I thought about it. If Deborah had still been watching, seeing two large bundles carried out would certainly have made her suspicious—and, being Debs, if she got suspicious she would have jumped out with her gun drawn and stopped them right then and there. So she had not been watching—but why not? Would she really abandon me, her own dear brother? Leave me to a fate worse than death, although certainly including it? I didn’t think she would, not willingly. I took a sip of water and tried to think it through.
She would not willingly leave me. On the other hand, she couldn’t really call in backup—her partner was dead, and she was technically doing something just a little bit outside department regulations and, for that matter, the Florida Penal Code. So what would she do?
I took another sip of water. The bottle was more than half-empty now, but it did seem to ease the pain in my head a bit—not that the pain went away, but hey—it wasn’t really so bad. I mean, pain meant I was alive, and who was it who said, “Where there’s life there’s hope”? Maybe Samantha knew—but as I opened my mouth to ask her she took the water bottle back and took a big sip and I remembered I was trying to think about what my sister would have done, and why that led to my being here.
I took the bottle back from Samantha and sipped the water. Deborah wouldn’t leave me like that. Of course not. Deborah loved me. And the realization flooded into me—I loved her, too. I took another swig of water. It’s a funny thing, love. I mean, to realize this at my age was weird, but I was actually surrounded by so much love—my whole life, from my adoptive parents, Harry and Doris; they didn’t have to love me—I wasn’t really their kid—but they did. They did love me, like so many others, all the way up to now, with Debs—and Rita, Cody, Astor, and Lily Anne. Beautiful, wonderful, miraculous Lily Anne, the ultimate bringer of love. But all those others, too, they all loved me in their own way—
Samantha took the water bottle and sipped, and it hit me with a tremendous rush of insight: Even Samantha had shown me so much love. She had proved it by risking everything that meant anything to her, everything she had always wanted, just to give me a chance to escape! Wasn’t that an act of pure love?
I took another sip of water and felt myself completely surrounded by all these wonderful people, people who loved me even though I had done some very bad things—but what the hell, I had stopped, hadn’t I? Wasn’t I now trying to live a life of love and responsibility, in a world that had suddenly blossomed into a place of wonder and joy?
Samantha grabbed the bottle and took a big swig. She handed it back and I finished it eagerly—delicious, the best water I’d ever tasted. Or maybe I was just appreciating things more. Yes. The world was really an amazing place after all, and I fit in perfectly. And so did Samantha. What a wonderful person she was. She had taken care of me, too, and she didn’t have to. And she was taking care of me now! Nurturing me and stroking my face with what could only be called love—what a wonderful girl she was! And if she wanted to be eaten—wow: I had an epiphany. Food is love—so wanting to be eaten was just another way to share love! And that was the way Samantha had chosen because she was so filled with love she couldn’t possibly hope to express it except in some ultimate form like this! Amazing!
I looked up at her face with a new appreciation. This was a wonderful, giving person. And even though it hurt my neck, I had to show her that I understood what she was doing and truly appreciated what a wonderful, beautiful person she was—so I raised my arm up and put my hand on her face. The skin felt soft, warm, vibrantly alive, and I rubbed the palm of my hand softly across her cheek for a moment. She looked back at me, smiling, and put her hand back on my face.
“You are so beautiful,” I said. “I mean, just saying the word, ‘beautiful’—that doesn’t really sum it up, except in a kind of superficial way that only talks about the outside and doesn’t really get at the true, absolute depths of what I mean by beautiful—especially in your case, because I think I just understood what it is you’re doing with this whole ‘eat me’ business—I mean, you’re beautiful on the outside, too; that’s not what I mean, not to take any of that away from you, because I know it’s important to a girl. A woman. You’re eighteen; you’re a woman, I know, because you’ve made a very adult choice with what to do with your life, and there’s no turning back from it, which makes it a really adult choice, and I’m sure you understand the consequences of your decision, and there can’t be a better definition of adulthood than that, to make a decision with ultimate consequences and know you can’t turn back from it, and I really admire you for that. And also because like I said you are really, really beautiful.”
Her hand rubbed my face and then slid down across my neck and through the collar of my shirt and she rubbed my chest. It felt good. “I know what you’re saying exactly and you are the first person who I think really understood what it means for me to go through all this—” She took her hand away from my chest to wave it in the air, indicating everything all around us, and I reached up and pulled it back down onto my chest because it felt really good and I wanted to keep touching her. She smiled and rubbed softly across my chest again. “Because it isn’t something that’s easy to understand, I know that, and that’s one reason why I never thought I could ever talk about it to anybody and why, you know, I’ve been so completely alone for most of my life, all of it really, because who could ever understand something like this? I mean, if I just say it to somebody, ‘I want to be eaten,’ then it’s gotta be like this whole, ‘Oh, my God, we’re getting you to a shrink’ thing and nobody ever looking at you like you’re normal ever again and I feel like this is totally normal, a totally normal expression of—”
“Love,” I said.
“You do understand!” she said, and she slid her hand lower, across my stomach, and then back up onto my chest again. “Oh, God, I knew you would get it, because even when we were in that refrigerator there was just something about you that was different from everybody else I have ever met in my whole life and I thought maybe just once before it happens I can talk to somebody who really gets it and they won’t look at me like I’m some kind of perverted sick twisted freak monster!”
“No, no, you’re just so beautiful,” I said. “Nobody could ever think that about you, just even your face is so amazing—”
“No, but that’s not it—”
“No, I know that, that’s not what I mean,” I said. “But it’s part of what makes you who you are, and to see that part really leads to understanding about the rest—I mean, if you’re not a total idiot, you can’t look at your face and not think, Wow, what an incredible person, and then to see that the insides are even more beautiful is just amazing.” And because mere words could not really express it completely and I really wanted her to understand what I meant, I pulled her face down to mine and kissed her. “You are beautiful inside and out,” I said.
She smiled with an incredible warmth and appreciation that just made me feel like everything would always be all right. “You are, too,” she said, and she lowered her face and kissed me again and this time the kiss was longer and it led into another kind of feeling that was new for me and I could tell that it was new for her, too, but neither one of us wanted to stop until she stretched out beside me on the floor as we kissed and after a long time of that she did stop, just for a second, and said, “I think they put something in the water.”
“I don’t think that matters,” I said. “Because what we have started to understand doesn’t really come from anything you can put in water because it comes from inside us, the real inside, and it is really true, which I know you can feel as well as I can.” I kissed her and she kissed back for a minute before she stopped and put both hands on my cheeks.
“In any case,” she said, “even if it is just something in the water it doesn’t matter because I always kind of thought that this is just so important—I mean love, and you know, I mean, not just the kind that you feel but the kind you do and I thought, I’m eighteen; I should do it at least once before I check out, don’t you think?”
“At least once,” I said, and she smiled and closed her eyes and brought her face back to mine and we did.
More than once.
THIRTY
“I’M THIRSTY,” SAMANTHA SAID. THERE WAS A WHINING NOTE in her voice. I found it irritating but I didn’t say anything. I was thirsty, too. What was the point to saying it again? We were both thirsty. We had been thirsty for some time. The water was all gone. There wasn’t a
ny more. That was the least of my problems: My head hurt, and I was trapped in a trailer in the Everglades, and I had just done something I couldn’t begin to understand. Oh, and somebody was coming to kill me, too.
“I feel sooooo stupid,” Samantha said. And again, there was very little to say in response. We both felt stupid, now that whatever was in the water had worn off, but she seemed to have more trouble accepting that we had acted under the influence of the drugs. As we had come back to our senses Samantha had gradually looked uncomfortable, then nervous, and then downright alarmed, scrabbling around the trailer for articles of clothing that had been enthusiastically misplaced. In spite of how awkward she made it look, I decided it was the right idea. I found and put on all my clothing, too.
And a small touch of intelligence returned to me with my pants. I got up and looked over the trailer from one end to the other. It didn’t take long. It was only around thirty feet long. All the windows were securely boarded with three-quarter-inch marine plywood. I thumped on them. I threw my full weight against them. They didn’t budge. They were reinforced from the outside.
There was only one door. Same story: Even when I ran my shoulder against it, I got nothing except more pain in my head. Now I had a matching pain in my shoulder. I sat down to nurse it for a few minutes. That was when Samantha had started whining. Apparently putting her clothes on made her feel she could complain about almost anything, because it didn’t end with the water. And through some mean-spirited trick of acoustics or plain bad luck, the pitch of her voice was in perfect resonance with the throbbing of my head. Every time she complained it sent an extra pulse of dull pain deep into the battered gray tissue in my cranium.
“It smells … funky in here,” she said.
It did actually smell funky, a combination of very old sweat, wet dog, and mold. But it was far beyond pointless to mention something when there was nothing we could do about it. “I’ll get my herbal sachet,” I said. “It’s out in the car.”
She looked away. “You don’t have to get sarcastic,” she said.
“No,” I said. “But I do have to get out of here.”