The Prodigal Girl

by Evan Ronan

  “For a few days, things seemed to be headed in the right direction. When Shannon began staying late after school, I didn’t think anything of it because she was working on the newspaper. She’d call me to pick her up or she’d catch a ride, usually with Olivia. I kept waiting to see her name in print, I mean, online, but there were never any articles. She explained that she was starting out at the bottom, checking copy and learning the layout, and that the older kids who were juniors and seniors wrote the news articles. It sounded reasonable to me, after all, she was just starting out on the paper. I didn’t know any better. I didn’t realize the paper would be dying for content, especially with the shorter and shorter news cycle these days.”

  I don’t say a word.

  Tarika sighs, looks down at her lap. “By March we were hardly speaking again. She stayed late after school every day. She’d decided not to play softball, even though the varsity coach was begging her to try out for the team. Shannon told me she wanted to focus on the newspaper and her grades. By then she’d all but given up on the piano. She’d practice for a few minutes before her lessons, that was it. Her teacher told me we should take a break for a while and see if her interest returned, otherwise I was just wasting my money.”

  Tarika shakes her head. She is using every ounce of will she has left to keep from breaking down. I want to tell her it’s okay if she does.

  “And that’s when I first saw him. I’ll never forget it. It was really late on a Wednesday, after dinner time, and she hadn’t called or texted. Normally she let me know about what time she’d be home or when she needed a ride. When I got nervous and called her, she didn’t answer. Around seven o’clock, this old muscle car comes roaring up the street. Even if I hadn’t been waiting for her to show up, I still would have been alarmed by the sound. The car stopped a house short, in front of my next door neighbor’s. I watched for a few minutes but couldn’t see inside. I was just about to go back to minding my own business when the passenger door opened and Shannon got out. And she was smiling, like you would not believe it. I knew right away what it was.

  “My little girl was in love.”

  Tarika closes her eyes.

  “What did you do?”

  “I got right out the front door. If that boy was driving, he was too old for Shannon as far as I was concerned.”

  “You must have been very surprised then,” I say, dumbly.

  She laughs bitterly. “You think? I stick my head through the passenger window and introduce myself, only to find a man sitting behind the wheel of the car. He was no boy. I knew right away he was at least twenty, if not older.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I asked him point-blank. How old are you? He laughed and wouldn’t answer my question. I told him I wasn’t playing. He just kept on smiling and said that he and Shannon were friends, that was all. Then he made a big deal out of having to leave, something about picking up his grandmother—oh God, I saw right through him! And you know what Shannon was doing when I turned around to face her?”

  “What?”

  The tears are flowing now. But still, Tarika is keeping it together. “Smiling at him, like they were partners in crime. You know, like they got one over on me.”

  “Must have hurt.”

  “It killed. Shannon and I had always gotten along, so I didn’t understand why she would just turn on me like this. I didn’t get it.”

  “Love is a wild card.”

  She gives me a look. “I took her right inside and sat her down and told her she was not to see that boy anymore. Shannon, though, stuck to the lie. She kept telling me over and over they were just friends, that he was somebody’s older brother, this other girl I’d never met, and I just felt like everything was spinning out of control.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “More of the same. She continued to retreat. I kept checking the school paper but never saw her name on the articles and then I got smart and checked the staff listing. She wasn’t on there either. No credits. Nothing. I knew then she wasn’t staying after school to work on the newspaper. I started snooping on her. I called to talk to her teacher about her grades, which had continued to slip. Now she was mostly a B student. Her teacher confirmed it for me: Shannon hadn’t been working on the newspaper.”

  I can’t even imagine. I know already I will have Dad Nightmares about this tonight. My daughter, Tammy, and I have a great relationship. But it sounds like Tarika and Shannon did as well. Then some invisible switch flipped and it was all over. Shannon just spiraled and the more Tarika tried to help, the worse it got.

  “What happened?”

  “I kept snooping,” Tarika says. “I figured out how to check her computer history and saw she spent all her time chatting with a group of friends I’d never met, including a guy who looked just like the driver of that car. Shannon had her cell phone, and I had never, not ever, gone through that, but I was really worried. I went through her texts and discovered right away that she and this boy, Marcus, were much, much more than just friends. My daughter is fifteen years old, and she is sexting with a grown man. I wanted to throw up.”

  I am horrified. “What did you do?”

  “I figured out who this guy was and drove Shannon over to where he lived. He was still with his parents. I remember that he and his mother were home that afternoon. I pounded on that door so hard, I nearly broke my damn hand. I probably would have if that woman hadn’t finally opened up. I told her what I’d found out. She acted surprised, but I could tell she’d known already. I told her this had to stop immediately, that her boy Marcus could be nowhere near my daughter. I warned her that I was going to speak to the police about this and get a restraining order if I could. I showed her the sexting messages and I said that I would make sure he went to prison forever if I found out he had behaved inappropriately with my daughter.”

  She finishes her drink.

  “I took Shannon home and was thinking about keeping her out of school the next few days, just so I could be around her. But she told me she had a couple tests and it was the end of the marking period. I let her go to school, and to this day I still regret it.

  “I took the next three days off work so I could literally drive her to school in the morning and then pick her up immediately after the last bell sounded. I stopped by the principal’s office on the first morning and discovered she’d been missing school and somehow hiding the absences from me. I was livid and I was so embarrassed. Some mother I’d turned out to be. I’d done such a good job ever since her father had left, even when the asshole didn’t send any child support, I’d made sure Shannon was taken care of. I’d vowed we weren’t going to turn into a couple statistics, but things had gone very, very wrong.

  “Shannon came home with me the first day. I forced my way into her room and lost it. Just lost it. I had to know if she’d had sex with that boy. I kept screaming at her to tell me the truth and, finally, she did. She told me they’d been having sex for a while, but only because they were in love. I wanted to hit her, and I wanted to murder that good-for-nothing boy, and I wanted to kill his parents too. They obviously knew something was going on and yet they did nothing to stop their twenty-two-year-old son from dating my fifteen-year-old girl. But you know what the worst part is?”

  “You blame yourself.”

  She nods. “That’s it. Right there. It was my fault this happened. Not theirs. She was only a child still. It was my job to … I’d always taken such good care of Shannon but now, when things had gotten real, I’d totally screwed everything up. I should have seen this coming. I should have been more proactive than I was.”

  “You never know where things are going as a parent,” I say.

  And it’s the God’s honest truth. I’ve been very lucky with Tammy so far, but she has her moments. And I’ve heard some real horror stories from a few different buddies, crap that’s more terrifying than any silly slasher flick.

  “I could have known,” Tarika says. “That girl was my whole lif
e and I—”

  It’s too much for her. Up until this point, she’d been crying off and on, but quietly. Now came the sobs. She covered her face in shame and cried into her hands, and I don’t have any tissues to offer her, let alone words. But what can I say? I know where the story goes from here.

  More importantly, where does it end?

  She’s crying hysterically, so I decide to finish the story for her.

  “The next day or the day after, you get a call from the principal himself that your girl went AWOL. Meanwhile, her boyfriend doesn’t call out and doesn’t show up to work. His family claims to have no idea where he is. They both just vanish, like that.”

  She nods through the tears.

  “And then they’re gone.”

  “Yes.”

  Six

  It’s a long, sad, heartbreaking story. As a father, it gives me chills. But like all ego-driven creatures, I’m still wondering when I come onto the stage. There’s a lot more to unpack, though.

  “For five, long years I searched and I waited. I hired two different private investigators to find Shannon. One of them even followed up on a lead down in Mexico. It cost me a fortune.

  “But we never found her. We never heard from her. His family told me the same story, but they were never honest with me about anything, so I don’t believe a word they say.”

  “It must have been hell.”

  She hasn’t heard me. “Then one day, out of the blue, the house phone rings. Would you know for five years everybody told me to get rid of my landline because it was such a waste of money, but I refused? I couldn’t do it. Shannon knew that phone number. I hardly used it. But I kept it, because I hoped and prayed she’d call one day. And then, one day, she did.”

  She’s smiling and crying. So am I, just about.

  “She told me she was coming home. There were so many questions I wanted to ask, but I kept my mouth shut and listened. She didn’t tell me anything, really, just that she wanted to come home. She told me the airport and the flight number and arrival time, and that was that. Later I checked the area code of the phone number she called from, it was in Texas.”

  I need another sip of booze.

  “Her flight was coming in later that evening. At first I just sat there, crying and laughing. Then I went to work. I cleaned up her room, put on new sheets, vacuumed, dusted, you know, all that. I ran to the grocery store and bought her favorites. Eggplant parm, garlic bread, a nice big salad. I was walking on air. It was like being in a dream. I got her room ready, raced through the store, put the groceries away, then headed out to the airport. Her flight wasn’t coming in for another five hours, but I didn’t care. I’d waited all this time, what was a few measly hours more at an airport?”

  “Who tipped the media off?” I ask.

  She shakes her head. “I don’t know. I called Marlon, her father, who I hadn’t spoken to in a long time, because I was so excited. He was there early too. To this day, he swears it wasn’t him.”

  “Other than the media, who else showed up at the airport that you weren’t expecting?” I ask.

  “Nobody. I expected Marcus to be with Shannon, so I kept waiting for his family to show up.”

  I remember from the news coverage they were there.

  Tarika wipes under her eyes and looks away. “She was so different. Shannon was no longer a girl. A different person stepped off that plane. Some woman I didn’t know. I still remember what it was like to put my arms around my girl.”

  Tarika closes her eyes and hugs the air. Slowly she rocks back and forth in her chair, like she’s holding her baby girl again.

  When she opens her eyes, the smile fades into something pitiful and sad and lonely. “I was riding a high from the phone call earlier, I couldn’t believe she was home, and I was just happy to have her back. But …”

  I’m on the edge of my seat.

  She looks down. “But I knew it wasn’t her. Not my girl. She was different. I expected more of a reaction from her, but she didn’t really hug me back. She just kind of—” Tarika holds a hand out and swats the air. “—patted my back, like she’d run to Wawa for a few minutes as opposed to being gone for five years. I knew something was wrong but I didn’t want to ruin the moment or the day with worry. I had Shannon back and I thought whatever it was, whatever was wrong with her, we could work it out. This time I was ready. I was older, much wiser, and I’d been preparing for her return ever since she disappeared.”

  I sit back on my chair and take a deep breath. I might need counseling before this is over.

  “She’s been home for five weeks,” Tarika says. “But she never really came back. That’s not my Shannon. She’s different.”

  “What has she told you?” I ask.

  Tarika shakes her head. “Only a few things. She says they went to Florida, then Louisiana, and then Mexico, but none of it makes sense. What little she’s said is self-contradictory. One night she told me they were in Florida first, then another night she said it was actually Louisiana. I asked her what she did for five years, and it sounds like she had a string of random jobs, mostly waitressing. But she’s vague with her details. With all the details.”

  “What about him?”

  “She won’t tell me. She just said that he took odd jobs to scrape some money together. That was all.”

  “Marcus’s family eventually showed up at the airport,” I say.

  She nods. “The nerve of those people. His mother hounded me. She kept asking if Shannon had said anything about her boy, if he was going to be on the plane too. It was unreal. I kept looking at her, like, you’re asking me for information about your boy right now? The same fu—the same kid who statutorily raped my fifteen year old girl and then took her somewhere? I couldn’t stand it.”

  “So you hit her,” I say, recalling the news stories. “Good for you. She had it coming.”

  “She had a whole lot more coming, but I am a Christian woman deep down.” Tarika swipes under her eyes again. “The police and the TSA had to tear us apart. It was all so ridiculous. I remember that feeling of hatred, like I’d never experienced before. I wanted to see that woman and her husband and their son dead. I thought about it while we were waiting for Shannon’s flight to come in. I thought about buying a gun. I even asked my ex if he had one.”

  “I don’t blame you.”

  Tarika looks up. “But now they’re the least of my problems. Shannon’s home but my daughter never came back.”

  I’ve already made up my mind.

  “I think something terrible is going to happen again,” Tarika says. “I don’t know what, but I have this feeling.”

  “How can I help?”

  “You can talk to the last PI I hired, Myron Strommel, but otherwise I need this to stay between us, Greg.”

  “Okay.”

  “I think my daughter is scared of something. I think she’s in danger,” Tarika says. “I need you to follow her.”

  Seven

  When we both come up for air later, I realize that fifteen minutes has turned into nearly an hour. Tarika Lahill, initially reluctant and reticent, gave me the juice on her sad, sad tale. She can’t say why she thinks her daughter is in danger, but speaks with the force of a parent’s intuition. She knows on some primal level that Shannon is in trouble.

  I don’t disagree. Shannon hasn’t explained what she’s been up to the last five years, nor does she seem to want to. Perhaps even more telling is the fact that Shannon can’t explain why, now, she decided to return home. Her daughter’s coolness of attitude demonstrates her return wasn’t made out of some deeper need to reunite with her mother. The way Shannon tells it, it seems like she just woke up one day and decided to come back home.

  Of course nothing is that simple.

  We make decisions for all kinds of reasons. Sometimes—perhaps most of the time—we don’t even know what those really are. The brain decides and then our conscious catches up and then, and only then, do we try to post-hoc rationalize our behav
ior.

  I went to the store because I really needed to buy those new swim trunks.

  No, you didn’t. You saw your old friend from sixth grade, who used to ride his bike past the pool to gawk at the girls, and that made you think of swimming, and how much you used to like it, and even though your old trunks are just fine you suddenly got an impulse to drive out to the mall.

  All that being said, when it comes to big life decisions that require significant action and change on our part, such as returning home after a five-year disappearance, we generally have some idea. Shannon didn’t just wake up one morning and decide. And even if it felt that way, she made the decision for reasons.

  We need to know what those reasons are, otherwise I’m not sure I can help at all.

  Tarika pops a compact and checks her makeup. “My Lord, I look a mess.”

  “You look just fine to me.”

  It’s out before I can stop myself. She gives me a look over the tiny mirror.

  “You are a real gentleman.”

  “Yeah. Wait till you get to know me.”

  Tarika has exhausted herself in sharing her story with me. I know she’s got nothing left in the tank. We exchange information, cell phones, addresses. She asks to see my standard contract so she can review it that evening.

  Real businessman I am. “I don’t have one.”

  She thinks I’m joking.

  “No, really. I don’t have one. I don’t do this often.”

  “Could you draw one up?” she says. “Not that I don’t trust you, but …”

  “Totally understand. I’ll get it to you tomorrow. But all the same, I’d like to start tonight. What time does Shannon usually leave the house?”

  “After dinner, she’ll go out for a little bit. She says she goes for coffee or to the bookstore. But I don’t know, Greg. I just don’t know.”

  I nod. “I’ll be there.”

  “Thank you.”

  She’s about to leave my office, but gives me one last look over the shoulder. “Do you mind if I go out the back?”