Don't Try To Find Me: A Novel

by Holly Brown

  So this was it. My parents were going to find my body. Or they wouldn’t. But time would pass—days, months, years—and they’d grow old thinking that I’d hated them. It’s not true. Despite what Dr. Michael said, I don’t hate either of them. I even love them. All Dr. Michael’s tricks, and I never even completely gave up my love for my dad. And my mom—it’s like a lottery ticket: Take a dime and scratch off the gray stuff and jackpot! The love is right there.

  If I managed to get out of this, I didn’t think I could actually go home. How could I face them or anyone else? But I’d send them a message, at least, let them know I was okay. Well, alive, anyway. I wasn’t sure I’d ever be okay again.

  The car was slowing down, like we were getting off the freeway. We hadn’t gone that far; we were probably still in civilization. It was my chance to jump out.

  I pictured myself reaching for the door handle, hitting the ground running. But I couldn’t make my arm move. I was too frightened to even open my eyes.

  Then Brandon pulled to a stop. I could hear a siren, moving closer, but I didn’t know anything beyond that. If I bolted, he’d grab me, no problem. Best to stay where I was, to see where he put me and then reassess.

  He touched my hair again. “Deep down,” he said in this low voice, “I think you’re a good girl. You deserve better than this.”

  My heartbeat accelerated. Better than what? Than what he was about to do to me?

  “I do love you. I hope you can forgive me.”

  Oh, shit. He was actually going to kill me. This was it. My last few seconds on the planet, and I wasn’t sure I could even form words. If I did speak, would he change his mind, or would I just give him another reason? Should I beg? Tell him he deserves better than this, too? That I know, deep down, he’s a good boy?

  I heard his door open, and I assumed he was coming around to my side. I needed to open my eyes and push the door, hard, right into him. Send him flying. All I needed to do was time it right. In order to do that, I had to see.

  OPEN YOUR EYES, MARLEY! OPEN YOUR STUPID EYES!

  It was too late. He was lifting me again, fireman-style. That’s when I saw the ER sign. I nearly cried. I’d gambled on his humanity and won. I went “unconscious” again and let him leave me on the curb.

  I waited an extra couple minutes after I heard his car pull away, just in case he was tricking me. Then I opened my eyes, for good. All the money I had left was in my pocket, and nothing else. I really was as light as a feather. I was on my own.

  “There’s a girl lying out here!” someone shouted. He was a black man, in his late thirties, in scrubs. He seemed kind. “Are you okay? They’ll bring a stretcher.” He was looking at me like he’d seen me somewhere and couldn’t quite place me.

  I got to my feet.

  “It’s best not to move, if you’re hurt.”

  “I’m not hurt,” I said. That was too simple a word for what I was. I stared after Brandon’s car. He’d become my captor, but it hadn’t started out that way.

  He wanted me to be his family. He wanted a life with me. We were going to disappear together and start over. For some reason, when he said in the car that he was planning to tell me the truth someday, I believed him. Because he was talking to himself, because he was talking to someone who he thought couldn’t hear him.

  Unless he knew I was faking the whole time and dropped me off anyway? Or figured it out en route and STILL let me go?

  I wanted to think that, to see good in him. I didn’t want to go from the normalest girl in the world to the wrongest. He was my first love, not some diabolical psycho.

  Or he was both.

  THE LIBRARY, FIVE BLOCKS away from the ER, was a good place to regroup: cool and quiet, and I’ve always liked the smell of books. I was still stunned that my plan had worked but also scared that maybe it hadn’t. At any moment, Brandon could figure it out (unless he already had) and show up. But finally, there were people around to hear me scream.

  There were still the posters to consider. Anyone could recognize me. They could call the police and I’d be sent back to my parents. I was definitely not ready for that.

  But for now, the library was a good place to sit and clear my head. A good place to get on a computer and check out Disappeared.com and plot the next chapter.

  Instead, I was caught on FindMarley.com. It was only supposed to be for a minute, long enough to see what happened after the press conference. I kind of wanted to know what people were saying about me and about my family. If they were saying I was crazy, and my mom was guilty. If anything bad had happened to her.

  I saw that she’d posted this video, and it was generating a lot of buzz. It was her talking directly to the camera—directly to me. It was apparently so involving that no one commented about my having seen a psychiatrist. When you think about it, that was pretty low on the list of revelations from the press conference.

  I cast a glance around for Brandon. Nowhere in sight.

  So I hooked up my earbuds and started the video. There was Mom, with messy hair and no makeup, looking like she’d never seen a webcam in her life. Looking nervous and twitchy. Like an addict, actually.

  But she got better at it. She was telling me about her marriage and her anxiety and her mistakes—with specifics, about the pills and Dr. Michael. She was talking in a way I never thought she would. She admitted that she lied to me about being unhappy and about wanting to leave my dad. And the stuff about my dad, it sounded like he’s done some changing, too.

  As I watched, I started to feel calmer, more grounded, like the way Dr. Michael used to help me feel. A few minutes went by before I even remembered to look around for Brandon.

  Mom said she was proud of me for what I did in therapy, all my hard work; I’d done what she hadn’t been able to do herself. She’d relied on pills instead. But she didn’t say anything about Dr. Michael and my needing help a second time. It made me wonder if she really doesn’t know. He might have kept it to himself. What did he call that? Protecting confidentiality.

  Then she talked about herself as a teenager and about her “Teen Angst” playlist. At that point, I’d been in the library for a while, and I knew I should be taking off. I probably didn’t even have time to go on Disappeared.com.

  I needed to get to the bus station. I’d take the first bus out of town and then switch to another. I needed to be untraceable. I wasn’t safe sitting in the library, even with Brandon’s hoodie covering my hair. The flyers were all over Durham. There was one on the bulletin board out front, and that guy outside the ER thought I looked familiar. Even if Brandon didn’t catch me, someone else could.

  But I was transfixed by this woman purporting to be my mother, the one with matted hair and no makeup, no pretense, talking about her addiction to pills and men. She knew a whole lot of people could see this video and judge her. She knew that I might never see it. But she took the chance, for me.

  I realized that the video was propaganda. I was supposed to see her being all honest, finally, and want to go home. I was supposed to get hopeful and think that she and my dad have been changed by this whole experience. I’m supposed to believe that they’re different now.

  The thought of facing my parents and having to tell them what happened with Brandon, of facing a bazillion other people who now know all this intimate stuff about my whole family—it’s pretty overwhelming. It was enough to make me want to go to the bus station and buy the first ticket to anywhere. I hadn’t come up with my new name yet, but it would be a long bus ride to wherever.

  I could do it. I could walk out of the library and start over. No Brandon, no parents. I wanted to do it.

  But I also wanted to keep watching the video. It was like my mother was hypnotizing me. I was sitting there, having this internal battle, and then “To Be in Your Eyes” came on. My mother talked over it for a little bit, some ramble about how her mother hated that the band was named the Church (“Why not the Synagogue?”). Then she closed her eyes and she sang along, sang som
e of my favorite lines: “So I’m waiting, contemplating / Relocating a faded image in my thoughts / But the memories are like clouds / Try so hard / But they never can be caught.”

  When she opened her eyes, there were tears in them. She said, “That’s what I’m so afraid of, Marley, that you’ll never come back, and the memories will be more and more like clouds, and you’ll really disappear. You’ll be lost to me forever.”

  I was not going to cry. She’s my mother. She’s supposed to miss me. It’s supposed to kill her that I’m gone; that’s her punishment for being the one Dr. Michael chose.

  But I’ve had this feeling like maybe Dr. Michael wasn’t all I made him out to be. Sure, he helped me. But that doesn’t mean he’s perfect. He’s the one who decided, while I was sitting in his office, to talk about insurance payments. My mom had nothing to do with that.

  She started talking about my dad again (she was looping around a lot, it’s like how I have trouble writing in a straight line). She said that she really wants me to come home and “see him in a different light.” I was thinking, Hey, lady, I’m just starting to see YOU in a different light, don’t get ahead of yourself.

  Then she said, “Your father has his faults, but he’s no narcissist.” If I was a dog, my ears would have pricked up. “What I mean by that is, a person who needs other people to see him in a positive way because underneath he’s fragile. Someone who doesn’t really care about other people’s feelings, who needs to be admired in order to feel superior.”

  I’m practically mouthing it along with her. I remember it so well, when Dr. Michael told me, “Your father can’t help it, the way he is. It’s like a disease. It’s called narcissism.” And I asked, “What’s narcissism?” He told me that same definition. He also said that narcissists can’t change. A few sessions later, I said, “What’s the point in trying to fix things with my dad if he can’t ever change?” and Dr. Michael answered, “Exactly.”

  If Mom’s right, and Dad isn’t really a narcissist, or if he WAS a narcissist who actually CHANGED . . .

  I’m getting this weird feeling like Dr. Michael might have manipulated both of us, my mom and me. He turned us against my dad. If that’s true, then I don’t need to be so angry at my mother anymore. Or at my father. It would mean Mom and I are in this together, and Dad is actually a victim himself.

  I’m not sure about any of this, by the way. But that’s when I decided to watch the rest of the video, no matter how long it was.

  Sure, some part of me knew that I was sealing my fate. There were too many flyers, and Brandon is no idiot, and if I didn’t go soon I’d never make it, there would never be a new life. I wasn’t even surprised when an officer approached. “Are you—?” he asked.

  “I’m Marley.” I stood up. “And I’m not ready to go home.”

  Hopefully, my mom still knows opposite-speak when she hears it.

  Homecoming

  THE LAST TWENTY-FOUR HOURS are nothing I could have foreseen. Marley is in the car with us, driving back from the airport, and I keep turning around to look at her, fearing it’s a dream. It’s all so unreal, even though it’s also the most normal thing in the world: Paul driving, me in the passenger seat, Marley in the back. We’ve been traveling this way her whole life, but she’s never seemed like a stranger before. I might seem foreign to her, too, since all the revelations through the media and in my video.

  That’s the amazing thing. Well, one of them. She watched my video. My yammering and DJ-ing kept her in the library long enough for someone to recognize her and call the police. I held her interest. That is a ceaseless source of amazement for me.

  I’m not sure she wants to be here. She told the officer that she wasn’t ready to come home. I’m hoping that’s opposite-speak, but I haven’t had the courage to ask.

  The police in Durham called Strickland, who came out to the house to tell us in person. He even apologized to me, and shockingly, it didn’t seem like an order from above. He seemed genuinely contrite. He said that since I had a legal prescription for my medications, and since I “have an anxiety disorder,” there wouldn’t be any charges. As for what’ll happen to Michael, that’s out of his jurisdiction.

  What he could say was that Marley was at the police station in Durham, waiting for us. We caught the first plane out. I was overjoyed at the thought of seeing her, and so terrified that she would disappear again or tell us that she hated us that I had to take an Ativan. But only one. It’s baby steps.

  In the police station, she seemed subdued. There was hugging, but all the force came from me. She was limp in my arms, visibly shaken. Her boyfriend had been caught, and he was far from a boy. He was a twenty-eight-year-old man named Brandon Guillory, and he’d been convicted of several assaults and accused of a prior rape—forcible, rather than statutory—but the charges got dropped. How much of this had she already known when she ran away from us, to him? She wasn’t talking.

  By the time Paul and I arrived, Brandon was already in police custody. He hadn’t been hard to find: He’d driven a few hours to some beach town, then paid for a motel with a credit card and was there when the police showed up. “Almost like he was waiting for us,” the officer said, shaking his head. “Isn’t there a TV show, World’s Dumbest Criminals?” Apparently, Brandon said that he and Marley were in love and that she’d moved in with him voluntarily. It had all been consensual, he claimed. It was still illegal, given her age, and charges were pending.

  Marley hadn’t contradicted his story, had no injuries or bruises, refused medical attention, and denied the need for a rape kit, but it felt to the police (and to us) like there was something more. We were given the detective’s card and told that we could contact him anytime with “further information.”

  His eyes lingered on Marley when he said it, but she was staring at the floor. I noticed that there was a patch of skin near her mouth that seemed red and irritated, and when I reached out to touch it, she jerked her head back. What did Brandon do to her, really? It was hard to imagine that she’d just gotten up and walked away, like she said. If that was true, why would he have taken off for a motel?

  Marley hasn’t seemed like herself, but then, I don’t really know who that is. I want to ask her why she left and if I have to worry that she’ll leave again. I won’t sleep tonight. I’ll be listening to every creak (and there are many, in our house), wondering if that’s her on the stairs, headed for who knows where. I think they’ve tightened up at the local bus station in response to all the hoopla, but if she’s really determined, that won’t be enough to stop her. If you want something bad enough, there’s always a way. We need to give her a reason to stay.

  But we have to give her space, too. Paul feels similarly. We talked about it on the plane to North Carolina. Really talked, as in, a two-way exchange of ideas. He was trying hard not to bulldoze his every thought. He’d catch himself, and then we’d smile at each other awkwardly. We were on a first date to get our fourteen-year-old runaway daughter. Life has become incredibly strange. And wondrous. And terrifying.

  Since we picked Marley up at the police station, we’ve been trying to sit back and follow her lead. That meant silence on the plane ride back (most of the time, she was asleep with her head against the window) and silence on the car ride from the airport. It meant holding back the flood of questions that she clearly wasn’t prepared to answer.

  I can tell that something’s very wrong. She made little noises and whimpers while she was asleep, and when she woke up, it was almost like a mini-seizure: body convulsed, pupils darting. She didn’t relax again for the rest of the plane ride. It was like she expected someone to turn up (Brandon?) and she needed to be on high alert. “We’re right here,” I said, by way of comfort. “And he’s in jail.” She nodded, but her spine stayed ramrod straight until we landed.

  There were a ton of news vans camped out in front of our house and more correspondents than I’d ever seen, pushing microphones in all of our faces. To his credit, Paul didn’t say an
ything, not even a “No comment.” He was only interested in shielding Marley and getting her inside the house as quickly as possible. Our little family, that’s all that matters. The rest can wait.

  But now that we’re inside the house, there’s more silence. “We don’t have a lot to eat,” I tell Marley. “Just a lot of frozen Trader Joe’s stuff. You like their enchiladas, right?” I feel like I don’t even know something as basic as what she likes to eat. She might have become a vegetarian. There’s missing information, and then there are the hidden trapdoors. Whatever I did before, I don’t want to do it again, but how can I avoid it unless she tells me? All I can do is try to be inoffensive, but maybe that’s what got me into this.

  I’m so scared of her. I’m scared of the kind of girl that fell in love with Brandon (whose daughter is that?), and I’m scared of what she might have done with him willingly and unwillingly. My gut tells me she didn’t just walk away; she had to run away from him, too, in the end. I don’t know how all that’s changed her.

  There’s nothing in her countenance that suggests she understands what she’s put us through or that she’s sorry. But she doesn’t seem defiant, either. It’s like she’s wilted.

  I should only feel grateful that she’s alive and here with us, and I do feel those things. But yesterday, I was a suspect. I was interrogated. I’ve been stripped bare and flogged on TV and the Internet, all to arrive at this moment. I don’t want to go to the grocery store, or back to work, because of how everyone will look at me. Sure, they know now that I didn’t kill my daughter, but they think I’m a pill-popping adulteress. And a bad mother. Because if you’re a good mother, your little girl doesn’t run away. Even I feel that way about me.

  Marley is eating a banana in enormous bites. Leaning against the kitchen island, the copper pots dancing above her head like wind chimes, she sure looks like my daughter. She’s in a hoodie I don’t recognize (Brandon’s?) but she’s got one of her button-downs underneath and her Ugg boots. Her hair’s the same. She might be a little thinner.