Page 45

FORTY-FOUR

When she gets to her apartment, Alex locks the door and rushes to her bedroom. She goes into the closet and reaches up to the top shelf. Her fingers close around the small metal lockbox where she keeps the important pieces of her life from before New York. These were the only things she took with her. She’d kept it at Sam’s Hardware, in the back where there was a small storage area that served as the employee break room. “You can hold on to this for me, right?” she had asked him once, not long before the end.

She remembers the way Sam looked at her. He’d hesitated, clearly wanting to say something else. “Of course. It’ll be right here. It won’t move. Are you sure you don’t need anything else?” But she’d been too scared to tell him. She hadn’t even wanted to risk coming downtown to bring him the box. What if someone saw her walking down the shoulder of the road toward town and told Brian? She’d shaken her head and given Sam a grateful squeeze on the shoulder. “I’ll come back for it. I’m just not sure when yet.”

Now Alex places her fingers on the dials and lines up the numbers until the lever pops open. She hasn’t opened the box in years. There was no need. Every time she happened to glance at it in her closet, it gave her such a pang of anxiety that she would quickly look away. She was trying to move on, she’d told herself. If she was going to start over, she didn’t need to look at all of the evidence that she was once the scared young woman in an abusive relationship. But now she wants proof. She pushes back the top of the box.

It is mostly empty. She’d saved only a few mementos from her other life. A small plasticky phone from a convenience store; the stubs of several used bus tickets that had brought her here; a social security card for Bess Christopherson, the name she bore until she turned twenty-two years old. There is a thin stack of photographs, the shiny paper curly with age. In one, her six-year-old self squints into the camera. It is summer and she is wearing her typical mishmash of secondhand shorts and a top; her two front teeth are missing. Her mother’s tan arm loops around her shoulders, and she gazes down at her with a maternal smile. This was, of course, before her mom’s boyfriend, Sid, entered the picture and stole her attention. Another photo of her on her first day at work, standing behind the counter wearing a trademark red apron with Sam’s scrawled in cursive across the chest. Alex feels the ache at the back of her throat and puts the photos aside.

She finds what she is looking for at the very bottom of the box. She pulls it out gently: a copy of the Herald from August 2014. She holds it by the edges, careful not to bend it. The newspaper has yellowed and is as fragile as a butterfly wing. She unfolds it delicately, like an archivist at a museum, peeling back the pages until she finds Francis’s letter.

Dear Lost Girl,

It’s a mystery of the human condition that often we seek out situations that are not good for us. Sometimes for a while they even allow us to pretend we are not hurting ourselves. Often staying inside the delusion feels easier than the alternative, which is usually some version of a dark room where you can’t see any doors. I need you to listen to me when I tell you it is not easier to stay. That a month or a year of stumbling around searching in the dark will be better than slowly allowing your life force to be stolen. It is no exaggeration to say that that is what he is doing to you.

People like him need you to be scared that something is wrong with you so that you don’t look at what is wrong with him. He wants to keep the focus on you, to make you nervous, too scared of your own imagined deficiencies to be able to even see any of his.

But we do not need to analyze him for a moment longer. He has taken far too much of your time already. The goal right now needs to be about getting out of this horrible and already dangerous situation. You need to find a safe place to go. You’ve written about your family not being able to support you. If they are not an option, I need you to know that there is help out there, there are shelters devoted to women’s safety. It isn’t ideal, I understand that, but for now, while you transition away from dependence on him, it is invaluable.

The next time he leaves, I want you to make a list of places you have always wanted to go. This should be fun. I have a feeling you are a bit of an adventurous spirit. Now I want you to choose one of them, it doesn’t even matter really which one as long as it is far away from him, somewhere he has no connection to whatsoever. I want you to find a women’s help center in that place, and then I need you to get on a bus, a plane, whatever you can afford, and get the hell out of there. Do you hear me? Things are going to be hard for right now, but you will be giving yourself the biggest gift of all. Your whole future.

You don’t need him in order to be special. Just like Dorothy and her ruby slippers, you will realize that everything you need has been inside you all along.

Go now. Quickly, before it is too late.

Sincerely,

Constance

Alex doesn’t realize until she puts the paper down that she is crying, gulping for breath. Her face is wet with tears. All those years ago, she’d followed the advice of a woman she’d never met and moved thousands of miles away to a city she’d never been to in order to save her own life.

A car honks outside. Standing up, Alex wipes her eyes and looks out the window to where a small white car is double-parked with its emergency lights on. She grabs her phone and a charger and shoves them into her purse. As she heads to the door, she still has the words Francis wrote in response to her letters as a young woman begging for help imprinted in her brain. They are a mantra she memorized and still repeats to herself in order to keep going. And now, even more than that, they are a calling to find Francis’s killer.