Ensnared

“I don’t want to be alone.” That was the last message Brad had texted her, and the one that bounced around her head the most. They’d been texting for seven months, and although there were many suspicious texts throughout that time, it was this one that shamed her, that she repeated over and over until its sound was no less familiar than the pop of the van lock or the cold, smooth hand of a stranger.

It had been twelve days since that text, twelve excruciating days in the dark bondage of Brad’s car, and Mindy was still reeling over the betrayal. There was anger, sure- at Brad for capturing and beating her, at herself for falling for it all. But mostly there was sadness, and it filled each day like a blimp, carrying her thoughts and dreams until hope became a nonexistent, mythical thing. 

Brad was someone she thought she could trust. She’d been coached on the risks of online relationships, the possibility that the person behind the phone was not who they said they were, but this was Brad! The man who never left a message unanswered. The man who always had something sweet to say, just when she needed to hear it. The man who sent her ice cream and roses when she failed two Biochem exams in a row. Brad was always in her corner, and the familiarity of his voice negated any suspicions she had of him.

She wasn’t overly trusting, either. Mindy did her due diligence. She dug through his accusations, made sure he was who he said he was. When Brad told her he worked at the Blowhole, a hip up-and-coming bar on Manhattan’s Westside, she called when he wasn’t there and confirmed it. She looked up his address, his phone numbers. She even reversed image searched his Instagram, although after their first Facetime, she knew that wasn’t necessary. He was exactly what she expected- a 30-year-old bartender from New York, golden locked and golden hearted, her own personal Hercules. 

It started as a friendship- an exchange of likes, then comments, and finally a DM or two- but it blossomed quickly, like an early spring, and within four months the relationship had turned romantic. It worked, she had thought, for both of them- they were young and busy with their careers (she, a Boston University medical student, him an aspiring actor)- and the time they did contact was blissful, almost childlike in its simplicity. The distance never felt demanding- quite the opposite, in fact. It felt freeing, cathartic, like open air that gives one level-headedness. It allowed them to be vulnerable without the complexity of a physical relationship. And, before that night, Mindy thought it’d been the healthiest relationship she’d ever been in.

Brad had texted her twelve days ago and let her know he was in town for one night only. Despite her feelings, Mindy was still cautious. She had always imagined their first interaction at a coffee shop, or a public park- somewhere safe and brightly lit. But Brad was lonely, and it was time, he said, to materialize their connection. Mindy agreed, and she let her conscious slip to the wayside as she exited her weathered brick apartment and made for the parking lot. She had worn her best clothes- a red silk dress with a slit up her right thigh, woven pumps, and a ring her mother gave her, a small, studded ruby that glittered under each streetlamp. She saw Brad, standing outside a black van, strong in his tucked in Sunday clothes, and she relaxed a bit as she walked faster towards him. He smiled- that was something else she reflected on, when the nights seemed endless and black, how anyone could smile before doing what he did to her- and waved her over. “Hi, Brad!” she whispered into the silence, afraid to break it with her excitement. “Hi, Mindy!” he mimicked back. Then she smiled and went in for a hug- and that was it. She didn’t feel it- he must have known where to hit her- but she did remember the waking moments, the realization that something had happened.

She first noticed the motion, could feel it through the black, rubber floor, as if she lay suspended over a churning ocean. Her head swam like concrete, and the back of it was warm and throbbing. She immediately recognized the smell of blood and began to panic. Mindy raised a hand to investigate the wound, but her hand didn’t budge. She tried again, and this time she could feel the sticky restraint of duct tape, ten layers thick and wrapped tightly around her wrists and ankles. It was then she knew she was trapped; knew she’d fallen for something. And that first wave of shame and anger was so visceral that she screamed and shook for hours.

Mindy didn’t scream anymore. It was a waste of energy, and her only amenities were saltines, water, and a bucket, so there wasn’t much energy to spare. Instead, she slept and only awoke when she heard the handle of the trunk, felt the light surge in like a SWAT team. She’d turn and squint her eyes, hoping that when they adjusted, she’d see her savior, or she’d be dead. Neither ever came true.

There was one time she thought it had. It was mid-afternoon, five days ago, and Mindy remembered feeling particularly defeated, as she’d gotten some dust in her eye and had no way of clearing it away. There she sat, against the cold metal wall, blinking quickly and crying for hours, the ocean below her surging unpredictably, her sunken heart at the core of those black waves. Then the car stopped for a few minutes (or was it an hour? Time was impossible to track in that visionless van) and she felt herself staring at the door, the splinter of hope she’d lost beginning to gain size and strength. “Brad?” she moaned and hated herself for how weak it sounded. Suddenly, the door shuttered open, and Mindy looked away, then back again. Her eyes were full of tears, but through the distortion she could see green branches, healthy and alive with leaves of all sizes, wrapped around a rich blue, the same color as the ocean she’d been envisioning. She began to scoot to the opening, until a man blocked her view. He had soft white hair, thin as chicken scratch, and that color seemed to match the pallor of his face, cadaver-white, blending with his light gray work shirt. There was only one surprise- his eyes, which radiated pale blue like rising dawn - and his stare reminded her of a scientist she’d studied, Alexander Fleming, the one who discovered penicillin. For some reason, this made her hope expand, and she called to him.

“Alex, please help me. Please- he’s going to kill me.”

The man looked over his shoulder, unsure of who she was calling to, before looking down and stepping inside the van. He grabbed her, softly, like a doctor would, and for some reason she let him, rolled with his movements, until she was on her stomach, and he was looming above her. She spoke again. “Cut the tape. Please, let me out.” She could feel that piercing stare through her back, could feel the pale blue on her brainstem, and waited eagerly for an answer. Then, a hand glided through her matted brown hair, and he spoke, slowly. “No.” He paused, then continued. “You look just like her. My late wife.” Then, his hand sifted down her body, over her scuffed shoulders and to the red silk of her breast. She shook and scrunched her face. Mindy was crying again and looked behind her. “Please, no. Alex, no. Your wife wouldn’t want this.” There was shame on his face, shame and fear that hung around his jowls, but he hid it by moving more quickly. Her tattered dress now hung around her ankles, and she sobbed on her stomach, pleading with Alex. “I’m not your wife! Please, help me! I’M NOT YOUR WIFE!”

Silence inflated the small blank space, and she moaned as she waited for the inevitable.  But then Alex placed his hand across her back. It was light, almost forgettable, and she wished she had savored it, that small flicker of humanity. Because afterwards, she heard the trunk open and close. He was gone, back into the world of branches and sky, and she, in the dark pond of the van, cold and alone. That night, she cried, and kicked against the van doors for hours, desperate for that green place, before letting exhaustion take her away.

Today, Brad told her they were stopping at a woman’s camp. What that meant, she had no idea- but she nodded like she did. At this point, she had adapted to Brad’s military rules- don’t speak unless spoken to, take what is given to you without question, don’t fight against authority- and repeating them in her head helped her imagine she might be in school, flipping through flashcards not of bones or organs but of the laws of survival.

The van clunked to a stop, and she sat up, placing her back as far from the entrance as possible. Her altercation with Alex, although scarring, had taught her caution, awareness, and she wielded it as her only weapon. She heard a pair of boots move outside, then a few more pairs join from the other end of the lot. After a few minutes, they convened at the trunk of the van, and pulled it open, the barndoors flapping to reveal a bucket of sunshine and three ugly goons.

Mindy knew these were not her saviors, so she paused while they decided what to do with her. Brad never put the dress back on her, so she coiled under her only possessions, which was a small wool blanket she gripped with her shoulders, and the small ruby ring that was now coated with grime and sweat. “Hey, tits,” one of the older ones said, bald and muscle bound with bushy black eyes, “help us out and crawl over here, alright?”

She sighed but didn’t waste any time competing against them. Mindy crawled outside and they grabbed her beneath each arm. She squinted, and saw they were in an open area, dying green covering the field, with only one building- a mid-century white and red barn. She had given up her geographic compass long ago, but her goosepimples made her believe rural Pennsylvania. They walked closer to the barn, and as they did, she tried to memorize this place, as if taking a polaroid she could keep in the upcoming shadow days. Finally, growing some sense, she began to work her captives.

“Sir, please help me. This is all a mistake- I don’t deserve to be here. I have mo-“

Without looking her way, the bald man smacked her hard, his bare palm shattering the serenity of the farmland. Mindy whimpered, the red contact shielding her own blush of embarrassment, and the bald man spoke over her.

“Shut it, tits. No one deserves to be here. I’ve got kids to feed, mothers to pay out. Monty needs some extra cash for his brother’s spinal tap.” The man on her right grumbled and tightened his grip on her arm.

“You think we want to be here, spending time with shit-smeared girls all day? Please.”

The defection sucked the fight from her, and she melted in their arms, letting them drag her inside as her final strike. The interior was bigger than she expected, and she felt a bit more comfortable in the space, like stretching her toes after a long road trip. She could see a few barn swallows in the upper rafters, and the hay flooring felt nice under her feet. But interrupting the tranquility on each side were cages, big and thick and rusty, ones she had thought they stopped producing in the 1920’s. And in each cage was a woman. Some were awake and pleading, others just stared. All of them looked tired, pale, shriveled, like things forgotten under the refrigerator. Looking at them was like looking into the future, and she winced, desperate to rid the thought from her head. Before she could, they pushed her into an empty cage near the end of the barn and slammed it shut. She was grateful for the space and the light and the old yellow pillow, but prison was still prison, and she cried as the industrial lock clamped onto her door.

Over those next few days, she fell into the routine of the encampment. No woman spoke to another- most stayed quiet their entire tenure, and only sat up when the guards came in. When that happened, it meant either a new woman was coming, or a current woman had been auctioned and sold off. Otherwise, her time amounted to lots of reflection. On Brad’s silver tongue and ivory claws. On Andy’s gaze like a dripping icicle. On the bald man’s calloused face, calloused palm. It all amounted to one simple fact- she was not human anymore, but rather a thing, something to be stepped on. And accepting that was like painlessly extracting that splinter of hope, helping her sit a little taller and relax against the cold bars.

That was until the boy walked in. She’d been at the encampment for two weeks, away from home for a month, and a quiet suspicion began to intrude her mind. The suspicion that she’d be the next one out that door, a special delivery to someone evil. But she controlled it and stared out her cell, blankly, at the grain patterns on the wall and the individual chaffs of hay and all the details one ignores when given the freedom not to pay attention. And then she heard it, to her right, a soft creak like an old floorboard, and a tiny face, prim with green absinthe eyes. Mindy looked through him at first, because it didn’t seem real, rather a hallucination that had slipped through the panels of the barn. But when he blinked and stuck his head further through the backdoor, Mindy straightened up, and silently crawled towards the bars.

“Don’t move. Get help. Please.” She mouthed, annunciating every word. “We’re being held captive.”

The kid said nothing- his eyes had frozen over, his mouth gaped open. Mindy crawled further and put her face against the bars.

“Go on!” she whispered in a quick jet, like a teacher would. It worked- the kid raised his head in attention and burst from the scene, leaving a barely visible tear in the wall, a stripe of blue and green.

For the next few days, she sweat and moaned and cried as she looked at that stripe. The splinter of hope had been nailed back within her, deep like a crucifixion, and her entire being became tortured by the thought of that boy. Hoping he made it home. Hoping he did as she said. Hoping she wasn’t sent away before help came. There was no ailment for that splinter, and she slept, as long and shallowly as possible.

Mindy awoke one night to find the stripe illuminated upon her cell. She squinted against it and saw the lights were changing, from red to blue and back again. In the fog of midnight, she didn’t quite understand, but she crawled towards her door and looked around. The rest of the girls were waking, too, and some were even starting to cry- not with tears but with shouts, loud as gunfire. “HELP!” “WE’RE IN HERE!” “SAVE US!”, the barn seemed to say. Soon, there was a burst at the backdoor, and five flashlights became jumbling in. “Oh my god” Mindy heard one say over the screaming women. She thought another threw up. She laid back down and cried until her lock hit the floor.

Mindy saw her family the next day. Two days later, her friends and colleagues. They all cried for her, sloppily, with tight embraces- but she just leaned in and closed her eyes. She was tired, and she didn’t have any more tears to shed. The rest of the year turned into a cycle of questionings, lawyers, suspects, courthouses. Mindy reacted with as little emotion as possible. Thinking back to each day was draining, and it was easier to sleep, or read a book, then get caught up in whatever reality she was living in.

By December, Brad had been sentenced to fifty years, and the bald goons to twenty-five. Mindy wasn’t sure how she knew that- she didn’t show up to the sentencing. They never caught Andy- his description much too vague for incarceration- but he was the one Mindy would never forget. As for the kid, he got a hero’s ceremony and a key to Philadelphia, just as he deserved. And after that, well, it was back to normal. School, homework, bars- Mindy fell into it as best she could.

It was only six months later that she read an Indian fable and realized her dilemma. It was called “The Tiger, The Brahmin and the Jackal,” and it was about a holy man who lets a tiger go, only to be held captive by him. The holy man searches for, and never finds it. He’s only saved by a jackal, who bears little knowledge of the situation, and acts on good intentions alone.

Reading it made her cry. Not because of the similarity to her own story, but rather for the fate of the holy man. How could the holy man forget what the tiger had done to her? Was the holy man ever the same? Did he ever help a tiger again?

Mindy didn’t know. The book never said. And as she turned out her lamp, letting in the dark of her bedroom, she imagined that forgotten ocean she’d left so long ago, and sank into it, deeper, deeper, deeper.