Chapter 3
Arthur looked at me with the patient contempt of a man who has operated in a system he controls for long enough that he has forgotten what outside the system looks like.
"Call anyone you want," he said. "No one is coming to save you."
He straightened. He put his belt back through the loops. He picked up his whiskey from the hall table and carried it back toward the study, and Julian followed him, and my mother remained in the doorway, and the chandelier hummed its expensive hum above the scattered papers on the marble floor where I was still lying.
Then Arthur came back. He crossed to where I was and took my arm and pulled me through the side door and across the concrete path behind the house toward the storage shed that sat past the garage, beside the trimmed hedges where my mother had the landscaper put a small American flag every Fourth of July. He shoved me through the shed door hard enough that my shoulder hit a metal shelf and old paint cans rattled and a rake went down and the dust burned my throat and then the iron deadbolt outside shut with the sound of something final.
Dark. Cold. The smell of fertilizer and motor oil and the specific air of a space that has been closed for a long time.
For the first minutes I sat on the concrete and breathed and waited for my hands to stop shaking, which they did, eventually, because hands cannot shake forever. I could hear, very faintly, the sound of the house settling back into its usual sounds, the low voices, the television, the clink of ice in a glass from somewhere past the garage wall.
I moved my hands along the floor under the lowest shelf.
My fingers found the phone by accident. It was half-buried in dust and grit at the back corner, a burner phone with a cracked screen split in two places, the battery indicator blinking red when the screen woke up. I did not know how it had come to be there. I did not spend time wondering. The screen held one saved contact.
I pressed the number.
One ring. Two rings.
May you like
Then my father's voice, immediate, alert, the voice of someone who has kept a phone active for exactly this kind of call since the day my mother remarried.
"Maya?"
