The Stolen (2008)
Page 10
time.
Six months ago I’d made a choice. I decided I had to
give her up. I told myself at the time it was the right thing
to do. A man had to put his love before himself. And since
Amanda had nearly been killed twice because of me, in
my mind there was no other option.
So I said goodbye to Amanda. I hadn’t been truly happy
in months. It didn’t take a great reporter to figure out the
two were directly correlated. But I still couldn’t be with her.
There had been times over the past few months where
I had wanted to call, where I’d gone so far as to pick up
the phone and dial everything but the last number on her
cell phone, nearly crying when I hung up before pushing
the final key. Nights where the booze loosened up my inhibitions, and only that last vestige of clarity prevented me
from calling. Like that terrible night six months ago, today
there was only one choice to make.
Amanda worked for the New York Legal Aid Society.
She would have access to Michelle Oliveira’s records. She
could help the investigation. She could provide answers.
She could also throw it back in my face.
And I would deserve it.
Maybe this was the opening I needed, I wanted. A way
to tell myself it wasn’t about her, even though deep down
I couldn’t even fool myself. Maybe it was fate. Or maybe
fate was a cruel son of a bitch.
Before I had a chance to think again, I picked up the
phone and dialed.
Amanda picked up on the first ring.
“Hey,” I said. “It’s me.”
10
The girl woke up with a slight headache. Her first thought
was that she’d fallen, maybe hit her head on the sidewalk
or bumped into the same tree she’d rammed her bike into
the other day. But she didn’t remember putting on a
helmet, didn’t remember actually falling. And she only
rode her bike when her mommy was watching. And right
away she felt the terror that she was alone.
She stood up warily. Her breathing was harsh, and she
felt hot tears rush to her eyes. She reached out for her bed,
the couch, some familiar sign. But she found nothing. She
grew desperate and called out. There was no answer.
The room was pitch-black. Had her mommy just put her
to bed, accidentally left the Bratz night-light unplugged?
No, there was a smell in the room, something different,
something rotted. She didn’t belong there. Yet when she
cried, nobody came.
The girl smelled something that reminded her of her
dad’s breath after he came home on Sunday evenings.
Mommy said he was watching the football games at the
bar with his friends. His breath had that sweet smell, and
her mom never let her get too close to him when he was
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like that. There was a smell in the air that reminded her of
that. Reminded her to be afraid of getting too close.
After a few minutes her eyes adjusted. The room was
small, about the size of her baby brother’s bedroom. There
was a small bench by the wall, and the floor was made of
wood. A slit of light shone from a crack under the door,
but other than that she couldn’t see a thing.
Her throat began to choke up. She didn’t know this
place. She wanted to feel her mommy’s arms. Wanted to
smell her daddy’s sweet breath.
Suddenly she remembered walking home from the
park, remembered feeling a hand clamp over her mouth.
She couldn’t remember anything past that.
The girl let out a cry of help, then ran toward the door.
She gripped the knob and twisted as hard as she could, but
it didn’t budge. She pushed and pulled and cried, but the
door stayed shut.
Finally she collapsed onto the floor and began to cry.
She wiped the snot away from her nose. She needed a
tissue. She could wipe it on her clothes, but she loved the
sundress she was wearing. Bright pink with pretty sunflowers. Her mom had picked it out for her at the mall, the
same day she’d bought that nice barrette in the shape of a
butterfly that mommy wore to the park.
She began to cry again. She screamed for her mother.
For her father. And nobody came.
Then she lay back down, curled into a ball, and hoped
maybe somebody could hear her through the floor.
And that’s when she heard footsteps.
She sat back up. Looked at the door. Saw a shadow
briefly block out that sliver of light. She wiped her eyes
and nose. She held her breath as the doorknob turned.
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Then nearly screamed when it opened. She would have
screamed. If she wasn’t too scared.
There was a man in the doorway. He was bald, with
thinning hair and glasses that were too small for his head.
He was wearing light jeans with a hole by one knee. On
his hands were leather gloves. When she saw the gloves,
she finally managed to scream.
The man flicked a switch on the outside of the door, and
a lightbulb came on, bathing the room in harsh white. She
closed her eyes, blinked through the glare, then opened
them. The man was now barely a foot in front of her. He
was staring at her. Not in a scary way, not like bad men on
television did. In the way her daddy did when he tucked
her in at night. He’d taken the gloves off. He held them
out to her, then made a show of putting them in his pocket.
“Don’t be scared,” he said. “I would never hurt you.”
The man reached out, took her chin in his hands. They
were callused, rough. She was too scared to move, felt
her head pounding, mucus running down her nose and
onto his hand.
When he noticed the snot on his fingers, the man
reached into his pocket. She closed her eyes. When she
opened them, he’d taken out a handkerchief and was
wiping her nose, her face.
“That’s better,” he said. He had a glass of water with
him. He handed it to her. “Go on. Drink some.”
She took it, her hand trembling. She didn’t know what
was in it, whether he’d poisoned it, whether he’d spit in it,
but she was so thirsty she downed almost all of it in one
gulp. When she was finished, he took the clean side of the
handkerchief and wiped her mouth.
Then he handed her two small pills. She looked at him,
looked at the pills.
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“You must have a bad headache,” he said. “This will
make you feel better.”
Then he smiled at her.
She didn’t know how he knew about her headache, but
if the pills would help…
“How do you feel?” he asked.
“Hurts,” she moaned.
“It won’t for long.”
She looked at him. He was wearing a wedding ring. It
was polished and it gleamed something pretty.
He stood up. Motioned for her to do the same. The girl
stood up reluctantly, then smelled the aroma of pancakes
coming from somewhere. Her favorite.
“Strawberry and chocolate chip. Fresh off the griddle,”
he said, smiling. “Let’s get you fed, you can meet your
new mommy and new brother, and then I’ll show you to
your room.”
She took the man’s hand, his grip gentle, and followed
him out of the darkness.
11
It would have been easy to say no. For years she’d grown
accustomed to disappointments, to a life that never quite
went the way she planned.
The wound still hurt terribly. Doing this could rub salt
in deep. And who knows? Another few weeks, few
months, and the pain might have begun to die down. And
given a few years, she might have never thought about him
again. Things would have gone back to the way they were
before the day they met.
None of that mattered, though, because when Henry
called, for the first time in months his voice coming over
the phone, she agreed to meet him almost immediately.
Just a few years ago, Amanda had nothing, no friends,
nobody to trust but herself. Her life had been a series of halfhearted relationships, embarked upon mainly because that’s
what she assumed was normal. That’s what she was used
to. Men who were more interested in their own success than
how it could be used to make others happy. She’d grown
weary of that scene, and at some point, like many other girls
her age, Amanda Davies had simply given up.
The irony was when she’d met Henry, the very first
thing he did was lie right to her face. Looking back, she
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knew he’d done it to save his own life without implicating her. And while back then she contemplated literally
ditching him on the side of the road, she could look back
at his brazen behavior fondly.
He’d tricked her into giving him a ride out of town
when he was mistakenly wanted for murder. In the end
Henry was able to clear his name, yet there was a moment,
that moment when he’d come clean, admitting his lie,
when she could have left him on the side of the road to die.
But in that moment Amanda was able to look into Henry
Parker’s eyes and tell one thing. This was more real than
anyone she’d ever known.
Henry’s eyes gave away everything. The year they knew
each other, he could never hide anything. She could read
his language—words and body—like nobody else. And he
offered himself in a way that was both selfless and confident, and utterly consuming.
That’s why when he ended their relationship, it wasn’t
simply another thing to forget. Being with him was the first
time Amanda felt a future. She couldn’t be the only one
who thought that way, though, so when he decided to end
it, for her own sake in his words, she didn’t fight. She
didn’t want to be another one of those sad girls, trying to
convince a guy to stay.
If she was meant to be happy, she would be. If not,
that was life.
So when Henry called her out of the blue, after radio
silence for nearly six months, the easy thing to do would
have been to hang up. To tell him to go screw himself.
Instead she found herself sitting on a bench in Madison
Square Park, waiting for him to arrive, looking at every
boy that walked by, waiting to see if the months had been
as cruel to him as they had to her.
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The park was neutral ground. That was one condition
she made him agree to. They had to meet far enough away
from both their offices that they could sit, and talk, and see
what was what, without any distractions.
Amanda folded her arms across her chest. The sun was
bright over the trees. She sat and watched couples lounging
on the green grass. The line snaking outside the Shake Shack,
home of the best burgers in NYC. Her purse was splayed
open slightly, and Amanda noticed the glint of her keychain.
Attached to the silver loop that held her keys was a small red
heart made of leather. Henry had brought it home one day.
He’d attached it to the chain when she was in the shower.
When she asked what it was for, he said it was because she
had the keys to his heart. At first she laughed. It was a pretty
cheesy gesture, something out of a bad romantic comedy, but
that night they made love, and as Henry lay there, naked,
staring at her, she knew that he’d meant it.
It would have been easy to throw the heart away.
Looking at it now, she was glad she’d kept it.
She buttoned the purse and looked up to see Henry
walking down the gated path. He stopped briefly beside
the dog run to make faces at a small shih tzu that was trying
to leap at him with its tiny legs. Henry was making bugeyed faces at the dog, and Amanda couldn’t help but smile.
He looked up, looking for her, saw her, and Amanda saw
his cheeks flush red. He quickened his pace and walked
over to her bench, sat down next to her. A foot separated
them. It felt like a mile and a millimeter at the same time.
“Hey,” she said, offering a purposefully bland greeting.
“Hey, Amanda.” He half leaned in, unsure of whether
to offer a hug, a kiss or nothing. She felt a brief flash of
electricity when he did it, felt slightly disappointed when
he pulled back, but glad at the same time. “What’s up?”
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He looked good. Better that she’d hoped in some ways.
Perhaps if he’d showed up thirty pounds heavier, with an
unflattering beard and gut paunch, it’d be easier to move
on. Yes, his eyes were bleary and red, probably from latenight deadlines, but it was still Henry. She’d gotten used
to those eyes, his near-constant state of exhaustion. And
despite that, every night she missed falling asleep next to
him, Amanda remembered how proud it used to make her
to see his name headline a terrific story. She looked at his
shock of brown hair, an inch or so too long, and couldn’t
help but smile.
“You need a haircut,” she said.
“Really?” He ran his hand through his hair. Amanda remembered doing that for him. “You think?”
“Yeah, you could use a trip to Supercuts.”
“So,” he said tentatively, “what’s up?”
“I don’t know. Work. Life. What’s usually up,” she
replied. He nodded. She wanted to say you called me, but
that was combative. “You know you called me.” Screw it,
she had to say it. Henry nodded, chewed on his thumbnail
for a moment.
“Just want to start by saying I’m sorry about what
happened. You know, between us. I didn’t…”
“Stop,” she said, her face growing warm, slight anger
bubbling up. “You said your apologies a long time ago. If
I wanted to hear them again, I’ve got a good memory and
a lot of sad songs on my iPod.”
“That’s not why I called you,” Henry said. “I just… You
know, I don’t really know how to start it.”<
br />
“Why do you need to in the first place?” she asked. Her
heart was beating fast, frustration building. She’d begun
to wish she’d stayed at the office, hung up the phone, let
everything heal the way maybe it was meant to. Seeing
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him was maddening and invigorating at the same time.
And she wasn’t ready to open back up.
“I need your help,” Henry said. “It’s not for me. It’s
for a kid.”
“A kid?” she asked, surprised.
“Daniel Linwood, have you heard about him?”
“Of course. My office is handling the paperwork. You
know, I never realized bringing someone back from the
dead was as easy as filling out a bunch of paperwork. Scary
to think there’s enough precedent that we have the forms
on file. I’m actually thinking I might do the same thing
with my aunt Rose, freak the hell out of Lawrence and
Harriet. That’d make a pretty neat headline. ‘Girl brings
dead, smelly aunt back to life, scares the hell out of her
adoptive parents.’”
“It’s been a while since I wrote obituaries,” Henry said.
“But I bet it’s like riding a bike.”
“Think of it as an anti-obituary.”
“Now, those I don’t have a lot of experience with.”
“So Daniel Linwood. The boy who came back after five
years. I saw your story in the paper. What do you need to
know about him?”
“Well, long story short, there’s a lot about his disappearance and reappearance that doesn’t sit well with me. For
one thing, there haven’t been any suspects arrested in his
kidnapping or disappearance, and from my talks with the
detectives in Hobbs County they’re looking as hard for him
as O.J. is for the real killer.”
“I’m waiting to hear what this has to do with me.”
“I’m getting to that. So I interviewed Danny for that
story…”
“Danny?”
“Yeah, that’s what he likes to be called now. Anyway,
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during the interview, he said something kind of strange.
He used the word brothers. As in more than one. And he
used it several times, even when I corrected him, like his
brain was hardwired to do it. But Danny’s only got one
brother. It might have been a slip of the tongue, but there’s
also a chance he retained something from his disappearance, something about his kidnappers or where he was.
Maybe he remembers somebody else, somebody his own