, but then…then I heard that voice again. In the back of my mind, warning me about the police. If I’d had any doubts that he’d gotten you, I didn’t after that. He obviously had Dalton. And when I heard her say ‘police’, all I could think about was keeping the two of you safe. I ended up apologizing. I told her I thought I’d told them I’d be picking him up early that day. I don’t even know if she believed me. I just told her we were both fine and hung up.”
“And then what?”
“Then, I waited.” I watched Gabe run a hand through his hair. Scrub it down over his face, like he was trying to wipe away bad thoughts. Bad images. Bad dreams.
I knew how that felt, too.
“I didn’t hear anything until the next day. I got a text from an unknown number. It was a picture of Dalton. He was…he was…” Gabe’s voice broke, and my heart along with it. “He was sitting in a big gray chair, in the same clothes I’d sent for him with my sister when she picked him up. His nose was running and his eyes were red. There were…there were still tears on his cheeks.”
I could no longer see my husband’s face through the blanket of tears that blinded me. I dropped my face into my hands. Prayed to wake up. Prayed once more that this was all just an elaborate figment of my imagination that would soon come to an end.
But when I raised my head at the sound of a loud sniff, nothing had changed. My husband was still sitting in front of me, wearing the face of a man who had been through hell, and hadn’t yet found his way out.
My voice was a choked wobble when I asked, “What then?”
“I asked him what he wanted. I told him if it was money, I’d find it, even if I had to steal it. He said it wasn’t money, that all I had to do was wait and keep my mouth shut. I couldn’t understand at first why he would take both of you if he wanted nothing. No money, no…nothing. Unless he planned to kill you and was buying himself some lead time. But then…then he called again. About two hours later. And he told me. He told me what had to be done to get you back.”
I saw Gabe’s Adam’s apple bob as he gulped. I could feel that lump in my own throat. It was guilt. It was shame. It was self-loathing. It was a knot of self awareness that no one wants to swallow. It was the knowledge of what horrific things we are capable of when our feet are held to the fire because our loved ones are being threatened.
I knew that feeling well. I would never be able to escape it.
I wondered if Gabe would either.
“What? What did he tell you?”
“He.” Gabe paused, took a couple of shaky breaths, and then tried again. “He told me you’d have to kill someone, that if you didn’t, he’d kill Dalton. And that if I didn’t cooperate, he’d kill you both. He said once it was done, he would return you, and that the day after that, as long as I didn’t call the police, he’d bring Dalton back. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to believe him. I mean, Jesus, trusting a psychopath to keep his word… When is that ever a good idea? But he must’ve known, because he said he’d send me a picture of both of you every day as long as I did what I was told. When I didn’t answer, he sent me pictures anyway. As a show of faith, he said.”
“He sent…he sent you pictures of me?”
Gabe nodded miserably. It was his turn to squeeze his eyes shut. Like he couldn’t stand the images burned into his own mind. I had my own burns I couldn’t escape. “Yes, he did. He did it a few times the first couple of days. Each one had a time stamp and was taken from different angles. He wanted to make sure I wouldn’t do anything rash. And I probably would have, but those pictures…seeing you both, so helpless…” Again, Gabe raked his fingers through his hair. “I don’t even know how to describe it.”
“I think I can imagine.” And I could. Only I had seen the real deal, the up close and personal version. My child, alive and screaming for me, just out of my reach.
For the first time since I’d been back in our home, nausea swept through my gut.
Gabe continued without me asking him to. He knew I needed to know, but I think he needed to tell me, too. He needed to explain why he did what he did. He was trying to find a way to alleviate some of the weight in his own conscience. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I couldn’t help him with that. I could listen, but I couldn’t carry anyone else’s burden. Mine was already crushing me.
“So I waited. I did what I was told. Against my better judgment maybe. Certainly against the law.”
“You didn’t break any laws, Gabe.” That was the one bit of solace that I could offer him. Only he couldn’t take it.
“Didn’t I? Knowing that there was a chance a murder was about to be committed… Didn’t I? Maybe I could’ve saved a life. Maybe I could’ve saved three lives.”
“Or maybe you could’ve gotten us all killed. You can’t know what would’ve happened.”
“But, Shannon, I didn’t even try. For days and days and days, I didn’t even…” He trailed off, his culpability a tangible presence in the room. It shared space with mine, which was much, much greater. “And then…twenty-four days later, when I got the call with instructions on where to get you, I knew.” He dropped his head. Let it hang in the devastating wake of what he’d done, of the choices he’d made. “I knew.”
I didn’t speak. I couldn’t. I wanted him to go away, but to never leave me. I wanted him to hold me, but to never touch me. I was two people. Divided in heart, shattered in mind.
When Gabe spoke again, I started to cry. Silently. Tearlessly. Earnestly.
“Lauren?”
A question.
A name.
A friend.
My best friend.
A wonderful force in my life since the day we met our freshman year in college.
A tragedy that I would mourn for the rest of my days.
A responsibility I would bear until the moment I died.
I didn’t have to answer Gabe. He knew.
I raised my eyes to his. Eyes that felt dead. Hollow. Inhuman. “He had Dalton. I could hear him screaming for me. I could hear him screaming and crying, Gabe. He begged me to help him. He…he said please.” I swallowed back hysteria. “I didn’t want to do it. I wasn’t going to. It was so dark and I didn’t even know who it was, but I still wasn’t going to do it. But I heard him screaming ‘Mommy!’ and then…then his voice was muffled and he started choking. I was…I was afraid…he was choking him. He was choking my son and I couldn’t… I couldn’t not do something. I had to do something. I had to help him. I had to. I couldn’t… I couldn’t…”
An excruciating pressure was crushing my chest. A relentless vacuum was stealing my breath. I gulped and gulped, but I couldn’t get any air. Those two words just kept coming.
I couldn’t.
I couldn’t.
I couldn’t.
They got lighter and lighter. Softer and softer. And then it all just faded into the background as a numbing darkness swept in to carry me away.