Back then you could do a lot of things you can’t do now, like buy a car without your parent’s signature, and he was able to divert enough money from his pay to buy an old Chevy for a hundred and fifty bucks from a kid at school. He parked the car at a supermarket parking lot half a mile from his house. He would leave home in the morning, saying he was going to catch a ride with a friend up the street, then walk to his car and drive to school. His school was huge, not like ours where everyone would notice and it would get back to your parents the first day. Eventually he got caught and of course there was a huge fight, and he was grounded forever, but it didn’t stop him. He had learned a lot about what you can do over the telephone from watching his parents run their business. From TV he knew enough to make the key calls from the pay phone at the supermarket.
He was really pissed and he had all that money in the bank and he knew he could get it just by going in there and signing for it. He also knew it wouldn’t take long for his parents to find out after he got the money, so he needed a plan. His family had been to Hawaii, which was a big deal back then; the construction company did pretty well sometimes and when it did, they celebrated with a vacation. So he knew how to buy plane tickets.
While he was on restriction, he had time to scheme and work out the details of the plan. He didn’t tell anyone, not even his closest friends, because he knew that as soon as he disappeared, they’d be questioned. The amount of planning he did was amazing. He got his money out by making a big show at the bank, saying his parents had finally agreed to let him buy a car. He even described it. It actually existed on a lot nearby where he’d talked to a salesman about it.
So he ran away to Hawaii and lived on the beach and bummed around for three or four weeks before he got caught. He might not have gotten caught if he hadn’t sent a post card to one of his friends. Either the parents of the kid he sent it to intercepted it, or the kid talked. Corey’s uncle’s parents were worried the way you’d expect them to be, and they made a big fuss about how he might be dead or kidnapped, but they knew he was pissed and that he took the money, so they and the cops strongly suspected that he had run away.
While Corey was telling the story all I could think about was how I had been doing all this secret escape planning myself, like a fantasy game in my head. Hearing about someone who had actually made it happen allowed me to take a pretty significant step forward.
That, and finding the birth certificate.
The birth certificate was huge. I mean it was bad enough, feeling disconnected from my mom and her life with Sterling, but finding out that I have a completely different last name that nobody had ever mentioned, and that I’m not even an American citizen, and that I’m a year and a half older than I thought I was, about blew me away. I felt like downing a bottle of Sterling’s scotch, flooring the Taurus on Reservation Road and letting the steering wheel go, but I didn’t.
Instead, I took Leslie’s advice, played out my fantasy like Corey’s uncle did and put the birth certificate to use. I haven’t cut myself once since I left, and I don’t have to fight off the urge to let the car veer into a tree or power pole or off a cliff, because I don’t have a car. Maybe this isn’t better, but it feels real and it’s not final.
Not yet, anyway.
Natalie
It’s strange how losing someone can make you feel. The significant people I’ve lost in my life are my dad (he died last year), Kristen (you know her story), and also my mom. My mom is alive, but she’s pretty much missing from my life. She still calls once in a while. Last time it was from Florida, the day after Christmas. She was drunk and full of excuses for not sending a present, and promises that she would never make good on. My dad was never around, but I used to fantasize about him coming to fix my life. It was pretty much a pipe dream. He was a loser too. When I heard my dad died—he was murdered—I didn’t feel much. Maybe I’m holding it inside and am screwed up in my subconscious, but when someone was never present, it’s hard to muster much real emotion when you learn his absence is permanent. I think I gave up on the dream version of my dad long before he died. But that’s all he ever was to me anyway—a dream.
My mom has been harder to let go of because I lived with her when I was young and you make those attachments, you bond, but I’ve been with Aunt Trish for so long now, and she’s the person who has been there for me when I needed someone, that I don’t miss my mom anymore. If she disappeared entirely, I would feel bad for a while, but I wouldn’t feel her as an actual absence from my life. I wouldn’t be reminded of her every day when I was just doing normal stuff. There wouldn’t be this big hole in my life, the way there is now, with Kristen missing from it. The worst part is not knowing what happened. I really miss her.
I trust instincts, gut feelings. I can’t pin down a feeling about Kristen. Sometimes I get the big sadness, grief, about her, and I just feel stuck, like nothing matters anymore. I used to tell her nearly everything. The few things I held back weren’t because I thought she wouldn’t understand, but because I just didn’t want to go there. Like I never told her the blow-by-blow about Corey and the camera, and now I think I should have. It might have saved her. Sometimes I get this light, good feeling about her, like she’s out there somewhere doing fine and I don’t need to be sad. I’ve heard about people having dreams after someone they’re close to dies. The person comes and talks to them in a dream and says or does something that allows them to let go. Kristen hasn’t come to me yet, and I haven’t let go.
I keep wanting to call her up so we can talk, because that’s what I always did when something important happened. I want to tell her about Brad. It’s killing me that this new and crazy thing is happening to me and there’s no one to tell. They’re probably going to let Corey out of jail in a week or so. It’s not really jail, even though he deserves the worst; it’s Juvie. He can rape and kill my best friend, but because he’s only seventeen, they have to protect him from getting hurt in jail. What a bunch of bull. Now they have to let him out because they haven’t found her body, and they can’t prove that she’s dead or that the weasel bastard did anything, even though we all know he did it. He’s been in there for almost two months, and even though they found a lot of pot in his room, that isn’t enough to keep him locked up any longer.
They haven’t found any new clues and he sticks by his story. They even looked for her body in the drainage ditch next to where Brad and I parked that night. There’s all this talk on the news about prisoners’ rights in the Iraq war and about whether the government has the right to torture people to get them to talk. I would have said no before all this happened, but if torturing Corey would get him to tell us the truth about what he did to her, they should do it.
Brad came and got me yesterday morning. He was here by ten. We got off I-5 north of Seattle because he said there would be less traffic if we went the back way and avoided the city. I was surprised by how, once we got off the freeway and onto the residential streets on Mercer Island, the neighborhoods were so quiet, like people might have gardens and grow organic vegetables. The road near Brad’s house is wooded on both sides, and the houses are spread out. They aren’t all mansions or anything, but you can tell people have money.
Brad’s family has a ski boat and we spent a great day on the lake. He pulled me around on an inner tube for a while, but I couldn’t drive the boat, so he didn’t get a turn. Mostly, we just drifted around, talking, and jumped in when we got too hot. We cruised along the shoreline, looking at people’s houses and yards for some of the time. There are a lot of rich people on Mercer Island. I have to admit I felt more than a little out of place, and it started to depress me, so I got quiet, which made Brad ask what was wrong. The cool part was I felt that I was able to just come right out and say it. I mean he feels like my friend, and I haven’t let myself get any big expectations yet, so I don’t have anything to lose. I know he’s way out of my league. We live in different worlds. But we have fun together and I feel comfortable with him in a way I’ve
never felt with a guy before, so I just keep saying what I feel. We’re having this kind of cross-cultural experiment and it still feels good, even after what happened before he brought me home.
Kristen
Though I didn’t expect to have a bike here, I’ve used it a lot. The part of this city I move around in most is made for a bike. It’s pretty flat between the house and the park, and between the house and work only the last few blocks are uphill. Some streets are really congested and riding can be a little dangerous, but it’s a pretty good way to get around and a lot of people ride, so I don’t feel out of place.
There are always better bikes nearby when I have to leave mine parked in a rack downtown or at the park, so if someone is looking to steal one, he wouldn’t choose mine, but I bought a good lock anyway. The bike has special significance, like my Garfield doll when I was a kid. It has brought me luck, both kinds. It’s worked both as transportation and as a prop for the role I’m playing, the character I’ve had to become.
I’ve definitely changed. I think about going back, and sometimes I imagine the end-of-year stress and excitement at school, and the Valley, and driving around in Bonnie’s Taurus. My old life seems like another dimension, not very real and a million light years away, the way Corey described his sense of going to college. Here, I go to work at the restaurant and the rest of my time is my own to manage for better or worse.
I’m sort of pretending my life is a play. The part I had in the play at school last year was only a few lines, but while we were rehearsing, I listened to Mrs. Packard talking to some of the other actors about how you get into character. It all ties in with this being like one of those kid fantasies that has become real. I’ve gotten used to this role I’m living, and it’s gotten easier to stay in character.
At the restaurant, I have different hours each week and I don’t always work the same shift as Trudy, but I see her often enough and she helps me feel like I’m part of a team. The work gets hectic during rush times and I’m glad when the shift is over. It isn’t something I imagine myself doing for very long, but I don’t hate it. The customers seem to like me and the tips aren’t bad. All in all, it’s not that hard. I get to feel like I belong when I’m at the restaurant, and knowing in the back of my head that it’s temporary may be what has helped me to keep from feeling that I’m trapped in a crappy job, the way I would if I was Trudy’s age.
At first, when I wasn’t at work, I would hang out with my roommates, Ian and Char. I liked going to bars with them. It was like a party scene, only in a bar instead of at someone’s house. It could be pretty expensive even at the cheap places we went, but I don’t drink much, and because I’m a girl sometimes guys would buy for me. I started to get to know a few people, not like I was making real friends, but there were faces I’d recognize, people I’d say hi to. Even so, I still spent a lot of time alone.
I went to the history museum. There’s so much there you can’t take it all in without going back, but it is too expensive, so I just went once. By the entrance to the harbor where the park ends, there’s this giant cement breakwater that protects the ships and barges that come to be loaded or unloaded at the big warehouse on the dock. You can walk out to the end of the breakwater, and on the ocean side, the open water changes moods with the weather. On the sheltered side, over at the dock, there’s usually a lot of noise and activity, with forklifts racing around and men shouting. I love walking out to the end of the breakwater. When it’s not windy, I see a lot of mothers and grandmothers pushing baby carriages. Being next to the ocean gives you this sense of being lonely and sort of melancholy, only happy, and it feels safe.
The park runs along the water for miles and most of the time feels like a family place. When the weather’s good, people jog, walk their dogs, ride their bikes. Families go for walks in the evening. I’ve spent a lot of time there. Most of the park is on a bluff above the beach, but there are some stretches of beach with stairs going down to it. At high tide there isn’t much exposed, but at low tide you can have a nice walk between two of the stairways. I sit on a log or on the gravel with my back against a log and look at the water. It calms me. But I’m obviously not the only one who gets something good from it.
I wasn’t a dedicated jogger back in the Valley, but before Grant, I went jogging a lot here. I even bought some running shoes with tip money. They were on sale and aren’t anything I would wear in the Valley, but they suit the new me just fine. I would ride the bike to the park and lock it into one of the racks, then go for a run. Sometimes I sat on the beach first, before I got sweaty. The day my bike broke, I had done that. It was a grey day, kind of misty, and you couldn’t see across the Strait. There was a little breeze but no rain yet, and I got cold just sitting so I didn’t stay long. I like moody, dark days almost as much as bright, sunny ones, but I don’t like being cold, so I climbed back up the stairs and jogged the mile or so to the lighthouse at the east end of the park. There’s a hill to climb coming back, so I was pretty tired when I got on the bike.
When I was sitting on the beach I was wearing a dark blue anorak. I’m pretty conscientious and don’t leave things lying around or lose things very often, but I must have been distracted. By the time I got to the lighthouse I’d worked up a sweat, so I took the windbreaker off and sat down at one of the picnic tables to catch my breath. Then I left without it. I wore it a lot and didn’t want to spend another thirty dollars for a new one, so I went back on the bike. Luckily, it was still there.
I had to pump hard to get the bike back up the hill and needed to shift to a lower gear or get off and walk. The bike is the old kind of ten-speed that doesn’t click to let you know when the chain is lined up to shift, and I’m not very good at judging since I wasn’t a bike rider before. There were people around and I didn’t want to embarrass myself by having to get off and push, so I tried to shift while I was pedaling hard. Well, the chain jumped off the front sprocket. This would have been bad enough, but then it got caught between the pedal crank and the frame as I was pushing down with all my weight.
It broke. I mean it really broke; instead of it being a loop that I could try to put back on, it was one long piece with loose ends. I came down pretty hard. Luckily it’s a girl’s bike with no bar to hit, but my foot slipped off the pedal, and I rolled my ankle trying to keep from falling. I stayed up, but it hurt. It turned out I had an audience.
I pushed the bike off the road onto the strip of lawn between the curb and the jogging path. My foot was really sore when I put weight on it. The chain fell off and I picked it up and wrapped it around the frame under the seat. I was wiping my hands on the grass to get the grease off them when he said,
“Are you hurt?”
I was pretty preoccupied, so I didn’t focus on him right away.
“I’m all right,” I said. “The bike’s not, but it can probably be fixed.”
“How’s your ankle? You came down hard. You’re limping.”
That’s when I actually looked at him. He was clearly an adult, probably in his mid to late thirties, and was dressed for jogging, the way you’d expect someone with money to go jogging. He had on nice warm-ups and his running shoes were expensive. I’ve learned to recognize expensive clothes from shopping with Bonnie. He was good-looking in an old guy, James Bond sort of way.
“Can I give you a lift?” he asked.
“I’ll be okay,” I said, and I thought I would be, so I raised the kickstand and started pushing the bike up the hill. It was maybe a mile and a half to the house. I didn’t look back and didn’t think much about him until about ten minutes later when my ankle started to hurt worse. It needed ice, I needed to not be walking on it, and I still had a mile and a quarter to go. So when his white Cadillac SUV pulled up next to me with the window down and he said, “Are you sure I can’t take you home?” I said okay.
He had to take the front wheel off the bike to get it in the back, but it came off easily. The car was spotless and the bike wasn’t, but he had some clothes from
the cleaners hanging behind the driver’s seat and he took a couple of the plastic slip covers off and put them under the bike to protect the car from the grease. Aside from his clothes, there were a dress and a woman’s blouse on the hangers, so I assumed he was married.
While we were driving, he asked me if I was going to school. I told him I’d graduated and was working at a restaurant for now, but planned to go to university next year. I’d picked that up, the way they say university here instead of college. I ended up saying the name of the restaurant too, which I thought was harmless because it’s a public place and not like some big secret or anything. It just seemed part of the conversation. He seemed like this family guy, like he probably had a daughter at home and helping me would somehow make the world safer for her too.
He dropped me off in front of the house. I thanked him and he drove off. I didn’t expect to ever see him again.
Corey
They asked me if I wanted to see Smith. They took me to the office of the guy who runs this place, and he said Smith requested it. Since Smith isn’t my parent, it wasn’t a normal situation, but because he was my teacher, if I wanted him to come, they could let him. I said yes because my first thought was that he was always a fair guy, but after I got back to my room, I was lying on the bunk, staring at the mortar lines between the painted cement blocks that the walls are made of, and I started thinking, and I got kind of paranoid. I started thinking that the cops are probably using him to try to get me to confess. They’ve tried everything else. They all believe I killed her. It would be easier to confess than to keep telling the truth. Since I don’t know what happened and didn’t have anything to do with it, I would have to make up a good story. I would have to say I dumped the body out in the bay somewhere, like off the Deception Pass bridge where the water is deep, and it could have drifted out into the Straits where it disappeared. People have jumped from there and have never been seen again.
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