Thirty-One Hours

She woke up in the dark with her mouth full of cotton, and for a long time she thought she was dead.

It was a reasonable conclusion. There was no light, and no sound, and no weight in her limbs; she floated on her back in a black warm nothing, with her eyelids glued shut and her tongue lying in her mouth like a stranger. Somewhere far away a bell was ringing, slow and dull, over and over, and it took her a very long while to understand that it was her pulse. I’m dead, she thought, quite calmly. I died in my sleep. How tidy. How like me. And then her stomach turned over, with a long ugly lurch, and she knew with perfect certainty that the dead did not need to vomit.

She rolled onto her side. She retched, dry, over the edge of the mattress, with her forehead against a cool sheet. Nothing came. The room spun round her once, slowly, like a carousel winding down, and settled.

She opened her eyes.

It was not entirely dark. There were lines. Thin pale lines of gray, very straight, very regular, running across the blackness in a series of slats, like the bars of a cage. She stared at them without understanding. They ran horizontally, three inches apart, from the floor to the ceiling, and they were the exact color of an early morning seen through a keyhole.

The window, she thought. That’s where the window is.

But the window did not look like a window. It looked like a wall with cracks in it.

She lay still, and gathered herself, and began to take inventory with the slow care of someone after a car accident. Her fingers moved. Her toes moved. She was lying in her own bed, in the cedar-smelling dark, under the quilt, in a nightgown she did not remember putting on. Her mouth tasted of copper and apples. Her head throbbed in a single spot behind the left eye. And beneath her palm, laid flat on her stomach, where her hand had gone by itself, she felt the warm familiar swell of the small hard curve under the scar.

Still here, she thought. Still there.

The relief was so enormous that she began to cry, helplessly, silently, into the pillow.

* * *

She got up at last because she had to.

Her legs were water. She gripped the bedpost and hauled herself to her feet and stood swaying in the gloom, with the floor tilting under her and her heart thumping in her ears. It took her three attempts to reach the bathroom, which opened off the bedroom through a narrow door, and when she got there she found the switch by touch and the light came on in a yellow stab that made her cry out.

The woman in the mirror was a stranger.

She was gray. Her lips were cracked and colorless, her eyes sunk in dark hollows, her hair a tangle of rats’ tails against her cheek. She wore a white cotton nightgown with a ribbon at the throat, a nightgown from the bottom drawer, one she had not worn since March. Somebody had put it on her. Somebody had lifted her arms, one at a time, and drawn it over her head, and tied the ribbon in a bow.

She stared at the bow.

Then she bent over the sink, and was properly, violently sick.

When it was over she rinsed her mouth and drank from the tap in long desperate gulps. She sat on the edge of the tub with her head between her knees. And as the shaking eased and her mind began, grudgingly, to clear, she lifted her eyes to the little frosted window above the bath, and saw that there was no light in it.

It was black.

Not dark: black. Flat, matte, solid. She stood up and went to it, and put out her hand, and her fingers met something cold and rough and unyielding that had been fixed over the glass on the outside. Wood. A board. She rapped it with her knuckle, and it gave back a dull, thick, heavy knock.

She went back into the bedroom.

It took her eyes a minute. Then, as they adjusted, the pale lines came clear, and she saw them for what they were. All three windows. The tall one over the bed, the bay on the side, the little round one under the eaves. Each of them was covered, from the outside, by planks: broad, rough, unpainted planks of pale cedar, nailed or bolted across the frames, so close together that only a hair’s width of daylight leaked between. She pressed her face to a crack. She saw a thin bright thread of green. She saw a single blade of grass.

“No,” said Corinne, aloud.

She went to the door.

It was the white four-panel door she had opened a hundred times. She took the brass knob in her fist and turned it, and it turned freely, easily, with a soft click, and she pushed, and the door gave an inch away from her and stopped, as if against a wall.

She pulled it shut. It came back. She pushed again. It moved a quarter-inch, and stopped with a flat, final, metallic sound.

Outside, in the hall, something had been fixed across the frame.

She threw her whole weight against the wood, and it did not move. She hit it with her shoulder, and a bolt of white pain went through her collarbone. She hit it again. She beat on it with both fists, her breath coming in short sobbing gasps, and screamed, a raw cracked scream that bounced off the plaster and came back, and then another, and another, and stopped, panting, with her forehead against the panel.

The house was silent.

There was no answer. There was no footstep. There was only the long slow murmur of the sea, far down below the cliff, and the quiet hissing tick of the radiator, and the bedside clock.

She turned and looked at it.

It was a small digital clock, the red-numbered kind, on the nightstand. She did not remember buying it. It was one of those things that had always been there. She looked at the numbers, and the numbers said:

5:14.

It was dark in the room. But the cracks in the boards were pale gray, and a pale gray was creeping across the floor. Five-fourteen in the morning, she thought. Early. Thursday morning. She had been drinking tea at ten. She had slept seven hours.

The appointment’s at ten.

She sat down on the edge of the bed to think. She could hear her own breathing. She was not going to panic. She was going to work this out. She would count the hours: she’d gone to sleep on Wednesday night, and now it was Thursday, and she had until ten o’clock, five hours, to find a way out of a locked room on the second floor of a house three miles from the nearest road.

Then she saw the date.

It was small, in the lower corner of the display, in letters no bigger than her thumbnail. The clock had a calendar function. She had never used it. She hadn’t known it had one. She leaned toward the red glow, and read the abbreviation, and the number beside it, and the two together made no sense.

FRI 5.

Friday. The fifth.

She read it again.

FRI 5.

“No,” she said. “No, that’s — it’s broken. It’s set wrong.”

But the room was telling her. The pale light on the floor, the stiffness in her neck, the deep dry hollowness in her stomach and her bladder, the cracked tongue. Her body was telling her. She had gone to sleep at ten-fifteen on Wednesday night. It was now a quarter past five on Friday morning.

She had slept for thirty-one hours.

* * *

He came at six.

She heard him on the stairs. She had been sitting on the floor with her back against the wall beside the door, hugging her knees, for a long time, listening to the house; and the first sound was the fourth stair’s soft complaint, and then a tread in the hall, light and slow, and a faint chime of china. A pause. The click of a key.

The door opened outward the width of a hand, held on a chain. A shadow fell across the carpet. A voice, very quiet, very gentle, said:

“Corinne. I’m going to come in. I need you to stay where you are. Is that all right?”

She did not answer. She gripped her knees.

“I’ve got a tray. I’ve got toast and ginger tea and your vitamins. I’m not going to touch you. I’m going to put it on the floor and go back to the door. Okay?”

The chain rattled. The door opened wider. He stepped into the gray light with a wooden tray in his hands, and set it down on the rug, deliberately, and stepped back until his shoulders touched the frame.

He looked terrible.

He was in the same sweater he had worn on Wednesday, wrinkled and stained at the cuff. His hair was standing up on one side. A stubble of dark beard shadowed his jaw, and under his eyes were deep bruised crescents, the color of plums. He had not slept. He was as pale as she was. He stood against the doorjamb with his hands loose at his sides, and she saw that they were trembling, very slightly, as a horse trembles after a long run.

“How do you feel?” said Emory.

She made a sound that was not a word.

“I’m sorry. I know it’s a stupid question. I’ll tell you what you probably feel. Your head hurts, and your mouth is dry, and you’re sick to your stomach, and you want to scream.” He took a breath. “That’s normal. It’ll pass in a few hours. I gave you a very low dose. It’s one that’s considered safe in pregnancy; I looked it up four times. You slept longer than I intended. That’s my fault, I miscalculated. You were so exhausted that your body just — took it.” He swallowed. “I sat with you the whole time. I checked your pulse every hour. I checked your pressure, and your temperature, and your oxygen levels. I have a pulse oximeter in the truck. The baby’s fine.”

“You drugged me.”

Her voice came out cracked and tiny. It did not sound like her own.

“Yes.”

“You drugged me. You put something in the tea.”

“Yes. I did.”

He said it simply, looking straight at her, without evasion, in the plain tone of a man giving evidence. Something in the plainness of it made her go cold from head to foot. She had been ready for denial. She had been ready for tears, an excuse, an elaborate sad story. She had not been ready for him to stand there in the doorway and agree.

“Why?” said Corinne.

“Because you were going to Portland.”

“I was going to a doctor.”

“You were going to a doctor alone, on a day when someone had been in your house.” He spoke carefully, with long pauses, like a man walking on a frozen pond. “You told me so yourself. You said you were frightened. You said there was someone moving your things. And I —” His voice shook. “I’ve been up for four nights thinking about it. I thought: she’s carrying a child with a one-in-five risk of dying. She’s driving two hours alone, on a bad road, with no phone she can trust, to a hospital where I can’t follow, because she said no. And somewhere out there, there’s a person with a key to her house. And I couldn’t — I couldn’t let you go.”

“You couldn’t let me go.”

“I wanted to keep you safe.”

“You locked me in a room.”

“I know how it looks.”

“You boarded up the windows.”

“Yes.”

“You —” She scrambled to her feet. The room swung. She braced her hand against the wall and stood there swaying, in her white nightgown, with her hair in her eyes, and screamed at him, in a voice that tore at her throat: “You undressed me!”

He flinched.

It was a real flinch. It went through his whole body, from the shoulders to the heels, and for a moment his face was naked and stricken, with a flush rising up the throat. He looked away.

“You were sick,” he said, thickly. “You’d been sick on the sheets. I couldn’t leave you in them. I washed you, as gently as I could. I closed my eyes. I didn’t look.” He pressed the heel of his hand to his forehead. “I’m an EMT. I’ve done it a hundred times, for strangers, at accident scenes. I didn’t — it wasn’t — it was care, Corinne. It was only care.”

“Get out.”

“I will.”

“Get out.”

“I’ll go. I’ll go in a moment. Please.” He lowered his hand. His eyes were wet, and red-rimmed, and desperate. “I know you can’t hear me now. You’re afraid, and you’re angry, and you’ve got every right. I’m not asking you to forgive me. I’m only asking you to eat. You haven’t had anything in thirty-one hours. The baby needs it. Please. Just the toast. I’ll leave. I swear I’ll leave.”

Thirty-one hours.

He knew the number. He’d been counting.

She stood against the wall with her hand spread across her ribs, and looked at him, and for the first time she saw him whole. Not the tender boy with the pencil box, not the grave young man on his knees in the lantern room. She saw a person standing in a doorway with his hands trembling, who had taken a woman he said he loved and locked her in a cedar-smelling box, and believed himself, with every fiber of his heart, to be kind.

It was the belief that frightened her most.

* * *

“What do you want?” said Corinne.

It was perhaps ten minutes later. He had not left. He had retreated to the chair by the window, a small cane-backed chair that stood in the corner by the bookshelf, and had sat down on it with his hands between his knees, and the tray lay on the carpet between them, untouched. She still stood against the wall. She had put on the cardigan from the chair, with its empty pockets; it hung round her like a cloak.

“I want you to be well.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the only one I’ve got.”

“Then I’ll ask it differently.” She wrapped her arms around herself. “How long do you intend to keep me here?”

He didn’t speak for a moment. He looked at his hands.

“Until the baby’s born,” said Emory.

The room tilted.

“I’m not going to hurt you.” He said it in a rush, still looking down. “I want you to hear that. I swear it. I won’t raise my voice. I won’t touch you unless you ask. I won’t — I’d rather die than hurt either of you. I’ve thought about it for days. There’s a way to do this that’s good. That’s gentle. You’ll be fed, and warm. You’ll have books. I’ll bring you anything you want. I’ll sit with you in the evenings and read. The house is big. There’s the whole house, in the daytime, and the cliff path with me, when you feel well enough. And in April —” his voice caught “— in April we’ll be parents.”

“Emory.”

“I know it’s a lot.”

“You can’t do this.”

“I know it sounds wrong. I know. But I’ve thought about everything else. Every option.” He lifted his head, and his eyes were enormous, shining, utterly sincere. “You said it yourself, Corinne, in the hospital, in the doctor’s office. The risk. One in five. Do you understand what that means? One chance in five that in March, or in April, or in the middle of the night, you start to bleed, and I’m not there. And I won’t be there, because you’d have run to a strange doctor in a strange city, and some nurse will say visiting hours, and you’ll die on a table behind a door I can’t open.” His voice cracked. “I can’t. I can’t not be there. I was supposed to be there for my father. I wasn’t. I’ll never make that mistake again.”

“That’s not — that isn’t why.”

“It’s the main reason.”

“You drugged me. You boarded my windows. You stood on my porch for three days with your phone, and rang me eleven times.” She was crying now, and did not care. “You’ve been in my house. You took my paper. You told Mrs. Dunphy I was unwell. You rescheduled my appointment —”

“I did.”

She stopped.

“I called the clinic.” He said it quietly. “On Monday afternoon. I got my friend Dani at the rescue squad to do the voice. I’m sorry. I’m not proud of it. I wanted you to stay where I could see you for a few days. I thought it’d be easier. I didn’t know it would turn out like — this.”

“And my rules?”

“I took them on Sunday night. After I left. I came back at two, with my other key, when your window had gone dark and you’d stopped crying. Your cardigan was on the banister. I took the paper out of the pocket.” He closed his eyes. “I wanted something of yours. I couldn’t leave with nothing. I’m sorry.”

“The mug.”

“I moved the mug.”

“The pencils.”

“I turned the pencils.” He opened his eyes. “I wanted you to know somebody had been there. I wanted you to be frightened, and call me. I’d made up my mind you would. I thought, if she’s frightened enough, she’ll let me back in. She’ll need me. And it worked.” The ghost of a smile crossed his face, wretched and bewildered and utterly without triumph. “It worked, Corinne. You opened the door.”

A great wave of cold rose through her.

“On Wednesday you swore. You said on my father. You stood in the kitchen and said you hadn’t been in the house.”

“I lied.”

“You lied to me.”

“Yes.”

“You said you’d tell me the truth.”

“I’m telling you now.” His voice was very low. “I’m telling you everything. I’m not going to lie to you anymore. There’s no point. You’re going to be here a long time, and I don’t want us to start with a lie.” He drew a shaky breath. “I did it all. The calendar, the phone, the router, the cameras in the hall — yes, there are cameras, in the common rooms, never the bedroom, never the bath. I’ve been listening to your messages since June. I read the text from the clinic. I know everything you’ve said and written for three months.”

The cormorant, she thought. The unsent sentence. It fell into place with a tiny hollow click. “You said it.”

“The soup,” she heard herself whisper.

“I made the soup.”

“The fridge. The honey.”

“I ordered the honey from the farm in February. I knew where you’d buy it, from your old order history. I put the notes on the door.” A pause. “I wrote P. on the note because it was the name of the company. It’s Pine & Pennant. I know you thought it was Mom.”

“The company.”

He did not answer at once. He looked round the room, slowly, from the bed to the window to the bookcase to the dark wooden beams of the ceiling, with the soft wondering look of a man who has walked every inch of a place so often that he can see it with his eyes closed. Then he looked at her.

“There’s no landlord, Corinne,” he said gently. “Harbor & Pine Realty was a website. I made it in January. I bought the house in December, through an LLC, with my father’s trust. I own it. All of it. The cliff, and the road, and the lighthouse.” He smiled, a small bewildered smile. “I’ve owned it since before you came. I bought it for you. I wanted it to be ready. I wanted there to be somewhere safe.”

* * *

She did not scream again.

She had thought she would. She had thought, when the moment came, that the horror would rush up through her like a flood and break out in a howl; but what happened instead was stranger. It was as if someone had turned a dial. A great stillness came down on her, calm and clear and enormous, like the stillness at the top of a mountain, and in it she heard her own heart beating, and the sea, and the voice of a man in a chair repeating, over and over, in a gentle hoarse monotone, I did it for you.

She walked across the room.

She stooped, and picked up the tray from the carpet. She held it in both hands: the ginger tea in its cup, steaming; the toast, cut into four neat triangles, the way she had liked it when she was sick; the little blue pill bottle, and a glass of water, and a folded paper napkin. He sat very still, watching her. His eyes followed her hands.

She raised the tray to the height of her shoulders.

Then she threw it at his head.

It hit the wall behind him with a clang and a crash, in a burst of china and toast and boiling water, and he threw up his arm and ducked, and the chair went over, and she heard him gasp as the tea scalded his wrist. A long fragment of the cup went spinning across the floor. The vitamins burst from the bottle and rolled in all directions, little yellow pills, over the boards. A hot brown stain bloomed down the wall.

She stood there, panting, with her empty hands still out in front of her.

He lay half on his side with one knee drawn up and his forearm across his face. A red mark was rising on his wrist. He lowered his arm, very slowly, and looked at her; and she waited for the thing she had been afraid of since Sunday, the flicker in the eyes, the flat fish-turn under the ice.

It didn’t come.

He looked at her with tenderness. That was all. He lay among the broken china with his scalded wrist and his hair in his eyes, and looked up at her with a heartbroken, patient, wondering kind of love; and she understood, with the sinking of a stone through deep water, that there was nothing she could do that would make him angry. Nothing. Not a blow, not a curse, not a weapon. He would take it all. He would hold it, as he held everything, close against his chest, and say I understand, and love her more.

He got to his feet. He righted the chair. He picked up the tray, and began, one by one, with great care, to collect the pieces of the cup.

“I’ll bring you something else,” he said quietly. “You must be starving.”

“Let me out.”

“I can’t.”

“Emory. Please.” The word broke from her, ragged. “Please. I won’t tell anyone. I won’t go to the police. I’ll stay in the house, I’ll stay in the town, I’ll let you drive me to Portland and sit with me in the waiting room. I’ll let you hold my hand. Anything. Just open the door.”

He looked at her across the wreckage. His wrist was livid. There were tears running down his face, steadily, silently, and he did not seem to notice them.

“I’m so sorry,” said Emory.

“Then let me out.”

“I can’t let you.” His voice was gentle, and cracked, and absolutely final. “I love you too much.”

He went to the door. He set the pieces of the cup on the tray, and the tray on the floor outside, and turned, one last time, in the frame. The light behind him was bright now, a hard white gold; it fell through the cracks in the boards in long burning bars and lay on the floor between them like the bars of a cage.

“I’ll be back at noon,” he said. “With lunch.”

The door closed. She heard the chain. She heard the key, and the bolt, and then something heavy being slid across the frame outside, slowly, with a long scrape of wood on wood.

Then she heard him on the stairs, going down: step, step, step, the fourth stair’s soft complaint, a pause, and, very faintly, rising up through the old floors of the old house, the sound of him humming.

She stood in the middle of the room.

She put her hand to her throat. Her fingers closed on the silver chain, her mother’s, and found it slack. She drew it out from beneath the nightgown. It hung from her fist, fine and bright, swinging a little, with its small clasp and its empty loop. The key was gone.

She looked at it for a long time.

Then she walked to the window, and put her face to the nearest crack, and watched, through a hair’s breadth of light, a single blade of grass bend and straighten in the wind.