Hold Me Close Read online

  “Can’t you just be happy with what I can give you?” she cried, still not turning. “Does it have to be everything or nothing with you?”

  Heath didn’t answer her. She heard the rustle of fabric and clink of metal—he was getting his coat from the hook that was his and only his, and would always be his. She turned, finally, unwilling to let him leave her this way one more time, with harsh words between them. She wanted to tell him she loved him and always would, but the look on his face stopped her.

  “The problem is, Effie, that you don’t give me anything. Not really.” Heath shrugged and opened the back door.

  “That’s not true.”

  Heath paused. “You don’t give me anything you don’t give a dozen other guys. Or maybe now, I guess, just that one.”

  That stung, and it wasn’t true. It had been true in the past, when she’d gone through men like wind through reeds, but was not now and hadn’t been for a long time. Effie’s chin went up, though. She wasn’t going to defend herself against him. Not about that.

  Heath didn’t smile. He looked at her with those green, green eyes and ran a hand over his too-short hair. “Thanks for the cut,” he said, and she didn’t know if he meant his hair or something else. Something deeper.

  In the end it didn’t matter, because he walked out the door, and she let him go without calling him back.

  chapter twenty

  Effie wakes with a pain down low in her guts. She’s grown used to pains like that. Sudden sicknesses. This is different, though. This is a deep and grinding pain deep inside, and though she feels as though she could possibly puke, this doesn’t feel like illness. It feels as if something’s wrong, though. With her hands on her belly, she sits up.

  Disoriented. Blinking at the faint light from the hallway through the door her mother insists on keeping cracked open, Effie swings her legs over the edge of the bed. Soft, clean linens, pillows, an unstained mattress. Her feet touch fluffy carpeting.

  She’s home, oh, God, she’s home, she’s home.

  It’s not a dream, this is real life, and she’d cry with the relief of it except that Effie is trying hard to unlearn how to weep. She listens for the sound of her mother hovering outside her door, but all she can hear is the faint noise of her father snoring. That noise is the background of her childhood and should soothe her, but something’s wrong now. Maybe nothing will ever be right again.

  Standing, Effie grunts at the force of a cramp. She needs the toilet, and fast. Halfway there, something tugs itself free from inside her, soaking her cotton panties, and begins an inexorable slide down her thighs. She knows it’s blood before she even gets to the bathroom. She doesn’t turn on the light. She fumbles with the toilet seat lid with its fuzzy yarn cover, something she also remembers from her childhood but that brings no comfort now. All she can think about it is how dirty that cover must be, how impossible to clean and how her hands have probably stained it.

  If she doesn’t turn on the light, she doesn’t have to know. She doesn’t have to see it. If she sits here in the dark with her sopping panties around her ankles, she can pretend she’s had an accident. Embarrassing, but nothing she’s never dealt with before. She will sit here until the cramping fades, and she’ll take a long hot shower and clean off. She’ll put her soiled clothes in the laundry and hope her mother doesn’t notice.

  But Mom notices everything.

  It’s been six weeks since Effie came home, and in that time, there hasn’t been a single thing Effie’s done that Mom hasn’t seen. Effie ought to be glad she’s home in her soft, warm bed, a fridge full of food she can’t quite bring herself to eat, loving and caring parents. Yet this constant scrutiny, the lack of privacy, the way everyone stares at her no matter where she goes, all have left Effie sometimes dreaming of the basement’s darkness. She misses Heath’s warmth in bed beside her. A legion of stuffed toys could never take his place. Her mother won’t allow Effie to see him alone. She sits with them at the kitchen table while they drink hot cocoa and play cards, or in the living room when they try to watch a movie. Heath is not Effie’s boyfriend. He’s more to her than that, so much more. Her father seems to understand at least a part of that, but her mother never, ever will.

  Except now Mom will know everything that went on. She won’t be able to pretend she doesn’t. No more denying. The truth of what happened in that basement won’t be hidden anymore, unless Effie can figure out a way to get herself up and off this toilet, clean herself up. She needs to take care of this. But even as she tries, her hands pressing to her cramping, aching belly, she wants to weep at the loss.

  She didn’t want to be pregnant at seventeen, but she hadn’t wanted to be abducted by a crazy guy and kept in his basement for three years, either. The baby is not a surprise. Effie’s long known about how babies are made. You couldn’t fool around without risking pregnancy, and she and Heath had been anything but careful.

  “Effie? What’s going on in there? Are you sick?”

  “I’m okay,” Effie manages to say. “Just ate something that disagreed with me.”

  Mom raps lightly. “Let me in.”

  “No, I’m fine. I’ll be...” Effie rasps a groan.

  “Let me in, Felicity!” Mom knocks harder. “Phil! Something’s wrong with her!”

  “No, no, no,” Effie says under her breath, but it’s too late.

  The knob rattles. She locked the door, but it doesn’t matter; her father has one of those little metal tools that pops the lock. The door opens. The light comes on, too bright, and Effie puts up a hand to cover her eyes.

  Mom screams. Effie wants to get up and tell her to stop, it’s all right, there’s nothing she can’t take care of, but in the light there is blood. So much blood. It’s splashed all over her legs, the floor, the toilet seat. Her hands. Effie clenches her fists, feeling the stickiness there. That small life, lost now.

  “Oh, my God,” Mom cries. “Phil, get out of the way. She needs to get to a hospital.”

  “No ambulance,” her father says at once, and Effie wants to hug him, but she can’t. “We don’t want everyone in the world finding out.”

  Effie says, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  “Shh, kiddo. It’s all going to be okay.” Her father grabs a couple towels from the shelf and wraps them around her waist.

  Together, they get into his car, Effie in the front seat and Mom muttering over and over from the back while her father drives. By the time they get to the emergency room, Effie expects the entire car to be overflowing with what’s coming out of her, but it seems to have slowed. Her father has given her his trench coat to cover her so that nobody in the waiting room even really knows what’s going on.

  She’s taken to a room at once. Settled onto a gurney. Feet in stirrups, her body opened and probed and examined while her father holds her hand tight on one side and Mom on the other dabs at Effie’s forehead with a damp cloth until Effie asks her to stop. Then Mom mutters something that makes the nurse standing between Effie’s legs frown and ask her to leave the room.

  “I’m very sorry,” the nurse says when her mother has left in a huff. “You’ve lost the baby. I... Did you know that you were pregnant?”

  “Yes,” Effie says.

  Her father makes a small, sad noise, but his fingers grip Effie’s tighter. A doctor comes in. He does some things that hurt, but they’ve given Effie some pain medication in an IV drip, and she doesn’t care what’s going on anymore. The nurse cleans her up. They give her a gown to wear. They take away her stained nightgown and the towels.

  “Mom’s gonna be mad,” Effie slurs. “About the towels.”

  Then there’s a far-off humming and she sleeps for a bit until someone shakes her awake. She’s in a hospital bed and she sits up, terrified, not sure what’s going on, because the last time she was in the hospital, it was after the b