And hopeless. Nobody was going to miss me or rescue me, least of all my family. My parents and I were barely speaking. My ex had no reason to want to phone me. My sons would not call, and it might take them a month or more to start worrying about me. I had two older brothers who kept in touch sporadically and might call if the spirit moved them, but I couldn’t count on it. I had not yet met anybody down here who gave a damn, just dollar store and grocery store clerks. My friends from up north might call, leaving messages on my voice mail, and get pissed at me when I didn’t call back. Nobody would come to my little fuchsia home to check on me.
Like my thoughts, the room darkened—nightfall—but my eyes stayed open.
The overhead light fixture flicked on.
I think my whole body winced like my startled eyes. Reflexively I turned my head. By the bed stood Stoat with his big pistol and his goatee, which did nothing for his undistinguished profile, just made him look like a goat. Stoat the Goat, that was what I would call him, although not to his face.
As I thought this, as if he were psychic and heard me, he turned to glare, pointing the pistol at me as Justin went around the bed releasing my wrists and ankles. Of their own accord, my arms and legs curled toward my midsection like those of a squashed spider.
“Get up,” Stoat ordered, gesturing with the gun. “Potty time.”
I realized I should have been afraid it was more than just potty time, but my mind had gone as numb as my toes. Awkwardly I swung my legs over the side of the bed to sit.
“The gag?” Justin asked.
“Yeah, take it off. Let her spit and get a drink.”
I felt Justin fumbling at the back of my head to untie the thing. Maybe he didn’t want his darling Uncle Steve to realize he could slip it in and out of my mouth. Finally he removed it.
“Stand up,” ordered Stoat the Goat.
Clenching my teeth against the pain and stiffness in my lower back, I tottered to my unreliable feet.
“Move.” Stoat nudged me in the ribs with the gun barrel.
I stepped out of the room and toward the back of the house as directed, and my brain got going also, starting to try to think. Escape. How? Bathroom window? Surely Stoat wouldn’t come in there with me?
He didn’t, but the bathroom offered no back exit. Its window was boarded up, and not just with plywood either. Two-by-fours. And not from the inside. Not so that the boards could be levered up, pried off, nails pulled out. They completely covered the window glass and screen from the outside. I saw not even a knothole to peek through.
This place had been altered to serve as a prison long before I came along.
“Hurry up!” yelled Stoat.
I decided to stall him as long as I could. Get my arms and legs back to life. “I need to wash,” I called back. “There’s beer all—”
All over me, I was going to say, but a loud bang interrupted me. The gun. Aimed low, the bullet ricocheted off the base of the toilet and zinged around the bathroom, so fast it was over by the time I jumped and screamed.
“Just pee in the damn pot,” Stoat said with patience that menaced worse than a shower of obscenities. If the man didn’t mind putting a bullet hole in his bathroom door, he wouldn’t mind kicking it in either.
I had peed, but not in the pot. Unfortunately, the bathroom was as obsessively tidy as the rest of the house. Using toilet paper, I cleaned up myself first, then started on the floor.
“What’s taking so long!”
“Almost finished.” I flushed the toilet I had not even sat on, ran water as if washing my hands (or maybe getting a drink and spitting), said “Oops” as if I had splashed myself, stalled by spraying with raspberry Glade, then discovered I could not take the next step. I could not open the door.
“I’m scared to come out,” I said.
“You come out or I won’t shoot low this time.”
It’s amazing how brave terror can make a person. I opened the door and stepped out. Justin was nowhere to be seen. Stoat motioned me back to my room and onto the bed with his oversized pistol. “Justin!” he hollered, and the kid came in and cuffed my wrists and ankles without looking at me. Stoat nodded and stuffed his weapon all too appropriately into the front waistband of his pants.
“Okay. Bedtime. Nighty-night, sleep tight,” he said, and I thought he was tormenting me, but there was a sort of genuine warmth, maybe eagerness, in his tone, and he put his arm around Justin, pulled him close, and kissed him on the lips.
I gasped in shock. This was probably what Stoat wanted, because he looked straight into my horrified eyes and grinned. Justin’s face, what I could see of it, had gone crimson, and he kept his head turned against Stoat’s shoulder.