Lizzie! by Maxine Kumin Page B

and then he went back up the ladder and pulled the mattress off Julio’s bed. He threw it down so that it landed right next to me and he said, “There. Pull yourself up on that. I know you can.”
    So I did. And then he threw me down this ratty old army blanket. “You will stay down there until Julio comes back, you understand?”
    He didn’t wait for an answer but went back up the ladder. I watched the trapdoor close over me, leaving me in the pitch dark. Then I heard him unroll the rug and pull the iron bedstead back over it and then I heard him dragging in something, most likely some old wooden boxes that had once held birdseed and bunches of bananas. I could hear him grunting as he worked, and from the thumping I gathered that he was stacking them on the bed. Then the outside door closed and after that I couldn’t hear anything because I was sobbing so hard. I cried for about five minutes and then I got hold of myself and sort of snugged the blanket up around me as best I could with my hands tied together. I had two forever useless legs, and now my hands were all but useless too. I lay there thinking about how sorry for myself I’d been in the hospital after my accident. A kid just about my age tried to make friends with me there. He had been in a pickup truck rollover and his spinal cord was severed so his arms and legs were paralyzed and he was a quadriplegic. He lay on his back and spoke into a little tube that hung over his face. This was what he had to live with every day for the rest of his life. I wondered where he was now or if he was even still alive. In the total blackness I couldn’t do anything except lie there with four fingers holding that musty old blanket. I wondered how long it would take me to die.
    I thought about how it must have been when Mom came home all bright and cheery and called, “Lizzie?” and then she and the Scarecrow saw my empty wheelchair and no sign of me. Mom must have totally freaked out when she couldn’t find me. I wondered what she did next. Did she sit down and cry or did she pick up the phone and call Digger and then the Woodvale police and then the Miami police? Or was she crying so hard that she couldn’t talk and so she handed the phone to the Scarecrow and he made the calls? And then I thought about Digger and Teresa, who were my abuelito and abuelita , and I thought that Teresa would have come over to our cottage right away to hold and comfort my mother and that Digger was already figuring out that I had been kidnapped by Jeb Blanco. But where would Jeb Blanco have taken me? Had he dropped me off the jetty to drown? What would Digger do? I cried a lot more. Some of it was over Josh who I might never see again just as we were getting started on a real friendship, and then I cried because I wouldn’t get to see Lia and Tom marry, and would the Scarecrow marry my mother after I was dead and on and on.

 
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    CHAPTER 16
    A t some point I must have dozed off, because when I woke up I heard the sweetest sound in my life, which was men’s voices and I knew they had come to rescue me. I tried to call out but of course I was gagged so the only sound that came out was a sort of gargle. I heard them exclaim over the broken padlock. Then there was the welcome sound of heavy boots entering the shack and their voices as they poked around in the wooden boxes and stomped into the corners. I couldn’t make out the actual words, but I thought I recognized Officer Frank’s voice. And then to my horror the voices moved away and the door closed and silence crashed back down on me like a grand piano dropped by mistake from a high-rise apartment.
    I started to sob again. You would think that there couldn’t be any tears left by now, but there were. My chest hurt from heaving up and down and my nose was so stuffed up that it was getting hard to breathe and I was scared I would suffocate before I could starve to death. Years