Hell, he didn’t matter. Justin mattered.
Staring at the ceiling again and feeling the age lines in my face deepen, I tried to think how best to approach Justin. Wanting to rescue him was just fine, but I couldn’t do it until I’d rescued myself, which probably meant talking him into helping me. But in my experience, most teenage boys would rather sit on a fire ant hill than talk with a motherly woman.
I could hear Justin doing chores. First the breakfast dishes, judging by the sound of running water and the clatter of plates, and then—whump of pillows being plumped—making the bed he shared with “Uncle Steve,” a thought that made me feel sick. Don’t go there, I told myself; the anthill syndrome went double in regard to talking about personal things. If I ever got to talk to Justin at all. What would be the best way to lure him into my room and get him talking? I could start fussing through my gag—
Justin walked in, sat down on the side of my bed, pulled the gag out of my mouth, and slipped it down beneath my chin. “How are you doing?” he asked. “Can I get you anything?”
So much for fire ant hills and most teenage boys. My mouth and throat felt strangely dry. “Um, I’m okay,” I managed to croak.
Justin nodded. “I know it’s not real comfortable. Uncle Steve kept me tied to this same bed for the first month.”
The first month!
“He would come home in the middle of the day to check on me,” Justin added. “He told his boss he was taking care of a sick dog. He’s not a bad guy, really.”
What? If Stoat wasn’t a bad guy, then would somebody please define—
But I didn’t say that. I felt eggshells under my verbal feet. One false step, one wrong word, and I’d lose Justin. Even clearing my dry throat would be a bad idea at this point.
In the lightest tone I could possibly manage, I asked, “How do you figure that?”
“Well, he lets me watch NASCAR. He brings me stuff I like to eat, like Oreos—he doesn’t care about them, but he gets them for me. And the brand of cereal I like, and—and clothes and stuff. Last year he even got me a Christmas present. A PlayStation.”
I wanted to scream or laugh or cry—he sounded so ludicrous, thankful for Oreos and a PlayStation while Stoat the insult to goats kept him as a sex slave. Needing time to contain my outrage and prompted by my raspy throat, I asked, “Could I have a glass of water?”
“Sure.” Justin headed toward the kitchen. As soon as he had left the room, I aimed a silent, primal scream at the ceiling, then tried to think. I knew I would get nowhere unless I figured out Justin’s point of view. Which wasn’t easy. Why was he still living with the man who had abducted him?
Justin came back with a coffee mug with the Gators logo on it, and before giving me the water, he cautioned, “Just sip a little. If you wet the bed, Uncle Steve will beat . . . well, that’s what he did to me if I couldn’t hold it—he beat me. And sometimes he made me stand against the wall while he threw the knife at me like in the circus. But I don’t know what he might do to you.”
Justin’s tone was so matter-of-fact that it rendered me speechless. He sat on the bed, lifted my head with one hand, and held the cup to my lips with the other. Heeding his advice, I drank only a little, then nodded, and he laid my head back on the mattress again.
Trying to keep my tone as no-drama as his had been, like, hey, I just want information, I asked, “Did he ever get you with the knife?”
“No. He has a real good aim. I know he meant to miss me, to scare me.”
“And how did he beat you, with a belt?”
“No. He just beat me up, slammed me around, broke my ribs, knocked me out sometimes. I thought he would kill me.”
Again, I enforced a no-fuss, conversational tone. “Why didn’t he?”
“He planned to. He almost did.” Justin set the cup on the bedside table, his face turned away from me, and for a moment I thought he was going to leave. But he didn’t. I don’t flatter myself for any cleverness; I think he just really needed to tell his story. Two years, and who had he been able to tell? Nobody.
Still without looking at me, he said, “He kept me and messed with me until his boss got tired of him and his sick dog. No more taking off in the middle of the day, his boss said, or he’d lose his job. Kill the damn dog. So that night he got out the gun and told me to get in the truck. He took me way out in the swamps someplace and—and maybe I should have just let him kill me.”
“It’s not that simple, is it?” I said, remembering how it had felt after the divorce, the suicidal thoughts, some petty vengeful part of me wanting to die but no match for Schopenhauer’s “irrational will to live,” aka Darwin’s “survival instinct.” Whatever you call it, that invisible and unmeasurable phenomenon is amazingly strong.