“HOW ARE YOU feeling today?”
I’m here with Dr. Kayla, the same therapist who came to see me on Sunday, four days ago. She doesn’t look frazzled anymore. Now she’s immaculately dressed, with long, straight dark hair and a kind, in-control look. I think she’s been told not to ask me directly. There’s some plot going on behind the scenes, between the cops and my parents and Aunt Hannah, to get me to tell them, to trick me into letting it slip. The cops are ready to run if I say something, ready to burst in and save Dee.
There was a time when I would have liked that.
Dr. Kayla waits. I’m already learning that she’s calm. I can’t wear her down by my silence.
“I feel good,” I say.
“How has your sleep been?”
“Fine.” It’s been two years since I’ve had trouble sleeping. And when I dream, it’s bizarre. I don’t dream about things that happened, or things I worry about. There are dolls in my dreams, though. Blond, blue-eyed dolls. They appear randomly in places they shouldn’t be. I don’t remember much of last night’s dream, only the dolls. A Lola, waving her chubby baby arms. A Barbie in a pink tutu, dancing.
She asks more mundane questions. Am I eating? Am I getting along with my mom? How does it feel to see my dad? And then: How do I feel about the news coverage? Have I seen what they’re saying on TV?
I know I’ve been on the news, but my parents won’t even turn the TV on, so I haven’t seen exactly what they’re saying. There was a news truck parked outside the house this morning, though. I think they stayed away at first out of respect for what they think I’ve been through, but now my grace period is over. It’s been four whole days. How much time to recover could I need? And how much money can they make off me?
“I’m trying not to see any of it,” I say. I’m sure they’re showing Dee’s picture, and mine, from six years ago. They’re talking about the day Kyle took us, rehashing how some man saw him forcing us into the car, but by the time the cops came, we were long gone. I saw that in the newspaper on Monday, before Mom canceled our subscription. I don’t need to see those pictures or hear that story. How if the cops had come faster, they might have found us. If the man had been closer. If if if.
“One of the most difficult things for people to deal with is all the attention,” she says.
“I don’t want to think about it,” I say.
“What don’t you want to think about?”
I’m not going to be trapped. I will only tell her what she already knows. “The day I was kidnapped. How someone saw us.”
She won’t ask the next question, about who kidnapped me. She’s trained in how to manipulate people. How to get them to talk even if they don’t want to. So she changes direction.
“It looks like you like the color purple.”
I say nothing.
She waits.
I say nothing and I say nothing, and I say nothing.
The time ticks by.
• • •
Lee picks me up at one o’clock sharp. I’ve barely said a word to my mom since I got home from therapy, and she’s even more worried about me going to Portland now.
“Are you sure you want to go?” she asks. “Lee will understand if you don’t want to.”
“I want to go,” I say. The truth is I don’t feel anything about it right now. I don’t want to go and I don’t want to stay home. I want nothing. I sit as still as I can, as if my stillness will stop the questions, maybe the world.
Lee doesn’t knock. She bursts in, and she’s smiling from the first second.
“Hello, cousin! Are you ready for a whole new wardrobe?”
“Lee, I’m not sure—” my mom begins.
“Fork over the cash, mama!” Lee interrupts.
Mom glances at me.
I stand up. I smile, even though the smile is plastic. I’m going to walk through this. Every day I have to walk and talk and smile like I’m Amy, and I’m back, and I’m fine. And the last six years were nothing. They never happened, and Kyle is not a real person. He never pulled Dee into the car, and I never went in after her, and we didn’t drive away, and there was nothing after.
Dee never became Stacie, never began to change and crack. And the cracks never spread and widened, never tore her apart until nothing was left.
Lee is smiling Dee’s smile, talking fast the way Dee did. I realize that when they used to fight, it was because they were so alike, more than we ever realized. As I watch her talking to my mom, cajoling her credit card off of her, assuring her that she’ll take care of me, that it will be good for me to get out, that I deserve to be free, I realize there is something I want, and it even fits with being Amy. I want to be back down by the river, and see Dee’s face when she got to the top of the path, the way she smiled that always-forgiving smile. I want to see that smile again.
Lee turns it to me. She waves my mom’s credit card in the air. “Let’s go!”
I nod. The shape of her face is a little wrong. It’s a little too narrow when it should be round. Her hair is too curly. Her chin is too small. But I’ll take it. I pick up my Safeway bag, which is the closest thing I have to a purse. At the bottom, I still have the Stacie doll. I don’t like leaving the house without her.
As we’re about to leave, Jay comes out of his bedroom. He sees us and turns back down the hall.
“Jay!” Lee calls. “Want to come to the mall with us?”
“No thanks,” he calls back.
“He’ll come around,” she says, unlocking her car with the press of a button.
“I know,” I say, even though I really don’t. He has every reason to be mad, and I don’t know where to start with him. He’s more like a stranger than the Jay I remember. I’m in a world full of strange new people, and one of them is driving me away, wearing Dee’s eyes and Dee’s smile. We’re heading into a world I tried not to remember, a place I’m sure will feel new and strange too.
IT WAS HOW she didn’t scream.
How one night, she was silent.
How the darkness was almost peaceful in that one room.
Where I was allowed to sleep, but couldn’t.
But she was never allowed.
That’s how I knew she was Stacie, and I was Chelsea, and it was forever.
• • •
Lee makes me get a haircut first. She leads me toward a salon, a devious light in her eyes. “You didn’t think I’d let you keep looking like that, did you?” She pushes me down in the seat, and I don’t resist. She starts giving the lady directions. “Bring out her cheekbones. Doesn’t she have beautiful cheekbones? You should be an actress, Amy. You’d look great on camera.”
“Is that what you want?” the lady asks.
“Whatever she says,” I say.
“This will look great,” she says. “Your friend is right. We’ll just even this up here . . . a few layers . . .” Snip, snip, snip. The haircut I gave myself with kitchen scissors disappears, replaced by something that looks like it was done on purpose. The face that was just a face looks totally different. I don’t know whose brown eyes are staring back. This isn’t my face, and it isn’t Amy’s either. I don’t know if my cheekbones are beautiful, or what I’m supposed to be seeing as the lady hands me a mirror and turns my chair this way and that. It’s like I’m watching a girl in a movie, and there’s no connection between her and the person inside me at all.
Lee hands over my mom’s credit card, and before I know it, we’re walking through the mall again. She drags me into one store and then another, throws clothes at me. I try them on, and I let her buy what she thinks I should want. Only some of it is purple.
“Get this,” she says, tossing a bracelet made of purple beads on top of a pile of clothes at the register. “That way you’ll always have something.”
“Do they have a pink one?” I ask.
She
stops, a sudden silence in the stream of words. She fingers something I can’t see. “Not a bracelet, but they have a necklace. Do you want this one instead?” She holds it up, a chain of pink plastic. Even I can tell it’s ugly. But I want it.
“I’ll take them both,” I say.
Lee sets the pink beads on top of the pile softly, as if it’s important that they not break. She pulls out my mom’s credit card, and in silence, we both watch as the clerk swipes it and bags the clothes.
I pull out the jewelry and rip the tags off. I put the bracelet on my wrist and the necklace around my neck. I haven’t said a word about what these things mean, but as we trudge through the mall, weighed down by all the stuff we’ve bought, Lee is still silent.
We sit down on a bench and watch the people. A woman walks by with two kids, a baby in a stroller and a toddler she holds by the hand. As she passes us, she smiles at me. Not at Lee, at me. I’m sure of it.
“Amy?”
I watch the woman as she walks away. Where do they live? I wonder. Do they live in a house, with a lot of rooms, and a big yard, and does she have a husband who loves her? Do the kids have a dad who takes care of them? Will they grow up to be happy?
“Amy.” Lee pokes me in the arm.
“Oh,” I say. “What?”
“I said your name three times,” she says.
“My name is Chelsea,” I say.
“Oh,” she says. “Do you want me to call you that?”
I can’t believe I said that. The truth just popped out. I can’t let that happen.
“No,” I say. “Call me Amy. I have to remember.” It’s a lot of work to be Amy, though. That’s why I slipped, I tell myself. This day has been exhausting. First, I had to be silent. And then I had to talk as if I were normal. I don’t know which one is harder.
“Okay, well, I promised your mom I’d get you home by nine, and it’ll take an hour and a half at least, so we should probably go.”
“Okay,” I say.
“But we can stop at the food court for some ice cream!”
We used to do that together, all four of us, me and Dee and Lee and Jay. We’d make a big extended family trip here every August before school started.
“That would be great,” I say.
Will they ever go to a mall for ice cream? I wonder which flavors they would like. I remember what Dee liked, though. Peppermint. And Amy always liked chocolate. She always wondered how Dee could get peppermint when there was chocolate in the world.
“I bet you want chocolate, right?” Lee asks as we get in line.
I want peppermint. I want peppermint more than anything.
“Yes,” I say. “And you want vanilla.”
“You remember!” She knocks against me with her shoulder. “Some things never change, huh?”
“Yes,” I say. I haven’t had chocolate ice cream in six years. I wonder if I’ll still like it. I wonder if when my name changed, the whole world shifted, so that nothing is what it was before. So I decide not to have chocolate, because I don’t want to know. And I definitely can’t have peppermint, because I will never be able to keep it together if I do that. “One scoop of vanilla,” I say when I get up to the front.
Lee stares at me.
“I can have chocolate next time,” I say.
“I’ll have chocolate,” she says to the kid scooping it up. “We can taste each other’s.” She smiles, but it’s not just a smile; it’s a smile with a little bit of the corner of the mouth turned down, and I wonder if she knows what I’m thinking, why I didn’t want chocolate. And then she says something that makes me know she does. “It’ll be just as good,” she says. “Trust me.” She winks as she takes her chocolate, and I notice that she got two scoops instead of one.
And it turns out it is good. It’s everything I remembered.
• • •
I used to daydream about chocolate ice cream. The smooth bitter and sweet flavor rolling over my tongue. I would close my eyes and picture a cone and myself licking it, and the rasp of my tongue against the checkerboard sides of the wafer. I would picture one of my mom’s white bowls, the small ones she used to trick us into thinking we were getting more. I would run my spoon around the outsides of the scoop and capture the liquid. I would slurp it down and then I would take a big, solid bite out of the middle of the ice cream. I would feel the ice cream headache and the relief when it passed, and I would take another bite and another.
Once I was sitting with my eyes closed on the edge of the bed, and Lola grabbed on to my leg. “Chel! Chel!” she said.
I opened my eyes.
“What are you seeing?”
“There’s this food called chocolate ice cream,” I said. I rolled my tongue around my mouth, trying to think of some way to explain it, but I was drawing a blank. “It’s really good.”
“Can I have some?”
“Well, we don’t have any.”
“Ask Daddy,” she said.
“It has sugar,” I said. “Daddy thinks sugar is bad. He wants us to be healthy.”
“Why?”
“Healthy is good,” I said. I was afraid she was going to latch on to it and start begging for chocolate ice cream, but she didn’t. She knew from when she could first talk that if Daddy thought something was bad, we didn’t ask for it. That was just the way life was. So there was no ice cream in our house. And I wonder if she remembers, if she imagines herself eating whatever it is she thinks ice cream might be. I hope she does.
THE MORNING Lola was born, I was a little girl.
That night, I was a mother.
No, I didn’t give birth to her. I didn’t carry her for nine months. I didn’t endure the pain that made her life possible.
But I was her mother, because Stacie was fractured. Stacie was a little girl then, and she would be forever.
• • •
“If you don’t get in the car, I’ll kill her,” said the big man with the little head. He held a knife to Dee’s throat. It was the largest blade on a big fat Swiss Army knife that he held in his fist. Even I could have cut Dee’s throat with that. He had his arm around her, too, an arm big enough to squeeze out her last breath.
Dee was making sounds like a balloon losing air fast. Zee zee zee. Tears were rolling down her face, but her eyes were closed.
Never get in the car. That’s what they tell you. Once you get in the car, you’re dead. They used to teach us that at school. How you shouldn’t talk to strangers. How if a car drives up alongside you, you turn and walk in the other direction. But whoever taught us that never had someone threatening their best friend with a knife.
I could have run away.
And then my mom would never have gone through this. And my parents would still be together. And Jay would only hate me the normal way a brother hates a sister, and he would secretly love me.
But if I got away, and Kyle thought someone would find them, he would have killed her. He had followed her around Grey Wood for weeks, even sitting outside her house and peeking through her bedroom window. He was obsessed with her, and in his own way, he loved Dee more than anything in the world. He loved her so much that no one else could ever have her. He only took me so I wouldn’t tell, so nothing could get in the way of the life they were supposed to have together.
I thought about the things they’d taught us in school. It all went through my head in a second, and my legs tensed as if to sprint away. My eyes latched on to the road behind the car. I calculated how long it would take the man to turn the car around. I could get away, I was sure of it.
Zee zee zee.
“Now!” the man yelled.
I took the three steps toward the car. I fumbled with the door handle.
“Get in!” he shouted.
I jumped in, and I pulled the door shut behind me. It locked with a loud click, like the pop of a cap gu
n.
He leaned over Dee and pulled the passenger door shut. There was another click. It hit my heart like I’d been shot. I gasped, and the car started, and we were driving. We were driving fast, faster than normal, faster than any car I’d ever been in.
Dee burst into full-on tears, her little breaths changing to gulping sobs.
I froze. It was like I wasn’t breathing at all.
“It’s all right,” the man said to Dee. “I’m not going to hurt you.” He slowed down until he was going a normal speed. He turned his head toward her and smiled that big clown smile. “Everything’s all right.”
Dee kept sobbing.
“My name’s Kyle,” he said.
I watched the road through the window, trying to figure out where we were. But we were already somewhere I didn’t recognize. We were out of Grey Wood, heading away from our old lives.
Once you get in the car, you’re dead. I gasped again, only my second sound.
“Everything’s going to be fine,” he said. He turned back to me and smiled. His eyes were a light brown, like a deer’s eyes.
• • •
By the time we got to the cabin, it was dark. Dee had stopped sobbing. I guess you can only cry so much, no matter what’s wrong. She had gone completely silent, like me.
“I bet you’re hungry,” Kyle said as he stopped the car in the dark driveway.
I was, but really, I had to pee. We’d just bounced up a long, winding gravel road after hours in the car.
“We’re going to get out of the car now,” he said. “There’s no point in screaming because this is the only place around for a while. And if you run, you won’t get anywhere.” His voice was matter-of-fact. And from what I could see, it was true. There wasn’t any light anywhere except what came from the car’s headlights. We might as well have been on another planet. He unlocked the doors, and I got out, stepping onto the dirt.
Amy Chelsea Stacie Dee Page 4