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A keening sound fills my ears, interrupting my sickening train of thought. It’s the most horrible screeching noise and I try to turn off the video with shaking hands that won’t obey me so I can find out what it is, but I can’t find the pause button.
I look frantically around for the source of the keening. There’s no one here. The horrible sound is not coming from the video. It’s coming from my lips.
My knees fold, and I drop to the floor. Then, even they give way, and I fall on my side in a fetal position on the carpet, gasping for air like a fish. No air comes in.
Eden.
Edie.
Eden.
My Eden.
In that monster’s house, her hair dyed, her soul slowly being eaten away by—
Hot vomit fills my mouth, and I clamp a hand over my lips, heaving. I try to jump to my feet to run to the bathroom, but I don’t make it. I throw up on the floor, my legs too weak to support me. I’m still lying on my side, and I know that if I keep throwing up like this, I’ll choke and die.
I honestly feel already dead.
But I do turn face-down until the nausea stops for a second, and then I may or may not pass out for a second, because next thing I know, Eden’s photo has vanished from the screen on my phone and the reporter drones on. His voice reaches me through a thick fog, his words barely registering.
“…she is now eighteen years old, a strong young woman,” the video goes on, “planning to go to college. She is brave, she is courageous, and more importantly, she is speaking out. In a statement she recently gave to the press, she said, and this is a direct quote:‘Living through that didn’t ruin me, as all the specialists seem to think. It made me me. It was horrific, and I will not pretend that it was a lesson or that it made me stronger. The difference was, for me, that someone saved me. Someone loved me, and that love saved me. That person saved me. God sent me an angel in the woods at the back of that house, and I snuck out in secret to meet a boy who was my secret friend. He helped me survive every day for two years, until I was free. He is the reason I am ok.’”
I’ve been making that sound again, the keening. It stops; there’s no more air in my lungs. They are so constricted that I can’t draw breath.
I’m still on my face on the floor, struggling to breathe, struggling to exist in the middle of this storm of pain that is tossing me about. My brain is feverishly trying to piece the picture together. To recreate the entire reality of the past six years.
None of it was real.
None of it was what I thought it had been.
Every single time I saw her… She wasn’t her. She was her, but she wasn’t her.
I never knew what she was going through. She never once asked me for help, she never once asked to be rescued. I did not do any rescuing whatsoever, no matter what she said on TV.
I am actually doubting if I ever loved her. How could I have loved her, if I did not really see her? If I did not have a clue about how much she was hurting? What was being done to her? I can’t have loved her, not really. I thought I loved her, but I was too busy loving myself, like I’ve been doing for the last four years.
From my fetal position on the floor, I begin to think.
All the memories, all the little moments that made no sense back then, slowly start to click together. And I do mean super slowly. My mind is sluggish at best. I think everything inside me just stopped when I saw Eden’s photo on that screen.
But now I’m remembering things. Things like how pale she looked all the time, how small she used to make herself whenever we walked out of the safety of the woods. How panicky she got every time I mentioned walking her home.
‘Anne of Green Gables is my favorite character from all the books I’ve read,’she told me once,‘and I have read alotof books.’It was true, she had. I used to think she was made of books.‘Anne has red hair, and she hates it. I love red hair. I wish I had it.’
Then she’d gone so pale I thought she would pass out on me, and I’d tried to ask her about it, but she’d immediately changed the subject.
Then I remember more things, like the translucent skin, the bones jutting out. The band aids I put on her knees—she’d probably scraped them raw every time she climbed out of that window in order to come meet me in the woods. Risking her damn life. The fact that she looks so much healthier now—I knew it wasn’t just because she grew up. It’s because she eats now, isn’t it? She was malnourished. She was dying of starvation, and I didn’t know. That bastard must have starved her.
The reporter keeps droning on, and I catch him saying: “Solomon restricted her foot portions to make her weak, and would starve her to the point of fainting for hours, among his other tactics.”
Oh God oh God oh God.
I can’t take this.
Exploding pain pierces my chest and I scream like a wounded animal.
Hurried footsteps echo outside my room, and then the door is flung loudly open, as if it’s been kicked in. Someone grabs me, lifts me to a seated position, and starts rubbing my back.
