Comfort Food (15 page)

Perhaps I should have gone somewhere else. But it was a perverse revenge, and I was unwilling to play this morbid scene out with anyone who didn’t deserve it.

“I’m real, mom.”

“But we didn’t bury you. You’re covered in dirt.”

My father stood behind my mom, his hands on her shoulders, steadying her as if he controlled anything in that house.

“No, you didn’t bury me. Did you not think that maybe I wasn’t dead, or was that not convenient for you?”

I understood they must have suffered when they’d thought they’d lost me. The sleepless nights, the fear for my safety. But it didn’t change the fact that they’d buried me to make their lives easier, so they could go on when I hadn’t had that luxury.

Then the tears started. Not mine. I was fairly certain I didn’t have tears left to cry. I’d used up my lifetime supply, and from now on my sobs would be verbal rather than wet. No, it was my mother crying. I was hurting her feelings.

“How could you say such a vile thing to me? We were worried sick. Where were you? What happened to you?”

Now it was time to accuse me. I’d not yet been invited into the house. I was still standing on the porch next to a giant plastic illuminated jack-o-lantern with a goofy grin on his face. A trail of trick-or-treaters stopped me from speaking.

“Trick-or-treat!” they caroled out, their treat bags held out like little beggars. One of the girls was dressed up like a witch. She’d managed to wipe off some of her green face make-up, and the wart was about to fall right off her nose.

My mother grabbed me by the arm and pulled me inside before giving the kids candy and sending them on their way. She shut the door and whirled on me.

She looked ridiculous wearing a pink bathrobe and slippers because Halloween was the one day of the year she could get away with being a slob. She had the bowl clutched in her hands so tightly I thought the glass would shatter and the candy would go flying onto the floor like a pinata. Her hands had gone white from gripping, and her face matched her hands. And yet . . . she was angry, not afraid.

“Where have you been?” She said it as if I’d been out playing hooky or something. Like I would disappear for months without a word on a joy ride and then come back looking like I did just for the hell of it.

I opened my mouth and then shut it again. Now that I was back, everyone would want to know. The police would want a statement, as would the media and all my friends and family. They felt they were entitled to know. I’d been gone, throwing their lives into a tailspin, and now I owed it to them to tell them, at least something. At least the barest, most TV movie-of-the-week version.

But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. To be forced to tell what had happened felt like rape, another violation and another choice that wasn’t free. I’d exposed every inch of my body and soul to one man for months, until force became voluntary. I wasn’t doing it again just in a different form.

Besides, I thought it was reasonable to think that once you bury someone, you give up rights to hearing their story. I wasn’t going to forgive them easily.

“I can’t talk about it,” I said. My voice quivered. I’m sure they thought it was trauma, but it was anger.

My mother nodded in understanding; my father still hadn’t said a word to me. Oh he loved me, in his way. He just wasn’t good at expressing it.

“I need to get cleaned up,” I said. After hours of dirt caked on me, I was becoming less and less appealing.

“You can use the guest room and bathroom, and wear some of my clothes. I’ll make you something to eat,” my mother said.

I wished I’d brought the clothes from the Mercedes, but I didn’t want any evidence that would help the police find my captor. It was irrational. I should want him locked up forever for what he’d done, but I didn’t. The thought of him locked in some cage turned my stomach.

I stopped off at my mother’s closet and got a T-shirt and some jeans in my size, which was six sizes ago for my mother. But like most women, she kept the hope alive that someday she’d get back into her skinny jeans.

The guest bedroom had previously been my bedroom. I wondered how long it had taken after my disappearance for them to start the erasing process? Packing my stuff up and redecorating the room.

The last time I’d been in this room had been a little more than a year ago. At that time it had remained untouched from my childhood, as if my parents expected that one day I would age backwards and they’d need it again.

There had been Barbie dolls and toys, as well as nail polish and posters of then-current rock stars, items from a room gone from childhood to teen. It had stood as some sort of unnatural shrine to keep me there, even after I’d freed myself from my cage and gone to college and then created a life of my own.

Now it was all gone. I wondered if they’d had a massive yard sale, or if it was all in storage somewhere, or up in the attic, out of sight out of mind. Now it looked like a country bed and breakfast. White wicker furniture and soft pale lavender carpet.

There was a delicate white crocheted bedspread and a border on the wall of wisteria, then the bottom half more pale lavender, stripes on white. An antique lamp and an old-fashioned alarm clock stood on the nightstand. There was not one shred of evidence I’d ever been there, as if it were my parents who had a crime to cover up.

I’d taken my shoes off at the door, so as not to track dirt into the bedroom. The bathroom had that same hollow
guest
feeling. Like the bedroom, it was warm and cozy but it looked like it belonged in a magazine, not that anyone could actually live in there. If I couldn’t find a friend to stay with until I got my stuff back and figured out, then I’d be stuck staying here in this warm sterility.

There was no trace of the bathroom of my childhood. It was a hunter green with lots of houseplants and ivy wallpaper that looked like it was randomly crawling over the walls. The linoleum had been taken up and new tile put down. The shower curtain was transparent.

I stepped out of the dirty clothes and turned on the water. After the first day he’d shaved me, it had been spelled out that any stubble would send me back to the bad cell. The promise of three weeks loomed over me as threatening in my mind as a sentence to death row.

One night I had stubble. He almost took me to the cell, but I begged him to watch the video so he’d know I’d obeyed him. He must have done so because when he returned, he’d nodded as if everything were okay.

Standing in the shower now, with the water pouring over me, I could feel the stubble. It would be normal, expected even, for me to leave it alone and let it grow, like some arcane and hidden secret proof of my freedom, but I couldn’t do it. Instead, I grabbed a razor and shaved, knowing I’d never let that hair grow out again even if no one ever knew about it either way, or why I did it.

After I was clean, shaven, and my hair was washed with mango-scented shampoo, I leaned my forehead against the wall and cried. Yes, I still could.

Out in the entryway I’d held it together. I’d had to keep myself from flinching when I’d heard my mother’s voice grating like fingernails on a chalkboard. And for once, my father’s silence had been appreciated.

I wondered if I would ever get used to hearing human speech besides my own again. I’d heard human voices on CDs I’d been given, but they were singing. Singing always seemed disconnected from reality, since aside from musicals, people don’t just randomly burst into song.

I got out of the shower, dressed, and then went to sit on the foreign bed. Probably the same mattress that had always been there, but who knew? Despite being hungry, I stayed there until my mother knocked on the door.

“Honey, I’ve fixed you something to eat. Come on into the kitchen.”

She’d shifted gears, and now she was prepared to deal with my existence again. When I got to the kitchen, I had to stop the scream from coming out of my mouth. I’m sure she thought it was the logical thing to do, that it would somehow comfort me. She couldn’t have known it would never comfort me again.

“Emmie?” My childhood nickname. “Honey, I made you some chicken noodle soup. It always made you feel better before.”

Before. Not now. And never again. How exactly did one explain an inexplicable phobic reaction to chicken soup?

“I’m sorry, I can’t eat this,” I said. It was as if his punishment followed me, and I wondered what I’d done to displease him.

Rationally, I knew my mother was just doing what made sense to her, what she’d always done. The one food Band-aid that had always worked before. Unfortunately this food was now a knife, not a bandage, and cutting on me more wouldn’t make it better.

“Why the hell not?”

I knew she was trying to believe I was being difficult. She was still holding onto the diminishing hope that I hadn’t been horribly tortured, that instead I’d gone off irresponsibly on a trip or had a late quarter-life crisis.

“I can’t talk about it,” I said, “I just can’t eat that.”

She started to open her mouth again, but my father stepped in, in one of those rare and miraculous instances where he doesn’t let her get away with just anything.

“Donna, I think if Emmie doesn’t want chicken noodle soup, she can have something else. We’ve got some leftover spaghetti.”

“That’d be fine, Dad.” I was relieved.

The last thing I needed was a shouting match with my mother because I couldn’t fit either the image of someone desperately grateful for chicken noodle soup, or that of some rebellious teenager. My mother lit a cigarette and sat in front of the television.

Soup was her entire repertoire. I guess being in the cell I’d overly romanticized it. When you’re someone’s prisoner, the idea of mom is idealized. All neurotic and annoying behavior is swept under the rug in light of that need to just be safe.

I followed my dad into the kitchen, unwilling to deal with her. I wasn’t about to explain to them about the soup. For one thing, I had no idea how to edit it down into some parent-safe version of the events. And for another, even if I could, they would suspect what had gone on, and I couldn’t handle the idea that my parents might suspect, even in the most vague way, the things that had gone on between my master and myself. That was private.

My dad busied himself in the kitchen, taking the spaghetti out of the fridge and loading up a plate for me. “You want garlic bread?”

“Yeah.”

I helped myself to some tea out of the fridge.

“You okay?” he asked. He didn’t look at me. I could hear the catch in his voice. If he cried, there was no hope for any of us.

“I’m fine,” I said. It wasn’t true, and I couldn’t exactly express that the largest reason it was a lie was because I was free. I didn’t think he had the proper wiring to understand that one.

He just nodded. “Your mother was worried. We both were. She may be acting a little funny, but she just doesn’t know how to process some things.”

“I know.”

And I did know. The tragedy of both my parents was that neither of them was a bad person. They had always loved me and my sister. They just couldn’t always cope with things. Although I suspected that the not coping came largely from my mother’s side of the camp.

When the microwave dinged, I took the plate and plowed through it like a starving woman. It was my first real food of the day. I didn’t count fast food, and I hadn’t had breakfast.

My father stood in the kitchen for a few minutes more, watching me. It was obvious he wanted to say something else, and I knew what it was. He wanted to know which version of reality was true. Had I been someone’s prisoner, so he could be distraught? Or had I just run off, so he could be angry? But he remained stoic as ever.

With the dirt that had covered me, one might assume something at least resembling what had happened. But if I’d had a mental breakdown and run off somewhere, only to come back and discover a fresh grave with my name on it, the results would have been the same. They were better off not knowing. They’d be better off angry.

The doorbell rang again. More kids. I put the empty plate in the sink and headed for the door. I wanted to do something normal. Even if my heart wasn’t in it, I wanted to participate in some inane activity like giving candy to random neighborhood kids in costumes.

My mother had been halfway to the entryway when I stopped her and took the bowl of candy from her hand and opened the door. But it wasn’t cherub-faced little princesses and miniature goblins that greeted me. I had believed I’d been discreet, that no one had recognized me, but I’d been wrong.

The glass bowl shattered on the porch and the candy went flying.

A crowd of journalists had assembled on my lawn with bright lights and cameras and microphones. Some of them with little squares of paper that they were furiously jotting notes down on. Perhaps noting my state of dress, my facial expressions, whether or not I looked abused or if I’d lost or gained any weight.

I squinted out into the sea of eager faces, people for whom my trauma equaled their paycheck. I could hear camera shutters clicking, could see the video cameras trained on me, and I wondered if he would be watching the news back in his fortress. Just another piece of video surveillance. Just another way he could spy on me.

“Miss Vargas.” It wasn’t one voice, it was several, all bleeding together, running on a loop.

“Why didn’t you go to the police?”

“Were you kidnapped? Is the perpetrator still at large?”

“Emily . . . ”

“Miss Vargas, were you held against your will?”

“What happened?”

“Can we get a statement?”

“Miss Vargas . . . ”

I shut the door and locked it. The nightmare had begun.

ELEVEN

I left my family to handle the media and the random people who kept popping by insisting we were the closest of friends and they needed to see how I was, when really, most of them had the most fleeting and peripheral impact on my life.

They just wanted to rubberneck. These people built up our association so they could watch with morbid fascination the undoing of one Emily Vargas.

I had no choice but to talk to the police. I’d already decided I wouldn’t turn him in. The idea of the man I’d called master being locked up was more distressing to me than anything else I’d experienced.