“Safe”
“Safe”
Dear Diary,
Today is the 354th day of my captivity. The only reason I keep writing is so that I can keep track of the days. 354 days. That’s almost a year. I still don’t know why my captor has taken me; he won’t tell me anything “more than I need to know.” He hasn’t tried anything yet. He still allows me to sleep in the locked bedroom. My food doesn’t seem to be poisoned. So, what does he want? He still leaves the letters and poems, which freaks me out a little. Still, I’m kinda used to it by now, I guess. It doesn’t make it any less weird, though.
Lily sighed as she put the pen down. Each journal entry seemed to blur into the next. When the world is nothing but a set of rooms without windows and there are no means of entertainment other than books, CDs, and a stranger, what else is there to write about?
Almost a year of his stares, of his little love notes, of him trying to show her his love. He was older than her by almost double, but he didn’t always act it. Sometimes he laughed and acted like he had the heart of a child, yet he wasn’t simple. After years of strict F.B.I. training, it was still hard for him to express his emotions. They cut that out of you, he said. She still had all of the notes from him sitting on the desk in ‘her’ room.
“I don’t know why I keep these things,” she said, grabbing a stack of the letters and shoving them into a desk drawer.
With that motion, Lily glanced around the room. I’ve memorized almost every detail, she thought, yet they still draw me in.
The walls were an eggshell color with teal border stripes, and there were no windows. The floors are bare except for an area rug the same color of the stripes on the walls. The light fixture is a small crystal chandelier which hangs above the four-poster bed. The bedding consists of various shades of teal covering the large queen-sized bed. Besides the bed and the desk, the only things in the room are a bookshelf full of books, a mirror, and a chaise-lounge. Basically, the room was sweet but boring.
Lily walked over to the mirror and stared at herself. She didn’t feel like she was anything special. Her hair was the color of earth, curling down to the middle of her back. Her skin and cheeks were freckled, and became even more so when she spent time in the sun. Nothing seemed special to her except for her eyes. She had often heard people say they were green like grass, but she felt like they were closer to a seafoam green. Either way, she didn’t see why Kevin would single her out.
With a sigh, she walked back over to the desk and picked up the top piece of paper in a different pile. It was the poem he had written her last night and had slid under her locked door. Her brow furrowed as she read it.
The morning sun cannot compare
Whenever I look upon your face
I know that you balk at my stare
My love, to you, is out of place
But it’s true.
As Kevin pushed the potatoes around the skillet, he thought about the reason he took Lily away in the first place. He could always say it was to keep her safe from the impending disaster at her school, but that wouldn’t be telling himself the full truth. He did want to keep her safe, that was true. The reason he wanted her safe more than the other students was one he still had difficulty in admitting, even to himself.
He loved her.
Even admitting that in his own head felt wrong. He knew he shouldn’t be having these feelings for her. She was young enough to be his daughter! Still, he couldn’t fight what he was feeling any more than he could try not to breathe. Watching the school for all of those months, he could only notice her. How her eyes showed what the rest of her face wouldn’t, how she interacted with other students. He saw how she felt uncomfortable with everyone, and that made him wish that he could be the one she felt comfortable with. He knew he couldn’t do that by normal social standards because of their age difference. So, he did the only thing he could think of at the time: he took her. Took her to keep her safe and to show her that he was worthy of love, despite the obstacles.
Sighing, he took the potatoes out of the skillet and put them on the plate next to the eggs. As he was easing the fried potatoes onto the plate, he couldn’t help but see his hand. It always made him cringe to see the shiny, scar-covered skin. It was years ago, and he was trying to save someone, but he couldn’t get to her before the bomb exploded. It wasn’t a large bomb, but it still managed to kill the few people who were close enough and leave marks on those who were just on the inside of the blast radius. His right hand, right arm, and right half of his chest were covered in burn scars which, except for the hand, he kept covered with long-sleeved shirts. Even in the summer, when the temperatures grew excruciatingly high, he wore long sleeves. No one should see those scars, even if the rest of him was moderately attractive.
He looked in the hallway mirror to make sure that he looked presentable. His thick, wavy, brown hair was medium-length. Nothing that was too long or too short, but he could tell he would need a haircut soon. His green eyes scanned his face, not really impressed with what he saw. He was always called attractive, especially being a slim 6’3”, but that didn’t prevent his wife from leaving him, or the subsequent girlfriends. All of them had been after the accident and they seemed to only pity him and want to take care of him. They thought he couldn’t take care of himself when, in reality, he could take care of himself very well. He could even shoot a target dead-on from 500 yards, and that’s with his right hand. He was even better with his left.
After he was satisfied that he looked presentable, he walked the rest of the way down the hall and knocked on Lily’s door.
She jumped as she heard a knock at the door. “Who is it?” she asked, more to annoy him than anything else.
“Who else would it be, Lily?”
He couldn’t help but say her name in a way completely different than he said the rest of the sentence. It was as if his very life depended on those last two syllables. He heard her sigh and unlock the door. She opened it and leaned in the doorway.
“What do you want, Kevin?”
His eyes bored into hers with such intensity that she straightened up. When she looked away, he nervously brushed a hand through his hair. He eyed her own hair, which he had always said was, “so similar to his,” and her eyes (which, as he put it, were “crystal clear like the ocean”) were what had drawn him to her in the first place. Normally, this morning exchange would last only a few minutes, just enough time for him to tell her what was for breakfast, but this time seemed different. He seemed more nervous than usual.
“Will you come to breakfast? I made you eggs and potatoes. I brought you a newspaper, too.”
A newspaper? she thought. He had never brought her a newspaper before. He had always tried to make sure that she was cut off from the outside world. It was as if reading or hearing about the outside world would somehow alert others to her presence there. She had never understood his paranoia. Maybe it was something specific to kidnappers.
“Yeah, I’m coming,” she said, walking past him as she closed the door behind her.
He followed closely behind her, so close that she could smell him. He smelled like Old Spice, like her grandfather used to smell. When they got to the table, he pulled out her chair and gave her a hand to help her sit. She had never needed his help sitting in a chair, but he seemed to rely so much on that single contact, on the way that her hand rested gently in his. His hand was warm and soft and his thumb caressed the back of her hand, but when he didn’t let go to push her chair in, she grew even more concerned.
“Oh, Lily,” he sighed, looking down at the hand he was still holding and stroking with his thumb. “I’m so sorry.”
She stared at him in confusion, wondering what, besides kidnapping her, he could be sorry for. Then he handed her the newspaper. The main headline took up almost the entire page covering a picture. The picture was utter devastation, with people in the streets crying. Across the picture it read “BOMB EXPLODED IN NYC. THOUSANDS DEAD.”
She grew even more confused until she looked at the picture closer. In the background, among the rubble, was a bright blue VW Beetle with a flower on the hood. A purple flower that she had hand-painted on the hood a few days after she had gotten the car. She felt faint and numb.
“This is my street. My apartment is… was… right next to my car,” she whispered.
But there was nothing but rubble. She was in shock as she opened the paper and read, her hands shaking and feeling like she could barely comprehend what she was reading.
On the morning of January 28th at 3:35a.m., a bomb exploded on 51st Street in Manhattan. There are no suspects as of yet, but it is thought that it may an act of domestic terrorism. Though a threat to the area, which housed a private all-girls college, had been known by the authorities for some time, an investigation had been a dead-end.
She gave up reading further. She had lived there a year ago, before Kevin took her.
I attended that school, she thought.
She didn’t have to read any more to know that there were very few survivors. There couldn’t be, not with the time the bomb went off. Everyone would have been asleep in their dorms. All of her friends were gone. Her roommate Elyse, her friend Diana, dead. All dead.
“I guess it was lucky I was here then,” she said, shaking and trying to wipe the tears from her cheeks.
“It wasn’t luck,” Kevin whispered, looking at her face.
Her brow furrowed as she looked at him. “What do you mean?”
“I knew about the bomb,” he said, letting her hand go and running his hand through his hair again. It was his nervous habit. “I was part of the FBI before I took you, and we had knowledge of the threat. When we first got the threat, I was told to investigate the area, since we thought the bomber lived in the area, or frequented it. One day, I was watching the school for suspicious activity when I saw you. It was the day that the girl pushed you. I saw it, and I saw you start to tear up. I had already noticed you, but in that moment, I wanted to hold you. I can’t fully explain it.”
He moved from kneeling on the floor to sitting in the chair next to her. He wouldn’t look at her, couldn’t look at her, only at the napkin he was fidgeting with his fingers. “I watched you for a few days, at first trying to do my job, but then I ended up using my reconnaissance excuse to get as much information about you as I could. I found out that you were living alone since your parents had kicked you out for wanting to go to school. I attended one of your voice rehearsals. Whenever you ate at that café, the one with the red and white umbrellas, I did my best to sit near you. I loved hearing you laugh with your friends. Then, when we had received a second threat, I began to take it more seriously than the rest of the bureau. I now had something to lose. So, I looked for a place. A safe place that was far enough away that nothing could happen. I found a place, this place, in the middle of the New Jersey Pine Barrens. I paid for it in cash and waited for a weekend when I knew you’d be alone. When you were sleeping, I injected you with a sedative and brought you here. The rest you know.”
Lily looked at him in shock. He seemed nervous, but at the same time it seemed like a weight was lifted off of his shoulders. Still, it made her feel a little uncomfortable when he mentioned the sedative. Still, he did save her life. It seemed as if he genuinely cared about her, even if he was a little misguided in his methods. Maybe it was the agent at work then, rather than the man.
“You saved my life,” she whispered, looking at him. When he looked up, she took his hand in hers and looked down at it, seeing his scars for the first time. Rather than commenting on them, which would make things even more uncomfortable than they already were, she continued, “If you hadn’t taken me, I would be dead just like everyone else. Why didn’t you tell me before?”
“Would you have believed me before?”
Of course she wouldn’t have, he knew that. She would have just said that he was making up a story so that she would fall in love with him. She could feel that her dislike towards him had lessened at hearing this, and she began to see him in a new light. He grew to be more than just him, the kidnapper. He became Kevin. Someone who risked his job, his reputation, and his life to make sure that she wouldn’t die in that explosion.
“I love you, Lily,” he whispered, looking back down at his hand. “I have since the moment I first saw you, and I couldn’t imagine a world without you. I wish that it could have been another way, but I had no choice. I didn’t know any other way. Besides, would you really have loved me out there? In the real world?”
She took a good look at him then. He didn’t look close to forty. He did have a few strands of gray in his hair, but he was tall and fit and handsome, and his burned hand didn’t even bother her that much.
She checked herself then. Handsome? Is that really what I thought of him?
She thought about it. She couldn’t tell if these thoughts always existed or if they were just because of the details that had just come to light. After all, she did remember seeing him in the café and thinking that he was not bad looking. Perhaps, because of the kidnapping, her image of him had changed, and it was reverting back to its original state. She had denied it for so long because she knew he had kidnapped her, but then she thought of the year of love letters and poetry. The year of breakfasts and lunches and dinners that he had made. He had previously been only thought of as just a creepy older man, but she could see now that he was like the guys who were her age when it came to women. He was nervous around a girl he liked and didn’t know what to do about it.
“The real world is gone now,” she said, kneeling down at his feet. Tears ran down her cheek as she took both of his hands in hers, holding them tightly. “You saved me, and you did it because you loved me.”
“Love,” he said, looking down into my eyes with more hope than she had ever seen someone express. “I haven’t stopped loving you.”
She smiled up at him. He knew that she should be mourning her lost friends and that he should let her be, but they seemed so far away. Maybe it was the shock, and maybe it was the look in his eyes, but she felt an undeniable urge to kiss him. As if reading her mind, he took one of his hands from hers and lightly touched her cheek, running his fingers along her jawline. Her eyes closed as he leaned down. She felt his lips on hers, gentle and wet with tears. She was crying for lost friends and he was crying for found love. The kiss lasted only a second, but it went a mile. She rested her head in his lap and began sobbing openly. He stroked her hair as she wept into his lap.
I may have lost my friends, she thought, and I may be stuck here, but at least I can have some semblance of happiness.
Dear Diary,
Today, I realized that the days don’t matter anymore. The people who I considered friends are gone, and there isn’t anything I can do about it. I am alive, and I intend to live. I would never have chosen to care for Kevin, but it happened so suddenly. I still haven’t figured out if I’ve cared this whole time but denied it, or if I only realized it when he explained his feelings for me. But they’re there, the feelings. He’s said we could leave here if we wanted to, but I don’t know if I want to. Out there is the real world. It’s dangerous and scary. In here, in Kevin’s arms, I’m safe.
