The Never List

I’d thought that somehow, surely she would break free of his control enough to try again, if only for the sake of her sanity.
    When I’d hear her scratching inside the box, like a trapped animal, I’d listen for patterns, for anything that sounded remotely like a code. I’d drive myself insane wondering why I couldn’t makesense of the random noises that would occasionally emanate from in there.
    And I kept listening for a long time. If the rest of us were quiet, I could sometimes hear her chewing her food, slowly savoring whatever scraps he’d left for her that day. I would even wake up at night if she shifted suddenly in her sleep. Once I thought I heard her sigh, and I sat still as a stone for an hour afterward, waiting for her to repeat it.
    But she never did.
    In a way, she might have been better equipped than most for such solitude and reflection. She had always been pensive, hard to read, withdrawn. Always thinking and daydreaming, never focused. She had hardly ever paid attention in high school, her gaze drifting out the window to the clouds above, her mind floating somewhere out there with them, thinking God knows what. But we managed to make it through our classes together, just as we’d made it through everything else. At the end of each day she would copy my class notes down into her own impossibly neat script, and we’d use her version for studying.
    I yearned for those days, when we had not been separated by ten feet of cold cellar space, a wooden box, and whatever impenetrable psychological force Jack held over her. Now I wondered if she even had enough good memories left to sustain her, or if, like mine, her very imagination had been invaded by the horrors we were living through, and her mind could produce only nightmares. I wondered if she sometimes wished she had died in that car accident along with her mother, all those years ago. I know I often wished I had.
    It must have been that same day—at least it is in my memory—that Tracy was brought down early in the morning after a full night upstairs with Jack. She seemed to be unconscious as he half-dragged her limp body down the stairs. He threw her up against the wall.She scowled and opened her eyes briefly, just long enough for me to see them rolling back in her head.
    She wasn’t dead, anyway.
    He leaned over and chained her, careful to check the lock twice, then turned to me and Christine.
    I know Christine did the same thing I did. We tried not to look away from him, cowering in fear, as our bodies naturally wanted to do. He hated that. But at the same time we both managed to shrink our thin frames into the tiniest possible space, hoping he wouldn’t pick us next. He stood over us, laughing softly, allowing his eyes to soak us in, to absorb the sight of his own private menagerie.
    The room was utterly silent. We watched him, our hearts seizing with fear. I was willing him away from me with all my might. Not me, not me, not me . Please .
    Finally, he turned slowly and stomped back up the stairs, whistling as he reached the top.
    He had just been fucking with us this time.
    As he left, I counted the steps in my head, the sound of the creaks echoing in the colorless space. Christine whimpered with relief. I let out a deep breath, slowly. Overhead we heard him moving about easily in the kitchen, going about his usual routine apparently. As if he’d just been checking the basement for water after a heavy rain.
    Tracy slept most of that day, huddled in a ball, looking enough like a corpse that I had to watch closely to tell if her chest was still rising and falling.
    In the early evening, marked for us only by the dimming of our precious crease of light from the window, she woke with a start. Without so much as a glance in my direction, she crawled back to the bathroom, her chain barely reaching, and I heard her retching violently into the toilet.
    She stayed gone a long time after that. I listened as hard as Icould and thought I heard a muffled sob from her. I nodded to myself, knowingly. Tracy would never let us see her cry. She must’ve been waiting back there for the tears to stop.
    I watched for her, tortured as usual by the slow ticking of time, waiting to see what she would do next.
    Looking back, it’s shameful that I didn’t feel anything for her then. No pity. No concern. It had all been stripped right out of me. The only variables I could register at that point were whether something caused me physical pain, or whether it