There is a pad of scratch paper by the phone. I didn’t plan to leave any kind of note, but now I can’t help myself. I can’t let Mom and Dad worry more than they have to. This time, they have to know that I’m leaving of my own free will and I’m okay.
“Mom and Dad,” I write. And then I add, “and Jay.” He deserves to be included. “I have to leave. I hope someday I’ll see you again, and I’ll be able to explain everything. Please don’t follow me, and don’t call the police. I have a good reason for doing this. Please trust me. I wish I could stay.” I don’t know what else to say. What I’ve written isn’t enough. It sounds like it was written by a robot. But I don’t have anything better. “I love you,” I write. And then I sign it, “Amy.” I write the A the way I used to when I was a kid, with a big round A and the tail of the Y curling around the whole word. Then I make two little round dots in the A, so it looks like the A is a sort of half-smiling face. It doesn’t fit with the note I just wrote, the one with no personality at all. It doesn’t fit with anything about me now. But I leave it. I head back through the living room and out the front door, closing it as quietly as I can. I walk down the driveway and turn right. I walk past the MacArthur mailbox with its chipping paint, and I keep walking two more blocks until I get to the place where I’m supposed to meet Vinnie. But he’s not here yet. I think about sitting down on the curb, but I’m too restless. I pace up and down the sidewalk beneath a sign that says 2 HOUR PARKING. And then I hear the unmistakable lurch of Vinnie’s driving, and the car skids to a stop in front of me.
But it’s not just Vinnie. Lee is in the backseat.
I freeze.
Lee jumps out. “Amy, don’t be mad,” she says.
Vinnie rolls down the window. “I’m sorry,” he says. “Lee called me right after you did.”
“So you told her?” I whisper-yell.
“I didn’t tell anyone,” Lee says.
“Why are you here?”
“If you want to go back, that’s your choice,” Lee says. “We shouldn’t lock you up any more than he did.”
“But.”
“But nothing,” Lee says. “We just want to help.”
I don’t believe her for a second, but I climb into the front seat. I can’t go back to my house. I will just have to think of something. I will have to be strong enough to take whatever they throw at me.
Vinnie starts driving. I haven’t told him where to go, but he has figured out that he needs to head for the highway.
“What are you going to do when you get there?” Lee asks.
I say nothing.
“Are you going to get revenge? Like, try to kill him?”
I say nothing.
“You don’t like him, do you?”
“No, I don’t like him!” I yell.
Vinnie jumps, and the car swerves.
“But you want to go live with him again?” Lee asks. Vinnie didn’t tell her everything. I let my breath out. Lee doesn’t know about them. Maybe she will let me go. She can’t care about me that much. “Amy, there’s this thing called Stockholm syndrome,” Lee says. “It’s when you start to identify with your kidnapper. Like, because you spend so much time together—”
“I don’t identify with him,” I snap.
He lifts Barbie in the air. He spins her around.
He slams the nurse Barbie on the table.
He puts a hand around Lola’s neck.
“Okay, well . . .” Lee searches for words.
“But you lived with him for so long,” Vinnie says. “Maybe you don’t realize that there’s another way. That you can stay with your parents. You can stay if you want to.”
“You know I can’t,” I say. He knows. Why is he doing this? Why does he have to make it harder? But he’s driving. We’re heading north.
“What if he kills you, too?” Lee asks. She leans forward, sticks her head between the two front seats. “You saw what happened to my mom. Do you want your mom to be crazy, too?”
It’s not fair of her to say this. I sit perfectly still. I stare ahead out the windshield. We are getting closer.
“Amy, this isn’t about you.” Lee’s voice is hard now. “If you cared about your mom and your dad, you would stay.”
I care about them, I think. But I don’t say it. I’m not capable of speaking. It’s like I’m not even in the car. I left a note for them. They will know I’m alive. But they won’t know if I die.
“Never come back here!”
The door slams.
There is blood in Stacie’s hair.
Barbie is crying.
“Dee would want to be free,” Lee says. “She would want you to be free, too. You were her best friend, Amy. She loved you. You were more her sister than I was. She would want you to stay.”
She wouldn’t want anything for me. She would barely even know me. But the old Dee. The old Dee. She would have loved them. She would have wanted me to go back for them. Lee doesn’t know. She doesn’t know.
Stacie grabs Barbie by the hair.
“We could call the police,” Lee says. “We could have him arrested, and he would never hurt you again.”
I can’t take a full breath. Air is rushing by us. Vinnie’s car is old, and the wheels rattle against the highway. He speeds around a curve. The window next to me is open a crack. I put my hands over my ears and close my eyes. I squeeze them shut. But I can hear my breathing.
“Amy, let me do this,” Lee says.
“Let her be,” Vinnie says. “Lee, don’t.”
“We can’t just let her go back,” Lee says. “She needs help.”
“Lee!” Vinnie yells.
The car careens around another turn.
“Vinnie, can’t you see how wrong this is?” Lee asks. “I’m doing it.” She’s holding her phone. I can’t see it, but I know it. She’s about to call the cops. She’s about to kill them.
I click open my seat belt and lean the seat back as far as it will go.
“Ow! Amy!” Lee screams.
I slide between the seats and fall on top of her. I can’t even see her. I grab blindly for the phone. My hand hits her face, her arm, her chest. My legs are kicking behind me. I’m trying to press against anything, anything to keep me on top of Lee, to stop her from calling.
She turns her face away and holds her hands up.
The phone tumbles away from her. I collapse on top of her and try to push myself up, try to see where it landed. But I can’t see anything. Everything is a blur. I think I’m crying. Or maybe we’re underwater. Maybe Vinnie has crashed the car into a lake and we’re going to drown. Maybe that’s why I still can’t breathe. But we’re weaving back and forth. We’re still on the road. I’m on top of Lee. Her hands are touching me. She’s pushing against my chest. She’s trying to lift me off of her, but she’s not strong enough.
“Amy. Amy,” Lee says. “Get off me!”
She was going to call the cops. She was going to kill them. I push away from her, and I punch her in the side of the face. She was going to kill them. She was going to kill my kids. The car jerks, and I roll away, still half on top of Lee. I fish under the seat for the phone, but I can’t find it. And I realize the car has stopped, and outside the window there is a silent, unmoving tree, and there is no wind, and the door opens next to my head, and I look up and see Vinnie. His blue eyes stare down at me out of his normal, round face. Three large zits sit in a row across his chin.
Vinnie grabs me by the shoulders and pulls me from the car. I let him pull me. The blur in my eyes has cleared. There are tears on my cheeks, but none in my eyes anymore. I set my feet on the ground and lean against him.
“Are you okay?” he asks.
“Don’t let her call,” I say. My voice is small, almost nothing. But it took breath to say it. I am breathing. My eyes search for the phone.
Le
e is still in the backseat. She’s sitting up now, and she has it. I try to leap forward, but Vinnie holds me.
“Lee, let’s talk about this,” Vinnie says.
The face of the phone is smashed up. Lee tries to do something with it, but it doesn’t work. The phone is broken. She can’t call. I lean into Vinnie.
I watch Lee. She throws the phone into the backseat window. “I’m trying to help you,” she says. She turns to look at me. The left side of her face is turning purple. I must have done that. But I’m still not sorry. I don’t care if she is their aunt. If she does anything to bring the cops, I’ll kill her.
“Let’s just chill out for a minute,” Vinnie says.
“You were never going to help me,” I say. I point at Lee. “You just wanted to stop me. You think I’m crazy. But I’m not crazy.”
“Yes, you are,” Lee says.
“She doesn’t really think that,” Vinnie says. “She just wants to make sure nobody hurts you again. His arm squeezes me. “I don’t want him to hurt you.” His voice is quiet and earnest. He says it slowly, not like when he makes a joke. He means it. And that means he’ll never let me go.
Lee slowly steps out of the car. “I’m sorry,” she says. “Vinnie is right. I didn’t mean it.” Her face really looks terrible where I punched her. But she’s still beautiful. She’s still a sharper version of Dee. “Let’s stay here for a while and calm down. Think about what to do.”
I can’t look at her. I hurt her, and it wasn’t fair of me. She doesn’t know that helping me means hurting them. She would love them if she knew. I’m a bad person. But I’m not only bad. I love my children. No matter what else I do, there’s that. I look past Lee, and I see that Vinnie’s keys are hanging from the ignition. The car is parked crookedly on the shoulder of the country highway, a two-lane road lined with trees. We are standing in a shallow lane of gravel.
The driver’s side door is even open.
I take a step away from Vinnie, act like I just need some space. I walk slowly around the car and put one hand on my face. I don’t cover my eyes, though.
“We have all night,” Vinnie says. “We can stay here for a while.”
“There has to be another way,” Lee says. “You deserve your life. You deserve to do everything—everything Dee would have wanted to do. We can help you have that.”
She’s trying to manipulate me again because Dee is dead. I remember a time when I was at Dee’s house. There was a little boy who lived next door to them. His name was Josiah. Dee would play tag with him in the backyard, and she would laugh. I can see Dee laughing. I can see Josiah running away on his stubby little legs. If Dee had had Lola and Barbie in her old life, that’s how it would have been. I’m standing next to the driver’s side door now.
I slide in, slam the door shut, and turn the key.
“Amy!” Lee calls.
I floor it. I swerve out on the highway. The back door is still open. They both must be yelling now, but I can’t hear them. I keep my foot on the gas pedal. I am speeding away from them. All I can hear is the noise of the wind.
• • •
When she was still at least partly Dee, we were driving up this very highway. And the wind rushed past us, and the wheels rattled against the road. And the trees seemed to be running by.
Dee and I held hands. She reached back from the front seat, and I leaned forward. Her hand was cold but sweaty. She sat perfectly still. I squirmed, trying not to move.
Kyle was humming. Mmm hmm hmm. Mmm hmm hmm.
I wondered what would happen if I got the door open. Could I jump out, or would I die? Could I get Dee to do it with me? You are not supposed to get in the car. Once you get in the car, you’re dead.
For a while, I thought that was a lie. I thought that even though we had to be with Kyle, we were alive.
I am humming as I drive Vinnie’s car. Mmm hmm hmm. Mmm hmm hmm. The song had no words. He loved to hum it when he was playing with his dolls. A long amount of time passes, and this highway winds around and around and every exit looks the same. I was looking for the road signs six years ago, hoping to see something that would help us. I thought I would remember forever, but now . . .
I have no idea where to go from here. As this realization hits me, I let up on the gas. I could have already passed the turn.
I try not to imagine what Vinnie and Lee are doing. They will need someone to pick them up. What will they say? They both want to protect me, and they think that means dragging me home. Lee wants to call the police. She might have used Vinnie’s phone to call them already. Why didn’t I take it from him? Why didn’t I think of that? I panicked. I saw the keys in the ignition and the open door, and I just went for it. Now I have hardly any time. I have to find them, and find them fast. I have to get them away from here, somewhere no one will ever find us. I have to make Kyle understand.
I shouldn’t have stolen Vinnie’s car. Vinnie was the only one who knew, and he kept my secret. He taught me to drive. I hope that after we leave, he finds the car. Maybe I can apologize someday. Kyle is a lot older than me, and someday he will die. And then we can come home again, and I’ll apologize to Vinnie. Maybe I’ll buy him a new car.
But Kyle isn’t that old. I think he’s probably about thirty. It will be a long time before he dies.
Unless.
They can’t know I killed their daddy. They don’t understand how things are. I can’t kill their daddy.
I drive on. I see an exit toward the town where I got on the bus, and I take it. I’m driving below the speed limit now, looking for another turn. When the lady drove me to the bus stop that night, I didn’t pay close enough attention. Why didn’t I pay attention?
My hands slip on the steering wheel. Sweat is pouring out of my palms. It’s like how when we turned a corner, my hand slipped out of Dee’s hand. I have to keep my hand on the wheel. I turn a corner now, a soft corner, and there’s a sign with a picture of a stoplight. And there, far down the road, is the stoplight itself, and something clicks together in my brain. My heart beats faster. When we reached this point before, Kyle began to slow down. He changed the way he was humming.
“We’re almost home, ladies,” he said. “Aren’t you excited to see your new home?”
That’s when my hand slipped.
Dee grabbed for it again, and again it slipped. Our hands slid past each other.
There’s a break in the trees before the intersection. There’s an old gas station that is closed and falling apart, and there’s a sign that says gas is $1.56 a gallon on a pump that isn’t connected to anything. This is where I take the left turn.
I ran down this hill.
I was carrying my Safeway bag with the Stacie doll, and my jacket was only half zipped, and I didn’t know where I was going. And I stopped next to that disconnected pump, and it was dark, and a woman stopped for me. A white woman wearing business clothes with an empty car seat in the back.
“Are you okay?” she asked me.
“I need to get to a bus station,” I said.
“Can I call your mom for you?” she asked. She looked me up and down as she said it, and she hesitated, as if she wasn’t sure I was as young as I looked, or maybe like she thought I was going to rob her.
Now I turn the car left across the main road. I drive slowly up the long hill. There are two more turns, one onto a steep paved road and another that’s gravel. And then off the gravel road is a road that’s just dirt. I wipe my hands on my jeans, one after the other, and I grip the wheel. Each time I have been on this road, there was no going back.
I PULL OFF THE ROAD before the second turn. I can’t drive all the way up, or Kyle will know I’m coming. If he knows I’m coming, he will hide, or he will do something. I need to be able to tell him that it’s just me, and convince him to take me back.
I wouldn’t take me back.
I would wan
t to kill me.
Sometimes I want to kill me.
I pull in as far as I can, but that isn’t very far. There are too many trees. The car isn’t hidden at all. It’s just a little ways off the road. Anybody who was looking would find it. That means I can’t leave it here for long, not with Vinnie and Lee down there, not with Vinnie still having his phone. I have to get them and then . . . I don’t know where we’ll go, but we’ll go somewhere. Another cabin, another river. Anywhere they won’t find us.
I run up the hill. My feet pound on pavement. I’m carrying my bag over one shoulder, and it’s slamming against me. I hold on to the straps and keep running. Up up up. I am leading them up this hill. If I don’t get myself up and then all of us down again, we’ll be found. Maybe they’re better off without me. If I take the car back down the hill now and drive away, if I drive away east and end up in Idaho, maybe the cops won’t find me, and if they don’t find me, I can never tell anyone that they exist or where they are.
But Vinnie might tell Lee now. He might already have told her. Lee won’t stop until she finds them. She’ll tell Aunt Hannah, and Aunt Hannah will not stop.
I don’t want to be a mother.
But I am.
I am.
I make it to the next turn, and up I go, on gravel now. This road has dirt, too, and weeds growing up in the road. No car but Kyle’s goes up this far anymore. There are no neighbors. There was a fire, Kyle told us. A fire in the nearest house, and the family ran out in the night, and later they came back for their chickens and cows, and now it’s just us, he said. Us and the river and the dolls and the night.
I can’t go back now. It would make sense to go back, to the car, to Idaho, to Wyoming, to Canada. I don’t even know what those places look like; I just know they’re not here. But it’s not possible. I slow down as I reach the dirt road, the one with hardly any gravel at all. It’s dark. By rights I shouldn’t be able to see anything, but my eyes have gotten used to it since I left the car. There are stars and the moon out. Maybe they will all be asleep, and I can walk in, and . . .
Amy Chelsea Stacie Dee Page 16