When She Woke (31 page)

“Till next time then,” the stranger said. Stanton didn’t respond. Hannah heard receding footsteps, the sound of a car door closing. “Stuck-up dwarf prick,” the stranger said.

He banged on the trunk lid, making the women jump. “Listen up, gals. It’s a three-hour drive to where we’re going, and you’re gonna stay nice and quiet till we get there. If I hear you making a racket, trying to get somebody’s attention, you’ll get it all right, from me, and believe me, you don’t want that.”

As the car started to move, an image formed in Hannah’s mind, of the naked hook in the ceiling of Stanton’s shabby dining room. A hook where a chandelier would hang, casting its radiance over the silk wallpaper and jewel-toned rugs, the antique mahogany table neatly laid with silver, china and lead crystal, all of it sparkling in that dazzling white light.

T
HEY RODE IN
stunned silence at first, each locked in her own thoughts. Hannah’s were grim. She was looking at five to six weeks of slavery, and that was if she was lucky; it could take as long as two months before she was totally fragged out. She had no illusions about what kind of slave she’d be. “Only the young and pretty ones,” Simone had said. Hannah calmed herself by picturing Simone’s face: clenched, furious, resolute. A woman with such a face wouldn’t let them be taken by slavers, hadn’t let them be taken by the Fist. She would come after them, would kill if necessary to save them, because for her, it was personal. And for Paul, it was even more so. He wouldn’t let Kayla be harmed. Surely he wouldn’t.

Hannah heard faint music playing, and then their captor started singing along, belting out the song with full-throated sincerity and absolutely no sense of pitch.
“Seen you and him dancin
at the Broken Spoke last night... He had his arms around you and wassqueezin you tight..."

“He
would
have to be a country and western fan,” Kayla murmured.

Hannah felt Kayla shaking with what she thought was laughter, and then she heard a sniffle and realized her friend was sobbing.

“Hey,” Hannah said, “Listen to me, it’s going to be all right. Simone and Paul—Vincent—know where we are. Their plan was to follow us. Think of him, Kayla. Think of Vincent.”

“I itched to break both his arms and pizzafy his face... Wanted to skin him alive but it ain’t my place... Cuz he’s your husband and I’m just the other man ..."

“They mean to kill us,” Kayla said. “Once we’re too fragged out to rape anymore.”

“Vincent isn’t going to let either one of those things happen. He cares too much about you.”

“What if he can’t find us in time? What if they kill him?”

“They won’t. He’ll find us, he and Simone, and I wouldn’t want to be the guy driving this car when they do. I’m sure they’re following us right now, making plans to rescue us. And after they’ve got us, you know the first thing they’re going to do? Go back and get that bastard Stanton.”

“I’ll help them do it,” Kayla said. “When I think of all that fucking food he made for us, I want to puke. And we just sat there and gobbled it up like rabbits in front of a pile of carrots.” The image was familiar, and Hannah tried to recall where she’d seen it. “Remember in
Watership Down,
how the nice farmer kept putting the food out every day, and the rabbits kept eating it and getting fatter and fatter, and then the one rabbit finally figures out that the farmer’s planning to turn them all into fricassee?”

Hannah suddenly felt her breakfast churning, threatening to come up. “Oh God, I feel sick.”

“Take deep breaths,” said Kayla. “The only thing worse than being kidnapped and locked in a trunk is being kidnapped and locked in a trunk full of vomit.” Fighting her panic, Hannah breathed. In, out, in, out. “On the other hand,” Kayla added, “if we puked all over ourselves maybe they’d decide to send us back and ask Stanton for a refund. What do you think? Might be worth a try.”

The deep breathing and the humor had the desired effect, and Hannah felt her nausea begin to subside. “The funny thing is,” she said, when she could speak again, “unlike the farmer, I think Stanton actually feels bad about what he’s doing. I think that’s why he cooked for us, as a sort of …expiation.”

“Huh. Expiation my ass. ‘Sorry, ladies, I’m selling y’all into slavery,’ “ Kayla said, mimicking his accent, “ ‘but here’s some nice brownies before you go.’ Two-faced son of a bitch.” She sounded stronger and less afraid.
Nothing like a little anger to blunt fear and grief,
Hannah thought. “I wonder how many other women he’s done this to,” Kayla said.

“Simone said there were three who disappeared before us.”

“One for the parlor, one for the library, and one for the kitchen. You and me should finance the renovations on the dining room and the master bedroom.”

Their captor had reached the grand finale:
“So if she makes eyes at you run as fast as you can .. . Cuz you don’t want to be the other man …Oh yeah it’s hell to be the other man"
He jumped up an octave on the last syllable, delivering it in a screeching falsetto.

When he fell silent Kayla said, in a small voice, “I suppose they’re all dead by now, those other women.”

“I hope so, for their sakes.”

B
Y UNSPOKEN AGREEMENT,
they passed the time by talking of other things—childhood, family and, inevitably, love. Their murmurs wove a soft blanket around them, and they took what comfort they could from its all-too-temporary warmth. Hannah knew they’d probably be separated once they reached their destination. She pushed the thought to the back of her mind and listened to Kayla reminisce about her first love, Brad, “who turned out to be gay, which I guess I always sort of knew, but I was still pretty busted up when he told me,” and two subsequent boyfriends: “Shaun was smart and funny and sweet as he could be, but he was the rebound guy, and I just wasn’t ready to get serious again so soon. Then there was Martin, he was a rich Englishman twenty years older than me. I met him at the Kimbell in front of a painting of some eighteenth-century lord in a powdered wig, which is kind of what he reminded me of. It would never have worked, even if I hadn’t fallen in love with TJ. Martin just wanted to keep me in a box. It was a velvet box, but it was still a box, you know what I mean?” A little laugh. “Stupid question, considering where we are right now.”

“Oh, I know, all right,” Hannah said bitterly. “I could write a book on the subject.” One by one, she conjured all the boxes she’d been put into: The good girl box and the good Christian box. The confines of her sewing room above the garage. The mistress box, played out in the boxes of all those indistinguishable hotel rooms. The sweltering room in apartment 122. The jail cell, the interrogation room, the witness box at her trial. The bad daughter and fallen woman boxes. Her red body in the mirrored cell of the Chrome ward, a box within a box within a box. The enlightenment room, Mrs. Henley’s parlor. The locked rooms at the safe house and at Stanton’s. The wooden crate. And now, for the second time, the trunk of a car. She saw with a painful blaze of clarity that every one of these boxes had been of her own making, either by consent or lack of resistance. She had no right to bitterness; she had put herself in them. And she would get herself out, she vowed. And once she was out, she’d never willingly climb into another box again.

Kayla nudged her. “Hey, you listening?”

“Sorry. What were you saying?”

“I was asking you if Aidan was your first love.”

“Yes, first and only.” Hannah told Kayla about how they’d met at the hospital, their long, torturous wait, their first time together and their last, when she’d lain behind him with her belly pressed against his back, knowing it was the closest he would ever be to their child. She’d never spoken of him to anyone, and the more she talked, the wider the breach grew in the dam inside of her and the more furiously the words spilled out. Kayla listened, with periodic murmurs of sympathy, to the whole story, which Hannah ended, dry-eyed, at the moment she’d seen him on the vid, so vibrant and far away, and known that he’d moved on. She fell silent, feeling wrung out but tremendously lighter. If the trunk opened right now, she mused, she’d float up out of it like a big, red balloon.

“You don’t see it, do you?” Kayla said.

“See what?”

“How strong you are, to have made the choice you made. That took real guts.” Hannah started to protest, but Kayla forestalled her.
“And
to have kept his identity a secret,
and
to have stood up to the Henleys like you did,
and
to have come after me when you thought I’d been kidnapped, and, and, and. Hell, Hannah, you’re one of the strongest people I ever met in my life.” She paused, added, “And that means you have a serious shot at surviving this.”

“What do you mean,
I
have a shot? You’re strong too.”

“Look,” Kayla said. “I’m not kidding myself. It could take Vincent and Simone days or even weeks to figure out a way to free us, and I probably won’t have that long. But you’ve got time—”

“Yeah, lucky me,” Hannah interjected. “I’ve got six or more fabulous, all-expense-paid weeks to enjoy this.”

“My point is,” Kayla said sharply, “you’ve got the strength to survive whatever happens until Simone and Vincent come for you. Remember that, no matter how bad it gets.”

“I will,” Hannah said, perplexed by Kayla’s manner. It wasn’t like her friend to be so fatalistic. Or so silent. “Kayla?”

A long exhalation. “I’m not positive,” Kayla said, “but I think I’ve started fragging out.”

T
HE BRINY TANG OF THE SEA
was the first thing her senses registered when the trunk was opened and the men pulled her out, eyes squinting and watering from the sudden incursion of light. The second thing she registered was shooting pain in her limbs. When she tried to stand, her cramped legs collapsed under her weight, and the man holding her jerked her up roughly, his hand a tight cincture around her upper arm. The third and fourth things were cold, sea-damp wind against her face and a sense of spaciousness that was dizzying after her confinement. She could hear the susurration of the sea now, that was the fifth thing, and see the glittering golden path cast by the moon upon its dark expanse, that was the sixth. The seventh was the size of her captor. He was a colossus, a breathing mountain. The eighth was a jab of pain in her upper arm, the one he wasn’t gripping, after which the rest was a kaleidoscopic blur: The world tilting as an arm hooked beneath her knees and another beneath her back. Hungry brown eyes staring down at her from a wide white face, the odor of un-brushed teeth overlaid by coffee, a sprinkling of stars made faint by a fat, gibbous moon. A wooden dock tapering toward a big white blob, feet clomping on wood, Kayla’s head limp and bent backward, bobbing down the dock away from Hannah. A hand pawing her breast and pinching the nipple hard, the cough of a motor swallowing her gasp of pain.

The salt smell of the sea was the last thing she registered before she slipped into the void.

FIVE
TRANSFIGURATION

A
T FIRST, WHEN THE BLACKNESS
began to recede, she was unaware of it. There was no she to have awareness, only infinite nonbeing. She was not in the void, she
was
the void.

She. Was.

The void began to lighten, fading to a not quite black, fading to a deep, sooty gray, fading to slate gray, fading to cloud gray. A glowing pinpoint punctured the darkness. It pulsed—
Hannah!
—and she saw a shining mote suspended there. It pulsed again, and again—
Hannah!
—becoming brighter with each burst of incandescence. It seared her eyes, stabbed her ears, threatened her nonbeing.
Hannah!
The mote blazed like a sun, overwhelming, all-encompassing. She entered into it entered into her. She was the mote.

“Hannah! Wake up!” Her eyelids felt like they were weighed down by bricks, but the command forced her to lift them. The room—she was in a room—swam. She was lying on her side, in a bed. She was naked from the waist down. It stirred a memory: a sweltering room, a table covered in dinosaur-patterned sheets, the glint of medical instruments, the smell of blood. She groaned, suddenly queasy. Her body broke out in a sweat and she retched. A trash can appeared beside her face. She threw up into it. A washcloth wiped her mouth.

“Better now?” The voice, a woman’s, was familiar. Hannah shook her head, groaned, vomited again. The washcloth returned, wiped her mouth again. “Better?” She nodded. “Turn onto your back,” the voice said. Hannah tried to obey it—she
had
to obey it— but her limbs were too weak. Hands turned her, and a cool, damp towel was pressed against her forehead. A face came into view, a white moon hovering over her. She knew it, combed her mind for the name attached to it.

“You are safe, Hannah. The men who tried to kidnap you are dead.”

Hannah remembered another face, leering down at her. A huge hand groping her, hurting her. She whimpered and recoiled, trying to escape it. Hands gripped her shoulders and pushed her down. “Shh, calm yourself, you are safe,” the woman—Simone, that was her name—said. At once, Hannah’s muscles relaxed, and she let her head fall back against the pillow. “They did not harm you, but they drugged you, the
salauds.
This is why you are sick, from the sedative they gave you.”

She remembered a prick in her arm, Kayla being carried away, head lolling. With effort, Hannah turned her own head to the right and then to the left, searching for her friend. There was a second bed in the room but it was unoccupied, still neatly made. A pistol lay on the bedside table. Alarm shot through her, dispelling some of the fog in her brain. Where was Kayla? She tried to ask, but her tongue was inert, immovable. She strained, managed a whispered, “Where?”

Simone misunderstood. “We are still in Mississippi, some place called Palagousta, Pascalula.” An impatient wave. “It is on the coast.”

Hannah groaned in frustration. “Kay,” she said.

“Ah,” Simone said. “They had a boat. We were no more than a kilometer behind you, but they were quick. We arrived as they were carrying her on board. They put out to sea during the gunfight.”