Page 64 of Trapped: Until The Darkest Of Night

“I don’t have the very first article. I was too busy with you, keeping you unconscious. This is the second one.”

“Doesn’t matter,” she whispers, looking at me with impatience in her eyes. Give it to me! she screams with every fiber of her body.

I withdraw my fingers and give her a warning look. “Don’t forget, you have to earn the others too!” I say and leave her alone. Back in the motorhome, I turn on the outside lights so she can read the small print better. For a moment, I’m tempted to watch her, but after a moment’s hesitation, I decide against it. This moment is hers alone.

Chapter

Seventeen

After a good hour, I finally look out at her. She stands trembling by the fire, watching the newspaper article she threw into it burn. My stomach hardens. It doesn’t make any sense why she did that. Maybe she lost hope.

A few minutes later, she enters the RV with wet cheeks and a rattling chain.

“Lou? You okay?” I want to touch her, but I promised her I’d only touch her if necessary. Right now, it might be necessary to stroke her hair or hug her, but that’s out of the question. And of course my you okay was uncalled for. Nothing has ever been less okay with her, I can see that. Why did I ask such a stupid question?

Tonight, I realize how far I still have to go to be normal. Maybe further than ever before.

Wordlessly, I free her from the second chain so she can go to the bathroom, then cuff her to her sleeping area. The stony pit in my stomach continues to grow, paralyzing my arms and legs with a leaden heaviness.

At night, as I watch Lou sleep, a thousand thoughts, a thousand feelings, and a thousand memories fill me. Maybe because I have experienced what she’s going through.

I remember my stepfather. He told me my mom left me with him. The little boy sometimes thought he’d never had a mom. Naturally, my mind knows that is not true. Everyone has a mom. But at times, it still feels that way. To this day, I don’t know why she did such a horrible thing to me. No mom should leave her child with a deranged sadist.

I explain it by assuming she was simply afraid of him. Maybe he did all those bad things to her, too, and she put up with it for a while. Eventually, at an opportune moment, she ran away and left me behind. Sometimes, I believe she spontaneously decided to leave. Maybe she went shopping for him, and in front of the liquor store, it hit her like a bolt of lightning. She decided to use the housekeeping money for a train ride to a better life and that sealed my fate. I like that version best of all. I can live with an impulsive decision better than if she had planned it over time.

Later on, when I lived in the slums and Ramon gave me my name, I initially considered searching for her. But first, I lacked money, and second, I lacked understanding. What could this woman have told me?

I didn’t want to hear excuses. Besides, I probably wouldn’t have found her anyway. She might have changed her name for fear he might go looking for her.

That night, I watch Lou longer than usual, imagining how she misses her brothers. The boy misses his mom just as much despite what he thinks of her.

Once again, I’m trying desperately to conjure up images that come from an even earlier time, pictures from a life before Thorson Ave, before Los Angeles. There must be images of that, but I can’t access them or I was too young like Dr. Watts explained. The picture of my radiant Miss Sunshine must be one of those memories. I know it as sure as I can breathe.

Since that night, everything has changed. At first, I chalked it up as a win since Lou has been eating three meals on most days.

But now, on the fifth day, I feel something is even less right than before.

Her apathy increases. Sometimes, she stays in the same position for hours. She no longer responds to words—and not because she wants to annoy me. It’s like everything flows through her and she’s in a completely different place, leaving only her outer shell behind.

Mentally in Ash Springs, she’s ignoring the here and now. Maybe she’s imagining her life as it could be. Thinking of Ethan, Avery, Liam, and Jayden.

I’d love to help her, but I can’t reach her. Even her necklace, which she used to hold so often in her hand, no longer seems to have any meaning for her.

The wall she builds around her is impassable. Sometimes, when she’s lying on her bed staring at the ceiling, I sit next to her and talk to her.

“What do you want to do tomorrow? See more of the area? Or we could go to the lake again? Perhaps you’d like to learn which berries are edible?” I know she hears my questions, but nothing comes out of her. She is completely withdrawn. She won’t fight anymore, not against me, not against her hopelessness. Her mental exhaustion knows no bounds and I don’t know how to help her. I’m secretly praying for a miracle even though I’ve never believed in a god. It makes me want to bang my head against the radiator because it doesn’t take God to save Lou. I could solve this problem by letting her go, dropping her off in Ash Springs and saying: Okay, Lou, it didn’t work out.

More and more often, I become afraid that she might never pull out of this state. Outwardly, I appear imperturbable. I do all the chores; wash our laundry in the lake, fill and empty the water tanks, and pick lots of fresh blueberries. But inside me there is a chaos of feelings. Rarely have I felt anything more than anger, loneliness, and emptiness. Now there are sensations I’ve only ever tried to imitate before. Concern, pity, affection. Real affection, not obsession that leaves no room for other thoughts. This upsets me. It makes me someone who I don’t recognize and I don’t know how it might progress or if that someone won’t scare me one day.

This morning, as I’m heading to inspect the two rabbit traps and build a new one, I leave Lou chained to the RV. I’ve given up asking since she doesn’t want to come anyway.

Before I leave, I put a blanket over her shoulders so she doesn’t get cold. As always, she’s dressed scantily as if she doesn’t care if she gets sick.

I take the path through the spruce tree line and walk along the stony lake shore. Coolness rises from the water’s surface, bathing the heart of the forest in cold, clear beauty. The coniferous forest all around is still full of morning shadows, the sky gray blue with only a few rays of sunshine reaching the ground. At dawn, they look like bars of light. It’s too bad Lou doesn’t want to see this.

I search the area and decide to set the new trap near the creek. I walk along the embankment for a while, trampling a couple of Canadian bush nettles and eventually return to the thicket. After a few minutes, I pull up the hood of the sweatshirt because of the cold.

I can’t get Lou and her grief out of my head. Should I force her to go out with me again? We could hike along the creek, maybe to the rocky gorge at the top of the mountain, it only takes half an hour following the deer trail.

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