Three days later, after more hijacked looks had passed between us, Hunter came to my room. I was asleep. It was past 2A.M. He got into my bed. He got under the covers. He didn’t say anything and I didn’t say anything. He started to touch me and not only did I not say anything but I didn’t do anything either. Not one thing to help him as he struggled with my pajama bottoms and the covers and then his pajama bottoms. And not one thing to stop him as he climbed on top of me. I lay still, very still, for as long as I could. Denying that I was letting this happen. Lying tomyself that I wanted it to stop. Because I didn’t. I hated Hunter Martin. But there were things about my life that I hated even more. When he was done, he fell asleep beside me. I could smell the alcohol on his breath. I did not sleep the rest of the night. I just lay there, staring at the ceiling. Thinking.
It happened only three more times while Emma was gone. That was all he needed. And that was all I needed. I did not care that he kept seeing his girlfriend. I did not care that there were no more hijacked looks. And I did not care that when Emma returned, they still treated me like the bird. I did not care, because I knew I was not the bird anymore. I knew I was the weapon and that I had power, and knowing was enough for me.
I also knew I was pregnant by the time school started. I ignored it at first, but then we saw our mother with Hunter, and Emma was wanting to confront her about it. This was my chance to see what would happen if she knew what he had done. This was my chance to see if she would help me if I told her I was the one pregnant with Hunter’s baby. If she would help Emma, then maybe (maybe) she would help me.
I got my answer.
I had the baby on the island. It was horrible and I won’t pretend it wasn’t. I thought I was going to die. I wanted to die. But then I had my baby, my little girl, and she became the first thing on my list of things I decided to make important.
They took her from me slowly after the first three months, not the way I told them it happened to Emma. But the rest was true. When I resisted and cried, they let me see her only once a day. We had been inseparable before that. She slept in my bed. She stayed in my arms all day. We took long walks in the woods. And I sang her lullabies from a book Lucy bought us. From my heart and out through my hands, love gushed out of me and into mybaby. All the love I had felt for Emma. All the love I had felt for my father and Witt. And all the love that I had wanted from my mother when I was a little girl.
When they took my daughter, I hid that book under my bed and I held it in my arms every night and cried myself to sleep. I waited outside their door at night and listened for the sounds of sleep. And on the nights I could be sure of it, I would crawl across the floor and sit by my daughter’s bed. I would sometimes reach my hand onto her back and let it rise and fall with her breath.
When I finally woke up from their spell, I added to my list escaping from the island with my daughter.
I am afraid now. I am afraid of myself and what I am capable of. I am afraid of my own mind.
The Pratts were sick people. I know now why they became psychotic about having a baby and how their isolation on the island made it worse, so they could no longer make sense of reality and understand that what they were doing was wrong. Dr. Winter explained this to me before she learned that I had told so many lies. They had been turned down for adoptions for fifteen years, then lost the one child they were given. They took me in so they could mother me. But then came my baby. She was the gift from God they had been praying for. And I was just an evil force trying to get in the way of God’s will.
But Dr. Winter told me something else after that night in the woods. She wanted me to be prepared. She told me that when they find the Pratts, or the Petersons, if they ever do, they will tell a different story. They will tell the story of a scared teenager who showed up at their home, asking for help. Asking to be saved from a wretched family. They will explain that I was always able to leave. They will use the things I did in my moments of weakness, laughing with them, eating with them, letting them hug meand kiss my forehead and tell me they loved me. I have been such a liar. And they will use that against me.
But it won’t matter. Because I will find a way to make them pay.
It was not easy to wait those last two years to escape. Being nothing more than a sister to my own baby, yearning to come home so I could find the sister who had disappeared—I would binge on their kindness until it made me sick. I was so hungry for it, and my hunger disgusted me. I told myself I was just working at my plan, to make them trust me. But that would also be a lie.
It was even harder to make Rick see me and want me and make me his lover. And when I was pretending to love him, I feasted as well on his love, what I thought was love, what I pretended was love. I feasted until I was sick from that, too.
The night I gave Bill the pills, I signaled Rick with the phone. I collected my daughter from the small bed in Lucy’s bedroom while Lucy snored, her fat belly rising and falling beneath the covers. I got all the money I could find from Bill’s wallet and Lucy’s dresser. I carried my daughter down to the dock and put her in the rowboat under a blanket. I told her to wait there, under the blanket, and if she could be very good and very quiet and stay hidden, I would take her to a very special, magical place. I watched for the boat. And when I saw it come closer, I called out to him.
Help me! Please. Take me away from this place!
He maneuvered the boat to the dock. He saw the blanket in the rowboat, and my daughter squirming beneath it, and he called out again.What’s under there? Is that the child?
I did not answer him but he knew. I could tell by the anger I saw on his face. I had been planting seeds in his head for months and I had become convinced that I had destroyed his trust in thePratts and replaced it with my love. I knew he believed that they had told me about Alaska, what he had done there. And I made him believe that they thought he was an immoral man.
I thought I had read him. I thought I had given it enough time. He would see how desperate I was and take us to shore. But I was wrong. When I jumped onto that boat, he did not agree to help my daughter and me escape. Instead, he did exactly what he had done before.You’re gonna take that child back to the house,he said.
The shock of it flooded my brain and I felt dizzy. I thought I had been a good student of Emma and Mrs. Martin. I had done everything right. I had figured out what he desired and I had become that. I had deciphered his relationship with the Pratts and I had unraveled it, slowly and with patience and what I thought was devious cunning. And in those stolen moments in the woods or on the boat when his body was on my body, when our skin was touching and our arms and legs were wrapped together like a knot that will never come undone, I thought I was being calculating. Every sigh. Every moan. Every kiss. Every touch. It was all calculated to be that thing he desired. The woman who needed to be rescued. I felt so clever that I could feel his love in the way he devoured me with such force but then held me with such tenderness. That was what I thought.
I was stupid. I was weak. I did not have the same appeal that Mrs. Martin and Emma had. Whatever Rick needed from me was easily undone by the weight of his debt to Bill and Lucy. I had not destroyed it. Not with my cunning and not with my sex power. Not even with my love, which had become real, mixing with the hate.
I will say this quickly and not say it ever again. Rage took control of my mind. It was bigger than my reason and more powerfulthan the currents that were always trying to bring me back. My daughter was waiting for me in the rowboat. And this man was going to keep me from saving her. From saving us. I was filled with an army of rage, with soldiers from every corner of my life heeding the battle cry. Soldiers from the times I reached for my mother and she pushed me away. Soldiers from the times my father failed to protect us. Soldiers from Hunter and Emma and that woman from the court. And soldiers from the joy I allowed myself in the arms of these monsters, Bill and Lucy and Rick. One by one, the soldiers of rage formed an army that was unstoppable.
I picked up a metal gas container and I hit Rick in the head, knocking him over the side. I threw the container in the water and I didn’t wait for a second to pass before I got behind the steering wheel and back on the throttle and then up. I steered the hull right over his body, crushing it into the dock. I reversed and did it again. Twice and then a third time. The soldiers fueled each strike, the final one leaving him still, floating facedown in the cruel, cold water that had shown me no mercy.
I took my daughter from the rowboat and we drove inThe Lucky Lady—so fast, we were both holding on with all our strength—into darkness and far up the coast. I was not thinking that this would make it harder to find out the location of the island. I was only thinking about getting far, far away. When we ran out of gas, we got pulled into a harbor by the current. I let the boat run up against the brush and then I just let that boat go, into the harbor, with the ignition still turned on but the motor stalled. I carried my daughter to a gas station and called a taxi to take us to Portland. I had four hundred dollars of the Pratts’ money and I would use it to get home. I noted the name of the town so I could send someone back to find the Pratts. Rockland. But that had notbeen enough, and my stupidity gave them the time they needed to escape.
I rode the train with my daughter. We rode from Portland to Yonkers. Then we took a commuter train to Rye. We walked to Witt’s house. He did not know we were coming. He did not know I had found him with the help of a stranger’s phone on the train and that I had memorized his address so that I could bring my daughter to him and keep her safe while I tended to my list. While I tended to finding Emma. It was Saturday afternoon. Witt was in his yard pulling weeds and I started to laugh. I can’t describe that feeling. Even after I saw Rick die, even as I was watching the landscape roll by from the train window, my daughter asleep on my lap, and even as I walked down the street, totally free, I did not feel free. Not yet. It was not until I saw my brother in his yard, and until he saw me and wrapped me in his arms and lifted me into the air, tears rolling down his face, that I felt it, my life coming back to me.
He listened to me but did not agree at first. His wife wanted to call the police and have my mother and Mr. Martin arrested. They both said they would find Emma. Somehow, they would find her. Wouldn’t they? It was Witt who finally understood. It was Witt who could see that Emma would never be found and my mother and Mr. Martin would never be punished for what they did to her. Mrs. Martin had never been punished for anything she had ever done. She was a master illusionist. Even people trained to see, even people looking for exactly what was there to be seen, could still not see. Instead, I would be the crazy one, the one with the daughter fathered by her stepbrother. Hunter would try to take my baby and I would lose everything—my sweet child, my freedom, and my sister all over again. So they kept my daughter for me and they lied and pretended and swallowed their guilt.
I went to my mother then. I made her wonder if Mr. Martin had lied to her, if Emma had been alive and if he had conspired with me to hide her. It took time to do this. It took the FBI investigation. It took the small pieces of evidence they found. It took the necklace. It took Lisa Jennings and the affair she had with Mr. Martin. But it also took the gift from Dr. Winter—the lie that Emma had been found—to turn that switch for the last time.
The local district attorney considered bringing charges against me because I had obstructed justice and lied to the authorities. But there was too much sympathy for me in our community and they thought it would fuel Mrs. Martin’s defense of entrapment.
He wasn’t wrong to want to charge me. I had lied to everyone, including my own father, my poor father who will never get over the death of his eldest daughter and the guilt he carries for leaving us in that house where she was killed. I lied to my mother and Hunter and Mr. Martin. I lied to Dr. Winter and Agent Strauss and the other agents—about Emma and the baby and, finally, about not knowing who had killed Richard Foley. And about my daughter. I lied I lied I lied.
But telling the truth is not on my list.
