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  “You done in there?” he asks through the holes in the wall.

  I step out. “I want to go home. Right now.”

  He scratches his head. “I don’t know how else to explain it to you.”

  It’s eerie, the silence down here. No cicadas screeching from the elm trees; no kettle on the boil. No lawnmowers; no tractor churning up a nearby field in the last light. If we were aboveground, I might be able to hear the distant strains of music at the carnival, or at least the faint roar of freeway traffic on K-10, maybe a crop duster headed for a barn. But underground, there is nothing but the sinusy breath of Dobbs Hordin and those briny eyes thinking of a way to explain something that makes no sense.

  “Maybe if I show you. Come with me.” He offers me his hand.

  I shove mine under my armpits.

  He makes a sweeping gesture as though by some miracle this is not the room in which I have just spent the last couple of hours but some new place that wants discovering. “I call this the Ark.”

  We move to the section that is meant to look like a living room. Between two brown recliners is a bronze floor lamp with a yellowed shade. On top of a rickety chest of drawers is an artificial potted plant. It is exotic-looking, leaves shaped like tongues. The shag carpet in mustard and orange colors matches the curtains, which don’t frame a window but hang around a paint-by-numbers picture—a boy reclining next to a creek, his straw hat pulled over his eyes, a fishing pole at his side.

  “My mother took up painting when my brother died. She said that’s how she pictured my little brother, Elby, in heaven.”

  It’s hideous, I want to shout.

  On the other side of the Peg-Board partition is a supply closet and what he calls “sleeping quarters.” The cot has a folded quilt at one end, a pillow at the other, and smack-dab in the middle a white teddy bear with a big red bow—something you might win at a stall on the midway. Hanging from the ceiling is a plastic curtain that Dobbs pulls till it makes a cubicle, like the one they have you change in at Dr. Hubacher’s office. “For privacy,” Dobbs says, as though that explains everything.

  He points to the clothes rack. “These should all fit.”

  The dresses are from another era, with pleated sleeves, modest necklines, fitted bodices, and long A-line skirts. Beneath their hems is a tub marked INTIMATES. Next to it are two pairs of ballerina flats—one black, the other tan—and a pair of house slippers. “Blue—your favorite color, right?”

  I stare at him. He looks so pleased with himself.

  I start to shake. I tell myself this is not the time to be weak. This is the time to be strong. To fight him. “You tricked me.” My voice quavers. I try again, loudly this time. “You lied!”

  “Yes, I’m sorry about that.”

  Could it really have been little more than two hours ago when Dobbs had leaned out of his car window, stopping beside me on the street? I had my face set to smile even though the evening, having started with such promise, had been such a letdown, and even though I had the long walk home ahead of me. The poem I’d written on the bleachers was crumpled in my hand, the misery of waiting for and then giving up on Arlo too clichéd for iambic pentameter. “There’s been an accident,” Dobbs had said. “Your brother.” That was all it took for me to leap into the passenger seat. He had to reach across me to close the door, had to belt me in. I had forgotten simple tasks. And then he was driving down Winchester Road, and I couldn’t imagine why he was still going the speed limit. When he turned left on the county road instead of heading for Lawrence, I asked, “Aren’t we going to the hospital?” “I’m sorry it has to happen this way,” had been Dobbs’s reply. I thought he meant my brother, twisted and bloodied, fighting for his twenty-year-old life, and my having to carry such a load at the age of sixteen. It hadn’t made sense. Not so much the words as the tone of his voice—flat. The way he kept his eyes on the rearview mirror—flat, too. There was a bumpy dirt road and a gate and a sign: TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT. Dobbs had gotten out of the car. He’d unlatched the gate and pushed it into a thick patch of foxglove.

  That’s where everything might as well stop. Right there, with me sitting patient as you like, hands folded tightly in my lap, watching Dobbs wedge the gate in the weeds. Before the word if had a chance to cross my mind.

  Now, it is fully formed.

  If I had slipped into the driver’s seat. If I had backed out of the driveway. If I hadn’t sat there, so quietly, with all the alarm bells ringing in my head.

  Whatever this is, I fear it is worse, much worse, than trickery or lying. “Take me home! I want to go home!”

  “Like I said, you’ve got nothing to fear—”

  “Don’t come any closer!”

  He holds up his hands. “I need you to be calm, that’s all.”

  I glare at him.

  “Stay calm and everything is going to be fine.”

  And that’s when I open my mouth and scream.

  I know what this is. This is what they warn every teenage girl about.

  I keep yelling.

  Dobbs doesn’t move.

  My scream ricochets off the concrete walls and swirls around us like a dust devil.

  When I’ve run out of breath, he says calmly, “Getting all het up won’t help.”

  I scream again. This time, the effort rips out half my throat. Something tears; Lord help me if it’s my resistance.

  “Nobody can hear you,” he says in the next lull.

  What is this place? I run to the door. I yank on the handle, screaming where the crack ought to be. I slam my fists against the door. “Help me! Somebody! Help!”

  Behind me, Dobbs might as well be chiseled from marble.

  “Let me out of here! I want to go home!”

  He grabs my wrists, but I wrest them easily from his grip. He should be stronger. It is sickening just how weak he is. And then I realize he isn’t weak at all; he’s purposefully trying to keep from hurting me.

  “This isn’t like you, Blythe.”

  I deliver a kick that catches more air than shin. Don’t fight like a girl, I think.

  I roar at him, and he suffers rather than counters each blow. His hair bounces out of its neat side parting and falls over his eyes. I swing my hand and it catches him in his face. I feel his skin roll under my nails like the pale dough Mama uses for biscuits. Apart from red welts on his cheek, there is no response, no about-face.

  It’s clear now what his intentions are.

  I don’t want him to soil me without first leaving a bruise. I want his spoils damaged.

  A thick vein sticks up out of his sinewy neck, and his eyes flicker like strobe lights. With my hands bound in his grip, I buck and kick.

  He says, “I don’t want to hurt you, Blythe.”

  “You are hurting me!”

  And he just keeps saying those same stupid, useless words while I fight him, a not-quite-full bag of flour.

  “I DON’T WANT you to struggle now because that will only make things worse. Think of something nice.”

  I look around. My head feels like it’s about to split open. I try to protest, but my lips won’t work. My tongue’s swelled up. Last thing I remember, my arm was twisted behind my back. We were in the kitchen. A rag.

  “You’ve only been out twelve minutes. I used just a drop.”

  Why is he wearing a plastic jumpsuit? I ask him for a glass of water.

  “No, not now.”

  I lift my hand to insist, but it won’t cooperate. I look down. Both my arms are tied to the chair. On the table in front of me is a pair of scissors. I start shaking worse as soon as he picks it up.

  “Be still now.”

  I swing my head to see where he’s going with them. From behind me, he tells me to settle down. I shake and buck and bounce the chair about.

  “You want to get an ear snipped off or not?”

  “No, please. What are you going to do? Please don’t! I haven’t done anything to you!”

  Mama, why haven’t you come?
Daddy!

  I hear the sharp blades slide open. He leans close to me. I feel his hot breath on my neck. He pushes my head forward.

  “Mama!”

  “Hush, now.”

  A warm spread happens between my legs.

  He smells it, too. “That’s okay; accidents happen. We’ll get you cleaned up after I finish. Now, hold still.”

  I can’t stop crying, but I keep my head very still as soon as those blades come toward it.

  “Think of something nice, like I said.”

  Snip. I feel the weight give way. One auburn braid lands in my wet lap.

  Think of something nice. Think of something nice.

  Daddy hollering up the stairs this afternoon. “We’re leaving in fifteen minutes. Don’t make us all late for the picnic, you hear?” Suzie has long overshot her allotted ten minutes in the bathroom. Gerhard is pacing out his frustration in front of the door. And there I am, the youngest girl, with Theo giddyapping on my back, using my braids as reins. What will Theo use now?

  Snip! There goes my other braid.

  Think of something nice! Me trying to look nice for Arlo, winding my hair around a hot roller when Suzie barges into Mama’s room. “What’s this? Remedial hairdressing?” Suzie calls my hair a national embarrassment. She says braids are childish. “Are you wearing Mama’s perfume?” Suzie sniffing my neck, declaring, “Blythe’s got a boyfriend! Blythe’s got a boyfriend!” Making wet kissing noises, knowing full well I’d never been kissed.

  Snip.

  I wanted to look like a grown-up, not a freckled, pudgy sixteen-year-old. Mama likes to say round cheeks are an indication of good health and that Gene Tierney had an overbite, too, and that didn’t stop her from being considered one of the most beautiful movie stars back in her day. According to Mama, if I’d just show my green eyes instead of letting my bangs hang in them and if I’d accentuate what she insists are Grandma’s bow lips, I’d be more grateful for what God gave me.

  Dobbs is hacking at my bangs. The scissors are going to gouge my eyes out. I squeeze them shut.

  My sister, watching me weave my hair quickly back into braids: “Who is he? The retard?” She means Arlo, who’d inexplicably changed from the friend I had known since first grade, the one with whom I used to play down by the creek on Sundays only after the others had left, to someone whose attention the girls in my class compete for. Suzie refuses to notice that Arlo has shed his baby fat, his bowl haircut and fidgety mannerisms, probably because he’s never taken much notice of her, and these days, even less so. But she’s right: Arlo is the one who I am fixing to meet at the Horse Thieves Picnic. Suzie pulls a face at me and mouths the word freak.

  Snip, snip, snip.

  Worse than freak now.

  He starts cutting more quickly. Bits of hair fly about.

  I can’t think of something nice. Mama’s face is all, but she’d be crying, seeing this.

  It goes on for ages and when I think there can’t surely be anything left to cut, he throws a thick wet towel over my head.

  I struggle for breath. He’s going to smother me. I wrestle and kick and the chair tips all the way backward and I land upside down. My skirt is up around my waist. The smell of my urine is shameful.

  He rights the chair, then smooths my skirt back over my knees. “I do not want to give you chloroform again. Please, sit still now. This is the tricky part.”

  I try to be still, but I’m shaking too hard. He lathers my head with something that smells like tar. The package on the table reads, VAN’S CARBOLIC HOUSEHOLD SOAP.

  “Please, no,” I beg when he picks up the plastic razor.

  It scrapes my scalp. The blade is too dull. It nicks and cuts. He daubs where blood runs down my temple. My head is stinging all over, but the sound is just as terrible. The sound of scraping; the sound of skin crawling; the sound of the razor tapping against the bowl.

  I can’t think of anything except the word freak.

  * * *

  When he’s done shaving me, he comes back with a nail trimmer. I dig my fingers into my palms, but he pries each one loose and clips my nails down to the quick. He sweeps up my hair from the floor and the table, bags my nail trimmings, and stuffs it all in a tin can.

  He undoes the straps. “Easy now.”

  I run my hand over my head. It’s bristly in places, slick in others. I can’t imagine how hideous I must look. I burst into tears.

  He lets me have a drink. This time I really do need to use the facility.

  There are locks on all the other doors in this place, some with the kind that uses buttons and some that need keys, but this toilet door barely latches. I pull down my wet underwear. I squat over the commode. What’s to become of me? I can’t bear to go with him being able to hear me.

  When I leave the stall, he hands me a rag, an ugly polyester nightgown, and big white granny briefs. I go back into the toilet. I put on the underwear. I decide I will just sit here forever, or until someone comes, but he raps on the door, and I have to get up.

  “One more thing.” He gives me a queer look, like he’s almost embarrassed to say.

  It doesn’t matter what that thing is; that there is more makes me drop to my knees. I bend my head till it reaches the floor in front of his shoes. Those ugly beige moccasins. It feels so terrible that my braids are not beside me, that my bangs are not there to offer some small relief from the cold concrete floor.

  He pulls me up by the armpits. I am set down on the cot. He places the bar of carbolic soap, the rag, and a bucket of water beside me. Then he hands me a razor. “You are going to have to do down there.”

  “What?”

  “I will be checking, so don’t try to pretend.”

  He draws the doctor’s office curtain around me. I look at the razor for a long time. I cannot understand what is happening.

  “Are you done yet?”

  I stand up and turn my back to the curtain. I pull down the underwear. I make a little lather in my hand. Raising my skirt, I shave myself without looking.

  When I am done, I slide the bucket and razor under the curtain.

  “Very good.” He flings back the curtain. He hands me a wet napkin and asks me to wipe myself because he has to be sure. I aim to close the curtain again, but he stops me. He has to see me do as I’m told. I turn my back to him. I think I am going to be sick. I wipe myself and hand him back the napkin. He inspects it for stray hairs.

  “Excellent!”

  I was a girl with hair. Auburn hair. Now color has gone. Everything fades. Mama’s flushed cheeks, the smutty palette of the evening sky, our yellow clapboard farmhouse. As goes color, so the senses. I try to conjure the scent of Theo’s head, all sweaty from play; Gerhard’s voice; the smell of Suzie’s nail polish. Nothing. What does rain feel like? Only yesterday, I’d gotten drenched in an afternoon downpour. If I could just hear the sounds of the carnival, or visualize the colored lights strung along Main Street, if I could feel Arlo’s fingers on the back of my hand. Instead, everything condenses into a small point of memory, like a knot in Grandma’s needlepoint, and then—snip!—gone. In its place is absence, and the color of absence is gray. Gray walls, gray floors, gray ceiling. I can taste the gray, smell it. On my arms, the hairs have risen up to meet the stale, gray air. Gray pushes its way into my ears and up my nose. Down my throat, too thick for lungs. I start to gag. It settles in my stomach, and retching moves it not one inch.

  Dobbs bends over me. “You okay? Here, use the bucket.” On my back, his hand is heavy and damp. His forefinger rubs back and forth over my vertebrae.

  “Don’t!” I right myself and clutch the rumpled curtain so we have at least this between us.

  “Blythe, don’t be like this.”

  “Be like what? You don’t be like this! Why are you doing this?”

  He does nothing but stare at me.

  “Please! Say something!” I scream.

  “I’m sorry about your hair. They aren’t going to suspect me, but if they do, they won
’t find any trace of you on my clothes. Hair fiber’s the kind of mistake amateurs make.”

  I don’t want to cry in front of him, but I can’t stop myself.

  “I’m going to have to leave you again. This time, it’s going to be for a bit longer. The fluorescents are on a timer, seven a.m. to nine p.m., but if for any reason they fail to come on, or you need a light in the middle of the night, there are glow sticks under the basin.” He points. “Crack one, and it’ll give you ten hours. Try not to use them, though, because I can only get them on special order.”

  He moves toward the door. I do, too.

  “I’ll be back to give you the grand tour tomorrow.”

  I clutch his shirt.

  “You’ve got to stay now.”

  I grab him around the waist.

  “Be a good girl.”

  “Please. Please don’t leave me here.”

  “I can’t expect you to take this in all at once, and I don’t expect you to feel the way I do. But you’ll see—it will all make sense in a little while.”

  I try to get through the door when he unlocks it, but he pushes me back. Before I can recover lost ground, the lights go out. The door closes with a heavy thud.

  “Dobbs?” I beat my hands against it. “Dobbs!”

  THERE IT IS again, that terrible silence that comes when the lights go out. And the kind of chill that doesn’t come from weather. I crawl on my hands and knees back to the cot for the sweater Grandma knit that Mama insisted I take to the picnic in case it turned cool, but I can’t find my way. I tell myself crying won’t help. I give myself the small task of finding the sweater, believing if I can do this, I will be able to do greater things when the time comes.

  My knees are scraped raw by the time I find it. I clutch it instead of putting it on. I find Grandpa’s watch, too. It doesn’t matter that I can’t tell what time it is.

  I rub the inscription on Grandpa’s watch.

  Thus let me live, unseen, unknown;