I don’t know.
Those three little words Bel knew better than most. Both the truth and a blockade, to hide behind when you needed it. But now that she was on the other side of those words, she finally saw why it drove people mad, mad enough to kidnap a small, scared girl and scream at her in the backseat of your car.
“What do you mean you don’t know?” Bel stared at Rachel, doubling down, kicking at the blockade.
“I don’t know where I was.” Rachel sniffed, repeating herself, like Bel always had to. “I don’t know where he kept me.”
Bel’s mind stalled, picking over her words, searching for scraps.
“He? Who’s he?”
“I don’t know,” Rachel said again.
A flash of frustration, warm, pushing against the cold drip of shock. “You don’t know?” Bel asked, unable to hide it from her voice.
Rachel shrank. “The man who took me. I never knew his name. Couldn’t see much of him.”
“How—”
“Kept me in the dark.” Rachel cut across her. “Think it was a basement. Can’t be sure.”
Bel paused, thinking that over. The questions peeled off her tongue, dropping to her gut like a dime down a well. No wishes to be found here. All she could find instead was:
“All this time?”
Rachel nodded. Like a nod was answer enough for all that horror. And it was all she would give.
“H-how long was it?” Rachel asked a question of her own now. “I tried to keep track of time, but it wasn’t always easy. I know roughly, I think, but …” Bel didn’t move and Rachel studied her, picking over her face for clues. “How long?” she repeated.
“Sixteen years, two months.”
Rachel’s breath shuddered, wiping a new tear before it formed. “You’re eighteen now,” she said, like that was the saddest part. She’d missed much more than just Bel’s eighteenth birthday.
“Yeah.”
“I’m sorry,” Rachel said.
Sorry for what? For being taken, for being kept? For everything else? They weren’t at sorry yet, there were still too many questions. They hadn’t even scratched the surface of each other, claws out and hungry. But there was one answer that meant the most to her, peeking through their scratches. If a man had taken Rachel, kept her in a dark basement all that time, did that mean she’d never really left Bel behind at all? Did it? Didn’t it?
That would change everything.
Bel took one step closer, sliding along the counter.
“How did you escape?” she asked next, wanting to savor that most important question; she wasn’t ready for everything to change just yet. Too much had already.
“I didn’t.” Rachel sniffed. “Never could. I tried so many times, so many ways.”
“Then how are you here?”
“He let me go,” she said.
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
Those words again. But Bel wasn’t angry this time; you couldn’t know what you didn’t know, no matter how many times people asked. She’d lived it, time and again.
“What happened?” Bel said, shifting to what Rachel could know.
Rachel shook her head. “You don’t have to hear all this, Anna. You don’t have to know, I don’t want you to know, that’s not fair …”
“Please?” Bel circled, hardening her gaze.
Rachel met her eyes.
“OK. He—he came downstairs. I thought it was to bring food. But he didn’t have any. He put a bag over my head, a fa—like a fabric bag, a tote bag, so I couldn’t see but I could breathe. Then he unbound me.”
Rachel glanced down one leg to her left ankle. Bel followed her gaze: red blistered skin in a band of raw flesh.
“Tape?” Bel said, urging her on.
“No, it was a chain. A cuff.”
Bel nodded.
“He’d never taken me out before. I hadn’t left since I first got there. But he walked me upstairs. Through a house, maybe, I couldn’t see anything. He put me into the back of a car. I asked what was happening, but he wouldn’t speak. He never spoke much.”
“And?” Bel drew closer.
“We drove for a couple of hours. I tried to count the time, but I was distracted. I was scared. Thought he was taking me somewhere to finally kill me. But it was also a relief, somehow. An ending. I said my goodbyes in my head.”
One of those goodbyes was for Bel, wasn’t it? Maybe the most important one.
Bel stepped forward, and then all the way, taking the chair opposite Rachel.
“But then we stopped,” Rachel continued, telling her story, eye to eye across the table. “He didn’t even turn off the engine. He got out, opened my door and pulled me out. It was grass, I could feel it, my feet were bare, I remembered how grass used to feel. I thought he would tell me to get on my knees. I thought that was it. But … I heard the door slam, and the car drove away. He left me there. I waited a few minutes, listening, making sure, because I thought I could still hear the engine. Then I took the bag off my head. He was gone. I was alone on a road, in the trees. Been so long since I saw trees. It was dark. I was by a river, that’s what I could hear.”
Bel nodded her on, wondering what it was like to forget the sight of trees, the sound of a river, the feel of grass. She couldn’t imagine it.
“I followed the river until I found a street. Then I followed that. No one was around. There were houses, but it must have been so late, or so early. I didn’t want to wake anyone, to scare them. I kept going until I found a road sign. Lancaster. I was on Route Two already. I knew if I just followed the highway east, it would take me home. I just wanted to get home. I’m so glad you hadn’t moved.” She laughed a small, wet laugh, without a smile, without showing teeth.
“You walked?” Bel asked. “All the way from Lancaster? That must have taken …” She thought about it. “Like eight hours.”
Rachel glanced down at her fucked-up feet in answer. “I found those shoes in someone’s trash. Too big for me. Better than nothing.”
“Did people see you?” Bel said.
“People saw me. After the sun came up.”
“Did anyone try to help?”
“One person did,” Rachel said. “But I wasn’t getting in the car of someone I didn’t know. I knew the way home, and I got myself here.”
“Fuck.” Bel exhaled. It wasn’t the end of the earth, it wasn’t even out of state, but—fuck—that was a long way to go. A slow, painful reappearance. Not the blink of an eye, like the way she’d disappeared.
Bel watched the stranger across from her, less a stranger than five minutes ago, swaying in her chair, the effort of a blink almost knocking her sideways.
She must have been so tired, so hungry.
“Are you hungry?” Bel asked her, and it felt strange to ask something so ridiculously normal. Normal didn’t belong here, between the two of them, one a fully grown person from the face of a toddler, the other back from the dead. “I—I could make you a sandwich or—”
The front door slammed, beyond the living room.
Rachel flinched, eyes wide, growing black with adrenaline. Her arms locked against the back of the chair, pushing herself up.
“It’s OK, it’s just Dad.” Bel got to her feet too.
Rachel flicked those otherworldly eyes back at her, standing tall in a way that must have hurt. She hissed through her teeth, clutching her side.
“Bel?” Charlie called through the house, worried. “Bel, where are you?!”
“Kitchen!” she shouted back, and Rachel winced at her voice too.
“What’s going on? What are you—”
Charlie appeared in the doorway, eyes catching on the bloody, muddy footprints on the tiles. “What did—”
“Dad,” Bel said, making him look up.
He did, first at Bel, eyes narrowed, face lined around them. Then he spotted the new person standing there, gaze following the footprints over to her.
“Wha—” The word died in his throat, eyes snapping open, like they might just keep stretching and stretching, taking his whole face with them.
He stared at Rachel, unmoving.
His keys dropped to the floor, a loud clatter.
No one moved, marble chess pieces pointed at each other, standing in their own squares of the black-and-white tile.
Charlie’s bottom lip unstuck, falling open. Bel wondered what was going through his head. Had this been the way he’d dreamed it?
“No,” he said, barely a whisper, backing up against the wall, gasping when it stopped him. “This can’t be possible.”
Bel watched her parents watching each other, though she could only see her dad’s face, and something wasn’t right.
His jaw hung open. Blinking hard at Rachel, like she might disappear between the flicker of his eyelids. Taken aback each time she wasn’t.
This was wrong.
He was supposed to be happy. Wrap Rachel in his arms and tell her he loved her. His wife, his vindication, standing right there in front of him, after all this time.
Was he in shock? Because he didn’t look happy. He looked scared.
“How is this possible?” Words found him again. But the questions were supposed to come later. He was supposed to hug her first, say he loved her and missed her. This was the wrong order.
“Hello, Charlie,” Rachel said then, and he backed away at the sound of her gravelly voice, flattening against the wall, knocking the clock off.
It smashed.
The sound echoed down in Bel’s gut, where it found the knot, growing and turning, spinning into thorns. This didn’t feel right at all.
“How is this possible?” Charlie repeated, more certain now, like he’d stepped out of the dream, even though none of it had followed the plan. “How are you here?”
“I came back.”
“How?” Charlie said, louder.
“He let me go,” Rachel said, quieter.
“Who’s he?” Charlie asked, eyes straining at their edges, voice too.
“The man who took me.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know,” Rachel said.
Charlie’s chest rose with his held breath. “Who?” he said again.
“She doesn’t know who he is,” Bel interjected, but Dad didn’t even look her way, like only one of them could exist at one time and his eyes were on Rachel.
“Took you how?” Charlie asked. Because there were questions and questions, and they were coming first, the mystery pulling hardest. Maybe the I love you and the I missed you would come after.
“Out of the car.” Rachel shifted on her feet, hissing as she did. “He followed me—us—from the mall. I didn’t know who he was, but I knew he was following me. I went down those small back roads, trying to lose him. He overtook, cut me off, made me swerve off the road. Next thing I knew, he’d pulled me out of the car. I managed to shut the door, hoping he wouldn’t notice Annabel.” Rachel glanced back at Bel, her eyes full with something. Maybe the memory of the last time she’d seen Bel’s face, that baby, strapped into that backseat alone while Rachel disappeared in front of her. “He dragged me through the snow to his car. Slammed my head against the trunk before he pushed me inside. I couldn’t get out. He drove away. No one could hear me screaming.”
Bel hung her head, picturing it, re-creating the memory that never was, what she must have seen and forgotten, because she was too young to have the words for it. The truth of what happened, and the answer that mattered most to her, out of all of them. Rachel hadn’t left her. She’d been taken away. This should feel good, so why didn’t it? Why was the room so stale, and the knot in her gut pulling tighter and tighter?
It wasn’t the most important answer to her dad, clearly. There was still too much to know. “What about the mall?” he asked, peeling away from the wall now. Rachel looked confused. “You disappeared twice, Rachel. The cameras saw you go in but never leave. Explain that. Why did you and Bel vanish inside the mall before that? How?”
“Did you call the police?” Rachel asked Bel.
“Yeah,” she lied again, looking at her dad, wondering if it was time to actually call them. Maybe after her dad’s questions, and the part that came after, the part he’d waited all this time for.
“Rachel?” he said, splitting her name into halves. Still scared, still in shock. Was Bel through hers yet? “What happened?”
Rachel staggered, turning to face him. “The man was there too. That’s when I first noticed him, following us, staring at me. It was the first time I noticed him, but I don’t think it was the first time he noticed me. I’d been feeling watched for a couple of days, like I was being followed. Something felt wrong, really wrong, and I knew it would be bad if he followed us out to the car. So after we left the coffeehouse, I made us disappear for a while. We hid.”
“Hid where?” Charlie pressed, not soft like the way Ramsey did it.
“I used to work in that mall,” Rachel said, answering hard too. “The food court was round the corner from the coffeehouse. When they emptied the trash cans, they always took the bags through this Staff Only door. We went that way, it was unlocked. Just a small corridor with trash and large recycling bins. I was scared the man had seen us, and I thought the door to outside would be alarmed, so we hid. Inside a recycling bin. The one for glass. Paper was too full.”
“You hid in a bin with our daughter?” Charlie said, like he almost couldn’t believe it. At least that was better than scared, closer to normal.
Rachel nodded. “I wanted to wait long enough, make sure the man didn’t find us, that he was really gone. Maybe an hour and a half. Annabel was sleepy. But then I heard voices, and the bin started to move. Someone was wheeling us out, some employees. They didn’t know we were in there. I made sure Anna stayed real quiet. They pushed us out the door, round a corner, complaining about how much glass there was. I guess the recycling was being collected soon.”
“That’s how we left the mall?” Bel asked. “Inside the bin?” The answer to the impossible mystery, that it could never live up to.
“We were inside the bin,” Rachel confirmed. “After the employees were gone, I opened the lid and we climbed out. We were in the back section, behind the parking lot. I guess there weren’t any cameras there, if they never saw us leave, if no one knew that happened. I never thought about that,” she said to Charlie. And Rachel had had a long time to think about everything. “We walked back to the car, a few streets away, and I started to drive home. But the man must have been waiting for us to return. Maybe he’d spotted my car, knew it was mine from another time he’d followed me, I don’t know. But I knew it was him behind us. That’s why I didn’t go straight home, I diverted up toward Moose Brook, to lose him. But he caught up to us.”
Rachel seemed lighter, somehow, in the shoulders, now that her story was almost through, the horror almost done. Then maybe Dad could live his dream after all. But Bel wasn’t sure it was going to happen anymore.
There was something she didn’t understand here, between them. Something thick in the air. Maybe sixteen years was just too much time. Could you still love someone across that vast universe of time and space and mystery? Maybe it was too strange now, but they’d regrow into it. Slow and painful, not the blink of an eye. That was the difference between real life and dreams.
“That’s where you’ve been?” Charlie asked, a dark cloud passing through his eyes. “For sixteen years?”
“In his basement,” Rachel answered.
“Who is he?” Charlie tried again, clenching one fist. Focused on the who, now that he had the how. Who had done all this to Rachel? To him? Who deserved his anger? The man who took his wife and then gave her back.
Now Bel focused on the who too, because she hadn’t thought it through before, not all the way: that same nameless man from Rachel’s story was a real person, still out there now. Bel checked the window into the backyard. He’d been watching then, could he be watching now?
“I don’t know his name, never found out. I could describe what he looks like, but he mostly kept me in the dark.”
Charlie moved forward a half step, boots crunching the broken glass of the clock.
“And he let you go? Today? How? How did you get here?”
Rachel swayed, catching herself on the chair, holding on to it like a crutch. “He came down to the basement, unchained my ankle, put a bag over my head. A tote bag. Didn’t say anything. Just led me upstairs, through a house I guess, into the back of a car.”
“How long did you drive for?”
“I don’t know, I lost count. Maybe a couple of hours.”
“Did you see any landmarks, anything you recognized?”
“No.” Rachel coughed into her closed fist. “There was a bag over my head.”
“But your hands were free? You could have pulled it up?” Charlie stepped forward again, glass cracking.
“I didn’t want to do anything that would make him kill me,” Rachel countered. “He parked up somewhere, cut the engine. Pulled me out and left me there. It was Lancaster. I found the highway and walked all the way home. Annabel found me.”
She’d left out the part about Bel running away from her, hiding. Retelling it kinder. Wait a second … Something else was different too. Something had changed between the story she’d told Bel and the one she just told Charlie. Before, Rachel said that the man had left the engine running when he pulled her out of the car, left her on that road, remember? But she’d just told Charlie that the man had turned the engine off first.
Yes, the car had definitely changed between versions, shifting through time, Bel was sure of it. She was old enough to remember things like that now.
A mistake?
Bel narrowed her eyes, studying the back of Rachel’s head.
Only one version could be true. Rachel must have misspoken, either now or with Bel. Yes, it must have been a mistake, because the only other option was a lie, and why would Rachel lie about something like that, such a small detail in such a big story?
A mistake.
Yes, it was just a tiny mistake. But Bel’s body didn’t believe it, not all the way. Something felt wrong, something in the air, in the buzz in her ears. Could Dad feel it too? Was that why he was backed into the corner again, where the clock used to hang, fear in the lines of his face, even though he’d waited sixteen years for this moment?
Bel and her dad at the outer edges of the kitchen, Rachel in the middle, keeping their eyes on her. Like a thing with teeth that you shouldn’t turn your back on.
It was just a mistake, right?
Or maybe Bel was the problem, she could have misheard?
But the thought ended there with a knock at the front door. Loud and hard. Not a knuckle, but a fist.
Charlie jumped hardest, his head thudding against the wall.
“Who’s that?” he said, scrabbling along the wall to leave the kitchen, hurrying through the living room.
Rachel glanced back at her, clean grooves through her filthy face, more tears, though Bel hadn’t seen them fall. Bel nodded, gesturing her ahead: Rachel should go first.
Rachel shuffled through the living room, her feet drier now, flaking off instead of bleeding.
Bel’s eyes drew to the front windows, red-and-blue lights spinning through the glass with the afternoon sun. But … she never called 911.
The sound of the front door pulled open.
“Sorry to disturb you, Charlie,” a voice boomed through the house, splintering the buzzy, dreamlike quiet that had taken over it. Real life had come knocking.
Bel followed Rachel into the hall, keeping just enough space between them.
Her dad blocked most of the door, but Bel could see the face of Dave Winter, Chief of Police, hovering in the space above his shoulder. Gray face and grayer hair to match, tucked beneath the shiny peaked cap of his uniform. So many times before had the two of them stood like this. The one who knocked and the one who answered.
“We’ve had a couple of weird calls in. One from your neighbor, Ms. Nelson. She says she saw Ra—”
Dave’s dark eyes sorted through the background, flicking from Bel before falling to Rachel. Staying there.
His mouth went slack, moustache hanging over his teeth.
“Holy shit,” he said.
He took off his cap, clutched it to the badge pinned over his heart.
“It’s true.”
