The Safest Lies

by Megan Miranda

  I stayed in the entrance—I could see everything from here. I could see it was empty. It looked small, and cold, and I understood why Jan would be worried if my mother had kept us in here. I pulled the door shut, my hand on the wall until I felt it latch.

  “What was that?” Ryan asked.

  I shook my head. “The safe room. For emergencies.” Not looking at Ryan, not wanting to see what he thought of that. Whether he saw it as a safe room or a panic room. Like the black iron gates, it looked different now, from the other side.

  A chill ran over me, but it could’ve been from the basement itself.

  “I need to check my phone,” I said. “Maybe she called.” But even I could hear the desperation in my voice.

  Ryan led the way back upstairs, followed me back to my room, for my phone.

  The first thing I saw was a string of messages from him:

  I’m outside. Can we talk?

  I’m sorry about earlier.

  There are things I have to say to you.

  I turned to look at Ryan, and he was cringing to himself. “Yeah, um, you can ignore those….”

  But Mom hadn’t tried to call me. Neither had Jan.

  Ryan was rolling up the sleeves of his dress shirt, keeping his hands busy, trying to find something to do. The impossibility of this moment only worked to increase my dread: Ryan Baker is standing in your bedroom, and nobody cares.

  I closed my eyes, trying to think like my mother. If she knew I was missing, who might she call? She knew I’d talked to Annika. Maybe she’d called her, maybe Annika had tried to cover for me and ended up making it worse.

  Ryan leaned against my dresser as I dialed Annika.

  I heard music in the background when she picked up. “Back so soon?” she answered.

  “Did my mom call you?” I asked.

  “Did your mom…what? No. Did she find out? Are you in trouble?”

  “No, I can’t…” I ran my hand down my face. Too many people knowing about my mother was still a fear of mine. I didn’t want the whole world knowing the extent of her condition. “Did you happen to see her? I’m not asking if you were spying, but you know, you can see my house from the wall, and maybe you were sitting on the wall or something….”

  The music was off now. “Kelsey, is everything okay?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “She’s not here, and it’s not…like her…not to tell me.”

  “Just like it’s not like you to tell her when you’re leaving, right?” I could hear the smile in her voice.

  “Annika, it’s important.”

  “I know, I’m sorry. Eli picked me up at eight, and we’ve been out since then. I didn’t see her. She didn’t call me.”

  I heard someone say something in the background, and I assumed it was Eli. “It’s my neighbor,” Annika responded, her voice muffled though the receiver.

  “Maybe she called your mom?” I asked.

  “My mom’s driving Brett back to college. Nobody’s there.” She paused. “Do you want me to come over? We’re in the car already, I can be there in thirty,” she said.

  “No, it’s okay. Enjoy your date, Annika.”

  Ryan moved to sit beside me on the bed—and again I thought of how ridiculous this was: Ryan Baker is on your bed. And I started to laugh.

  “Everything okay?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “You’re sitting on my bed, and my mother is missing. And I kissed you ten minutes ago.”

  His lips quirked up in a half smile. “I know you did.” And now he was staring at my mouth again, like he was replaying it. “I liked ten minutes ago.”

  But he didn’t understand—everything about ten minutes ago was gone. Everything from then to now was impossible.

  “This can’t be real,” I said. I stared at the phone in my hand, because I knew what I had to do. I had to call Jan. I had to find out if she knew something, without giving anything away.

  White lies. Little lies. Like my mother taught me. Careful.

  I called Jan’s cell, but it went to voice mail after a single ring. Which meant she saw it was me and hit End. Which meant she was probably in a late meeting with a patient. Or at the class Cole had mentioned. If she knew something about my mom, she would’ve picked up. I was sure. I was pretty sure.

  I typed: Did my mom call you?

  And then: Did something happen? But I changed my mind, deleting the second line before hitting Send.

  But it was too late—all those somethings started working their way into my head, circling and circling.

  My phone beeped in response, and my heart jumped along with it.

  Text from Jan: No. Is everything okay? In a seminar.

  Was everything okay? Not even close. My mother didn’t call Annika, or Jan, or me. The possibilities were shrinking. Wherever Mom was, she was not okay.

  “Kelsey?” Ryan asked, reaching for my hand.

  Ryan was watching me closely. Between the ceremony and this moment, his hair had gradually become disheveled, like it usually was at school, and his dress shirt had turned casual, with the collar unbuttoned and the sleeves rolled up, and he was beginning to look, once again, like someone who had been playing a part—stuck in someone else’s clothes—who was slowly unmaking himself.

  He looked, all at once, both uncomfortable and unsure, alone with me in this house where something was very not right. Like my thoughts were catching. I remembered his face the moment we fell. His words as he crawled inside my car. But I also remembered the way he’d held on to me, promising we’d be okay. The way he thought that I was the brave one.

  Think, Kelsey. If my mother noticed I was missing, would she try to come after me? Was it possible? Would she try? “The front booth,” I whispered. “And the backyard. We need to check them both.”

  —

  The booth near the front gate was not made like the rest of the house. It was wooden and painted white, but the grain was starting to show, with weather and time. The door didn’t have a lock. Though small and enclosed, nothing about this booth was safe. Even the floorboards echoed. As a kid, I’d been afraid to play inside it.

  The windows to the front and side were thin and rattled when I pulled the door open. The room was empty.

  Inside, it smelled of must and gasoline and exposed wood. Everything was coated with a thick layer of dust and pollen. There was only room for one person to sit, in a chair that was no longer here. Red plastic containers of gasoline for the generator were stored under the control panel—and had been for as long as I could remember. Everything about this room was undisturbed.

  There were no safe answers left. My mother had not tried to come after me and then lost her nerve at the gate.

  I quickly shut the door again, staring at Ryan.

  He must’ve read something in my face, because he said, “There’s still the whole yard.” As if we might find her curled up in the weeds, hidden from our sight, just waiting to be found. As if words alone could turn into hope. He reached a hand out for me, and I took it.

  I followed him in the darkness, and I felt the vastness, as my mother called it. All the danger, all the possibility, existing in the places I could only imagine.

  “Mom?” I called repeatedly, as we made our way along the edge of the gate, until we could be sure there was nowhere left to hide.

  I shivered in the night air, and I felt too exposed all of a sudden. Like my mother would be, standing in this very spot. My eyes darted from shadow to shadow in the darkness. There could be people watching, from every corner of the woods. My blood was thrumming.

  Inside. Inside was safety.

  “Let’s go,” I whispered. I led the way back into the house, locking the doors behind me on instinct. I wandered down the hall, my hands trailing along the walls, trying to orient myself. Like I was waking in a strange place for the first time.

  The alarm was off, and she was missing.

  What the hell was going on?

  —

  I sat down at the kitche
n table and stared at my cell, hoping it would miraculously provide answers. Ryan hopped up on the countertop, like he used to do at the Lodge. Like my two worlds were overlapping. As if I could be both people at once.

  “Should we call someone else?” he asked.

  Ryan was not nearly as worried as I was—because Ryan didn’t understand how improbable this situation truly was. The fear was too great. It had no boundaries. It seeped into every aspect of our lives, binding her here. I imagined it like the ivy, creeping up the iron gates. Tangling together until you couldn’t see one without the other.

  “Kelsey?”

  Ryan Baker, who asked you out, is hanging out in your kitchen in suit pants and a button-down shirt, two feet away from you, with his brown hair falling in his eyes, waiting for you to do something. Snap out of it, Kelsey.

  I didn’t want to explain how delicate my situation in this house was already. I was always just one moment from being pulled. One call from Jan, or one call to the police, and the whole thing might tip too far, my whole life might slip away from me.

  “She doesn’t have a car,” I finally said. And then I gave voice to the thought that had begun in my room when I was texting Jan. The thought that dug in and circled and wouldn’t let go. “What if someone broke in and hurt her?”

  Lightning striking twice. Her biggest fear.

  He pushed off the counter. Surveyed the room. “Is anything missing?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

  Because that was why people broke into homes, in Ryan’s world. Not to take people. Not to keep them, and hurt them, and ruin them.

  He looked around the room, his eyes lingering on the closed doors, the locked windows. “It doesn’t look like a break-in to me, Kelsey.”

  I nodded. Except. Except we had locks and security and a panic room for a reason. What if her fears were not so ungrounded? What if she knew the danger was real? That someone was still out there, just waiting for a chance?

  The fears started skittering along my skin, threatening to shut me down. I wanted to give myself over to them. Crawl into bed, stare at the walls, surround myself with them.

  Ryan grabbed my shoulder, crouching beside me so his face was just inches away, his eyes wide and worried. “You okay? You look pale. Like you might pass out.”

  My mouth had gone dry, and it felt almost like my throat was closing off, the air scratching along the surface, and I was a balloon, drifting farther and farther away….

  “Kelsey?” he called, but his voice was on another planet. Didn’t he see?

  My mother was gone.

  My mother was gone.

  Jan didn’t come into our lives until I was nine.

  Before that, we’d been coasting along at a pretty decent clip, under the radar.

  And under the radar was my mother’s number one goal. Jan and I were the only ones who knew who my mother had once been. She told Jan because she had to. She told me because it was always just the two of us against the world. And what she wasn’t able to tell me herself I could find out easily enough with an Internet search.

  Amanda Silviano was famous.

  She was famous for the horror. For the media circus. For the tragedy of what had happened to her, and also what happened because of it. She was one of those names that lingered. Elizabeth Smart. Jaycee Lee Dugard. Girls taken and kept, like so many others. But she was one of the few: girls miraculously found again.

  The difference was she no longer had a place to return.

  The Amanda Silviano in the news stories was raised in a middle-class neighborhood by a single father. She lived in a beige ranch with a white picket fence, in a grid of houses that looked exactly the same. I’d seen the pictures from old articles. Her father reported her missing—kidnapped—after coming home one morning from working the night shift to find the house ransacked. The front windows had been smashed in. The neighbors had heard a scream.

  My mother was beautiful, and seventeen, and a Girl Who Followed the Rules. The perfect trifecta for media attention. The attention got more police involvement, and then more people involvement. And then the allegations began. Allegations of a long history of abuse. The cigarette burns. The black eye. The reports from her classmates. The screams, not so unusual, the neighbors said. But nobody had spoken up. Nobody had protected her, then or later. Only in hindsight did anybody care.

  It was a past that, in the eyes of the public, could only lead to one single truth: that he was guilty. And that perhaps this was a cover-up. Perhaps his daughter was dead and buried, and he had staged the whole thing.

  He was vilified. The police brought him in for questioning. He took, and failed, a lie detector test. He was all but declared guilty, before a trial, and he overdosed on sleeping pills as rumors of his impending arrest swirled. Impossible to tell whether it was accidental or not. Suicide over the Guilt, one headline claimed.

  But then, later that year, my mother reappeared—alive. She escaped from the man who truly held her. She was found running on the edge of a highway, in the woods of Pennsylvania, delirious, dirty, smelling of gasoline—and four months pregnant. The hospital ID’d her, and the reporters were there almost as fast as the police. She was alive, and what a tragedy, they said, what had happened to her father. What a tragedy, what they themselves had done.

  Is it any surprise she changed her name? She checked herself out of the hospital as soon as she could, and she left. She took the money that her father had left her, and she used it to set us up here. Given the media circus surrounding her reappearance, her request to have the records sealed on her name change was granted.

  She had no memory of her abduction, and I had no memory of her ever leaving the house.

  Though I believed, based on the fact that she would never talk about her life before her abduction, either, that she was more than happy to leave all of Amanda Silviano behind. To become someone new. To give us both a fresh start.

  She took classes online, eventually finding herself some part-time bookkeeping work for a local business. She slowly set up a life for herself, one where she could provide for the both of us without ever having to leave these walls. I played out in the backyard, inside the gate, while my mother watched from the kitchen. I’d turn to see her, always at the window, smiling and watching. I was healthy and loved, and I grew and thrived.

  She registered me as homeschooled. I took the state tests. I scored well. I hadn’t had a checkup, or a vaccine, which wasn’t illegal then—but it raised some flags with social services, over time.

  But sometime between year seven and eight, something happened. I’m not sure what, exactly. But Child Protection showed up, and they asked me questions without my mom around, and I said something—I said something troubling, about the kids on TV, and how dangerous it was for them, playing in the woods. Something that made them realize that neither of us had left the property since soon after I’d been born.

  I was temporarily removed, just for forty-eight hours, but my mother went into a fit. It was not the best reaction, truly. I remember this well, because it was the first time I’d been away from home. Sometimes, when I walk into a new place for the first time, that same feeling overwhelms me, and I remember disappearing into myself—trying to scream, but finding no air.

  But even then, even when her daughter was taken from her, even when she did not know where I was, even then, she did not leave the house. She did not try to find me.

  She waited for them to return me, and then she fought hard to keep me.

  But that was how I knew she wouldn’t leave just because I wasn’t home.

  She couldn’t.

  It was impossible.

  —

  Ryan had made himself at home in the kitchen, gotten me some juice, looked at me sideways, and pushed me into a chair anytime I’d stand and start pacing. I felt numb and removed, like I was still floating above my body somehow. This was really not how I imagined my first date with Ryan going.

  Hey, remember
that other time we did something? Where we sat silently in the kitchen while I tried to figure out what happened to my mother? Right. Good times, part two.

  Ryan looked through the pantry and ate a cookie before sliding one in front of me, too.

  He took out his phone, and that’s what jarred me back to the present. “We should call the police,” he said, “if you think…something happened. We need to call.”

  Something happened. Yes, something happened. But what? The what changed everything, and I couldn’t make a decision until I knew.

  It was such a delicate balance, and I needed him to understand. It felt like a confession, though, and I was so used to keeping these things to myself, for myself. But he was waiting, tapping his fingers—listening. I took a deep breath. “If I call the police, I won’t be able to live here anymore. And she needs me here.” And I need her. “Just…I need to look around. I need to figure out what happened first.”

  He put his phone on the counter, like a concession. He didn’t ask one of the thousands of questions he could’ve asked based on what I’d told him. Instead, he ran his fingers through his hair, pushing it back from his face. “Okay,” he said. “Other than the alarm being off, was anything else different?”

  “No,” I said, and then I felt my eyes growing wide, drying out, the buzzing in my ears. No, no, no.

  The doors were all locked when I left, but my window…

  I pushed back from the table, the chair abruptly screeching against the tile, and ran to my room, my hands brushing the walls, realizing why I’d felt that chill—why it was colder in my room, like something had happened here. Not my mother’s anger.

  The window.

  It was ajar, and the grate was pushed open, when I was sure I’d left it closed. “Oh God,” I said.

  She could’ve pushed it open looking for me, or…someone could’ve gotten in.