The Safest Lies

by Megan Miranda

  I waited for everyone to catch up. “We’re at a road,” I said, my body trembling, from the cold and the wet and the fear. We were caged animals. Savage creatures living in darkness. With the water and the dark, the blood and the sweat, we were unrecognizable.

  And then I climbed, pushing open the grate, stumbling into the ditch on the side of the dark mountain road.

  The mountains seemed closer in the night, their shadows stretching ominously in the moonlight. The dying leaves rustling on the tree branches. I pictured that leaf in my lap, from when we were hanging over the car. Slowly curling, slowly dying. And I felt the vastness, as my mother called it. Everything and anything that could possibly happen, just a blink away.

  I felt it like a rush of air, coming from nowhere. Felt it like me, running full-speed and free through the cold night.

  The four of us lay flat in a ditch on the side of the road as Ryan made contact with his cell. “Help,” he said. “We need help. This is Ryan Baker, and there’s a home invasion going on at Blackbird Court in Sterling Cross. They’re armed, and we’ve escaped. There’s a gunshot injury.” The words poured out of him, and I knew there was finally, finally someone on the other end.

  I crawled across Annika to get to Cole, who was lying too still, no longer pressing a hand to his side, and I listened to our breathing as Ryan continued. “I don’t know where we are. We’re on the side of a road somewhere near Blackbird Court. I think.” A pause. “I see trees. Just trees.”

  I heard wheels on the road, saw him debating standing up, gripping the grass. Saw him change his mind, lowering his head out of sight. The headlights lit up the trees behind us as they passed, and I squinted from the sudden brightness.

  “We’re not moving,” he said. “Not until the police arrive.”

  He joined me in the grass beside Cole, nodded as he saw that I already had my hands over his side, pressing on his bandage. The movement and adrenaline had made him worse. His skin was cold, his eyes unfocused, staring off into the night sky.

  “Hey, we made it,” I said.

  His chest rose and fell, and he placed a hand over mine, on his side. But it was weak and cold, and it slid off just as quickly as it had appeared.

  “They’re coming,” I said. I pressed myself close to his body, my mouth to his ear. “We’re okay,” I said as I rested my forehead against his shoulder. And I thought how unlikely that I should feel closer than ever to someone only as they were slipping. That it was only as they were drifting away that I wanted them to stay.

  We lay that way until we heard sirens, and Ryan spoke into the phone, and then he stood on the edge of the road, his arms waving, until red and blue lit up the sky and the road and our faces.

  —

  The EMTs pushed me aside and took over, assessing Cole’s injuries. Cole winced as they moved him, which I took as a good sign.

  “My mother,” I told them, gasping. “My mother was taken.”

  One of them swung a head in my direction. “By who?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “I don’t know, she’s just gone.”

  “We’ve got officers heading to the house now.” He looked me over, blocking my view of Cole. “Where are you hurt?” he asked.

  I arched my neck to see over his shoulder. “I’m not,” I said.

  His gaze lingered on my arms. “You’re covered in blood.”

  I looked down, saw it crusted into my jeans and my shirt. Felt it under my nails, thick and congealed. “Not mine,” I whispered.

  I wiped my hands on my pants, but nothing happened. It clung to the creases of my palm, the ridges of my fingerprints. Blood on my hands. “He’s going to be okay, right?”

  He placed a hand on my upper back, led me toward the road. “Come on,” he said.

  Ryan and Annika were up on the road, speaking to a police officer. But all the words sounded too far away, out in the vastness. The flashing lights turned our faces garish and unnatural. So when the police officer gestured to the back of his vehicle, I happily obeyed. I wanted to crawl inside his car and never leave. Annika climbed in after me, followed by Ryan, and we were silent and stiff the whole way to the station. I imagined we were all repeating the same type of thing in our heads, like a prayer: This is over, this is over, you’re safe. You’re safe.

  —

  An hour later, and Ryan, Annika, and I still sat in an office across from two plainclothes officers—one sitting at the desk, the other standing behind it. “Once more,” the one sitting said. His desk plaque said DETECTIVE MAHONEY. “From the beginning.”

  Ryan let out an annoyed breath. Annika checked over her shoulder out the glass office windows again. The man standing behind the desk looked at me with a mixture of sympathy and compassion, but Detective Mahoney was all business.

  Detective Mahoney held out his hands, palms up. “I know, I’m sorry. The more we can get right now, the more help this will be going forward. Even by tomorrow, things will start to fade.”

  I thought of my mother, fading away too.

  I closed my eyes, started again. “We got there, and the alarms were turned off,” I said.

  “And what did you first notice that let you know your mother was missing?”

  I thought of the feeling in the house. The emptiness. “I knew right away,” I said. “The door was unlocked, and the lights were on, and I heard the emptiness.”

  “You heard the emptiness?” he said.

  Apparently that wasn’t a normal response. But the house was never empty. It had a feeling, a stillness that resounded.

  “And you decided not to call the police?” he asked.

  Ryan groaned. “I should’ve,” he said.

  “I called Annika,” I said. “I called her first. And then I sent a text to Jan.”

  He consulted his notes. “This would be Janice Murray, then?”

  I nodded.

  He flipped through pages and pages of everything we’d given him. “Other than this emptiness you speak of, what else was there that made you think your mother had been taken?” he asked.

  Ryan stood, pushing the chair back. “Is the fact that there were two men with a gun who forced their way into her house not enough?”

  Detective Mahoney raised his hands again, as if he was used to calming people. He waited for Ryan to sit down before speaking again. “Okay. Here’s what we know, and what we’re trying to figure out. The house was empty when we arrived. We saw where the gate had been tampered with out back, and the bullet in the window, which all happened after you returned home, yes?”

  I nodded.

  He continued. “Nothing seems disturbed inside. Other than the smoke, which you yourselves admitted to.”

  He paused, waiting for it to sink in. “You’ve heard the saying that the simplest explanation is most likely the right one?” he asked.

  I leaned forward. “Yes. The simplest explanation is that the people who were in my house took my mother.”

  He leaned forward as well. Folding his hands on top of his desk. “We have people looking. I promise. But here’s what the simplest explanation looks like to me: it looks like someone noticed your mother left, and they thought the house was empty, and they tried to rob it, and you were caught up in it.”

  I shook my head, felt the need to rise from my chair like Ryan had, made myself speak calmly, rationally. “She’s agoraphobic. She can’t leave the house.”

  Annika caught my eye. She kept staring over his shoulder, or at the blank wall, and every time someone spoke, she looked surprised. “Someone said her name,” she said. “Someone asked for Kelsey Thomas by name.”

  The detective leaned forward again, and Annika slouched lower in her chair. “There’s another option, of course,” he said, “and I don’t want to worry you. But your name was just in the paper, along with your picture. And the timing makes sense. Look, you’re a pretty girl. It’s possible someone became fixated with you after the story. It’s possible.”

  As if being a girl was a reason i
n and of itself not to feel safe. My mother did not cast her net wide enough, it seemed. The dangers were everywhere.

  Ryan straightened his back, looked at me. I knew what he was thinking—my name in the paper still came back to him. But the police were grasping. They were finding a story that made sense. “And my mother, then? What happened to my mother?”

  “We will need to talk some more to Janice Murray before making any conclusions. But we have a bulletin out to all departments. We have people at the house, searching for evidence. We’re going through your mother’s computer and her phone records. We’re interviewing neighbors.” He leaned forward, placed a hand over mine. “If she was taken, we will find her.”

  “If? If?” My voice was rising, my frustration was rising, and something was rising in the back of my throat.

  “Just a few more questions. You say you got out from a tunnel under the floor in the safe room of the basement?”

  For the third time, I didn’t answer.

  Detective Mahoney didn’t speak, but the man behind him took a step forward. “The house is a crime scene, Kelsey. We’re still processing, trying to piece together the story. We’re going to need that code.”

  And I hadn’t given it yet. Kept saying I didn’t remember, but that was a lie, and Ryan knew it. I thought of the fact I wasn’t supposed to give the code to anyone. Ever, my mother had said. But she had also promised to always be there. She had been taken. And they didn’t believe it.

  “Twenty-three, twelve, thirty-seven,” I said. The numbers felt like sandpaper in my mouth.

  The other detective wrote it down, excused himself from the room, already reaching for his phone. “Yeah, this is Conrad….” His voice faded out in the hall. Ryan reached a hand down for mine.

  “We’ve spoken briefly with Janice Murray, and she said she has power of attorney over you,” Detective Mahoney said.

  “Right,” I said.

  “You’ll stay with her?”

  I hadn’t thought of the logistics of where I’d stay, who would take me in. Hadn’t realized yet that I’d have to keep moving, even as my life had seemingly halted. “Yes,” I whispered.

  “I’ll arrange for someone to bring you to her house, then.”

  “Not necessary,” Ryan said, and the detective looked to me for confirmation.

  He turned to Annika. “Your mother should be here within the hour. Do you want to wait for her here or at home?”

  Annika didn’t look me in the eye. “Here,” she said, and my heart sank. She was scared. She was scared of home, the one place that should keep us safe.

  “Annika,” I said, reaching for her. But she didn’t look up. Just flinched at the sound of my voice. “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Come on,” Ryan said, a hand on my back. Once we were out of the room, he said, “She’ll come around. Give her some time.”

  When we rounded the corner to the lobby, Ryan stopped in his tracks. A man faced him—same height, same hair, broader-shouldered and softer all around. “Dad,” Ryan said.

  “Son.” His face was impassive, and then he reached for Ryan, pulled him closer, brought Ryan’s head down to his shoulder, his large hand around the back of his head. The distress on his face broke through only when Ryan couldn’t see. He took a shuddering breath before releasing him. “You call me—”

  “Dad, I’m—”

  “Oh, I know. You’re an adult. You’re part of the company. It’s part of the job. I know. But I’m your father, and I got a call from the captain, and I had to pretend that it was no big deal in front of your mother so she wouldn’t lose it. So don’t ‘Dad, I’m an adult’ me, okay? I know the game. I know it.”

  Ryan swallowed. “Okay.”

  “Okay,” his dad said. He rolled his shoulders, let out a long breath. “You guys okay, then?” He looked between the both of us.

  Ryan looked at me, then his dad. “We’re okay,” he said.

  “They had Kent bring your car down. If you’re all done here, follow me home. Your mother has insisted that she see you in the flesh.”

  And then I felt it. The emptiness. That Annika’s mother was coming, and Ryan’s father was here, and Cole was at the hospital with his parents and Emma—and who did I have? Where was my mother? The room tilted and spun, and I couldn’t ground myself. I grabbed on to Ryan’s sleeve, as if I might slip through the cracks otherwise.

  “I will, Dad. I’ll be right home. But I’m driving Kelsey to where she’s staying first.”

  A muscle in his dad’s jaw twitched. “All right. We’ll see you at home, then.” We were almost out of earshot when he called, “And, Ryan?” Ryan paused, turned back. “Drive safe, son.”

  —

  It felt like déjà vu, getting into Ryan’s car, directing him to the house I’d be staying at. That same silence sat between us, because there was too much to say and not enough to make sense of. I couldn’t give voice to any of the terrible things I was thinking: my mother was gone, and there were no witnesses. And wondering…what if the same had happened to me? Could I just disappear like that? Would people give explanations and let me fade away in their memories? Would anyone even notice?

  Ryan stopped in front of Jan’s two-story blue house. The street was dark, except for a few porch lights on the block. Jan’s house was closed up and completely dark.

  “No one’s home,” he said.

  “I know. They’re all at the hospital.” She had told me to let myself in. That someone would be bringing Emma back soon. “I know where they keep the spare key.”

  I reached for the seat belt, and his hand covered mine. “Yeah, not going to happen,” he said.

  “I’m sorry, what?”

  “You’re not staying here.”

  “It’s Jan’s house.”

  “It’s empty,” he said.

  “They’ll be home later.”

  “Tell her you’re staying with a friend,” he said.

  He shifted the car into drive, and I tried to find the words to explain that I had nowhere else to go. Nobody else who would take me in.

  “Me, Kelsey. You’re staying with me.”

  I pictured his father at the station, his worried mother at home. “Your parents will let me?”

  He kept driving, didn’t look at me when he answered. “I find it’s sometimes better not to bother them with such questions.”

  —

  I discovered how this was possible when we arrived at his place—a ranch set pretty far back from the road—and pulled into the detached garage at the end of a winding driveway. He held a finger to his lips and opened a door at the back of the garage, leading me up the stairs to an apartment over the top.

  “Ryan? Is that you?” a voice called from down below.

  “Stay here,” he whispered.

  He jogged down the steps, and I heard him talking to a woman. His mother, I assumed. “Yes, I’m fine, I’m fine,” he said, and I smiled—my mother would be the same way. There were some similarities in our family after all.

  I stood in the middle of the room. There was an unmade bed in the corner, just under the window. A couch against the other wall, a small television across the way, and a low table in between. A bathroom behind me, and slanted roofs on either side, so you could stand upright only in the middle third of the room.

  When I turned back around, Ryan was standing at the top of the steps, watching me. He didn’t come any closer.

  “So,” I said, “this is where you live.”

  “Sorry, I know it’s not much. But there are people here, and my dad is kind of a badass for an old guy. I promise you’ll be safe.”

  As if he could see straight through me.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  He was still watching me from across the way. “Um. I’m gonna, um.” He went for his dresser, pulled it open, reached a hand in, and froze. He raised his hands and backed away. “No, you do it. I don’t want to be creepy. This is the T-shirt drawer. And there are sweats below but I don’t know if the
y’ll fit, but you can try, and I’ll just…run to the kitchen….”

  I looked down. I was covered in blood still. As soon as he left, I stripped off my jeans and purple shirt, and threw on the top shirt from his drawer, which fell almost to my knees and, honestly, probably covered more skin than most of what I’d wear all summer. I used his bathroom and scrubbed at my hands and nails with the bar of soap, watching as the pink water swirled down the drain. The tips of my fingers were cold, and no amount of hot water was able to change that.

  Ryan still wasn’t back, so I sat on his couch and tucked my legs up inside the long shirt, trying to calm the ever-present nerves.

  I heard a door from somewhere in the garage, another at the bottom for the steps, and my spine stiffened until I heard his voice from just out of sight. “Okay if I come in?”

  “Yes,” I called. He came through the open doorway with two bottles of water and a bag of chips, which he placed on the table in front of me.

  Then he dragged a canvas bag from his closet. “Here,” he said. He opened the bag, which was full to the top. “I’ll put in a load of laundry, so you have something to wear tomorrow. Before we can see if we can get into your house.”

  I crammed my ruined clothes into the bag. “You do your own laundry?” I asked, and then I blushed.

  He almost smiled. “Part of the arrangement. If I’m going to claim to be an adult, I kind of have to do the adult stuff.”

  I thought of all the firsts that were supposed to be so important. Realized nothing had prepared me for this one: First time a guy does your laundry. It suddenly felt bigger than all the rest. More intimate, more meaningful. Everything within me warmed.

  Ryan headed back down the stairs with the laundry sack, and I stared at my phone on the coffee table. Jan hadn’t called. There was no sign of my mother. And the people who had come—who had tried to take me—were out there still.

  There was a window into the night, and people that could be watching. There were no alarms, or bars, or gates. No first or second or third line of defense. Just me and the empty night, every possibility on the other side of the thinnest window.