by Kara Thomas
I prop my elbows on the table, rest my face in my hands. Shrug stubbornly, the ringleader of a food fight marched into the principal’s office for questioning. Whatever it takes to stall.
Agent Cummings’s gaze flicks to her partner.
“We just spoke to the medic who checked you out,” Agent Novak says. “You sure you don’t want a more thorough exam at the hospital?”
I shake my head. “I’m not hurt.”
Agent Cummings strips off her suit jacket and drapes it over the back of her chair. “Can we get them to turn the heat down?” she says, as casually as if we’re at the Olive Garden.
Novak sighs and steps outside, leaving me with Cummings.
There’s a crescent of taupe lip gloss on the rim of her Dunkin’ cup. She taps a smoothed, unpolished nail against the lid. “It might be a good idea to get checked out by a real doctor.”
“I think I’m going to pass out,” I say.
“Head between your legs,” Cummings says. “Deep breaths.”
I lower my head to my lap, just so I don’t have to look at her. The tick of the clock overhead is the only sound in the room for a beat until the click of the door.
The man, Novak, is back. He shuts the door behind him and hovers next to Agent Cummings instead of taking a seat.
“We know you must be shaken up,” he says. “But as you can imagine, we’ve got a lot of questions for you.”
I nod. I have no plans to answer their questions.
Novak’s brow furrows. “Why didn’t you want the officers here to contact your family?”
I cast my eyes down at my hands.
“Katherine,” Agent Cummings says, drawing my gaze up to her. “There are a lot of people who are going to be happy you’re alive. But they’re gonna want answers.”
I say nothing. Maybe acting traumatized will buy me time. Buy Jesse more time, to disappear for good.
Cummings pushes her coffee cup aside and knits her hands together. “Where’s Jesse, Kat?”
“I don’t know,” I say.
“Okay,” Cummings sighs. “What about your cousin?”
“I don’t know.” I swallow to clear my throat, make room for the lies. “I last saw him yesterday morning. He went to Burlington to do a drug deal and never came back.”
A knock at the door; before Cummings or Novak can reply to my claim, the gawking officer sticks her head in the room. “There’s a woman here demanding to see Kat.”
Mommy. The word streaks through my brain, even though I haven’t called her that in years. I blink away the tears clouding my eyes, aware that Cummings and Novak are staring at me, watching for a reaction.
Movement in the doorway—the police officer is shunted aside as my grandmother steps into the room. When she sees me, her hand moves to her mouth. I stay still as she moves toward me, my heart sinking to my feet.
Marian stumbles on the last step before throwing her arms around me. It’s not until I notice Cummings and Novak staring at me that I think to lift my arms and hug her back.
My hands go still; my grandmother’s hair is in a perfect chignon at the nape of her neck. I think I even saw the smallest smudge of mascara at the corner of her eye. She got a call in the middle of the night that I was alive and safe and she did her goddamn hair and makeup before driving up here.
Over the past six months, I imagined her changing. Losing a son and a granddaughter had to have humbled her.
When Marian finally lets me go, she turns to the agents. “I’ll be taking my granddaughter home now.”
Novak folds his enormous arms across his chest. “I’m afraid it’s not that simple, Mrs. Marcotte.”
“Is she being charged with a crime?”
“No—”
“Then yes, it really is that simple: Katherine leaves with me.”
Cummings stands; Novak puts a hand on her arm. “With all due respect, your granddaughter is an adult. It’s her choice if she wants to stay and talk to us.”
“Not until she’s been examined by a proper doctor,” Marian snaps. “If you have a problem with that, you can contact our family’s attorney.”
Marian grabs me by the elbow. Anger rises in me, white-hot, at the familiarity of it. I yank away from her. Compose myself in time to see Agent Cummings watching me, her perfectly shaped eyebrows bending toward each other.
“Katherine, this way.” Marian is already on the other side of the door frame.
I follow her.
It’s not until we’re halfway down the hall—Cummings and Novak out of earshot behind us—that my grandmother says: “I have a car waiting for us in the back lot. There will be reporters outside by now.”
* * *
—
We are in the black SUV idling behind the police station. When Marian shuts the divider between us and our driver, I speak. “You should have let me talk to the FBI.”
“Absolutely not.” Marian lifts a hand to the crown of her head, winces. “You’re not speaking with anyone until I speak to our attorney.”
My stomach dips as the car begins to move. On some level, this was what I wanted—for Marian to rescue me from that shitty farmhouse, to take control and keep me safe—but now that I’m alone with her, I want to claw my way out of this car. The idea of the narrative of my kidnapping being in her hands, shaped by her PR pros and lawyers and money makes me feel like I’m suffocating. “I had everything under control—”
“Did you?” Marian snaps. “Because it sounded to me like you had no idea Jesse was apprehended trying to cross the Canadian border an hour ago.”
The blood drains from my head. Jesse got caught. “Apprehended for what? He didn’t do anything—”
“The FBI put out an APB for him as soon as you showed up at the police station.” My grandmother reaches into her purse with trembling hands. She removes a bottle of Advil, pops the top. She swallows two, dry, her eyes closed. “You should have broken up with that boy when I told you to.”
I want to scream at her, ask her if controlling my life was worth all of this, but my voice comes out in a whisper. “Why? Why do you hate him so much?”
“You really don’t know, do you?” Her voice cracks slightly on the last two syllables.
It chills my blood. “What are you talking about?”
Marian pinches the skin between her eyes, as if a migraine is coming on. When she composes herself, she says, “His mother interned at my office while she was in college.”
An unsettled feeling pools in my stomach. “What does Jesse’s mom have to do with anything?”
“She had too much to drink at a fundraising event and made disgusting accusations against your father.”
“That’s why you hate Jesse?”
“I never said I hated him. I said you can’t be with him.”
The force in her voice seems to suck the air out of the car.
Jesse had been born when his mother was still in college; she’d left for a semester to have him.
I can’t stitch the words swirling in my brain into a complete thought. “Did she say my father—is he Jesse’s—”
Marian’s eyes flutter shut. “You should have listened to me, Katherine.”
“No,” I whisper. “You’re lying.”
“I’m not, Katherine. As soon as I realized who he was, I told you to end things.”
The party—she hadn’t been horrified because Jesse said his mother was half Mexican. My grandmother was horrified because she recognized the last name Salpietro.
His dark brown eyes, the cleft in his chin just like the one my father had—
I bang on the window divider. “Excuse me? Please let me out.”
“Katherine, don’t be ridiculous.” My grandmother snaps her head toward the front of the cab. “Please keep driving.”
I bang on the
window again. “I’m going to be sick—”
The car swerves off the road as if a train were barreling toward us. I stumble out and vomit onto the shoulder. When there’s nothing left in me, I hunch over, arms around my middle, sobs rolling through my body.
All those nights that my father destroyed our house, that he screamed at me with spit flecks flying at my face, that I worried about him going downstairs to that gun safe and killing us all, I would think, At least if I’m dead I never have to go through this again.
How I felt in those moments could never compare to how I feel right now. It’s a thousand times worse.
I buckle over and vomit again as the driver hops out of the car and hurries over to me. “Miss, are you okay?”
“She’s fine,” my grandmother barks, hot on his heels. “Please get back in the car.”
The driver looks from her to me. I really hope she made him sign an NDA before agreeing to drive us all the way to Long Island.
I stare back at her. “I don’t believe you.”
“For God’s sake, Katherine.” There are tears in her eyes. “Just look at the boy.”
A cold sweat is spreading over me. She’s lying—she’ll do anything to keep us apart, even telling a horrendous lie.
But she would not lie about her son. Her darling Airman Marcotte.
She made disgusting accusations about your father.
Marian never reaches for me. The cars on the freeway whiz by. It seems unfair, that my entire world is falling apart as they’re all searching for a decent radio station or debating where to stop for dinner.
“Now you know,” Marian finally says. “I was only trying to protect you.”
I wipe my eyes. “Protect me? You protected him. He should have gone to jail.”
“It’s easy for you to judge me. You couldn’t possibly understand the position I was in. Until you have a child of your own you will never understand what you would do for them.”
“What about my mother? You were just going to let her live with that animal for the rest of her life?”
Marian is breathing heavily. A lock of hair has escaped her chignon.
“I dated him for almost a year with no idea who he was,” I whisper.
“If you hadn’t hid him from us, I would have told you to break up with him much sooner.”
“Who else knew?” I ask. “Besides you, and Jesse’s mom?”
“Just us. My agreement with his mother was that she not tell him his real father’s name.”
“So, you paid Jesse’s mother to go away?”
“No,” she says. “I helped her with her medical bills and made sure the child would be taken care of once he turned twenty-one.”
“You never even told my dad? How could you?” I say.
“How could you, Katherine?” She’s finally raising her voice. “You’ve destroyed this family. You’ve probably destroyed that boy’s life too.”
That boy. She can’t even say his name. Her own grandson.
I feel like I am going to vomit again, but I have nothing left. There is physically nothing left in me.
“I hate you,” I say. “You are the worst person I have ever known in my entire life.”
“Maybe you mean that,” Marian finally says. “But where would you be now without me?”
KAT
FEBRUARY
They called it a late Christmas miracle. Kat Marcotte and Jesse Salpietro, found alive after six months. At first, everyone from Brenda Dean to Lester Holt wanted to interview us. The longer we stayed quiet, the more the public’s appetite for answers grew.
The rumors began on the dark corners of the internet at first. Jesse and I couldn’t be trusted—we had obviously run away together, maybe because I was pregnant. After Brenda Dean implied we were a teen Bonnie and Clyde, Marian started to get so many death threats that she, too, had to sell her Brookport house.
The FBI maintained a good poker face, saying they refused to comment on the case until the investigation was complete and any charges were announced. During that time, the tide began to shift. First, a story in the Daily News about the visits the social worker paid to our house in Italy, complete with quotes from subordinates of the captain, claiming he regularly threatened his employees with violence.
I have no doubt Marian was behind the leaks to the press. A carefully constructed narrative to support my own: I ran away to escape my father. The monster in a hero’s uniform. My cousin was supposed to help me, but his own greed got in the way. Amos secured us a safe haven in the farmhouse; we were at the mercy of his drug money, and his gun, lest we thought about turning ourselves in. When Amos didn’t come back from a drug drop, I decided it was finally time to go home and tell the truth.
I haven’t seen or spoken to Jesse since I arrived at the police station. Marian, and my lawyers, have expressly forbidden it.
He deserves to know who he is. Who he really threw his life away for.
My mother is moving us to New Jersey, which, according to the people who believe in my guilt, might be a punishment worse than jail. Her family, my other grandparents, live in Princeton, in a gated retirement community. It had never occurred to me that my mother never saw her parents because the captain wouldn’t let her.
Anyway, in the fall, I’ll be enrolling in the local community college. Emma refused to move with us, refused to leave Barton for a Catholic high school in Princeton.
Our Brookport house sold. Over the past week, from the guest bedroom of my aunt Erin’s house, I’ve seen the moving trucks pass by, carting our furniture off to Jersey. This morning my mother asked me if I wanted to say goodbye to the house before she left to hand the keys to the new owners at the closing. My stomach gave a violent twist at the thought of those empty rooms, the fist-shaped holes in the walls spackled over.
I close my eyes, picture my room, the heating grate. If Amos had just stayed calm and input the alarm code properly when he went to retrieve the phone, we would all still be in Timsbury. I would still be Kaylee Brewer, at least for a few more months.
The sound of an engine puttering outside startles my eyes open. I stand slowly and creep to the living room window.
The sedan parked across the street, oatmeal colored, paint chipping, belongs to Jesse’s aunt Andrea.
My stomach catapults. His lawyers told him to stay away from me, and vice versa. He hasn’t tried to reach out to me in the two months since we’ve been home.
He looks up. Sees me in the window.
I didn’t think I’d be able to look him in the eye ever again. I never thought I’d even get the opportunity.
I slip on the shoes waiting by the door and hurry outside. He motions to undo his seat belt. I shake my head, freezing him to his seat. I open the passenger side door and slip into the car. “Sorry. No one can see you here.”
Jesse nods, drumming his fingers on his knee. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be here. I heard you were leaving and I needed to see you.”
I look away from the hand on his knee, from the slight tremor in his fingers that suggests he’s holding back from grabbing my hand, kissing the knuckles like he used to. I pinch the flab of skin between my thumb and forefinger, a move Marian always used to say could banish nausea.
“I heard the charges against you are coming soon,” I say.
“Lying to investigators. My lawyer got the heads-up.”
“I can’t do this,” I whisper. “I can’t let you go to jail for me. I have to tell them the truth.”
“Kat, you can’t. That’s what they want. If you contradict me, we’ll probably both go to jail.”
I swallow. “Are you? Going to go to jail?”
“I could get up to a year, but my lawyer thinks more likely it’ll be a couple years’ probation.”
I have to put my head between my knees. Jesse rubs my back
. “Hey. I’m lucky if that’s all I get, after everything.”
I look up at him. “You did it for me. I’m the one who deserves to go to jail.”
“I did it for us.” He moves his hand lower down my back. The warmth of his touch makes me recoil.
I jerk forward so his hand separates from my back. “You don’t understand. There’s a reason my grandmother wanted me to break up with you.”
“Kat.” His voice is gentle. “Don’t.”
“No. You deserve to know who my dad—”
“Kat. You don’t have to say it. I already know.”
My surroundings begin to blur. All the possibilities of how Jesse could have found out curdle in my stomach. If Jesse knows, it’s only a matter of time before it’s tabloid fodder.
I swallow against the nausea swelling up in me. “Did the FBI tell you?”
“No. They didn’t.” Jesse isn’t looking at me.
“Jesse,” I whisper. “How did you find out?”
“When my uncle said that thing to me last year—about what happened to my mom—I did one of those DNA tests. I just wanted to know his name.” Jesse shuts his eyes. “He wasn’t in the system, but I found out I had a distant cousin on Long Island. Their last name was Sullivan.”
My blood frosts over. “When did you do the DNA test?”
“Last March—but, Kat, I didn’t put everything together until your grandma’s birthday party. The way she looked at me. She wasn’t just disgusted, she was scared.” Jesse wipes his eyes. “I got this horrible feeling that she knew me.”
“So instead of saying something to me, you did what? You dug into my family and found out that we were related—”
“I needed to be sure before I said anything.” Jesse’s voice cracks. “I was going to tell you, but when you told me you were thinking of killing yourself it changed everything—”
“It didn’t change anything!” I’m screaming—I’ve never once before screamed at Jesse.
I needed to escape a monster. Not run away with a different one.
I grab the door handle. Jesse motions to stop me—the voice that comes out of me is so frightening, it almost sounds like it can’t be mine. “Don’t touch me.”