Collared Read online

  I pour him a tall cup of it and slide the almost empty jug back in the fridge. He can’t go without his milk, which means he’ll have to make a run to the store soon. He leaves the house sometimes. Usually once a week. It’s only for a couple of hours at the most, but those are my hours. The ones I can do what I want without the fear of him peeking over my shoulder and not liking whatever I’m in the middle of.

  The last time he caught me doing something he didn’t approve of, he had me make a fire in the wood stove and forced me to rip apart the picture I’d spent the last week of nights sketching. He made me watch each piece go up in flames while I repeated over and over that that was my old life—ripped to pieces, burned apart, nothing but a pile of charred ashes.

  Now when I draw, I make sure to keep one ear tuned to the stairs that lead upstairs to his bedroom. At the slightest creak, I gather everything up and stuff it into the very back of the game cupboard because I know he’ll never look there. He doesn’t like playing games. At least the kind on boards.

  There’s an old box television in the living room, but it doesn’t work anymore. It used to, and sometimes when he left, I’d flip it on and tweak the antennas enough to get reception on a channel or two. It was usually always a news channel though, and the news was just too depressing. Especially when, for those first years, the faces of my past were there, talking about not giving up hope or holding my photo at some candlelight vigil with tears in their eyes.

  It might have comforted some in my situation to know that they weren’t forgotten—that people still cared—but it did the opposite for me. I didn’t want them to keep looking, because I knew what they didn’t—I’d never be found. He’d never let it happen. He’d told me so. He hadn’t just told me that—he’d shown me. He’d been showing me for years.

  People could look for me, but they’d never find me.

  His lunch was ready. I set it on the table, at the same chair as always, tucking a paper napkin under the right side of the plate.

  “Dad!” I call upstairs. “Your lunch is ready!”

  I hear the floor creak upstairs again.

  “I’ll be down in three minutes, Sara,” he replies.

  His voice is kind of high for a man’s but rough. Like each word has to be processed through a tunnel of gravel. At first, that voice terrified me. Eventually I got used to it, and now . . . it’s the only voice I ever hear. Now, it’s almost a comfort.

  I wander to the sink to wash my hands. My fingers are greasy from handling the chips, and I can’t stand the smell of bologna on my skin.

  “Sara?”

  The water from the faucet is blasting as I scrub my hands with dish soap. I hear his voice, but it takes a few minutes to process.

  “Sara!” This time his voice is less patient, more like I remember it at first.

  It makes me stand up straighter and turn off the sink. “Yes?” I call back, reminding myself for who knows how many million times that I’m Sara.

  Sara Jackson, Earl Rae Jackson’s daughter. I’m his daughter. He’s my father. That’s the way it is. I can’t let things like dreams of the past mess up that reality or else I’ll wind up back where I started. In the closet. The one so sealed up that not even a stream of light came through the cracks.

  It’s been years since I’ve spent any hard time in it, and I only have to occasionally visit it whenever a random person shows up at the front door. It doesn’t happen often, only once every few months or so. Like a couple of days ago, when that solar panel salesman showed up and Earl Rae practically threw me in the closet after plastering a strip of duct tape across my mouth and another around my wrists.

  I suppose I could have made noise. I could have kicked at the walls. I could have thrown my body against the door. I could have tried screaming through the gag. I could have tried to get help, but I know what Earl Rae has been telling me from the beginning is true—I’m beyond help.

  It’s been too long. Too much of me has been replaced by Sara. Too much of me has been snuffed out by Earl Rae. Help can’t help me.

  So I stopped looking for ways to escape. I stopped searching for the cell phone I know Earl Rae must have somewhere. I stopped looking for metal cutters to free myself. I stopped watching the driveway for the police cruiser I prayed would show up one day. I stopped hoping.

  It makes things easier.

  “Dad?” I call again after he doesn’t say anything back.

  I can’t hear the creaks from him moving around upstairs. It’s quiet. The television has even been turned off, and a quick check of the time shows it’s only 12:28—he still has another two minutes left of the afternoon news. He never turns it off early.

  I move toward the stairs leading upstairs. “Dad?” I shout louder.

  My heart’s speeding up. This isn’t normal. This isn’t predictable. This isn’t part of the schedule. Earl Rae lives and dies by his schedule. By default, so do I.

  My pace picks up as I move across the kitchen floor. Something’s wrong. I slow when I reach the bottom step because I know I’ve reached it—the end of my lead. When I twist my neck to peek up the stairs, the cool kiss of hard metal cuts into my throat.

  I wince but don’t cry out. I’ve gotten better about learning how to turn my head so it doesn’t pinch or dig into my skin, but every once in a while, I’m reminded by the thick metal collar cutting into my neck.

  I feel a couple of warm trickles trace down my neck. I’ve broken it open again—the perpetual scab that never seems to heal, the one I sometimes tear open when I forget.

  At first, my neck spent more time bleeding than scabbing, but I’ve gotten used to it. I sleep with the collar on. I shower with it on. I walk on the old treadmill with it on. I’ve gotten used to it the way people get used to a wedding ring. It might feel foreign and strange at first, but eventually, you don’t even know it’s there. Eventually, it just becomes a part of you.

  “Dad?” I’m screaming as loud as I can because I know something isn’t just wrong—something is very wrong.

  I angle myself so I can look up the stairs, but I can’t see him. I can’t see anything but more stairs. I’ve never been up there, but I’ve drawn pictures in my mind of what it looks like.

  That’s when I hear it—the sound of feet pounding up the wooden steps to the front door. This can’t be some lost delivery man trying to find one of Earl Rae’s fellow reclusive neighbors. This can’t be some door-to-door salesman trying to sell windmills and water tanks to the off-the-grid types drawn to these kinds of remote locations.

  There are too many footsteps. They’re too loud. Almost like a herd of wild horses have been set loose and are about to charge through the front door.

  Since I’m getting nothing from upstairs, I rush through the kitchen toward the living room to see if I can tell what’s going on. I hear shouts, but I can’t make them out. Still more pounding. How many people are out there? There could be a thousand from the sounds they’re making.

  Earl Rae keeps the windows sealed up, but there’s a peephole at the front door. I don’t want to get that close though. I feel safe here, not too close to the front door. I don’t know who or what’s on the other side of that door. I want them to go away. I want the noise and shouting to stop.

  Other than Earl Rae’s voice and the household sounds, I haven’t heard anything in years. The feet pounding on the porch and the fists pounding at the door and the voices shouting outside probably aren’t as loud as they seem to me.

  I can’t make out what they’re saying, but it doesn’t sound friendly or like they’re asking. They’re telling. Ordering. I know that tone. It was the only tone I’d heard for months.

  Finally I can make out sounds upstairs. He’s moving around the room, quickly from the sounds of the creaks the floor makes.

  “Earl Rae?” I don’t wince in anticipation of what he’ll do to me for using his real name. What’s banging on the front door is scarier than any punishment he can dole out.

  He doesn’t ans
wer.

  More frantic noises come from upstairs.

  More angry noises come from outside.

  More panic surges inside me.

  “Earl Rae!?!?” My lungs strain. I haven’t screamed this loud since the beginning. I haven’t screamed half this loud since then.

  What I hear next, I want to pretend I don’t. I want to pretend I don’t know what it is. But I do. Once upon a lifetime ago, someone close to me was a police officer, and the sight and sound of guns have been embedded in my head. I’ll never forget the way a gun sounds when firing. The chilling sound a shotgun makes when being pumped. The explosion it makes when it goes off.

  Up until today, I’d only experienced those sounds in a gun range, with sound-cancelling headphones and targets downrange. It isn’t until today I hear the sound it makes to the unmuffled ear when it goes off a floor above you. The sound a body makes when it crashes to the floor a moment after the blast.

  The feeling that pools in the stomach of the person left behind.

  “Earl Rae!” I scream, but I know it. I know he’ll never reply again.

  That’s when the front door bursts open behind me in an explosion of wood shards and dust. I crawl across the kitchen floor and huddle beneath the kitchen table as far as I can go before the chain gets tangled up in the chair legs and I become stuck.

  Stuck.

  I’ve been trapped in the same small square for years, but I’ve never felt so stuck.

  What seems like dozens of men in black outfits, helmets, and bulletproof vests storm through the front door, all of them holding guns. Most of them fan through the house, some ducking into downstairs rooms and some sprinting upstairs. Their guns are all aimed forward, ready. Four large white letters are stamped across their vests, and even though I have a distant memory of what they mean, I can’t quite remember. It doesn’t stop me from being scared of them with all of their guns and all of their shouts.

  I wrap my arms around my legs and curl into as small of a ball as I can. I’ve never been tall, and I’ve gotten so thin Earl Rae’s brought me back children’s sized clothes from thrift stores whenever I’ve needed something new. I imagine becoming so small they won’t see me. I imagine becoming invisible so that once they’re done doing whatever they’re doing, they’ll leave and never find me.

  I’ve been taken once by a man I didn’t know. I don’t want to be taken again by a bunch of men I don’t know.

  I’ve almost convinced myself they won’t find me when I notice two dark shadows kneel beside the table. I shiver and try crawling farther under the table. The collar cuts into me, and I cry out in pain.

  The two men don’t crawl under the table after me. Instead, they stay where they are, one of them taking off his helmet slowly. I don’t recognize his face, not that I would. I’m not sure I’d recognize my parents’ faces anymore.

  The man beside him also removes his helmet. One is older, the other younger. They both have clean-cut faces and look friendly enough, but I know from Earl Rae that these kinds of faces aren’t to be trusted.

  “Jade Childs?” the older man says, lifting his hands when I try crawling away again.

  The collar tears at my scab as I move. I feel more warm trickles wind down my neck, soaking into the collar of my sweater.

  Both men look at me like they’re having to try very hard to keep a brave face. The younger one has a harder time with this. Each time his eyes drop to my collar, the length of chain trailing off of it, he diverts his eyes like the sight is too much for him.

  I don’t blame him though. The first time I saw my reflection in the mirror— that metal collar fitted around my neck—I threw up. I didn’t stop until my stomach was empty and my throat felt raw from the acid.

  When I don’t say anything, the older man lowers his hands and digs something out of the front pocket of his vest. It’s a photocopy of a picture of a girl. Not the same girl whose photo is hanging on the wall beside me.

  “Are you Jade Childs?” he asks me, turning the photo toward me.

  I stare at the picture for a minute, trying to remember her. I stare at it for another minute, trying to remember what she liked and who she was and what her dreams were. I can’t though because that girl’s gone. The life and soul was choked out of that girl years ago, compliments of the collar still around her neck and the man who locked it there.

  The men are waiting for my answer, so I shake my head and look away. “No, I’m not her. I’m Sara Jackson.”

  I EXPERIENCED A living nightmare once. I’d hoped life would spare me a repeat.

  My head is foggy from the drugs they’ve pumped into me. My body’s numb from the same. When I tried ripping out the IV so I could attempt to invoke one clear thought of my own, my hands were confined. They keep telling me I’ve been saved and am safe, but so far, none of this feels any different from what Earl Rae did to me.

  He burst into my life and took me without my consent as they did. He confined me to a small space, pumping me full of drugs as they are doing. He punished me when I didn’t do what he wanted as they have. He restrained me when I resisted, taking away my freedom, just as they have.

  If this is what being saved means, I want a pass. I want my old life in that small house in the middle of nowhere back because at least there, I’d gotten used to it. I had a schedule. I had fifteen feet of freedom inside a house instead of being strapped to a small hospital bed.

  I’ve been told I’m at Seattle Mercy Hospital in Seattle, but I’m not sure how long I’ve been here or really much of anything else. The nurses and doctors whisk out as quickly as they whisk in. With the drugs pulling me under every few minutes, I’ve probably only been here for hours instead of the days it feels like.

  I could ask. They probably would answer me. I could ask what happened to Earl Rae. I could ask where I’ve been living for years. I could ask just how many years I’ve been missing. I could ask any one of the million questions I have, but I don’t because I know the answers can be summed up in one phrase—I don’t want to know.

  If I want any chance of making whatever kind of life a person like me can have going forward, I have to bury all of the past and pretend it doesn’t exist. The only way to have a future is to murder the past. To cut its throat, let it bleed out, and bury it in an unmarked grave.

  The machines surrounding me beep every few seconds. I guess that means I’m alive, but I’ve never felt so dead. Well, other than those first few months after Earl Rae took me. The machine on my left shows my heart’s still beating, but it isn’t. Not really.

  The room is dark and quiet. They gave me a private room when I was whisked in, and I’m thankful for that. My life has been so small for so long I’m not sure what would happen if I were thrown into all of the stimulation of the outside world all at once. The light, the noise, the smells, the people . . . I panic just thinking about it.

  My head’s melting into my pillow again—the drugs are strong—when the door opens. At first I think it’s a man coming in, but when the person moves closer, I can see it’s a woman. She has short hair, is tall enough to play in the WNBA, and is in slacks and a button-down shirt. She isn’t dressed like the doctors and nurses. She isn’t in a SWAT uniform either. She’s wearing normal clothes—the first person I’ve seen in them.

  She moves slowly across the room after closing the door. Her shoes barely make a noise on the tile floor. “Good evening. I’m Dr. Argent. I’m a psychiatrist who works with the hospital in certain instances. Is it okay if I sit down and talk with you for a minute?”

  I can only imagine the things she wants to “talk” about. I’m not sure what her clinical term for me would be, but I know what the layman’s term is—a head case. I’ve been kidnapped and held captive, and I actually tried evading rescue when a team of police officers came to “save” me. She’s probably already working on a book deal for this mess of a case.

  “Certain instances?” My throat’s dry because of the drugs. In the closet, I spent what felt like
a year with severe cottonmouth. It isn’t a feeling I associate with pleasant memories.

  “Exactly.” Dr. Argent moves closer, still slowly, and reaches for the pitcher of water on my bedside table. She pours some into a glass.

  “Certain instances being a girl who’s been found years after her kidnapping?”

  She doesn’t commit to my assumption. Instead she rolls her hand. “Anyone the hospital staff feels could benefit from talking with me.”

  She holds the glass out for me, but I don’t lift my head. Cottonmouth’s uncomfortable, but not as much as drinking from a cup being held by a shrink because my hands are restrained.

  “I don’t have much of a chance for a normal life, do I? After all of this?” I shake my head when she tips the cup in front of me. “I know the stories of other girls who were taken and held for years. They don’t acclimate back into society very well.”

  She shrugs in a suit-yourself kind of way and sets the cup back down. “True, some don’t adjust back into what you call normal life well. But some do. That’s why I’m here and why I’m hoping you’ll be receptive to speaking with me.”

  “Some do?” I repeat. “Don’t you mean most don’t?”

  “And if some—even one person—have done it, that means it can be done. That means you can do it too.” She pauses like she’s hoping those words will wind their way inside me, but that door, the one receptive to optimism, was sealed shut years ago. “You don’t have to let what happened to you define the rest of your life. You don’t have to tell yourself you have no chance for a normal life, because guess what? There’s no such thing as a normal life. You can make a new life for yourself— however you want to build it.”

  My throat itches. I need to scratch it, but I can’t with my wrists restrained. I try twisting my neck around on the pillow, but that’s useless. “I already built the kind of life I wanted. Years ago. I want that life back.”

  “And why can’t you have it back?” she asks gently.

  I haven’t had a conversation with another person in forever. Even with Earl Rae, we never really conversed. We exchanged words and a sentence here and there, but we never sat down and just talked. I feel out of practice. I don’t recognize the voice or words or edge of bitterness in my tone. I’m the one talking, but it feels like someone else is calling the shots as to what’s said and how it’s said.