“He’s definitely off,” Paige says, shaking out the blanket and folding it up. “Want some tea...or a margarita?” She laughs.
“No, I better get back,” I say. “Thanks, I mean, really. You were a real friend for trying. It’s just all a little too much, and I need to decide to be...peaceful. Ha ha. That’s too much Oprah talking, but really. Thanks,” I say and squeeze her hand before I go.
As I walk back across the street to our house, I pause and look over at Georgia’s. I want to stop. I want to dismiss the paranoia that always gets me in trouble, but...she should be back. He shouldn’t be home. Something feels wrong.
12
GEORGIA
When I finally arrive in front of my house, I’m hopeful that everything will be okay. There’s a good chance that Lucas didn’t notice the video that shows Avery and me taking a two-and-a-half-hour nap. Maybe he only glanced at the screen once.
I look horrendous. I’ll probably make her think I’m even stranger than she already does turning up like this. In the taxi, I tried to concentrate on thoughts of Avery and stay hopeful and calm, but as the dark thoughts crept in, I had trouble catching my breath. It seems so easy from the outside. If I heard about a woman like me, I wouldn’t understand. But the town isn’t big, and he’s set up a trap at every corner. Everyone here looks up to him. There is not one person I can go to who he hasn’t known for years.
It seemed for so long that I just couldn’t figure out an obvious way to escape. But a very clever man spent a very long time setting up this world, and it’s designed with no escape. And the truth is finally starting to sink in. I have no identity, no proof of who I am, and no way out. He calls me Georgia—a nickname, because my skin is pale as a Georgia peach, he said—and introduced me that way to everyone. I found it charming. But it was another setup. My name is Nicola Dawson, and I’m finally realizing that I’ll never be her again.
So in the cab, I couldn’t breathe. I had to go back home with no plan and no hope. Finally, seeing my distress, the cabbie pulled over. I was sitting on the curb with my head between my knees, trying to catch my breath, to pull it together, and before I knew what was happening, medics had pulled up. I had to run. I don’t know which would be worse: them taking me to the hospital and Lucas finding out I’d escaped the house, or having yet another recorded incident of my instability. I just got up and ran as far as I could, and when I was blocks away from them, I tried desperately to find another cab to hail, but that just doesn’t happen in a small community like this, so I walked. I ran when I had the strength, and by the time I made it the four miles home, my hair was plastered to my face with cold sweat, I’d ripped the knee of my jeans, my eyes were bloodshot and full of tears, and I had no time to care because I needed to get my baby and get home.
I run to Cora’s door and ring the bell. She answers quickly and looks me up and down.
“What happened?” she asks, hand to heart.
“Car broke down. Long story. Can I get Avery? Sorry to rush, I really appreciate—”
“Oh, it’s okay. Lucas picked her up a little while ago,” she says, and I feel almost weightless, my knees weak, and all the blood drains from my face. Bright bursts of light flash behind my eyes, and I feel like I’ll fall, like my body will give up and my heart will stop right here, but I have to think about Avery. I have to go into that house and face what’s to come because Avery is there.
I back away from Cora, stumbling, then catching myself. I can’t open my mouth to speak, so I just walk across the street, looking at the warm orange light glowing in the windows. It looks like a normal family lives there—like if I peer in the window, I’ll see a husband watching TV with a beer, a baby at his feet playing with her shapes toy, all waiting for me to come home so we can have dinner together and talk about our day and laugh and laugh.
I stand on the porch a moment before I go in. I have the wherewithal to click the remote that freezes the porch camera. That’s probably why he’s come home early, but I don’t know for sure. And I need it if there is the slightest chance he didn’t notice it.
When I walk in the front door, I don’t hear a sound. I hesitantly cross the front room and into the kitchen, where Lucas sits at the kitchen table with a lowball glass of whiskey on the rocks and a smile on his face. He lives for this. The punishment. The control.
“Where’s Avery?” I ask, knowing it’s a short time before the rage will surface, praying she’s safe.
“Napping. Drink?” he says, the game beginning. I shake my head as tears spring to my eyes. I stand very still and watch him, waiting.
“Sit down,” he says, still smiling. I slide into a chair at the opposite side of the table. The house feels cold, and all the curtains are drawn. We are sitting in the light left from the afternoon sun that shines through the middle of the curtain in a thin yellow line across the kitchen floor, a laser beam of light in the dark house.
“As you well know, you can make this easy or hard. Where. The. Fuck. Did you think you were going?”
There is, of course, no right answer to this. Almost every answer somehow turns into me being a whore and trying to turn tricks for money, which is not something out of the realm of possibility—I’d do anything to get some cash at this point—but every answer is punishable, some worse than others, and since I have money on me that he’ll find, I say, “I found a necklace on the walk out front of the house, so I went to pawn it. I’d like to have money of my own.” I add this last part because I’ve learned it somehow helps to play into the fantasy that I really am just a housewife in need of an allowance rather than a prisoner. Adding that bit makes it seem like I see myself that way.
“What don’t you have that you need? I provide you with everything. You have good food, nice clothes. Look around you. How many people live in a house like this?” he asks. “Look!” He demands that I actually move my head around as if I haven’t seen the inside of the house in which I have been locked for an eternity. I obey.
I see the white walls and cabinets, the white quartz countertops, the white area rug under a greige couch and love seat, the joyless, loveless space that is as sterile as a medical-office waiting room. I left my toast plate on the front hall table. That must have driven him mad. My eyes land on the French doors leading into the den. I see my reflection in a small square of glass and shudder.
He stands and walks toward me, slowly. He stands above my chair, and I hang my head.
“Stand up,” he says, but he doesn’t give me space to stand. I have to push my chair back and rise to my feet. And then it’s there: the white-hot pain as he puts his hand around my throat and slams me up against the wall. He keeps me there by the neck while he shoves his hand into my pockets and down my bra and pulls out the forty dollars I stole from the woman at the bank and the twenty I took from Cora that I never ended up paying a cabbie with anyway. He throws it on the ground.
“This worth it?” he screams, spit landing on my face. “Sixty goddamn dollars! Because I don’t sacrifice enough to give you all of this. You need this that bad, huh?”
“No,” I say, dutifully.
“What?” he screams.
“No,” I say, straining to breathe. He lets go of my neck, and my own hands flutter to it instinctively as I gasp for air. I lean over the chair and try hard to catch my breath before whatever comes next.
If he kills me, the fantasy he’s spent so many years crafting is over. I know he doesn’t want me dead, but I also know he has plans to make that happen if he needs to. His go-to plan is to make me overdose on my antidepressants so nobody would ever suspect a thing. No mess, no suspicion. That’s my theory—that he doesn’t want me dead—but I could be wrong. He could be grooming a younger version of me online right now, ready to off me and fly to some country to do the same to her. I really have no idea, so I don’t struggle. I think of Avery, and I don’t scream or cry or fight back.
