Never Let You Go (a modern fairytale) (40 page)

“Hello, dear. Are you looking for Professor Foster too? Don’t tell anyone, but when it’s locked, he’s napping.”

Griselda realized that she was scanning the woman’s face for similarities to Caleb Foster’s, and, finding none whatsoever, she said, “I have a paper to drop off.”

“Shall I give it to him? Oh! Here he is now.”

The door opened, and Professor Foster stuck his head out just enough to see his wife. “You’re early, love.”

She shrugged, grinning up at her husband. “I was in the neighborhood, Seth. I thought we’d walk home together.”

Griselda didn’t feel the envelope slip from her fingers, but she felt her lungs close up as she sucked in a ragged breath and held it. Her whole body trembled, and it felt like the world was spinning, faster and faster—so fast she was barely able to see anything. Her hand reached out and touched the slick, painted cinder block of the wall beside the office door, and she shuffled closer to it, flattening her palm against the cool stone and finally dragging in a gasping breath.

“Dear? Dear, are you all right?”

The woman’s voice was distorted and far away.

“Seth, I think she’s sick. Help me get her to a chair.”

Her professor took her other arm, and together Seth and Ruth led her into the office, closing the door behind her.

She was carefully maneuvered onto a couch in the professor’s office, and a moment later a glass of water was placed in her hand.

“Are you ill, dear? Do you need a doctor?”

Griselda sipped the water, and the world finally stopped spinning.

Ruth Foster was sitting beside her, and Professor—Seth? William?—Foster was standing in front of her. She looked up at him, searching for similarities between him and Caleb Foster, but she didn’t see any in his face either. Professor Foster was clean-shaven, with kind eyes and neat gray hair. His face was only slightly wrinkled and still very handsome, and his body wasn’t as large and terrifying as his older brother’s had seemed to little Griselda so long ago.

She looked down and swallowed another gulp of water, trying to get her head around what her heart already knew, what her heart had somehow known since the day Professor Foster called his wife Ruth after class: Seth and Ruth hadn’t died in that fire so long ago—they’d merely used it as a way to escape. And now? They were here, in the same room as Griselda.

“Your name is Seth?” she panted.

Professor Foster nodded. “My middle name. William Seth Foster.”

“You didn’t die in the fire,” she said, taking a deep breath. She sat back on the couch and looked up at her professor for a moment, then at the woman beside her, who had turned as white as a ghost.

“What?” asked Ruth, sliding away from Griselda on the couch, her eyes wide as they flicked to Seth’s. He looked at his wife evenly, then back at Griselda, his face carefully blank.

“What do you mean, Miss Shroder?” he asked, his voice tight.

“My full name isn’t Zelda. It’s
Griselda
,” she said slowly, looking at Seth’s eyes for a flicker of recognition. There was none. She turned to Ruth. Still none. They didn’t know her name. They didn’t know her story. “My foster brother and I were kidnapped in 2001 by a man named Caleb Foster and held captive for three years at his farmhouse in West Virginia.”

Ruth gasped. Griselda raised her chin a touch, turning her gaze to Professor Foster. “I know you’re them. His brother and sister. You’re Seth and Ruth Foster.”

Seth pulled his bottom lip into his mouth, his nostrils flaring.

“He’s dead,” she added softly, wondering if they knew. “Caleb Foster died in Oregon many years ago.”

Seth’s eyes fluttered closed in relief. When he opened them, they were glassy as he looked at Ruth. “He’s dead.”

Ruth nodded, taking a deep breath and sighing raggedly. “How did you know? How did you know who we were?”

“Caleb Foster called
me
Ruth. The boy, he called Seth. Hard to forget those names.” Griselda looked at Ruth with sympathy. “I’m sorry for what you went through.”

“For what
I
went through? My God, what happened to
you
?” asked Ruth.

“He abducted me and my foster brother, Holden, in July of 2001.”

“Sweet Lord,” gasped Ruth.

“In fairness, we got into his truck willingly. We thought he was a relation of our foster mother’s. He didn’t steal us, but he did hold us hostage. Forced us to work. Tried to . . .
reform
us. He thought we were you.”

Professor Foster pulled up a chair, sitting across from Griselda and Ruth, his hands tented under his chin, his eyes grave. “I’m trying to get my head around this. You’re saying that our older brother, Caleb, abducted you and kept you hostage as a child?”

“Yes,” she said. “You can look it up.” Griselda’s eyes narrowed, thinking that at some point they should have read about the abduction, somehow found out about it. “How did you not know? You
never
looked him up? In all these years?”

“We turned our backs on Caleb the day we left West Virginia. We promised to never, ever look back. We promised each other not to look for him, or ever seek him out, or help him. We had to pretend he was dead. It was . . . safer,” explained Seth, his gaze resting on Ruth tenderly.

Ruth spoke softly. “He was . . .
so crazy
.”

“He ranted a lot about you two. Constantly.”

“Leviticus,” murmured Ruth.

“Yes!” said Griselda. “Hellfire and damnation, the sins of the flesh, evil, wickedness.”

“How did you get away?” asked Seth, drawing her attention from Ruth, who was still pale and trembling.

“We ran,” said Griselda, her eyes tearing. “While he was at church one Sunday morning, we ran away. But Holden . . .” She swallowed the painful lump in her throat. “Holden didn’t make it. Only I was able to escape. Holden stayed with him until Caleb died.”

“And Caleb thought Holden was me? Seth?”

Griselda nodded.

“Did Holden . . . did he . . . survive?” asked Ruth, her eyes worried.

“Yes,” said Griselda, wiping her tears away and allowing a small smile. “He did.”

They were all silent for a moment before Seth cleared his throat. “I’m so sorry, Griselda. I’m so very, very sorry for what you went through.”

“Me too,” said Ruth, reaching for one of Griselda’s hands. “Did he . . .”

“Hurt us? Yes. He beat us. He kept us in the cellar. He had a strict set of rules we had to figure out and obey. He made us work long hours. We were frightened all the time, often hungry, almost always hopeless.”

“How did you survive?” asked Seth, taking off his glasses and wiping his eyes.

“We had each other,” said Griselda, squeezing Ruth’s hand once before releasing it.

Ruth looked up at Seth, and Griselda read the meaning in the older woman’s eyes: love, understanding.

“You’re brother and sister,” said Griselda, looking back and forth between them, trying to keep her voice even and nonjudgmental. Some part of her had always wondered—or hoped?—that they weren’t.

“Not by blood,” said Seth quickly, dropping Ruth’s eyes.

Griselda’s eyes widened. “What? What do you mean? You’re twins.”

Seth shook his head. “No. We were born on the same day, but Ruth was adopted. Her mother died in childbirth in the same hospital where my mother was giving birth. It was such a small, rural town, and Ruth’s mother was a young girl, a runaway. They didn’t know how to track down her family, so they asked my parents if they had room for both of us.”

“You’re not related?” clarified Griselda.

“No,” said Ruth, “though we
were
raised together, and our parents never told us the truth. We
believed
we were brother and sister. But Seth and I had feelings for each other that started when we were—what?” She looked at her husband, and he nodded. “Twelve? Thirteen? We knew it was wrong on one level, but it felt so right on another. We couldn’t help it. We tried to keep it a secret, but the bigger the secret, the closer we became. And then Caleb caught us.”

Griselda nodded. “We figured that out.”

“And he started falling apart. We were a Bible-reading family. Very strict.”

“Plus, Caleb was kicked in the head by a breeding mare when he was little,” offered Seth. “He’d never been
right
, but after he caught us, he unraveled.”

“How’d you find out? That you weren’t related?”

“When our mother died. I found my birth certificate in her things,” said Ruth. “Different mother. Father unknown. Different time of birth by several hours.”

“Caleb had become very dangerous, especially to Ruth,” said Seth, reaching out his hand, which Ruth took, lacing her fingers through his. “He didn’t believe us, even when we showed him Ruth’s birth certificate. He blamed her for leading me astray. He ranted and raved, following me around and reading Bible verses. He tried to hurt her several times, beating her with his belt and hitting her hard in the face. He finally drugged our dinner one night, and we woke up locked on separate sides of the cellar. He told us we couldn’t come out until we repented.”

“How’d you get away?”

“He was scattered. Got drunk and forgot to lock the kitchen door one night before heading to Rosie’s,” said Ruth. “Seth managed to loosen one of the panels in the wall between our rooms, and we decided we had to run away because Caleb was our legal guardian for two more years.”

“There’s no way Ruth would have survived,” said Seth softly.

“So we walked out of that house, I took off my sweet-sixteen silver bracelet and threw it in the barn, and then Seth set it on fire.”

“That’s how you escaped.”

Ruth nodded. “We never looked back. I had a little money that Mother left us. We walked all the way into Charles Town in the dark, got on a bus to Florida, and never looked back.”

“You were just kids,” said Griselda, marveling at their strength. “How’d you live?”

Seth gazed at Ruth. “Not easily. We worked awful jobs and lived in homeless shelters. We’d chosen a warm place, and we stretched Mother’s money as far as it would go. We eventually got our GEDs and kept working. Ruth put me through college managing a Denny’s, and I put her through college once I got a job.”

“We made it,” she said proudly.

“Because we stayed together,” he said.

“Three years ago,” said Ruth, squeezing her husband’s hand, “Seth was offered a professorship here in D.C. We weren’t sure about coming back north, but we hired someone to check and see if Caleb had paid taxes or still owned property in Charles Town. We didn’t want any other information about him. Just that. When we learned he didn’t pay taxes or own property in West Virginia anymore, we assumed he was dead or gone.”

“And Ruth always missed her white Christmases.”

“So we came back up north.”

“And here we are,” said Seth. He searched Griselda’s face, his own filled with sorrow and remorse. “I am . . . oh, my dear, I am
profoundly
sorry for what you went through.”

Ruth’s face was wet with tears, lined with sorrow, when she looked at Griselda. “I don’t know how you survived as . . .
me
. He hated me so terribly.”

“Holden protected me. We learned what to do—and what not to do—to make things bearable. I think he would have killed us, though. If we’d stayed much longer.”

“He certainly would’ve killed
me
,” whispered Ruth.

“I don’t know what else to say,” said Seth, letting go of Ruth’s hand and sitting back in his chair. He searched Griselda’s eyes. “This is a lot to take in. Can we do anything to help you? Can I . . .? Can we . . .? Do you
need
anything?”

“No, but I’m glad you’re alive. I’m glad you survived. I’m glad you thrived.” She chuckled as tears streaked down her face. “That sounded ridiculous.”

“It wasn’t Shakespeare,” said Professor Foster, raising an eyebrow.

“Seth!”

He smiled at Griselda kindly, his eyes rimmed with deep sorrow. “You know, he wasn’t always like that, Caleb. He wasn’t
right
, but before he found out about us, he was . . . kind to me. In his own way, I think he loved me.”

Griselda thought about Holden’s conflicting feelings for Caleb Foster, how he hated him even as he felt gratitude for Caleb’s saving his life.

“I know this will sound unbelievable,” said Griselda, who had embarked on a journey of healing the day she was reunited with Holden, and was anxious to leave the horrors of Caleb Foster’s basement behind and finally move toward the future. “But I don’t think he was all bad. Holden calls him a principled monster. There’s some truth in that. He was trying to save Seth, I think. And I think that yearning to save could have been born from love.”

“You’re incredibly forgiving,” said Ruth.

Griselda swallowed, her face hardening. “I
don’t
forgive him. I’ll
never
forgive him.”

“Of course,” said Ruth softly. “What a stupid thing to say.”

“Do you still know him? This . . . Holden?” asked Professor Foster.

Griselda nodded. “Yes. He’s at boot camp. He’s going to be a Marine.”

“And you love him,” said Ruth.

“More than anything.”

Seth grinned at Ruth, shaking his head. “It’s a hell of an irony, isn’t it? That Caleb would try his damnedest to keep two couples apart for the wrong reasons and end up pushing them both together for the right ones?”

Ruth gave Seth a look. “I doubt Griselda is ready to laugh about any of this yet, dear.”

“I mean no disrespect,” said Seth quickly. “I just mean that—for me, at least—Caleb’s fierce disapproval made me fight harder for what I wanted. For Ruth. We left that farm at sixteen years old, barely schooled, with a couple hundred dollars. And now here we are. Married for over thirty years. Attached to each other as fiercely as Caleb’s disapproval would have separated us. We fought so hard, so early, we never really had to fight for each other again.”

“When you make sacrifices like we did,” said Ruth, “the rest is easy somehow. Life will always throw curveballs. No money. Losing a pregnancy and finding out no more will be possible. Getting laid off. A storm that levels your home. Sickness.” She looked up at Seth with tears brightening her eyes. “Our life together wasn’t
easy
. We had plenty of heartbreak, plenty of sorrow. But we also had each other. We’d
fought
to have each other. The rest? Well, as long as we had each other, anything was bearable. Anything was possible. The biggest battle had already been waged and won. We belonged to each other.”