Stockholm Syndrome

         Yes, I know how messed up this is. I realize that I should be running as fast as I can, away from here. But instead I find myself unable to move. I stare out the open door, the cold winter air bushes by me, and for the first time in a long time I see the sun peek out over a cloud heavy with snow. The whole scene is breath taking, and horrifying all at once. I want to run, to leave him behind, to be free from this hell, but the outside world scares me even more. Its too big, too open, too uncertain. I watch a snowflake slowly float to the ground just as he grabs the last grocery bag from his truck. I’ve missed my chance. There is no leaving now.
      “Good afternoon, darling” he says to me as he gently closes the door, the picture perfect winter scene disappearing behind its wooden frame.
“I’ve missed you” he says as he kisses me on the cheek and walks into the kitchen, and I have no choice but to follow.
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         Today is different somehow. There’s something about the small crack of sunlight that seeps out of my bolted window, it gives me a strange feeling in the pit of my stomach. It’s a familiar feeling, but distant somehow too. The feeling spreads all the way to my fingertips and toes. My brain searches to recognize it. It’s a warm, pleasant feeling. It makes me smile. Suddenly it hits me, and I am finally able to identify this strange feeling; hope.
         Hope, for a long time now has only been a word. A word that no longer has meaning  to me and only occasionally appears in the books he makes me read. I gave up on hope a long time ago. With hope only came more pain, especially since I always hoped for the one thing I would never again have; freedom.
         The house is different somehow today. It's too quiet, an eerie kind of quiet. And dark, too dark even for this time in the morning. Maybe he's still asleep. I leave my tiny room and slowly walk down the hall toward the staircase, carefully avoiding the spots on the floor that creak. I know that he hates to be woken up, so I’ve memorized the places in the wood, to avoid being punished. I misplace my foot and the floor makes the smallest of sounds. Immediately his face appears at the bottom of the stair case.  “Get down here now”. His voice is urgent. Something is wrong. I rush to the bottom, no longer focusing on which stairs creak and which do not.
         The scene before me is not our usual breakfast scene. The kitchen is in utter disarray, which is not what he likes. He liked order, and schedules, and this is chaos. I stand in shock, looking at the table pushed up against the kitchen door, and the couch blocking the front entrance. The windows have been hastily boarded. I don’t know how I didn’t hear him moving all this around. It makes me think that he must of drugged me last night, which doesn’t surprise me.
He grabs my arm and pulls me down behind a fortress he’s built of the remaining chairs in our living room.
“They're coming” he mumbles more to himself than to me, as he shoves things into a backpack.
         He pushes a pile of random things towards me; the book we were reading, a row of soda cracker and a small bottle of ginger ale.
“Their coming, the people I warned you about.” His words are frantic and rushed. “I want you to stay here and don’t move.”
         He gets up and climbs over the chair fortress.  I sit there in shock, not sure what to say.  He turns and crouches down to my level, so that his face is just inches from mine.
“Now this part is important, sweetie. Can you promise me something? That if they come before I do, you’ll shoot them.”
         He places a gun into my hands, its cold, and I don’t know what to do with it so I set it on the floor beside me. Hes already shown me how to use it, just in case something like this were to happen.
         “Wait” I grab his sleeve as he goes to walk away. “Don’t leave me here” I beg. As much as I hate him, I can't bear the thought of him leaving me here all alone. This is sick and twisted, I know, but I really can't stand the idea of him being gone. This place is hell, and he is the ruler of it all. With every fiber of my being I hate him, but there is a part of me that doesn’t hate him, that doesn’t even blame him for what he’s done to me. A part that cant seem to cope with the idea of him leaving, a part which is slowly consuming the other.
           He bends down again and looks me in the eye. “I have to leave honey, trust me I really don’t want to, but I have to” he says lovingly, he’s calm again. He brushes my cheek with the back of his hand, a gesture I no longer bother to pull away from.
“I’ll come back and get you, I promise.” He gently kisses my forehead before he gets up.
         Then, just before he disappears into the darkened house he turns back around and looks at me, a final good bye. “I love you.” he says.
I sit there staring into the empty space. “I love you too” I whisper before I even realize I’m saying it.
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         I sit in his chair fortress for a long time. The silence is suffocating, and I feel like I cant breath. I’m waiting for him to come back. Like he promised. I sit there for a long time, though with the windows boarded its hard to tell how much time has really passed.
         And then I hear them. These are the people he warned me about. The people I use to hope would come, I use to pray would find me. I reach down for the gun, getting myself ready, just like he taught me.
         I hear them at the door. They ask to come in, but I when don’t respond,  they use force.
         I remember, when I started living here, I would close my eyes and think of  this very moment. The moment when they would come take me away. It brought me comfort, and helped me to survive. But its been so long since I’ve thought of them as heroes, now I see them as the bad guys, trying to take me away from him. That what he always told me. That the people I envisioned saving me, actually were the ones taking me away.
         Now sitting here alone, I don’t know whether the people breaking into my house are heroes, like I’ve dreamt of, or villains, like he‘s warned me. I wish he would come back for me now, I wish he didn’t leave. I wish that they’d go away, but at the same time I wish they could save me. But they can’t, its too late for that.
         They finally break open the front door and push away the couch. The sunlight pours into the house. Its so bight, and I feel like I’ve never seen the light before. A breeze rushes in through the broken down door, as they run in, searching for me. Its all too much to handle. The open space, the fresh air, the people calling a name I haven’t heard in so long, one that use to belong to me. My head is spinning, my heart is pounding, I can't move. I can't yell “I’m over here”, I can't run, I can't even pull the trigger, like he showed me. All I can do is sit and stare.
         Stare as a man comes over to me, and picks me up, “I GOT HER!” he yells. Stare, as he smiles at me, and tells me “its ok, we’ve got you now, your safe.”
“He promised he’d come back for me” I mutter to the man, as I continue to stare at the last place I saw him; where he left me, the place where he promised he’d come back for me…
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          “Abigail Brenton” I tell the police officer when they ask for my name. I’m sitting in a hospital room, wrapped up in a big white blanket. The room is big and open, and bright. All things I am not used to, things I’m struggling to cope with.  The doctors just left, and officer Hall says that my parents are on their way.
         I remember my parents. My mom had brown hair and use to make me the best peanut butter and jam sandwiches. My dad taught me to ride a bike without the training wheels. My parents now are more like strangers, but familiar strangers. Its been so long that I don’t know that I’ll recognize them when they come in. So long, in fact, that I’m not even sure my parents ever existed, I think I might have made them up, to help me survive.
         “Do you know how old you are sweetheart?” Officer Hall’s partner asks. Though Officer Hall was the one who rescued me, his partner is the one who asks most of the questions. “Lowell”, is what her badge reads. I already told them everything, though it seemed like they already knew. His ‘trademark’ is what they whispered to each other, when I described some of what had happened. Officer Lowell smiles at me sympathetically. ‘Your age’ she prompts.   
         I don’t respond, because to be honest I’m not  sure of the answer. I don’t know whether I lived with him for 3 months or 3 years, it could even be longer than that. Or maybe it was only hours. The time I spent with him has already  began to run together. All I know for sure is that I wish he was here now.

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         It has been 6 months since I was rescued. I’ve  moved back in with my family. My mom and dad and little sister. I’ve started school again, high school, I only go one day a week though. I’m learning to cope with the things I went without for so long. Things like fresh air, and open spaces, people even. I try not to think about the 6 years I was missing for. I try not to think of him. And for the sake of my family, I pretend to have moved on. But truthfully, he is all I can think about, I see his face everywhere. Telling me, over and over that he’s coming back for me.
         
         He was arrested a week after they found me. He was at a park, ‘looking for his next victim’ the police told me. “We got him just in time” they said. He’s in jail now, on death row. One of the only death sentences this place has seen in a long time.
         The court case was a month ago. I had to sit there, in front of all those people in a big open courthouse and nod as they read out all the things he did to me. Most of them I don’t remember like they said. Forcing me to drink drain cleaner, burning my palms with cigarettes, locking me in the basement for days. I drank the medicine he gave me, because he told me it would help me, told me it would stop the pain. And the scars on the back of my hands are meant to be hearts. “That’s how much I love you” he told me with each new blistering red mark. 
         But the worse part about it, was sitting in a room that close to him. Being only feet away. I wanted to run over and kick him, and yell at him, and punch him in the face. I wanted to scream at the top of my lungs, that he lied. He promised he’d come back, but he left me there in that house to be taken away.

         “Abby can I talk to you” my mom says to me, as she sits down on the corner of my bed. I’m reading Catcher in the Rye, which she probably would have taken away from me had she had know that I used to read it with him. It’s the last thing he gave to me before he left, a small piece of the past I still linger in. A piece of a past I wish didn’t exist, but can’t get rid of.
              “Abby, your father doesn’t want me to tell you this, but I think that you deserve to know. He wanted to tell you afterwards, but the court decided to move the date up. And well, they decided it would be today. The um… injection?” she pauses, struggling to find a way to  tell me.
         “They're going to kill him Abby. He’ll never be able to hurt anyone again.” my mom starts to cry, and hugs me. I sit there, unable to move or speak. I can’t breath. They’re  going to kill him and there’s nothing I can do to stop them. 

         I quickly shower and do my hair, even put on a little makeup. I pick a yellow sun dress out of my closet. Yellow was his favourite colour on me he told me once. I tell my parents that I’m going for a walk, and then call a cab once I get to the corner store. The cabbie asks me where I’m headed and looks confused when I tell him.
         After 20 minutes we finally arrive. I hope I’m not too late. I know that I can’t save him, but I can’t let him go without saying goodbye. I know it’s messed up, but if there was something I could do to save him, something to go back in time, I would do it without a second thought.
         The lady at the front desk gives me an odd look when I ask where I would go to find the place where he’s being put to death. She hesitates before telling me the room number and points me the right direction.         
          
         The viewing room is overly air-conditioned, and I cringe as I sit on the black leather seats. I sit in the middle of 4 rows, I don’t want to be too close, but I still want him to know that I’m here. There’s  only 3 other people in the room, all sitting in the back. Two of whom look like journalist, quietly discussing the man about to murdered. And the other I recognize as the detective who ran the team who found me. He doesn’t seem to notice I’m here, which is good because he would probably make me leave. Or worse, talk to me about how I’m doing, how things have been since he save my life. The detective use to tell me how he’d been looking for him for 15 years. And I was the one he was finally able to save.  I think its strange how he uses to term ‘save’, like I was somewhere I needed to be rescued from. When really, to me, that wasn’t the case at all.
         I sit in the cold leather seat forever, waiting to see him. It reminds me of sitting behinds that chair fortress, waiting for him to come back. I’m nervous to see him again. The detective’s cell phone buzzes and he leaves the room to answer the call.
         The black curtains covering the large glass window began to slowly open. My heart is pounding. I’m not sure I’m ready to see him again, not sure if I should leave now before the curtain moves any further, leave this whole thing behind for good. But I cant. I’m glued to my chair, eager to finally see him again. That strange yet familiar feeling starts to rise in my stomach again. Spreading throughout my entire body, a warm pleasant feeling; hope. A sense of hope that its almost over, I’ve almost got rid of him for good. Hope that I finally wont see his face everywhere, and hear his voice whispering in my ear. Hope that he would come back for me. Hope that I get to see him again, after all this time.
         The curtain fully opens and immediately he spots me. He smiles that gentle loving smile I’ve missed so much. 
         I hear some one running down the hall and I know its my parents and the detective. Neither of them want me here, seeing him again. But its too late, they can’t save me, no matter how hard they tried to salvage what’s left of me, its too late.
          I jump the two rows in front of me and run towards the glass, just as the detective and my parents try to get in the door, passed the security guard. I can hear them yelling trying to get inside.

         But their voices are distant. Far away from me. All I can see is him. He smiles at me again. He is order in this place of utter chaos. People are yelling behind me, the reporters are viciously taking notes.
         “You lied to me” I whisper to the glass as the doctors prepare the place on his arm where they intend on giving him the needle that will end his life. “You promised you’d come back for me. You left me when I needed you the most” I yell at the glass, unsure weather he can really even hear me.   
“I’m sorry” he mouths back. Just as my parents, the detective and officer Hall burst through the door. Suddenly the whole place is silent as they take in the scene in front of them. Me standing in front of the man who kidnapped and tortured me for 6 years. The man who made lose faith in humanity, made me see that hope doesn’t exist, made me realize that the only person in the entire world I can trust is him.
         The doctors injects the poison, and I watch him as he slowly fades away, staring at me with a smile. The colour fades from his face as the injection seeps into his veins stopping his heart from beating.
         Just before the injection kills him, just before my parents run down the aisle and grab my arms to tear me away from what should be a horrific scene, just before he disappears into the darkness and is gone forever, he looks at me and says his final goodbye;  “I love you”.
         And though I know its messed up, a sick and twisted response to the man who shattered my life into a million pieces, fully aware he’d be the only one who could ever piece it back together, I cant help it but to whisper back, “I love you too”.