Comfort Food (17 page)

I Love Lucy
was playing on low in the background. The canned laughter filtered over to me on the bed.

For a moment I thought about turning him in. What if? I was still angry with him for throwing me away. Shouldn’t he be punished for that? Even if it seemed like he was being punished for something quite different? He’d know the real reason.

I tried to imagine the look on his face when the squad cars pulled into his driveway. Would he be remorseful? Ashamed? Shocked? Accepting? Would he adjust to imprisonment as well as I had?

I wondered again if he believed freeing me had been a cruelty or a kindness, if he thought he’d done something wrong in taking me. I wondered if he regretted letting me go, and if he ever thought of me or dreamed of me as I did him. Surely my obsession couldn’t now be greater than his.

Would I be in trouble for lying and obstructing justice? Would someone lock me in a cell no matter how brief the time, thinking it was okay because I hadn’t told the truth to the all-powerful police arm of the government?

Or could I play the fear card?
He terrorized me too much to speak. I was afraid he’d come for me again.
I didn’t know.

But although the revenge fantasy was appealing for a moment, it quickly faded, replaced with the same feeling I always got when thinking of him as anything but omnipotent. Anxiety.

The next day was different. I don’t know if it was seeing Dr. Blake or if the reality of my freedom had finally sunk in, but I started to get things together. I looked for an apartment, a small one. I had enough in the bank to see me through a year maybe while I tried to figure out what to do with the rest of my life.

I would adjust and be okay. I’d find my place in the world again, and this would just be something I’d experienced, but not something that had changed the core of who I was. I could be cured. I’d go through all the standard trauma responses, and then at the end of it I would be a
survivor
.

I could be unbrainwashed. It would require new conditioning, but it could be done. I could be free of him forever, mentally as well as physically.

It wasn’t minor fame that gave me the money to take care of myself now, but extreme responsibility with my finances. I’d always been a saver instead of a spender. It was part of why this step scared me.

But I had to act. Otherwise, I was going to wither away and die in my parents’ house in the creepy room with the white wicker furniture and the paper border wisteria dripping down from the edges of the ceiling.

I was too cowardly to kill myself, though I’d had fleeting fantasies. My master had thrown me out with finality, and my life with him was over. The only thing left to do was act.

To anyone observing this tragedy, I was a brave little soldier. Emily Vargas, the inspiration to kidnapped women everywhere. Such strength to so quickly begin putting the pieces of her life back together after all the horrors she must have suffered spending months at the hands of a madman.

I’d been invited already on a few talk shows to share my story, but I’d declined. No one was getting an exclusive. No one was getting the story period.

Everything seemed normal on the outside. But no one was there to hear me wake up crying in the middle of the night, reaching out for the comfort of a man’s body that wasn’t there. I dreamed only of him. Nothing else. There seemed to be nothing I could do to purge him from the darkest corners of my mind.

Thanksgiving came. Almost four weeks away from him and I couldn’t even begin to not want him. I went to my parents’ house for the obligatory turkey dinner. It was always a big deal. My cousins and uncles and aunts, my parents. My remaining set of grandparents on my dad’s side. And of course friends, including Bobby White, the guy who’d grown up two houses down from me and had always had a crush.

Before being taken, I’d finally consented to one date with him.
Just to see
, as he’d said. He was seated at the main table directly across from me, staring at me over the large shiny basted turkey that looked like it should be in a food magazine.

I looked down at my plate. I couldn’t stand to see the mixture of pity and self-absorbed disappointment that his one shot with me was probably gone for good.

My mom, as always, was the spokesperson for Thanksgiving. Granddad was the patriarch, but both he and Dad were men of few words, and mom had never had that problem. Like me. Or like I’d once been. I stared at my plate, tracing the filigree pattern around the edges with my finger, trying not to hear her as she said what she was thankful for, my safe return.

Various family members exclaimed their agreement, and I never felt so distant from them. Who were these people? I was a stranger here. We shared blood but not much else, and I wondered why we continued to get together every year like this. Like some bizarre mockery of the family unit.

Dinner went quickly and then there was pumpkin pie. I took my pie on a paper plate and went to sit on the couch in the living room. Several family members attempted polite conversation that skirted delicately around the facts of my absence. It was as if I’d been away at Summer Camp.

Four weeks before, every one of these people had been wearing black and attending my funeral, and now, here we were as if none of it had happened. The denial seemed to stretch out to all my family, to all I knew. Or thought I knew.

I sat with the paper plate propped on my knees as their voices turned into one big white noise machine. I felt the couch dip beside me but kept my focus on the pie. If I didn’t acknowledge whoever it was, maybe they would go away.

Or at least just be fucking quiet.

“You’ve got more whipped cream than pie,” Bobby said.

I glanced over to see him sitting beside me, his paper plate propped carefully on his lap mirroring mine, except for the modest amount of whipped cream, as if indulging in more would be a mortal sin.

“Yeah,” I said and looked back at it.

I’d tried begging out of Thanksgiving dinner, telling my mother it was too much, too soon. It was partly true. It was too much, but I didn’t think a timetable made a difference in the grand scheme of things. It would still be too much five years from now. I’d been irrevocably changed, and no one wanted to accept it, not even me.

They all wanted to believe with enough therapy and enough time, my world would be lovely again. I’d be their golden girl again, but despite my brief forays into fantasy land, I knew it wasn’t true.

Mom had insisted I come. Everybody would feel bad if I wasn’t there. And we wouldn’t want that. I’d been avoiding them all for weeks. They missed me. Etc. etc. I’d caved because you always caved with my mother if you knew what was good for you. She wouldn’t leave you alone to make a decision. She’d just harp until she got the answer she wanted. I regretted giving it now.

Most of the family was crowded in the other room around the new giant screen plasma television watching football. None of them were football fans, and most of them knew nothing about the game. They sat and watched football because it was what families did on Thanksgiving, or what they thought they were supposed to do.

We were all doing what we were supposed to do, and I wondered if even one of us was doing what he wanted to do. I glanced up to see Bobby staring at me intently. Well, one person was doing what they wanted to do.

Good for Bobby.

“Are you going to be okay?” he said.

“Yeah,” I lied.

Part of me hated him right then. Either he was too clueless to understand the nature of my captivity made it completely inappropriate for him to bring it up, or worse, he was hoping to score points as the knight in shining armor who comforted me. I couldn’t deal with being a pawn in his fantasy right then.

He reached out and put his hand over mine. I jerked away and scooted to the far end of the couch. I couldn’t stand for anyone to touch me. Or at least I couldn’t stand for anyone but one person to touch me.

“Sorry,” he mumbled. “Jeez Emmie, that fucking bastard fucked you up good, didn’t he?”

“Don’t say that!” I was shocked by the vehemence of my voice.

“Aw, hell. You know I didn’t mean anything against you. I just wish I could get him alone in a room, you know?”

I couldn’t meet his eyes because I knew he’d see the anger boiling just beneath the surface. There was a chance he’d think the anger was directed at my captor. But there was a chance, however small, that he wouldn’t.

“Emmie?”

“Yeah,” I said, acknowledging his empty threat toward my master.

I don’t know why I was angry. Bobby wouldn’t have a shot in a room alone with him. I knew I hadn’t just built my captor up in my mind as physically stronger than he was because of how helpless he’d made me.

I’d seen his well-muscled body many times, felt his weight on me, the strength of his grip. I knew. He’d rip Bobby to pieces, and I couldn’t decide whether that idea upset me or not. It upset me a lot less than the idea of Bobby hurting
him
.

“Alright, well, um . . . I need to really get going. But if you ever need somebody to talk to, you know where I am, yeah?” He was edging toward the door.

“Yeah.”

He looked at me another long moment before turning and walking off with his empty paper plate. His shoulders slumped. I had been right. He’d had a picture in his head about how his love would heal me or some other similar romantic bullshit. He’d be my rescuer. But what if I no longer wanted to be rescued?

One by one family members and friends trickled into the room to have a word with me, to tell me how much they’d missed me, how glad they were I was safe. If I needed anything . . . By the time they’d all paraded through, I was crying and couldn’t stop. I waited until they left, and then I got in my car and went home.

My mother had seen me upset and seemed to regret persuading me to come. I’m not sure if it was because some perfect, mythic Thanksgiving was ruined or she really felt bad. We never spoke of it.

That week I put in resumes at several places. My publisher called, but I had no intention to continue writing, at least not self-help books. “Maybe a memoir,” they said. I said, “Maybe,” but didn’t mean it. I was done. It was time to move on to something else.

The day of my next appointment with Dr. Blake, I sat in my apartment looking at all my stuff. The bookshelves with my books lining them, a couple bags of fan mail that had piled up while I’d been away. This was freedom. This was what I wanted, what I’d yearned for, for months. Or at least until I knew it wasn’t possible and I’d given up the hope.

I didn’t think I could ever do public speaking again. I wasn’t sure if I could write, at least not that sort of book anymore, the kind that changed people’s lives for the better and made them go after their goals and believe in themselves. All of it now seemed like pat phrases and cheap pop psychology. How had I taken my knowledge and boiled it down to such black-and-white simplicity?

Maybe I would go into research like I’d originally planned. Don a lab coat and stay out of the spotlight. As I rode the elevator up to the fifth floor for my session, I held out the fragile hope everything hadn’t ended for me.

“You look a bit better this week. I take it the journaling was helpful? Cathartic maybe?”

I nodded, a nonverbal lie. I looked better because I was employing the
fake it til you make it
technique, acting as if I were fine in the vain hope it would make it so.

I handed her the journal and stretched out on the couch while she flipped through it.

“This is more than I expected. I’m very pleased.” She said it as if I were a dog eager for a biscuit.

I didn’t care one way or the other about her approval, but I smiled anyway. It was easier to just go along.

If I went along and cooperated, she’d write me a prescription at the end of the session, and hopefully a combination of drugs and life itself would make me free of him. Happy.

I waited while she read and felt suddenly self-conscious. Though I hadn’t revealed everything, or even the most graphic things that had happened during my enslavement, it was enough. It was far more intimate a portrait of those days than I would share with anyone who wasn’t offering drugs to numb it all down to a pleasant fuzziness.

Finally, she closed the journal and looked up. “Thank you for sharing this with me. Would you like to tell me why it’s all written in third person, though?”

I don’t know why I said it, I just blurted the first thing that came into my head. “It’s not about me. It’s just a story.”

I was less shocked at having said it, and more shocked that it was true.

I had dissociated. Every sexual encounter I’d written as if it had happened to someone else.

I closed my eyes and went back, remembering, seeing his eyes, his hands on my body, not someone else’s. I expected to feel revulsion, fear, panic, disgust, but what I felt instead was much more disturbing. I felt the heat surge between my legs, the wetness of my panties, and full-on arousal.

I was barely there through the rest of the session, on autopilot, responding as the doctor expected, until the session was over and it was time to write a prescription. She scribbled something on the prescription pad and handed me the journal, telling me to keep up the good work and she’d see me next week.

I stopped off at the bathroom on the way out, ashamed of my physical reaction in the doctor’s office and what I was about to do, but I needed release. I locked the door behind me and unzipped my pants, letting them fall in a whisper to the floor. I leaned forward against the door, one hand pressed against the cold metal, anchoring me as I brought myself to orgasm with the other.

His face was in my mind as I came, stifling a moan. I pulled my pants back up, my fingers trembling as I buttoned them. I washed my hands in the sink. The soap smelled like the soap from my elementary school. I didn’t look at my face in the mirror. I didn’t want to see my eyes.

After getting my prescription filled, I wandered through the city. I left my car in the parking garage and took a cab. Before I knew where I’d asked the driver to take me, I was sitting in front of the Atlanta Zoo.