by Wendy Walker
Witt said things like that after he went to Europe one summer.
This place is small. Very small. And you can leave here one day. You can become something else. Anything you want. And when you come back, this place won’t feel big anymore. It will appear the way it really is, which is very little and small. Almost nothing.
This gave me comfort, this thought of our home, our family, our mother being very small. So small that maybe the bad things I thought would happen would not happen after all.
* * *
I did not see my father’s car enter the driveway. It turned out that he had slept through the phone ringing. My father could sleep through an earthquake. They eventually sent a squad car to tell him his daughter was alive.
My father suffered, and I found his suffering unbearable to witness. I have had a lot of time to reflect on our story inside this house. And I’ve been through things that have shattered the prism through which I see our story, through which I now see everything, so very differently. He kept a nice house for us. It had four bedrooms so Witt could always be there when we were, even after he went to college. And it was close to town so we could come and go to meet our friends. Emma liked that because she had a lot of friends. For me, it was always a reminder that I did not.
Our father’s house after the divorce was bright with sunshine but dark with sadness. His sadness. He told us that ever since the divorce, he struggled to remind himself that happiness is a state of mind. The glass is half empty. The glass is half full. It’s pouring rain. The flowers will grow. I am going to die one day. I am alive on this day. He said that after the divorce and losing my girls, he could see that everything he had, everything he loved, everything that made his life feel like a life could disappear at any moment. He said we, his three children, felt like drops of water in his hands, moving toward the cracks between his fingers, where we could slip through and leave him, one at a time or all at once until his hands were empty and his life became an empty space, an empty heart, I think he said until his life was nothing more than air going in and out of his lungs. These were the things he would talk about at dinner, and it was dreadful.
Sometimes Witt would get mad at him, tell him he should find some friends to tell this stuff to, not us, because we were his children and not his friends. He would tell him to see a shrink, and that all his bad moods were not because of the divorce. Our father would say he didn’t need a shrink. Then Witt would say, Fine, then why don’t you just shake it off? But our father said he couldn’t shake off the problem of knowing that the more you have, the more you have to lose.
And then we were gone, proving him right.
A woman with short blond hair walked from her car toward the house until she was out of my view. After seventy-four seconds, I heard the door open and close in the foyer, then the sound of feet coming up the stairs.
I closed my eyes and pretended to sleep again. My mother slipped her arm out from under my neck and quietly crept from the bed to answer the knock at her door. She pulled a blanket up around my shoulders so gently, it made me shudder. This was what had plagued my father. In spite of everything she did that she shouldn’t have done, and everything she didn’t do that she should have, something that felt like love was in her and she would take it out at times like this and show it to us and make us hunger for more. All of us, each in our own way.
Emma would sometimes dress Barbie in an evening gown. Ken, still buck naked, would chase after her.
Please, Barbie, please … let me put my dick inside you. Please, I’ll do anything!
Her voice was derisive and full of anger. We were young, but we still understood why our father was driven mad by our mother’s indifference, and how his madness had taken over every part of his brain and his heart so there was nothing left for us.
One day Emma took Barbie and threw her against the wall. She said nothing. We both sat on the floor, silently, looking at the doll. She had landed on her back, her dress flowing around her, white teeth shining through smiling red lips. This memory was now before my eyes—so vivid, my heart was pounding in my ears. Emma was the one brave enough to throw a doll against a wall while I gasped and then covered my mouth. She was the one brave enough to bargain for our mother’s love, even though she risked losing it every time. She was the one brave enough to challenge our mother’s beauty by wearing red lipstick and short skirts. Every day of our lives here, Emma fought for what she wanted, for what we should have had, while I hid in the shadows she was willing to cast for me.
Emma shielded me from our mother’s storm, and whether she did it for my benefit or just because that was who she was and that was what she needed to do, it served the same purpose. She kept me safe.
Doubt filled me up top to bottom when I thought about those storms. Why had I come back here? I was free! I could have gone anywhere! Then I told myself why. For Emma. For Emma! And to make all the wrong things done to us right again. It was my turn now, to be the lightning rod. Still, conviction is not the same thing as strength, and I was terrified.
I heard some whispering at the door. My mother sighed with disapproval but ultimately relinquished her control over me. Three sets of feet walked across the carpet to the edge of the bed. My mother sat down beside me and stroked my hair.
“Cass? Cass—these people are from the FBI. They want to talk to you. Cass?”
I let my sister enter my mind. I let her push aside the vision of that indestructible doll, taunting us from the floor. I opened my eyes and sat up. The woman with the short blond hair was standing by the edge of the bed, and I knew this was the gatekeeper to finding my sister.
“Cassandra? My name is Dr. Abigail Winter. I’m a psychologist with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The man with me is Special Agent Leo Strauss. We’re here to see how you are, and maybe just talk a little bit if you feel up to it.”
I nodded my head. The words were in my mouth—words that I had carefully crafted and rehearsed. But they were trampled by a stampede of emotions.
I started to sob. My mother pulled me close and rocked me back and forth.
On the other side of my mother was the woman with the short blond hair. Dr. Abigail Winter. Through my watery eyes and the breath that was heaving in and out of me, I could still see her clearly, and how she was looking at my mother.
I fixed my sight on her and her alone, over and in spite of my mother’s body that was enveloping me.
“Find Emma!” I said through my gasping and crying.
My mother let me go and pulled back far enough to see my face. “She said that before…” She was still looking at me as she spoke to them. “But she doesn’t say anything else. I think something’s wrong with her!”
Agent Strauss spoke then, his voice calm. “Cassandra … where is Emma? Where can we find her?”
The words I said were not the words I had rehearsed.
I was not being a very good artist to my story.
FOUR
Dr. Winter
“Find Emma!”
Everything stopped when Abby heard those words. Heart, lungs, limbs, all still. Frozen. She could not take her eyes from the young woman on the bed, the woman who had been just a girl when she disappeared. Abby had studied her face from every stage of her life. Photos, home movies, social media posts—not only the features but the expressions as well had been painted onto a canvas that became the Cassandra Tanner Abby believed she knew.
Her hair was darker. It was longer as well, with waves that had not been there before. It fell around her shoulders, the silk bathrobe and the pillow that was tucked behind her head. The features of her face were sharper, cheekbones and brow bones. Hazel eyes set deeper beneath full brows. Abby could not look away, mesmerized by the figure before her and the one piece of the puzzle that had just been revealed. Emma was alive.
“Cassandra … where is Emma? Where can we find her?” Leo asked.
“She’s still there!” Cass cried out, frantic now.
“Where, Cass?
Where is Emma?” Leo repeated. His voice was calm and it drew Cass in. She looked at him cautiously while she forced a long breath in and out. Then she told them about Emma.
“The island,” she said. “She’s still on the island.”
“What island?” Leo asked.
Cass looked at her mother. Judy Martin had probably changed a great deal, but all Abby could see was everything she had seen before. She was a woman consumed by her appearance. Even now, there was fresh makeup and the smell of hair spray. She let the thought come and go. But she filed it away.
Cass looked to Abby then, which was strange since Leo had asked the question.
“What island, Cass? Do you know where it is?” he asked again.
Cass shook her head and started to cry.
Judy removed her hand from her daughter’s hair and pulled her body away so they were no longer touching.
“You have to find it! Please! Find the island. Find my sister!”
Leo looked at Abby then, then back to Cass, cautiously. “Is Emma in danger? Is she being held against her will?”
Cass nodded. “They wouldn’t let us come home. For three years. I had to leave her behind. It was the only way, but now you have to save her!”
“Get forensics back,” Abby said. She wanted to hear the story—from start to finish—but if Emma was in danger, they needed to run it from every angle. Leo agreed and texted his colleagues to return from the first floor.
Cass went on to tell them about an island, and a man named Bill who lived there. She told them, too, about his wife, Lucy, and how they had both “taken us in” and “given us a home” and how everything had been “really good until it turned bad.” Without hearing the story in order, it was impossible to understand how it came to be that their refuge “became a prison,” and how only Cass was able to escape. And how “Emma is still a prisoner there.” And why she didn’t know exactly where it was or how to find it “because of how I got there and how I left.” And why she left. God, how Abby wanted the answer to that question.
But she sat calmly even as the urgency pushed against the thin walls of her patience.
Judy Martin kept asking questions. She was standing now, and pacing the room. “What do you mean Emma is there, on this island? What are you talking about? This is crazy! How do you not know where it is? How can you not tell them? None of this makes sense, Cass! Dr. Winter, don’t you see how crazy this is? Is she well? Maybe she’s not well? You need to examine her!”
“I do know things!” Cass yelled into the room. “It’s in Maine! It’s north of Portland!”
The forensics team was back in the room, and they wanted to get the physical description so they could start to run an analysis.
They asked Cass about the seasons there. The foliage. They spoke to each other about the soil in her shoes. The pollen and mold and dust on her clothing. Other people’s hair on that clothing, maybe on her body. There could be DNA evidence that they could try to match in their system. Then there were the less tangible things, like what she had smelled in the air and the kind of food she ate. People who came and went, what they sounded like. Their accents and the words they chose.
Cass worked with them for nearly an hour. She tried to explain why it had been impossible to leave.
“The water was very cold, even in the summer. Lucy was always warning us about hypothermia. We only saw one person other than Bill and Lucy. His name was Rick and he drove a boat to and from the island to deliver groceries and gas for the generator. There were no lines to the island. No cables, like for a phone or television or electricity. But we had a satellite dish. I could see other land from three sides of the island. It was miles away. The fourth side faced the ocean, like we were at the very edge of some kind of inlet or harbor, but it was enormously wide. You couldn’t see houses or people or anything like that on the other land, and it was very hard to get to our dock. There were rocks underneath the water, and you could only see them during low tide.”
Her voice grew steady. Her composure sound.
She told them about the current, and how strong it was on that one side that had the dock, the south side, and how it pulled everything to the west. She described the storms that rolled in, and how severe they were. How she could see them for miles and miles before they reached the island, like a wall of wind and water pouring from the sky, creeping toward her. There would be a few seconds of sprinkles, shooting sideways on the wind, before the downpour would arrive.
She told them about the sky and how seeing it like that, unbroken, from left to right was like being inside “one of those glass snow globes.”
“That was how it felt to be there under such big, open skies, but unable to leave.” Her description was almost poetic. She sounded educated far beyond her one year of high school.
Then she told them about the trees, and how they were the same as in Connecticut, except there were more that stayed green during the winter.
“Conifers?” they asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Pine trees, Christmas trees…”
“Yes, like that. Like Christmas trees. But taller and thin at the bottom…”
Bill and Lucy’s last name was Pratt. She did not know anything about where they were from and she never met any friends or relatives. They sometimes spoke of a mother or father but never a sister or brother. She did not know what they did for money or work. They tended to the island, to their garden and the house. She did not know where they went when they left the island on the boat with Rick. Lucy did not leave more than once a month. Bill left a few times a week, but only for half a day, at most.
They were in their early forties, she thought, but as she said, “I’m not a good judge of age.” Lucy was “sort of round at the center” and had long gray hair down to her waist, which she wore hanging all around her face, never in a ponytail or bun. Cass said she could tell Lucy thought it was special, having such long hair, even though it was “gray and frizzy and not something you would ever want to touch.” She had a lot of wrinkles around her mouth and eyes, and a slight gray mustache above her upper lip.
“All of these things are disgusting to me now, so maybe I’m exaggerating them. When I first met her, I found them endearing.”
Bill was very tall and he had brown hair but he used dye. Grecian Formula. She’d seen the boxes in the groceries when they came from the mainland, so she thought he was probably gray on his head.
“What about the groceries? Any receipts, store names on the bags?”
“No. Not that I can recall.”
“And what about brands of food? Anything different, local farms, fresh baked goods, things like that?”
“Yes, there was fresh bread but no names. They came in brown paper bags. The milk brand was Horizon. We had all kinds of brands. Land O Lakes butter. Thomas’ English muffins…”
“How about fruit, fish?”
“Yes, but I don’t remember any names. Just green boxes with berries, blueberries in the summer. Small ones. And lots of fish. Wrapped in white paper. Emma hates fish. Even lobster and shrimp. But there was a lot of fish.”
“White fish?”
“Yes. It was white. Like in fish and chips. Only they didn’t like to fry things, Bill and Lucy. They said it wasn’t healthy.”
Abby sat in a chair, her hands clasped together tightly. This was all useful to locating the island, but it was moving them away from the story, from the answer she’d been waiting for, to the question that had tortured her.
They asked Cass about bills, mail, boats that went past. Did she remember any of their names? “No,” she answered. Boats never got that close to them, because of the rocks and the current, and many of them were small fishing boats. The boat that came to the island was called Lucky Lady. They ran the name. There was a Lucky Lady in nearly every harbor. But the fishing boats …
“What did they look like, these fishing boats?” They showed her pictures from the Internet.
She identified lobst
er boats, which supported her belief that the island was in Maine.
She told them, too, how the island smelled of gasoline sometimes because of the generator, and they told her this was helpful.
Judy Martin kept interrupting and asking the same questions. “But how did you make it there three years ago and then make it home now without knowing where you were? It doesn’t make sense, Cass! How did you not leave for three years? You’re all asking the wrong questions! Trees and goddamn blueberries!”
One of the forensics pulled out her phone. “Did any of them sound like this?”
She played a recording. She said it was a Maine accent. She explained about the added r and the long a and e, which sounded like “ah” and “eh.” And Cass told them the boatman talked like that.
“Emma used to say he sounded like a hick, which was not very nice, but Rick was not very nice. That’s part of the story. Rick is how I escaped.”
“Yes, yes! The escape. Let’s talk about that.” Mrs. Martin threw her hands into air.
Cass told them that she escaped in the Lucky Lady.
“It wasn’t easy. Rick depended on the Pratts for everything, and they did not want us to leave.…”
“Go back to the boat … how far did it take you before you reached land?” they asked.
She told them how the boatman brought her to a dock inside a harbor. She didn’t keep track of the time it took to get there, but it felt like a while. It was pitch-black and hard to tell which way they were going. Then a friend of his let her ride in the back of his truck.
“How long did you ride in the truck? Did you notice the time, the roads, the direction? Street signs, highway names, anything?”
She told them that she stayed under a blanket until they got to Portland so no one would see her. They stopped for gas and she saw a sign. It said Rockland. They stopped one other time for gas and another time on the side of the highway so she could go to the bathroom in the woods.
“It took three hours and fifteen minutes to get to Portland. The roads were slow and curving. We were going south. I saw that sign! Isn’t that enough?” Cass’s voice was shaky again.