THE PACKAGE : Part 2

No. No, No. No, no, no…

All Nina saw was his empty eyes. All she felt was the burning imprint of his palm on her chest. She fell for a lifetime until her heel caught the edge of the raised step to her front door, and she met the floor, head first.

Blackout.

_

Nina opened her eyes with the force of a power lifter. She heard him before she saw him, his voice low and muffled as if he were talking through a pillow over her head. Her eyes focused and there he was, sitting on the raised step with his back against the front door. Posture casual. Unbothered. Head back, eyes closed. As if he hadn’t just shoved her face first into her worst nightmare.

Sat next to him like his little lackey, was the industrial-sized trash can she’d left for the developers to take to the dump. They should've picked it up by now. Crap company. One star. She’d been so annoyed at them for leaving just the can, no lid, but turns out she couldn’t use it anyway. As much as she packed into boxes over the past few weeks, she’d had to stuff double that into trash bags, bins, cans, anything within arm’s length that would convey her emotional baggage and unworthy belongings to the Ardmore County landfill. This last can was the only decor left in this ownerless house with its bouquet of old pots and pans, hangers (so many hangers), a broken curling iron, naked pillows with sprouting tags and blooming stains, and a hand. A hand, and some toes, and a few dark curls…

“Won’t be needing her anymore, now will I?

Nina jumped right out of her skin like an old black and white cartoon, leaving a Nina-shaped hole in the wall and her skin in a pile on the floor that looked a lot like her sex doll doppelganger now shoved in the trash.

Her eyes twitched from the trash doll back to her neighbor. His eyes hadn’t been closed after all. Just hooded. Watching her. Her skin crawled but stayed firmly attached to her body. No chance of her fantasy cartoon escape.

“Feeling ok?” His tone wasn’t sarcastic, more matter-of-fact. Soft as always, with that same un-pinnable accent that now froze her insides. Her father had once told her something about trusting her instincts, but that was too long ago, the words too faded to be of any use.

Nina felt exposed beneath his heavy-lidded gaze, though he had yet to undress her. He would, though. She immediately threw that thought back in its box, choosing instead to mentally examine her body. She took inventory of her pulse, nerve endings, vision, hearing. Everything was in working order, just delayed. Her brain felt like an aol dial-up.

She could have answered his question after her self-evaluation, but didn’t. Rhetorical questions didn't need answers. She tried to block him out as he started to tell her his story, his secrets, his deep, dark, inner shit that she didn’t care to hear. She knew exactly what was going to happen, but she didn’t care why. Her only concern was how to stop it.

Nina couldn’t sit up just yet, but inch by painful inch, she began to scootch her prone body backwards, willing it to wake the hell up.

“It’s only because you look like her, you know. If you didn’t look so much like her I wouldn’t have done it. She always said no to me, every time. Her family adopted me, yes, but we weren’t related, so why did she say no? She did tell me she loved me. Once. That time right after her father finished with me and she cleaned me up with her favorite…”

No weapon.

She realized this with a sudden clarity that cut through the fog of his monologue. No knife, no gun, no rope, or one of those cheese cutter wire things to strangle her with. He was actually sitting on his hands.

“The doll would have been enough,” he said, looking over at it. “ I swear, it would have. Something to hold, just, I needed a piece of her that wouldn’t say no, always no.”

Nina’s brain started working quicker now. Loading, loading. Jefferson! it called out. Nope. Still glitchy. She had no husband, no boyfriend to come looking for her. Nobody even knew where she was. Her closest friend, Lyric, might remember that she was moving today, but she was a night nurse and more burnt out than Nina. Her mother would never care enough to mention her name again, less likely come looking for her. Her kids. Fuck. Her poor children, all they would think is that she left them and didn’t come back.

The thought of Bridge and J.J. got her heart going, pulse racing. Adrenaline, that’s good. Come on brain, think.

The realtor. Janeen had become a pretty good friend and might get suspicious if she didn’t drop off the key tonight, like she promised. But she would call, text, email probably, before bothering to come and investigate herself. That could take days, and Nina wasn’t sure she had many (if any) of those.

Think. He had two options: take her to his house or finish her here. She’d have a better chance of being found here, but far less time before he– she had to figure out what he wanted with her. Why she wasn’t already stripped down and hog tied. But that meant she had to start paying attention.

“And then she gave me the prize monkey and said, ’I think this one prefers tacos’, and that was the best day of my life.” He chuckled to himself, the loneliest sound she ever heard.

Her brain had fully booted, but her body still wasn’t cooperating. Nina tested her jaw to see if her mouth would work.

“Sounds like a monkey with a refined pallet.”

He started at the sound of her voice as if she’d frightened him. In her head, Nina laughed loud and hard, though nothing was funny.

“When was the last time you saw her?” she tried again, her voice soft and shapeless as pudding. He smiled and came to squat down next to her, shoes eye level. The sneakers he’d worn every single day since they’d met were now work boots with a reinforced steel toe. She convinced herself that this change of footwear was simply due to the weather change.

He touched one of her curls with feather-soft fingertips.

“Oh I see her all the time,” he says, eyes bottomless and vacant.

But does she see you?

He was close enough to take a Hail Mary swing at him with her freshly revived left arm, but she decided against it. Weapon or no, Hill Rivera was almost twice her height and weight, and chances were, she’d only get one shot at burying the bastard. But first, she needed proof that her legs worked.

“Ehm Melissa, right? She sounds lovely. I, uh, always wanted a sister myself. Growing up an only child could get pretty…”

“Lonely?” He said, fingers venturing deeper into her curls and towards her scalp, moving, massaging, disorienting her in the worst way.

She wiggled the fingers of her right hand, wedged behind her back where he couldn’t see.

She was so focused on her own fingers rather than the ones on her scalp that she almost missed his confession that he wasn’t sure what to do with her.

Nina looked up at his blank face. She didn’t have to say aloud, Can’t you just let me go? And he didn’t have to answer. She simply raised her un-plucked eyebrows, a rogue tear escaping down her cheek, and he responded with a set jaw and sharp shake of the head. Asked and answered.

He noticed her subtle movements and stood abruptly, wedging his steel toe boot into her ribcage with enough pressure to set off her internal panic alarm.

“We’re gonna go now.”

He wrenched her up, twisted her arm behind her back and walked her through the sliding back door, through her beloved garden and through the gate in their shared fence. He hummed in her ear the entire way, the same song from when they first met, but this part, this was the part she sang her kids at night. He must have been watching them for a while. The same way he watched his sister. He may or may not know where her kids were now, she couldn’t take that chance. Nina kept her mouth shut tight, effectively gagged by a show tune.

Stock still she stood in her neighbor’s back yard, the wooden gate swinging shut behind them with a resounding finality. Nina stared down at the barren, scorched earth. Her humble garden was an eden compared to this wasteland. Hill said he’d been landscaping weeks ago, but there was no sign of it. Not a single flower or wheelbarrow, shovel or potted plant. Nothing. Empty. As if someone had burned every single blade of grass down to a blackened rug.

The box in her mind opened to reveal what lay ahead for her. Only then did she scream.

And that’s when he clocked her.

_

Day Nineteen.

Nina balanced another screw on the dusty ledge behind her pillow. Carefully balanced, upside-down, nineteen in a row. Scratches on the wall would’ve been too conspicuous. These she could knock down right away if ever in danger of being discovered. Danger. What a silly word.

She sat naked on her dirty mattress on the floor, listening.

He’d been gone all day today.

She stood on her tip-toes and squinted through the sliver of window, both panes caked with neglect. Car still gone. She sat back down, careful not to disturb her screws. She rocked back and forth impatiently, listening to the soft clinking of the heavy duty chain bolting the collar around her neck to the wall behind the water heater.

It had taken him a few days. After several tantrums, many long, heartfelt, cathartic conversations, and one masochistic attack, he’d finally used her. Stripped her down and done all the things he promised himself he wouldn’t. She’d known way before him that he’d lose that battle. And so she became silicone. A silicone body with cellulite and stretch marks, with glassy eyes and a plastic mind and a mouth used for many things but never to scream.

Whenever he was with her, she waited. And whenever he was gone, she plotted.

Nina checked her inventory. One by one, she pulled everything she’d found, made or stolen over the past three weeks from their hiding places, laying them on the floor in front of her. Small tools, old clothing, little toys she’d made for her children in hopes they would forgive her. Her futile attempt at a radio from day thirteen–really just a nest of exposed wires. And a weapon. A weapon she’d crafted with her children’s names on her lips. She’d never seen the rest of his house. Never left this basement. But there were things down here, things he didn’t expect her to know how to use. She gathered it all into a holey messenger bag with a broken strap and tucked it behind her beneath the corner of the mattress. She tugged her collar away from the raw skin on her neck, not needing a mirror to know how badly it would scar. She stretched out her legs, bruised and marred. Those would scar too.

Last night had been a bad one. He only came to her at night, in the pitch dark, when he couldn’t take it anymore, when his conscience couldn’t keep him at bay. She may count the days, but she didn’t bother counting those nights. Her fate was sealed the moment he’d entered her house.

On day three, she’d remembered her car, her cell there on the front seat. A conspicuous blue chevy with a trackable beacon inside it. Only a matter of time before she was found. But the days passed into weeks and the only one who ever came was him. But today her house was supposed to go into escrow, and the kids’ school must have reported her missing by now, if not her best friend. Hopefully both. Even better all three, realtor, school, best friend–so the police could connect the dots.

She just had to make it out of this basement.

Boots on the stairs. She must have been too deep in thought to hear his car pull up. The base of his boots gave rhythm to his humming. His face appeared, expression drawn, movements slow. Tough day, sweetheart? Neither of them spoke as he crawled onto her mattress, fully clothed, and rested his head on her bare chest, now sunken, sagging and sallow. He stroked her legs, tracing his handiwork as his living doll cradled him, too distracted by the worries of the day to notice how she angled his head.

From behind her back came the knitting needle, rusty, yet sharpened with care, fixed to the handle of an old gardening spade. Into his ear it went, fast and deep, just the way he liked it.

Satisfied by the pop from his eardrum, Nina shoved his body off hers and grabbed her pack, quickly locating the tool she’d made to jimmy the padlock on her collar. Less than a minute and she was free, bolting barefoot up stairs she’d never before climbed and through a door at the top he’d forgotten to lock.

Now came the hard part: finding her way out of a house she’d never seen the inside of. But after only a few wrong doors into sheet-adorned rooms, she found herself at the front door, the only thing left between her and her freedom, dressed in nothing but blood and a messenger bag. She paused long enough to throw on the old t-shirt she’d swiped from his laundry–which she’d done every Sunday–and to stick her feet into his spare boots by the door. She wiped off the blood, snot and tears best she could with the sleeve of a coat from his coat rack, but she refused to wear it. No amount of protection against November weather in Pennsylvania was worth being bear hugged by his scent.

Nina flipped the deadbolt, took a deep breath and twisted the knob. A crack of sunshine was her only reward. She looked up to see another padlock high above her head where only he could reach. The reason the basement door had been unlocked. She looked around for something to stand on, but there was nothing and she doubted her flimsy tool would work on this lock anyways.

A desperate sweat drenched her forehead and pits despite the fact she was freezing. She turned for the back door, her last hope. If it was locked, maybe she could break the glass of his sliding door with the steel toes of his boots? Nina ran back down the hallway. Ran for her kids, ran for the banished ghost of her dead husband, ran from the horror of the past nineteen days and that weak son-of-a-bitch who’d turned her into a sex doll because he “just couldn't help it.”

She turned the last corner, flung open the kitchen door and stopped. The back door was no longer an option.

She hadn’t checked. Hadn’t made sure. Number one thing she always yelled at the screen at those stupid white girls who’d managed to get themselves kidnapped.

Her neighbor’s skeletal frame was cut in sharp relief against the backdrop of the sun setting over his scorched backyard. Blood and pus drained from his ear. He trained his empty eyes and faint smile on her. He looked like death. Or more like, the Grim Reaper.

_

She walked up to the door, heart beating out of her chest. The place looked the same as she recalled, though it had been a mansion in her 6-year-old minds-eye. Twenty years later, she could see it for what it was, a good-sized 4-bedroom colonial, well-kept, yet unremarkable. She looked over at their little old cottage, bright and cheerfully not hers. Too happy to be hers.

Her brother didn’t know she was coming here. Would’ve tried to stop her. But he’d never believed in their mother. That she would have never abandoned them. Ever.

She pulled her sleeves down over the permanent welts on her arms; a decade’s worth of gifts from her grandmother. She stuck the folder from the private investigator back into her messenger bag, tucked a loose curl behind her ear, and picked up a UPS package that had been left on the stoop.

She rang the doorbell. An older man, complete with thinning hair and a paunch, answered it, appraising her with empty eyes.

“Can I help you?”

Bridge dropped the package, pulled her pistol from the waistband of her jeans, and shot him right between the eyes.