He sighed, shaking his head, and ran his thumb across his nose once. “Hey. Look at me. I know this sucked, okay? I know this was the worst night of your life?—”
“Is it true? Did I really have an abortion?”
He stared at me, and the silence was a deafening confirmation that it was all true. So, I hadn’t been clean for a long time; I was just fooling everyone, lying to them and myself. God, was there no end to the evil inside me? I was just a fraud. The realization gagged me, and bile slipped from my mouth onto the dirt. The force of it hurt the cut in my stomach so much I dropped the knife, needing to hold my belly as my legs gave out.
He sat on his shins in front of me once I was done. We stared at each other in silence for a long time.
There was that pull, that connection again. “Listen to me. This is my way to show you my regret, by telling you something you need to understand. Are you listening?”
I answered him with a glare.
“You’re a tiny girl but fierce. You can do this. I know you’ll get past this, but what’s more important is that you can run faster than you did tonight, because you just put the worst target on yourself and your family. I’ve destroyed all the evidence on their phones. There will be no video, no record of us being here. It will not deviate them forever, but it will give you enough time to disappear.”
“Were you there?”
“Where?”
“At the psych ward.”
He sucked his teeth. “Goddammit! Yes. I was. He makes—made me witness everything he ever did to you.”
“What’s your name? Did y-you touch me? Th-the first time? This is not the first time you raped me?”
“My name doesn’t matter. What happened at that psych ward doesn’t matter. Your first time doesn’t fucking matter! What happened here doesn’t matter! You need to get the fuck out of this country! You need to disappear!” he screamed in my face, and I grimaced.
He thought I wanted to keep living after this. That was quite the assumption. All of me was trembling, and my tears marked new hot trails on my face and neck. I squeezed my eyes close, wanting to remember, yet fighting the memory when it would start appearing in my mind like some broken old film. How could I not remember my first time?I only had tid bits. I could see the men. There were so many of them surrounding me and someone was screaming. Was it me? Had I been screaming?
“Magdalena!” he yelled, and I knew he’d been trying to talk to me. I scratched at his hands on my shoulders like a rabid cheetah. He held them up in the air, opened to show he wasn’t a threat. “Promise me you’ll try to escape. Promise me you’ll survive. Come on, Little One, show me how strong and fierce you can be.”
“I don’t owe you anything! Go!” I’d missed something. Would he kill me if I couldn’t handle this? We looked at the knife lying next to his hand. Even if I tried to reach for it, I wouldn’t get it in time. Slowly, our gazes met. As he stood, he grabbed the knife and stepped away from me.
“I’m taking this with me.”
I lost it. “No! Let it go! Let it go!” I screeched. “It’s mine! It’s my knife. Let it go!” When I stood and charged toward him, he allowed the knife to fall and again backed away from me. Onlywith the knife in my hand, squeezing it, did I feel like I could function.
“Maggie.”
I met his gaze.
“Please...” He paused allowing the birds to start chirping and the wind to blow. “D-don’t kill yourself.”
Shortly after, tires screeched in the distance. I had no idea when he’d left, but he had.
You know what sucks? That horrible willingness we all have to keep living even when we’re living in the pit of hell. For the longest time, I lay there, humming, bleeding, breathing, with my only consolation, the knife in my hand and Mael’s dead body by my side.
“It’s over. All my monsters are dead. It’s over.”
“I’ll forget this soon. I will.”
“Come on, Magdalena, get over it. It’s over. They’re gone. It’s over. We can do this. We can do this.” While sitting on my shins, rocking myself back and forth, coming in and out of this world, I kept talking to myself, trying to will myself to reject the sweetest call I’d ever heard, the song of death. It promised me a peace I needed so miserably, it promised me the end to all my pain and shame. I’d never have to pretend again to be normal, to be good and clean. It would really end it all for me.
I just had to sever the arteries in my wrist, and then I’d be completely free. I kept telling myself it was the right thing to do.
But I couldn’t.
Had he put some spell on me to keep me from doing it? It would have been his cruelest act yet.
14. After
