by Amy Gentry
I give her shoulder a quick squeeze. “We’re just glad you’re home.” I lower my arm and we stand there, side by side, staring at the shiny metal chute, until half the passengers on the flight have claimed their bags and wheeled them off, their absence making the juddering of the conveyor belt sound even louder. Finally, Jane’s rolling suitcase somersaults down the chute and thunks onto the belt in front of us. It was a graduation present—apple green and already dingy from its maiden voyage to Seattle and back, it almost matches her dyed-green streak. She grabs the suitcase before I can make a move but lets me take her satchel when she stops to peel off her army jacket in the blast of humid air that hits us outside the automatic sliding doors.
“I see we’re in swamp mode already.”
“No place like home,” I reply and am rewarded with a half smile of acknowledgment.
The ride home is rocky, though. I’m shooting blanks on college life despite spending most of my time in a university.
“How are the dorms?”
“Pretty good.”
“You still like your roommate?”
“She’s fine. We stay out of each other’s way.”
“Are you going to room with her next year?”
“Probably not.”
Finally I resort to a subject I’m sure will get results, although it pains me. “So, tell me about this English professor you ate Christmas dinner with.”
“Her name is Caitlyn, and actually she’s a professor of semiotics.”
Caitlyn. “I didn’t know they still taught semiotics in English departments.”
“The course is called Intersectionalities. It’s an English class, but it’s cross-listed with linguistics, gender studies, and anthro. There are supposed to be all these prerequisites, but I went to Caitlyn’s office hours on the first day and convinced her to let me in.”
I can’t help but feel a glow of pride. A true professor’s kid, Jane knows all the angles. Moreover, this is the longest string of consecutive words she’s spoken to me without Tom around for ages. “Tell me more about it, what did you read?”
“I think I’d rather wait and talk about it with Dad too,” she says.
“Of course,” I say.
“I don’t want to say it all twice.”
“Sure, sweetie.”
I turn on NPR, and the measured, comforting sound of rush-hour news commentary fills the car as we inch past a firing range and a gym where an Olympian gymnastics coach is probably even now yelling at ponytailed girls in formation. Jane stares out her window. I assume she is wondering why Tom didn’t come to pick her up instead of me. I’m wondering too.
A few minutes later we both find out. Pulling into the driveway, the sky just starting to glow with dusk, I spot Tom through the kitchen window, making dinner. As I open the door and walk in, I smell Jane’s favorite pasta dish: fettuccine Alfredo tossed with breaded shrimp and grilled asparagus, a ridiculously decadent recipe Tom got off the Food Network and makes only on special occasions. An expiatory salad of fresh greens is in a bowl next to the cutting board, ready to join the bright Fiestaware on the dining-room table.
“Janie!” Tom opens his arms and steps forward, and Jane throws her arms around him, squeezing her eyes shut against his chest. I slip off to the bathroom, then to the bedroom to change out of my teaching outfit into more comfortable jeans, loitering for a few minutes to put away some laundry that’s been sitting, folded, in a basket at the foot of the bed. When I return, they are talking animatedly, Tom’s back to me as he chops heirloom tomatoes for the salad, Jane resting the tips of her fingers on the butcher block as if playing a piano.
“Dad, you would not believe the names people were throwing around in this class,” she says. “Derrida, stuff like that. Everyone was so much smarter than me.”
“Hey, she let you in, and she’s the MacArthur Genius lady.”
“Every time I opened my mouth I sounded like an idiot.”
“At least you opened your mouth,” he says, resting the knife to the side of the cutting board for a moment while he looks her in the eye. “I bet there were some people who were too scared to talk.”
Jane’s grateful smile, just visible over Tom’s shoulder, curdles me like milk. As if he can sense it, Tom turns around and sees me standing there. He throws a handful of chopped tomatoes onto the pile of greens and picks up the salad bowl.
“Everything’s ready!” he says. “Grab the pasta, Jane. Let’s sit down and eat our first family dinner in God knows how long.”
And that, believe it or not, is when the doorbell rings.
2
The first thing I see is her pale hair, all lit up in the rosy, polluted glow of the Houston sunset.
Then her face—ashen skin stretched thin over wide cheekbones flushed red across the top so that the dark circles stand out under her sunken eyes. The face looks both young and old. She wears worn-out jeans with holes at the knees, a T-shirt. She opens her mouth to speak, and I see that her feet are bare.
There’s something familiar about her, but it’s like my entire body has become fused with my surroundings, my brain rewired to resemble blind hands fumbling, the sensory data bumping uselessly around in search of something to latch onto: Hair. Eyes. Young. Bare.
Her eyes widen, and the color drains from her face.
My hands stretch out in front of me, palms out, fingers spread wide, ready to shield me from the nuclear sunset or as if I’m about to fall down, but it’s the girl on the porch who falls, her knees buckling so that she folds up neatly as she collapses onto the mat, blond hair catching lightly in the azalea bushes on her way down. I open my mouth and I think I must be yelling for Tom, although I can’t hear it because my brain is still blinded by the sunset glancing off her face. He comes running up behind me, stops, and then thunders through the doorway. When I look again, the girl has all but vanished into his arms, the loops and tangles of her hair crushed between his fingers as he hugs her to his chest, rocking back and forth. “Julie, Julie, Julie,” he is sobbing, like the chorus of the nightmares that I now know have never stopped but have been unreeling every night for eight years, and perhaps all day long as well, in a continuous stream I have simply chosen to deny.
The sight of Jane standing stock-still in the hallway flips the light switch back on in my head. “Call 911,” I manage to say. “Tell them we need an ambulance.” To Tom, who is making strange, animal sounds of grief I have also heard in my dreams, I say, “Bring her in.”
And just like that, the worst unhappens. Julie is home.
The first twenty-four hours after Julie’s reappearance are oddly similar to the first twenty-four hours after her disappearance, a mirror symmetry that lends extra significance to every detail. There’s the humidity of the long, hot summer’s beginning, the crape myrtles that were already dropping their flowers when she was taken in early fall just now starting to put out blossoms like crumpled scraps of tissue paper. There are the sirens blaring their way through the neighborhood up to our house, just like last time, but bringing EMS rather than the police and at sunset rather than sunrise, so the neighbors who open their front doors to see what’s happening are wearing work clothes rather than bathrobes, holding oven mitts rather than newspapers. Everything is backward, like a photo negative of tragedy.
Only one of us can ride in the ambulance with Julie, and Tom immediately steps forward, so Jane and I climb into the SUV and follow behind. When we pull up to the ED, they are unloading her gurney, now connected to a rolling IV, and she is wheeled inside and installed in a curtained-off room with that excruciating combination of slowness and urgency native to emergency departments.
The next thirty minutes pass like hours under the fluorescent lights. Julie wakes, mumbles, sleeps again. Tom sits by the bedside, holding Julie’s hand and murmuring something unintelligible; I pace; Jane leans; nurses come in at odd intervals, never telling us anything but instead asking for details about insurance or Julie’s medical history, questions that
seem so useless and redundant that I become convinced some of these people just want to see the famous Whitaker girl in the flesh. One nurse comes in to draw blood, and Julie starts awake at the cold wet cotton swab on her inner forearm, keeps her eyes open just long enough to nod vaguely at the nurse’s bright questions, then fades as soon as the needle is in. The curtain that separates us from the hall flutters as people rush by and does nothing to block out the cacophony of squeaking wheels, indecipherable PA announcements, and hallway conferences punctuated with loud sighs and occasional laughter.
When the doctor finally comes, she sends everyone out of the room over Tom’s and my objections.
“I just need her for two seconds,” she says. “You—Mom, Dad—don’t go anywhere.”
Needless to say, we don’t, but Jane takes the opportunity to find a restroom. The doctor emerges from the curtained room after a hushed conversation I strain unsuccessfully to hear, and I glimpse Julie in the background, awake but flushed and disoriented, before she pulls the curtain shut behind her. Julie is dehydrated, the doctor tells us, suffering from exhaustion and exposure, and hasn’t eaten for a few days, but there don’t seem to be any injuries or illnesses, no substances in her bloodstream. “After the fluids take effect, most likely she’ll be right as rain,” she finishes, her use of the expression right as rain proving she cannot possibly have read the chart, or she has never watched the news, or she is so calloused by her job that she lacks the power to think past a stock phrase indelibly associated in her mind with the word fluids. “Just get her to the clinic for a follow-up after a few weeks. They’ll schedule her when she’s discharged.”
As we file back into Julie’s room, there’s a knock on the wall, and a police detective steps in after us. Fortyish, with dark hair, looking not unlike a police detective from a TV show but far less attractive, he leaves the curtain open a foot and stares at Julie from the improvised doorway.
“Julie Whitaker,” he says. “Unbelievable.”
Julie doesn’t take any notice of him, but on seeing Tom and me again, she collapses back onto the pillow, crying tearlessly. Tom rushes to enfold her in his arms. Noting my expression, the doctor says they’ll move Julie to a room with a door as soon as one opens up, and then she hustles out. The cop introduces himself as Detective Overbey and starts asking me questions about the circumstances of Julie’s arrival, which I answer as best I can considering that, for all I know, she could have come straight out of the glowing orange sunset or a god’s forehead or the side of a man opened up while he was sleeping. The question of how she was delivered to us seems that unimportant.
In the background, I hear Tom repeating the words “You’re safe now. It’s okay. The doctor says you’re going to be okay.” He is talking to himself as much as to her, and though the words aren’t meant for me, they’re so comforting that I let my attention drift toward them and away from Detective Overbey’s questions.
He notices. “I’d like to talk to Julie alone for just a few minutes.”
“No,” Julie says, clutching Tom’s arm but looking at me. “Don’t go.”
“This won’t take long.”
Tom stands directly in front of Julie’s bed. He’s a tall, broad man, imposing even with a gut. “Absolutely not. We left her alone once tonight, for the doctor. We’re not leaving her again.”
Tom and the detective begin to argue back and forth, and the tiny curtained room shrinks. The same words keep coming up, and at first I think Detective Overbey is questioning our mental health or Julie’s; he is talking about the sane, the safe. Finally, he addresses Julie directly, speaking right through Tom. “I know you’re not feeling well, ma’am, and I hate to bother you right now,” he says. “But I need to ask: Were you sexually assaulted?”
Julie just looks at the detective and nods. Tom sets his jaw, and I find a moment to be glad Jane is still not back from the restroom.
Detective Overbey explains about the forensic exam, and I realize SANE and SAFE are acronyms. “The sexual assault nurse examiner has already been dispatched,” he says. “She should be here soon to set up the exam room. The minute you’re off the IV, she can get started.”
Julie shakes her head no, and Tom steps forward, looking ready for a fistfight.
Detective Overbey, equally imposing, stands his ground. “If there’s any evidence of sexual assault, it’s best to collect it—”
“Listen,” Tom says, pointing his finger at the detective for emphasis. “We’ve done everything the police told us to since day one and never asked a single question we weren’t supposed to. Eight years later, after we’ve—” He chokes. “Years since we’ve heard any news, and our missing daughter shows up on our doorstep, no thanks to you. And now you want to keep her up all night asking her questions, treating her like a crime scene?” He snorts. “We’ll come in tomorrow.”
Detective Overbey starts to answer but a faint noise from Julie’s bed stops him.
“The last time was—a long time ago,” she says quietly. “At least six months.”
Detective Overbey sighs as if the news that our daughter hasn’t been raped in six months is disappointing but acceptable. “Okay, then. We still recommend you come back for the exam, but from a forensic perspective there’s no rush. Rest up, and we’ll get a full statement from you folks at the station tomorrow.”
Julie nods weakly. Tom slumps forward, hands on knees.
Jane comes in, a juice box in her hand. She must have gotten it from the nurses’ station. When she sees Julie awake, she smiles shyly and says, “Welcome back.”
Six hours later, in the middle of the night, Julie is discharged, fully hydrated and wearing hospital scrubs to replace the scruffy T-shirt and jeans the police took for evidence. She leans on Tom’s arm while I sweep everything into my purse: prophylactic antibiotics for chlamydia and gonorrhea, a prescription for Valium in case she has trouble sleeping, and a folder stuffed to bursting with pamphlets on sexual assault and Xeroxed phone lists for HPD Victim Services and various women’s shelters. It also holds Detective Overbey’s card, tucked into four slits in the front of the folder so it won’t get lost. I remove it and slip it into the back pocket of my jeans.
Tom drives us home, Julie sleeping in the back seat of the SUV on the disposable pillow they let her keep. Jane, who slept quite a bit in the hospital, now stares at Julie silently. Nobody talks—in part because we don’t want to wake Julie, but also because we ourselves do not want to wake up. Or maybe that’s just me.
It’s 3:00 a.m. when we open the back door and walk into the kitchen through the laundry room. It looks like some other family’s house preserved on a perfectly normal day, a museum of ordinariness: over the washing machine, a blouse drips dry; on the cutting board, a heap of glistening red chopped tomatoes lies next to a knife in a puddle of red juice. Through the doorway to the dining room, Jane’s elaborate homecoming meal sits forgotten on the dining-room table, the salad wilted, the breading on the fried shrimp gone soggy, the sauce jelled on the cold, gummy pasta. As the others pass through the kitchen into the living room, I head into the dining room and start picking up the dishes full of pasta. It takes only a moment for me to stack the evidence that we were surviving in the kitchen sink.
When I join them in the living room, Jane and Tom are standing awkwardly by the sofa with Julie, like people putting up a distant relative for the night. Tom is shaking his head, red-faced, and when I realize what they are discussing, my efforts in the dining room seem futile.
Tom moved his office into Julie’s room seven years ago. He did not discuss it with me first; nor did he let me know he was quitting his accounting job, the job we moved to the Energy Corridor for in the first place, to go into private practice as a tax consultant. One day I passed her room and saw it had been transformed from bedroom to carefully tended shrine, a desk and file cabinet where her bed used to be, posters replaced with framed pictures of Julie. I understood without being told that this new office was to be his command center
for the search, that he was turning his longing for her into a full-time job. Only now, with Julie standing in front of us, does it look like an exorcism.
“I don’t mind the sofa,” Julie is saying.
“She can have my room,” Jane says, still hanging back, like she’s afraid to stand too close. Clutching her elbow awkwardly, she looks more like her ten-year-old self than I would have thought possible, though I notice with a pang that she’s taller than Julie by quite a few inches. Jane stares at Julie, not hungrily, like Tom, who looks as if he’ll never let her out of his sight again, but with a wary expression. “I don’t mind.”
“No, please,” Julie says. “I don’t want to take anyone’s room.”
I have a sudden longing to bed her down between Tom and me, like we did when she was a seven-year-old with a fever and couldn’t stop shivering. This, however, is not practical, and meanwhile, the living room yawns open like a mouth around us, the windows dark behind the curtains.
“Tom, the air mattress?” I offer. “She could be in her room until we can move your desk out.”
“A door that closes would be nice,” she says, and it’s decided. She has no toiletries or luggage, and no one wants to ask why, so Jane gives her a T-shirt and shorts to sleep in and I scrounge up a spare toothbrush still in its package. After the bustle is over, Julie disappears behind the door of Tom’s office like the sun behind a cloud. I wonder if she is comforted or disturbed by all the pictures of her in there.
By the time we have seen Jane to bed as well, with reassurances that she can decide if she wants to come to the station when she wakes up, it’s almost dawn. The bedroom door closes and my legs want to buckle under me, but I also feel more awake than I have for years. My mind is racing, or rather somersaulting, tumbling over itself as I go through my bathroom routine.
Tom says, “Anna?” in a way that suggests it is the second or third time. I come out of the bathroom and see him lying on his side of the bed, looking up expectantly.