Reaching the doorstep, Violet hesitated. The key to their house was in her hand. Every other time she’d stood on that porch, she had used it to let herself in. But something about that seemed wrong now. She would feel like they were intruding. After the phone call to her mother, Violet figured it would be wise to simply ring the doorbell and allow her to come to them.
“Do you want to ring it?” she asked Ben, pointing to the little button. He shook his head no. Violet wondered why he looked so little to her right now; as if he had shrunk somehow. Maybe he had, just a little.
Violet reached her left pointer finger up, and pressed the button much harder than she needed to. There was that noise, that ring they recognized. Ben and Violet locked eyes at the familiarity. It felt comforting, which was a welcome relief.
Straining her ears, Violet heard nothing at first. Then there it was, soft padding footsteps. Tentative steps in their direction.
“Here she comes,” Violet whispered. The emotion she felt most clearly was terror, and she had no idea why. She grasped Ben’s hand tightly. He didn’t resist, and gripped right back.
The door opened. They could hear the click of the latch and gathered that it hadn’t even been locked. They could have just walked right in without a key, anyone could have. Violet held her breath.
When she saw them, Holly screamed and dropped to her knees. It wasn’t a choice. Her hand flew up to cover her mouth and she screamed again. Violet dropped down next to her and put her hand on Holly’s thin shoulder.
“Mom, we’re home, we’re okay.” She wanted to say a million words as fast as she could to assure her everything was alright. She waited for Holly to say anything at all.
“Oh my god,” she said wetly, the sound muffled by her hand. “I don’t believe it.”
Ben was on his knees by then. “It’s okay mom,” he said, “I love you,” as if that had been the doubt on her mind, the reason she cried.
“Ohhhhhhhh,” Holly howled as if she was in pain. “My babies,” she said. “You’re home, you’re okay.”
“We’re okay,” Violet said again. She felt as if she should say it over and over again. Tears flowed down her cheeks. It was all over. If she turned around, Jeremy wouldn’t be there. No bracelet or camera would hold her back. She wouldn’t have to hide in the basement if anyone came to call.
She belonged to herself again, to nobody else. She would be able to leave Jeremy behind. She repeated the mantra in her head and wondered why she still didn’t believe it.
AFTER
Some people make it despite the odds stacked against them. Some glue within them holds stronger. They can compartmentalize the things that make them hurt into chapters they can turn the pages of and leave behind. They’re forever changed because of it, but everything changes you somehow.
Violet never moved on. She stayed in that chapter, that prison in her mind. She remained contained long after being released. What was it about her that allowed Jeremy to stay in her bones? Her eyes became glazed over, and you could never tell if she was with you or back there with him.
If she was in the past, you might catch her fingering her necklace, the one with the stars Jeremy had given her for Christmas. A small shackle around her neck. Her mouth might twitch. Not a smile, not a frown, just the faint shimmer of a response to something from long ago.
Once, we were stolen. But one of us never made it out.
1
That was twenty years ago. I still can’t believe so much time has passed. It’s not as if it feels like yesterday, but I often find myself wondering how something so immense could happen during only one year out of my 27. I feel as though my life could not be defined without it.
So much happened after Vi and I went home. Our rooms were just as we’d left them. Mom kept them as a constant reminder of all she had lost. She really did think she had lost us. Everyone told her we were gone, to give up and move on. She didn’t do either of those things, but she did stop actively looking.
Not long after we got home, Vi asked Mom to sit down with us and tell her side of the story, all that happened while we were gone. Mom seemed reluctant, as if it would hurt us somehow, but Vi said we needed to know. I wasn’t sure if we did or didn’t, but I still wanted to hear it.
Mom told us she’d been expecting us home for dinner that night. When we didn’t show, she hadn’t been too worried. A little pissed off, actually. She called Vi’s cell phone, which Jeremy never told us.
When we didn’t come home that night at all, that’s when she really started to worry. She called my daycare to see if I’d been picked up, and they told her I had and that Vi had been the one to do it. No one had seen the man in the car; no one had noticed at all.
Mom didn’t sleep that night. She drove to Vi’s work. She thought maybe Vi was ignoring her, or had taken an extra shift, and she wanted to see with her own eyes that Vi was or wasn’t there. But she wasn’t; she had left hours ago. That was when Mom had called the police. She wanted to know if there had been any accidents, any suspicious characters in the neighbourhood, any reason they could give her why her two children hadn’t come home. No one could tell her anything, except that she shouldn’t worry, that we would most likely show up in the morning.
The morning came, we did not, and I became an Amber Alert. That’s still neat to me, in a twisted way. Our house turned into search party headquarters. Mom says she had no idea so many people knew who we were, let alone cared enough to join the hunt to find us.
Police officers interviewed Mom for hours on end about things like whether Vi had a bad boyfriend, if there had been any strange people lurking around before we vanished. Because that’s just it, we did vanish. We didn’t leave any trace; we hadn’t realized we would need to. Mom says she felt awful because some of the officers seemed to think we had run away from her, that she might have been an unfit mother. The thought ate away at her, that maybe it could be true. When she told us this, we gave her big hugs and comforted her, told her we never would have stayed so long if we could’ve helped it. I remember thinking, even then, that it was a lie.
They checked border guard records to see if any people of our description had left the country. For a while, our faces were even on the evening news down south. Vi asked which picture Mom had given for the posters, which I thought was a dumb question. She’d picked one of the two of us together, Vi’s arm around me at Christmas. Vi said it was a bad picture. Girls are so strange; as if that mattered. We were both smiling and my hair was in my eyes. Mom used to always brush it off my face, telling me not to hide my brown eyes. By the time we got home after being with Jeremy, my hair was so long you could barely see my face. Mom took me to get a haircut the very next day. It was one of her top priorities, which I always thought was strange.
She told us our faces had been all over the place, not on the milk cartons because they didn’t do that anymore, but everywhere else. I think Mom spent a lot of money on things like magnets. She told us she didn’t want people to just walk by a flyer, see our faces and keep going. She wanted us in their houses, on their fridges, to remind them every moment that we still hadn’t been found. Mom didn’t sleep a lot during that time. I don’t think she ate a lot, either. Hugging her felt different, less soft and more angular. She was smaller in various ways.
The worst part, she told us, was that there were no leads. Well, there were the crazies who called the tip line to spout conspiracy theories, and the police did the best they could to check up on all of the false alarms, but it got frustrating. Apparently, there were almost one hundred phone calls. Some were psychics, claiming our bodies could be found in the bottom of a well somewhere in the forest. The police didn’t tell her about calls like that. The only time she heard such things was the night she volunteered to man the phone line. She didn’t offer to do it again.
Nothing new developed. It wasn’t like they were putting together a puzzle piece by piece, each bit bringing them closer to us. The pieces were all missing. It began with inte
rviews, so many interviews, finding out who knew what. Searching different places they thought we might have ended up. There was a memo sent out about Vi’s car so people could watch the road for it. Of course, by the time they were looking, it was locked in Jeremy’s garage.
After a week of searching, they knew we hadn’t just run away. We weren’t heartless, we would have left a note or called to let Mom know we were okay. But that made it worse because it meant we were somewhere we didn’t want to be. The police even asked Mom to speak on the evening news, to send a message to anyone who might know something. She broke down in the middle of it, couldn’t finish the words. She told us she stayed awake all night after that newscast, thinking she might have blown her one shot, that she had muttered and mumbled the instructions people needed to get us home to her.
The worst part was what came next. That was when they started dragging the lakes, scouring the fields. Mom said it terrified her, but it wasn’t as if she would ask them not to look. As she told us this, Vi and I both cried. They were the words we needed to hear. Our mother had been looking for us. She hadn’t thrown in the towel or forgotten us. We shouldn’t have wanted to hear that she’d been destroyed by it, but we did. It was music to our burning ears. I remember how important I felt, and how anchored. It was nice to know that someone grieved your absence. I don’t think either Vi or myself truly realized how much we doubted our ability to be missed.
We asked so many questions, greedy for the knowledge of what had happened while we’d been suspended in time and space. It strained her to answer; she would stop to break down, but I think she understood why we needed to know. She told us the only thing that kept her going was that at the end of each day, our bodies hadn’t shown up. Our corpses weren’t lying in the bottom of any lake they had drug so far. Whenever the phone rang, her body would tense with the fear that it would be the worst news. For the first month or two, she actually drew comfort in the absence of that phone call. She told us she was living in a world of in-betweens. I wasn’t sure what she meant at the time,and I didn’t ask. I think I know now.
All in all, we were gone for ten months. Mom told us she was in denial for a long time, and Vi asked in denial of what.
“Of your absence,” she said, and even at seven I thought that was silly. The only certain part of any of it had been that we were absent. That we were in danger, that we were being held against our will, that we could be harmed or damaged or tortured – it was the rest she should’ve been in denial of.
After four months of searching, the police told her they couldn’t keep looking much longer. Things had been winding down, volunteers lost stamina and resources ran low. Mom offered to put more money in, more man-hours, but it was no good. They cancelled the tip line. Mom didn’t have the heart to answer those calls, and there was no one else to do it. The house emptied. The hallways were still lined with markered maps, but now no one added to them, no one clustered around, delegating tasks based on where those red dots were and weren’t. The task to find us fell to her. Our names stopped being read on the evening news. The newspaper stopped reporting on us, the journalist who had been covering our story stopped calling. Mom said she felt a little offended. With all the details she had shared with that woman, Jessica Valdez, she felt they shared something special. Mom couldn’t believe their relationship had been about publishing a story and nothing more.
Family members rallied around Mom; people brought casseroles and called to invite her to barbeques on the weekends. She always declined. She lived like a hermit, only going outside for work and racing home every evening to check her messages, her mail, to see if there was any word.
I know my mother. I know she loves us, and I don’t doubt that a large part of her was missing when we were missing. But I also know her well enough to know how she copes. Our house wouldn’t have been empty. She wouldn’t have said no to all of the offers. She would have needed the attention, the frames to lean on. When I think of our house in our absence, I imagine it teeming with men, like an anthill. I can see suitors coming and going, bringing flowers and food, each one an offering for her bleeding heart. That wasn’t something I figured out when I was seven, but soon after, when I started to ponder the logistics of her sitting at home abandoned. That’s when I started to white-out some of her version of the story and paint in my own. I know Vi did this instantly, right as Mom told us.
When Vi called from the pay phone, Mom hadn’t known what to think. It had been so long since she’d heard our voices, and Vi wasn’t herself that day so the voice was likely unfamiliar. Regardless, when we showed up on our own front stoop, Mom told us she thought for a split second that we might be ghosts come back to haunt her. She said she was scared to touch us in case her fingers went right through.
People always ask me what it was like to be kidnapped, and they’re always disappointed with my answer. It wasn’t all that dramatic, not for me anyways. I wasn’t deprived. And I know, I know, people always say that the things that matter most aren’t the tangible ones, but I was a little boy. I didn’t have all of that stuff figured out just yet.
Jeremy was never mean to me. I mean, he did things that were awful. Keeping us in the basement at the beginning was really negligent. It was a long time ago now, but I can still smell the bucket in the corner where we had to go to the bathroom. Vi even threw up in there one time, and Jeremy didn’t come in until the next morning to clean it out. It was awful and cramped, but that didn’t last long. For the most part, we had the run of the house and the whole property.
When people ask me how I feel about Jeremy, I never know what to say. I should hate him. I know this is what they want to hear. Since we escaped, the world has been waiting for Vi and I to condemn him, but we haven’t. I was too young to understand that what he had done was truly wrong, and Vi was in too deep. I didn’t know that then.
2
I don’t know how long it took Jeremy to realize we were never coming back.
Later that day, Jeremy drove to the police station and turned himself in. He walked in, told the woman at the counter that he had kidnapped Violet and Ben Wrigley for almost a year. After he said it, he took out the gun that was tucked into his pants, placed it on the counter, and put his hands behind his head. The woman had no idea what to do. She radioed someone in the back, and they came out with handcuffs. They arrested him right away.
When they told me Jeremy had a gun, I knew instantly that he would never have wielded it against anyone. He must have purchased it after we left; otherwise he would have used it to kidnap us instead of the fake one. I found out it was fake years later, but I’ll get to that.
The gun he carried that day, a real one, carrying one bullet only, had been meant for Jeremy and Jeremy alone. He would have turned it on himself before anyone else, and this knowledge tingled inside of me even back then. I still don’t know the reason why he didn’t just do it; blow his brains out and get it over with quickly. I’m glad he didn’t, but I can’t help but wonder what changed his mind and gave him the courage to hand himself over. His last parting gift to us.
He’s still in prison, twenty years later. It’s minimum-security, and I know firsthand that he’s fairly comfortable there. It isn’t so bad. Twenty years for what he did for one year. I don’t know, is that a lot? Maybe I’m biased.
We weren’t involved in the trial. We never had to stand up in court and say that yes, Jeremy had been the one to keep us. We never got to defend or condemn him, not really, not in any grand way. We were sat down in interviews and asked how we felt about Jeremy, what had happened while we were gone. They asked me over and over if he had hurt me in any way. I always said no. They would rephrase the question, saying the same thing in different words. They were looking for me to say yes. I think it pissed them off when I refused to submit. A couple of times, they worded the questions so bizarrely that I didn’t even know what they were asking, but I was smart enough not to answer those ones. I asked them what they meant, every time. I didn’t
know what was going to happen to Jeremy, but I wanted them to know the truth about what happened when we lived with him.
The newspapers loved it. Our faces were all over the papers again. They took an updated photo of us with our arms around each other and plastered it on every front page. They called us the Stockholm Syndrome Siblings. I had no idea what it meant. I do now, and they had it all wrong.
People try to tell me that Jeremy brainwashed us, that he told us he wasn’t the bad guy so many times that we started to believe it. I told them that not once did Jeremy ever tell me he wasn’t a bad guy. He didn’t ever say he was a good guy. He didn’t talk about what sort of guy he was at all. That’s when they would tell me that the best manipulators are people who can do so without you even knowing, and that this must have been the case for us. I always shook my head at that. It didn’t make sense to me. Jeremy hadn’t conducted some strange voodoo, he hadn’t swung a pendulum in front of our faces and told us we were getting sleepy and that he wasn’t the bad guy. But people didn’t like to hear that. People are dying to convict, to sentence, to condemn. I think they truly believed that if Vi and I admitted we’d been brainwashed then the world would be a little safer again. It was the in-between that was the scary part.
It would be a lie to say I’ve fully moved past what happened to us. I don’t think there’s a day that goes by that I don’t think about it for some reason or another. People recognize me less now. Sometimes they still look at me with huge eyes, like they were the ones to discover me, as if they could call 911 right at that moment and set everything straight. I always feel like telling them that no one found me, not really. We might still have been lost if we had waited to be found. We turned ourselves in. We were the ones who finally brought ourselves home.
Once, We Were Stolen Page 29