Hold Me Close Read online

  And there is light, faint, from the other room.

  A woman’s voice, querulous, curious. Calling out a name. Then a strangled cry. The thud of an overturned table. Shadows stretch and tease. Effie sees a silhouette. Long hair. The sickly-sweet stink of a familiar perfume.

  “Oh, my God! Oh, my God! Oh God, oh God!”

  God stopped caring about them, Effie thinks, while beside her, Heath struggles to get up from the bed. The light stays on. Heath is on the floor. Someone’s in the doorway, and then they’re gone.

  More time.

  Another voice. More light. Bright, this time. It hurts Effie’s eyes through her eyelids, and she tries to cover her face with her hand, but she can barely wiggle her fingers.

  “Hello? Holy shit.” The voice is garbled. Staticky.

  A figure looms over her. He wears blue. He has a gun, but he puts it away and puts a hand on her, gentle, but the pain flares and Effie screams. Or tries to scream. She has no breath for it.

  “You’re okay,” the police officer says. “I’m Officer Schmidt. I’m here to help you both. You’re going to be okay.”

  * * *

  Blinking, Effie gasped for breath. She was going to pass out. Her fingers gripped the wooden railing hard enough to make the wood creak. A splinter gouged her with a small sting, but no real pain. She misjudged the last step and went down too fast, onto...

  Carpet.

  Soft, thick carpet in a plush royal blue. The basement was well lit with hanging pendant lamps in multiple colors. One big space broken up by several wooden pillars, but nothing else. No other rooms. No walls.

  Everything she’d been expecting was gone. She moved forward on numb feet into the center of the room. Here it was, their living space. Here, that fetid bathroom. Here, the tiny decrepit bedroom where they’d spent so much time. All gone, replaced by fresh white walls and the lingering scent of floral air fresheners. From one corner, a small dehumidifier hummed. Two small windows hung with pretty, gauzy curtains let in a bit of filtered light. Like the frame of the door upstairs, the wood around these had been painted, but if you looked closely enough, you could see the places where nails had once punctured the wood to hold in place the boards that had covered the glass.

  It was gone, everything was gone, there was no remnant here of what had happened, and this was worse, somehow, even than Daddy not recognizing her. Effie went to her knees there in the middle of the room. Then her hands, too. Bent over, pressed her forehead to the carpet, waiting to see if she was going to scream or wail or faint or die.

  With her eyes closed, it was dark, but she could still sense the light. Above her head came the familiar creaking step, step, step. That had not changed, and oh, what fuckery, that she should take comfort from that. Effie pushed herself up onto her hands.

  Get up, she told herself. Get up, Effie. You didn’t come here to be a prisoner again. Get the fuck up and go upstairs and walk out that fucking front door.

  There are no more locks.

  Shaking, she managed to get one foot beneath her. It wasn’t enough. She couldn’t make herself stand. Her fingers dug into the carpet, all the way to the scratchy base. A staple poked her. She dug her fingers deeper, seeking that pain.

  “...Miss? Are you all right?”

  Get up, Effie. You’re making a fool of yourself. You need to get up right now.

  She turned her head, trying to smile. “Yes, yes, I...”

  “I know you,” the woman said. “Oh. God. I know who you are.”

  * * *

  “My mother left my father when I was twelve and my brother fifteen. She wouldn’t tell us why. There was no joint custody. We never saw my dad after that, except maybe once or twice a year for holidays, and then he always came to our house and sat in the living room while we opened our presents or whatever. My mom wouldn’t talk to him, but she never left us alone with him, either.”

  The woman’s name was Karen. She was older than Effie by about ten or twelve years, but you wouldn’t have guessed it if you put them side by side. They were about the same height. They had the same color hair. Karen’s eyes were deep brown, but aside from that, they might’ve been sisters.

  “He’d been in the hospital for two weeks before they found you. The infection from that untreated stab wound. It almost killed him.” Karen paused to pour them both mugs of tea. She’d chased out the Realtor and everyone from the open house so she and Effie could sit in the kitchen and talk alone.

  Effie was lucky Karen hadn’t called an ambulance. Or the police. As it was, Effie could barely string more than a few words together. She took the tea and warmed her hands on the mug, though of course she didn’t sip.

  “It might’ve been better if he’d died then.” Karen’s voice shook a little, and she drank a gulp of tea. “Someone would’ve come in. Found you sooner.”

  “Someone found us anyway, thank God.” Effie blew on the tea and let the steam bathe her face.

  “I asked my mom, when he went to prison, if there was something he’d done that had made her divorce him. I was almost thirty by then. Married, two kids. I’d allowed my dad to see the kids. Never alone, like I somehow knew without knowing, but still...” Karen shuddered and shook her head. It took her a long minute to speak again, but Effie let the silence hang between them without trying to fill it. Karen got up to wipe her eyes with a paper towel she tore from the rack beneath the cabinet. She stayed where she was, leaning, before she cleared her throat. “He took you and that boy to replace me and my brother. And I finally got out of my mother why she left him. She’d found diaries, drawings. Sick things of what he’d intended for us. He wanted to keep me safe, so I didn’t become a whore. And my brother was somehow a replacement for him, to do things he wasn’t able to do. He was impotent or something. I just... I didn’t want to ask her more than that.”

  Effie pressed her hand to her mouth. She wanted to hate Karen. She wondered if Karen hated her.

  “He never touched me,” Effie said. “I know that we testified something different in court. I know it’s what everyone thought. But he never actually touched...me.”

  Karen looked sick to her stomach. She breathed in and out a few times, then shook her head. “I’m so, so sorry. He was a sick man. I’m so... If there was something I could do, I would do it.”

  Effie looked toward the basement door, shut but not locked. She gave Karen a faint smile. “You’ve done a lot.”

  Another silence spun out, longer this time. Karen came back to the table, but not to sit. She took her mug and dumped it in the sink, rinsed it and put it on a dish towel on the counter. It was a signal, Effie thought. Time for her to go.

  “What ever happened to the boy? The one who was with you? Is he okay?”

  There was a question without a straightforward answer. Effie hesitated, then decided there was no point in launching into a life history. “Yeah, he’s fine. We keep in touch.”

  “Well, you look like you’ve done all right, anyway,” Karen said. “You look...good.”

  “Sure, other than totally losing my shit in your basement, I’m great.” She’d meant to joke, but Karen flinched. Effie stood. “Sorry. I was trying to make light.”

  Karen wouldn’t meet her gaze. She wiped her eyes again with the paper towel, then crumpled it into a ball she shoved into her pocket. “I wanted to make sure there was nothing left of what happened down there. He’s dead. There’s no reason for anyone, ever, to remember anything he did.”

  Except there was every reason. There was Effie. And there was Heath. They lived it, survived it, and they’d done it together. They were the only two who knew what it was like.

  Effie didn’t say that, though. It wouldn’t do any good to castigate Karen for what her father had done. If smiling blandly and leaving meant Karen got to go on with her life without carrying more of a burden