Cass nodded and smiled again, politely. Her demeanor had changed drastically from the day before. There were no tears. No desperate pleas.
“Cass, you said it was that night that made you believe the boatman would eventually help you?” Abby asked her, looking down at a legal pad.
“Yes. Well, not that night but because of that night.”
She looked tired, as though she hadn’t slept much either.
“Because of what happened after you got back to the house—after the first time you tried to escape?”
“Yes. Should I tell the story now?”
“Yes,” Abby said.
Cass took a breath, in and out, then began to speak in a slow, methodical rhythm.
“It was three days later. That night, when I got back to thehouse, it was dark and dead quiet, except for the generator. It came on and off when something in the house needed electricity, like heat or hot water. It was pretty loud and it was on when I got to the front door, so I went inside and up to Emma’s room with no one hearing anything. ‘What happened?’ she asked me. I could see she was distraught that I was still there, on the island. I told her about the current and the oars and Rick taking the boat. She grabbed my arms and shook me, hard, and yelled at me through a whisper that I had ruined everything. And she was right. Six months of planning was gone. She ordered me to leave and I did. I could hear her crying as I walked down the hall.
“My room was on the other side of the upstairs, like I said, and so I had to be quiet as I walked around. I lay down but didn’t sleep. And in the morning, when Rick showed up with groceries and mail, I forced myself to stay at the desk where we studied and do what I always do, which is glance up and then look away because he was hard to look at. If you looked at him too long, you could feel his anger like water in a kettle. I had never considered asking him for help or telling him anything, even before Lucy told me about his past and how they had saved him from drugs and his guilt.
“He came and left and everything seemed normal. I slept that night, relieved and grateful because I thought he hadn’t told them and it would just be forgotten. Another day passed, and another night of sleep. I felt my nerves settle down and when they did, the disappointment poured in. I realized then that I was right back to where I had been, and that I had exhausted myself and worried Emma for nothing. Just to be back in the same place.
“It didn’t help that Emma was mad at me, and not just pretend mad for our plan. She was mad because I had failed.
“On the third day, Emma and I came downstairs to breakfastset at the table. Usually we just made some toast and took it to our desks. Lucy didn’t like us being around the baby. ‘Sit down,’ Bill said. It was strange that they were both there in the kitchen like that. But we did what was asked of us and sat down. Lucy poured us some juice and then gave us plates with two toaster waffles and syrup. Then she sat down as well, with the baby in her arms and Bill standing behind her.
“‘We’ve been thinking,’ Lucy said. ‘Maybe you girls have been here long enough. Maybe it’s time to go home.’
“I felt a rush of happiness! I thought Rick had told them about the boat and the rocks and the oars that wouldn’t steer me out of the current and now they were just going to let us leave. We weren’t prisoners. How stupid we had been! Why didn’t we just ask to leave? All this time, they would have let us go! And then I felt guilty for thinking bad things about Bill and Lucy, for being so stupid and melodramatic.
“Emma looked at her baby and started to cry. ‘Really?’ she asked. ‘We can go home now?’ Lucy smiled. ‘Of course! You always could.’ They told us to finish eating and then go pack our things, which we did. But before that, when we were at the top of the stairs, Emma about to turn left and me right, she grabbed me and hugged me and told me I had saved us all. I packed so fast, you can’t imagine! I put things into three plastic bags because that was all I had, and I left whatever didn’t fit inside. Emma and I were on the dock within half an hour. It was February, and the cold is hard to describe. It cuts into you.
“Bill and Lucy were there, with the baby. Rick was in the boat waiting with the motor running. I hugged them both. I thanked them for everything they’d done for us. Emma did the same. Bill took our bags and put them on the boat. Then he helped us step over the railing and into the boat. Lucy was standing right nextto us, holding the baby. Emma reached her arms out to take her, but the boat started to move, to pull away.
“‘Wait! Stop!’ Emma yelled at Rick. He shut the motor. We were ten feet from the dock, Emma’s arms stretched out as far as they could go, reaching for her daughter. ‘What’s wrong, love?’ Lucy asked her. She had the most evil look on her face. ‘My baby!’ Emma said. ‘Oh, no,’ Bill called out. ‘Julia’s not going with you. Why would you think that?’ Emma started yelling at them, screaming all sorts of terrible words. It was as if the whole eleven months of being deprived of her flesh and blood had infected her with poison that was now gushing out like an exploding volcano.
“‘Give me my baby, you stupid old bitch!’ She was yelling things like that. Rick just stood there looking out at the ocean. The boat was drifting into the harbor, and I knew it would soon get pulled into that place on the west side of the island. It was quiet like the night I tried to leave, only the water lapping against the boat and the wood dock creaking as it rocked back and forth. I couldn’t believe what was happening, even though I knew what was happening.
“Then Bill held up a piece of paper. ‘She’s not your baby, Emma. She’s our baby. “Certificate of Live Birth. Baby girl, born to Lucille Pratt and Bill Pratt.”’ He was reading from the document, a birth certificate he said he had made and filed with the town hall in Portland. That’s what he said. Rick started the boat. Emma screamed like I’ve never heard her scream before. I didn’t know until that moment how much she loved her baby. How hard she must have been suffering. ‘I’ll come back with the police! I’ll prove she’s not yours! I’ll prove it!’ She waited for a reaction but there was none. The boat just kept moving. And then I realized what they were going to do.
“‘Emma!’ I screamed at her twice. The first time I screamed,‘They won’t be here when we come back! They’ll be gone. With your baby! And with that piece of paper, they could go anywhere!’
“Emma looked at me, horrified. Then she climbed onto the edge of the boat and jumped into that freezing-cold water. The thing about the cold water is that when you are in it, your heart starts to pound wildly, like out of control, and then you can’t breathe well. It feels like you have an elephant on your chest, and I could see Emma already struggling as she tried to swim.
“I screamed the second time, this time just her name. ‘Emma!’ But she didn’t look back. She just kept swimming and gasping for air through her heavy chest and pounding heart. Rick steered the boat around. We weren’t more than twenty feet from the dock by then, but against the current, and Emma swam to it and climbed up the side of the dock. Bill and Lucy looked at her, at both of us, with this sort of smug expression. Like we were naughty children who deserved to be punished. Emma ran toward Lucy and her baby, soaking wet and shivering, but Bill grabbed her by both arms. She was like a wild animal, thrashing against him, her long wet hair sending pellets of icy water all over the dock. ‘Give me my baby!’ Lucy squeezed the baby tighter and tried to block the sight of Emma, of her own mother, from her eyes.
“Bill started screaming back at Emma. ‘I’m so sick of you girls! You selfish girls who don’t know what’s right!’ There were more things—horrible, crude things—about girls and sex and babies, and I realized that tolerating us to keep Lucy happy with the baby had worn out his patience. He was sick of this world where ungrateful girls have babies all the time and his precious wife could not. He started to push Emma back toward the edge of the dock. She looked at me, and then the ocean, and then he just gave her a shove and she was back in that water! She came up from beneaththe surface and swam again to the edge of the dock and tried to climb out. But Bill wouldn’t let her. He kicked at her fingers with the toe of his boot until she let go and went back in the water.
“She did it three times. I could see her lips turning blue, her fingers red with blood. She was hysterical, not thinking straight. She was screaming from the water. Bill was screaming from the dock. I was screaming from the boat. And then, Bill did the most horrible thing. I couldn’t believe it when I saw it with my own eyes. He went to Lucy and took that little girl, that baby, from her arms. She said nothing at first. I think she thought he was going to take her up to the house. But he didn’t! He walked to the other side of the dock and he held that baby over the side by one arm, dangling her in the air. And he said, ‘I swear to God, I’ll let her drown!’ Emma couldn’t say the words from her frozen mouth but she was shaking her head, thrashing it back and forth. She tried to swim toward them, but Bill then lowered the baby to the edge of the water. We all could see that she would sink beneath the black surface before Emma could get there.
“When the boat came close enough, I jumped onto the dock and reached in for Emma. I grabbed her arm and pulled her to the edge, and then back onto the platform. She was so heavy that she could barely help me. I pulled at her shirt, her pants, pulling her to the edge of the wood planks and then rolling her until she was out of the water. ‘We’ll stay,’ I said. ‘We’ll stay and we won’t cause any trouble. I promise! Please!’ Bill cradled the baby, who was screaming so loud by then, and walked away from the edge where he was standing. He gave the baby to Lucy, who stood silently, watching. Looking back, I think she knew Bill would never have dropped that baby, her baby, into the water and let her drown, because she had been silent. But it didn’t matter whetherhe would or he wouldn’t. All that mattered was that we had no way out. If we left without that baby, we would never see any of them ever again.
“But it was more than that thought that made me say those things about staying. There were two thoughts. The second was this—when Bill was dangling that baby over the water, and when he was kicking Emma’s hands off the dock, making them bleed, I looked at Rick, at the expression on his face. It was something I had not seen in the year and a half since we’d been there. His face sort of flinched, and I imagined him on the deck of that boat in Alaska, watching those men attack that woman. And I knew then that I would be able to make it out of there.”
Cass stopped speaking. That was it—the whole story—and she had nothing more to say about it. Abby clutched a pen in one hand, the notebook in the other. She could not remove her eyes from her subject. Cass had told this story start to finish without looking up once. Was she concentrating? Was she afraid to see the look of disbelief on her mother’s face?
The room felt as though it were being swallowed by the silence.
“Can I get something to drink?” Cass asked. She was eerily calm, given the story she had just told.
