Cora
I remember standing behind the science labs sharing a cigarette with one of my high school friends-who-was-not-really-a-friend. It’s strange, because I don’t remember her name now, only her face, which was beautiful and always drawn tightly in an expression of anger. I remember sucking heavily on the cigarette so that it felt like my head might float away from my body. We were talking about the future, as teenagers often do, but we had no conception of what the future actually meant. For us it was a scary land of fog full of grownups and dating and driving and jobs and all the other aspects of life which terrified outcasts like us.
I remember saying, “I’m never going to be like those women you see waiting outside the gate for their kids. You know the ones I’m talking about, the ones who are always dressed like they’re about to walk down a catwalk, always standing with their backs straight to push their fake tits out, just in case their husband happens to join them. Or maybe it’s to make the other women jealous. I don’t want that.”
“What do you want?” my friend asked.
“I want to feel something, really feel something. I don’t want to have to put on a performance. If I’m going to find a man, I want a man who’s going to, I dunno, like make me feel real, you know? I want a man who’s going to make me feel alive, like if he reaches out to touch me I’m really there and he knows me so well and …” I stopped, smiling like a giddy teenager, because that’s what I was. “Is there anything in this?”
“Just a bit of weed …”
“Weed!”
And then time passed and we were walking home, and I was ranting again: “I want a man who makes me feel like I can do anything, but he doesn’t pander to me. He makes me feel like, like, oh, just like. I just want to feel. I don’t want to be one of those couples who go and hang out with their separate friendship groups and bitch about what the other person did because they can’t just talk to each other about it, or one of those couples you see on The Real Housewives who stand together like they’re posing for a photo, like they never learned how to be natural with each other. I want to be one person. Wouldn’t that be neat?”
But my friend had left and I was ranting to myself.
As I rise out of the abyss of unconscious, I grasp at those memories, trying to sink through into the haze of the past and tell her, my naïve past-self, that I’ve done it, I’ve found the man. I’ve found the one who we can build a life with, who we can grow close to, grow into. But now that we’ve found him we might just lose him, just when things are getting good, just when screwing is turning into lovemaking, and a connection is forming between us. Just when things are starting to smell like roses, the scent of rotting flesh has come between us.
And then I shake my head and grit my teeth.
My head aches from where Moretti slapped me across the temple with his pistol. I blink away tears and look around. I’m tied to a chair, my wrists behind my back, the zip-ties cutting into my flesh. Pale shafts of light shine through the floorboards above. Rickety steps lead up to the basement door. Above me, men speak. Down the street a plane takes off, no—a drill hammers into the concrete. When I close my eyes I can feel the drill, an almost-nonexistent hum up the chair leg and into my body. I work my jaw, spitting onto the floor, and then roll my neck in my shoulders.
I’m in big trouble here. There’s no doubt about that. Fear twists inside of me. I try to fight it, try to be brave. Whenever I’m scared I try and think about what Viking women had to go through, constant death and misery and pain; maybe that’ll put things into perspective for me. But fear doesn’t work that way. For some people, saying hello to the postman is the scariest thing they’ve ever done. For others, it’s jumping out of an airplane. If I’ve learned anything in my life, it’s that everything is subjective. I try not to think about what they’re going to do to me, the men stomping around upstairs, laughing and drinking. I try not to think about chains, or naked men, or blood or tears. I try not to think about Logan standing over my corpse not even knowing there was a baby in me. Or maybe that’s how he’ll find out: when the doctor tells him that I was pregnant. Tears slide down my cheeks and I can’t even wipe them away. They slide into my mouth and spread over my tongue, salty and warm.
I sniff them away when the basement door opens and Moretti enters, walking snake-like down the stairs. Logan said I moved like a snake onstage, but I’ve got nothing on the way Moretti is moving right now, arms at his sides ready to strike, fingers twisting like spiders poking out of a snake’s mouth. He doesn’t seem like a man. He seems like something otherworldly. I wonder if he’s a god, here to punish me for … for what? For not being the woman my father wanted me to be, for not playing the Good Girl. The irony of this whole mess is that I want to do that now, want to be with Logan and have this baby.
I gasp at the thought, and fresh tears spring from my eyes. I want the baby, and I want Logan. It only took being kidnapped to make me see that!
“Don’t cry, please,” Moretti says. I expect someone else to join him, his backup, but the basement door stays closed. That’s more unsettling somehow, just me and this man who has complete power over me. There’s no pity in his eyes as he kneels down so that we’re eye level. He places his hand on my knee. I move it away, but he grips it hard, so hard it feels like fangs are digging into my skin. “Now, now. Let’s be nice, okay? Let’s not cause any unnecessary drama.”
“I need you to listen to me,” I say, desperate for him to stop sliding his hand up my leg. He stops mid-thigh, staring up at me expectantly. “Listen,” I go on. “I haven’t got any money. I swear to you, I’m broke. If I had money do you think I’d be staying in a one-bedroom apartment, where I can barely pay my rent? Do you think I’d be working in a dentist’s office? Just think about it! I’m broke.”
“Your father was Crash Collins,” he says, sitting down on the grimy gray floor, spreading his legs out in front of him like a kid. “You can’t sit there and tell me I’ve got that wrong. I’ve been in this business since before you were born, whore. I know how to find out about folks’ names, addresses … everything. So what exactly are you saying to me?”
“My father was Crash Collins,” I agree, grateful that his hand is no longer anywhere near me, but aware that he could grab me again anytime he wants. I need to keep talking, cast a word spell so that he won’t touch me again. I need to wield my words so skillfully that even he’ll be able to see past his sadism and hear me. I don’t think I have it in me, but I have to push on. “That’s true. But I don’t have access to his fortune. You need to understand that—”
“If you tell me what I need to do ever again,” he says, in a deadly casual voice, “I’m going to split you in half.”
I swallow, my spit tasting like acid, bubbling painfully in my belly. Then I nod. “Okay. I understand. What I’m trying to explain is that my dad wanted me to have a husband and a baby. He wanted it really badly. So before he died …” I tell him about the will’s conditions.
He listens, nodding, stroking his chin. The light from the single naked bulb in the room casts his fingers on the wall, five shadows which dance like hairless tarantula’s legs. I won’t glance at them, because then I’ll start thinking about all the horrible things he’ll do with those fingers. All at once he leaps to his knees, bringing his face close to my legs. “Do you really expect me to believe you?” he asks. “You tried to play me for a fool in the car. Don’t think I’ve forgotten that. And now you’re trying to play me for a fool again. Your father would rather see you go poor, would he? He’s that desperate for his little slut to open her legs and sprout a grandson? I don’t think so. I know what overbearing parents are like, trust me, I do. But that’s a real cunt move. Was your father a real cunt?”
“I don’t know,” I whisper, voice trembling. He’s rubbing his cheek up and down my thigh, the creepiest, weirdest thing I’ve ever seen. “All I know is that I’m telling you the truth. I swear to you. I haven’t got any money!”
He smooths his face up my leg almost to my crotch, his body tensed up like a malformed dog, his head twisted and his small, mean eyes flitting from my face to my chest. “I can make you sing,” he says. “I’m good at that.”
I don’t know what to do, how to fight this man. I want to get at him some way, hurt him, scare him like he’s scaring me. But it’s hard being the tough girl when my hands are tied behind my back. The zip-ties dig into my wrists so hard that blood beads around them, like garrotes, twisting, tighter and tighter each moment. Then I start thinking about if my panic is going to make my wrists swell, and when my wrists swell the zip-ties will completely cut through my wrists, and I’ll bleed out.
“Wow.” Moretti stands up, smiling from ear to ear. “You’re having a panic attack. Interesting.”
I close my eyes and try to interrupt my train of thought. I need to derail it. But what if I really am going to bleed out here, in some dingy basement under the care of some psychopathic mafia men? What if this really is the end for me?
“What a freak,” he comments, stroking his chin. “I’m going upstairs now, Melissa. Try and get your shit together for when I return. Okay, whore?”
He prances up the stairs, leaving me in the semi-darkness. I strain at the bindings but I’m too weak and my heart is beating too fast.
“Stop it,” I whisper. The voice does not sound like mine. It sounds like a timid, defeated woman: a woman who is going to die today.