Appetite for Innocence: A Dark Psychological Thriller Page 15

  “Sarah, I’m done,” I call out, forcing my voice to stay even.

  It hurts so bad I can’t breathe. I will myself to stand upright. It’s only twelve steps to my bedroom. Twelve steps. I can make it twelve steps.

  She opens the door and eyes me quizzically.

  “You don’t look good,” she says.

  “I don’t feel good,” I respond.

  She hurries me back to bed, anxious to get back to her show. I hold back the urge to moan or hold my stomach while we walk. I pull the covers up over me, bringing them up to my chin. I don’t move until I hear the door lock. I let out the breath I’ve been holding. I grab my pillow and put it over my head like I’m suffocating myself and scream into it like a wild animal. Firecrackers explode on my insides.

  I turn on my side, folding myself into the fetal position. I rock and force myself to breathe. It’s all going to be over soon, I chant in my head again and again, trying to calm myself.

  It isn’t long before I feel water between my legs. I pull the covers back. Crimson red stains my crotch.

  “Sarah! Sarah! Something’s wrong!”

  SARAH

  (THEN)

  Ella’s frantic screams pierce the air. I run to her bedroom and throw open the door. She’s curled up on her bed, the covers thrown to the side. She clutches her side. And that’s when I see it—the blood pooling underneath her.

  “Oh my God. Oh my God,” I say.

  She looks up at me. Her eyes are filled with pain. “Do something,” she begs. “I need a hospital. Please, take me to a hospital.”

  I don’t know what to do. I race to her side and put my hand on her head. She’s clammy and covered in a sweaty film. The smell of copper fills my nose.

  “I don’t know what to do,” I say.

  “Just do something,” she cries. Her tears intermingle with her sweat. Her eyes are wide. Her face contorted in pain.

  “Um... um...” I scan the room.

  I need John. He’ll know what to do. He’s got to help her. I run back out the door.

  “Sarah! Sarah! Where are you going?” Her screams are desperate.

  I fling open the front door. The alarm blares. He always told me if I triggered the alarm, it goes straight to his phone, and I’d never get away because he’d be here in five minutes. I hope it’s true. I race back to her room. The alarm wails in my ears.

  “What’s happening?” she asks.

  “I set off the alarm. It’s the only thing I know that will bring him home,” I say.

  Her arms are wrapped around her stomach. She’s moaning like a wounded animal, deep sounds coming up from her throat.

  I run out and into the kitchen. I fill a bowl with water. Not too hot. I don’t want to burn her. I grab towels and carry everything carefully back into her bedroom. I wet the towel and bring it to her forehead. I wet another and place it around her neck. I don’t know if it will help, but I have to do something. I rub her back like I’ve seen them do on TV when someone is in labor. Her entire body is rigid. Every muscle contracted.

  “Is this too hard?” I ask.

  She doesn’t respond.

  I rush around the other side to look at her. Her eyes are open. Pupils wide and dilated. All the blue has disappeared. I wave my hand in front of her face. She doesn’t even blink. I take her face in my hands, staring into her face.

  “Ella, it’s going to be okay. John is on his way. He’ll know what to do. You’re going to be okay.”

  The alarm stops.

  “Sarah!” John’s voice pierces the air.

  I run into the hallway, pointing like a crazy person into the bedroom.

  “It’s Ella! Something’s wrong with Ella! You have to help her!”

  As soon as I say Ella, he starts to run. He’s pushing past me before I even finish my sentence. He rushes to her side. There’s no mistaking the blood. I’ve never seen so much blood. The pool grows larger and larger. He looks like he’s afraid to touch her.

  “Ella. Oh, Ella,” he whispers, his voice thick with emotion.

  “We have to do something,” I say. “We’ve got to help her. She needs a hospital.”

  “We can’t take her to a hospital.”

  “But she needs one. She’s having a miscarriage.”

  He’s just staring at her, his eyes as unfocused as hers.

  “John!” I yell at him. “We have to do something.” I keep repeating it until he snaps out of it.

  “Okay. Okay.” He runs his hands through his hair over and over again. I’ve never seen him lose his composure. “Help me lift her out of the bed.”

  He lifts her to a sitting position. She yelps. He puts one of his arms around her and pulls her to her feet. I race to her other side, putting my arm around her too. Her head flops against my shoulder. She’s in too much pain to walk. We drag her through the bedroom and into the bathroom, leaving a bloody trail behind us. She alternates between moaning and crying.

  “Fill the tub,” John orders.

  I turn the knob, plug the drain, and let the water fill.

  He picks her up in his arms like she weighs nothing and carries her like an overgrown baby into the tub. He sets her down softly and carefully into the water. Blood rises up from between her legs. There’s pieces of meaty flesh in it. Globs of her insides and what’s left of the baby. I take a deep breath so I don’t vomit.

  John looks horrified. He stares at her like it’s the first time he’s seen her. I grab the glass from the sink and fill it with the water still pouring out of the faucet. I fill it and dribble it down her back. I do it rhythmically again and again.

  “We should take her to the hospital.” I try to persuade him one last time.

  He just shakes his head.

  “Do you have anything you can give her? Anything to help with the pain?”

  He leaves without speaking.

  “I’m sorry this is happening to you,” I whisper to her while he’s gone. I don’t care if we’re not friends. Nobody should have to go through this. “I wish I could help you. I do.”

  I reach out and grab her hand. She lets me hold it. Her hands are limp and lifeless. Her face is as white as the walls. “It’s going to be okay. You’re going to get through this.”

  John returns. He hands me a small pink pill. I take the glass I’ve been using to pour water on her back and fill it with cold tap water from the sink.

  “Ella, open your mouth,” I say.

  She opens her mouth mechanically. I place the pill on her tongue. It sits there. She doesn’t do anything. Her mouth is still wide open.

  “Close your mouth.”

  She closes her mouth.

  I bring the glass of cold water to her lips. “Swallow the pill with this.” I pour the water into her mouth. It spills out, but she swallows. The pill goes down with it. “Get her another one. Whatever that is. She needs more of it.”

  We follow the same routine with the second pill. It looks like she’s swimming in the Red Sea that I used to read about in Tiffany’s Bible. It’s disgusting. I drain the water from the tub, scooping up the pieces of her that are too big to go down the drain. I toss them outside the tub. I’ll clean them up later.

  I refill it again, making it hotter this time. I ease her back so she’s not sitting upright and so rigid. Her muscles are beginning to relax. The pills must be working. They don’t do anything for the pain in her eyes, but her body uncoils. I crouch next to the tub and rub her back until the water runs cool again.

  ELLA

  (NOW)

  My mom still doesn’t know I’m the one who killed my baby. She’s against abortion no matter what and she’d be horrified if she ever found out I’d gotten rid of the life inside me. She thinks he did it. It’s better that way. I wasn’t surprised when the doctors told me I’d never be able to have children because there was too much damage inside me. Randy made her leave the room because she was crying so hard she couldn’t get herself together.

  I’m glad I can’t have children.
I don’t want to bring a child into this world. I used to think the world was a good place. Now I know it was only a fairytale. Bad things happen and they happen all the time. They’re everywhere. You can’t stop them.

  Blake and Phil ask about the baby too. What happened to it? How far along was I? I told them I don’t know and that my baby is circling in his pipes somewhere.

  This afternoon they told me John’s real name. Derek Hunt. I keep rolling the words around in my brain. Derek Hunt. I have no connection to it. He will always be John to me. Randy says it’s okay if I don’t use his real name just like I don’t call Sarah her real name.

  She also told me about what happened to Sarah. John didn’t steal her. Her dad sold her to him. They all think she was his first victim and his kidnapping spree started with her. She was his guinea pig. The one he tried things out on until he worked up to taking other girls.

  She won’t tell me a lot about the details of what her life was like before. She says it’s Sarah’s choice to tell me and I should give her space. All she would say was that she was horribly abused and neglected by her father. It crushed Mom’s heart all over again. If there was any chance of her not coming home with us, it’s gone now.

  Mom is as determined to save her as she is me. She’s already working on different therapists and survivor groups we can go to when we get home. She doesn’t understand that some wounds run too deep. She’s convinced all we need is love and time. Oh, and God. God’s grace will heal us too.

  I don’t have the heart to tell her my faith in God was the first thing I abandoned in the basement. In the beginning, I prayed so much I even did it in my sleep, begging for protection, guidance for the people trying to find me, and to watch over Mom. God had always been as real to me as the bed I slept in at night and the walls of my house. I’d carried my Bible in my backpack since kindergarten. He was my compass, always my due north. His job was to love and protect me from harm.

  As time went on and things grew worse, it seeped in what I fool I’d been to believe. At first, I saw it as a test of faith. I’d always been taught God tested your faith, but it wasn’t a test—it was torture. It boiled down to two options: God was real, present, and directly involved in our lives like I’d been taught or nothing I’d been taught was true and God wasn’t real. He was either there and did nothing to help me or he didn’t exist. I quickly decided there couldn’t be a God because no God who was supposed to love me and had the power to intervene in my life would do nothing to save me. I didn’t have to be scared of going to hell because of my unbelief. I was already there. I lived in it every day.

  I want something to hold on to, but there’s nothing there anymore. I feel like I’m flying or falling, never steady or planted on anything solid. I’m unstuck from the world around me. Now I just float in empty, vast darkness.

  SARAH

  (NOW)

  “Have you ever heard of Patty Hearst?” Randy asks.

  I shake my head. I’ve refused to speak since my meeting with Blake and Phil.

  “I want you to know you’re not alone and there’s other people who’ve been through what you’ve been through. There’s even a name for your experience.”

  She talks about me like I have some kind of disease. I’m disappointed in myself. I promised John I’d never tell and keep all his secrets. I took my life before and locked it in a vault. There’s no key, and even if there was, I wouldn’t open it, but they keep insisting on prying it open. They’d gotten under my skin talking about my dad this morning. I screwed up and let my emotions get the better of me, but I won’t allow it to happen again.

  “Do you want to hear about Patty Hearst?”

  It doesn’t matter if I do, she’ll still tell me. I don’t respond.

  Just like I predicted, she begins talking. “Patty Hearst was a nineteen-year-old girl who was kidnapped in college. She was kidnapped at knife point by a terrorist group. When they first took her, they kept her locked in a closet and blindfolded for weeks. They only let her out to eat. She didn’t have any other contact with the outside world. She had to rely on the people who’d kidnapped her for everything. Much like John did with you.”

  He was only trying to train me. Girls have to be trained.

  “They threatened to kill her numerous times. Eventually, they raped her. Repeatedly.” She draws out the word repeatedly for effect.

  I will myself not to react to the words she’s throwing at me. It’s what she wants me to do. Just like Blake and Phil. It’s not going to work this time.

  “After a while, they started letting her out for brief periods of time, but always with the threat of death unless she did what they said. Do you know what happened to her eventually?”

  I pretend I don’t care, but there’s a small part of me that does.

  She studies me for a few moments before continuing. “They gave her a different name. Tania instead of Patty. They indoctrinated her with their beliefs about the world and over time, she started believing them as her own. She even went so far as to start committing crimes with them for their cause. She robbed banks at gunpoint and was involved in shootings where people died. She tried to blow up a bank. She continued to pledge her allegiance to them even after she was arrested. It wasn’t until weeks after that she was able to talk about what really happened. Patty Hearst had what psychologists refer to as Stockholm Syndrome and she’s not alone. Neither are you. We see it play out again and again. Children are even more vulnerable to it than adults. And no matter how grown up you might think you are, you were still a child when John took you from your father. We also call it Survival Identification Syndrome. Do you know why?”

  I don’t trust myself to speak. I shake my head.

  “We call it that because bonding and identifying with your captor is actually a very strong survival technique. People get so beaten down, tortured, and brainwashed that they believe there’s no way out. They stop believing they’ll be let free or escape so they create a new story for themselves and force themselves to believe it. It keeps people alive when they’re terrified of their captor but completely dependent on them at the same time.”

  I’m not like the people she’s talking about. I never wanted to escape. I didn’t want to go back home because there wasn’t a home to go back to. When my father and I weren’t living on the streets, we lived in filthy crack houses or disgusting storage sites. We never had any plumbing and lived like savages. The only reason my father kept me after my mother died was to collect the benefits from the state and use me as a prop when he begged for money or to sell me out to his friends. That was it.

  “I know what it was like for you with your father, Sarah.” Her eyes meet mine.

  At least she calls me Sarah. Blake and Phil refuse to. I hold my breath for what’s coming next.

  “I’ve read your social services file and hospital reports.” She flips through the papers in the folder on her lap. “The first report was made when you were two-years-old. You had two broken ribs and a black eye. They removed you from him then. But your foster home wasn’t any better, was it?”

  She moves to sit next to me on my bed, getting closer to me than I would like. She always does that like she thinks being physically closer to me will bring us closer together emotionally.

  “You’re a really smart girl, Sarah, and I know you think I’m only talking to you so I can get information from you. That I’m out to get you. Punish you or see what kind of help you gave John, but I’m not.” Her voice softens even more. “I’m actually here because I want to help you. Those guys?” She motions to the door where Blake and Phil are probably posted along with whatever law enforcement officers are out there. “They want to solve this case and will do whatever they have to in order to get the job done even if it means hurting you. And yes, if you’re thinking they only pretend to care about you so they can get information, you’re probably right. It’s the downfall of doing what they do. If they got attached to every victim, they’d never be able to do what they need
to do. But me?” She places her hand on top of my hand. “I care about you. Nobody should have to live through the things you’ve lived through. All you’ve ever known is abuse and betrayal. And you know what? Tracking down John will stop him from hurting other girls, but it’s not going to do anything for you. It’s not going to heal you and it’s not going to help you find your way back to reality, but I can. I can help you, but you have to let me.”

  For a second—only a second—I almost start to talk and tell her everything.

  ELLA

  (THEN)

  The throbbing pain wakes me again, only slightly dulled by the pain pills they keep giving me. The last twenty-four hours are a blur. I can’t believe I made it, but the constant pain is a continual reminder that I did.

  That filthy thing is gone. It’s no longer inside of me. My plan worked. John has no idea I did it to myself. He’s barely been in to see me, but Sarah hasn’t left my side. Every time I open my eyes, she’s there. Putting a cool washcloth on my forehead. Rubbing my feet. Adjusting my bedding. She brings me my pills and washes them down with water. She spoon-feeds me her homemade chicken noodle soup.

  We don’t talk. Not a word.

  I’m still bleeding. It hasn’t stopped, but it’s nothing like it was before. Every time I close my eyes, I see myself in the tub surrounded by red water. I wake up feeling like it’s still covering me. I don’t know if I’ll ever get it off.

  SARAH

  (THEN)

  It’s been five days since she lost the baby. She lays in bed all day staring at the ceiling. She barely blinks. I’ve cleaned the bathroom four times and scoured everything with bleach. I cleaned the tiles around the tub with a tooth brush, but every time I’m in there, I look down and am sure I see a speck I missed so I do it again.

  I burned all the bedding in the fireplace. John gave me permission. He said he didn’t want anything to do with it.