Page 107 of Wrong Mail

She’s alive. Drugged, I think, because they can’t focus on me. They drift, swim back, find me, drift again. But she is alive.

A sound comes out of her from behind the tape, low and formless.

"I'm here," I say. "I'm going to get you out of here."

My hands are already at the tape. I get a nail under the edge of the top strip. It won’t come at first. It pulls her skin white before it lifts, and I peel it slowly, as carefully as I can, but fast enough to get it off her.

She makes the sound again while I do it.

The second strip comes away. Her lips are cracked, dried blood crusted at one corner. She drags in air, and it rattles in her.

“It’s okay. I’ve got you.”

She tries to talk.

Nothing comes that I can use. Her voice is thick and slow, the words collapsed into shapeless vowels. The storm is too big. It is on top of the house now, thunder rolling in over itself until the walls hum. Between the thunder, the rain is a solid wall of sound.

I turn my good ear toward her and press close to her lips, but I still get nothing. "Slower," I say, which is a stupid thing to say to a woman who can only lie there and push sound at me that doesn’t become words.

Her hand moves. I follow it down.

Her wrists are bound in front of her, wound many times in the same white tape, tight and neat. I pick at it, but it is hopeless with my fingers.

The band she gave me slides down my wrist as I work. I feel in the dark for anything to cut with and find nothing. No box cutter, no key.

So I use my teeth. I catch an edge and tear at the tape until her hands come loose and drop into her lap.

Her ankles are next, the same tape, the same winding. I work at it in the beam and my hands won’t stop shaking. I keep talking.

“Stay with me,” I say.

The ankle tape gives. She’s loose now, all of her, but she doesn't push up off the floor. She lists against my arm. I get her half up. Her head lolls back, and I catch it in my hand.

"Julia. We have to go. Can you stand for me?"

Her eyes come to mine, and I can see her trying to tell me something. Not with sound. She has stopped trying to speak. It is all in her face now, in how she holds my gaze and won’t let go.

I read it as fear for me. I think it’s David she is afraid of, David who did this, David who could walk back in at any moment.

"I know," I say. "That's why we need to go now."

She makes a sound, one hard sound, and her head turns toward the hall, toward the far dark where I found the phone.

The phone.

The thought of the message that lit my screen out in the garage with her name over it comes back to me.

Mallory.

Julia's phone was lying in the hall, feet from where she is now. But her hands were taped in front of her.

The two things don’t fit together. She couldn’t have sent it.

Her eyes stay on mine.

I set the thought down. There is no room in me for a question I can't answer, not with her weight against my arm and the storm coming apart over the roof.

Get her up. Get her to the car.