“I have to get off,” I’m telling my husband. The moment the pilot told the attendants to shut the doors, I knew. Knew there was no way I could go through with this. No way I could continue on to Detroit.
“What’s gotten into you?” Russel’s voice is firm. I know I’m making a scene, but I can’t help it. I haven’t felt this trapped in years, not since I found myself in Henry’s basement.
I was fifteen, even though he insisted I was a full year younger. I told him my name was Anastasia, I begged him to let me tell my parents I was okay, but he wouldn’t listen to me.
“Your name is Jennifer,” he said. “You’re my sweet little pineapple. We’re finally together, just like we were supposed to be.”
I tried running away. After the first few weeks of compliance, he finally took the cuffs off. The very next morning I made it halfway up the basement steps before he stopped me, tackled me to the floor. I went days without food as my punishment.
I complain. Tell him how my stomach hurts.
“You’ve always been worried about being overweight,” Henry tells me. “I’m doing you a favor.”
I cry then, tell him I’m sorry about whatever it was that happened to his daughter, but I don’t know anything about anyone named Jennifer and won’t he please let me go.
It’s talks like this that earn me starvation rations. More beatings. Endless nights chained up in the basement, an animal in a cage. An animal he insists on calling Jennifer, his daughter.
The weeks wear on. The cold seeps into my bones. I’m ashamed to admit it. Maybe I should have been stronger. I go along with his games. I call him Daddy like he wants. Every time he begs for my forgiveness, I give it to him, even though I have no idea what he’s sorry for.
“They came every day, questioning me,” Henry says. His voice is so full of sadness I want to cry for him, for his poor little girl, whoever she was, for his loss.
I don’t ask him what happened to Jennifer. I’m not sure I want to know.
“Once your mother died, I thought I couldn’t go on,” he says one night. He’s recently cracked one of my ribs, and now he’s rubbing some kind of salve on my skin. It stings, but the touch is gentle. His voice is kind but filled with heaviness.
“I begged God to put me out of my misery,” he admits. “I didn’t want to live anymore, not without her. But I had you. You’re the one who kept me going. You’re the one who kept me alive.” There’s a hint of pride in his voice, and I’m so tired and so homesick and so confused that for a minute I wish that I really was this man’s daughter. That I really could ease his sorrow, heal the wounds of his past just like he’s healing the wounds in my side.
I forget how long I’ve been here now. Long enough that I don’t think of my captor as Henry. I call him Dad, and at night when I dream, I’m his daughter.
Sometimes I ask him what day it is, but I can never keep his answers straight in my head. And sometimes I know he deliberately lies to me, like during that heat wave he told me it was still March. We celebrated my birthday in the fall. Jennifer’s birthday, I should say, although these days it’s hard for me to remember that there’s a difference.
“It’s the anniversary of your accident,” he tells me one day. I don’t like it when he talks about the accident, when he hints to the tragedy that befell his daughter.
When Henry first brought me here, when he kept apologizing to me and telling me I was Jennifer and he was so sickeningly sorry for what happened, I was convinced he’d killed her.
“They kept questioning me after it happened,” Henry says to me nearly every day.
At first when he talked like this, I wondered why the police didn’t do more than just question him, why they didn’t put him in prison to rot for the rest of his miserable existence. I imagined he must have killed her. Strangled her maybe. Or beat her with a bat. But now, it’s hard for me to picture him doing anything to Jennifer like that. He has a temper on him, but he acts so gentle. He’s old now. Weak. Sometimes he stops in the middle of whatever he’s doing to me simply because he’s out of breath and needs to rest.
He likes me to soak his feet in salts. The skin on his heels is hardened and cracking all over, and he likes it when I massage them in warm water. When he’s done, I pat them dry and rub in lotion.
“You’re such a good daughter,” he tells me, and my heart aches because somewhere I remember I have a father who used to say the same thing to me, but it’s been so long I can hardly recall the sound of his voice. Sometimes I feel like I’ve been living in Henry’s basement for decades, that my whole life has consisted of nothing but his rage, his pity, his love.
He’s worn me down. I don’t fight anymore. The truth is I don’t want to. I’m too tired. When he gets angry, I remember that somewhere is a dead teenager who must have looked and acted and least somewhat like me for Henry to have gotten the two of us so confused. I remember that at some point Henry did something terrible to her, that she’s gone, dead, and Henry is a broken man because of it.
I believe he’s responsible for Jennifer’s murder, and that means he could kill me too. The thought comes to me most often in the middle of the night, when I hear him snoring upstairs. If this man could murder his own daughter and get away with it, why in the world do I think myself safe?
Except what can I do? Everything’s locked. Even though he hardly ever uses the handcuffs anymore, there’s no place for me to run. Nothing I can do. When he’s awake, when he’s in one of those fits of rage that overcome him, I’m quite certain that he not only possesses the strength to kill me but the will as well. Sometimes I wonder why he doesn’t just get it over with already. I wish for it at times. Intentionally egg him on. There’s very little left for me to fight for. I don’t want to hurt anymore. That’s all I know. And life with Henry is a life of pain. Not the physical so much as the mental. The emotional. The sadness, the regret, the remorse, everything he feels about his daughter — all that grief and anguish — I take it upon myself, just like after I’ve finished rubbing lotion into his scaly heels my own hands are drenched in oil.
I think we’ve become inseparable, Henry and me. I think if I were to leave it would kill him. Is that why I stay? Or do I stay because of the chains, the locks, the fear? And in the end, if I’m destined to die here in this cement basement one way or the other, does it really matter?
At night, I dream about my mother. I dream that she’s at home praying for my safety. I try to tell her I’m all right, that she can move on, that she doesn’t have to worry anymore. I try to promise her that I’ll fight harder next time, that one day I’ll manage to escape and return to her, heal her broken heart. But she can never hear me, and when I wake up, I realize that I’ve forgotten the details of her face. I can’t recall her smell, the sound of her making breakfast in the kitchen in the morning.
All I see is Henry. All I hear is Henry. He’s become my life, just like I’ve become his.
I forget about the promises I make to my mother in my dreams. I forget about a world outside of this cold basement. And I massage my father’s feet and lotion his dry skin and take his pain upon myself because he’s old and weak and needs me to ease the intolerable anguish in his soul.