Page 96 of A Future To Remember

My hands were wet and sticky, looking down I saw that my gloves were soaked in blood. I pulled them off and threw them aside, freeing my trembling hands.

We’d landed next to the gun, but I didn’t reach for it. It was out of bullets anyway, and I only wanted out of that fucking hellhole, so I scrambled to my feet, grabbed my sheepskin coat from where it’d fallen off me when I was struggling with Wade, and bolted toward the door, managing to snag a set of keys off the hook on my way out. After rushing to the men’s pickup truck, I threw open the door and tried to insert the key, but it wouldn’t fit.

In the dark, I squinted at the key ring and finally turned on the pickup’s overhead light. When I took a better look at the key ring, I noticed that it held only two keys. And then I realized that Wade had the set of keys to the truck and my shackles still on him when he’d freed me from the wall. The truck’s keys were somewhere still inside the cabin.

The keys I was holding were to the three-wheeler that the brothers often rode when they went hunting. My choices were to go back inside and face the possibility that I’d only wounded one or both of them and that they’d kill me when I went back for the keys, or I could escape on the three-wheeler.

It took me only a moment to decide. Scrambling out of the pickup, I ran over to the three-wheeler and started it up. The moon was nearly full that night and the three-wheeler had a headlight, so I could see well enough. I headed down the driveway, the three-wheeler rocking and bouncing with every divot and rut.

Having never been allowed out of the cabin in all the time I’d been there, I had no idea how far the driveway extended, but I knew I had to find a main road.

At last, I did reach a road, but it was also riddled with divots and ruts from a recent rain. I sped along it for at least an hour—probably more, hoping and praying to see another vehicle.

And then, out of the darkness, I saw a glimmer of light. My heart leapt and I accelerated. At first, I thought it was a car or a truck, but then I realized that the light was stationary. And growing in size the closer I got.

Around a bend, I lost sight of the light; I finally saw it again and realized I was on a ridge above a small town, down in the valley. By now I was shivering violently with cold again, but I was so close to rescue that I didn’t care. I gunned the throttle and accelerated, ignoring the bumpy ride in favor of getting closer to that town.

That was when the dirt road I was on suddenly pitched down at an alarming angle. It was no wonder I hadn’t seen any other vehicle! The road started to get crazy steep. But I was so cold and so close to that damn town! So I didn’t let up on the throttle, caution having gone out the window, and then, just as I was closing in, I had to pull sharply on the handlebars to avoid a boulder that had fallen into the road. At the same time, the front wheel hit a deep divot, and in the next moment, the three-wheeler was jerking forward, over the edge of the road, and into the woods. I was vaulted off the seat, my body launching itself over the handlebars and through the air to slam hard against the trunk of a tree, and then the world simply went dark.

When I next awakened, the sun was rising and my head was spinning so severely that I didn’t believe I could stand. I tried rolling to my left but let out a cry when a lightning bolt of pain lit up my left arm from wrist to elbow and my rib cage throbbed in agony.

I lay there for a long, long time, waiting for the pain to lesson, and I remember being so, so cold. Through the fog and the dizziness, something told me that if I stayed there, I’d die. Somehow, I managed to crawl carefully to my feet. My brain felt fuzzy, my memory elusive, and my only thought seemed to be that I had to get out of those woods, and down the mountain was easier than up it. So I stumbled my way through the brush for what felt like an eternity, the branches and twigs from smaller trees tearing at my clothing and skin. I kept needing to pause and lean against any nearby tree until I could see straight enough for a few more steps. The dizziness was unrelenting, but the cold was now whittling away at my life force inch by inch. I was on the edge of death and I knew it, but I didn’t seem to know much else. It hurt to think. It hurt to move. It was agony to even exist. But something told me to fight. I had to fight!

And then, like a miracle, I came out of the woods to stumble onto asphalt. I’d made it to the road. But what road was it? And where did it lead?

I took a few more steps and saw a car approaching. I tried to lift my arm to wave at it, but the effort was too much. All of it was just too much. My legs gave out and I dropped to my knees, then I simply crumpled to the ground and closed my eyes. If death came, it came. If the car stopped and the driver helped me, then I might yet live. Fate would decide, and I felt okay with that.

I finished the journal entry, and by the end of proofreading it, I decided that I’d write another version to give to Cash. One that made it a little clearer that I’d acted in self-defense.

And while I now knew the first name of the two men who’d abducted, tortured, and raped me for months on end, I didn’t know their last names, nor an exact location of where they lived.

But this was a start. It was a thread. And maybe, if we were careful as we pulled on it, we might discover more information about me. It frustrated me that I knew all the details of that night but nothing else about the time before it. I couldn’t really remember anything before realizing I was cold to the bone and Wally and Wade had come back to the cabin after dumping my SUV into a river. What river, I didn’t know. Maybe a look at a map would be helpful.

And Wally had mentioned that I’d had a husband, so why hadn’t he come looking for me? If he’d put up flyers, then why wasn’t there a missing persons report that Cash could find in the Idaho State database?

It was then that I realized that in my recount of the memory, I knew that Ivy had come from Washington state. What if I too had been abducted from another state? What if I was from Washington, Oregon, Montana, Wyoming, Nevada, or Utah?

Glancing at the clock, I knew I needed to get dressed and ready for another day at work, but my heart really wasn’t in it.

It would’ve helped if Levi were still here with me. I could’ve told him all about this memory, and he would’ve helped me form a plan. But Levi was gone. Cash had made good on his promise to hand over the reward money, and I’d given it directly to the young man. Levi had protested and tried to give me back half, but I wouldn’t take it. He was right when he’d told me that L.A. was expensive, and I’d insisted he take it all.

Once he’d accepted the offering, he’d wasted almost no time gathering his meager belongings, re-donating his weight set back to the church, and making plans to head out of town. He’d asked Cash to drive him to the bus station in Idaho Falls, and Cash had agreed to provide the lift, but he’d sent Buchanon to do it. Looking at my watch, I figured Levi was in the final hours of his one-way trip to L.A.

Before leaving, the young man told me he planned to get a job immediately and enroll in film school the first chance he got. When I’d hugged him goodbye, I could feel both the relief and the future success rolling off him in waves. It was both a wonderful thing and heartbreaking to see him go. I wanted nothing but good things for him, but I couldn’t help the heavy sadness that was reminding me that I was once again all alone in the world.

And even though I had this detailed, and now journaled, memory to pull some threads from, at the moment, I still had no idea who I was or where I came from, and in the six weeks I’d been here, the only other thing beside the memory of the cabin that I could remember about my identity were the gossamer threads of a memory from a time I’d been lifted up by a man—presumably my father—who’d been so happy that his horse had won a race.

And if the man had been my father, I still didn’t know his name. And I couldn’t recall the details of his face or where we lived.

But I did have one tiny crumb to hold onto. The name he’d called me. That garbled blurring of “Mabby.”

I was starting to wonder if maybe it hadn’t been a blurring after all. If perhaps it was my own mind that was blurring the lines of the name. I’d given myself the name “Maddy” because it’d sounded so familiar, and, when trying to find a name to call myself other than Jane, I’d stubbornly skipped the A’s in the baby-name book, flipping to the middle, planning on working my way out. But I’d never made it out of the M’s.

So, what if my name had actually started in the A’s? What if my name was Abby?

Abigail.

Without Levi to distract me, I’d had time to really focus on it. And I don’t know if it was the fact that I’d been so focused on the name that it was really starting to sound like it matched who I felt I was or, if because I wanted it to sound familiar, I was slowly convincing myself that’s who I was. But in my mind, I was now thinking my name was actually Abby.