The Trap

by Catherine Ryan Howard

This is the story she tells herself as she leaves the village and crosses into the dark its streetlights had been holding back.

An ex-boyfriend had once told her that his favorite part of a night out was the walk home. Just him and his thoughts on deserted streets, the evening’s fun still warm in his chest. He had no tense wait for a taxi. He didn’t need to walk to the front door with his keys squeezed between his fingers, ready to scratch, to disable. He had never texted a thumbs-up emoji to anyone before he went to sleep so that they could go to sleep as well. The part of the night he loved was the part she had to survive.

hedgerow,

but then the road twists into a tunnel of overhanging trees and the dark solidifies. She can’t see her own legs below the hem of her dress now. Her body is literally disappearing into the night.

But then, she isn’t dressed for this weather. That’s a statement of fact. Jesus Christ, you really can’t say anything these days, can you?

a brief smile she hopes won’t encourage him or antagonize him.

The media, who play favorites with the missing women

Lucy would take anonymity over pity any day of the week.

The world, she’d discovered, just wasn’t designed for people with open wounds. Instead, it seemed packed with the privileged and their petty problems, their shitty attitudes, their blatant ungratefulness.

It had been disconcerting to discover that, even when your life had a person-sized hole in it, you still occasionally had to pop to the supermarket. You had to eat, even if you’d no appetite for it. And no matter what else was happening in your life, you were going to need things like toilet paper and rubbish bags.

the not-very-whispered whispers

the curiosity disguised as concern.

gorse

relishing her misfortune like a premium-channel spectator sport.

In the outside world, you always had to be the exact right amount of devastated. Look like you’re on the verge of falling apart, but not let it actually happen. Be grateful that people were enquiring as to how you were, but thank them by never burdening them with the raw, horrible truth. Be OK, but not too OK.

A Goldilocks of grief.

All she wanted was answers, but now, faced with the possibility of actually getting them, she wasn’t sure she was ready for them.

Or was there never any beginning, just an always, and trying to figure out when things changed is like searching for the start of a circle?

Before you ask, no. She doesn’t know. What I find fascinating, though, is that she seems to think that she would, that it would be obvious.

I know there’s a very real risk it won’t end well for me, but I’ve no interest in a life where I don’t do it. The first time I made it to the summit, it was a feeling like I’d never known. As if there’d been a hole inside of me all this time and that feeling was the missing piece. It was the exact right shape and size. It filled me up. For the first time, I really did feel alive.

I acknowledged that the thing I was best at was being lucky.

jetwash.

In the deepest, loneliest hours of the night, she found this show inexplicably soothing.

Maybe it was because of all the technical lingo, the flaps and the pitot tubes and the trim and so on, the terminology that turned the emotion of death and destruction into science, engineering, and cold, hard facts.

burying her face in his chest, drawing in a deep breath and holding it, hoping it would hold in all the parts of her too, all the feelings that were popping and bursting and threatening to turn themselves into tears.

It was a slow and painful realization that, in real life, gone girl wasn’t anywhere near enough of a story.

clutching a sheaf of Gone Girl Golden Tickets® in her hand: young, beautiful, and totally innocent.

Trusting him with the story of your missing loved one was like going to Jerry Springer or Jeremy Kyle to sort out your family feud.

One of these times, I’ll perish on the mountain. If I keep going up, that much is true. All I’m ever trying to do, really, is delay it. To avoid it being this time, if I can.

When she opened her eyes it was to a darkness so complete that when she closed them again, it made no difference.

that she could pick and choose her chances, because she had got plenty of them.

She couldn’t stay in this room of broken people a moment longer, or she’d break herself.

“You know, it drives me absolutely fucking nuts when people say that. As if a man who’s violent, not only at all, but to the woman he supposedly loves the most, is our baseline for normality, and a man who does it until his victim dies is some other species entirely. They’re one and the same, for fuck’s sake. The only difference is one of them got angrier than the other.”

When she got home, Lucy stood at the kitchen counter and poured herself a cold glass of white wine. She drank half of it immediately, imagining that she could feel its effects instantaneously, that as it slipped down her throat it was already working to blur the sharp edges of this awful, awful day.

Either Margaret had no photos of her daughter without some tangible evidence of her exceptional achievement in her hands, or she was out to prove a point with every choice:

metal fatigue.

You women aren’t as trusting or naive as you once were, you see.

We can’t demote her from victim to witness.

She said, “Oh,” because she had to say something and that was the shortest thing she could think of.

Not my circus, not my monkeys.” “But we’re the Missing Persons Unit. Didn’t we at least rent them the tent?”

I’ve been scared to tell the truth about her, in case it makes them care even less.”

When he shows up, everything turns more primal. It’s the part of me—the core of me, I’d say—that holds much more ancient desires. That guy remembers what it was like to need to hunt and kill every day just to stay alive. He’s much more focused on wants than perhaps he should be. And he doesn’t really consider consequences; he just acts. All I do is let him take the wheel.

She slumped to the ground like a bag of broken things,

you wanted me to come on here and open a vein because you wanted good TV.

I said everything you told me to.” “Yes,” Jack said. “Yes, you did. But then, you spectacularly failed to shut the fuck up.”

jeans and a T-shirt, both garments stretched tight against his skin, emphasizing the bulging muscles in his arms and legs, the expanse of his chest, the physical power he had to call upon.

crazy o’clock

what was the point of this if she didn’t say what she needed to say?

misprint, should be or

A next-level busybody. They saw tragedy as entertainment, something exciting, a bit of drama in their otherwise boring lives. They elbowed their way into it, offering help and support, supposedly, to people in the worst hours of their lives, in the hope that they’d become indispensable to them.