LATISHA’S EYES OPENED IN THE GRAY GLOOM THAT MEANT THE SUN was shining outside. In the days since she’d been alone—and she wasn’t sure how many there had been—she began each one with a prayer, not one of Granny Lou’s hellfire-and-brimstone prayers but a variation on the ones she’d learned secondhand when she was a reluctant student at Christ the King.
“Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen. God bless Sandra Ruth Locke, Sadie Kaitlyn Jennings, and Amelia Diaz Salazar. Take them home with you and grant them peace, now and forever, amen.”
Saying that simple prayer aloud somehow made Latisha feel less alone, although she was alone—absolutely alone. If you were in prison, she realized, this was what solitary confinement had to be like, except in prison there would be guards and someone coming by during the day and passing you trays of food. Obviously this was far worse than prison.
She got up and hobbled to the bathroom. There was no longer any need to ask if anyone else was already there and no danger of crossing chains with anyone else and creating a tangle. She used the toilet. While she was sitting there, she touched her leg. It felt hot and feverish. So when she filled her cup the first time, she sat back down and ran water across the wound, hoping to clean it. What would happen if it got worse? Granny Lou had told her that was how she’d lost her legs—with sores that wouldn’t heal and that had turned into gangrene.
With all four girls there, they’d had to be stingy about using too much toilet paper, because there was always a worry about running out. Now, though, left on her own, Latisha wrapped layers of toilet paper around the shackle on her leg to provide some cushioning and maybe give the wound a chance to heal. She already knew that the Boss didn’t tolerate imperfection. If he came back and noticed the sore, Latisha worried that might be the end of things—that he’d get rid of her the same way he’d gotten rid of the others, but for a different reason.
Latisha suspected that the other three had all been pregnant at the time they disappeared—first Sandra, then Sadie, and finally Amelia. When Trayvon had come to pick Latisha up after her second abortion, the doctor at Planned Parenthood warned them that she’d suffered some internal damage as a result of the procedure and that it was unlikely she’d ever be able to have children. And now the fact that she’d gotten rid of that baby and the one before it—both mortal sins, she was sure—was the thing that was sparing her life, or at least keeping her alive at the moment. Not that being alive was any favor.
Walking back from the toilet with her cup of water, Latisha discovered that the makeshift bandage she’d made actually helped. The clamp didn’t chafe quite as much. On her mattress again, she set the cup of water beside her and groped around until she located the food dish. The kibble was easier to swallow if you had water to wash it down.
With the others gone, Latisha had appropriated their three blankets and their food containers as well. She had rolled up one blanket and used that as a pillow and appreciated the warmth those other two layers of blanket offered. She didn’t think Sandra and Sadie and Amelia would have minded. After all, the three of them had been her friends, and she was sure they would have been glad to share.
But even with extra rations added into the mix, Latisha found the level of kibble in the container alarmingly low. For the first time, she wondered what would happen if the Boss was gone and wasn’t coming back—not ever.
“That was the worst part,” Sandra had told them one day. “The first time he went off and left me here by myself, I worried about what would happen if he never came back. I’d be lying here dead and no one would ever find me. No one would ever notice.”
“Do you think anyone is looking for us?” Latisha had asked.
“I doubt it,” Sadie had said with a laugh. “We’re your basic no-deposit, no-return kind of girls.”
Sadie was always cracking jokes that Latisha didn’t quite get. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“In Oregon, on some pop bottles, you have to pay a deposit, which you get back when you return the empty bottles to the store. There are other bottles that are marked ‘no deposit, no return.’ ”
Latisha didn’t like being compared to a pop bottle, but it made sense. Trayvon wouldn’t have gone out of his way to look for her. He’d just go out and find himself some other stupid girl. As for her parents? No, Lou Ann and Lyle for sure would have given up on her long ago.
But that brought Latisha to the core problem. What if the Boss didn’t come back? What if he was gone for good? How long would her food last? She had water to drink, but the toilet made that strange sound when you flushed it—as if there was what sounded like an electric motor inside it. What if the Boss didn’t come back and somebody turned off the water and the electricity because he wasn’t paying the bills? What would happen to Latisha then?
And of course there was the chain clamped to her ankle. What about that? She remembered hearing of animals with their legs caught in traps who had gnawed through their own limbs in order to escape. That wasn’t possible here. Latisha could barely touch her head to her knee.
And then she remembered the book. What was the name of it again? Something about a rock and a hard place. She’d done a book report on it once and had gotten a good grade, too, even though she’d never actually read the book. She had never read any books. One of the boys at University City High School had shown her how to look up book titles on the Internet and then write book reports based on what the Internet said about them. Once she knew about that, her grades in English had improved remarkably.
But that book in particular was about a guy whose name she couldn’t remember. Alan, maybe? Anyway, he’d been out hiking by himself in the wilderness somewhere out west. There’d been an avalanche, and a big rock—a boulder that was far too heavy for him to move—had landed on his arm.
So there he was, trapped and alone, with no one to help him. He was there for a period of time—Latisha didn’t remember exactly how long—before his water ran out. That was when he realized that if he didn’t get loose, he was going to die, so he tied a tourniquet around his arm and then used a pocket knife to cut off his lower arm to save his life.
But Latisha didn’t have a knife. She had water, kibble, four blankets, and darkness—and that was it. Oh, and maybe God, too—in case He was still listening. And so she prayed again, without benefit of a rosary, whispering the words into the silent gloom.
“Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen.”
After asking another blessing for Sandra and Sadie and Amelia, Latisha found herself oddly at peace. In the darkness that prayer she hadn’t wanted to learn, just like Lyle’s remembered pancakes, offered her comfort. And in that moment of hopefulness, she made herself a promise. She swore that if she ever did get out of here, if someone came to her rescue and she somehow managed to live, she would track that book down and read the whole thing, from cover to cover, because she now understood that man on the mountainside. He’d been left alone with nothing but his thoughts and prayers, and so had she.