The Girl in the Headlines

by Hannah Jayne

  “What the fuck is so funny?” I spat.

  The man stopped laughing and looked at me with something like shock. Then he started up that laughter again.

  Great, he’s psychotic.

  I started looking for exits for when this man cracked. I’d have to cross in front of him to get to the front door, but there was a high little window in the bedroom I slept in and another one in the bathroom.

  And where is Rita anyway?

  “Oh, honey, I’m sorry. I’m sorry for laughing. It’s just that—Lord almighty, we screwed this up pretty badly, didn’t we? Come on. Get up there.” He jutted his chin toward the couch, and I crawled up there, keeping my eyes on him and his meat hook hands the whole time, inching my feet up and curling my knees into my chest in an attempt to put as much distance between him and me as possible.

  “Screwed what up?” I asked slowly.

  “This.” He gestured between us and shook his head as though it really were some sort of tragedy, and my mind was spinning in place, kicking up dirt. I had read or seen or heard that girls got out of psycho killer situations by making their potential killers aware that they were human. That they had lives and families and were actual people. I licked my lips.

  “I screw a lot of things up. I mean, you know, it’s okay that maybe this didn’t go as planned, because it’s normal. To screw things up sometimes.” My smile felt stupid and forced, and it was, but the guy seemed to be listening and smiled back.

  “Um, you know, Rita, Rita’s my”—I gritted my teeth, pushing the word out between them—“mom, and we’re both allergic to cantaloupe.”

  The man’s eyebrows went up. “No shit?”

  I didn’t know what was shocking to him, that Rita was my birth mother or that she was and I might eventually be allergic to cantaloupe, but I pressed on. “And neither of us like mustard.”

  “Okay. You got a big, shaggy dog out there too?”

  I blinked, tears stinging the back of my eyes. He was playing with me. He didn’t care if I was human or a ham steak.

  “Aw, I’m just messing with you!” That big, raucous laugh again, and this time, he clapped me on the shoulder, and I almost took off running. Almost, because he pinned me with a stare, and something gnawed at me, was itching at the back of my mind.

  Other than from the motel, I had never seen this man before in my life. Why couldn’t I tear my eyes away? Why did I study the way his lips quirked up and thinned out when pulled down?

  “I thought it would be different is all. I thought I’d be a little bit better at this all when I first saw you. And about the motel, I wasn’t trying to kill you, I promise you that.”

  “You kicked the door.”

  “I knocked. For a long time, I knocked, and when you didn’t answer, I got worried.”

  “It was the middle of the night.”

  “I know, but I—I knew your situation, and it made me nervous, you know? I didn’t know who was in there with you, if they was hurting you or something.”

  “It didn’t occur to you that I could have been sleeping? Because I was.”

  “Like I said, I got worried for you.”

  “So you went around the back—”

  “And the window was open. And I thought I could just slip through and make sure everything was all right, maybe without you even knowing.” He patted his belly with a cough that was half chuckle. “But I’m not as slim as I used to be. Or as agile! I slipped right through, and I guess I made a hell of a racket taking down those blinds. Cheap-ass motel.”

  I nodded, then stopped. “Wait. You know what was going on? With me?” This man didn’t seem the type to peruse the newspaper or glue himself to TV news. “You know…me?”

  “Of course I do, hon.” He smiled, those lips going up and pushing his red cheeks to rounds. “I would have thought you’d know me, too, Andrea.”

  Thirty-Nine

  “I’m sorry. I don’t have any idea—why should I know you?”

  His eyes actually looked downcast, and I felt a twinge of sadness for him, because I was obviously losing my mind. How long did Stockholm syndrome take to set in? Days? Minutes?

  “My name is Dave.”

  “Uh, hi, Dave.” I didn’t know if I should offer to shake his hand or fist-bump or run the hell out of the house. The entire situation felt strange and forced, and I tried to command myself to run, to hide in that bedroom closet or vault myself out the bathroom window with a jagged piece of mirror in my hand, but I was rooted to that couch, staring at this man who made no sense, and suddenly, I was apologizing.

  “I’m sorry, Dave. But I have a lot going on right now.” I scratched my head. “It’s been a really rough couple of days.”

  Has it only been a couple of days?

  As I was talking, I saw the fireplace tool set from the corner of my eye. I shifted my weight and moved an inch closer toward it, hoping Dave wouldn’t notice. I could grab the poker, knock him out, and use Rita’s wall phone (who still had one of those?) to call the Midnight Inn.

  “So if we’d met before or—”

  He was still studying me, those eyes that vaguely suggested something familiar, something—familial.

  “See you real soon, cupcake.”

  The gruff voice. The laugh-cough. Those eyes. My breath caught in my chest.

  Knowing seeped through my veins. “You’re my…dad?”

  Dave smiled, his expression a weird mix of pride and disgust. “What tipped you off? Our eyes? Our smile?” He fingered the pointed edge of a single tooth on the left-hand side. “Our fang?”

  My tongue immediately found the same pointed incisor in my own mouth, and I wanted to pull it out with my bare hands. I didn’t want to be any reflection of this man.

  “Dad.” Dave mouthed the word, his dark eyes going skyward. “I kind of like the sound of that. You know your bitch of a mo—” He paused, as though some sense of fatherhood actually set in. “I mean, your mom didn’t even tell me you were coming until after you were born. I don’t know. You were, like, two or three or something.”

  I licked Sahara-dry lips, that memory like hot tar in my gut.

  “For a while, I guess I just kinda brushed it all off.”

  “Me,” I said, my voice firmer than I expected. “You brushed me off.”

  Dave kind of shrugged, and I pressed my lips together, both wanting him to go on, to explain himself, and to never speak to me again.

  “She told me for sure when you were—I don’t know, nine or ten or something? I was…indisposed though.” Another shrug. “But that’s all in the past.” Here Dave actually smiled, and I could feel heat in my gut, venom in my throat. “Water under the bridge, right?”

  He patted my knee, and I flinched. “Sure. Water under the bridge.” I spat out each word, shooting daggers from my eyes. He was indisposed. “You were in jail.”

  Dave’s eyes met mine, and he bobbed his head. Not shamefully or apologetically but matter-of-factly. “Yep. But hey, this reminiscence has been nice and all, but we should really all come together as a family.” The way he said it was saccharine sweet, dripping with condescension. He snaked an arm around my shoulders and pulled me toward him. The smell of stale cigarette smoke and old beer was textbook deadbeat dad, but there was something else about him: a sickly sweet stench that hung in the air between us.

  “You’re not my family.”

  Again that smile. That pointed incisor, just like mine. “Looks to me like I’m the only family you’ve got.” I glanced out the window, and he laughed, a throaty, guttural laugh that held no mirth. “You really think she’s coming back for you? Kid, you ain’t got nothing she wants. She already dumped you once, twice… What makes you think she’s going to come back for you now?” Dave laughed again, and the sound was a knife ripping through leather, a cold, hard-edged slice that stabbed at me. I didn’t love Rit
a. I wasn’t even sure I liked her, so why would her abandoning me again hurt?

  “I thought you said she’d be back after her shift.”

  Dave shrugged. “Could be. You never know with that one. Bit of a wanderer, you know? Now why don’t you tell me a little bit about yourself? There’s a lot we need to catch up on.”

  I couldn’t imagine sitting here with this stranger, telling him the intimate details of my life. He didn’t deserve to know anything about me and my life without him, the life that he referred to as “water under the bridge.”

  “My father was murdered and my mother was left for dead in our home. My little brother has gone missing,” I said, my lips tight.

  Dave nodded his big head. “Uh-huh, I heard all that.”

  “Did you? Who did you hear it from?”

  Dave gestured toward the TV. “It’s been all over the news, kid.”

  I licked my lips, strangely calm, weirdly steady. “Just tell me where Josh is. Tell me where Josh is and what you want from me, and then I’ll happily be on my way.”

  “You think I want something from you? Aw, Andrea, that really hurts a guy. Deep down in my heart. You’re my little girl and, well, I’m your pop. Can’t I just spend a little time with my girl? It’s been so damned long…”

  “You don’t care about me,” I said through gritted teeth. “Or Josh.” I tried to shrug Dave’s hand from my shoulder, but his fingers dug in, thumb and forefinger pressing into the flesh around my shoulder, pinching the narrow bones at my collar. He leaned down a little closer so that sickeningly sweet smell was showering me and whispered, “Darling, you have no idea what I care about.”

  I gritted my teeth and tried to keep my breathing steady and even. I could feel the lactic acid pooling in my joints, the aching when my muscles twitched, poised and ready to run. But Dave’s grip on my shoulder was painful, and his physical form a hairbreadth away held me down.

  “What. Do. You. Want?”

  This seemed to please Dave in some perverse sort of way, and he pivoted so he was standing in front of me. I stood, too, but he pushed me down, and I sat stiffly, trying my best not to sink into the springless couch. His words sent a shiver right through me, and I froze.

  “Why, darling, I just want what’s been mine all along.”

  Forty

  I felt the sweat bead at the back of my neck, and it was like the entire world dropped into slow motion, making every inch of that moment seem huge and looming. The damp stench of the house was overwhelming, and the acrid smell of my own sweat was biting. I could hear Dave’s breath, the half whistle it made as it shot from his parted lips, could hear the way his clothes crinkled as he sat down on the couch a half-inch away from me. I sank back into the cushions, hoping my recoil wasn’t too obvious, but it obviously was, because Dave took my hand and squeezed it, and I could feel the tears welling in my eyes.

  “Those McNulty people took away something that was rightfully mine.”

  My muscles stiffened. My tongue went heavy in my mouth as Dave’s thumb trailed along my hand.

  “What was that?”

  He cocked his head. “Ain’t it obvious? You, darling.”

  I wanted to scream. I wanted to kick out, run, do anything but sit there staring into the almost-familiar eyes of this maniac with my DNA. “Now you have me. What are you going to do with me?”

  Dave dropped my hand and put his hands on his belly, laughing. No matter how many times I heard it, I didn’t think I could ever get used to that weird, raucous sound that reverberated through the walls. He dragged a palm over his eyes. “Now I see the resemblance. You and your mom both have a flair for the dramatic. Did you know after you went with the McNultys, I searched for you?”

  I wanted to spit out that Rita was my mom’s sister, that he—they—had to know where I was. That if they wanted to find me, they could have. But the realization was all at once terrifying and heartbreaking. They could have found me anytime. They just didn’t want to.

  “So now I got you back, but I still got a hole, you see, right here.” He patted his heart. “I got a hole in my heart for all that looking and longing and worrying about my girl.”

  I licked my lips, hating the part of me that was piqued, that vaguely wondered if all this time, he really was out there thinking about me. “And Rita?”

  “You mean your mom.”

  I think he was waiting for me to nod, but I couldn’t.

  Finally, he said, “Her too. We were both looking and trying so hard, but those people wouldn’t give you back to us.”

  “Didn’t Rita know where her own sister was?”

  “That’s just the thing. Once Beth got ahold of you, we didn’t always know.”

  We had lived in the same house with the same phone number for as long as I could remember. We weren’t exactly hiding. Were we?

  “When your mom was having some…addiction problems and Beth said she’d take you—just to help out till Rita got her feet back under her—we thought we were doing the right thing. Family helping family and all. But then Beth and Ed decided they were good parents and Rita and I weren’t.”

  “You didn’t know I existed, and Rita was on drugs.”

  “We got clean. We got clean for you! You know, at first. We went to the police, to a judge. But your fake family there, hon, they had money that me and your mom just didn’t have any access to.” He shrugged. “Money always wins.”

  “And then you went to prison?”

  Dave’s eyes went up to the ceiling, his head cocked like he was accessing the memory. “Something like that. I mean, I did get pretty hard-core into drugs, and who knows? It was probably because of the sadness, you know, the loneliness.”

  “You had Rita.”

  “Not at that time. She and I went our separate ways, but we never stopped trying to get you back. We never stopped wanting to be your parents.”

  The whole thing and Dave’s big eyebrows and downcast eyes played too much like a made-for-TV movie, but something inside me wanted so desperately to believe him, to believe that somewhere out there, when my own parents were trying to get a shrink out to see me, my birth parents were missing me and trying to find me.

  “Is that why the McNultys never formally adopted me?”

  Dave’s eyes went wide before he nodded. “We wouldn’t give you up. We wouldn’t give up our—you know”—he drew a line from me to him—“parental rights or whatever, because we knew one day, we were going to get you back.”

  He smiled, and part of me wanted to smile back. Part of me wanted to pump my head and agree that the McNultys were the bad seeds, they kept me from a real family, and this—the musty smell of this house and this couch with no springs—this was real and life, and it was my life, and the McNultys thought it wasn’t good enough.

  “What do you want from me?”

  “Nothing, darling, I told you that. Not a damn thing. I just want us to be a family and maybe to be compensated for some time lost.”

  I blinked. “Like birthday parties and pony rides or something? Father-daughter dances? Because I’m going off to college—”

  Again that raucous laugh, the tears that lined his bottom lashes, that fat palm wiping them away. “My God, you are a crack-up, aren’t you? No, honey. I’m thinking monetary compensation. We lost everything in our fight for you. We wouldn’t stop fighting, and we just kept losing.”

  I could feel my face pale. “I don’t have any money. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Dave opened his mouth and shut it again when headlights flooded the living room. I could hear the crunch of tires on gravel before I saw Rita’s maroon van. Dave licked his lips. “You, me, and Rita. We’re family. We’ve always been a family.”

  Rita pushed open the flimsy door and smiled when she saw Dave and me.

  “You guys getting reacquainted, I see?” she s
aid, smiling.

  “I’m real proud of our girl here, Rita. Real proud.”

  I wanted to throw up.

  Rita, still wearing her Midnight Inn motel smock, her hair in a damp, mussed ponytail, was smiling at me from a sea of shopping bags. Dave, with his bushy eyebrows and eyes too much like mine, was smiling at me from his seat on the couch. This wasn’t my life. These weren’t my parents. DNA or not, I wasn’t supposed to be here.

  “I was just telling our girl here how…how we’re just needing some compensation…”

  Rita’s brows went up and knitted. Her nostrils flared. “Did you tell her it isn’t about the money?”

  “What? I think you guys are seriously confused. I don’t have any money.” My heart was thudding in my throat, and I wanted to leave. “I should probably just—”

  Rita sighed and broke in. “My mother died just about a month ago. But before that, your goody-goody mother got her to change her will. She cut me out and added you”—here Rita jabbed at the air with her nicotine-stained index finger—“instead.”

  “Your—I have a grandmother?”

  “Had. She was in and out of our lives—that woman could not hold her liquor—but she amassed a pretty decent fortune before she kicked the bucket. Gotta give her credit for marrying rich. She divided the money between Beth and me, then cut me out because I’m such a terrible person, according to my lovely sister, and gave my half to you for college or whatever. Told me you deserved the money after”—she made air quotes—“all I put you through.”

  Everything inside me was colliding and crashing. I had a grandmother who left me money. Who passed away before ever wanting to know me as I grew up. I had an aunt who loved me and a mom who—I didn’t dare ask what Rita thought of me now.

  “So there’s money,” I said slowly, my jaw beginning to ache from the almost constant clench of my teeth.

  “Yeah, and it’s not like we’re trying to take anything from you, honey,” Dave said, all father-knows-best-y. “You deserve that money that Madelyn was going to give you. But Beth’s half…”