“Wait, do they share a room?”
“Of course they do. They’ve been together for fifteen years.”
“You don’t have to get all pissy. I’m just thinking about the fact that you lied to me about them.”
“I never once lied to you about them. I never said anything to you about them.”
“You called her ‘Aunt’ Linda. How is that not a lie? You showed me Aunt Linda’s room, down the hall from your mom’s. You pointed it out the first time I went to your house. And if they sleep in the same bed, then obviously that’s not her room, so that’s a lie. And then you went and told Lizzie about them before you told me. And I’m your girlfriend!”
“I only told her last week at Chastain. You were at that thing with your mom, and Sake had cousins in town or something, so it was just the two of us. We started talking, and I knew from what you had told me that she and Sake were a couple, plus I could kind of sense it on my own, so I just went ahead and told her about my moms. It actually felt really good to tell someone. And then she said that, yeah, she and Sake were in love and she was pretty sure that you knew and she was pretty sure you were freaked out by it. She said she figured that was why the three of you weren’t hanging out together as much this year.”
“She told you that?”
“She said she misses you.”
Suddenly I felt so sad. Was I losing all of my friends, first Anna and now Lizzie and Sake, and maybe even Dean? I could feel tears welling in my eyes. How had we gotten here? How was it that Dean and I were yelling at each other on the night we were supposed to have sex for the first time?
“I’m happy for Sake and Lizzie. I really am. It’s just, it’s an adjustment, you know? But I’ll call Lizzie tomorrow. I will. Honestly, though, I think I’m more of a bad friend than homophobic. I mean, I think the real reason I haven’t been hanging out with them as much is because I want to spend all of my time with you.”
I watched as his jaw unclenched and his face softened into a half smile. “You’re sweet,” he said.
• • •
We finished the pizza—now cold—and watched Harold and Maude. Dean almost fell off the couch during the bubble-blowing scene, when it’s made obvious that twenty-year-old Harold and seventy-nine-year-old Maude just consummated their relationship. Dean and I did not end up consummating our relationship that night. I told him that I wasn’t actually sure if I was ready, and he acted like the opposite of a guy from a John Hughes movie, assuring me that he was fine doing whatever. And then we started kissing, ending up on the living room rug. Dean touched my breasts, just stroked them lightly, and told me I was beautiful. I pressed my hand against the hollow of his chest. For some reason I loved that part of his body in particular.
We fell asleep on the floor and probably would have slept there all night if Argus 2 hadn’t woken me, butting his head against mine. It was after midnight and the house had that odd, haunted feeling it gets when the rest of the neighborhood is asleep.
“You awake?” I asked Dean.
Silence.
I poked him until he opened his eyes. “Where did you tell your mom you were sleeping?”
“Here,” he said.
“God, it really is different for boys. Even my mom would not be cool with you staying overnight.”
“My moms are just happy I’m straight,” said Dean sleepily.
“Wait, what? Wouldn’t they be super supportive if you were gay?”
“They would, of course. But they know how hard it is, so they don’t want that for their kid. You realize I’m telling you a dirty secret about gay parents, don’t you?”
“All the secrets are coming out, huh?”
Argus 2 settled against my chest and Dean flopped an arm over my shoulder. Even in the dark I could make out the shape of the furniture in the room, including my dad’s old leather recliner, which carried his essence, still.
“I was surprised to see Anna here,” Dean said.
“Me, too. I think she was offering an olive branch. It was so funny, though, she came to me to tell me about how she wants to give money to our old nanny so she can get acupuncture. Which is just so not Anna. Nor is it Ada. But I contributed. It was my own peace offering.”
“Huh,” said Dean.
“What?”
“Did you know there was someone waiting for her in her car while she was in here with you?”
I sat up, Argus 2 darting out of the room as soon as I moved. “What are you talking about?”
Dean sat up, too. “I parked down the street like you asked me to. Anna’s Volvo was parked down there, too. It didn’t really register with me at the time, not consciously. But shit. That was her car. And there was someone in the front seat. Just sitting there. Wearing a ball cap. Fuck, Sarah. Do you know who’s really into acupuncture?”
I could feel my heart tighten inside my chest even though my brain hadn’t quite caught up. “Who?”
“Mountain Man. He gave me a whole lecture about it one night, about how doctors try to suppress the evidence of its efficacy because they’re scared Western medicine will die out.”
“Anna said something just like that to me. Oh my God, Dean. Do you think she’s still hanging out with him?”
“Do you really think she’s collecting money to give to your nanny for acupuncture?”
“I don’t understand. What else would she do with it?”
“Give it to Mountain Man?”
Had Anna come by my house earlier that night because she was collecting money for Mountain Man? God, if that was the case, then he was definitely lying when he said he was once some higher-up at Coke. Shit. Was Anna dating him? Was she planning to spend the night with him, maybe use the money I gave her for a hotel room, telling her mom she was sleeping at my house, an easy cover since my own mom was away?
I stood and raced to the phone, dialing Anna’s house, praying she was at home to answer.
Chapter 21
SURFACE
Atlanta, 1990
Anna’s family had two phone lines, one for Anna and one for her parents. I dialed hers first and let it ring a bunch of times before hanging up. I dialed again. No answer. I took a deep breath and dialed the main number, the one that would sound in her parents’ bedroom, the number I had committed to memory by the time I was five.
Uncle Bob answered on the second ring. “Yes? Who’s calling?”
“I’m sorry to be calling so late. It’s Sarah. Sarah Strum.”
“Sarah!” he said, his voice suddenly full of warmth and concern. “What’s going on? Are you girls all right?”
“I need to get ahold of Anna and she didn’t pick up when I called her line.”
I heard Aunt Eve’s voice in the background. “Is everything okay?”
“Isn’t Anna with you?” asked Uncle Bob, and it felt as if all the air was squeezed out of my lungs.
“No, she’s not. She came by earlier tonight, a little before seven. She was looking for money to help Ada.”
I heard Aunt Eve again, her voice panicked: “Anna’s not with Sarah?”
And then I heard Uncle Bob say, “Go check her room,” before he resumed talking to me.
“Anna said that she was spending the night at your house and the two of you were meeting Ada for lunch tomorrow at Deacon Burton’s. She said y’all were collecting money for Ada. We gave her two hundred and fifty dollars.”
“You gave money for Ada’s acupuncture?”
“Acupuncture? No. Nursing care. Anna said she was having back surgery and needed a home nurse to assist her afterward.”
I could feel the tightening in my throat that often signaled the onset of a panic attack. I was thinking of Mountain Man—Miles—and how idiotic it was that we all just sort of accepted him as a fixture of Chastain Park, how we let him hang around, how we engaged him in conversation, and no one ever told a parent or anyone with any authority about the fact that there was a grown man lurking in the woods. I was thinking of how I dutifully sent my mom
to tell Aunt Eve about what had happened with George, but I had kept secret Anna’s interactions with Mountain Man, so as not to get our whole class in trouble, so as not to shut down the whole Chastain Park Senior Experience.
What if Miles did something terrible to Anna? Men did terrible things to women all the time. I knew this from some of the cases Mom took on, details of which she had started sharing with me over the last year, because I had started asking. These particular clients were insane, Mom claimed, and should spend their lives in prison, but still she did not believe they should die at the hands of the state. I thought of her client who pushed his way into a strange woman’s house when she answered his knock, bound her feet and hands, raped her repeatedly, cut off her nipples, and then stabbed her to death, puncturing her body again and again.
I heard a muffled noise and then Aunt Eve’s voice was on the phone. “Sarah, are you certain that Anna is not at your house right now?”
“No. She’s not.”
“And y’all never had plans for her to spend the night with you tonight, to keep you company while your mom is out of town?”
“No. I mean, she came by earlier, but I didn’t know she was coming. She was never supposed to spend the night.”
“Do you have any idea where Anna might be or who she might be with?” asked Aunt Eve.
“She said she was going to visit Ada, bring her money, but I don’t think she really was. And then later my friend Dean, who came over just as she was leaving, told me he saw someone in her car.”
And then I told her about Mountain Man, as I should have done weeks ago.
“Stay right where you are, sweetie, and don’t answer the door to anyone but Anna or me. I’m coming over.”
• • •
Twenty minutes later there was a knock on the front door, and when I peered through the peephole Aunt Eve was on the other side.
I unlocked the bolt and she stormed in, and if she noticed Dean standing beside me she made no mention of it.
“No word?”
I shook my head.
“Bob stayed home in case Anna shows up. I need you to take a look at something, something that might help us find her.”
“Okay, sure.”
She strode into the kitchen and sat down at the table. “Could you get me a glass of water?” she asked Dean.
Dean wordlessly filled a glass with water and placed it on the table in front of her.
Aunt Eve took an envelope out of her purse and from the envelope an old photograph of her as a young woman, rail thin, with short-cropped hair and granny glasses. She was looking straight at the camera, her expression fierce, unsmiling. Next to her was a man, maybe twenty-five years old, with long curly hair and a smirk. It took me a minute to make the connection because in the photograph the man was much younger and thinner, but then it hit me: It was Mountain Man.
“How do you know Mountain Man? I mean, Miles?”
“His name isn’t Miles,” said Aunt Eve. “It’s Warren. Warren St. Clair. I knew him a lifetime ago. For a long time I thought he was dead. Oh, sweetie, there’s more to tell you, but for now we have got to find Anna. Think, Sarah. Think of anywhere they might be.”
“Chastain Park,” I said, feeling like an idiot for not having suggested it the first moment we realized Anna may have been with Mountain Man—Warren. “Look in the woods around Chastain Park, near the stone pavilion.”
• • •
Aunt Eve called Uncle Bob, who contacted someone high up in the Atlanta Police Department, and soon an APB was sent out that Warren St. Clair, a man who was supposed to have died eighteen years ago, had been seen earlier that evening in seventeen-year-old Anna Powers’s 1987 Volvo station wagon. Warren St. Clair had a laundry list of charges against him, including murder and assault, and now he was wanted for the possible abduction of Anna Powers.
Eve returned home on the slim chance that Anna might miraculously show up there, while instructing Dean and me to stay at my house just in case she returned. Meanwhile, the police sent a swarm of officers to Chastain Park. They did not find Anna or Warren but instead encountered a couple of kids from our class, stragglers who still hadn’t called it a night, though it was after 2:00 a.m. They were brought to the police station, where they were questioned about their knowledge of the whereabouts of Anna Powers before their parents were called to come pick them up. Everyone was talking about it at school on Monday.
When they finally did find Anna, she was within two miles of both of our homes, at the Majestic Diner, where two cops had happened to stop for a cup of coffee. The cops had both read the APB and were pretty sure the burly man in a City Lights T-shirt sitting at a table with a pretty teen fit the description. The officer asked the waitress, who was pouring drinks behind the counter, how long the two of them had been there, and she rolled her eyes, saying they had been there all night, first ordering eggs, then pancakes, then endless refills of coffee.
Warren surely noticed the officers as soon as they walked in. Later Anna told me that throughout the night his eyes kept glancing at the door, as if he was expecting someone. It was probably when the cops started conferring with the waitress that he had placed a twenty-dollar bill on the table and stood to leave, perhaps believing that he and Anna could just hustle out. His decision to make a sudden departure confused Anna, especially because he offered no explanation, but she stood and followed him to the door. One of the officers stepped in front of it, blocking Warren’s exit, and when Warren turned to see if there was another way out, the other officer, gun pulled, told him to freeze. Warren did not try to run for it or reach for a weapon or pull Anna in front of him as a shield. Instead, he complied, almost as if he had been anticipating this moment. They made him get down on the ground, face-first, before cuffing him. All the while Anna was crying for them to stop, insisting that he had done nothing wrong, that they were just talking, just talking about books. She held up Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent, along with a collection of feminist essays titled This Bridge Called My Back, both of which Warren had recommended to Anna, and which she had purchased a few days earlier from A Cappella Books in Little Five Points. They planned to talk all night before he headed back to California, taking with him the six hundred dollars she had managed to gather from her savings, her parents, and me. Warren had told her he was going to use the money to continue with his antiracism work, which Anna said helped her justify lying about collecting it for Ada. “I figured it would go to someone like Ada in California,” Anna later told me.
• • •
The officers insisted Anna come in for questioning. She asked if she could ride in the back of the patrol car with Warren, but of course they said no. At the station they were gentle with her, one officer getting her a blanket and another bringing her a cup of water. It was very late and she was scared and exhausted. She told me that they kept asking if Warren had tried anything sexually improper with her and that she kept explaining that they just liked to get together and talk.
It turned out that their meeting at the Majestic was the third time they had met one-on-one, ever since he had choked up while talking about his daughter with her and Redburn at Chastain. She had vanished from his life when she was eleven, taken by her mother to her home country of Guatemala, where they had disappeared into a culture he had no access to. What could he do, Warren had said, his eyes wet with tears, besides hope that Julianna—his daughter—chose to contact him once she was eighteen? (His half-Guatemalan daughter was, of course, a fiction. He was readying Anna to tell her, one day, that she was the daughter he was searching for.)
He told Anna that she reminded him of his lost daughter, and she shyly told him that they shared similar names—hers was short for “Joannah.” He told her that he hoped she was being careful at Chastain with so many careless, drunken boys around. “All women should take self-defense classes,” he said. “Learn judo.”
Sometime during that conversation about his fictitious daughter, after Redburn had wandered aw
ay, Anna told him about what had happened with George, or at least as much as she knew, and how she had kept quiet about it, hoping the shame would pass. “Maybe if I had known judo . . . ,” she said.
He looked at her sternly and said very clearly, “You did nothing wrong. Nothing. Your body is yours, period. You have nothing to be ashamed of. That little shit is who should feel shame.”
She told me that, at that moment, she had felt a great surge of love for this strange man whom she knew she was not even supposed to be talking to, but who made her feel better than anyone had in a long time.
• • •
After being questioned, Anna was released into the custody of her parents, and sometime over the next day Aunt Eve told Anna that Warren St. Clair was her biological father, come to find her.
But I didn’t know that when I called Mom’s hotel room early the next morning, after Eve had called to say that Anna had been found. All I knew was that Anna had been in danger and now Anna was safe. A man answered, and then Mom, clearly flustered, grabbed the line. “I’m sorry, sweetie. We thought you were the wake-up call. Meet Bruce, my friend.”
“Oh, Mama,” I said, and I started weeping.
“Sweetie, I had no idea you would be so upset. Look, Bruce is wonderful, but no one is ever going to try to replace your father.”
I actually laughed. “God, no. That’s not what I’m upset about.” And then I told her about what happened with Anna and Mountain Man, who turned out to be Warren St. Clair.
“Do not let that man get near you,” said my mom.
“He can’t. He’s in jail. They arrested him last night.”
“How much of the story did Eve tell you?”
“She said she once knew him, a long time ago.”
We Are All Good People Here Page 26