Page 40 of Trapped: Until The Darkest Of Night

I want to stick my head in the sand and not pull it out until she’s done. But she doesn’t stop. On the contrary.

I take a deep breath and focus on the me who is hard and cold, who can mercilessly drug and chain her without batting an eyelid. This part shakes his head. “Crying isn’t going to help you. Crying never helps. Not with me.” I feel strange. Far away. I look grimly out the window, concentrating on my old anger. “Where I grew up, it’s the law of the strongest and that’s me, not you. Sorry.”

Suddenly, I want to get out of here. When I’m almost at the door, I turn back to her. “I know how hard this is for you. I’ll do anything I can to make it more bearable.” Lou’s tears form two streaks down her cheeks and drip onto the Avery-style scrambled eggs. “When you’re angry, be angry. When you’re sad, be sad. I’m not going to forbid you to have feelings. I can handle them until things get better. If you think you want to spit on me or whatever, then do it, but don’t overdo it…” I pause for a moment, feeling my eyes drill into her and how vulnerable she is to it. “There’s only one thing I absolutely forbid you from trying.”

“What’s that?” Just a whisper.

“Escaping.” The word comes out hard like an icebreaker, much harder than I meant.

“What would happen?” Her eyes are wide open for me to fall into.

You’re thinking about it, aren’t you? All the time!

Just thinking she could run away from me upsets me to no end. Involuntarily, my hands clench. Lou grabs the butter knife—no explanation necessary.

“Just don’t try,” I say as calmly as I can, then storm out, slamming the door behind me.

I drain the gray water at the side of the road and fill the fresh water tank with several water cans. My reserves, in case we don’t stop near a stream or lake.

I’m still beside myself. In the slums of Los Angeles, I saw so many people cry. Widowed mothers, starving children, even Ramon once when he thought I couldn’t see him. So far, I’ve been immune to tears. They didn’t touch me inside, as if my capacity for compassion had withered. But Lou’s tears hit me in a way that upsets me. It’s as if they can soften something hard the way water can round a stone. I feel helpless and vulnerable, yet it’s her who’s crying, who’s helpless and vulnerable, not me. I hate feeling like this. It reminds me too much of my past. And that is dangerous because it reawakens things in me that are better left dormant. Locked away.

A little later, when I enter the RV again, Lou’s still sitting at the table. I ask her a couple of times if she feels like doing the dishes to do something she’s familiar with, but she declines. At some point, I turn on the TV and flip through the shows. Coming across a missing person announcement, I immediately click to the next channel in case it’s about Lou. I have to think about the newspaper articles—I could use a current issue to keep up to date. Maybe I can pull over after Johnsons Crossing somewhere outside so Lou won’t be the wiser.

“Do you want to see something in particular?” I ask her after I’ve channel surfed about a hundred soap operas.

“That missing person announcement!” she replies promptly.

“Except that!”

“How about Hero of the Week, then.”

“You like that?” I’m learning something new about her. Properly taken aback, I click to the channel and start doing the dishes. I watched the show a few times in Los Angeles, or at least I tried, but it was that typical heroic kitsch that you can only endure for five minutes or you’ll end up throwing up.

And Lou likes this? I glance over at her. She’s glued to the screen and I’m glad to see she’s distracted.

The banter of the moderator and the hero rushes past me, though my ears perk up when the moderator, David O’Dell, asks Andrew Franklin about his story.

“Okay, so tell the nation how you came across Henry Clark,” the moderator asks the hero, Andrew.

I turn to the screen. This Andrew looks like a pompous ass-kisser with hair parted on one side and a grin like a prick. “Well, David, can I call you David?”

The inconspicuous moderator merely nods—for there’s no time to reply as Andrew takes the floor:

“David, a few weeks ago I saw that picture in the paper.” He looks intently into the camera for attention. “Some teenagers had assaulted a homeless man. Another photograph of a subway station and a literal whipping boy. I mean, we all know those pictures, don’t we, David? Not that I would describe myself as jaded, but it is what it is.”

The account from this attention-seeking man sounds rehearsed. He probably practiced it in front of a mirror. Along with that permanent grin of his, he looks like a wide-mouthed frog that inhaled too much air. Irritated, I continue to listen because he is in rare form.

“Nobody knew the man and something made me want to look more closely. I mean really closely, David,” he says earnestly. “God knows why. Anyway, I looked at him and I thought, wow, that old man literally looks just like a good friend of my father’s. God rest his soul.”

I look at Lou again. The thought of her liking this Andrew makes me want to stick my head in the toilet. Is she into Harvard students like him?

I glance back at the screen. Andrew is still doing his monologue.

“So I recognize him, but it’s been so long that I have no idea what his name is.”

“So what did you do?” David O’Dell asks.

Andrew doesn’t look at David. “I started putting the word out on Facebook and Do you know? And eventually, I managed to find a friend of a friend of a friend, you know, the usual route, who was able to identify him.”

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