Tony never visited me, never brought me food. I didn’t know where I was or what Tony wanted. I didn’t know if he was planning on torturing me or killing me, or even just leaving me there to starve to death. I was weak, drained of energy, and survived by drinking water from the tap and from sheer force of will.
The lights of the bathroom flickered on, and it was obvious Tony was coming. It was so bright that I had to shield my eyes with my arm until they adjusted to the brightness again. The last thing I was prepared for was a confrontation, but when I heard heavy things being moved away from in front of the door, something in me snapped.
My survival instincts and my burning will to live gave me a rush of adrenaline. All I knew was that I wasn’t about to let myself be a victim—I wasn’t going out without a damn good fight. If I was going to die, I was going to do so knowing that I’d taken a chunk of Tony with me.
My breathing was loud in my ears and my heart beat hard against my rib cage. The blood in my veins sped up as Tony got closer to me. With the lights back on in the bathroom, I surveilled my options. There was no mirror that I could shatter and use as a weapon, no cabinets I could search or unhinge. As the last heavy object slid away, the part of my brain that was being blocked by hunger and fear took over, and my attention narrowed in on the toilet—specifically on the lid of the tank.
I remember reading or seeing somewhere that if you’re ever home when there are intruders and have no weapons, the lid of the tank is a great option because it’s thick and heavy. In the seconds between when the dead bolt slid open and the doorknob turned, I grabbed the lid, satisfied at feeling its weight, and turned toward the door just as it was pulled open. With all the strength my body could possibly muster—strength I didn’t know I possessed—I swung my makeshift weapon without aim as hard as I could in a direction I prayed belonged to Tony’s head.
With time simultaneously speeding up and slowing down, the tank lid connected with his skull, the momentum of the impact almost causing me to fall over. His body slammed against the wall and immediately slumped to the floor.
I didn’t wait to see if he was unconscious or not. Tossing my weapon to the floor, I jumped over his body and ran out of the bathroom as fast as my weakened body could take me. Sprinting barefoot through the basement, adrenaline pushing me forward. Not registering the pain of my scraped heels, I focused only on the exit and my path to freedom.
I took the steps two at a time, my rising hope briefly deflating when I came into contact with a locked door. Registering movement from somewhere behind me, I frantically jiggled the doorknob and attempted to push the door open, but it stubbornly remained in place. In my haste and fear, I barely noticed the three dead bolts on the door.
As I looked down the staircase, the blood in my veins turned to heavy lead as I made eye contact with a maniacal gaze. Standing at the bottom of the staircase was a bloody, furious Tony.
There wasn’t time to take in the damage I had caused, or the details of his facial expression. The second I saw him there, so close to me, so close to overpowering me, I turned back around and set all my attention on the door, ignoring the way my heart had jumped into my throat and the panic that was trying to take over my body.
Fumbling and feeling time slowly slipping away from me as heavy footsteps ascended the stairs, I slid the dead bolts open with shaking hands. Practically falling through the doorway as the door swung open, I slammed it shut behind me in a split-second decision, hoping to momentarily delay Tony and buy a couple more precious seconds.
As I collided with the front door, my hands automatically went straight to the dead bolts before turning the traditional lock and pushing the heavy door open to reveal my awaiting freedom.
Without pausing to look at where Tony was or how close he was to capturing me, I took off the second the door was open. My bare feet pounded against the hard concrete and carried me onto the road, into fresh air that I’d previously taken for granted.
The sun was setting, and there weren’t any cars driving down his street. My first instinct was to run, to put as much distance between me and Tony as I possibly could. I barely registered the cold air or my overworked lungs or the new blood escaping from the soles of my feet and mixing with the light layer of snow on the ground. I kept thinking about how I was so close, so close, to being safe.
I must have run a couple of blocks before a car drove by, the driver slamming on their brakes at seeing a disheveled, shoeless girl running at a full sprint in the middle of the road. Was it Tony, coming to recapture me? No, it wasn’t. An older woman with a soft face who was wearing a pink turtleneck stepped out of the car and rushed to my side to ask me what had happened and what my name was.
I blankly recited my name to her and she gasped and told me that she’d call the police right away. I didn’t say or do anything else. All I kept thinking was one word, which played on a continuous loop in my head.
Over.
It was over. I was safe. I could go home. At the time, I didn’t know how mistaken I was.
At the police station I told my story countless times. It was there that I first discovered my hatred for those beige chairs and the shrill sound of multiple phones ringing. The police searched Tony’s house, his neighborhood, and other places that he might be. They put out an APB on him, but he was never found; it was like he’d disappeared off of the face of the earth, like he’d never existed.
They told me that they wouldn’t stop searching for him, but for the time being I should go home, try to live normally, and give them a call if I noticed anything unusual. In other words, they sent me off with a pat on the back and good luck wishes.
I wasn’t so confident that this fight was over. They hadn’t seen Tony—they hadn’t felt his anger, they hadn’t seen the way his rage was practically controlling him. He wanted me for a reason; he wasn’t just going to let me go off on my way, happily ever after.
Starting the second my mom brought me home from the police station, and for the weeks that followed, I was paranoid, walking on pins and needles in my own house. Every noise startled me, every stranger who looked at me made me uneasy. Someone who wanted to hurt me was out there, and he wouldn’t let a little police APB or locked door stop him.
During those weeks the phone calls started. The person on the other end of the line would hang up immediately if I answered. I was getting way too many hang ups from a blocked number for it to just be coincidental—it had to be Tony. I screened my calls, only answering for my mother, but calls from the blocked caller didn’t stop.
There was never a voice mail, but I could hear him on the other end of the line—waiting, planning, plotting—a promise that he’d never forget about me. I told the police, of course, and they tried tracking the calls, but he always hung up right away, even when the police urged me to engage him in conversation.
The death threats were unnerving when they started coming in. Notes in the mail directed to me told me how I deserved to die, and how he was going to get justice, no matter what the cost to him was, by making sure I was dead, just like his daughter, Sabrina. My mom took my key to the mailbox away when she found out, but I knew they were still coming, that she was reading them.
I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t eat. I was a shell of a girl named Thea going through the motions while living in constant fear. I started learning jujitsu, and working out to build up strength and learn some self-defense, but I was always nervous; I could never be strong enough to beat him.