Disconnected

by Jennifer Weiner

  He sounded groggy—but, thank God, not angry—when he picked up. “H’lo? Shannon?”

  “I need you to take me somewhere in Crown Heights.”

  His voice was dry. “I assume that this is urgent?”

  She gave him the address of the diner on the corner of Henry and DeGraw. “I can get you something . . .”

  “Ah, I’m not hungry. I’ll meet you there.”

  She ended the call and raced outside, even though there was no way he could be there yet. Shivering, she waited on the fluorescent-lit sidewalk outside of Mr. Park’s shop, pacing back and forth and wishing she had money for a cup of hot cocoa and a sweet roll. When Devonté’s little blue Zipcar pulled up to the curb, she was in the passenger’s seat almost before he’d stopped, slapping the phone into his hand like a nurse handing over some necessary instrument to a doctor in the midst of a delicate surgery.

  He flicked through the pictures, frowning. Over his shoulder, Shannon read the next round of texts.

  WTF did u do 2 hr?

  N0thing. She wuz fine when i left.

  shes not fine now

  that wasnt me.

  If u took pics delete them. meet back here have 2 figure out what 2 do

  Devonté shook his head and scrolled back to the first picture, the pills in the kitchen. “So you know where this is?”

  Her voice was dry and rattly, a dead leaf blowing down a sidewalk. “It’s in Crown Heights.”

  “But you don’t know where the house is? Or what street it’s on, or anything?”

  “I’ll find it.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know.” The last word came out half an octave higher than the preceding two. A chill worked its way up her body, shaking her shoulders. She didn’t want to go back there, but what choice did she have? Nobody had come to save her, not that night, not the night on her futon, the night she’d gone to the hospital, but that didn’t absolve her of her own responsibilities. “Come on,” she said, and Devonté started to drive. Shannon shut her eyes, leaning her forehead against the cool window glass. When she opened them, the message light was flaring again.

  think she’s dead

  “No,” she moaned as Devonté squinted at the GPS, driving along Eastern Parkway, leading them deeper into a neighborhood of boarded-up storefronts, Chinese restaurants with plastic signs, OTB parlors and shabby churches and burnt-out, windowless shells of houses. Pairs of sneakers dangled from the powerlines; a torn garbage bag leaked paper plates and chicken bones onto the street.

  “What now?” he asked.

  She knew the answer. Most addicts had what a career counselor might call a limited skill set, but finding the party was generally part of it. Find the party, you’d find booze and blow and pills and powder, or at least someone who knew how to get them. A pretty girl or even just a thin one (and all addicts ended up thin eventually) could always find the party.

  Shannon directed Devonté to a convenience store. Inside, there was a trio of giggly girls in denim jackets and high-heeled boots standing in line, sipping from sixty-four-ounce cups of Mountain Dew, ordering Salem Lights. “Hey,” said Shannon, reaching out to tap the shoulder of a girl wearing sparkly red devil horns. The girls ignored her, turning their backs, marching out the door on a slipstream of perfume. She followed, thinking she’d get their attention once they were outside.

  “Girlie.” The voice sounded like concrete being churned in a broken mixer. She looked down. The bum leaning against the side of the cinder-block wall wore a dirt-stiffened sweatshirt with a dark red stain down the front. His pants were held up with a bungee cord. Reddened toes poked through slits he’d carved into a pair of too-small sneakers. He leaned against the wall of the convenience store and grinned a smile that revealed three teeth. “No offense, girlie, but I think maybe you’re up past your bedtime.”

  “Please.” The word came out as a croak. “Do you know where there’s a party? There’s something I have to do there.”

  Beneath the thickets of his eyebrows, the bum’s eyes rolled. “Oh, I know all about that.” He worked himself slowly from sitting to standing, then reached into his pocket. “Here.” He gave her a pamphlet printed on flimsy green paper. The Promises, read the words on top. If we are painstaking about this phase of our development, we will be amazed before we are halfway through. We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness. We will not regret the past, nor wish to shut the door on it.

  “See, doesn’t that sound nice? A new freedom and a new happiness?” He sounded, Shannon thought, like a parent trying to coax a child into taking a bite of some new vegetable.

  “I tried,” Shannon said. Her head felt hot and heavy as it throbbed with her pulse. The wind rose, blowing crumpled pieces of newspaper and the strands of someone’s abandoned weave past her toes. “I went to those meetings. They weren’t for me. But, look, I swear, I’m not going to try to get drugs. There’s someone there I have to help.”

  He looked at her for a minute before pulling something else out of his pocket that she also recognized. A plastic chip, a twenty-four-hour chip, the one they gave you at your very first meeting. The desire chip, she’d heard it called, because it didn’t demonstrate any particular achievement or length of sobriety, just that you had a desire to stop doing what you were doing, a desire to change for the better. Shannon slipped it in her pocket. “Try Utica and Atlantic,” he said. “Good luck, girlie. Ah, no, never mind that,” he said when she took her last three dollars and tried to give them to him. “Do the right thing,” he said, and slumped down against the wall, almost vanishing into the shadows.

  Shannon ran through the darkness, back to Devonté’s car. Clouds drifted over the surface of the moon. Dead leaves twitched on the tree branches, and the sky above her seemed enormous and empty. She dug her hands into her pockets and wished for her winter coat.

  “Where to?” asked Devonté.

  “Utica and Atlantic.”

  “Which house, though?”

  “We’ll know,” she said, and she was right. There were cars parked along each side of the street, people lingering around the open door of a row house made of crumbling brick, with squares of cardboard taped over the windows and a single lightbulb dangling from a twist of wire illuminating the porch. This was the place, Shannon told herself, and hoped that she was right.

  “Come on,” she said, and she and Devonté pushed past the people lingering on the porch through the battered front door propped open with a cinder bock and into the house. The kitchen was still empty of furniture and appliances, although now there was a keg of beer set on a metal trash can filled with ice. The living room had scarred hardwood floors and was almost completely dark, except for the occasional spark and flare of a lighter. Shannon could hear murmured conversations, arguments, the hiss of smoke being drawn through a glass pipe, a woman’s drunken protest that dissolved into a sigh.

  “Where we going?” Devonté murmured.

  She stood at the bottom of the stairs that led to the basement, cold seeping up through the soles of her shoes, eyes wide open in the smoky half darkness. There were bodies moving through the dimness, kids sitting against the walls, a couple entangled on a couch. Something moaning and dirgelike was coming out of the stereo, muddy guitar chords, a singer’s whispered incantation. On a couch across the room, a topless woman swung a leg over a boy and sat straddling him. The curve of her shoulder echoed the curve of the moon. Nothing was where she remembered it—not the furniture, not the ceilings or the walls. Shannon had never felt so sober in her life or wanted so badly to get high.

  Where?

  She put her hand in her pocket, wrapping her fingers around the raised edges of the plastic chip before pulling it free. In the darkness, it cast a glow, small and feeble, but better than nothing. Behind her, something flickered. She turned and saw that Devonté had pulled out his cell phone and was us
ing its screen to light their way. He put his hand on her hip, and they shuffled forward, deeper into the basement, which seemed to have lengthened and deepened and darkened.

  In the house where Shannon had grown up, her parents had turned the crawl space above the garage into a secret room that she could access through a tiny door they’d hidden behind a bookcase. The ceilings were so low she couldn’t even stand up straight when she’d been seven, but it had delighted her, and her parents, delighted by her delight, had gotten a contractor to install carpeting and lights and a fan. She has a wonderful imagination, she’d heard her father saying. Maybe she’ll be a writer someday.

  Shannon gripped the chip so hard that its edges dug grooves into her palm, moving against the wall. Icy fingers groped for her ankles, plucked at her wrists and her hair. Hey, baby, hey, baby, whispered a boy. Shannon didn’t listen. Finally her hip slammed into a doorknob set into the rock wall at the far end of the basement. She tried the knob. It didn’t move.

  So now what? Hit it again? Kick it? Say the magic word? Shannon fell to her knees, pressing her ear against the splintered wood, which felt greasy and somehow alive against her skin. She couldn’t hear anything. Then she could. Faint moans, gusts of goatish laughter, guys chivvying for position.

  We will not regret the past, nor wish to close the door on it. As often as she had said the words, they’d never made sense to Shannon. Bad as she’d been, bad as she’d done, how could she not regret? How could she want anything other than a closed door? She’d stolen her parents’ money, broken their hearts. She had betrayed every friend she’d ever had. She had betrayed herself. She had left a girl in the darkness to die. In her mind, she walked through her bedroom door, past the door to her closet, where only one dress hung, the only one her mother had kept, the one they would bury her in. She knelt down by the bookcase and, as she swung it aside, she said, “I’m sorry!” The words burst out of her like she would explode if she’d tried to keep them inside. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” In the basement, underneath her palm, the doorknob turned. The door opened. The boys, one, two, three, four of them turned to face her. One had a Freddie Krueger mask on. One had his pants off. The girl was naked, on the floor, legs kicked open, in a widening pool of something.

  “What the fuck?” one of the boys cried as the door banged against the stone wall.

  “Surprise,” said Shannon. The clicks that Devonté’s phone made as it took pictures—one, two, three, four—were as loud as gunshots in the little room, and the men squirmed away from the light like vampires. Shannon pulled out her own phone and slid it across the floor to where the girl was lying, dazed.

  “Nine-one-one,” said Shannon. The girl didn’t look up. It was like she hadn’t heard her. The guys were scrambling, pulling up their pants, stepping over the girl like she was a toy someone had left on the floor. Shannon bent down. She reached out, meaning to touch the girl’s cheek, then reconsidered, thinking, confusedly, about evidence and fingerprints and how she could contaminate the crime scene. Instead, she picked up the phone, punched the buttons, waited for someone to pick up and then said, “I’m on Utica Avenue, and there’s a girl here who’s been kidnapped and raped.”

  “Hello?” said the operator, sounding frustrated. “Hello? Is anyone there?”

  “Hey, man, calm down,” one of the guys who’d been scrambling around pantless a minute before was saying to his compadres. “It was probably just the wind or some shit like that.”

  “Wind in a basement?” another guy, this one in jeans and bare feet, was asking.

  “Whatever,” said the first guy.

  “Hello?” said the operator. “Hello? Is anyone there?”

  The girl finally opened her mouth. Her face was puffy and bruised. She wore a necklace of fingerprints on the soft flesh beneath her jaw. “Are you real?” she whispered to Shannon. Then, before Shannon could answer, she spider-walked her fingers to the phone.

  “Please help me,” she said. “My name is Stella Flick and I live at two-two-one Hazel Street.”

  The operator’s voice shifted immediately, becoming sharper, more alert. “Okay, sweetie. Tell me your name again. Stella Flick? Is that right? We’ve been looking for you. Can you tell me where you are?”

  The girl’s eyes were drifting shut. “Utica Avenue!” Shannon shouted.

  “She can’t hear you,” Devonté said quietly.

  “They had a puppy,” Stella was saying. “A little brown puppy on a leash. I always wanted a puppy, but my mom and dad said no.”

  “Tell me where you are, sweetheart,” said the operator, who sounded like she was crying. “Can you tell me what it looks like? Is anyone else there with you?”

  “I went to pet the puppy,” the girl whispered. “It was right near the school. Right out on the street. There were people all around . . . but they grabbed me up so fast . . .”

  Shannon turned, looking at Devonté helplessly. “Does the phone have GPS?” she asked. He shook his head.

  “I don’t know what happened to the puppy,” said Stella. “I hope they didn’t hurt it.”

  “Okay, sweetheart, we’re going to send people to come and get you, but I need you to try to tell me where you are. Is it a house? An apartment? Can you see anything through the windows?”

  “Basement,” said the girl. Her eyes were closing again. Shannon wondered if they’d hurt her or if they’d been drugging her, if she’d ever known where she’d been taken. “Look,” said Devonté, and pointed. Then she saw it, flashing like a bloody diamond in the corner, the flaring message light of one of the boy’s abandoned phones, maybe the very one that had sent her the messages in the first place. She grabbed it, slid it across the floor, and held her breath, watching, as the girl punched the numbers 911, and repeated, “I’m in a basement,” and the voice on the other end said, “Okay, sweetheart, okay, you just stay with us, just stay with us, keep talking, we can see you now, we can follow the phone’s signal, we know exactly where you are.”

  ***

  Devonté walked her up the stairs, across the porch, and back out to his car. She sat in the passenger seat until the sounds of the sirens came lilting through the night and the people in the house came pouring out through the windows and the doors and down the second-story fire escape and scattered. She waited until two female officers with flashlights, followed by two more men, one with bolt cutters, walked into the house.

  “You did good,” said Devonté. Shannon could barely bring herself to nod. She was so tired. It felt like this night had gone on forever. In her pocket, her phone had gone silent. Maybe the battery had died. She was hoping that it had. If that phone’s screen never flashed at her again, that would be, she thought, just fine.

  Devonté gave her a candy bar and a cup of coffee laced with sugar and fake dairy sludge like they had at the AA meetings, and she slurped it up, not minding when it burned her tongue. She was huddled in front of the heater, finishing the last of the coffee, when the girl emerged. She was wrapped in a blanket, a tiny figure with bare feet. Shannon hoped that her parents would welcome her home; that there’d be a warm bath and a soft bed, and that they’d tell her that they loved her, no matter what she’d done or what had been done to her, that no matter what, she would always be their girl.

  “You did good,” Devonté repeated. Her eyes had slipped shut. She forced them open, then let them close again. His voice seemed to be coming from the other end of a very long tunnel. The world looked strange, the sky stretching wide and thin overhead, the upturned Big Wheel on the porch seeming to float a few inches off the wooden boards, and Shannon was so tired. The electricity she’d felt when she’d recognized the house, when she’d known that she could find this place and save the girl imprisoned there, was gone. When she opened her eyes again and saw the row house silhouetted underneath the black fall sky, with the moon still riding behind its veil of clouds, she knew. She knew what h
ad happened, and why the guy at that first meeting had wanted to talk about the white light, why Mr. Park hadn’t seen her at the fruit store, but she’d been perfectly visible to the old guy leading the Night Owls meeting, the one with the bandage on his cheek. The one who was dying.

  Don’t you know you’re dead already?

  She plucked at the sleeve of her undershirt, then tugged down the collar. The twin branches of the Y-shaped incision they’d made, then stitched shut with thick thread, were both visible. No need to make it pretty. The dress in her closet, the one her mother kept, had a high collar. Dead already. Devonté nodded as if she’d spoken the words. “Yeah,” he said. “Sorry about that.”

  “When?” she asked. Already the street was starting to fade. The crumbling brick facade of the house had faded to pale pink, the pumpkin set on the porch across the street was fading to the color of watery Tang. As she watched, there was a faint pop, then the pumpkin winked out of sight.

  “That night you went to the hospital,” Devonté said. “The night with the two guys. They gave you too much. It wasn’t on purpose. They bought it on the street, didn’t know it wasn’t cut.”

  She closed her eyes. It didn’t seem to matter much. “So why?” she asked. “Why all this?”

  Devonté shrugged. Outside the car window, the house collapsed in on itself, then disappeared. The sky above was flat and dimensionless as gray paint on a board. The street looked like a stage when the performance was over, just before the sets were struck. “Couldn’t tell you,” he said. “I’m not the one who makes the decisions, you know? But if I had to guess—if, you know, you put a gun to my head . . .” His teeth flashed as he smiled. “Maybe it was your chance to do, you know, a good deed.”

  “Is that what happened?” she asked. “Did someone put a gun to your head?”

  “Nah, man, I had lung cancer.” He shook his head, disgusted. “And I never even smoked.”

  Shannon turned her head away from the window. She knew she was crying, but could not feel the warmth of tears on her cheeks. What a joke. It turned out that God was just another one of those writers in Brooklyn, moving chess pieces around some cosmic board for His own amusement, telling Himself a story. And if God had chosen this girl, the one in the house, to be saved, why not her?