It is the minute-by-minute decision-making, the endless calculations, the mapping of escape routes, the constant, exhausting negotiation of egos.
These fears have become so embedded in the breath of my own life that they are as known to me as the lines on my palm.
Yet I never thought to fear this. I never allowed my mind to wander that far, to stretch itself to something so completely outlandish.
Now I am trapped, bound, and it is so very dark. My head pounds, hot and heavy, something wet and sticky congealed at the base of my skull. When I touch it, an image of split fruit flashes into my mind—nauseating—and I kick myself for having been prepared for every eventuality but this one.
There I go again.
Blaming myself. For being a woman. For allowing myself to be taken when, in reality, nothing in my power was ever going to stop you, was it?
You are the one who has done wrong, who has harmed. You are the one who has turned my life on its head and reduced it to four damp walls; one pipe; bound, bruised hands.
But the next step is on me. I am the one who is going to have to find a way to get out.
Sixteen
Beverley is restless,drifting into and out of sleep.
She’s been seeing faces in her dreams. Henry. The dead girls. The image of Emily Roswell in her cheerleader uniform. Cheryl Herrera on the track, sneakers pummeling the crushed shale. Then she sees blood, arrows slicing through tissue, a body engorged and swollen at the bottom of a lake.
Henry may have slaughtered seven people, but she herself had seen only one dead body: her father’s, in an open casket at his funeral when she was a child. She remembers waiting in line to walk past his corpse, although she wasn’t quite sure why she had to queue to see her own dead father. His latest girlfriend had sat in the very front row, stinking up the pews with her cheap drugstore perfume. Beverley and her mother had huddled at the back so Alice could escape every few minutes to smoke. When she returned to the church each time, her hands trembled. Beverley was never sure if it was the nicotine that made them shake or her mother’s anger that her father had now abandoned them twice.
Beverley knows Margot thinks she has “daddy issues,” that she’s incapable of making decisions for herself. What pains her the most is that she knows Margot is right. Things happened quickly after Beverley met Henry at the studio that day. High school graduation came and went, and the two moved in together after a small, hurried wedding. She wore broderie anglaise from Macy’s. Alice wasn’t overly happy about things. She thought Beverley could do better than an air-conditioning salesman—but at least she’d found a man who would take her. And what could Alice do? Bev had turned eighteen in the fall and could make decisions for herself. She had money saved from her modeling jobs, and a man who loved her. She was set.
Henry, it became clear very quickly, was a man of appetite. He couldn’t get enough of her—in the bedroom after work, sometimes even in the kitchen as she was making his breakfast. She’d been bewildered by his advances the first week after she moved in—she’d had sex ed classes at school, but she’d never gone further than kissing a boy before—but this was obviously what being a wife was. She was there to see to his impulses and keep him happy, even if it meant doing things she didn’t want to do. It was worth it, though, for the way he looked at her. That’s what she told herself. Sometimes he clasped her hair in his hands and held it tight at the base of her skull. He’d lean her over his arm and kiss her so hard that it left her breathless. Even if he spent the rest of the evening ignoring her and she busied herself around the house desperately trying to work out what she had done to turn his mood, it was worth it. It was worth it to be desired, even if just for a moment.
She has never wanted to admit it, but there was always a part of her that enjoyed being controlled. Henry had liked to know where she was at all times, whom she was with. She had earned the bulk of their money, but Henry was in charge of the finances. He didn’t want her to work anymore, didn’t want men looking at her in that way, but hehad no qualms about spending the money she had earned. When Beverley had learned of Henry’s crimes, the shock and disgust eventually shifted to something else entirely: confusion, a sense of being adrift. Who was she if there was no man there to admire her? How was she to act when there was no one there to pull her strings?
A noise startles her and she sits bolt upright in bed, pulse quickening. She waits awhile for the noise to come again. When it does, it is familiar, that routine shuffling sound, the soft swish of a small body brushing against the wall outside her room.
Benjamin must be sleepwalking again.
She pulls the sheets away, noticing that they are damp with her sweat, and climbs out of bed. She must be careful not to alarm her son, not to wake him. That can be dangerous, the doctor said. She must simply guide him back into bed, tuck him in, hope he settles.
The corridor is dark, lit only by the moon’s glow through a gap in the curtains. She can see Benjamin. He looks so small in his pajamas—his tiny hands, his bare toes, his eyes open but unseeing as he shuffles along the hallway.
Beverley feels a stab of guilt. Her mother maintains that Benjamin sleepwalks because he is disturbed by the loss of his father. Beverley has never told him, or Audrey, the truth about Henry’s crimes—that’s a conversation they will have when they are older—but they know he did a bad thing and is being punished for it, that it means Benjamin cannot see him, that Audrey will never meet him. They were so trusting, the kids, when she told them. They watched her wide-eyed and nodded even though she knew they must have been scared by what she was saying. Benjamin started sleepwalking as soon as he turned four. It has been a regular occurrence since then, and another reason for Beverley’s mother to judge her.
She goes to Benjamin and bends, taking him softly by the shoulders. She can smell the apple shampoo on his hair, the delicious scentof sleepy children that makes her want to gather him up and squeeze him tight. But she doesn’t. She leads him back to his room and steers him into his bed. She tucks him in, kisses him on the soft peach of his cheek and closes the door behind her.
She hovers outside the room for a while, eyeing the nails on the wall where photos of her and Henry once hung. Her modeling pictures had been up there, too—Beverley in spearfishing gear and neoprene for Tampax, in frothy white lace for Clairol. She remembers tearing them down, hurling them to the floor, the glass frames smashing. She has still never got around to replacing them, the sun stains a daily reminder of exactly what went wrong. Henry was never house-proud, but he was a practical, capable man, good with his hands. When he was put away, Beverley found herself as head of a household she wasn’t entirely sure how to run. A fortnight after his arrest, a fuse blew upstairs, plunging Benjamin’s bedroom into darkness. It was ten days before she managed to get to the library to find the right book and work out how to fix it. She was too ashamed to ask anyone else for help.
She walks to the window on the landing to pull the curtain to, glancing through the glass, up at the stars, then down to the front lawn, as manicured as ever.
Except…
There is something down there.
There is something laid out on the lawn, bulky and dark—something the size of…the size of a body.
She freezes, her blood going still in her veins before it surges and she bolts down the stairs, the sound of her breath, heavy and frantic, in the air. She pulls at the sideboard pushed up against the front door. It screeches as she drags it across the vinyl floor, but she does not care if it wakes the children; she has to get out there to see what, or who, is on her lawn. Her hands shake as she unlocks the door, and she sprintsout into the still night and across to thethingthat lies, bathed in moonlight, in the very center of the lawn. She reaches it and immediately recoils. Then she forces herself to look, horror scuttling up from the bottom of her belly.
It’s a carcass. Not human, but animal. A pig. Its snout is horrifyingly soft and pink. Its eyes are open. The grass surrounding it is soaked in blood.
Beverley feels as if she might be sick.
She wheels around, her eyes roaming every bush, every crevice, every shadow of the yard, searching for someone hiding. She rushes to the fence and looks down the street, expecting to find someone fleeing. But the street is silent, the cars static.
