Cody McFadyen - Abandoned

“But it’s dark, Daddy,” I protested, eight years old and using my best little-girl-in-distress voice, the one that never failed to bend him to my will.

This time, he’d held firm. I saw my mother behind it. “It’s never completely dark, honey,” he said. “Look, I’ll show you. I’ll turn off all the lights, but I’ll be here with you when I do it, okay?”

“Okay,” I agreed, doubtful.

He flicked the switch and everything turned to black. I felt the old panic rise, the same panic that told me to beware, there was something under my bed, something with the voice of a snake and the claws of a beast, waiting to grab my legs when my feet hit the floor.

“D-Daddy?” I whispered.

“I’m here, baby, don’t worry. Now, I want you to do something for me. I want you to put your hand in front of your face, and I want you to stare at it.”

“Why?”

“Just trust me, honey.”

I had no longer been afraid, of course. My father was with me, so the monsters would stay away. I brought my hand up in the darkness and stared.

At first I saw nothing at all, but as the moments passed, I became aware that Dad was right. The darkness wasn’t total. The moon, though only a quarter full and hidden behind a blanket of clouds, provided the barest hint of illumination through the curtains. The street-lamps in the distance bounced off the clouds and sent faint light my way. My hand ghosted into view. Just an outline, but it was there.

“I see it, Dad!”

I try it now. I stare and stare and stare. Time passes. I see nothing. Nothing but blackness.

“Shit,” I say, alarmed at how shaky my voice is already. I lower my hands. The clink of the handcuffs is strangely comforting in the otherwise complete silence.

“Work out your surrounds,” I say aloud.

I picture the room as I’d seen it before the door closed.

“Bed should be to my left.”

I move left slowly, until I feel the metal edge of the cot. I reach down with my hands and run them over the cool metal sides. I find the blankets, which are sparse and rough. A sheet covers a thin mattress, and a lumpy pillow sits at the head. I fumble further and find the bolts that were used to secure the cot to the wall.

“Like a prison bed,” I mutter.

It was apropos. This was a cell, right?

I straighten and turn, putting the bed to my back.

“Toilet should be to my right in the center of the wall.”

I walk to what I think is the center of the room, and then I face right and walk forward. I keep my hands out in front of me and soon touch cool concrete. I hunch forward, searching.

No toilet.

I remain bent over and crab-walk to the left. A moment later I feel the toilet, which is made of metal, not porcelain. Again, like a cell. Porcelain can be broken; its pieces can be made into knives.

“Don’t want anyone slitting their wrists, now, do we?”

I realize that the darkness throws off almost all of my spatial sense.

I was certain that I’d walked to the middle of the room, but I’d been off by almost three feet. My admiration for the blind is rising by the minute.

I decide to pace off my cell. I follow the front wall back until I reach the side wall to which the cot is bolted. I put my back to it and walk slowly, counting as I go. I keep each pace to what I think is a foot. I reach twelve by the time my toe contacts the far wall.

“Twelve feet. Okay.”

I walk the distance between. It’s five feet.

“Twelve by five. Gotcha. Bed, toilet. Blanket, pillow.”

I find my way back to the bed and sit down on it. I stare out into nothing. The blackness is oppressive in its completeness. I cock an ear and hear the low swish swish of air being pumped into the room. There is nothing else. I lay back on the bed and stare into the blackness that leads to the ceiling.

“Jesus,” I whisper, and it’s almost a sob.

I’d judged Heather Hollister. It’s a natural reaction. We see someone sicker or weaker and we’re stronger and healthier and we assume at some unconscious level that there’s an innate difference between us and them. Be it luck or karma or inner strength, we must somehow be superior, else we would be like them.

I sit now in the darkness and the silence and the swish swish swish and I understand. Eight years of this would destroy anyone, anywhere. The fact that she could still string words together into sentences was a sign of tremendous strength, not fundamental weakness.

“I’m sorry, Heather,” I say aloud.

I have no problem speaking to myself. I’ve done it, off and on, since the loss of my former life. I realize it’s not healthy, but it was my original truce with insanity. It’s worked so far.

“We’ll have whole conversations, Alexa, if I’m here long enough.”

Terror shoots through me like an electric shock, strong enough to make me swoon. I’d been thinking about talking to a dead child. What about the live ones? Bonnie can’t lose another mother. I reach down with my cuffed hands and touch my belly.

What’s going to happen to this baby?

An image of the camera in the first room comes to mind, and I jerk my hands away from my abdomen.

What if he’s got an infrared camera going in this room?

It would make sense. I resolve to hide the pregnancy for as long as I can.

We’ll have to talk silently, baby. I can’t chance that he’s listening in.

The silence and the blackness are numbing. I hadn’t realized how much of my sense of self is wrapped up in the visual perception of my body. You walk and see your arms swing from the corner of your eyes. You pass a window and see a shadowed reflection in the glass. You exist. In the darkness there is only thought, touch, smell. It doesn’t feel like enough.

“Then make it enough.” I say the words loud, but the concrete sucks them away, preserving the hush.

I decide to concentrate on why I’m here. Why did he grab me? I’m not particularly surprised that he knows who I am, but why grab me now? What purpose does that serve?

I hear a faint sound in the hallway. The lights in the room go on, and I scream in shock as the world disappears in a sheet of white. I’m blind again, blinded by light this time rather than by dark. I press the heels of my hands to my eyes but see only spots. I register the sound of the door opening, and then I feel something press against the side of my neck. A moment later an electric shock jolts me, causing me to cry out in pain and making my muscles contort. It goes on and on, and I feel my bladder let go a moment before I black out.

I wake up a few seconds later. I’m facedown on the floor. I try to say something, but only a parched moan comes out. I feel a needle in the crook of my arm and get the sense of something being forced into my veins. A great dizziness washes over me, and then I’m blind again, overwhelmed by a whirlpool of warmth and white.

I come to again facedown, naked, bound to a metal table, blindfolded. My head is clearing quickly. Whatever he used metabolizes fast.

I cringe into myself, overwhelmed with a sense of shame about my vulnerability and nakedness that is all too familiar. Though I know rape isn’t his thing, all I can think of is, here I am again, that place I swore I’d never be. A man who is not my husband is looking at my body, taking in both its beauties and its flaws. I want to vomit in despair.

I ache everywhere. My eyes and throat feel raw from the pepper spray. My wrists are sore from the cuffs. The muscles in my neck are spasming from the stun-gun hit. Shooting pains run screaming to the base of my skull, promising to turn into a bad, bad headache soon enough.

“This is just a demonstration,” Dali says.

He no longer sounds bored. The quality of his voice has changed in a subtle way. He doesn’t sound excited so much as attentive. Whatever it is he’s about to do, he assigns importance to it. It deserves his concentration.