The Ninety-Sixth Day

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Laura was not released from Ray Leopold’s basement the next day, or the one after that. She and Andy staggered their sleeping schedules so they would have a few hours alone each day. While awake, Laura and Andy talked, argued, picked each other apart. They shared their deepest feelings of alienation and discontent. Laura began to rest her head on Andy’s shoulder while he talked, her arm over his stomach.

The first time they kissed was a week into their captivity. Laura realized she had never engaged in sexual activity while sober. This made it awkward, and so did the handcuffs that still pinned Andy’s hands behind his back. Laura took her own clothes off, and offered bits of herself for Andy to put his mouth on.

Sex was only an incidental component of their relationship, something they did to pass the long afternoons. Without use of his hands, Andy became wholly dependent on Laura. His need for her was staggering; she had never been so needed by another person. Laura was the sole means by which his every desire was satisfied. She became as comfortable with Andy’s body as she was with her own.

Laura kept a calendar. She used the little fold-out nail file on the fingernail clippers to carve notches into the wooden top of the TV. They didn’t start recording days until they had already been in the basement several weeks, and they disagreed about how much time had elapsed; Laura thought it was five days longer than Andy did. She deferred to his judgment on all matters, though, including the passage of time.

Most days the door would open at some point–it could be in the morning or the afternoon, or late at night. The door would open quickly and a package would be thrown down the stairs. Sometimes it was a garbage bag, sometimes a small plastic grocery store bag. Toilet paper, soap. Cans of green beans, beets, water chestnuts, corn. Laura spent hours getting each can open, using the nail file on the fingernail clippers and the handle of their spoon. The green beans were several years past their expiration date, but Andy thought they should still be good. He let her try them first, and when, an hour later, she still hadn’t gotten sick, he allowed himself to be fed the green beans, one at a time, sucking the salty juice from Laura’s fingers.

Then the canned food stopped coming. Even Andy pined for the days of cornflakes and bologna. Now it was giant ziplock bags of old Halloween candy, cracked and waxen lumps of chocolate that sometimes contained maggots. There were Twinkies and all manner of snack cake, fruit pies in paper wrappers. Everything was stale, as if it had languished at the back of a pantry for years.

*    *    *

A typical day in the basement, the seventy-fifth, according to their calendar. Andy stepped on Laura’s sleeping bag, somewhere near her ankles. This was his usual method of waking her. Groggily, she got to her feet and waited for Andy’s orders.

“Fill my cup with water,” he said. He settled onto the couch.

Laura filled the blue cup and held it to his lips. Then she stood in front of him so he could evaluate her body. This morning she wore a white camisole with a pale blue half-slip. She cycled through the slips from the box, changing in accordance to Andy’s moods.

“Turn around,” Andy said. Laura turned so he could judge her backside. “Strip,” he said. Laura peeled off the slip and the camisole. She wasn’t wearing underwear.

“Okay,” he said. “Your legs look good. We’ll do more abs today. Clench for me.” Laura turned to face him, clenched her stomach muscles. “Yeah. More obliques today, definitely. Get dressed.”

Laura went to the box, bent at the waist, and reached in for the next slip. It was dark blue, with a modest neckline and a demure edge of lace at the bottom.

“No,” Andy said. “Next.”

Laura tossed the slip back in the box. The next slip she pulled was hot pink, with a sheer lace bust and an empire waistline.

“Put that one on,” Andy said. Laura put it on. “Turn around.” She turned around, slowly. “Okay. That’ll work.”

Laura sat beside Andy on the couch, and efficiently brought him to orgasm using her hands and mouth.

“Okay,” he said when that was done. “You can have some water now.”

Laura drank from the blue cup, and then sat at the table to prepare Andy’s breakfast. For the past several days, this had meant dissecting several of the “fun sized” Snickers bars, using her fingernails and teeth to extract bits of peanut. Andy expected the peanuts to be bare, without remnants of chocolate or caramel. She gathered the peanuts in her palm and brought them to him for inspection.

“Those look good,” he said. “Good job.”

He opened his mouth and Laura put the small handful of nuts in it.

“You may eat the remainder,” he said, and Laura ate the shredded chocolate and nougat, licking her palm where the candy had melted.

After breakfast, it was workout time. Each day they had exercise sessions in which Andy told Laura what to do. She was not allowed to stop moving until he told her to, and he worked her until she was soaked in sweat and on the verge of collapse. Andy assumed total control of her body, to the point that Laura felt she would stop breathing, her heart stop beating, should Andy command it.

Today, Andy ordered Laura to jumprope with an extension cord they’d found. Then he told her to drop into a plank position and do ten pushups. Then it was fifty squats, then ten more pushups, then another interval of jumprope. He never took his eyes off her. The workouts continued until Andy was bored, which could take anywhere from twenty minutes to two hours. Laura had fainted during previous sessions.

“Okay,” Andy said finally. He allowed her to have a shot of mouthwash, just one. On her perpetually empty stomach, the alcohol gave her a strong buzz. Sometimes it made her dry heave, which she fought against.

*    *    *

Ninety-five days since the start of their calendar. Andy sat on the love seat in lotus position, meditating. Laura was pretending to meditate, but really she was watching Andy, his closed eyes, his blank expression. It was late in November. Andy had been saying more frequently, lately, that Laura was soon to be released.

In the early weeks she had missed her parents so intensely she felt like a little girl spending her first night at a sleepover. Now, Laura rarely thought of her parents. She felt no shame in the knowledge that her life back home had probably been picked apart, analyzed, her every acquaintance interrogated. All of that belonged to a different life, one she felt no attachment to.

Laura fantasized about leafy greens and lean cuts of meat. She avoided looking in the mirror above the sink, especially in the daytime, when gray sunlight highlighted the pallor of her skin. She had lost at least twenty pounds. In spite of Andy’s workouts, her muscles had wasted, her skin hung off her bones, and she looked much older than seventeen.

Each day, Laura would massage Andy’s arm muscles and help him stretch his shoulder blades forward as far as they could go. She didn’t mention her alarm at how his muscles had diminished. She encouraged him to eat more, but he said it was pointless.

“If I get out of here, I’ll eat nothing but dead animals for the rest of my life,” he said.

Laura tended the Beanie Babies, shuffling them from one shelf to another. She quarantined all the bears together in the top right corner of the display. She sorted the Beanies into taxonomies. Mammals, reptiles, aquatic life, birds, and “other”. Andy taught her to juggle using several of the bears.