The Girls I've Been

by Tess Sharpe

  I bite the inside of my cheek as I hear the agent punch in the code and swing the door open. “This is all of them?”

  “Yes,” Amelia says, because as far as she’s concerned, that’s true. I think about the thumb drive tucked behind the toilet paper. I’ll need to move it soon.

  “Let me just verify.” More silence. I can barely breathe around it. Is she going to squash the deal? Will she somehow figure out what I held back? But then there’s a snapping sound. “That’s all, then.”

  “Do not come looking for me,” Amelia says, and it’s not just a warning; it’s a plea for mercy. And North is deep enough in it still to give it to her.

  “Goodbye, Amy.”

  My sister does not say goodbye in return. I wonder if she’s not able to. If she’ll break.

  The door clicks shut, and North’s footsteps fade.

  “That’s it,” Yvonne says. “Are you all right?”

  Amelia nods. “Thank you for everything, Yvonne.”

  I tilt my head farther to the side so I can see Yvonne pause at the door, worrying her lower lip. “Free advice?”

  Amelia nods.

  “Go deep, wherever you end up. He won’t stop. A little girl cut him off at the knees, and it’s not going to sit well with him or his cohorts. So get out of here. And don’t come back.”

  After a moment, my sister says, “Thank you, Yvonne.”

  “I would say anytime, but let’s be honest: I hope I never see you again.”

  “Me too. But I owe you. If you ever need me . . .”

  “I pray I never have to collect. But I will if I have to. Try to stay safe, Amelia.”

  “We will.”

  “You’re a good sister. Remember that.”

  I hear her heels click out the door, and then it shuts. I close my eyes when Amelia starts rustling around, and then I hear the TV flick on. The murmur of voices fills the room, mindless nonsense I can’t fully make out. I let myself drift. Just to give her some time.

  Act 3: Home

  * * *

  —

  I wait a long time before I walk out into the suite, where she’s turned on an old movie and is staring at it with the kind of frown that tells me she’s not seeing or hearing any of it. I drop down next to her on the couch, crisscrossing my legs. Our knees brush, and her jeans are ripped and soft, like my sister is underneath. The exhaustion pulses through me like a heartbeat, and I want to lay my head down on her leg and let her stroke my hair off my face like I’ve seen sisters do in the movies. The impulse is something I should fight, shed like skin and strands of hair, because comfort isn’t something I deserve, is it?

  “Are we leaving soon?”

  “We need to get your new ID on the way out of town. I know someone.”

  Of course she does.

  “Are we going overseas, like you said?”

  Amelia shakes her head. “I’m taking you home with me.”

  The word echoes strangely in the room. She’s never mentioned home. I don’t know where she lived before we started the Florida Plan. Amelia has always been careful with the information she’s given me. She had to be, because girls are supposed to choose their mothers, and what if I did, in the end?

  Abby would’ve chosen him. The last two years tell me over and over again that she would’ve chosen him. I have to believe that. I have to understand that the second they met, her world tilted toward him, tossing me off. I could’ve crashed, but Amelia helped me fly.

  What had she sacrificed to get here? I know some, but not all. I look at her out of the corner of my eye, thinking about how the room had crackled between her and Agent North. You know me, Amelia had said, and I knew what she sounded like when she was telling the truth.

  “You slept with the FBI agent, didn’t you?”

  And for the first time since this all started, my sister lets out a laugh. “Oh fucking hell,” she says, and then that laugh turns into a mockery of it.

  I don’t know what to say. I feel sick. What I know about sex and relationships is purely transactional and violent and violating, but I’ve read enough to know that that’s not right. That it can be different.

  Can’t it?

  “I’ve got you less than six hours and you’re already picking me apart,” Amelia says, shaking her head. “You are a trip.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She reaches over and grabs my hand, squeezing it. “Don’t ever apologize for being smart,” she says. “You and I, we see things differently than most people. We catch the little stuff, the hidden things.”

  “Because of Mom.”

  She squeezes too tight. I don’t flinch. “No, she just saw it in us. It doesn’t mean it’s because of her. And it doesn’t mean we have to use it the way she does.”

  “But . . . you did sleep with the FBI agent,” I say, because I don’t want to talk about her anymore. I can’t. Not yet. Maybe never again. Can I do that? Can I just hide forever?

  “It’s complicated,” Amelia says.

  My lips feel horribly dry. I lick them. “Does that mean . . . That means you did it for me.”

  She starts to say my name but stops, because I asked her before not to. It’s enough answer.

  “You conned her,” I say. “She was the one who answered your cell phone when I called you in Washington. And I called late. Which means . . .”

  “I—” She leans her elbows on her knees, breathing deeply. She’s not elegant, my sister. But she’s all raw-hewn grace and neatly pulled-back hair, cheekbones for days and big eyes full of regret. “I want you to be a kid,” she says. “I want to take you home and have you go to school and live the kind of life you haven’t had and I never will. And if I tell you—”

  “If you tell me, I’ll know what I owe,” I interrupt.

  That makes her straighten. “I’m going to say this once: You owe me nothing. I chose to seek you out when you were little. I chose to get you free of her. I chose to be your sister. That was all me. There is nothing owed. You and I are on even ground. Always.”

  “I don’t know how to be on even ground.” My confession, when it comes, is just as quiet as hers, but it’s so shameful. I am so ashamed. Tears well in my eyes, and am I a monster, that this is where I cry? Not before?

  The bathroom light outlines her profile, stark bones against the golden glow. We are both so tired, and there is so much still to do. There is so far to flee. But I have to know.

  If she wants us on even ground, I need to know what she did for me. What my existence did to her.

  So I’m honest for once and tell her that. And in turn, she is honest with me.

  “I didn’t find out about you until you were three,” she says. “When I ran from Mom, I was determined to never come back. I ended up in LA. Disappeared into the sprawl. I worried that if I started running cons, it might get back to her somehow. So I went legit. Worked for a PI. Got my own license. I resisted looking for her for a long time, but when I finally did . . . that’s how I found out about you.”

  “But you didn’t come to see me until I was six.”

  “I didn’t want to come at all,” she says, and she can’t look at me while she says it. Honesty at its most brutal. This is what I asked for. “For years, I told myself that you weren’t my business. I knew if I went back, she’d just use you to pull me in.”

  “What changed your mind?”

  “You were turning six,” she says. “I was six when—” Her fingers shake as they press against her lips, like she’s trying to keep the words inside. “I couldn’t leave you. I had to try to get you away from her. So I made a plan.”

  “You came to see me.”

  Her fingers are still pressed against her mouth, but her lips spread, an almost-smile for the tips of her to remember. “You were so funny and smart already. But you were wary. And the second I saw that rubber ba
nd on your wrist . . .” She shakes her head.

  That was one of Mom’s tricks, to keep me from messing up. She’d snap it against my skin. I’ll forever associate some things with the sting and the faint smell of rubber.

  “I wanted to take you right then. But I knew she’d never stop searching for you. She doesn’t know how to run a con without a daughter. She needs a partner.”

  “She gets lonely.” It’s automatic, the defense of her, even now.

  “It’s not our job to fill that in her,” Amelia says.

  “You sound like a shrink.”

  “Probably because I go to one,” she says. “And so will you, when we’re safe and home.”

  All three of those things are unfathomable: safety, therapy, and home. I want to argue, but she says, “Do you want me to finish?”

  I do, so I nod.

  “When I left that first time, I knew I had to find a way to make it so that once I had you with me, Mom couldn’t get to you ever again. I either had to kill her or put her in prison. And since I didn’t want to add matricide to my list of crimes, I chose the latter. Which meant I needed two things: I needed you to actually want to leave, and I needed an FBI agent in my pocket for the moment that happened.”

  “Agent North.”

  Amelia nods. “I knew it was going to be a long con. That it would take time to get you on my side. But I started working on North right away. She had a big case, and one of the witnesses was in the wind. So I tracked him down and brought him in. We became friends.”

  “Friends or friends?”

  “Friends,” she says, but I don’t think I believe her. “I’d pass her tips sometimes.”

  “You put Abby on her radar,” I say.

  “The FBI already knew about Abby, but North is ambitious. And a con woman who’s tangled up with all sorts of other criminal power because of the men she targets is a big get. If they managed to bring in Abby, think of all the marks she’s had through the years. Think of all the dirt she’s dug up. If she turned snitch, she’d be a gold mine.”

  “Did she know that you were Abby’s kid?”

  “Not until Washington.”

  “You played her for four whole years?”

  She nods. “It blew up after that. She found out everything. And by then . . .”

  “You were together,” I fill in when it’s clear she won’t. I understand why she can’t. She broke the number one rule.

  She fell for the mark. I want to reach out and stroke her arm, but I’m afraid that it’ll be clumsy. That it might be unwelcome.

  “I couldn’t find you after you and Abby left Washington. When you finally popped up, I was just going to go to Florida and take you. Fuck the plan; I’d worry about her chasing us later. But then I saw the marriage license.”

  “Agent North couldn’t ignore you if you gave her Raymond Keane,” I say, understanding now.

  “So the plan was back on. And now we’re here.”

  “I fucked it up.”

  “You managed,” she says. “That’s what matters. And in a few hours, we’ll be gone.”

  “He’ll look for me.”

  “We have a head start. He has to be on good behavior through the trial. Once he’s put away, it’ll take him a while to gather power. They’ll assume you’re in witness protection. Whoever he hires to come after you will focus on that angle first. We have time.”

  “To do what? Hide better?”

  “To make backup plans. To prepare. And to live. That’s what this is all about.”

  “You want me to live like a normal person.” I shake my head. “Agent North is right. I’m not normal.”

  “There is no normal,” Amelia says. “There’s just a bunch of people pretending there is. There’s just different levels of pain. Different stages of safe. The biggest con of all is that there’s a normal. What I want for you is happiness and safety. That’s what I want for myself, too.”

  “Were you happy with Agent North?”

  When she doesn’t answer, I press further.

  “Did you love her?”

  Still no answer.

  “Because she was kind of mean,” I add.

  “What I did to her was more than mean,” Amelia says.

  “So you did love her.” I pause. “Do love her?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she says, all the answer I need. I really am just a tidal wave, destroying everything in my wake.

  “I’m sorry.”

  She reaches out again to squeeze my hand. This is something she does, I realize. Touch people genuinely. Can I tell her that I’m not used to it? That it makes me jump inside my skin almost as much as it comforts me?

  “Everything that I’ve done is worth it to have you here safe with me,” she says. “And now you get to have a brand-new life.”

  “Where?”

  “California,” she says. “Way up north.” She squeezes my hand again. “It’s a little town called Clear Creek.”

  “And you?” I ask. She looks quizzically at me. “What are you called?”

  It’s like the air sharpens around us, and her entire body tenses and then releases just as quickly. An ingrained response that we both have. Amelia was her touchstone, the real girl no one but the Deveraux women know. She conned Mom into thinking she was still Amelia, but she’s become someone else, truly and fully.

  I know my sister, but I don’t. Now I get to meet the real her.

  “Lee,” she says. “Lee Ann O’Malley.”

  Lee. Short. Matter-of-fact. It suits her.

  I want to be brave when I ask the next thing, but I’m not. I’m right back in front of that mirror, Mom’s hands braiding my long hair as I repeat a name dutifully after her . . . and my voice shakes.

  “And what am I called?”

  “That’s up to you,” Lee says, and choosing like that is as unfathomable as safe and help and home. “What do you want your name to be?”

  “I get to choose?”

  Her thumb settles on the pulse point of my wrist. Thump-thump. Thump-thump.

  “You get to choose.”

  — 43 —

  11:57 a.m. (165 minutes captive)

  1 lighter, 3 bottles of vodka, 1 pair of scissors, 2 safe-deposit keys

  Plan #1: Scrapped

  Plan #2: On hold

  Plan #3: Stab

  Plan #4: Get gun. Get free. Get Iris and Wes. Get out.

  Duane slumps to the side, his hold on the pistol slackening, and I move. I don’t talk myself out of it or hesitate, because who knows if he’ll jerk himself conscious any second.

  It’s awkward with my bound hands, but I manage to pick the gun up, though I can’t shoot it or hold it properly.

  I set it down on the desk, turning back to him. His breathing is shallow. The blood loss got to him, maybe, but if he just passed out from the pain, he might come to fast. But I need my hands free.

  I tug up his shirt with two of my fingers, exposing the waist of his jeans, and the knife is tucked against his back. I grab it, peel it open, and, with some maneuvering, manage to flip the blade to the right position and saw through the layers of tape.

  The knife goes in my pocket, and the gun’s back in my hand, and I can’t hesitate, even though the weight of it is a free fall in my stomach, every muscle in my body telling me to put it down.

  I move forward instead. Got the gun. Got free. Now I get Iris and Wes. Then we get out.

  Cracking open the office door, I peer through the slit into the hall. There’s no one in sight. Red Cap’s still down in the basement. We might be able to avoid him altogether.

  I slip out the door and into the hall, hurrying to the heavy steel table they dragged to block the office they were keeping us in. I set the gun on the table and yank the end of it.

  “Stop.”

  I w
hirl, grabbing the gun as I move, and it may look confident, but I’m not. I don’t want this. But I still point it at Red Cap because he’s got the shotgun pointed at me.

  “Put it down,” he orders.

  “Put yours down.”

  He jerks his head to the side, and when Iris steps into the hallway, all the greedy joy of slipping free fizzes out in my chest.

  “Down,” he insists, and I do it, because there’s no other choice. The knife’s still in my pocket, but if I reach for it, he’ll shoot me, so I stay stock-still. Iris stares at me as he hurries over and gets the gun. “What did you do to him this time?” he demands as he hustles us into the office where Duane is slumped against the wall.

  Iris’s eyes widen as she sees my bloody flannel next to him.

  “I didn’t do anything. He passed out on his own.”

  Red Cap slaps Duane’s face a few times, but he doesn’t move. Iris looks from both of them on the ground to me, with a question on her face.

  The scissors, I mouth, making a stabbing motion.

  She shoots me a look that seems to be more disappointed I didn’t do it properly than horrified I did it at all.

  “You’re lucky he’s still breathing,” Red Cap tells me when he finally gets up after tying my flannel against Duane’s wound. “He better wake up.”

  Red Cap has a point, unfortunately. I kind of need Duane awake, because Red Cap is not the leader type and he’ll fall to pieces if he doesn’t have someone to boss him around.

  “I didn’t do anything,” I say again, not liking how he’s straightened with the kind of intent that has my fists curling.

  “You stabbed him.”

  “Girl’s got a right to protect herself.”

  “I am done with your shit,” he tells me as his grip on the shotgun tightens.

  “I have to go to the bathroom!” Iris squeaks out. We both look at her, the tension suddenly broken.

  “No,” he says, in such a frustrated way that I realize this is a worn-out argument between them. What has she been up to?

  “I did what you told me,” she says. “I sat down there in that creepy basement and breathed in welding fumes forever. You said when we came up, I could. And now you’re not going to let me?”