Comfort Food (14 page)

“Can I take a few things?” Mementos. How fucked up was that? I wanted reminders of my imprisonment.

He nodded.

I didn’t take much. A few Middle Eastern CD’s––the drumbeats would calm me––some candles, a few favorite outfits, and my journal, the pages all written in. Full. It was a strange sort of poetry.

I had always thought when I got to the end of the journal that he would buy me a new one, not release me.

I didn’t think it was anything more than coincidence that the two events coincided, but it was as if I’d written a book, and I’d run out of space, so I had run out of captivity as well. I took the things out to the garage and loaded them into the car.

I don’t know why I didn’t try to beg more. I guess there was a part of me that knew I really couldn’t stay. He was giving me my life back and to refuse that gift was unthinkable.

I’d obeyed him so very long now that to receive an order, the instinct was to obey, no matter how much I didn’t want to. Not out of fear of punishment, but out of a desire to please him and gain and keep his favor.

Of all the things he’d wanted from me, this was the hardest to obey. I really had lost my mind. No sane person would be so horrified by the idea of freedom. But surely when I saw my family and friends again, things would be different, and I could put all of this behind me.

TEN

He didn’t have to forcibly remove me from the house because I knew he would and having a breakdown at this point wasn’t going to help. I had belonged to him, and now he was showing me how absolute that was by disposing of me like any other piece of property that had become of little interest.

The car he’d given me was a silver Mercedes, and truly it was a gift because what was the likelihood I’d bring it back? I dumped everything but the CDs into the trunk on top of a car emergency kit. A small shovel clattered when the journal hit it.

It took forever to get out of the driveway. It really did seem to go on forever. Part of me wondered if it was all an elaborate test to make me come back, but then I’d seen the absoluteness in his eyes, and there was no reason to show me my helplessness. I knew it; I’d taken it into the deepest part of my being, and I’d accepted it. No further object lessons were needed.

The car didn’t have a global positioning system, something I found odd. I ripped the
this journal belongs to
page out of the red leather book and started writing reverse directions, like a trail of bread crumbs, recording where I went so I wouldn’t get lost.

After a couple of lucky and arbitrary turns, I came to a busier road. At least I’d found civilization again and

could ask for help if I needed it. Though I wasn’t sure I wanted to deal with the possibility of being recognized as
that self-help guru that had gone missing
. So I kept going until I found the interstate.

When I finally got there, I discovered I was about thirty miles from home. Not starting from the interstate but including the bumble where I’d been. I’d assumed I was thousands of miles away from home in some remote location. To learn I’d been just thirty miles away from my house the whole damn time made me crave the freedom I’d thought I’d given up.

I’d been listening to one of the Middle Eastern CDs. The music hadn’t calmed me so much as made me want to turn the car around, but I didn’t. There was some tiny screaming sliver of me that still wanted to be free. Finally, I couldn’t stand the drums any longer.

I took the disc out but resisted the urge to break it, some part of my mind still convinced I might want to listen to it again someday in the future when the wounds weren’t as fresh. I turned on the radio and remembered it was Halloween.

I expected the date to make me feel giddy. Instead, driving through suburbia I found myself disconcerted by all the sensory input. The decorations. The kids running around in costumes at afternoon parties. I found myself bizarrely frightened of the imaginary creatures which within hours would be going bump in the night.

I couldn’t go to my house first. It was a rental, and somehow I doubted anyone would have kept up the rent for the almost six months I’d been missing. As I drove down the Magnolia-lined street my parents lived on, the radio ceased being background noise.

“A memorial service was held yesterday for self-help guru, Emily Vargas, as police still have found no leads to her mysterious disappearance. When contacted for comment, the family expressed a need for closure and would offer no more . . . ”

I nearly swerved off the road. They’d erased me. Just like my sister. What kind of family waits only six months before burying an empty box to just get on with it?

Surely most would wait a year, maybe even two. I understood how hard it had to be considering losing Katie like they had, but it felt like rejection, as if I had no place left in the world to go to.

I drove past the house and went to the cemetery. I searched the family plots until I found mine. It was surreal and more upsetting than I expected it to be, and I couldn’t help but feel completely betrayed by my family for acting so selfishly, for not thinking about how this might make me feel after what I’d experienced. How did they expect to explain it to me if I was ever found?

There were still-blooming flowers all around the grave, the dirt fresh and piled high. Some crazy part of me wanted to dig the coffin out, if in fact there was one. If there wasn’t, I couldn’t imagine what it was they’d seen fit to bury.

I tried to picture my family and friends wearing black, sobbing over my supposed death based on the fact that my parents couldn’t carry the torch just a little bit longer, and I was disgusted.

I stared at the gravestone.
Emily Vargas: devoted friend, loving daughter, inspiring leader.
My death was marked as the day before, the day of the funeral.

Goddammit!

I kicked at and scattered the pile of dirt. What the hell gave them the right to just kill me off? It was inconvenient for me to exist and be missing?

I don’t know if it was what they’d done, or if it was because of the inability to act out for so long, but the rage flipped in me like a switch. It was something I’d forgotten I had. I didn’t know I could feel anger like that; I hadn’t felt it in so long.

I threw flowers and arrangements as far as I could and fell to my knees digging into the dirt, clawing at it, as if clawing to get inside. It was the reverse of being buried alive. Maybe I should be in there and not out here under the open sky with the birds chirping and everything so innocent and bright.

I’d once seen a movie about someone buried alive that somehow escaped their coffin and clawed to the surface. They were buried in a pine box, but even so, one would think the weight of the dirt would make escape impossible. If the work of digging to a box was this difficult, I couldn’t imagine the reality of digging out of one.

Even though my progress was insignificant, I continued to dig. I didn’t care how impossible it was, I had to get in there. I remembered the emergency kit and retrieved the shovel from the trunk of the car, thankful for a master who was compulsively prepared for any traveling contingency.

As I continued to dig with the small shovel, I worried the police would show up. Surely they kept a closer eye on cemeteries on Halloween. But it was early afternoon, and the troublemakers wouldn’t be out until after the sun had gone down. I thought about kids out making mischief stumbling upon my dug-out grave and having a ghost story to pass around.

I finally got to the coffin. I had the momentary fear I would open it and see my body in there, that I really was gone and somehow didn’t know it yet. But when I opened the lid there was no body, only things of mine. Old ballet shoes, journals, photographs. Things that became me in the absence of a body to put in the earth.

Now, out in the fresh air, looking at what was meant as evidence of my passing, I couldn’t let myself think the word
master
. But I had nothing else to call him, except
the monster who had taken me
. In the end the most monstrous thing he did was let me go. Especially in light of the fact that everyone else had let me go, too.

I wanted to get in the car and go back to him, throw myself on his mercy and hope that at least one person in the world still wanted me. But I knew I wouldn’t. He’d broken me, but he’d been so strangely gentle about it that somehow I was still me inside.

I wasn’t a shell, a hollowed-out zombie of a human being, though at this moment, with graveyard dirt covering me virtually head to toe, I looked like it. For whatever reason, he wanted me to be free, and I’d been trained to obey. I could keep going if I thought of it as obedience.

I gathered my stuff from the coffin and took it to the car. I’d found a twenty-dollar bill in my pocket, so I stopped at a drive-through for some food. My master must have slipped money into the jeans before he’d tossed them to me that morning.

Thinking of how well he took care of me ripped me apart inside, and I had to hold back the floodgates because I was in public. The girl at the drive through looked at me oddly as I paid for my cheeseburger meal.

“I’m a zombie,” I said dully. I almost laughed at my own joke.

The light bulb went off over her head as she looked down at her clothes and remembered it was Halloween. She was about seventeen with blonde hair that had pink streaks in it and going for a slutty Punky Brewster effect with her clothing. Probably she was passing it off as a costume because she didn’t have the nerve to wear it any other day.

“Oh, right. Clever,” she said. “The dirt makeup looks real.”

I smiled, biting back the urge to say it was real dirt. I ate in the parking lot, then started the car again. I needed to get cleaned up, but I knew I didn’t have a house to go to except for my parents’ place, and I wasn’t ready to see them just yet.

I hadn’t been in the house for long when I’d been taken, and still had my storage unit. It had held all the things in my house before they went into my house, and I’d paid a year in advance because you never know when you might need a storage facility.

I hadn’t been sure the new place would work out. I blame my mother for this insane level of over-planning. I have no other excuses.

My storage unit, like all of them at the ultra-modern facility, worked by a combination keypad, and I was the only one who knew the code.

My fingers trembled as I punched it in, then drove the car into it like a garage and turned off the ignition. I’d known from the moment I got out the door I wouldn’t call the police. I would never tell them anything that had happened, or lead them down the winding roads to the house that had been my prison.

I sat in the car, going through the things that had been buried in the coffin, reading the journals, looking at who I’d been, or who they’d simplified me down to in order to fit me into a box, and it struck me how much they didn’t really know anything about me. Whether it was by my own omissions or their lack of observation I would never know.

My house was fifteen miles away from that of my parents, and it was that way because it was the opposite end of town, as far as I could get and still be in the same place. The storage facility was only five miles from their house, which made walking much easier.

Once the car was taken care of and I was walking down the streets through the residential neighborhood, the enormity of my situation hit me.

Kids were running down the streets beside me all dressed up like pumpkins and pirates and ghosts, shrieking and laughing, their candy pails swinging from their arms as exhausted parents tried to keep up with them.

It was too much. Everything was too loud. Even the drive-through had been difficult. To have a human being speak to me. To have any set of eyes on me but his . . . it was unnerving, an invasion. It made me feel naked and exposed.

Over months of being with him, my prison had become my sanctuary, and now that I was free, the world was my prison. There was nowhere left to run.

No one paid much attention to me as I walked. I’m sure part of it was that the sun was setting behind the trees, and the stark afternoon brightness of a few hours before was long gone. I wasn’t recognizable as Emily. Anyone who saw me didn’t look horrified or shocked. I was just wearing a costume like everybody else.

It was full dark when I reached my parents’ house. Their porch was lit with the typical Halloween array, a giant lit-up pumpkin, bats hanging from the porch, a bloody scarecrow lying over a bale of hay in the front yard.

They really had just erased me, had some kind of psychotic fit that allowed them to shut that door and open another one. To lay me to rest and the next day give out candy to neighborhood kids and do the normal Halloween things without it necessary to give me a second thought. It was obscene.

I’d seen them when Katie had died. I knew it was because the only way they could survive was to behave like this. Still. To not openly grieve and mourn, to instead hide and bury and erase. It wasn’t the way normal human beings behaved toward those they were supposed to love. Even if those they loved were only a memory now.

When I knocked, my mother shouted from behind the door, “Ted, get that!”

I heard something fall and break, a stream of curses, and then the door flew open. My mother’s irritation turned to shock.

“Ted!” she screamed, as if her shouts could protect her from the daughter who wouldn’t die and be gone forever like a good little girl.

My father came to stand behind her in the doorway, “Donna, what is it?” His face went pale when he saw me, looking morbidly as if I’d crawled out of my grave.

I wanted to say it served them right for burying someone who wasn’t dead in the first place, but it wasn’t my dad’s fault, not really. He just went along with whatever my mother said to do.

Finally, I found my voice. “Mom . . . ”

“You’re not real,” she said. It wasn’t said like someone who actually missed their daughter and was thrilled to have her home. It was said as if my appearance on her doorstep screwed up her 12-step plan to deny I’d ever existed. Such was the way of the Vargas clan.