Heartless (30 page)

I wasn’t staying calm. Not at all. Her next words didn’t help.

“Baby, we’re in trouble. There are people here, bad people. They told me they did terrible things to you. Is it true?”

“I wanted to tell you, I never thought they…Mom, are you okay?”

“Jolene Elizabeth Hall,
is it true?
I need to know if what they say is true! Tell me
now
.” Her voice, always so fluid, so soothing, was tight like a rubber band stretched to the brink of breaking. The tightness rendered it shrill, too, and beside me Eli flinched.

I didn’t want to answer. The interior of the car closed in around me. Eli went fuzzy, the afternoon light went dark. I closed my eyes. “Yes,” I whispered. “Yes, it’s true. Everything they said, it’s probably true.”

“So you’re…” She trailed off, and the sound of her sobbing threatened to kill me, to finish me right then and there with no further interactions with my bloody creator.

But I wasn’t dead yet.

I opened my eyes. “No,” I shouted. “No. I’m not dead. I’m not dead yet.” I’d never been so sure of my own words. “Where are you? Tell me!”

Suddenly it was my father’s voice at the other end of the line. He had a man’s voice. It belonged on football fields, or at fancy martini bars, wheeling and dealing. At various times in my life, he’d use his voice to terrify me, and to delight me. But now he sounded old. Exhausted. Pushed to the limit. “Jolene?”

“Yes, Daddy, I’m here.”

“Oh, thank God. Whatever you just said to your mother, it doesn’t matter. It can be fixed. They told me, the people holding us. They told me they can reverse it. We can save you.”

“No, Daddy.”

“Yes. We have to do a few things, help them out, and we will. They’re right here next to us, Jolene. There’s three of them. They had your mother’s phone, and only gave it to us when Lucy said it was Eli’s number. Jolene, listen to me. Do not call the police. They need you here, as soon as possible. They say you’re running out of time. But they can still fix you, as soon as I wire them the money and get them the connections they need.”

I shook my head violently, almost dropping the phone. “But Daddy, they’re lying. And you can’t negotiate with them! They’re killers! They’ve killed dozens of girls already, it won’t matter to them if I die, too!”

“Stop it, Jolene. Don’t say that! It’ll upset your mother, and it’s not true. I have their word.” He sounded desperate, like he was grasping at straws, and he knew it. But he didn’t want me to know it. And he hadn’t even seen me yet.

“Daddy, they just want your money. Don’t give them anything.” I paused, glanced back at Eli. “How’s Lucy? How are you and Mom? Have they hurt you?”

“We’re fine. Your mother is shaken, but we’re unharmed. Wait, no, stop…”

There was a crackle on the phone, and then once again I heard my mother’s sobs filling the air, so much more clearly than they’d been moments ago.

“What happened?” I cried.

Then it was Sondra Lewis’s voice taking over the airwaves. “You’re on speaker, dear Jo. Your parents and Lucy are with me. I heard you blew my cover this afternoon, that you figured it all out. Good detective work, dear. I’m rather proud of you.”

“Let them go,” I said, trying hard to block out the sound of my mother’s hysterics from my ears. “Let my parents and Lucy
go
!”

“Oh yes, but dear, we need your parents’ connections. Lucy’s connections. The funding your families can provide. You do remember burning down our entire facility, don’t you? We need to rebuild, resupply. Of course, lucky for you, we have a backup location where, believe it or not, we can still fix you. That way, you won’t be a complete waste. And if not, when you die, we can at least use you for spare parts.” She giggled, a high-pitched sound that used to wake students from their mid-class slumber, but now made me half-crazed with anger.

“You’re a psychopathic bitch.”

“Oh no, dear. I’m not. Come back to us and I’ll prove to you exactly how not crazy I am. How not crazy my friends are,
dear.
You’ve caused us enough headaches this week. It’s time to come home.”

“No,” I said. I turned to Eli and frantically mimed at him:
Get Strong,
I tried to say, but he just stared at me in silence, a look of horror on his face. Outside, Strong shouted into his phone. I decided to stall, to keep them talking until he could come in and use his fancy phone tracker to find out where they all were. “Let me talk to Lucy. Let me hear her voice.”

In the background I heard a crash, then I heard Lucy. “Ouch, okay, okay,
quit it!
” Lucy sounded pissed as hell, not at all dead, and I was thrilled. “Jo, I’m here. They’re assholes, but they haven’t done anything to us yet. Your parents have been here for about an hour. But look, don’t come. It won’t end well if you…
ow! I said quit!
” There was another crash, and then Lucy was silent.

“Lucy?” I called. “Luce? Mom, Daddy, is everything okay?”

There were more sounds of struggle, and then once again Sondra Lewis’s voice was the loudest. “Jo. Dear, sweet Jo. All this will be over soon. Just come home. Now.”

“No! Never! Not on your terms!”

My mother cried out, and it sounded like she was in pain.

“Well, then, dear, we’ll just have to do this the hard way.”

“Let them go, you bitch!”

And then the phone went dead.

“Mom? Mom?
Mommy?
”

My mother didn’t answer, and when I tried to call back, my call went straight to voicemail. “Hi, you’ve reached Vera Hall. I’m sorry I missed your call, but if you leave a message…”

I hung up.

“Dammit,” I said, before I doubled over, folding down upon myself, my shoulders shaking and heaving in a cruel mockery of true crying. I stayed that way until the driver’s side door opened and Strong loomed over me, red-faced and angry.

“What’s going on?” he said.

“They have my parents.”

“I know,” he said.

S
trong reached in and grabbed my arm. He yanked me hard so that I tumbled out of the car. My charger burst from the dashboard and the cord dangled in the snow. I flew through the air, across Strong’s broad shoulders.

I yelped. “What the hell?”

From the back seat, Eli yelled and tried to open the door. His fingers squeaked against the glass as he tried to reach through to help me, but I was well beyond his reach.

“You know what, Jo?” he said, his voice cold. “I’m so tired of smelling you. You can ride the rest of the way in the trunk.”

“What? No! No, stop!”

I kicked and yelled and even bit, but the mouthful of Strong’s uniform coat knocked two teeth from my mouth. I spat them in the snow. Profanity poured from my mouth as he carried me to the trunk of the squad car and dumped me in. I landed in a heap in the small, carpeted space, where I lay in sudden, stunned silence as he slammed the trunk closed. I was enveloped in complete darkness.

Through the back seat I heard more struggling, and then silence. I didn’t know if Eli was still in the car or not, but it soon began to move.

For once I was grateful for my lack of human senses. The motion didn’t bother me, not immediately anyway. I couldn’t smell musty carpet or exhaust. I knew carbon monoxide wouldn’t kill me.

But. In the darkness, I was scared. More scared than I’d ever been before.

T
ime passed, but I had no idea how much. The car moved forward, left, right, up and down, and I learned I wasn’t entirely immune to motion sickness. My head spun, a vortex in a car trunk. It was a strange sensation, the spinning without the stomach-churning nausea, and yet it wasn’t a new feeling to me.

I
was ten years old, on a trip to Miami for one of my father’s annual lawyer conferences. My mother and I tagged along, looking forward to our annual week of beach and pool and shopping. My parents sat on either side of me in our first class seats, and I enjoyed the doting attention of a handsome flight attendant who brought me chocolates and a shiny metal pilot pin.

But the flight was turbulent. Extremely turbulent. The type where the pilot says, in an oppressively calm voice, to stay in your seats except in an emergency, and you somehow know the emergency is now. Where the flight attendants tour the cabin with empty smiles, securing any loose belongings before belting themselves into their own fold-down chairs.

At first, it felt like a roller coaster ride. We went up. We went down. We hit bumps. We dropped for hundreds of feet at a time. I grinned at my parents and raised my hands over my head. “Look, Mom!” I said, laughing. “No hands!”

But then the plane banked, turning to try to get out of the chop. As one wing dipped, my stomach dropped. I felt like the seat had dropped out from underneath me, like I was free-falling without a parachute.

We banked the other direction, and then the other. Each time, I felt more and more out of control. The free-fall in my stomach headed toward Mach speeds. After a minute, my head began to spin, whirling with a tornado’s ferocity.

The smile melted from my face. My arms sank to my lap. I looked at my mother, away from the window through which I had stared at the cotton ball cloudbanks. “I don’t feel so good,” I said, bile rising in the back of my throat.

She was like lightning. Before I could blink, she’d reached into the pocket on the back of the seat in front of her. She pulled out the barf bag and held it open in front of me.

It wasn’t a second too soon. The entire contents of my stomach spewed into the bag. Out came the chocolates, the sodas, the tiny airline pretzels. It was all gone. And still the plane kept banking, so I kept vomiting.

My father turned away, disgusted, but my mother never missed a beat. When the first bag filled, she somehow had a second one waiting. Within moments, with a free hand I never saw, she plastered a Dramamine patch behind my left ear. Soon, I felt woozy and weak, but the vomiting stopped as suddenly as it came.

But my head didn’t stop spinning for a long time. Not until after the airplane landed and we drove away in a chauffeured limousine. Not until after we reached our resort hotel with a lagoon-shaped pool that called out to me even while I wobbled. Not until after I slept the afternoon away on the overstuffed couch in our penthouse hotel suite.

M
y head spun like that as I rattled around in the trunk of Adam’s police car. I wanted so badly to throw up, even though I knew it wouldn’t stop the spins.

Throwing up would have at least felt productive.

But my body couldn’t do that anymore.

My body couldn’t do anything anymore, other than wait. And wait. And wait some more.

So that’s what I did, in the trunk, while I continued to spin.

E
ventually, my internal battery ran low. Thoughts grew thicker, harder to maintain. Even the spins slowed down. I longed, thickly, for the warm buzz of the car charger, even more for the electrical socket in my dorm room. We become so quickly addicted to the few things in life that feel good. It hurt that I’d never feel that again.

And then, I shut down.

I’d love to say that shutting down felt good, a relief, like how a good nap can seem such an amazing escape from a rough day.

But instead, shutting down felt final. My eyelids fell shut, locking me into darkness more complete than the blackest night.

I will not shut down. I will not shut down.

As though I was a computer accessing a file, I found deep in the recesses of my mind a memory of a photograph of my mother and father when they were very young. As a little girl I’d carried the photo with me in a small, glittery-covered purse everywhere I went. It hung from a braided cord across my chest and back, sitting low on my hip. If I was apart from my parents, I’d pull it out and look at it. My small fingers would trace the curls in my mother’s hair, the slope of my father’s shoulder. They held each other in the photo, their faces close together, foreheads touching. My mother’s lips parted in a wide, laughing smile, and my father’s eyes crinkled at the corners in the way they did when he was happy. Really and truly happy.