Authors: Amy Cross
“I probably could have thrown most of it away,” I mutter, feeling spots of cold rain starting to fall. Looking up, I see that the sky is a darker gray than earlier, but still lighter than the hospital's concrete walls.
“Shall we go back in, then?” she asks. “I bet all the doctors and nurses are waiting to say goodbye. You're a popular girl around here.”
I shake my head.
“You don't want to go and see them one last time?”
“I said goodbye to the ones I wanted to,” I reply. It's a lie, but hopefully it'll be enough for her.
She pauses, clearly a little disappointed. That's typical of her, really. Always so desperately polite.
“Can we get going?” I ask, heading around the side of the car and opening the passenger-side door. “I just want to go home and forget about this place.”
“I'll just pop back in and get your prescriptions from Doctor Larkin,” she replies. “Are you
sure
you don't want to -”
“I'll wait here.”
With that, I climb into the car and pull the door shut. I wait as my mother hovers a little, but finally she goes back into the building and I lean back, trying to relax. For a moment, the whole world feels completely silent all around, and I adjust the rear-view mirror so I can see my eyes. I thought I'd have a blank expression, but instead I look absolutely terrified. It's as if what I'm feeling doesn't always match my face these days, but I guess I can work on that.
Home.
I'm going home.
The truth is, I didn't go back inside to say goodbye to the doctors and nurses because I already know what they think. I see it in their eyes, they think I'll be back, that they have to give me this chance but that I'm irrevocably broken inside. They think I'll have some kind of mental collapse, and I'll be dragged kicking and screaming back to the hospital before too long. Even Doctor Larkin seems reticent, and I wouldn't be surprised if they're keeping my room open for me. I'm going to prove them wrong, though. I'm going to get through this, and I'm going to be a normal person again. I'm twenty-four years old and I'm not going to be defined by something that happened when I was twenty-one.
I'm going to live a normal life again.
He swings the baseball bat at me, hard enough that for a moment I actually think my head might come off. Instead, I feel my jaw shatter and I cry out, but he quickly hits me again, this time on the other side. Again and again, pounding me as I cry out, hitting me harder and harder until I start to lose consciousness and -
“Do you want a cup of tea?” Mum asks.
Turning, I see that she's already getting two cups off the shelf.
“Thanks,” I mutter. Making tea is Mum's default activity when she's nervous.
“I spoke to Karen over the internet,” she continues, “and she said she'd like to pop over to see you later today, but I told her I'd have to check first to see if you're up for a visit.”
“Why wouldn't I be up for a visit?” I ask, before realizing that I probably sound a little too defensive. “I mean, yeah, sure, I'd like that.”
“You remember Karen, don't you?” she asks. “You went to school with -”
“Of course I remember Karen,” I reply, bristling at the suggestion otherwise. “I'm not brain-damaged.”
Sighing, I realize that I'm being way too harsh. The last thing I want is to turn into some kind of resentful bitch.
“Sorry,” I tell her. “I didn't mean to snap.”
Mum smiles at me as she heads to the fridge. She's trying so hard to act as if nothing's wrong, but I can't stop thinking about that very first day at the hospital when she came to see me, just after she'd found out what had happened to me at the cabin. She was sobbing, she was in a worse state than me, and she hugged me so tight that it actually hurt. I've never seen so much mascara run down one face before. Now she's back to how she used to be, albeit with an edge of discomfort. Sometimes I wonder whether she knows all the gruesome details about what happened to me, or whether she chose to focus on the bigger picture.
As she opens the fridge door, I briefly get a sense of someone standing next to her, but I turn and of course there's no-one there.
Don't go crazy, Anna.
Keep it together.
Christian smiles as he starts drilling through my breast-bone. I can hear myself screaming.
Stop it.
Stop thinking about that.
“I think you'll like this one,” Mum says, setting two tea-bags into the cups. “I've started drinking green tea now. I didn't like it at first, I thought it was far too bitter, but now I reckon it's rather nice with a bit of lemon. Do you want to try, love?”
“Sure.”
She smiles again. That was the right answer.
“Hey,” I tell her, stepping over to join her, “do you want to see something cool?”
“Um...”
Without waiting for a reply, I reach up and remove my prosthetic nose. “How -”
“Stop!” She immediately turns away. “Anna, put that thing back on!”
“I was only -”
“Put it back on!” she shouts. “Please!”
I pause for a moment, shocked by her reaction, before settling the nose back in place. In the old days, she and I shared the same sense of humor, but she seems to have tightened up while I was in hospital. “Sorry,” I reply, “I was only trying to make you laugh.”
“Why would
that
make me laugh?” she asks, slowly turning back to me. Her eyes are filled with fear, as if she expects me to suddenly do it again. “Anyway, this tea is really rather nice once you get used to it. The bitter notes are still there, but the lemon makes it all somehow okay. Plus, the anti-oxidants...”
She keeps talking about tea as we sit at the kitchen table. I don't really interrupt, except to ask the occasional question just to show that I'm paying attention. There's something kind of calming about being here with her like this, and I'm mildly shocked that one person can say
so much
about tea. Still, as the minutes drag past, I can feel my thoughts drifting. I want to talk to Mum about what happened to me, to make sure that
she's
okay, but I know that kind of topic is off-limits. Finally, I realize that there's only one way I can satisfy my curiosity.
***
“A British girl has flown home from Norway just days after being rescued from a remote cabin,” I read, having brought up yet another online article on my laptop. “Twenty-one-year-old Anna Matthews is believed to have spent several days being tortured by a group who, according to police, were intending to sell a video of the ordeal to the highest bidder.”
I can hear Mum pottering about in the kitchen downstairs. Up here in my bedroom, however, I'm finally reading the news articles that were kept from me at the hospital.
Scrolling down, I find a photo of myself as I was back then, just before I left for Oslo. The picture shows me standing in a departure lounge at Heathrow, smiling happily. I look so carefree, it's almost impossible to believe that I was once so confident and brave. I want to reach through the screen and tell that twenty-one-year-old that it's a trap, that she mustn't get on the plane, but I know I can't change the past. Scrolling again, I find another photo, this one showing Jennifer and Joe.
A shiver rushes through my chest and I quickly switch to another tab.
“Anna Matthews,” I read, “now twenty-four, endured a nightmarish ordeal three years ago when she was lured to a Norwegian cabin and tortured. Now her ex-boyfriend Max Walters has written a book about his own reaction to the horrifying incident, including his time with Anna before she was kidnapped and also his attempts to come to terms with what happened. In an exclusive interview, he tells us why Anna's ordeal shocked him to his core, he explains his sadness that she refuses to let him visit her in hospital, and he defends himself against accusations that he's cashing in on her ordeal.”
“I hope you choke on the money from that book,” I mutter, scrolling down and seeing a photo of Max sitting with a somber expression, holding a book titled 'Horror at the Cabin: The Boyfriend's Story'. I want to say that I can't believe he'd stoop so low as to put his name on something like that, but deep down I guess I always knew Max was a loser. He soaked up every minute of fame he could get from what happened to me, and he even ended up as a contestant on a couple of reality TV shows, but the last I heard he'd spent every penny he earned and now he's back working at the supermarket.
Good. Let him rot.
Tucking the knife under my left breast, Jennifer maintains eye contact with me as she starts to cut. I scream and try to pull away as I feel the blade slicing through my flesh again and again, tearing a little further each time. Finally I feel the knife break through just below my shoulder-blade, and Jennifer holds the breast up for me to see before tossing it aside like a lump of old, wobbly meat.
Instinctively, I reach under my shirt and touch the patch of scarred, flat skin on my chest.
And then someone laughs outside.
Getting to my feet, I hurry over to the window. A couple of local kids are walking past the house, talking excitedly about something, and for a moment I feel a rush of anger at the idea that they might be making fun of me. I've been prepared for this, I steeled myself for the inevitability of jokes and ridicule. After a moment, however, they take the next turn and walk along another street, and I realize that they weren't talking about me at all. I'm sure there are a few people who think of me as the local celebrity, but Doctor Larkin warned me that I mustn't let myself become paranoid, and I guess I still need to focus on following that advice. Heading back over to my laptop, I tell myself to calm down. It would be so easy to become a paranoid wreck.
“What about the other one?” Jennifer asks with a smile, stepping back toward me with the bloodied knife in her right hand. “Can't have you looking lop-sided, can we? Or maybe we can save that for another day.” She pauses, with a hint of anticipation in her eyes. “My, what a pretty nose you have.”
“What's the difference between Anna Marshall and Peppa Pig?” I read out loud, as I find a joke about me on social media. “One's a squealing pig that needs slicing up, and the other's a character in a children's show.”
***
“That's sick!” Karen laughs. “Doesn't it hurt?”
“Nope,” I reply, taking a moment to put my nose back on. “Mum almost had a fit when I showed her. I guess it's kind of childish, I should stop, but I love seeing people's reactions. Is that really so awful?” I pause for a moment. “When I describe it like that,” I add, “it doesn't really seem very healthy. It's almost needy. Okay, I definitely won't do it again, I just... I guess my sense of humor got a little dark in hospital.”
“Show me again,” she says with a faint smile.
I briefly take my nose off before setting it back in place.
“Don't take this the wrong way,” she says, “but next Halloween, you could have the greatest costume of all time!”
“Wanna help me with it?”
She grins. “You bet.”
I smile, but deep down I feel that it's wrong to keep making these jokes. It's a kind of defense mechanism, a way to talk about what happened without
really
talking about it. Then again, I should probably stop over-analyzing things and just go with the flow.
“What about -” She stops, as if she's decided against asking.
“What about what?”
“Nothing.”
“Come on.” I glance at my bedroom door again, just to make sure that there's no hint of my mother hovering outside. “You can ask anything,” I continue, turning back to Karen. “Seriously, I don't mind. I'd rather people ask if they want to know. You know it's impossible to offend me.”
“I was just wondering if you're going to have any more surgery.”
I shake my head.
“But you had quite a lot already, didn't you?”
“You'd be surprised how many bits of me aren't as real as they look,” I tell her. “I had to have a lot of skin grafts, some prosthetic fingers, stuff like that. Plus there's...” I pause for a moment. “I mean, I keep debating whether to get a new boob. It feels kind of vain to care about that, but at the same time -”
Suddenly Karen lunges at me, pulling me into a tight hug. I open my mouth to ask her what's wrong, but after a moment I realize that she's crying so hard, her whole body is shaking.
“I'm so sorry that this happened to you,” she sobs. “It's like, I can't even imagine what you've been through, it's amazing that you can sit here and talk about it. If it had been me, I'd be a total wreck.”
“No,” I reply, genuinely shocked by her sudden outburst. “you wouldn't. Trust me, we're all tougher than we realize.”
“But they tortured you!”
Jennifer holds up Marit's severed head, with blood dripping from the bottom. Marit's eyes are wide open, almost staring at me, and her mouth is open too. I can see her tongue.
“They're all gone now,” I whisper, blinking a couple of times to get the image out of my mind. “When I was at the hospital, I decided early on that I wasn't going to let them haunt me for the rest of my life. I'm not going to give them that satisfaction. I'm going to be normal.”
I wait for her to let go of me, but she's still gently crying. Finally I put my arms around her. This feels slightly odd, but I guess I have to go with it.
“It's okay,” I say finally. “Don't worry, there's no need to cry.”
I wait for her to say something.
“So can you feel my lop-sided chest?” I ask. “Is it weird hugging a girl who only has one boob?”
“This is ridiculous,” she continues, pulling back and wiping her eyes. “Why am
I
the one who's crying and getting all upset? It was
you
who went through it and got all cut up.” She sniffs back some more tears. “It just makes me so mad that there are people out there who'd do something like that. They should've survived so they could end up facing justice. I swear to God, I don't believe in the death penalty, but for people who do that kind of thing...” Her voice trails off, and there's real anger in her eyes. “I'd pull the lever myself.”
“No you wouldn't,” I tell her.
“I would watch the bitch fry!”
“Karen -”
“Sorry, it's just -” Sighing, she leans back. “I hate it. I hate that there are people like that in the world. And Max too, that goddamn pig of an ex-boyfriend you had. Did you see that he wrote a book about you?”
“I saw.”
“Did you read it?”
I shake my head.
“I did,” she continues, her tone filled with anger. “God, it was a pile of garbage. At least it didn't sell many copies, so I doubt he made much money. Haven't you had book offers, stuff like that?”
“I'm not interested.” I wait for her to reply, before seeing a hint of discomfort in her eyes. “Why are you looking at me like that?” I ask.
“I just think people'd really like to read your side of it,” she explains after a moment, with a hint of added intensity. “Like, I'm not just saying it, I think people would benefit from a book like that. Nothing exploitative, nothing gross that goes into the sick details, no-one wants to read stuff like that. I just mean something tasteful, something that puts the human side across. It could be, like, uplifting.”