Empty Promises

off the bottoms and pull your hair back,” he ordered. Trembling, she was forced to stand naked in front of him.
    Tom expected romance because he had chosen her to be his woman, his companion in the woods, but Robin broke into tears of fear and embarrassment. Her terror didn’t bother him at all. He forced himself on her and raped her.
    When he finished, he allowed her to get dressed. Robin begged Tom again to just leave her in the woods, telling him that she would somehow find her way out. But he refused.
    They continued along the river, climbing over logs and rocks. Tom grudgingly helped Robin over difficult spots when she couldn’t keep up with him. That night they made camp and ate. Robin felt like gagging on her food, but she knew she had to keep up her strength. Tom bragged to her that he could have killed Hank with a knife or with his bare hands since he was trained in hand-to-hand combat. “But of course, a gun is much less messy and painless,” he finished, “if you know how to use it.”
    Robin told him she’d been ill and that Hank had considerately avoided having sex with her. Tom shrugged and said, “I was going to kill him last night, but I thought I’d be a sport and give you one more night together.”
    Tom explained to Robin that he was trying to protect her. After all, he hadn’t killed Hank in front of her. “I tried to make it easy for you.”
    “How did you kill Hank?” she asked.
    “I just pointed at something and gave him the binoculars, and I stepped back and fired.”
    As Robin’s long, handwritten statement continued, a reader could track the points where her mind had gradually began to bend under the combination of grief, fear, guilt, and the persuasive words of her captor. She submitted to more sex acts, things Hank had never asked her to do. She learned to turn her mind off and not think about what he was doing to her. She just wanted to get it over with, and now she no longer fought him. “I cried myself to sleep,” she wrote. “I’ve never felt so alone before. The next morning I woke up, forgetting that it wasn’t Hank beside me but the man who had killed him. It was a nightmare. I didn’t want to believe he was a murderer, though, because he was the only person on earth I had to talk to.”
    The brainwashing process intensified. The world Robin knew was far behind her, and she was so frightened. All the time, Tom talked on and on and on. The second day wasn’t as bad for her; she began to get used to plunging mindlessly through the woods. Whenever they rested, she read her Bible and prayed.
    “I used to be religious myself,” Tom commented, “but God gave up on me a long time ago.”
    Robin assured him that God didn’t give up on anyone, not even him.
    Tom shook his head. “I’ve killed too many people—a lot in the army and five or six for the Organization. That’s all I know how to do.”
    Tom embellished his story of Mafia connections. He told Robin he had been betrayed by a girlfriend who was in the Organization, and Robin believed him. She knew he could kill, and she believed now that he was an expert in survival. Now he was letting her see the pain he had known in his life. It was important for her to see him as something other than a murderous monster.
    Tom didn’t like to see Robin cry. “You should be getting over it by now,” he complained. But Hank had only been dead for twenty-four hours. How could he expect her to get over it so soon? She would never get over it.
    “He was hard to figure out,” Robin wrote. “One minute, he’d be rough and mean, and the next he’d be kind and gentle. We talked about the human mind a lot. He said the mind contains a lot of little doors and that you could open and shut them when you wanted to. He said, ‘When I kill someone, I open a door.’ He said someday the doors in his head might all open and let the bad things loose and he might go crazy, but until then he had no guilt feelings.”
    Robin read the Bible aloud to Tom until he asked her to stop. It helped her to hear the words aloud. When she began to cry again, Tom got angry and yelled at her.
    All along, he assured Robin that he was her protector. She had to remember that he was saving her from the men who were hunting them.
    “Why didn’t you just tie Hank up,” she asked. “Then you could have taken me away.”
    He explained why he hadn’t done that. “That would have been mean,” Tom said. “[To leave him] In the hot sun with no food