CHAPTER 44

THE WORST HANGOVER Grace had ever experienced occurred the day after she celebrated her twenty-first birthday. When she woke up at the crack of noon, her stomach feeling like the greasy water found at the bottom of a dumpster, her throat scratched raw from the hours spent throwing up, her head pounding as though a car had backed up over it, she could still recall, without effort, almost every single detail from her birthday party.

That wasn’t the case now.

She remembered the van sliding up next to her and she remembered seeing the armed men. One of them smashed the driver’s-side window—with a crowbar—because she had been frantic, fumbling at her seat belt buckle. She managed to free herself, but it was pointless; a man, maybe more than one, had grabbed her by the hair and pulled her out through the window. Yes, there had been more than one; she remembered several hands on her. She remembered being thrown into the van and being pinned against the floor, screaming for help against the cold steel, and she remembered the stab of a needle in her neck, and that was all. She had no idea what had happened since, or how she’d arrived here.

Here was a blow-up mattress with a pillow and blanket in a room she guessed had once been an office—low-pile beige carpeting coated in a film of dust, the fibers dented in areas where furniture had sat on it. No windows. On the white walls small holes left by nails used to hang whatever. The door was closed and, she assumed, locked. She didn’t know because she hadn’t gotten up from the bed to check—knew she should but it was too much of an effort. She couldn’t summon the energy.

Has to be the drug or drugs they gave me, she thought, and drifted back to sleep.

The next time she opened her eyes, her environment had changed slightly. A small lamp had been brought in and set up on the floor, and in the dim light she saw a bright yellow pail with the word toilet written across it in black marker. There was stuff in there; she could see a couple of rolls of toilet paper peeking over the top. She tried to reach for the pail—it was right beside the mattress, maybe a foot or so away—but she couldn’t hold her arm up; it flopped back against the mattress.

What did they give me? Why can’t I move?

It wasn’t exactly true that she couldn’t. She could move her fingers. She dug them into the carpet and worked her hand across the floor and up the pail and knocked it over, revealing the bounty inside: rolls of toilet paper, a bag of vinegar potato chips, a can of warm Diet Coke, and the kind of prewrapped sandwich only the truly desperate bought at convenience stores, the inside of the cellophane dripping with moisture and mayo. The thought of food repelled her.