Obstetrix(13)

Sarah and Calum walked me back to my cabin after dinner. “There’s a social gathering tonight for the community,” Sarah said, “but it’s probably best you get to bed early. You’ve clearly got rest to catch up on.”

When I opened my window briefly, I could hear music, faintly, coming from the dining hall—fiddle and banjo. I closed my window again; it was still bitterly cold. I took my pen out of my coat, pulled my mattress to the side, and made two hash marks on the wall. Yesterday, today. It had been January 12 when I was taken, two days … probably … of travel. I made a note of my best guess as to today’s date. The two days, at least, that I’d been here—that, I was more certain of.

I tucked the pen under my mattress, and put the mattress back against the wall. Then I went into the bathroom for a drink of water, and looked into the mirror. I looked old; I looked scared.

That was the real reason the lawyer wanted me in makeup, I thought. Putting on those layers of paint helped me look like I was in control. Helped me remember to pretend to be in control. I had to present myself like I believed I would get off, like I trusted the jury. This … this was different.

I took a deep breath and thought, I’m going to survive this.

My eyes did not look convinced.

I’m going to survive and escape.

I was going to have to be patient. I was going to have to convince them that they’d cowed me—the more I cooperated, the more my captors would let down their guard.

“Sleep when the baby sleeps” was advice I always gave to new mothers. Sleep when the baby sleeps, instead of getting up and trying to get the dishes washed or the laundry folded. Prioritize your welfare, your healing. I need to sleep when they let me sleep, I thought now. I need to eat when they let me eat. I needed to be ready for the chance to escape when it presented itself; I needed to be patient until then, and prioritize my own welfare as much as possible.

My father did not talk much about the Vietnam War. In high school, I had interviewed him for a paper I was writing. He’d joined the Air Force because at the time, all astronauts were Air Force pilots. The fact that an ROTC scholarship would help pay for college seemed like a win-win. “I’ll be honest,” he’d said. “I absolutely thought the war would be over before I got out of college. The US entered World War II in December of 1941, and Japan surrendered in September of 1945. That was an entire world war we won in a little under four years! Surely by the time I was out of college, we’d be done in Vietnam.”

“What would you have done, if you’d known we wouldn’t be?”

He thought about that question. “I don’t know. I wish I could say it would have mattered, but I was young, and dumb. And really pretty desperate to get off my parents’ farm, and that was another thing, a military career was something my father respected, a reason for leaving the farm he’d accept.”

In Vietnam, Dad had spent a year flying combat search and rescue missions in a prop plane, an incredibly dangerous job. He’d been told by another pilot after he arrived that he should just assume he was going to die during his twelve-month tour. He’d refused to accept that, he said. He thought that if he believed he was going to die, it would happen. He’d told himself he was going to make it through. That he’d survive and go home.

Dad had never gotten to be an astronaut. His eyesight had deteriorated; he’d been grounded, a year or two after finishing his tour in Vietnam. He’d survived that year, though. He’d gone home.

I looked at myself in the mirror, thinking about my father. “I’m going to survive this,” I whispered to myself. “I’m going to escape.”





CHAPTER 3




“SLEEP WHEN THEY LET you sleep” was all very well and good, but falling asleep was another matter entirely.

I lay in bed in the dark, thinking again about where I might be. If I was right about two days of travel, that would have taken me out of the Dakotas—unless Sarah and Brandon had taken me for a longer drive than necessary just to disorient me. But that stop at the gas station made me think they probably wouldn’t have done that. Iowa, Nebraska, Wisconsin, Missouri, they were all within a day of Minneapolis.

I could be in Montana. Or Wyoming, Idaho, Utah, maybe Colorado. I reconsidered my conclusion that I wasn’t in Oklahoma, but the buildings here seemed to have been built to withstand cold more than heat. It also smelled like boreal forest here, which excluded Nevada and made Colorado and Utah less likely. I could see hills around us; if there were mountains beyond, I couldn’t tell.

I’d assumed at the start that they’d dragged me to a state where all the obstetricians were gone. That would exclude Washington, Oregon, and Colorado. But their real motivation might have simply been a captive obstetrician, so hell, maybe I was in Oregon. Did it even matter, if I was twenty miles from anywhere?

If I could steal a car, I could probably get away, but the cars were kept locked up. If I could find something with Internet access, I could send a message, but again, everything was kept locked up. These people even locked up the Bible.

I was going to have to be patient.

Trying to run too quickly could get me killed, or at least watched a lot more carefully. I needed them to believe I was cowed and cooperative. They’d showed me a grave with the intent of intimidating me—let them think it had worked.