The Girl in the Headlines

by Hannah Jayne

  “It’ll also go to you, eventually, but really…” Rita trailed off. “Legally and morally or whatever, it should go to me.”

  “It would just go a long way toward making amends.”

  I couldn’t believe Dave and his doe eyes, Rita and her moon face, her whole skinny body looking like she might jump out of her skin at any moment.

  “So you want compensation from my parents for the…pain…of losing me. And then half my grandmother’s estate.”

  Dave went palms up. “It’s just what we’re owed, see. And there’s a cut in there for you. What is it—seventy, eighty thousand?”

  “Dollars?” I felt my eyes bulge. I heard my mom’s voice, faint, in the back of my mind: “Your job is to get into college, Andi. Our job is to pay for it.”

  She knew there was money coming.

  “So what do you want me to do?”

  Forty-One

  “Don’t look so frightened, girl!” Rita said. “Like I said, it ain’t about the money. We’re just so happy to finally have you back in our lives. Didn’t your daddy tell you we’ve been after you for ages? The worst thing I ever done, baby, was give you up. I thought my sister would be honest, you know? I thought she really wanted to help me. Turns out she just wanted me out of the way so she could get to you.”

  Rita crossed the linoleum floor in two steps and crushed me in a hug. She smelled like the Midnight Inn—disinfectant and neglect—and I think I wanted to hug her. My arms ached to hug her, to hold someone mom-like and cry and fall apart and be saved.

  My arms snaked around her waist. She tightened against me, and my head fell to her shoulder, nuzzled in toward her hair.

  I could smell lavender faintly.

  “Mom,” I whispered.

  I wanted it to feel right. I was forcing it to feel right. But I needed something—someone—so badly that I pushed the thought down deep in my soul.

  “You—you wanted me?”

  Rita held me at arm’s length, pushing her fingers through my hair. “Every minute of every day,” she said, then shared a look with Dave. He nodded, and I could feel the lump rising in my throat.

  Someone wanted me.

  “I thought—I mean—I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything about you…”

  “I wrote you letters and sent you gifts.”

  “You did?”

  “Every birthday. Christmas, whenever. Did you ever get them?”

  I shook my head, feeling empty. “No, never.” I racked my brain, trying to think of the mail, wondering if there was a stack of envelopes somewhere with handwriting I didn’t recognize, notes addressed to me from my birth mother. Birth mother—that phrase used to sit on my tongue. It used to feel foreign and weird, like something other people had in another country. I didn’t have a birth mother; I had a regular mother. I was a regular American girl with a regular family and a white picket fence and…and I really knew nothing about the McNultys. My dad had bought my best friend’s house. My mom was really my aunt. My parents thought I needed a psychiatrist and medication. I blinked back tears.

  “Oh, honey.” Rita grabbed me again, another hug that made my ribs ache and my heart break. “I never wanted to cause you pain. I thought your life would be so much better if I let them have you till I got clean. You know, they talked me into it. Beth mostly. Older sister, you know?”

  “But why?”

  “I was young when I had you. Messed up, alone. Your mom is so perfect—was always so damn perfect. I thought she knew best. They were so persuasive.”

  “My parents?”

  “Right. They said they’d just keep you until I got back on my feet. And I did, you know? Kicked drugs, got a steady job. They moved. Then they stopped returning my calls. They sent me letters, from a judge, telling me to keep away. They wanted me to jump through hoops, this one, that one. Take drug tests, show pay stubs. They were probably telling you all sorts of horrible things about me and your daddy, huh?”

  The word daddy bit at me. I still barely recognized Dave, and every time he looked at me, I felt something that I couldn’t describe. It wasn’t familiarity or the pull of distant memory. It was something more sinister, something dark. When he looked at me, it wasn’t a father looking at his daughter. It was more like a predator looking at his prey.

  I clung to Rita even harder.

  “I just don’t know what you expect me to do,” I said, murmuring into her hair. Her hair that was so much like mine—like mine had been. I suddenly wanted to ask her a thousand questions: Did I have relatives; were Dave’s parents—my other grandparents—alive? Was I a cute baby, a C-section, natural?

  “They said I was born addicted to drugs.”

  Rita’s eyes went downcast. “Well, that part is true. Like I said, I was basically a kid, and my dad was a drunk. My mom had checked out.” She shot another look toward Dave. “And I was all alone.”

  He blew a puff of air from his nostrils and looked away.

  “They took you from me straightaway. But I still remember your little face, the way your eyes looked up at me. And you cried and cried and cried. Man, you were loud!”

  I kind of chuckled; Dad told me the same thing when I whooped on the sidelines during Josh’s soccer games.

  “Do you have any pictures?”

  Rita shook her head. “Not from that time. I mean, I did. I did at one time, but like I said, I was messed up pretty bad…”

  “That’s okay,” I said softly, patting her on the knee. “You’re here now.” I wanted to keep grasping at the crumbs Rita was tossing out. I desperately wanted some roots, some history, now that my future had been slashed away from me.

  Rita stood. “But I do have a couple from when you were a little older…” She rifled through a drawer and came back with three round-edged photos. They were yellowing, and one had fold lines down the middle, but when she handed them to me, my stomach turned in on itself.

  “This is me?”

  I was a chubby toddler with a rat’s nest of curls piled on the top of my head. I was smiling, and Rita, a much younger version with a choppy haircut and a flowered shirt, was holding me and smiling too. She didn’t look much older than I was now, and with the pack of cigarettes balancing on the arm of the folding chair and the awkward way she held me, I thought she looked more like a bad babysitter than a new mom. The next photo was me alone in a cute, fluffy dress, the last one me with Rita in the background at a house that somehow scratched a memory.

  “Where were we in this picture?” It looked like there was a barbecue going on in the background, a bunch of people in plaid shorts and flip-flops.

  Rita took the photo between her forefinger and thumb and squinted at it. “You know, I don’t know. That was a long time ago, you know? You were only, like, three or four.”

  I scratched my head and wanted to ask for the photo back, but Rita stacked the three and put them back in the drawer. I wanted to be happy with this little puzzle of my past, this visual representation of a time where I was loved enough to be cuddled and photographed, but something niggled at the back of my mind. That house… I knew that house. Was I just remembering something from my past, something from that time, or was it something else?

  “Was that our house? Were we—or you—hosting the barbecue?”

  Rita’s eyes went to the ceiling as though she was thinking. “I’m not really sure. You know, I think it may have been Beth and Ed’s first place. Yeah, I think it was.”

  Home.

  It was the first home that was stable and warm and safe, and somehow deep inside, I remembered it.

  I pressed my lips together and offered a small smile while my brain clicked through the images. “So do I have any siblings or anything?”

  Rita laughed. “No, Andi. After they took you from me, I couldn’t even think of having another baby.” She lit a cigarette and crossed her arms in fr
ont of her chest. “If I’d a did, those bastards probably would have stolen her from me too.” My head snapped up, and Rita sucked her cigarette and batted at the air. “The CPS people. They’re ruthless. Won’t even give a lady a chance to get her kid back.”

  Dave reached over and took Rita’s cigarette. “And this is supposed to be America.”

  Our seminice family moment dissolved with the smoke in the air.

  Forty-Two

  “Well.” Rita clapped her hands, and I jumped, which both she and Dave thought was hilarious. “Dave, it’s time for you to meet your…friend.”

  She jutted her head toward the front door, and for some reason, my heart started to pound. I was sitting here with my birth parents, and the idea of anyone else coming into my life (another aunt? a long-lost cousin?) made the breath catch in my throat.

  “Oh.” Dave bobbed his head. “Right. Duty calls.”

  I licked my lips. “You have a job? What do you do?”

  “It’s not a job, exactly, just a—”

  Dave cut Rita off. “She’s an adult, Rita. It’s fine if she knows.” He turned toward me. “Your daddy got in some trouble a long ways back. Now, I’ve got to check in with my parole officer. That’s who we’re going to see. I wouldn’t exactly call him a friend…”

  I could feel my eyes widen. “At the police station?”

  “Round there, yeah.”

  I looked from Rita to Dave, feeling all at once like a needy child and a caged animal. “What about me? What should I—”

  I can’t trust these people. If they were going to the police station, what was going to stop them from turning me in? Dave wanted compensation. Fifty thousand dollars would go a long way toward plugging up the hole in his heart. But he wanted to get to know me… I knew it was foolish. I knew it was downright ridiculous. But I wanted it to be true. I wanted there to be someone left in this world who wanted me.

  Rita batted at the air. “You can just stay here.”

  “So you can bring the police back for me?”

  I was shocked that I had said it out loud. Rita’s mouth fell open, and Dave held his breath before chuckling. “You really think I’d bring those assholes out here? They’ve never done a damn thing for us, honey. Never a damn decent thing. The police aren’t exactly on our side.”

  I was immediately pulled into a memory of my own dad, my own living room. I couldn’t have been more than six or seven, and my dad was telling me that the police were who to go to for help. That they were the good guys who took the bad guys to jail. If I couldn’t find my parents or if I was lost or scared, I was to find an officer in a uniform, and he would help.

  “Assholes,” Dave said again, this time to no one in particular.

  “You just wait here. You can watch TV.” Rita found a remote and clicked on the ancient television set. I was weirdly surprised to see a talk show on, another indication that the world didn’t need me and my parents, that life went on without me.

  I eyed the phone behind Rita’s head and nodded. “Yeah, sure, that sounds okay. I’ll just hang out here. How long do you think you guys will be?”

  “Just a quick check-in, pee in a cup, and we’ll turn back around. Although maybe we’ll pick up doughnuts or something to celebrate.”

  “Celebrate?”

  Rita’s smile was wide. “You being home, darling.”

  I swallowed, my saliva sour. “Great.”

  I watched carefully as Rita gathered her purse and Dave collected his wallet and cell phone from the top of the TV. He buckled on a watch and disappeared down the hall, coming back with a fresh button-down shirt and his hair combed with a severe part.

  “Do I look like an honest, contributing member of society?”

  I didn’t know if he was serious, but Rita laughed and slapped him on the back, and once again, I was thrown into this upside-down, bizarre world where everything I had ever known was wrong. Rita had been looking for me all along. The police were bad and unhelpful. My parents kept me away from my birth mother, didn’t make it easy for her. My heart was in pieces, and my head was even worse. I didn’t know what to believe, and even more troublesome was that I didn’t know what I wanted to believe: that Rita, my real mother, was young and had made mistakes but wanted to make things right? Or that the McNultys really did love me, they wanted to keep me, and Rita never really did reach out?

  She said there were letters, gifts, but I had never seen a thing. I remembered running to the mailbox on my birthday, looking for the fat envelope covered in stickers and stamps that Lynelle always left for me. I remembered being the mail monitor in November, when all those gaudy cards came in. Mom would let me open them all, read the greetings and the names that I vaguely recognized—someone from Dad’s work, the family of one of my dance friends. But I had never seen anything from Rita or Dave.

  Was Mom keeping hold of them, the same way she kept hold of my birth certificate?

  I shook my head. I couldn’t think of my parents as anything other than loving and protective.

  “Help yourself to whatever is in the fridge, and if you want to take a shower or something, there’s an extra towel in the linen closet.”

  I nodded and stayed rooted to my spot on the couch while Rita and Dave shrugged into coats and walked out the door. I counted the seconds it took them to back up the car and turn around. I held my breath until they disappeared through the trees and onto the road, and then I waited in case they turned around.

  They didn’t.

  I intended to spring into action. I intended to do something Mission: Impossible–esque and take off, hot-wire a car, and drive my way to freedom or to whatever freedom looked like in my new, horrible life. But I was frozen to that spot, a miniscule piece of me whispering that Dave and Rita might really be okay, might actually be telling the truth even though he was a felon and she was the ex-druggie who dumped me at a bus station and hardly looked back. But they had looked so earnest, so genuine, when they talked about trying to get me back and writing to the judge.

  But Dave had looked so angry, so spiteful when he talked about the McNultys. Could he be guilty of…? I let the thought trail off, trying to occupy myself with the connections I had made with Rita and the idea that maybe, just maybe I could have a semireal family again or, at the very least, someone to spend Thanksgiving with.

  Maybe Dave killed my dad and tried to kill my mom. He obviously knew about my grandmother. He must have known the money was mine.

  It was logical. It made sense. But what did he do with Josh, and why did he dump me and—

  My mind reeled.

  It could have been Jerry. He was indebted to my parents, and he lied to the police, he lied on camera. If he pinned the murders on me, he would get off scot-free.

  I think I wanted it to be Jerry at this point, or Cal, so all the neighbors and our school friends could be interviewed and say things like “he was so nice and friendly,” and my name could be cleared, and I wouldn’t have to think about how I was connected to this whole thing.

  How I was even at fault.

  Dave said he wanted to be compensated. Rita said I had had a grandma and I was coming into money. Dave said my parents owed him something.

  What if he just went in and took it?

  My blood went cold even as my entire body felt hot, sweat pricking out above my upper lip and beading at my hairline. Jerry wanted his debt to be gone. Dave wanted to cash in. And Rita… I thought of her nicotine-stained fingers, the way she smiled when I said I hated mustard too. She couldn’t be involved in this, could she?

  I didn’t want her to be.

  For all the times she abandoned me and had never called or written—I couldn’t quite believe that she actually had, even when she said it—I wanted her to be good. I wanted her to be a bright spot that really did think of me and miss me. I really did want to have a connection with this woman
who vaguely looked like me, because at least it was something.

  I didn’t know how badly I wanted roots. And I didn’t know how far I would go to get them.

  Forty-Three

  The house was impossibly quiet with Dave and Rita gone, and I felt even more like a fugitive walking around it. I felt like every step was booby-trapped, and at any minute, I’d be caught in a giant net or stabbed clean through with a poison-infected arrow. But I needed to use the phone. I beelined from my spot on the couch to the wall phone, walking in tiny circles, trying to see from every angle. There were windows everywhere with those lousy, see-through curtains, and the actual lack of noise—I guess I had gotten used to the whoosh of cars on the highway at the motel—was unnerving me. My heart was in my throat, and my fingertips felt useless and numb when I got to the phone, took the giant receiver in my hand. It shook. I shook.

  On my cell phone, I hit the carrier icon, and their jaunty, computer-generated personal assistant dialed numbers for me. I had no idea how to do that on a rotary phone. I held it to my ear and whispered, “Operator?” like I’d seen on some old movies.

  Nothing happened.

  “Operator?” I repeated, this time with a little more strength.

  Again, nothing.

  I just wanted to call the Midnight Inn. I wanted to hear Nate’s voice, his smooth, velvety voice that would probably tell me I was crazy and in so much danger but that he would be there for me right away. He would pick me up, and we would rush to the police, and that giant net would come down on Dave and Rita and… I hung up the phone and pulled the receiver again, dialing 911. That number I knew, and if the police came screaming out here and even if they did throw me in jail, I’d be safe from Rita and Dave, and I could plead my case and show them proof.

  I pressed the receiver against my ear but again, no sound, no crackle of connection, no police coming to save the day.

  The phone was dead.