Always Watching

hand on my mouth, grinding my lips into my teeth. “If you tell anyone about this, I’ll do it again—but I won’t let you out.”
    His hand presses harder. I taste blood. He says, “I’ll bury you alive. Do you understand?”
    I nod, terrified.
    He says, “Wait for a few minutes, then go down to the river and clean up.” He leans close to my ear, his voice muffled and distorted and seeming to come from far away. “Remember, tell anyone, and I’ll leave you to die next time.”
    He lifts me out of the hole, dumping me on the floor of the storage room.
    Then he is gone.
    After a few moments, I pull myself together, stagger away from the barn, through the back field, down to the river, going to a pool farther below the commune where none of the members swim. Crying and shivering as I wash myself in the frigid water. I wash my clothes too, spreading them across a rock in the sun, curl my naked and bruised body up into a ball, hiding behind a big rock, the warm sand wrapping around me. I fall asleep.
    Hours later, when I come back to the commune, my mother asks where I’ve been. I tell her I’ve been at the river. That I split my lip on a rock.
    I can’t remember anything else.
    *   *   *
    Now, I forced my body to relax, to breathe in and out. I was terrified, my legs shaking, but I had to break this down into moments, analyze the situation, and take it step by step. Take some deep breaths. You can get out of here if you keep calm.
    Aaron wasn’t coming back for me. He had warned me years ago, and his rage was too great. This time he would let me die. Now that my eyes had adjusted to the dark, I searched for a crack of light at the edges of the lid, but I was just surrounded by blackness and the scent of old horse feed, musty and rancid. My head filled with terrifying memories of freezers being recalled in the seventies because so many children died, and all the warnings to never play in one.
    I tried to calculate how much air I had, how long I could live. I knew that if I panted too much, I would use it up faster, so I tried to slow my breathing. I didn’t think I had much time, the air already felt different, my head light and my blood seeming loud in my ears. I tried to accept the fact that there was a very good chance that I was going to die. I thought of my family. What would happen to Lisa? Would she ever know where my body was? Tears leaked from my eyes as I thought of Robbie, wondering if he was also buried somewhere, staring up at a lid, screaming for help. Would death come easy for us? Would we just fall asleep, or die gasping for breath, suffocating in our makeshift graves? Panic surged over me again, rage at my helplessness. I hit up at the lid, an angry shove that got me nowhere. I burst into tears, sobbing in the dark like I had as a child. I pressed my hands to my eyes, took some breaths, and tried to refocus.
    I had two choices. Accept my fate, pray that Daniel would realize his father intended to kill me, and somehow overpower both men. Hope that Mary would call the police, that somehow, some way, I’d get lucky and survive this.
    My other choice was to die trying to escape.
    I bent my knees and, bracing my arms on either side of the freezer, kicked my heels into the wall. It didn’t give. I tried to push against the side walls, the wall behind my head, and the lid. The freezer was solid.
    I wondered if I would have more strength if I used my shoulders to push up. Angling my body and trying to double over in the small space, I reached down and braced my hands on the floor of the freezer. Then I reared up as hard as I could, using all the strength of my back. My neck and shoulders were in agony from the blow, my knees throbbed. But I thought I felt a slight give. Could the latch on the lock be rusted? Or maybe the screws that attached it to the freezer?
    I pushed up hard again and heard a slight noise, like something might be giving. I pushed up again and again, sweating and grunting with exertion. I took a break, sucking in big gulps of air, scared about how much oxygen I was using, but then the thought: If I’m going to die, at least I’ll die faster.
    With the last of my strength, I slammed my back up against the lid, sending a jolt of pain down my spine. Then a louder, tearing sound, a feeling that the lid was loosening, like the lock was giving out. I pushed up again, using everything in my body. A rip of metal as the bolts started to pull out. Now I just had to push a few