The Never List

carefully, but I also knew there would be something in there only I would understand. Above all things, that’s how he operated. He wanted that personal relationship. Very deep and very personal. He got inside your mind, crawled in like a venomous snake slithering into a hole in the desert, then twisted around in there until he was fully comfortable and at home. It had been hard to resist him when physical weakness made you turn to your attacker as a savior. Harder to push him away when, after taking everything away from you, maybe forever, he doled out the only things you needed to sustain you—food, water, cleanliness, the least sign of affection. A small comforting word. A kiss in the dark.
    Captivity does things to you. It shows you how base an animal you can be. How you’d do anything to stay alive and suffer a little bit less than the day before.
    So I was scared looking at that letter, remembering the control he’d had, and in some ways might always have, if it was put to the test. I was scared that that envelope might contain words powerful enough to take me back there.
    But I knew I couldn’t betray Jennifer again. I would not die letting her body sink deeper into the earth, alone wherever he had put her.
    I could be strong now. I reminded myself that now I wasn’t starving, tortured, naked, deprived of light and air and normal human contact. Well, maybe normal human contact, but that was of my own choosing.
    And now, after all, I had Bob the doorman downstairs and a whole city of saviors out there, shadowy forms far below my window down on Broadway, shopping, laughing, talking, never knowing that eleven stories up a ten-year-old drama was unfolding at my dining room table. Me against me, mano a mano .
    I picked up the envelope and eased out the single piece of thin paper. The pen had been pushed so hard against it, I could feel the letters like Braille from the back. Sharp letters. Nothing curved, nothing soft.
    Jennifer had been gone from the cellar only a few days when he started taunting me. At first I dared to hold out hope. Maybe she had managed to escape and would send for help. I would spend hours imagining how she had broken free, that she was just beyond the cellar walls, with the police, their weapons drawn, surrounding the house. I knew how unlikely that was, given that she’d barely had the strength to walk up the stairs when he pulled her from the box that last time, with her head covered and arms chained. Still I hoped.
    He left me to my own imagination for a while, then slowly it dawned on me what his strategy was. He started smiling at me knowingly when he came down to bring us food or water. As if we had a secret together. He gave me extra each day, as though he werenursing me back to health, as a reward for something. Christine and Tracy began to look at me suspiciously. Their voices sounded guarded when they spoke.
    I was disgusted at first, but in the end, this new form of torture provided the germ of the idea that would save me.
    After nearly two months, in a gesture of what might have even been compassion in his twisted worldview, he told me she was dead. I could not believe the emptiness that fell inside me in that instant, as if a black cloth had dropped over our cellar diorama. Despite the fact that Jennifer had not spoken a word in nearly three years, and I hadn’t seen her face for the last one because of the ever-present black hood, still her presence had defined my day-to-day existence. She had been there, silent, like a deity.
    When Tracy was upstairs and Christine asleep, I could whisper to Jennifer safely without being heard. Prayers, supplications, musings, memories of our life were all spinning out into the darkness to her, my quiet goddess in the box. Her suffering was so much greater than mine. Maybe that was what gave me the strength to keep fighting, and, indeed, to stay alive.
    He took exquisite pleasure in watching the pain on my face when he told me she was dead. I tried to hide it. For three years he managed to use my love for her as a component of my regular punishment. In those rare instances when I tried to fight back and even pain wouldn’t make me give in, he knew all he had to do was threaten to hurt her more than he already had. I suppose he did the same to her, but I wouldn’t know because after that first night we were never to speak again. She was kept bound and gagged in that box. Our only communication in those early days was through a