I.
The first time she finds herself trapped in her own grave she is sixteen. The foster family she is living with is much worse than the three previous ones, but by now, like the boy who cried wolf, she finds her complaints to the social worker falling on deaf ears. There are so many rules, so many unspoken cues that Temperance cannot see – it makes her head spin. It makes her a nervous, jumpy, clumsy thing. So badly, unfortunately clumsy.
They warn her. They tell her quite clearly all the things she dare not do, from the largest to the small: don't lock your door, do the sweeping, the washing, don't backtalk, never come home late, don't pick up the phone, don't make noise, don't drop, crack, break anything and when you leave a room make sure there's not a trace of your presence there left behind. They give her fair warning, and she tries, but that night she's upset. Her hands shake, and the dishes are covered with soap and the water, it steams, it scalds her skin and she tries, she cannot help it, a dish slips through her fingers. It falls, slow motion-like to the ground, hits the linoleum tiles edge first, cracks, bursts, scatters across the floor. And Temperance Brennen freezes, tries to think, to react but it is already too late. They both come into the kitchen. She whimpers, whispers, begs. She tries to struggle, but he is so much stronger.
Then she is there, inside of the trunk of his car. Her ankles and wrists are tied together with duct tape, and she screams, she writhes but there is so little room to move and it is so dark and it gets her nowhere. She sobs. Falls asleep. Wakes up. Screams, sobs, pounds her hands against the walls of the small space, retches, faints. Time passes. Her stomach growls, aches. Her throat and lips grow parched. She whimpers. There is waiting and more waiting. She is cold. How long as it been? Will they come back, let her out? Time passes. She cannot cry anymore. She thinks of Russ, her parents, she tries to remember their faces, hoping as strongly as she ever has in the last year and a half that they will come back for her. She hopes that they'll find her, save her now when she needs it so badly, one of them, all of them, please.
Time passes. The air feels sticky, thick, she feels like she cannot breath, the smell of her own urine makes her retch again, the time passes on forever, she shivers, she wants to cry but cannot, cannot feel or breath or even move, really and then she knows, in a moment of epiphany as she stares into the blackness, that it is all over. That her parents and brother are never coming back no matter how much she needs them, how much she acts out or cries; she knows that the foster parents are going to let her die in here, that her life will end in this small, dark trunk, that she will never see the sunlight again, or breath fresh air, or read a book. She will die in this too-familiar darkness with her hands and wrists stuck together like an animal and it will be days or even weeks before anyone even notices she is gone. Fascinated by the morbidity of her thoughts, light-headed from dehydration, exhaustion, and lack of oxygen she starts to imagine what will happen to her body after she dies, how it will look in a day, in a week, when someone finally notices the smell. She imagines what will be done with it when they finally pull it out. Will anyone even be sad? She curls into an even tighter ball. She does not think of an afterlife. She is certain there will be nothing, that everything will simply stop. It will stop, she will be gone, and the world will go on just as before, not a bit less of the loss of her. As she loses consciousness, she cannot let go of that thought, of just how little she has to lose as she dies in this goddamn trunk.
Then she wakes up, jostled awake by her foster father's rough grip as he deposits her onto the living room floor. She is foggy-minded, uncertain that this is real, that she is in fact still breathing and seeing something other than the dark. But she is sure of that last thought, of the fact that she should have died but did not and that, perversely, after all that she was no longer terrified. She had accepted that she was going to die alone in that dark trunk, and instead she was here, on the living room floor, tired but blissfully alive. There wasn't a damn thing they could do to make her afraid again. In fact, she was almost overcome with the need to laugh.
She waited, lay there on the floor until they both left the room and then, heedless of repercussions, called the police.