Penny lay in the bottom of the bathtub on top of the towel, her knees taped together. She couldn’t bend her legs and reach the piece of broken crockery hidden in her sock. Couldn’t cut herself free. She’d been here for so long she was beginning to wonder if the man with the scars was ever coming back, or if he’d just left her for good. The tub was slippery. She could rock back and forth but could not get her legs up and out and over the edge, could not get out of the tub.
She’d tried a dozen different things, at one point accidentally rolling over so that she lay facedown on the towel. It had taken her several tries to get back over onto her back. Her flailing efforts reminded her of a turtle she’d had- Cheyenne -and how her mother had made her leave it behind on one of their many moves.
If she could get out of the tub, even taped as she was, she thought she might hop to the door, maybe bang her head against it as someone passed. Do something. But trapped in the tub she felt helpless.
Frustrated, Penny rocked and bucked, which only served to bang her head against the tub, and that hurt. She quieted again, remembering her mother’s lessons on patience, that everything took time, sometimes more time than we wanted, and there were “more ways than one to skin a cat.”
At that moment, at the height of her telling herself to be patient, her mother so fully in her mind that it felt to her as if she, her mom, were sitting on the toilet while Penny took a bath, her mom finger-combing her hair the way she did when she was tired and talking to herself, Penny heard her mother say, “Look for the obvious.” “Don’t fight the easy answer.” It was then, at that moment, that Penny finally did see the obvious, saw what had been facing her throughout her entire ordeal, facing her like a giant’s eye, and she thought that without Mommy she never would have seen it, and that made her sad and all the more desperate to be out of here.
The tub’s faucet, its single lever right before her eyes.
She wiggled, moving herself incrementally toward the drain, stiffened her elbows, and rocked her bottom like playing bucking bronco. Her feet jumped up, though she could not hold them there. She tried again. And again. The third time, the tape around her ankles snagged on the pull-up lever on the top of the spigot, a lever that started the shower. Her feet were held aloft.
One more heave, and her toes smacked the faucet.
Cold water trickled out.
Another try and the valve opened and the water gushed out.
Shivering, she wrestled her feet free of the spigot.
She felt the water collecting. When the maid had finished cleaning, she’d left the tub’s stopper down, plugging the drain.
The tub slowly filled with cold water.
A moment later she felt the first tingle of her body rising with the water. Floating toward the top of the tub.
She cried at the thought of seeing Mommy again; her freedom might now be within reach.