I’m talking to someone. Who? The only one here is Beth, and she’s just now stirring awake.

Oh, my God.

I was talking to him. He saw me. He knew I was there. He knew I was watching.

But he won’t understand what it means. I didn’t know any of it was real until I saw Brian at the club that night. I’d been having the dreams for a week before I knew it. There’s no way he’ll realize what’s going on.

There better not be.

I don’t tell Beth; I don’t want to say it aloud. We’ve got more than enough to be worried about today without me adding to it.

She puts on a brave face as she goes about her morning activities. If she weren’t my best friend I might be fooled. Nobody else might notice that her smile is forced or that her voice is just a little bit too even and controlled, but it’s clear as day to me.

I look at the clock. 9:55 AM. Two hours before we go. I don’t want to go to breakfast; I’m sure I won’t be able to keep anything down. But I have to do something, distract myself somehow.

I call Brian. He answers on the first ring; he sounds as tense as I am. By way of greeting I ask him, “Has your roommate gone over to breakfast?”

“Not yet,” he answers.

“Call me the second he does,” I tell him, and he says he will.

Beth looks – I’m not sure whether it’s horrified or impressed. Maybe both. “You’re not?” is all she can say.

Oh yes, I am. “You of all people should understand,” I say, and I can’t say anything else because the phone rings. I don’t think it’s been even thirty seconds since I hung up.

I don’t even give him a chance to speak. “Stay right where you are. I’ll be over in a minute,” I tell him, and I hang up without waiting for a response. I’m out of the room, down the stairs, outside and over to him in record time; it might not even have been a minute.

When he opens the door, I don’t say a word. I just go straight in and lock it behind me.

An hour later, we’re back in my room again. I send Brian down to the vending machine in the lobby to get some sodas and whatever snack looks good. At least we’ll have something in our stomachs. And it gives me a moment to talk to Beth alone.

“Even I wouldn’t have done that,” she says, looking at me nervously.

“I just – I’m afraid. After today – who knows? That could have been the last time…”

She doesn’t let me finish. “Don’t. Don’t you dare say that.” She’s been thinking it too. I know she has. And Brian felt it just the same as I did. Neither of us said it, but we didn’t have to. There were no words at all.

He comes back up a minute later with three Cokes, two Twinkies and a Snickers bar. He starts to apologize, but I shake my head. Really, that’s about the best we could hope for.

We eat our snacks in silence. At one point, out of nowhere, Beth takes my hand and Brian’s. “We’re all going to take care of each other, right? We’re all going to be OK, we’re all going to come home in one piece. Right?”

“Right,” Brian and I say together. Beth squeezes our hands hard.

“Right. That’s just all there is to it,” she says.

Exactly.

It’s a quarter after one. We go past the house, and there’s still no car in the driveway. I don’t know what that means.

We park a couple of streets away and start walking. Beth nearly falls on a patch of ice, and it’s very lucky that Brian catches her. That would be all we need – one of us breaking our leg or something.

We’re on the block now. Red Oak Drive. About halfway down, there it is, number 7209. Still no white car. Also no lights on. We can’t hear a TV or radio or anything else. I don’t think he’s here. What do we do now?

I know what the answer is, but – once we do it, there’s no going back.

“Let’s go around the back.” I’m in front, tiptoeing around the side of the house. I can hear Brian and Beth crunching through the snow behind me. It’s impossible to be quiet.

There’s a tiny yard in back and – thank God – a door that probably opens into the kitchen. He can’t be home – if he was anywhere on the ground floor, he’d have heard us by now. Still, we whisper.

“What now?” Beth asks.

The lock on the back door looks pretty flimsy. I wonder…

“What are you doing?” Brian asks, as I pull my driver’s license out of my pocket and insert it between the door and the doorframe, just like Jessica showed me. It only takes a second – I feel the catch, I push, and I turn the doorknob. We’re inside.

“There’s no alarm,” Beth breathes. Hopefully. Or, there is and it’s a silent alarm. But we can’t worry about that now.

The kitchen is very dirty; the floor needs a good mopping, and there are probably a week’s worth of dishes in the sink. Several days’ worth of newspapers sit on the kitchen table.

He’s definitely not here. We’d know. I think.

There’s a small dining room, a round table and four chairs. There’s a living room, curtains drawn. We see a decent-sized TV and a flowery-print sofa with a plastic cover over it. There’s a bathroom, the door ajar. Nothing in there. There’s another door. It’s closed. It must lead to the basement.

And then there are stairs going up. That’s where the bedroom is. Brian takes the lead. “Beth, wait at the bottom of the stairs. Let us know if you hear anything,” I whisper. I follow Brian. There are three doors, all open. One is another bathroom; the second is filled with boxes, but no furniture or anything else. Nobody in either of them.

The third is the bedroom. Everything is exactly how I saw it. It’s as though I’ve stepped straight into the nightmare. The dresser, the painting with the ship and the orange-red sky, even the wristwatch. All here.

Images come into my mind, and I can see right there on the bed – no! I won’t. He’s not here. It’s not real. It’s not going to be real.

“Come down here!” Beth hisses, breaking me out of my spell.

Slowly we step out of the bedroom and back down the stairs. Beth is waiting there; she looks nervous enough for the three of us. “Behind that door,” she points to the closed door, the one I assumed leads down to the basement.

After a moment, I can hear what she heard; metal rattling against metal, and something else. Something like an animal whimpering. I try to turn the doorknob; it’s locked.

I try my trick again, and I can’t get it to open that way. Brian grabs my hand, pulls it away from the doorknob. “Give me one minute,” he whispers. Beth and I both cringe at the noise he makes, looking for God knows what in the kitchen.

He returns a couple of minutes later with a hammer. “Under the sink. My Dad keeps a toolkit there, too,” he says.

“Go for it,” I tell him. There’s no point worrying about being quiet now. He takes one, two, three whacks at the doorknob, and on the fourth, he smashes it right off of the door. I look up into his face, and if this were any other time or place, I would kiss him and never let go.

Instead, I turn away from him and pull open the door. There’s a raspy shout from below us: “Help me!”

I feel around on the wall, and sure enough there’s a light switch. I take two steps down the stairs, and I can see everything. It’s an unfinished basement, there are boxes, some lawn furniture folded up against one wall, and, there, by the boiler – there she is.

It’s her, the girl I saw. She’s sitting on the floor, with one arm up in the air – she’s chained to one of the pipes coming out of the boiler.

“Beth, go look for a phone! Call the police!” Brian shouts. I hear her running, I hear Brian coming down the stairs behind me. I continue down, over to the girl.

“We’re going to help you. You’re going to be all right,” I say, forcing calm into my voice. She focuses her eyes on me. She’s dressed, thank God. I assume these are the clothes she had on when he took her. Jeans, a Cleveland Browns t-shirt over a long-sleeved white shirt. She’s barefoot.

“I’m Sara. What’s your name?” She’s in shock, I think. I just want to get her talking, get her attention on me and off of whatever’s already happened to her. She’s got the beginnings of a black eye, and there’s a bloodstain all down her left sleeve.

“Rebecca,” she mutters. “Help me!”

I put a hand on her shoulder, very gently. “We will, Rebecca. I promise. We’re going to get you out of here, you’re going to be just fine.” I hope. God only knows what she’s been through already.

From above, Beth calls out, “There’s no phone anywhere!”

I look at Brian; he nods. “Go next door. We’ll be OK here.”

“I can’t leave you here!”

Yes, you can! “Beth, just go! Get the police here! And an ambulance, too!”

I hear her footsteps above me. “I’m going now!” she shouts, and I can hear her muttering in a much lower voice something that sounds like “Oh God, oh God, oh fuck, oh God!” Then there’s a sound that has to be the front door slamming shut.

“Please help me!” Rebecca wails again.

“We will, honey. The police are on their way. We’ll have you home in no time.” Her right wrist is handcuffed to the pipe. I don’t know how to get her free. Someone gave Beth a pair of those furry handcuffs last year as a joke, and I remember thinking that they looked pretty flimsy. Not these-they look serious, like what the police use. “You didn’t see any nice big, sharp pliers in that toolbox, did you?”

Brian shakes his head. Just then, there’s a loud click, and a whistle from the boiler and Rebecca screams. The pipe! “I know it’s hard, but you have to keep your arm away from the heating pipe, honey. We’re doing everything we can. I promise.”

There’s a loud thump, and the whistling stops; the heat’s off again. Then-oh, fuck. Oh, God. No! I didn’t just hear…

I did. Brian heard it too. Rebecca starts wailing at the top of her lungs. “Please don’t,” I beg her. “Please.” I step away from her. She’s still yelling. Of course she won’t stop. She can’t.

I wouldn’t.

Brian takes my hand and heads for the stairs. We go up slowly, one at a time. We get to the top…

And there’s someone there, looming in the doorway. He shoves Brian with both hands; Brian‘s too surprised to act. For one instant, he stands on the top step, frozen in place, and then…

Everything happens in slow motion. Brian loses his balance. His feet go out from under him. He lets go of my hand as he falls, and for a moment I’m still standing. My left hand goes to the railing, and as Brian goes down headfirst, I grab his ankle with my right.

Then I lose my balance, too. I hear a sharp crack – it seems like the loudest sound I’ve ever heard-and my right foot is on fire. I scream. Brian slips out of my grip and slides down the stairs. There’s a hollow thud as, I think, his head hits the wall. Brian!

I go down right after him, still hanging on to the railing for a moment. My body twists around and I slide down feet first, on my stomach. My right foot hits the floor – I’m screaming again, it’s worse than anything – God, it hurts! It’s broken. Has to be.

I try to get up anyway, and I make it almost to my knees before the pain is just too much, and I think I black out for a few seconds.

I’m on my back as my eyes open again. There’s a sharp pain in my rear, to go along with the stabbing, burning pain in my right foot. I must have fallen on top of something sharp.

I look up to see the man stepping over me. He looks down, and I see him clearly now.

It’s him. Dr. Walters. “You!” he spits. His eyes go wide as, I assume, he remembers his own dream. “I saw you last night,” he says uncertainly.

“Yes!” I say, forcing the word out. Everything hurts now. My head is pounding. I feel so light-headed. I have to stay conscious. I have to keep talking. Keep him talking. “I saw you, too. I know – I know everything. Everything you did.”

Brian’s near me, just a couple of feet away. He’s lying on the floor, not moving at all. I have to see – he can’t be – please, don’t be – thank God! There! I can see his chest rising and falling. He’s breathing. He’s alive.

“I know you,” Dr. Walters says, looking from me over to Rebecca and back again. “You’re a student at the university.”

My attention returns to him; I have to fight to stay awake, to focus on his words. I have to keep him talking. That’s how it works in all those movies, doesn’t it? As long as he’s talking, he isn’t doing. And Beth must have called the police by now. They’re on their way. They have to be.

“Yeah,” I say. I don’t know how I’m managing to speak. It’s so hard. I just want to pass out. I won’t. I can’t. “You – my roommate really liked you. You were her advisor. Beth? Beth Rosewell?”

That gets through to him. He’s interested in spite of himself. “Elizabeth? Very bright girl. She always impressed me.”

Hell of a way you have of showing it, don’t you? But it matters to him. It’s important that I’m a student there. Maybe – I wonder if – I hope I’m right about this. “The other girl, the one with dark hair, the one at the bus stop. She’s a student there, too. But you knew that.” That’s why his dream about Jackie was different. He dreamed about looking for her, instead of dreaming about already having her. Somewhere inside, maybe he’s got just enough of a conscience left that he knew how wrong it was. “You didn’t want to hurt her. You didn’t want to hurt someone from the school.”

He kicks my side, hard. My vision goes dark, just for an instant. I don’t know how much longer I can keep this up. “You don’t know that.”

I have to keep going. Keep him talking. Help will be here soon. I know it. Beth wouldn’t let me down. “I do know. So do you. You knew it was wrong to hurt her.” He’s actually listening. I’m getting through. I can’t stop now. God, I want to, I want to let go, I want to pass out and not hurt anymore. But I can’t do that. “She has a name. Jackie. She’s my friend, and Beth’s friend. You knew it was wrong. You know it’s wrong to hurt me. Or Rebecca over there. She’s got a name, too.”

I wish Brian would wake up. I need him. I can’t do this by myself much longer.

Dr. Walters looks away from me towards Rebecca. “She doesn’t matter.” It was a mistake to talk about her. Oh, God. I screwed up. I have to get him to hear me again.

“She does so matter! We all matter!” He’s just standing there, looking back and forth from me to Rebecca. I’m losing him. I’m losing him, and he’s going to – no. I can’t let him. “Hurting her isn’t going to fix anything!” I don’t know where that came from, it just popped into my head. He stomps on my foot, my already injured foot, and I shriek. I retch and my stomach empties onto the floor.

I’m coughing and shaking. I have to get control of myself. Keep talking, keep him talking. “You can’t bring your wife back this way,” I manage to get out. “You can’t get your job back. It won’t work.”

He kicks me in my side, again. I definitely pass out for a moment there. When I come to, he’s still standing over me. Rebecca’s still crying. Keep his attention on me. Beth will come through. The police will be here. I know it. “You can’t fix everything that went wrong this way.”

He snorts. “Next you’ll tell me that if I just say I’m sorry and let you go, that’ll make everything right again.”

“No,” I whisper. My voice is going. My throat is so sore. It hurts to breathe. It’s a struggle to say anything, but I have to. “You can’t make it right. But you can make it not any more wrong than it already is. You’ve still got the chance for that.”

“No. It’s gone too far. Too far,” he says, and he looks ready to kick me again – and that’s when it happens. He freezes.

We all hear it, Dr. Walters and Rebecca and I, at the same time. The sirens. He looks down at his hands, as though he’s surprised to find them empty. His eyes dart around the basement in a panic. There’s no exit down here, no way for him to escape. No weapons. He steps over me, and as he’s running up the stairs I can hear footsteps above me, more than one set of them – lots of them.

It has to be the police. Beth came through for me. I knew she would.

There’s a thump, then another one. I hear breaking glass, shouting, more shouting, and finally a thud that shakes the ceiling. And then I pass out for good…

I don’t know where I am. It’s white. Bright. It smells like – cleaner. Not bleach, but something like that. There’s someone standing over me, looking down at me.

“Dad?”

I think it’s him. He’s talking to someone behind him. “She’s awake,” he says to them.

“Dad?”

“I’m here, Sara. You’re fine. You’re in the hospital.” He looks really tired. I can just see, there’s Mom standing right behind him. And Beth is next to her, I think.

I must have laughed. “What’s so funny?” Beth asks. It’s definitely probably her.

“Mom’s the same height as me, did you know that? She looks just like me, and you look just like you, so you look like you and me standing next to each other.”

Dad whispers something to them. I think I hear the words “pain medication” but I’m not sure.

“Why am I in the hospital?” Did something happen to me? Why does my right leg look so much bigger than my left? I’m really confused…

I remember everything, right up to the moment when the police came. Beth is sitting next to me, and she’s just now filling me in on what happened after that. She doesn’t wait for me to ask about Brian; that’s the first thing she tells me.

“He’s fine. He had a concussion, but that was all. They kept him overnight, but they made him go home yesterday.” She squeezes my hand. “He wanted to stay, but you were still in Intensive Care and they wouldn’t let him, and then his father showed up and took him back to campus.”

“Where is he now?”

“Downstairs in the gift shop. Buying you flowers, I think.” Of course he is.

I love him.

“What about – what about Rebecca?” I want to ask if she talked about what happened before we found her but I don’t think I want to know.

“She’s going to be fine, too.” Beth knows what I’m not asking. “He didn’t – didn’t do anything. I mean, besides what we saw.” I sigh. That’s something, anyway. Actually, it’s a lot.

“And Dr. Walters is in jail,” she continues. I don’t really want to know any more than that. I don’t ever want to think about him ever again, if I can help it.

“And – this is important,” she says, whispering now. “I told the police what happened. I told them I wanted to visit him, because he was my favorite professor. You and Brian came with me and when we got to the front door we heard Rebecca, and the door was open so we went inside.”

What a load of crap. Not that I would have done any better. “They believed that?”

She grins. “Under the circumstances, I don’t think they really cared why we were there. But it’s better if you tell them the same thing. I already told Brian.”

I just now notice her left hand is bandaged. “What happened to you?”

“Oh,” she shrugs. “Nobody was home in either house next door, or across the street. Then he drove up, and I kind of freaked out. I picked up a garden gnome and smashed the living room window of that house across the street, and I called 911 from there. I cut myself climbing in through the broken window.”

That actually is kind of funny, but I don’t have the energy to laugh. “So what happened to me?”

That’s less funny. “Your right ankle is broken, you’re probably going to have that cast for six weeks or so. And you’ve got some bruised ribs. And,” she’s fighting to suppress a giggle. “A laceration of your left buttock. You landed on a nail when you went down the stairs.”

“I don’t understand. That’s not funny.” I don’t think I appreciate her laughing at my injuries.

“No, it’s not.” Except obviously it somehow is. “Just – I guess you better not ever break up with Brian, otherwise you’ll have to explain to your next boyfriend why you’ve got a scar on your butt.” If I had enough energy, I’d try to sit up and smack her.

Brian picks that moment to walk in the door, bouquet in hand. “Those are so pretty,” I say. “So nice. Come here.”

Beth takes the flowers out of his hand as he leans over me. I can’t pull myself up, but – I don’t have to. Brian’s found the lever to raise me up, and now my head is level with his, and he kisses me.

“I was so scared, when you fell. I saw you were breathing, but – God, I don’t ever want to lose you.” That was the worst moment out of all of it, that first instant when I didn’t know if he was – if he was alive.

“I don’t want to lose you, either. Why don’t we just never lose each other, how about that?”

I kiss him; it seems like a good answer.

It’s all the answer either of us needs.