All the Little Raindrops

The captives’ fingers acquire figurative significance when Noelle sacrifices her physical safety to save Evan’s hand. In this way, fingers become associated with Noelle’s goodness and generosity. Evan later sacrifices his own fingers during their escape, slightly assuaging his guilt over what Noelle sacrificed for him and demonstrating his own courage and loyalty. In this sense, the motif illustrates the protagonists’ moral characters.

As a point of physical connection, fingers also demonstrate the bond that develops between Evan and Noelle. After Noelle pays “dearly” for Evan’s fingers, he offers them to her through the bars of their cages as a source of comfort. Soon, the movement feels “as natural as breathing air” (86). This gesture “creat[es] what [feels] like an unbreakable link” that soothes them both (87), so much so that they reach for each other even after their escape. In the motel, Noelle wakes in confusion, fearful that they are still imprisoned, but when Evan reaches for her, she suddenly finds that she can “breathe” again.

However, like Evan and Noelle’s relationship broadly, the motif of fingers also becomes intertwined with The Psychological Impact of Trauma. Noelle’s sacrifice prompts Evan to declare that they will do everything in their power to “leave here whole” (75). This “wholeness,” however, is merely physical; they do not lose any of their body parts, but they remain scarred by the experience. Indeed, this is quite literally the case with Evan, who uses a mallet to break his hand so that it will fit through the bars, allowing him to reach the cage’s lock. Years later, his hand remains scarred and painful, though multiple surgeries restore its use. His fingers, then, are explicitly linked to the trauma he continues to endure even after his captivity is over. Meanwhile, the act of holding hands becomes distressing for Noelle; when a man tries to take her hand, she “[feels] like her skin [i]s crawling” because she associates holding hands with Evan and their shared trauma (138).

The ultimate sign of Evan and Noelle’s healing thus becomes their ability to hold hands with one another without reawakening memories of trauma or doubting that their closeness is merely a byproduct of shared suffering. After he and Noelle reunite, “[t]hey turn[], fingers linked, and head[] toward the house. Whole. Together” (374). The gesture signifies a full-circle moment; they’ve healed, finally feeling “whole,” and can move forward with certainty of their love.