Don’t Look Back

‘Whitney Houston. “Saving all my love for you,” right? She’s having an affair with a married man. That’s wrong.’

‘But she loves him. And isn’t what he’s doing more wrong?’

‘Women are better than men. Most, anyway. Men are weak, so women need to be strong.’ He reached in and punched a button on the radio, returning it to his station, although she had never touched it. The gas pump clicked off, and she hoped he might have to go inside to pay the attendant and then she would – she looked around. What would she do? It was surprising how quickly the landscape had turned into out-and-out country, real hicksville. If she had the chance to jump from the truck, where would she go? Later, when he pulled into a drive-through to buy her a hamburger, she had tried to announce to the attendant that she had been kidnapped, but he had placed his hand over hers, squeezing hard, and said: ‘Don’t make jokes about things like that, Elizabeth.’ (She had given him her name at his insistence, but he had yet to share his.) The cashier, a teenager not much older than Elizabeth, had looked bored, as if she saw such things every day. She even seemed a little resentful, tired of couples playing out their dramas and private jokes in front of her. The girl had bad acne and frizzy hair, and her uniform pulled tightly across her broad torso. Elizabeth wanted to say: ‘He’s not my boyfriend! I’ve never had a boyfriend! I’m more like you than you think, except I’m not old enough to work or drive a car.’

He had kept squeezing her hand. It seemed to her at the time that he managed to exert just enough pressure to let her know that, in the next squeeze, he would crush every bone in her hand if she disobeyed him. Then he stroked her arm, along the inside. She remembered a game she played with her friends, where you closed your eyes and tried to guess when a trailing finger landed in the crook of your elbow. Depending on where it stopped, you were oversexed or undersexed. Everyone screamed in protest if they got oversexed, but, of course, that was the thing to be.

Elizabeth always ended up being undersexed, begging for the finger to stop well short of the elbow hollow.

The gas tank full, they drove on. An hour later, she asked if she could go to the bathroom. She expected him to scold her, as her father might have, for not asking when they were at the gas station. But he just sighed and said: ‘Okay, I’ll find a place where you can have some privacy.’

It took her a second to get it.

‘Why can’t I just go to a gas station or a fast-food place? Or even a restaurant.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t think so.’ This was his way, she was learning. He said no, but, unlike her parents, he never explained his reasons, didn’t provide enough information to allow argument.

‘I’ll be good,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to go to the bathroom outside.’

‘Number one or number two?’ he asked.

She thought about lying, but she didn’t think the answer would change his mind. ‘Number one.’

‘If I were you,’ he said, ‘I’d take my panties off. Some girls leave ’em on one leg, but if you want to stay clean, it’s better to take them all the way off, then squat. Keep your feet wide, too.’

It made her sick, hearing him say the word panties. She thought about the things he was going to do to her, later. She thought about her parents, sitting down to dinner with Vonnie, wondering where she was. They wouldn’t be worried, not just yet. They were calm people, unexcitable compared to most parents she knew. They trusted her. They would be irritated that she hadn’t called, they would be readying a lecture on consideration, how the freedom they gave her came with responsibility. But they wouldn’t worry about her until the sun set, which was still late this time of August, about eight or so.

Squatting in the dirt, her panties placed carefully on a nearby rock, she cried as she peed, then did a little dance, hoping to shake free whatever drops remained. She wasn’t going to use leaves to blot herself, despite his advice. What if she picked poison ivy by mistake?

‘Why are you crying?’ he asked in the truck. He didn’t retie her, though.

As darkness fell, he considered a few small motor inns, finally settling on one in a U-shaped court. ‘We won’t do this often,’ he said. ‘This is a treat because we’ve both had a long day and need a real mattress. Tomorrow, we’ll get a tent, some sleeping bags.’ Once in the room, after testing the bed and finding out it was bolted to the floor, he bound her hands and feet, then gagged her. She began crying again, the tears falling down into the corners of her mouth.

‘Shush,’ he said. ‘With time, when I can trust you, it won’t have to be like this. But you have to earn my trust, okay? You earn my trust and you can have all sorts of freedoms. But if you wrong me, I’ll kill you and your whole family. I’ll kill your family while you watch, then kill you. Don’t think I won’t.’

Her parents had given her similar instructions about trust – except for the killing part. She cried harder, wondering how awful it was going to be. She had read stories about rape, of course. Quite a few, given her taste in reading. And four years ago, she had watched, along with millions of others, an episode of a soap opera where a rape victim married her rapist. Of course, they had come a long way by then, Luke and Laura. They had been on the run together, evaded death, grown close. They were in love, and she had forgiven him. Vonnie had insisted, loudly and at great length, that it was all crap. But when the afternoon of the wedding came, Vonnie was there, watching as raptly as Elizabeth and her friends. They did not find the groom particularly handsome, but they understood that he was desirable because he loved his bride so much, that his love for her had driven him to commit crimes and take enormous risks. That one of those crimes had been an assault on his alleged beloved was tricky, but they understood. To be loved that way, to be desired to the point where you drove a man mad – what more could any girl want?

‘Look,’ the man said, ‘can you be brave? Can you be good?’

She nodded, although she was sure she could not.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I’ll take the gag out. But you have to be good. You know what I mean, by good? No screaming or crying. If you make a sound, I’ll put the gag in and show you the ways I know how to hurt people. I’m not a man to be messed with. Just go to sleep, and we’ll talk things out in the morning.’

Her mouth freed, she thought for a moment about screaming her head off but found she could not make the sounds come. She was too frightened, too scared. His hands lingered near her throat. She thought about the mound of dirt where she had first seen the man, working with his shovel. He had not said, explicitly, what he had done, but she knew. He was capable of killing someone. He had done it. Elizabeth decided in that moment that she would do whatever was necessary to survive. She would endure whatever plans he had for her, as long as she was allowed to live.

‘What’s your name?’ she whispered.

‘Walter,’ he said. ‘I think sometimes I should shorten it to Walt. What do you think?’

She was terrified that there was a right answer, and she wouldn’t give it. ‘Both are nice.’

He watched her for a while, hands at the ready to clamp over her mouth. His gaze was detached, curious. She snuffled and gagged a little on her tears, but was otherwise quiet as commanded. He took his hand away – and went to sleep.

Eventually, she slept, too, and they stayed that way, side by side, on top of the bedspread. He touched her only once, turning her on her side and complaining: ‘You snore.’

Chapter Eleven

For a few days, the letter to Walter was like a pink elephant, the one in the mental exercise that instructs a person to think about anything they desired – with the exception of pink elephants. Had he gotten it? Was it enough? Would he be disappointed?

She had written him with what she hoped was polite finality. Yes, she was married and living in the area. (Funny to be vague, when he knew her exact address.) She omitted any reference, any hint, to Iso and Albie. Walter was not a pedophile, although there had always been some confusion about that, given the age of his victims, and she doubted he would escape, much less head toward Bethesda if he should. But the fact of motherhood was too intimate to share with him. She wrote that it was interesting to hear from him, yet not completely unexpected. How she had struggled over those words, weighed each one. What would Walter read into ‘not completely unexpected’? He had an uncanny ability to hear what he wanted, to glean meanings that no one else could see. Later, in college, when she took a course in semiotics, she couldn’t help thinking that Walter could give Derrida a run for his money. Walter took everything down to the word, then made words signify what he wanted them to, justify whatever he wanted to do. He was like a character from Alice in Wonderland, or one of the later Oz books, the one with the town where everyone spoke nonsense. Rigamarole, that was it.

Still, she also was careful not to write anything that would cause him trouble, although the letter would not be scrutinized by some official. Walter was most unpredictable, most likely to lash out, when he thought someone was trying to hurt him. She chose to send her letter via the same PO box that had been used as the return address on the letter to her, not the prison’s address. She knew this meant that Walter’s coconspirator, whoever it was – please, not Jared Garrett – might read the letter first, although she put it in a sealed envelope within the stamped and addressed one. But whoever was helping Walter already knew who and where she was. If she sent the letter in care of the prison, it would take only one gossipy correctional officer to send her life careering out of control.

Besides, she understood now why he had written via an intermediary. As an inmate, he was not allowed to write just anyone, a fact she had been able to establish by a cursory search of the official Web page maintained by Virginia’s prison system. Correctional facilities, as the official jargon had it. The word struck her as sweetly naive and utterly false. While she realized that prisons did attempt to rehabilitate inmates, she was not sure how anyone on death row could be said to be in a correctional facility, unless one considered death a correction.

She struggled most over the ending. Sincerely? Insincere. All the best? More like, All my worst. She chose to sign her name, assigning no emotion at all.

Time, her old friend, exercised its subtle power. The letter dropped to the back of her mind, like a sock lost behind the dryer. Or, perhaps more accurately, a bit of perishable food behind the refrigerator, something that would eventually stink or bring pests into the house but that enjoyed a brief, carefree amnesty in the short term. Meanwhile, there had been too much to do to prepare for the beginning of school. The children would be attending two different schools, with Iso riding a bus to middle school and Albie attending the elementary school within walking distance. It would be Eliza’s responsibility to get them both off in the morning, which didn’t bother her at all. This was her job, it was what she did, and she was – she admitted privately – superb at it. Privately because it was the kind of sentiment that did not land gently, anywhere. Vonnie became almost enraged at the idea that Eliza considered being a mother a full-time job, and a satisfying one at that. Even their mother couldn’t help wondering where Eliza would find fulfillment as the children grew. Inez was forever suggesting that Eliza would want to return to school eventually, finish the graduate degree she had abandoned at Rice. The women in Peter’s world, the ones she met at those endless functions, tried hard to remember to add ‘outside the home’ when they asked if Eliza worked, or had ever worked, but their politeness could not mask their belief that what she did was not work. Hard, perhaps, tedious without a doubt. But not work.

That was okay. Eliza didn’t consider it work, either, because she enjoyed it too much. It was the thing at which she excelled. She wasn’t one of the smarmily perfect mothers, packing ambitious lunches, never falling back on prepared treats for classroom parties. But she was more or less unflappable, rolling with things. In fact, she liked a bit of a crisis now and then – the science project left until the last minute, lost homework, lost anything. Nothing remained missing when Eliza began searching for it. She knew her children so well that it was easy for her to re-create those absentminded moments when things were put down in the wrong place. She was aware, for example, that Iso took out her retainer while watching television, so it was often found balanced on the arm of the sofa. She understood that dreamy Albie lived so far inside his own imagination that anything could become part of that world. His knapsack might be found perched on the head of the enormous stuffed dog his aunt Vonnie had given him, creating a reasonable facsimile of an archbishop, although Albie was probably aiming for a wizard.

She was on her hands and knees, looking under the bed for Albie’s missing trainer – sneaker – when the phone rang. Albie had been forced to wear his sandals to school, which he didn’t mind until Iso teased him about it, and he had walked the five blocks to school as if heading to the guillotine, sniffling and wailing the whole way. Eliza had promised she would find his shoes before day’s end, perhaps even bring them at lunchtime. She snagged the shoe, marveling at how far it had traveled from its mate, which had been discovered in the first-floor powder room, then dashed for the phone, a habit she couldn’t quite break. Even when the children were in the house, present and accounted for, the ringing phone taunted her with the possibility of an emergency. Strange, because if there were an emergency, it would be much more likely to arrive via the chirpy ringtone of her cell phone. Got that one right, she congratulated herself, picking up the phone in her bedroom.

‘Is this Elizabeth?’ a woman’s voice asked.

Reflexively, she almost said no.

‘Elizabeth Benedict?’ the woman clarified. But those two names were never paired, ever. It must be a telephone solicitor, working off some official list, perhaps one gleaned from the county property records? But, no, she used Eliza on all official documents except her driver’s license and passport, had since her registration at Wilde Lake High School in 1986. Did call centers have access to MVA records?

‘Yes, but please put me on your do-not-call list. I don’t buy things over the phone, ever.’

‘I’m not selling anything.’ The woman’s voice was husky, her laugh a throaty rasp. ‘I’m the go-between.’

‘Go-between?’

‘The person who passed that letter to you, from Walter. He wants to add you to his call list.’ Again, that raspy laugh. ‘Not to be confused with the federal do-not-call registry.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘He’s allowed to make collect calls to up to fifteen people. Of course, he doesn’t have anywhere near that many. Just his lawyer and me, as far as I know. He can add you without his lawyer’s knowledge. But you have to say it’s okay. Is it?’

‘Is it—’

‘Okay.’ The woman was clearly getting impatient. ‘And telling me isn’t enough. You’ll have to make an official request, via the prison. Then there’s paperwork. There’s always paperwork.’

‘I don’t . . . no, I don’t think so. No.’

‘It’s your decision,’ the woman said, and then promptly negated that obvious fact. ‘But I think you should.’