Girls on Film

by Gregg Olsen

  “What happened to my mom?” I ask.

  “What happened to her?” Aunt Ginger repeats my question, her expression confused. Or pretending to be confused. “Didn’t you tell me he took her?.

  I’m not going to fall for that stall tactic.

  “Not now. Back then,” I say. We both know what I’m getting at. But I let it slide.

  Aunt Ginger gets up from the sofa, leaving me all alone, nearly swallowed up by its dark brown, velvet fabric. She keeps her face away from me, to the wall, but I can see it reflected on the glass of a framed picture. She is searching for the right words and I know that it has to be difficult.

  It is for me too.

  “When I was twenty, your mom was sixteen,” she begins. “She was coming home from feeding the neighbor’s cat. It was summer and the dahlias were in bloom. We had planned to go out shoppping after dinner. She needed a new outfit for a party at the end of the month.” Aunt Ginger hesitates, lost in a memory that must be bittersweet and horrific at the same time. I give her a minute. I have memories like that too; the kind that take me far away from the present.

  “No one saw it happen,” she says, back from wherever her thoughts have taken her. “I mean, she just vanished. It was as if Courtney was just lifted up away from home by a helicopter or something. There was no trace of her. Nothing”

  She pauses, her face darkening as she goes back in time. She stops. I prod her. “What happened?.

  Again, Aunt Ginger weighs how much she’ll say. I want it all, but she looks at me and sees a kid. She has no idea how much strength I have or what I would do for my family. What I’d do even for her.

  “How much do you know?” she finally asks.

  I slide to the edge of the sofa. “I know who my real father is, if that’s what you’re asking”

  Aunt Ginger spins around. Her long almost-sister-wife hair swings behind her like a pulled curtain. There is a look on her face that I can only describe as relief. Her eyes study mine for some deeper connection, some meaning. She nods at me.

  “I’m sorry,” she says.

  I want to say something off the cuff, something flippant, to defuse how I really feel. I don’t want her to know that I’ve imagined my DNA being made up of serial-killer genetic matter, a ladder of code that only leads to violence and murder. But I don’t.

  “What happened to her?” I persist.

  “Your mom had been abducted by a monster. That’s what happened”

  “Besides getting her pregnant, what did he do? I have to know what you know if I’m going to find her”

  She shakes her head. “Sweetheart. You’re not going to find her”

  Again, she clearly doesn’t know me. She doesn’t know what I’d do for someone in my family. She doesn’t have a family. She’s all alone. She’s not a fighter. I am.

  “Because she’s already dead?” I ask, serving up the only concern I really have. If she’s dead, I can’t find her. Save her. Tell her how much I need her.

  Tell her how pissed I am that she lied to me about everything.

  Aunt Ginger returns to the brown velvet sofa. “No, no, not that. Because your mother wouldn’t want you to”

  “I’m not going to just let her die,” I say, now wondering how this woman, my mother’s own sister, could have any inkling of what my mother would want me to do. My mother expects a lot of me. She left me and Hayden alone with a bunch of clues. She wants me to try and find her.

  I look over at the stolen purse, slumped by the front door where I dropped it when we first came inside. I consider retrieving it and pulling out the letters to show Aunt Ginger exactly what Mom told me to do. I think of the gun too. I hold back on those things.

  “Look. I’m not a kid. Tell me everything. I have a right to know”

  Aunt Ginger’s hands tremble a little and I touch them. They feel cold. Bone cold. “Right. You do. It’s just that it’s so hard. So hard to talk about”

  I nod because I understand, but there’s a life at stake here.

  “Start,” I say. “Tell me everything”

  Aunt Ginger inhaled half the oxygen in the room. “Your mom said she stopped to help someone who was trying to load some things into the back of a truck. The things weren’t heavy, she told me later. Just awkward. Your mom is like that. Always helping people. When she wasn’t looking, he came from behind her and put something over her mouth. Chloroform, she thinks. It could have been something else . . . .

  My face doesn’t give away how I’m feeling. “Go on,” I manage to say. “What happened after she was taken?.

  At first Aunt Ginger looks in the direction of the flickering images of the silent TV, but I can tell that she’s not really watching it. I let her take another moment. Reliving whatever happened to Mom is painful for her. I get that.

  She starts slowly. The words pummeling me: captive, abused, tortured. She tells me that my mother was subjected to the vilest of humiliations. She says that only the sickest, most depraved mind could conceive of the things done to her. Now that she started, it all comes tumbling out, and my aunt seems to be in another, horrifying world, until her eyes focus back on mine, realizing who I am. How old I am.

  She stops. “You wanted to hear this, right?.

  A long lapse hangs in the air.

  “Of course. I said I did”

  She stares at me with her penetrating eyes. She wants me to understand this next part, to embrace it.

  “A weaker person would have folded and given up,” she says. “But Courtney is the bravest girl that ever lived”

  I wonder how she could say that. We’ve been on the run my entire life. Exactly how is hiding brave.

  “How did she get away?” I ask when she takes another pause from reliving the nightmare.

  Aunt Ginger swallows and looks me in the eye. We are holding hands now. Hers no longer feel like ice.

  “She said she was able to drug his coffee. She doesn’t even know what the pills she used were. She should have cut his throat while she had the chance. It was the biggest mistake of her life. She regretted it more than anyone could ever know. She said she was too weak to kill him, no matter what he’d done to her”

  “Why didn’t she just go to the police and have him arrested?.

  “Look, I can see you don’t really understand. Not every criminal is caught. Not every victim is believed”

  “I know that, but I still don’t understand. It’s worth a try, right?.

  “Your mother did file a report. And she had her body probed and scraped for evidence. She said it was nearly as humiliating as what he’d done to her. She even told me once that she felt the police and the doctors were almost an extension of her captor’s crimes. Their questions were like acid poured over her wounds. They didn’t think that she had been abused, raped, whatever. Our mother—your grandmother—didn’t believe her. Even I wondered about it”

  “But why didn’t anyone believe her?.

  “Because she’d been captured once before.” A pause. “Or she said she was”

  Now I am confused. Completely.

  “The year before she was raped,” she goes on, “your mother disappeared. She claimed she’d been kidnapped, but, well . . . .

  I can tell by the way she’s wringing her hands that this part is hard for her to disclose. The torture of my mother was, oddly, easier. “She’d run off to be with a boy. She had gone to the coast. She was afraid she would get in trouble so she made up a story”

  My aunt sees the look on my face and she pounces. “She was kidnapped. She was brutalized by that monster who raped her. She wasn’t lying about that”

  Her explanation placates me only a little. “So if she made a complaint to the police, why did he carry on stalking her? If it was all out in the open, he had to know that even if he wasn’t arrested that the police would be watching his every move”

  “Like I said, the police didn’t believe her. We don’t know why for sure. It might have been the past incident. Or there might have been
more to it”

  I wonder if she’s going to make me dig for every detail.

  She is.

  “Like?” I ask.

  “He had friends in the sheriff’s office. Some people who made evidence disappear”

  “But why didn’t he just leave her alone?.

  She grips my hand tighter. Almost hurting tight. “Because she had something he wanted”

  “What?” I ask, trying to get her to release me. “What did he want?.

  Aunt Ginger keeps her eyes fastened to mine as she tries to read me like a book. I give her nothing. Her eyes glisten with tears.

  “You,” she finally says. “He said he wanted you”

  Chapter Eight

  Cash: $34.50 (I found a ten on the dresser).

  Food: OK, if you like homestyle, which I do.

  Shelter: Our aunt’s house for now.

  Weapons: Gun, scissors, ice pick.

  Plan: The same. Find Mom. Kill Dad.

  THERE IS NO AIR IN the room. Not a single molecule of oxygen. I let out a gasp and Aunt Ginger is all over me. I don’t need CPR and I push her away. While I understand what she said, I still feel like the room is spinning and I’m unable to grab ahold of its meaning.

  He wanted you.

  “Honey,” Aunt Ginger says. “Honey, are you all right? Put your head between your knees”

  Of course I’m not all right. And I’m not putting my head between my knees. I’m beginning to wonder if Mom ran away from Aunt Ginger that first time because she was bossy and annoying and caring at the same time.

  “I’m fine,” I finally say as Aunt Ginger makes a move toward the kitchen. She is a streak of long hair and she leaves a trail of concern as she hurries back with some water.

  “Drink this,” she says. “You’re upset. You’re dehydrated”

  I want to say that everything she said is true. I also want to say that in the past twenty-four hours I’ve lost my mom, pulled a knife from my dead stepfather’s chest, found out that my bio dad was a serial killer, and not only did he want my mom, he wants me. Add Idaho to the list and just about anyone could see that I had ample reason to feel the way I did. Upset didn’t cover it.

  “Thanks,” I say. “It’s just hard to take in all of this”

  “I know, honey. I can only imagine”

  I have calmed down now. I don’t know this woman, this sister of my mom, the aunt that I never knew I had, but I do know right then that she only means well. I see the lines around her eyes, the circles that underscore the anxiety that has held her captive since her sister disappeared.

  “What do you mean he wanted me?.

  “He found out that your mom had gotten pregnant,” she says, looking deeply into my eyes. “He made it known that he felt that you belonged to him”

  I feel a rush of bile. I could never belong to that rapist. I belonged to the dad who raised me. The dad that my creep of a bio father has murdered. I can’t speak for a moment, and looking down I see my hands shake a little.

  My silence makes Aunt Ginger uncomfortable. She looks down to one of those old-time braided rugs that has probably been there since the day she and her husband—whoever he was—moved there.

  “Rylee. I was there when he came for her . . . and for you”

  THE HOSPITAL MATERNITY WARD HAD the shiniest floors Ginger could imagine. A mirror finish, she thought. Their mother was too embarrassed about her daughter’s condition to be there for her, so Ginger volunteered to be Courtney’s birthing coach. Although she was still sixteen when she delivered, Courtney seemed to be a trooper about the whole thing. After an agonizing—and a little boring—wait for contractions to quicken, the birthing process went off without much of a hitch. Certainly there was screaming and the kind of facial contortions that suggest an imminent demise, and then a baby girl who’d been conceived in darkness was handed from her aunt to her mother.

  Courtney didn’t look at the baby right away.

  “I’m glad it’s a girl,” she said.

  “I was hoping for that too. Look at her. She’s beautiful”

  Courtney was scrunched up in the bed as a whirlwind of hospital staff flitted about pulling bloody sheets, clamping this and that, stitching here and there.

  “I can’t look. If I look, I might see him in her”

  Tears leaked from her eyes.

  “She doesn’t”

  “It will make it harder to give her up”

  “You don’t have to”

  “I am afraid”

  “I know, honey”

  AS THE STORY AUNT GINGER tells plays out, I find out more about my mother and my life; and it illuminates so much of what has been hidden in the orchestrated turmoil of our lives. I remember one time when we were watching an episode of Teen Mom on TV and the girl who’d just had a baby wa.

  talking about giving it up for adoption.

  “I could never do that,” I said.

  “If it is best for the child,” Mom replied, “then it is what’s best for you. I know people who have considered doing it because, well, it was the only thing to do that was right”

  “Ditching your kid? How could that ever be right? I mean, they shouldn’t have got pregnant in the first place”

  “You’re right, but sometimes mistakes happen. Sometimes pregnancies are anything but planned”

  I knew Mom had me young. She told me she was eighteen, but now I know she was sixteen. I thought she’d been married to my father, the war hero, but that was a lie too.

  “I know people who have made the decision to keep their babies and have regretted it,” she had said. “I know others who contemplated the same thing and they now hate themselves for ever having thought so”

  I wonder now where I fell on the spectrum my mother had laid bare. Had she regretted keeping me? Had I been the mistake that ruined her life.

  AUNT GINGER FIDDLES WITH THE fringe of a burnt-orange colored afghan and continues her story. I pull myself from the memory of my mysterious mother and listen. I am calm now. Riveted really. I know that Aunt Ginger is in the middle of a set of memories charged with emotion and fear. It shows plainly on her face, in the quick movements of her fidgety fingers. I wonder how many times she’s told this story. I suspect not many. I suspect no one but her, my mother and my biological father know the truth about how I started life.

  “SHE LOOKS LIKE YOU, COURTNEY. She looks like you!.

  Courtney removed a cool compress from her brow and looked down as her sister placed her baby next to her. Her breasts had nearly tumbled out of the sheet, and though she was modest, she didn’t care. Her eyes were transfixed by the slightly pinched, pink face of the creature that had just emerged from her tattered womb in one slippery final push.

  “Hello, little girl,” she said.

  “She’s your baby. Not his,” Ginger whispered next to her.

  But a nurse caught the remark and shook her head.

  “None of my business,” she said, “but sometimes it’s good to have a man around. At least for child support, if nothing else”

  Ginger almost sneered at the nurse. “That’ll never happen. Not with this man”

  “Just trying to be helpful. None of my business”

  “You’re right. None”

  Courtney wasn’t paying attention to the conversation between her sister and the nurse. She was off somewhere else. She was holding her baby, looking down into the unfocused eyes that now latched on to hers with tentative uncertainty.

  “I love you, baby of mine,” she said. “I’ll never let you go. I’ll never let anyone hurt you. Never”

  AUNT GINGER STOPS HER STORY. She’s folded the afghan and she’s stiffening her body in a way that indicates she’s about to get up. Like the story is over. But it isn’t. It didn’t get to the part that I want to know about. I don’t want, don’t need, to know that she almost gave me up. I need to know how it was that my biological father, this Alex Rader, staked a claim for me.

  “You can’t stop now,” I sa
y, too forcefully, and I see her bristle slightly. I try to backpedal to soften my words. “That didn’t come out right, Aunt Ginger. What I meant to say, is I really need to know and you’re the only one who can tell me. I’ve spent my life with Mom—alone at first, then with Dad, and then Hayden—but now only Hayden remains. I need to know everything. I need to find my mom”

  My words are like grenades to Aunt Ginger’s heart. I feel bad about that but what can I do? I don’t know her at all. I don’t know if she’s a liar like my mom. I sense that she’s holding back because she cares about me.

  “Look,” she finally says, blinking back my words. “It happened at the hospital. A security guard, a policeman, I’m not really sure who or what he was. He told your mom. I was there”

  “What did he tell her?” I ask.

  She starts talking.

  THE LAST VISITORS HAD LEFT for the night. They weren’t there for Courtney, but for a Mexican woman named Celina who’d had a son the previous afternoon. In marked contrast to Courtney, who had not had a single visitor outside of Ginger, Celina had a steady stream of well-wishers. All were boisterous, joyful. All came with gifts, flowers, and the best intentions for the newest member of her family.

  Courtney had not a single tulip on her side of the room.

  As Ginger stood to leave, she bent down and kissed her sister.

  “We’ll get through this,” she said.

  “I know . . . for her.” Courtney indicated the still-unnamed baby in a clear Lucite incubator next to Courtney’s bed.

  The door pushed open and a man in a dark blue and gray uniform poked his head into the room. In his arms, a bouquet of red roses, sixteen in all.

  “Special delivery,” he said without a smile.

  “Ms. Morales is sleeping,” Ginger answered.