Collecting Cooper

chapter twenty-two

Cooper’s head is much better today, but it’s still throbbing a little and he’s tempted to take the pills he found in his pocket yesterday. The wound on his chest is starting to itch and when he touches it with his fingers they come away damp with blood and something else too, something that’s not quite yellow. If he doesn’t eat something soon he thinks he’s going to go crazy.

He recognizes the girl. Shoulder-length red hair that is knotted and frayed. Her skin is pale and flushed. She can’t be any more than twenty. A student? Perhaps a former one. Even one from this year-there are always so many. Or it could be somebody from the supermarket, a checkout teller, some girl he’s made idle chitchat with while his groceries were scanned before he swiped his credit card. Maybe a hairdresser from the mall, a Jehovah’s Witness who banged on his door one morning, a receptionist at his doctor’s office. He’s seen her around but can’t place where. She’s in a dress that’s too big for her and covered in flowers that, under the lamplight, all look pale blue. It’s something his mother would wear in the summer.

Jesus, his mother. . she’ll be a mess. His mother will be eighty years old in July, and already the family is planning a huge party for her. His sister is going to fly back from the UK-and he suspects she might be flying back now because of what’s happened, assuming people even know he’s disappeared, which they must do if it’s true what Adrian said about burning down his house. He hopes his mother is holding up okay. She’s a strong woman. Has been ever since his dad walked out on them when Cooper was twelve years old. He hasn’t seen him since. Has no idea whether the man is even alive and doesn’t care. But his mother. . he owes her everything. With a weaker mother, his life would have taken a different path. When he was fourteen years old, he stole a car. He and his friend got drunk, and they crashed it. Neither of them were hurt, but his mother came and picked him up from the police station and didn’t say a word on the way home, didn’t say a word until the following morning when she made him breakfast.

He had apologized, and she had told him she wasn’t the one he should be apologizing to, that he should be apologizing to his future self, that it was his future self he was damaging. He didn’t care. Back then he didn’t care about much except that his dad had left, and how good beer tasted when he snuck out at night to meet his buddy. She made him write himself a letter for the future, in which he told himself how sorry and how stupid he was. She made him write down how much he had hurt his mother. He did that too. Then she went into her room and cried. When she came back out she sat down with him and ate breakfast and told him she felt sorry for the man she was going to give that letter to in ten years’ time. She never gave him that letter. Instead things changed. Every day she would tell him whether his future self would be happy or disappointed with his actions. He started to care about that future self. He didn’t want to grow up to be like his dad. He started to study harder. His grades were good.

When he was twenty years old, he had an affair with the next-door neighbor. She was fifteen years older than him. He thought he loved her. One day her husband came home with a shotgun and put a hole in her before putting one in himself. Nobody saw it coming. Cooper was never sure whether the husband knew his wife had been cheating, and he suspected that if he had known and who with, there would have been a shotgun shell reserved for him too. The husband was the cliché, the quiet man who didn’t speak much to people, and Cooper couldn’t figure out how he hadn’t seen it coming. It fascinated him. People were different, they ticked differently, and he wanted to understand them. He felt the loss of losing his lover, but he felt no guilt, and that interested him too.

Right now, he needs to understand Adrian and, if he can get this woman to wake up, get her to understand what’s going on.

“Hey,” he says, loud enough to be heard but not loud enough to be heard by her. He bangs against the door and gets the same result. Adrian said he’d be half an hour. The clock is ticking. He’ll aim for twenty minutes to be on the safe side. Cooper bangs against the window. He needs the girl to wake up, and to wake up now.

And she does.

Slowly.

Her eyes stay closed and her hands creep up to her face and start probing. She looks like she’s coming out of a very deep sleep, probably a nightmare. Her skin is red and patchy and her face is flushed, except for the dark gray smudges beneath her eyes. Her hands explore the straw sticking out from her mouth. She pulls on it gently but it doesn’t budge. For the first time he realizes her lips are glued shut. He calls to her again but she doesn’t respond. In fact she looks like she’s passed back out. Her fingers have stopped moving and her hands have collapsed onto the floor. It takes what feels like an hour but is only two minutes before there’s any further movement. She rubs at her eyes slowly and then they open. He can see her looking around but she can’t focus on anything. He taps on the glass and she looks in his direction but doesn’t register his presence.

He has eighteen minutes left.

“Miss, hey, miss, wake up, wake up. Please, you have to wake up.”

He watches her jaw move as she tries to speak. Then he sees it all coming back to her, her memories flooding with emotions. Her face tightens and her eyes grow wider and her hands probe faster at her face, especially at her lips, and she starts to cry. She sits up and looks around the room before holding the edges of the dress up to stare at it for a few seconds. Finally she locks her gaze on him. Her jaw moves again and he thinks she’s trying to scream. She turns away from him and her head pauses in the direction of the bookcase, the lamp casting her shadow over the books and trophies, and he’s sure if she could another scream would be coming.

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” he says, holding up his hands even though she can’t see them. “You’re going to be okay. I’m going to help you.”

She puts her palms on the ground and pushes herself further away from him. Looking through the cell window, and with her lips glued shut, it’s like watching a show on mute.

“Please, please, I’m not here to hurt you,” he says. “I’m a friend. I’m in the same situation as you.”

Sixteen minutes. Maybe more.

She gets to her knees. Both of them are scuffed and become even more scuffed as she tries to get to her feet. She loses balance and falls forward and he can hear something in her wrist crack. He winces at the sound. She starts to cry again. Another minute is lost. “Please, can you open the door?” he asks. “Is there a latch there? Or a lock?”

She doesn’t look at him. She cradles her arm and curls up into a fetal position. She’s wasting time and he can feel himself becoming increasingly frustrated. Even angry. He wants to get out of the cell and shake her. She’s going to blow their chance and she’s going to die and he’s going to die and if she just focused, if she could just get hold of herself. . Christ, if only he could slap her!

“We’re going to die down here if you don’t start helping me,” he says, only she isn’t listening. Out of a desperate need to do something, out of instinct, he turns and looks around his cell for something to help, but of course there’s nothing, only a ratty old mattress and a spring bed and a bucket a quarter full of his own piss and vomit that smells worse today than yesterday. He looks back at the window. She hasn’t moved.

Stay calm. Baby steps.

He takes a deep breath. “My name is Cooper,” he says, clenching his fists down low where she can’t see them. He tries to smile at her but ends up grimacing. He has to return to the basics, he has to return to psychology 101. “I bet your family is worried about you,” he says. “My family is worried about me. Help me help you see them again. Can you open the door? Please, please, take a look at the door.”

She looks up at him. She seems to figure out if she’s a prisoner here and he’s a prisoner here then they’re on the same side. She tightens her jaw and her eyes clear and for the first time since waking up she seems fully aware of herself.

Twelve minutes left.

“We need to be quick,” he says, “before the man who took us comes back. You have to help me, then I can help you. I promise we’re going to get out of here,” he says. She looks around the room, and it seems to Cooper that she’s seeing it for the first time. She turns in a circle and stops when she’s looking directly at him.

“The door,” he says. “Can you unlock it?”

She nods, but doesn’t move.

“We have to hurry,” he says, “and we have to stay quiet.”

She takes a step toward him, and then another, and finally she’s directly on the other side of the glass. He keeps waiting for her to back away and curl into a ball again but she doesn’t. She looks through the window at him and tries to see beyond, and he steps aside slightly so she can get a better look, only the lamplight doesn’t hit much of it. Up close, her face is sunken in and she looks tired and underfed and there are small blisters growing around the edges of her mouth. At least he thinks they’re blisters.

“I can find something to remove the glue,” he says, keeping his voice low and calm, no traces of panic, no hint that he desperately wants her to hurry the fuck up. “It won’t be hard, I promise.”

She nods again, and then she looks down at the door. She continues to cradle her injured wrist under her opposite armpit as she works at something with her free hand. There is squeaking as metal is hinged up and down, a dead bolt he assumes. It’s tight, and she has to work it a few times and then bang as it slides open and hits into place. The door opens a crack. He puts his hand on it and pushes, thinking this is too easy, then thinking it ought to be easy when the person holding you captive has the mind of a child.

Ten minutes left.

The door swings open. He steps into the basement. The air is just as cool on this side of the door. She flinches when he wraps his arms around her and holds her tight. “Thank God,” he whispers, and he has the urge to sob into the side of her neck. He pulls back. “I’m not going to hurt you,” he says, holding her shoulders, but she doesn’t seem to believe him.

“We need to find something to use as a weapon,” he says, and he moves over to the bookcase. He couldn’t get a good look from his cell window, but there is plenty of history on these shelves, including a couple of knives that have come from his house. He picks up the largest one, it’s a dull blade that forty years ago belonged to a man who stabbed his parents, a dull blade that he bought in an auction for just under two hundred dollars. Right now the blade feels priceless. It makes him feel as powerful as the previous owner must have felt. His briefcase is on the floor. He kneels down and pops the catch that does work and opens the lid. Everything inside is messed around. He rakes his fingers through the contents.

The camera is missing.

If it fell out when the briefcase got damaged, if Adrian doesn’t have it. .

This changes everything.

He closes up the case. He picks up the lamp and heads to the steps. Even though he was banging on the door a few minutes ago, he’s desperate to stay as quiet as he can now. In a world well away from this, his house has turned to ash, his life ruined, but nothing could be worse than being stuck down here forever. The basement door will probably be locked, but compared to the cell, even the basement feels like freedom. If it’s locked he’ll just wait on this side of the door until Adrian comes back. He can’t see things playing out any other way than him being forced to kill his captor. He has to. If he doesn’t, he risks too much. He’ll kill Adrian and the police will give him a hard time. The one thing he knows for sure is how eager the police are to get a conviction, no matter what the circumstances are. He’s seen it before. He’s seen them lock away men they’ve known are innocent, and there have been proven instances where they’ve planted evidence to get a conviction.

He’s going to kill Adrian and save this woman’s life and end up going to jail.

He comes to a stop halfway up the staircase.

The police are going to be a problem.

The missing camera an even bigger problem.

He carries on up the stairs. He crouches down and puts his head against the door but can’t hear anything beyond. There are so many possibilities waiting out there.

The girl is two steps behind him. She looks unsure of what’s about to happen.

Ultimately it’s the missing camera that makes his mind up for him. If it’d been in his briefcase, then things could have turned out differently. It’s a shame, because he truly was grateful for the girl’s help.

He still has eight minutes left. That’s plenty of time.

“There’s something I should tell you before I open this door,” he says, “because so far I haven’t been completely honest with you.”