“Go ahead. It’s okay,” Estelle says. Then she whispers to Jon, “I hate this.”
“They said to help her try things again on her own. She’s right there. She can do it.” He reaches over and holds her hand and she lets him.
Even on the best of days, it has been difficult to shake the image of Jennifer sitting on the cot in the small room at the police station. Fifteen pounds were missing from her already thin frame. Her head was shaved and her lips badly cracked from dehydration. She wore a hospital gown and her dirty, soiled clothes were piled on the floor. Her wrists had rope burns from being bound so tightly. It took them two weeks to gather the nerve to ask Marceau what they found out from the man they arrested.
“There is something very troubling occurring between here and Brussels,” he said. He sat with them in their living room on a chair brought from the kitchen table, his legs crossed and his hat in his lap. Estelle and Jon sat on the edge of the couch, uncomfortable but ready for some answers. “It is almost like a game. Children are disappearing and becoming a sort of currency. As far as we can tell, there is a system in place where these children can be exchanged for one another. No money is involved. The people meet, size up what the other has, and will trade the children as if they were used cars. We believe that this is what happened to Jennifer the day the woman reported seeing her, that the men with her had either just traded for her or were on their way to swap her for another child. The man that we found Jennifer with was the third person to have her. You can imagine how difficult this is making things for us with these children constantly on the move from city to city, or in some cases from country to country.” Marceau spoke without emotion, describing the situation as if he were describing a bowl of soup.
“Then why was she in such bad shape?” Jon asked.
“That’s the same question we asked and the man told us that this is the way she was given to him. He had planned to clean her up but hadn’t gotten around to it. Otherwise, we’ll have to wait until she is ready to talk to fill in the blanks.”
And they continue to wait, but after four months, she hasn’t been ready to talk about the time from her abduction until the time of her return. Not to the police, not to the therapist, not to Estelle and Jon. They know what the medical reports told them but they only waited on Jennifer. Estelle and Jon have not allowed anyone to push her, believing that Jennifer will talk when she’s ready, though they would prefer all the answers, no matter how harsh, to what their imagination has done with the missing time. The only thing that Jennifer has disclosed is how it happened. How she was bored at the museum, and while the class was moving from one painting to another, she skipped out and went to the restaurant on the top floor. After a candy bar and Coke, she went to return to the group but they had moved into another area of the museum and a short, balding man in a navy-blue suit asked her if she was lost. When she said yes, he explained that he worked for the museum and that he thought her group had gone outside to the school bus. He put his hand on her shoulder and walked her out of the front doors of the museum, then around to the side and to the back. The bus was there and they walked to it but it was empty, and on the other side of the bus was a van. A man in a similar suit got out and approached them and they forced her into the van. Jennifer gave this account a week after returning home, sitting at the police station at Marceau’s desk, a tape recorder running and her parents flanking her. She stopped twice to say that she tried to get away, tried to scream, tried to fight, as if she needed to prove that it wasn’t her choice.
Estelle takes a bag of potato chips from the plastic bag. She offers one to Jon and he declines. Then she says, “She’s looking better.”
“Still too thin,” Jon says.
“I know. But her hair, her face. She’s getting there, right?”
They watch Jennifer, and if they didn’t know her, she could easily be taken for a boy. Her hair has grown slowly and is darker than before and her knees and elbows appear to have their own agenda as her thin frame runs with the kite string. She stumbles and falls as she looks back to see if the kite is in the air. Jon starts to get up, but Jennifer gives an “I’m okay” wave.
“Is she sleeping any better?” Jon asks. Estelle and Jennifer moved into the big bed when she came home, leaving Jon on the couch. Most nights are filled with shouts from dreams, panic in the dark. There has been no mention of Jennifer moving back into her own room.
“Not really,” Estelle says.
School begins in a week but Jennifer will not go. She doesn’t want to see friends, ashamed of her appearance. “Not until my hair comes back,” she says and her parents agree. And there have recently been more complex questions from her. “Does everyone know?” she asked Estelle in the grocery store. Then later in the day, as the three of them ate lunch at M. Conrer’s café, she asked, staring between them, “What do I tell people?”
“We’ll talk about that later,” Jon said after exchanging an empty look with Estelle, but neither has figured out how to answer. The therapist warned them to be prepared for such questions, but it was like being told to prepare for a bullet.
Jennifer calls for her mother to come and help and Estelle hands Jon the bag of chips and goes to her. Jon mindlessly finishes the chips though he’s not hungry. He wonders if Iris found the note he slid under her door earlier in the week. Have you finished? is all it said. It was the first time he had been back to see her since Jennifer’s return. He figures Iris knows, as it was on the news and in the newspaper, and he wonders if the popularity of Jennifer’s return may have dissuaded the portrait’s completion, the subject now too mainstream for Iris. Estelle mentioned the painting of Jennifer as they sat up one night and listened for Jennifer to call out in her sleep, and Jon was happy to answer honestly that he hadn’t been back.
“Do you still want it?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “Do you?”
“No. Not really.”
But he took her interest as a kind of permission, and the next afternoon after work, he stopped at Iris’s apartment. The door was locked. No sound from inside. He scribbled the note and slid it under the door and left relieved.
Estelle and Jennifer have little luck without a breeze and they return to the blanket. “Would you like the ice cream now?” Jon asks.
“Okay,” Jennifer says. “Vanilla on the inside, chocolate on the outside.”
“Me too,” Estelle says and Jon promises to be right back.
He follows a curvy pebble pathway across the park, avoiding bicycles and soccer balls as he walks with his hands in his pockets. He looks over his shoulder now and then at Jennifer and Estelle. He comes to the ice cream cart and stands in line behind a teenage couple holding hands, twin girls no older than Jennifer, and an old man who wears a sweater despite the heat. As he waits he looks across the park. The sun has fallen in the afternoon sky and many find relief in the growing shadows of the trees. The breeze picks up and he hopes to make another attempt with the kite, to show Jennifer that it can be done. He moves up in line and buys what Jennifer and Estelle asked for, and walking back, he feels the ice cream already beginning to melt, so he begins to trot. Back at the blanket, his wife and daughter lie on their backs, hands behind their heads.
“Better eat it fast,” he says and they sit up and Jennifer thanks him.
“No napkins?” Estelle asks and he shakes his head.
Halfway through the ice cream, the drips have made their hands sticky and Jon holds the plastic bag while they toss away what’s left. Jennifer says, “Can we go?”
“Sure,” Estelle answers. “There’s a fountain by the gate and we can wash our hands.” The three of them stand and Jon folds the blanket and puts it over his shoulder. Estelle picks up the plastic bag. Jennifer stands between her mother and father and takes a hand from each of them. They walk at a leisurely pace across the park, the sun behind them and their shadow before them, their silhouette providing a glim
pse of what they used to be as they make their way home.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank Joseph Levens and M. Scott Douglass for their early love for this Parisian story. Thanks to Douglas Mackaman for the time provided at the Abbey in Pontlevoy, France. I want to thank Sarah Knight, my editor, for introducing this novella to the team at Simon & Schuster and keeping this story alive. Peter Steinberg, my literary agent, comes through again. Merci bien, Peter. And as always, I want to thank the three girls that are with me each day, for all that you give.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michael Farris Smith is the author of Rivers and a native Mississippian who has lived in France and Switzerland. He has been awarded the Mississippi Arts Commission Literary Arts Fellowship, the Transatlantic Review Award for Fiction, the Alabama Arts Council Fellowship Award for Literature, and the Brick Streets Press Short Story Award. He lives in Columbus, Mississippi, with his wife and two daughters.
ALSO BY MICHAEL FARRIS SMITH
Rivers
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2011 by Michael Farris Smith
The first chapter of The Hands of Strangers first appeared in slightly different form as a story titled “Anywhere” in The Summerset Review.
Previously published in 2011 by Main Street Rag Publishing.
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The Hands of Strangers Page 12