by M. O’Keefe
“You’re…kidnapping me, Tommy?”
“I am.”
“You get that this is ridiculous, right?”
“I do.”
“So how about you explain it to me!”
He glanced at his watch. “I will, I just… We need to get going, Beth,” he said.
Every second of my life since I left him had been about turning myself into something he wouldn’t recognize. Something I wouldn’t recognize. Burying that real and true part of myself I’d shown him so deep, so far, I never saw it again.
And no one else did either.
I had to be Jada.
Jada was the only way I survived.
“My name is Jada,” I said out of sheer habit. Sheer self-protective habit.
“Jada,” he said with a nod as if committing it to memory. As if erasing all he could of Beth.
It wasn’t a bad idea. I’d done it, too. In fact, I would do it with him. I’d put Jada in charge of shit again.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Then don’t do this. Let me go.”
“I can’t.”
“Well then, what are you waiting for, Tommy? You’re in the middle of a kidnapping! You’ve got a time frame to keep. Chop chop, my friend.” Sarcasm was a comfortable place to be. Sarcasm was all Jada. Beth had been too soft for sarcasm.
Tommy shut the door and then locked it with the key fob he’d taken when I tried to drive away.
I rolled my eyes at him in the rearview mirror, but I liked that I was a problem.
Really, was there anything worse than a passive kidnapping victim?
We pulled away from the side of the road, and I exhaled slowly. My brain was chasing itself in circles. I was half here, half in the past.
Concentrate. Concentrate on now. The past is nothing.
“Is this for money?” I asked.
He shook his head.
“You said it’s a job.”
“Not for money.”
“What kind of job isn’t for money?”
He didn’t answer.
“Is this some kind of Jimmy Fallon prank?” Please let it be a Jimmy Fallon prank.
His eyes met mine in the rearview mirror, and I felt the blast of something…sizzly. An echo of that prickly new-love feeling, with all the heat we’d had. God. So much heat. I’d been on fire at the thought of him. My hands—at every available moment—in my panties.
Once this guy showed me what hands down panties could feel like.
None of that, however, is relevant to the fact that he is kidnapping me.
“No. It’s not a prank.”
“Is it a sex thing?”
His eyes in the mirror were horrified.
“Is it? You’ve kidnapped me in order to do what we didn’t do when we were kids. You looking for a little sexual closure, Tommy? You want me to put my hair up in pigtails and we can find the nearest art room and finish what we started?”
That I was actually trotting out one of my old, post St. Joke’s fantasies shouldn’t have been exciting. None of this was…exciting.
But it was. Kind of.
And when his eyes met mine in the mirror—that was exciting too.
“No,” he said. And if that was true, fine, but now the idea was here, between us. Like his ugly fucking dog.
We used to want each other so bad I rubbed myself raw in bathrooms in that high school. I’d get worked up just from a glance at his wrist, with its knobby bones and all that promise of manhood. The sound of his voice cutting through the noise of the cafeteria had the power to stop my heart. Turn me to goo.
I’d been a radio with one frequency. Him.
“Then you better start explaining,” I said, snapping through the smoky heat in my blood.
“Do you… you remember the foster home?”
I laughed. “Yeah, Tommy,” I said with enough sarcasm for, like, twenty kidnap victims. Using up all the sarcasm in a twenty-mile radius. They were running out of it in the Grand Canyon. There would probably be a national shortage. “I remember St. Jokes.”
His ears got red, which meant he was blushing, and I hated that I knew that. That those memories lingered like ghosts. “Some people would want to forget what happened there,” he said in a low murmur.
I stared at the back of his head, my heart in a knot.
Yeah, I wanted to say. Some of it was shit but…there was you. There was us.
And those memories were so sweet. So fine. Worn smooth like pebbles, because I took them out like gems and held them in sweaty, clutching fingers when I needed to remember a time I’d been loved.
There was no way I could have forgotten him. Tommy was too big a memory to forget. Too beautiful a sound to let go of. Despite everything else, there was no forgetting Tommy.
“Is that what you did?” I asked him. Did you put me in a box and forget me?
“I tried,” he said. And it didn’t just hurt; it fucking infuriated me. It filled me with something dark and hollow and hungry. I’d been shining memories of him to a high polish, imagining what would have happened between us if we’d only been regular kids, if Mr. Mendoza hadn’t walked in on us.
I’d thought myself so in love that when I finally got away from my mother—I looked for his family.
Looked. For. His. Family.
I’d tried to connect myself to every single part of him I could find. I’d thought I could fix things for him. Or something…
And he’d been trying to forget me?
I called bullshit on that, right there. Something in the way his eyes tracked me in the backseat, the way the tips of his ears were red and his hands were squeezing on that steering wheel told me a different kind of story.
“And yet, here you are, kidnapping me? I don’t think it worked, Tommy.”
“No,” he said in his serious, quiet voice that I remembered so clearly. “It didn’t work.”
Outside, a dark bird took flight against the peach dawn, and in the silence of the car, the memories sprang up like dandelions in May. Unstoppable.
The art room. The notes under salt shakers. Sitting beside him at church, the distance between our legs delicious and awful at the same time. My nerves still remembered. The wild zing of something so wanted and so forbidden, it left its imprint on my thigh. A tattoo of desire.
The graham crackers.
The fucking graham crackers really started everything.
“You hungry or anything?” he asked like he’d been remembering the crackers too.
I was starving, but I wasn’t asking this guy… my God, Tommy… for shit. That was how Stockholm syndrome began.
“I’m fine,” I said. “Finish your story about how you came to carry me out of a house without shoes, phone or…what else, oh, that’s right…consent.”
God, I loved Jada.
“You asked me to get you out of there, Jada,” he said.
Of course I did.
“Is that making you feel better about this? Or did you happen to notice I was wasted at the time?”
His silence was pretty damning.
“It’s a long story,” he said with a sigh that told me he’d rather do anything but explain why he had me in the backseat of his car.
“Yeah? Good thing we’re on this thousand-mile road trip, isn’t it?”
He laughed, a kind of tired laugh. He must have been driving all night.
I refused to feel anything about that.
I refused, in fact, to feel anything about anything. Dr. John was so good at facilitating that kind of thing. It was hard to manufacture that drifty careless feeling on my own. But I pulled my legs up under me and crossed my arms over my chest and gave it my best shot.
“Right.” He sighed and picked up a Styrofoam cup from the middle console but it was empty and he swore, tossing the cup into the passenger seat footwell. I imagined him stopping at gas stations with me passed out in the backseat of his car, and I was cold to the bone. “Well, that night when the Pastor took you into the—”
“I know which night,” I said. I held myself rigid so the memories and their hot, greedy hands would get no hold on me. Those memories I’d dealt with. I’d processed the fuck out of them. I’d counseled and therapied. I’d group sessioned and yoga retreated. I’d art therapied and casual sexed them into something I could manage.
I’d cried… I’d cried and I’d cried and I’d cried. And I’d raged and screamed. And then I put them away. Leaving me with trust issues, insomnia and some stories to tell.
And Jada.
But here they were again, slices like nightmares. The Pastor’s hand had smelled like tomato sauce and his breath like soap. The edge of the desk had bit into my thighs. And I thought, I thought with my whole heart that it was over. That I was going to be raped by the Pastor in my Hello Kitty nightgown. But then the door opened and Tommy came in, holding his knife. And he’d screamed. He screamed so loud everything went quiet. I would remember that for the rest of my life.
I didn’t get raped, and that that was my silver lining for that night was its own kind of nightmare.
Everything after Tommy coming in was hazy.
“They told me he was dead,” I said. In the hospital room they’d told me he was dead. That the kids in the house had killed him.
But then my mother showed up. And the nightmare got real.
“I thought all of you were in jail,” I said.
“We would have gone to jail,” he said. “But this man came in and he made the charges go away. He even took care of the Pastor’s wife, who told the police we’d planned to kill both of them and steal from the church.”
“Was he a lawyer?”
“No. Opposite of a lawyer, I think. But in return for him doing this, we owed him a debt.”
“You fucking killed a guy, and you got to leave for a favor?”
“The man, Bates, he was really powerful. Or worked for a really powerful man at that time. And he pulled the strings to get us out. I can’t explain it. I don’t know why. It just…happened.”
I understood that kind of power. How money could make things go away. How fear could make people do things they normally wouldn’t. How some people could walk into a room and make everyone bow to their will—and feel, in the end, like every awful thing they did was right. And just.
My mother had that kind of power. She’d waltzed into that hospital room with her money and her soft, reasonable voice and all her credentials and it was like she’d never left me. Never hurt me. Wouldn’t dream of doing it again.
Yeah, I understood that kind of power.
I lived in fear of that kind of power.
But I didn’t feel like being sympathetic.
I was being fucking kidnapped. By my childhood crush. My first love.
Sympathy was squashed out by the heavy fucking irony of it all.
“Sounds ridiculous.”
“Yeah,” he said quietly. “It really does. But we walked out of that police station, and no one stopped us.”
“And none of it explains why you’ve got me in this car.”
“This was the debt.”
“Kidnapping me?”
“Picking you up in Santa Barbara and dropping you off in Arizona.”
“That makes zero sense, dude.”
“I know. But it’s happening.”
“You know I’m going to have you arrested, right? For kidnapping. I’m going to see you in jail for this shit. The second I get my hands on a phone, you’re done.”
“That seems about right,” he said like going to jail for this was what he deserved, and I sniffed and looked out the window. The sky was getting lighter. My heart was turning to glass.
“People are going to be worried about me,” I told him, though frankly it was kind of hard to come up with a list of people who would give a shit.
The US tour was over, and after the debacle in Los Angeles, the European venues were pulling away. Two of them had been canceled altogether. Half my crew had left for Lorde’s tour.
I’d fucked up.
My mother said I self-sabotaged.
She was probably right, but I didn’t go around admitting it.
“My manager,” I said. “Sherman. He’ll call the cops. He probably already has.”
In front, Tommy nodded.
“Beth. For sure she’s freaking out,” I said, and he glanced at me in the rearview mirror.
“Your assistant?” he asked.
“Yeah. She does not fool around, and she will be out for your blood—”
“You fired her.”
“What?”
“You fired her. Last night before I picked you up.”
“You didn’t ‘pick me up,’” I grumbled, but I frowned. Was that the low-level anxiety I felt about Beth. Had I really fired her? I swallowed my groan and put a hand over my face so Tommy couldn’t see my expression in the rearview mirror.
“She stayed though,” he said. “After you fired her. She stayed and she tried to protect you from that doctor.” He smeared a bunch of disdain all over the word doctor, and he wasn’t wrong.
I sniffed and watched the rolling red earth outside.
“Where in Arizona are you dropping me?”
“Outside Flagstaff.”
Flagstaff. Jesus.
“You better hope it’s a spa, Tommy.”
“Let’s hope it’s a spa, then.” I glanced up to see a quick smile flash across his face. There and gone. This wasn’t funny. None of it was funny.
But his smile was nice. His smile had always been nice. It was the dimple.
And its rarity. How, in those three months, I’d felt special when he turned that smile on me.
Think of something else. Anything else.
But since I was only twenty percent myself these days and the things I usually thought about—the things that usually crowded my brain, like art and music—weren’t there to occupy me…
I couldn’t stop fixating on what was happening in my body: the anxious, antsy feeling in my veins, the way my skin didn’t fit right and every thought wanted to go someplace dark. This would be about the time I’d make my assistant get Dr. John.
So he could make these feelings go away.
“You have my purse?” I asked. I had a bottle of Ativan in my bag. And an Ativan would really help take the edge off this kidnapping.
“No,” he said.
“No phone. No purse. No shoes. I’m giving this kidnapping a shitty review.”
I was being ridiculous. I felt ridiculous. I felt like I was coming apart.
The dog came up over the console to jump into the backseat. She crowded me into the middle, stepping on my hand and flopping over my legs. I suddenly had a lapful of dog.
“Pest,” Tommy said, but the dog—Pest, I guess—didn’t listen. She licked my hand instead.
“Are you sure this is a dog?” I asked.
“Simon and me thought she was a cat.”
I blinked at the casual mention of Simon, and I bit back a thousand questions I had and instead, feeling small and awful, muttered, “Get off me,” and shoved the dog away. She whimpered as if wounded by my rejection, and she climbed and flopped back into the front seat.
Comfort had no appeal for me.
The silence was thick and awful, and I wanted to snarl at him. I wanted to sharpen my claws and draw blood. The anxious feeling was growing worse, and it had nothing to do with Beth or not having my phone or even wondering where the hell he was going to take me.
The feeling that my body didn’t fit me anymore—it came from the pills and the needles. Or rather it came from not having them.
“Beth?” he said.
“The name’s Jada.” Beth doesn’t live here anymore.
“Jada. You all right?”
I wiped a hand over my face, and it came away sweaty. I was beginning to sweat through my shirt. But I was cold.
“Just fine,” I said, giving him nothing. Not even my pain.
11
Jada
Th
ere’d been a time, those heady art-room days, my hands learning the shape of his body through his clothes, that I’d thought I’d recognize Tommy MacNeill anywhere. In the dark, even, by smell.
I would know him by the sound of his breath shuddering in his lungs at the touch of my hand against the bare skin of his waist the few times I’d been brave enough to slip my fingers under his shirt.
There’d been a time I’d thought it impossible not to recognize him. Every sense knew him. My body. My heart.
But I saw nothing of the Tommy I’d known, with his shy smile and bright eyes, in this giant man in the front seat.
And if you’d asked me seven years ago if I thought Tommy was capable of something like this, I would have laughed in your face. The kid with the graham crackers was not the adult in this car.
“What have you been doing since St. Jokes,” I asked, trying to make my chattering teeth stop chattering. We were climbing a hill, and my ears popped painfully. Everything hurt. This had to be the first stages of withdrawal. Which meant there were going to be more glorious stages. “I mean, is this your first kidnapping, or do you have a little business going?”
He glanced at me, real fast in the rearview mirror, and then back at the road.
And he didn’t say a word.
“It’s not a hard question,” I said. “Unless… if you tell me, you’d have to kill me?” I gasped. “Are you a government agent, Tommy?”
He shook his head.
“Is that a yes?”
“No.”
Again more silence.
“Really? The silent treatment? We’re not sixteen anymore, Tommy.”
“What’s talking going to do?” he asked.
I blinked, surprised. At St. Joke’s we used to talk all the time. Once I started talking, anyway. But maybe I remembered it wrong. Maybe…maybe all those feelings had just been on my side. Maybe I’d changed things over the years, recast what happened to give me some comfort.
Whatever.
“Keep you awake,” I finally said. “Distract me.”
“I’m awake.”
“Jeez, you turned into an asshole.”
I saw his jaw clench, the muscle bulging in his neck. “There’s no point, Jada,” he said. “I’m dropping you off and driving away.”