Save Her

Natalie - Chapter 5-2

“It was just a room,” Livia continued, her sobs getting stronger. Behind her, she was oblivious to the people turning in her direction. “It had cement walls, fluorescent lights — no, they were the long ones, the old style of fluorescent — you know, the kind that sometimes flicker.”

Agent Love closes the lid of the DVD player. “You’ve seen enough.”

Natalie burns Agent Love with her eyes and opens the lid of the player again. She hits play. The video continues. Livia loses all control of her emotions. “I really don’t think she’s okay. Oh my god, I don’t! That place was so cold. So dingy. I’m so worried for her! And the baby!” Suddenly, Livia stops crying. Her mouth opens, but no sound comes out. Not a breath escapes into the mouthpiece. She’s as still as if her lungs had collapsed. Natalie glances at Agent Love and then back to the video. Livia just revealed that Natalie was pregnant to the person on the phone. “Yes,” Livia says into the phone. Then, “It was a mistake… I shouldn’t have….I’m sorry! Somebody has to do something… please do something… I have no idea where he is... They asked me about him… I don’t know if he knows.” Natalie realizes Livia can’t be talking to Drayden because Livia refers to him in the third-person. She must be talking to Natalie’s mother or father. Livia’s cries turned into deep sobs as she listens to the person on the other end of the phone call. “Okay,” Livia says a few times in between a few “Uh huh’s” and “Yeah’s,” finally getting control over her crying. “Uh huh,” she says again, “I’ll try. I’m sure I can describe at least two of them… Okay… Okay.” And then the other person must have hung up on her because she removes the phone from her ear and looks at it suddenly, curiously.

The video cuts out. Natalie waits for more, but that’s it. The video had been unsatisfying. They showed no newspaper, no date-stamp, no sign of the season because the lighting was so clammy and dreary it could have been any day at all in England. Natalie looks up at Agent Love who gives her nothing back — not so much as a raised eyebrow to see if her wishes had been met, nor a hint of an apology because she knew this ridiculous attempt would agitate Natalie.

“This is preposterous!” Natalie says to Agent Love in her angriest voice. “The video proves absolutely nothing, and you know it! Was it recorded yesterday? Weeks ago? I wanted proof she was still alive. This proves nothing! She’s dead, isn’t she? Isn’t she?” Natalie pounds her fists on the table.

Agent Love doesn’t flinch. She’s as angry as Natalie. Gone is the studied stare of authority. Agent Love rises so suddenly from her chair that the backs of her legs send it toppling behind her. By the time her chair settles to a stop, Agent Love is standing over Natalie. She grabs the collar of Natalie’s shirt and slaps her hard across her face. Natalie is too stunned to do or say anything. She flashes through her life quickly, and can’t remember a time she had ever been struck. Her parents rarely scolded and had never raised a hand in anger. They didn’t have to because their authority was understood. The pain blazes on her cheek. The hot slap quickly turns to broad pricks of pain on her skin and deep into her cheekbone. Agent Love stands hovering over her looking at her threateningly in a way that Natalie can’t seem to understand. It had all happened so quickly. Agent Love had lost it. She cracked. Natalie cowers slightly as Agent Love tries to slow her breathing. She’s so close and could strike again. She looks like she’s about to strike again. The door behind Natalie slams open. Two guards enter the room quickly and rush to Agent Love and pull her away from Natalie. She holds her eyes on Natalie as the guards pull her out of the room and close the door behind them.

Natalie’s right hand goes to her belly where she feels kicking, while her left hand goes to her cheek where the pain is throbbing the most. She feels wetness. She looks at her fingertips. Tears, not blood. She rubs the tears between her fingers and then feels the swelling of her cheek. Natalie wonders if Agent Love’s reaction had been the confirmation of her worst fears? That Livia was indeed dead? No. Her mind can’t accept it. She forces her mind not to go there. There’s no way her best friend is no longer alive. That’s preposterous. Or maybe it’s not. Her heart races. What just happened is the most terrifying event of her life. She was in danger. Her baby was in danger.

Her heart rate picks up. She looks at Agent Love’s toppled chair. Natalie is alone in the room. She sits there wanting to leave, but she’s afraid her legs might shake too much and cause her to fall. She’s afraid. She takes a deep breath. It helps a little. She takes more deep breaths and feels her pained cheek and feels her round belly. She has to calm down. She has to figure out what happened. She has to not let anything like that happen ever again. She has to get out of here.

The stress of it all is too much. She can’t control her breathing. The adrenaline pumps viciously. Agent Love had hurt her. Worse, Agent Love had scared her. The door opens behind her again. She turns defensively and sees it’s just two guards. She’s never seen either of them. She knows they’ll never talk to her. They never do. She’s given up on them entirely. The guards take each of her arms and help her up out of the chair. The coursing adrenaline seems to settle. Exhaustion hits her suddenly when she rises to her feet. She feels weak. She stumbles. The men guide her back into the chair. A minute later, two different guards enter with a wheelchair. They put a heart monitor on her pointer finger but are wordless besides. Then, they put some portable wand-like instrument against her belly and watch something on a small portable monitor. She cranes her neck to see but doesn’t have the angle. They’re looking at her baby, she knows.

“Let me,” she says. “I want to see.” The man using the wand uses his other hand to hold down Natalie’s shoulder, pinning her in place so she can’t see what he’s seeing.

He says, “The baby’s fine,” but he doesn’t say it to Natalie. He says it to the walls. He says it to whoever is behind the cement and the glass watching these interrogation sessions. The comment and the hand keeping pressure down on her shoulder confirms what she already knew: she’s just a vessel. She’s not their concern. It’s entirely about her baby.

They move Natalie carefully into the wheelchair. When her butt hits the vinyl seat, Natalie feels something slip inside her blouse. It falls onto her belly, sticks to her skin for a few seconds as they pushed her wheelchair towards her room, and then finally slides down the right side of her belly to her right hip. At first, she doesn’t know what it is, but by the time she reaches the outside door to her room, she’s in a full-fledged panic. A sheen of stress perspiration immediately envelopes her. She hopes the guards don’t notice. If they do, she hopes they attribute her nervousness to Agent Love slapping her. Inside her gown, sandwiched now between her hip and the vinyl seat of the wheelchair, is the possibility of freedom. It’s a keycard. She’s sure of it. It’s flat and plastic and light. It’s the same keycard her male nurses used to deliver her trays of food, and the same keycard that opened the doors of escape. Agent Love had given Natalie a key.

The lowering of adrenaline throws her as they got to her door. She can’t think straight. The one thing she knows is that she can’t let them move her from the chair. She needs to stay in the chair. No matter what. She can’t let the key slip any further. She can’t let it fall. If she stands then gravity will reveal her’s and Agent Love’s secret. She will not let Agent Love’s mysterious act be discovered. She can’t. It would be the end of Agent Love.

Natalie cries. She puts her head into her hands and covers her face and tries to clear her thoughts. The emotion is partly real because the true up and down feelings of anger and relief and sadness and pain and discovery are almost too much for her to bear. She hunches over toward her knees, and her sobs get louder. The two men try to straighten her again.

“Get off me!” She screams louder than she’s ever screamed before. The scream startles them. Both look a little afraid. Both look toward the camera and wait. They glance down at her. “We’re fine! Just leave us alone!”

After a few seconds, the one who held the wand to her belly holds his hand to his ear and nods. He gets behind her and pushes her chair slowly into the room. She hears the door close behind her. She listens in between her sobs. It sounds like she’s alone. She doesn’t want to recover too quickly. She’s sure they’re watching her on the cameras right now. Her thoughts sharpen. She has a key. A key to her freedom. For whatever reason, Agent Love had given her a key. She thinks about how to hide it. She doesn’t know where she might hide it. They watch her always. She knows they do. She knows there’s not a single minute that somebody from Rine isn’t watching her. Even in the bathroom, there is no privacy. At night it is never too dark to not see her. Agent Love had taken a chance, and Natalie knows she cannot let her down. Surely she had thought of a place for her to hide this, but where? And again, how?

Her room is clean sometimes when she comes back to it after her sessions, so she can’t stick the keycard haphazardly under the sink or behind the toilet. She needs to be smart. She needs to hide this as if her life depends on it. They’d be bringing her food soon. Her bland and healthy food. She knows this not because of a clock that reminds her, but because her hunger tells her so. She needs to hide the key before they come with her food. She rolls the wheelchair towards the bed and wiggles forward in the seat. In one rolling step she lunges up and out, holding the key to her right hip with her right hand, and carefully places herself in bed. After the sheets are over her, she relaxes. She slows her alligator tears and thinks about the foam mattress underneath her. If she saws back and forth into it, how long will it take to make enough of a slit to slip the key into? She takes the key from underneath her gown — careful not to rustle too much — and hides it in her palm like she imagines a magician would do and then puts the edge of it firmly on the foam. She moves the edge of the card against the foam, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, but it doesn’t weaken the integrity of the mattress at all. She tries again, but anxiety kicks in when it won’t cut into the foam, so she forces herself to stop.

They come with her food. One stands at the door while the other moves past her bed and heads straight for the wall opposite the door to the small stand where they put her food. Neither makes eye contact; nobody but Agent Love ever does. These two are somewhere in their forties, super-fit, with limbs that move easily and not clumsily. Inside the room are four cameras. When she first arrived, she thought there were only three, but then one day a fourth appeared. She still wasn’t sure if she remembers wrong or if the fourth got added after the fact. Either way, each camera overlaps the other slightly, which means absolutely zero privacy for her and her little one, even when taking care of her personal business. Because of that, she never lingers in the bathroom longer than she needs to.

She can’t hide the keycard in the bathroom. In the bathroom, nothing covered her. The small shower stall is glassed-in, but it isn’t the wacky glass that morphs things you see through it, all wavy and distorted; this glass was smooth and didn’t even steam up, so it was high-tech stuff that revealed everything always.

Her two visitors finally leave. Natalie thinks better than to draw attention to herself by not eating, and god forbid, cause them to come in and check her vitals and her baby’s vitals. She keeps her new prize under the covers as she sweeps her feet out of bed and makes directly for the food. It’s unmemorable just like all her meals before. She eats everything and even sops up the green bean juice with bread. If only her mother and father could see her now, she thinks as the juice drips down her chin. They would have an absolute fit. All the training and manners are gone in a matter of months! But she doesn’t care because who she used to be differs greatly from the young woman she is now. Now she’s a mother, and it doesn’t matter how young she is, because she knows who she will be: she will be a survivor. And the key hiding in her bed will be her freedom.