The Taking

by Kimberly Derting

  Considering I’d been born and raised in Burlington, Washington, a town that barely rated a dot on most maps and definitely not worthy of a mention by name, I was chalking it up to the fact that I’d spent the night outside and still had no memory of anything after the fight with my dad.

  Why I’d decided to camp out behind a Dumpster was beyond me—I was claiming temporary insanity, because there was no other feasible explanation.

  Going home was sure to play out one of two ways, the way I figured it. My dad was either gonna be super sorry about our argument, and the fact that I’d gotten out of the car in the middle of the road and just . . . disappeared.

  Or he was going to be massively pissed at me for being so dramatic that I’d decided to stay out all night, even though I had zero recollection of making that decision at all.

  Either way, I was still trying to decide how to explain the part about having no memory of getting from there to here. That’s why I’d been hoping to talk to Austin first. He was good at those kinds of things. Good at talking me off the ledge and trying to see my parents’ side of things. He was reasonable and even-tempered in a way that I didn’t seem to be capable of when it came to them.

  When I saw my house, on the same block I’d lived on my whole life—right across the street from Austin’s house—that sense of déjà vu returned full force, nearly buckling my knees. For a moment I just stood in front of it, running my tongue over the sharp edge of my chipped tooth. I studied the gray-blue paint that my mom and dad had agonized over when they’d had to repaint the house last summer; and the azalea bushes out front, which suddenly seemed bigger and bushier than I’d remembered them; and the place in the sidewalk where I’d pressed my hands in the wet concrete when I was four and my mom had written my initials with the end of a stick: KA. Kyra Agnew.

  I turned to glance at the house across the street. If Austin’s car had been parked out front, I would’ve gone there first. I was suddenly nervous about going inside my own home.

  But his car was gone, so I was on my own.

  Walking up to the front steps, I tried the door, but it was locked. I reached up to the top of the doorjamb, stretching because I wasn’t really tall enough unless I stood on my toes, and felt for the spare key we kept there. My fingers fumbled along, slipping over the grit, and all the while my pulse felt like it was choking me, it was beating so fast, so hard. But no matter how many times I checked, and double-checked, there was no key.

  I searched around my feet, thinking it must have fallen, but it wasn’t there either. Maybe my parents had decided to teach me a lesson for my tantrum. Maybe they’d locked me out to force me to face them at the door before letting me back inside, which of course they would. To show me that they’re still in charge.

  Finally, when I couldn’t think of anything else to do and when I couldn’t put it off any longer, I knocked. My throat felt suddenly too tight, which seemed silly. Of course they’d be mad, but they’d forgive me too.

  It was an accident, me staying out all night. Somehow I’d have to find a way to explain that to them. To make them believe that I didn’t know exactly what had happened the night before.

  I shifted nervously back and forth as I waited, thinking of a million ways to say I’m sorry. The seconds seemed to stretch and bend and last an eternity, and just when I was about to give up, when I was sure that neither one of them was home, I saw the curtain on the other side of the door—the one above the couch in the living room—part.

  A face appeared.

  A child’s face.

  I was confused, startled by the appearance of the toddler.

  I was an only child—the product of parents who’d spent my entire life doting on me, and only me. I was the center of their universe. Their sun and their moon and their stars, as my dad liked to say when I was little.

  The little boy lifted his hand in a motionless wave, pressing his chubby fingers to the window and leaving a steamy impression around them. I thought of my mom, and the way she’d always told me not to touch the windows because it left fingerprints.

  But when the man appeared behind him, I physically jolted. I looked at the door again; a sense of dread filled every crevice of my being, like I’d made some terrible mistake and gone to the wrong house. Like there was some other blue-gray house with my handprints forever imprinted in the walkway.

  My panic subsided somewhat when I saw the worn gold numbers running alongside the front door: 9-6-1-2.

  My address.

  My house.

  My home.

  I was definitely in the right place. So who were these people? These strangers staring at me from the other side of my window?

  I glanced back, but they were gone, the curtains fallen back in place. The only reminder that they’d been there at all was the outline of the boy’s hand. I felt sick, still dizzy, when I heard the door.

  I glanced up just as it opened, and I found myself staring into the man’s intense brown eyes. He didn’t say anything, just gave me that look that people give you when they answer their doors. The look that says, Can I help you?

  Suddenly indignant, I took a step forward, reaching for a door handle I’d turned a million times before. “Are my parents here?” I’d meant to sound forceful, but my voice had a wavering quality that made me sound nervous instead.

  I’m not sure it would have mattered, though. He’d stopped me anyway. “Who are your parents?” he asked, and that uneasy feeling settled deeper.

  I looked once more at the numbers, double-checking, triple-checking them. “This is my house.”

  The little boy appeared between the man’s knees. He had messy blond hair and round cheeks covered in what I could only imagine was jelly. He reminded me of a smaller version of the boy from the gas station, except that this boy didn’t have freckles. Or pants. His chubby legs were white, and his bare feet were wide, looking vaguely like flippers.

  The man moved, pushing the boy back inside and positioning himself between me and the toddler. Like I was a danger, a threat. “Who are your parents?” he asked, his voice slower now.

  His patronizing tone rubbed me wrong. I pursed my lips. “What are you doing here?” I asked, unwilling to give him too much information, and suddenly worried that there was a strange man in my home. Where were my parents anyway?

  The man’s eyes narrowed, and I couldn’t decide if he was studying me, or suspicious, or both. I saw him reaching for his pocket, and my stomach tightened. Behind him, the boy was clamoring to get around his legs. “Me see . . . me see . . . me see . . . ,” he kept repeating.

  When the man’s hand emerged, he was holding a cell phone. “Do you need me to call someone for you?”

  This time when I reached for the handle, I was faster than he was. “No!” I was nearly hysterical now as I managed to push my way past him. The little boy jumped out of the way of the swinging door. “I need you to tell me what you’re doing here!” I searched the entry frantically. “Mom!” I shouted. “Dad!”

  I’d only made it one step before the man had ahold of my arms and was dragging me back out the door. I heard his phone fall, clattering on the tile floor. He wasn’t gentle, and my heart was racing, slamming against my ribs, bruising them. I didn’t know what he planned to do to me. The little boy was crying, but the man didn’t release me as he hauled me down the steps. I tripped over my own feet as he pulled me along the walkway until we were standing on the sidewalk out in front.

  “I don’t know what you’re problem is,” he hissed, trying to keep his voice low, his eyes shifting back and forth from me to the screaming boy with no pants at the front door. “But this is my house, and you’re scaring my son. If you need help, then call 9-1-1. I can’t do anything for you.” He released my arm but didn’t leave right away. He just stood there looking at me, waiting for some sort of acknowledgment that I’d heard what he’d said.

  I had. I’d heard him. I just couldn’t make sense of it.

  His house?

 
Is that what he’d said? His house?

  But that wasn’t right. This was my house.

  My house.

  I tried to find something in all of it to cling to, something that would clear things up. I replayed the last few minutes, when I’d burst through the front door, and tried to recall what I’d seen.

  It was the same house I remembered. The same, but different.

  How could that be?

  Tears burned my eyes as I looked, too, not at the boy, but at the house in front of us. The house I’d grown up in.

  The man gave me one last piteous look before shaking his head and going back to his son. The boy raised his arms to his father, who scooped him up and carried him back inside, closing the door without looking back at me.

  I wanted to explain what I was going through, to tell him who I was and who my parents were, but all I could manage was “But I . . . I live here.”

  The house across the street was almost as familiar to me as my own, which right now wasn’t entirely reassuring. The pounding in my head was back, starting behind my eyes and radiating down the back of my neck. FML.

  Despite the past few minutes, I wasn’t hesitant as I neared the perfectly edged grass and tidy flower beds, because it was all so familiar. All so comforting.

  Everything was exactly as it should be.

  Even the car in the driveway—Austin’s mother’s—the same as always.

  Austin would know what was happening. He’d clear things up for me.

  I checked my phone again and saw the same NO SERVICE message blinking at me from the screen. If Austin’s car had been there, I would have gone to his window. Instead, I went around back to the kitchen door and rapped softly.

  When Austin materialized on the other side, peering at me through the panes of glass that separated us, I leaned forward, sagging against the door as relief loosened the knots in my chest and the tension in the back of my neck. I pressed my hand against the window, the same way the little boy had in my house when he’d waved to me through my living-room window.

  Austin was here!

  Everything would be fine now. Austin would make everything okay.

  The door opened, and I moved with it, tumbling inside as I fell into him. His arms opened, catching me before I could fall all the way to the floor.

  “Thank god,” I mumbled against his chest, the only place that felt safe. I no longer cared that I was still wearing my uniform, dirt and sweat stains making it rank. “Thank god you’re here. I’ve had the strangest morning. The strangest night. I have no idea what’s going on.”

  The arms around me tightened, but only slightly, and then I heard his mother’s voice, so achingly well-known to me that tears brimmed in my eyes. “Tyler? Who is it? What’s going on?”

  I hadn’t noticed Tyler, Austin’s kid brother, but it was a relief to know I was no longer alone, that I was surrounded by familiar faces when everything else was so out of whack.

  I drew back from Austin so I could see his mom. “It’s just me,” I told her. “I just came over because—” I wasn’t sure how I’d planned on finishing my explanation, but I never had the chance.

  Tamara Wahl dropped her coffee mug. The ceramic shards became projectiles as it shattered, sending pieces flying in every direction. Coffee pooled at her feet, but she just stood there, staring at me, her mouth gaping.

  “Mom, it’s Kyra . . . ,” Austin said, and for the first time I realized that this was all wrong too. I looked down at the arms, still at my waist, and noticed the wiry hairs on them. They should have been flaxen, closer to blond than brown. Even the arms, the skin, seemed somewhat too pale, as if this version of Austin hadn’t just finished his annual lifeguard certification—something my Austin had most definitely done.

  His voice, too, was not right. It was deep, yes, the timbre just shades away from Austin’s.

  I was almost afraid to look at his face.

  And that was when he caught me for the second time. The moment I realized that he wasn’t Austin at all; he never had been.

  This was Tyler Wahl. Tyler, who looked far too much like his older brother—my seventeen-year-old boyfriend—in looks, in stature . . . and, most of all, in age.

  Tyler, who, the last time I’d seen him just the day before, had been only twelve years old.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  CHAPTER TWO

  “KYRA, ARE YOU SURE I CAN’T GET YOU SOMEthing?” Tamara Wahl asked, her disembodied head looming out of the darkness as she peered into the bedroom.

  I wasn’t sure how I’d gotten here, but at least I knew where I was. Or thought I did. Everything felt topsy-turvy at the moment.

  “No. I don’t think so.” I shifted on the Batman sheets that I’d laid on almost as many times as my own. “No. I’m okay.”

  I glanced around at a room I had memorized. I knew right where the poster of Mark Spitz (the Olympic swimmer Austin idolized) was—the one with the preprinted autograph Austin had tried to replicate above it when he was eleven in scribbly purple marker. The furniture was arranged exactly the same as always: his bed, his dresser, his corner desk plastered with a mishmash collection of sports and music and bumper stickers he’d collected.

  But despite the sameness of it, it was missing his everyday clutter. His overflowing clothes hamper, the discarded Coke cans and water glasses on top of his dresser, messy homework piles on his desk. Even the bed was too neat, the sheets too fresh and smooth, as if they’d just been changed.

  As if I were inside a diorama of Austin’s room. A perfect, unused replica.

  His mother had tried to explain things to me, but nothing she’d said made any sense. It was like she’d been speaking gibberish.

  Five years, she’d kept saying. It had been five years since anyone had seen me last.

  She was wrong, of course.

  Wrong.

  Wrong.

  Wrong.

  It hadn’t been five years. It had been one night. I knew because I had been at my softball game. The championship game.

  I knew because I was still wearing my uniform, and it still smelled like grass and sweat, and I still had the ribbons threaded through my hair.

  One night, I kept insisting while my head and my throat ached. My dad and I had had an argument, and I’d run off to have a few minutes to myself—that was all. I must’ve wandered until I’d fallen asleep. At the Gas ’n’ Sip. Behind the Dumpster.

  One damn night. Not five long years.

  But she’d given me some time alone to absorb it, to let it sink in before coming back to check on me.

  She patted my hand now, her voice cautious, as if I were held together by wishes and hopes. “Well, your mom should be here soon. Maybe she’ll do a better job of explaining things than I did.”

  I shot upright. “My mom?” My throat constricted around the anticipation. “She’s coming?” My words barely made it through my airway, and the last one came out as a squeak. I didn’t want to cry, but just hearing that my mom was on her way made everything better somehow, and there was no way to stop the tears.

  And then Austin’s mom, who I couldn’t remember not knowing, had her arms around me, comforting, reassuring, holding me in the way only a mother knows how. “It’ll be okay, Kyra. Everything’s gonna be okay now.”

  Waiting, the same way I used to do when I was a little girl and I knew it was time for my mom to come home from work, I was standing at the window when I saw her pull up. She was driving a car I didn’t recognize: black and shiny and sporty.

  If what Tamara Wahl had said was true, which I still couldn’t wrap my brain around because it was utterly-completely-totally insane, but if I allowed myself even to consider that I’d really lost five whole years of my life, then more than just who drove what had changed.

  I know Austin’s mom believed what she said, and she definitely had some evidence to
back up her story. Austin was off at college, or so she’d told me—living the life we’d always planned, attending his last year at Central Washington University in Ellensburg. And Tyler—pipsqueak Tyler, who used to follow us around the house, intruding on conversations and telling the same annoying jokes that we used to tell when we were his age—was now a junior at Burlington Edison High, the same school Austin and Cat and I had once gone to. I couldn’t deny that part, that he’d changed—I’d seen it with my own two eyes.

  And, obviously, my mom and dad had moved.

  All those things made it hard to argue with her. But that didn’t change the part where everything inside of me said she was wrong.

  I wanted to cry and scream at the same time, and I was so ridiculously confused, I could hardly think straight.

  Five years was a lifetime. An eternity.

  I was surprised, then, when my mom stopped her sleek black car, not in front of Austin’s house, but in front of our old house. Habit, I supposed. It was the first place I’d gone too.

  I watched as she emerged from her new car. Her hair was more highlighted than I remembered and shorter too, skimming her shoulders rather than falling to the middle of her back.

  I wondered if I looked different too. I’d tried to wash up and had examined myself in the mirror. I didn’t feel changed, and I couldn’t see anything that said five years had gone by, right down to the farmer’s tan where my uniform sleeves hit, from spending hour after hour practicing in those last days of softball season. I even had the same bruise on my right shin from where I’d banged it against our coffee table when Cat and I had been wrestling over the remote last weekend.

  Well, last weekend plus five years.

  But how was any of that possible? How could I have the same bruise and suntan? How could I still be wearing my uniform and the ribbons threaded through my hair, and smell like sweat and softball field if five years had passed?

  Those were the things that made me hesitate, no matter how logical Tamara Wahl’s explanations might seem. No matter how much Tyler had grown.