Safe

by S. K. Barnett

  “So,” Trude said, with her smile still stuck on high beam, “what are your plans now?”

  “Yeah,” Ben said. “What are your plans now, sis?”

  “Just take it easy, I guess.”

  “Sure,” Trude said. “That makes sense.”

  “How about after you take it easy?” Ben said.

  Mom shot him a nervous glance. Ben ignored it.

  “I don’t know. I haven’t really thought about it.” They were still staring at me, these pretty much perfect strangers—asking me questions like I’d just come back from college or something, because they needed to tiptoe around where I’d really come back from.

  “There’s no rush,” Mom said. “Jenny can figure that all out later.”

  “Of course she can,” Trude said.

  “Want to play Gobble Gobble now?” Melissa, the nine-year-old, asked me, showing me her phone.

  “Sure,” I said.

  She demonstrated the finer points of the game, using her middle finger to stuff pieces of candy into this fat frog’s mouth. There were thirty-nine different levels and she seemed determined to take me through all of them.

  “That’s one full frog,” I said.

  “It’s not a frog,” Melissa giggled. “It’s a monster.”

  “Yeah,” Sebastian, the five-year-old, said. “It’s a monster.”

  “That’s one full monster, then.”

  “You’re funny . . . ,” Sebastian said.

  “Yeah, I’m hysterical.” I’d always felt irritated around kids—probably because I’d never been allowed to be one. Chalk it up to jealousy.

  “Don’t annoy your cousin,” Trude admonished them.

  Good idea, I thought.

  “Someone should take a picture,” Aunt Gerta said, and finally Arnie obliged, using his cell phone to snap a family portrait. This one would be titled: Melissa and Sebastian Annoy Their Cousin Jenny.

  Ben was staring at me from across the room.

  “Want a turn?” Melissa asked me.

  “I’d rather eat the candy myself,” I said. “Screw the frog.”

  “Mommy . . . Jenny said a curse word.”

  Trude looked like she was about to say something to me, but then the little voice in her head must’ve said, We have to make allowances for poor Jenny, and she scolded Melissa instead.

  “I said don’t annoy your cousin.”

  “But she said a curse word.”

  “Yeah,” Sebastian said, giggling, “she said screw!”

  “Sebastian! Do we use language like that? Do we?”

  Sebastian tried to explain that he was merely telling her what language his cousin Jenny had used, but since cousin Jenny was apparently off-limits to any parental correction, Trude remained purposelessly oblivious.

  “Never use language like that again, Sebastian.”

  Smash. Sebastian flung his sister’s iPhone to the floor.

  “What are you doing, mister!” Trude wagged her finger at him.

  I would’ve been happy to explain. He’s telling you to screw off in five-year-old.

  Melissa started to cry because her iPhone had a big crack in it now—See what he did, Mommy . . . see—and then Sebastian joined in, creating a kind of stereo bawling.

  “I’m sorry for my children’s behavior,” she said, directing most of that toward them.

  “No problem,” I said.

  Everything had been knocked off-kilter. Trude wasn’t smiling anymore; Aunt Gerta wasn’t dabbing at her eyes; Arnie wasn’t taking pictures. Dad’s uncle Samuel still looked confused, as if he was wondering where all the forced cheeriness had gone.

  Ben was still staring at me.

  Trude said it was time to get her incorrigible kids home, and that started a mass exodus, everyone probably tired of maintaining their smiles for that long.

  I received a rapid-fire series of good-bye hugs and kisses.

  Before Ben stomped upstairs, he brushed past me and whispered something in my ear.

  “That game where Uncle Brent tickled us till we said uncle? Guess what? I made it up. Never happened. Weird that you remember it, huh?”

  NINE

  The two FBI agents sitting in the living room with us were named Hesse and Kline. But I was picturing them as one of those wannabe YouTube comedy duos, because that made it easier when they kept asking me questions I didn’t feel like answering—even with Mom telling them to stop because it was upsetting me.

  “Sorry,” Hesse said—the woman half of the comedy team—“we appreciate this is hard for both of you, but the more we know about what happened to you, the better chance we have of finding them. Don’t you want them locked up, Jenny?”

  What I wanted was for them to stop asking When did the sexual abuse start? And Can you describe exactly what he did to you? And Did this Father use protection when he raped you?

  Jenny wanted to go upstairs and take a nap or go back to the Roosevelt Field Mall with Mom to buy some new tops.

  “I don’t want to think about them anymore,” I said.

  “Of course,” Hesse said, “that’s totally understandable. But they’ve committed a very serious crime. Several serious crimes. And they need to be taken off the streets before they do that to someone else. You can understand that, can’t you, Jenny?”

  Mom had tried to push the interview back, but the FBI pushed harder. Every day they waited could make it tougher for them to find my kidnappers, they’d told her.

  “Why do you want to know about the . . . you know . . . that stuff?”

  Hesse looked over at Kline as if she was asking him the same question. But she was just passing the baton, which was their standard operating procedure. Every time me or Mom made a stink about having to answer a question—mostly about the sex stuff—Hesse would hand the questioning over to Kline. Who’d change the subject—like asking me about where we’d lived in Iowa.

  I told FBI agent Kline about the deserted trailer at the edge of a dump. About the two ripped beds and the roach-infested cabinets and the sink that didn’t work. About the hole in the ceiling where the freezing rain poured in.

  “She told Detective Schilling all about Iowa,” Mom said. “At the police station. Don’t they share all that with you?”

  “The mobile home’s been checked out,” Kline said. “It was empty.”

  “Well, you didn’t think they’d . . . like . . . stay there?” I said.

  “Not if they thought you’d be going to the police,” Kline said. “Would they have thought that?”

  I shrugged. “How would I know?”

  “When you left, what exactly were the circumstances?”

  “The circumstances?”

  “Did you have a fight that day? Did you confront them . . . about the sexual abuse, about them having kidnapped you . . . about anything in particular?”

  “It wasn’t like that.”

  “Okay, Jenny,” Kline said gently. “What was it like?”

  “I just wanted to get out of there. So, one day I did.”

  “How?”

  “I walked out and didn’t come back.”

  They’d already asked if I’d been restrained in any way.

  “Sometimes.”

  This is the way we tie your arms, tie your arms, tie your arms, this is the way we tie your arms, early in the morning . . .

  Had they let me attend school at any point?

  “No.” (Hesse explaining to Mom that homeschooling made perfect sense, since the less interaction kidnappers have with people in authority, the better, and me explaining to Hesse that it wasn’t homeschooling—I’d learned English by reading all those DC comics Father collected, math by counting the empties he picked up in the streets.)

  “But eventually, they gave you more freedom,” Kline said.

  �
�If you want to call it that.” I’d already told them about the shitty job they let me get at the mall, mostly so I could kick in for family expenses.

  “So there wasn’t any argument the day you left? No confrontation with either of them?”

  “No.”

  “What made you decide to do it that particular day? You were how old then?”

  “Sixteen, almost.”

  “So why leave that day? Why not the day before, or the day after . . . or the month before?”

  “I don’t know. I just felt like it. It wasn’t like some big planned decision or anything.”

  “Where did you go?”

  “I told you. I hitched a ride. I got off the first place that seemed far enough away.”

  “Which was?”

  “I told you that too. What does that have to do with finding them?”

  “I know this must seem repetitive.”

  “Because it is repetitive. You ask me the same stuff a million times.”

  “Sometimes it takes a couple of times before people remember things, Jenny. Things they didn’t remember before. Sorry, I know this isn’t fun.”

  I sighed and looked over at Mom, who looked like she was sorry too, but not enough to go to bat for me again.

  “Do you remember who picked you up that day?” Kline asked. “The car, for instance?”

  “It was like two years ago.”

  “Man? Woman?”

  “Boy.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “Like a boy.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Yeah, that’s it. It was just a ride. I didn’t care what he looked like.”

  “Okay. And where did he leave you off?”

  “I told you. Illinois. Peoria.”

  “Did they come looking for you, Jenny?”

  “Who?”

  “Father and Mother?”

  “How do I know?”

  “You never contacted them after you left?”

  “No. Why would I?”

  “I don’t know . . . because they were your parents all those years. Because you wanted to tell them off, maybe. You must’ve been angry at them—angry enough to leave that day.”

  “I wanted to forget they ever existed; that’s what I wanted to do. Besides, how would I have contacted them? It’s not like they had a phone or computer or anything.”

  “Right. Maybe you could’ve sent them a letter?”

  “Maybe I couldn’t have, because maybe they didn’t have a mailbox or, like, even an address. It was a junked trailer.”

  “Speaking of that trailer, Jenny”—Hesse piping in again, the baton having been invisibly exchanged without my noticing—“what were the sleeping arrangements like?”

  “Sleeping arrangements?” How stupid did that sound? I wanted to say. What would she ask next—what were the seating arrangements at dinner?

  “Did you all sleep in the same area?”

  “My bed was in the back,” I said. “Not a bed exactly. Just a mattress”—thinking that they would probably be combing it for hair and stuff. Of course they would.

  “And Mother and Father . . . they slept in the front?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And when Father, sorry, when he sexually assaulted you, he would leave Mother and go to your bed in the back?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And what would Mother do?”

  “Snore.”

  “So she would be sleeping when he assaulted you?”

  “Mostly.”

  “But not all the time? Sometimes she wasn’t sleeping? She was up? She could hear what was going on?”

  “She knew what was going on.”

  “I’m talking about when the assaults were actually taking place?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know if she was ever up and could actually hear it?”

  “I was kind of occupied.” My voice had an edge to it now, and I pictured it as an actual solid thing, made of steel, razor sharp, and able to slice Hesse and Kline to ribbons.

  “We’ve been over this already,” Mom said. “Do we really need to keep harping on it?”

  “Just a few more questions,” Hesse said. “I’m sorry.”

  No, she wasn’t.

  “Was Mother,” she asked, “I don’t know . . . ever sympathetic?”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “I mean did she ever try and help you? Tell Father to stop. You know, try and protect you?”

  “No.”

  “Why do you think that was?”

  I felt it coming on, the stupid quivers. I was back on the planet Bizarro, where there was an opposite Jenny who didn’t eat nails for breakfast like the one here on Earth.

  “’Cause she was a massive bitch, I guess.”

  There was a brief silence, as if they needed to let my anger have its own space for a while.

  “What do you remember about the day they took you?” Kline asked, switching tacks again.

  “Huh?”

  “The day they kidnapped you? What do you remember?”

  Hold on, I thought. Hold on . . .

  “I was walking down the block to my friend Toni’s house. And I was taken . . .”

  “Yes, we know that. But how? Did they drive by in a car and pull you in? Was it just Father? Or both of them?”

  “I don’t remember. It’s . . . it’s kind of a blur.”

  “Can you take a minute and think about it?”

  I spent the minute thinking about what Ben had whispered to me instead. I made it up . . . Weird that you remember it, huh?

  “So?” Kline said. “Was it just him . . . Father? In a car? Or the both of them?”

  “Just him.”

  “In a car?”

  “Yes.”

  “What kind of car? Do you remember?”

  “I was six.”

  “Sure. But maybe they kept that car for a while?”

  “No. I mean . . . I don’t think so.”

  “And he grabbed you while you were walking down the sidewalk?”

  “Yes. Right.”

  “How?”

  “How . . . ?”

  “Did he come up behind you and just grab you? Or did he stop you first? Maybe say something to you.”

  “He . . . stopped me.”

  “And said something to you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What? Do you remember what he said?”

  “He said my mom had asked him to pick me up.”

  “But you knew that was a lie, right? You were walking down the block to your friend Toni’s house. Your mom”—looking over at her now—“she’d just let you out the door. So you knew that wasn’t true—that this stranger wasn’t supposed to pick you up.”

  “Uh-huh. Right.”

  “So what happened then? You didn’t go with him like he wanted. That’s when he grabbed you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you scream?”

  “Scream? I don’t . . . yes.”

  I suddenly remembered what it’s like to scream but not hear anything coming out of your mouth, because you can’t open it.

  If you keep moving it’s going to hurt worse . . .

  “So what did he do? Did he gag you with something?”

  “His hand.”

  “He gagged you with his hand. And he pulled you into the car?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then what?”

  “I don’t . . .”

  “Were you still screaming when he had you in the car?”

  “Yes.”

  “So what did he do?”

  “I told you. He had his hand across my mouth.”

  “Even while he was driving?”


  “I guess. I don’t remember.”

  “Okay. Where did he take you?”

  “I don’t know . . . to Mother, I guess. I was scared. I was screaming.”

  “You don’t remember where Mother was? Where he drove you to?”

  “No.”

  “A house? An apartment?”

  “I . . . it was an apartment, I think.”

  “Do you remember if it was a long drive? From where he took you?”

  “I don’t remember. It felt long.”

  “How long did you stay there? At the apartment?”

  “I don’t know. A while.”

  “A month? A year?”

  “I don’t really remember. Longer than a month.”

  “Were there any neighbors around the apartment?”

  “I don’t remember any.”

  “You sure? No one? So far, of all the places you can remember living with them, you don’t remember a single person ever interacting with them? A neighbor, the postman, a pizza delivery guy . . . ?”

  “No.”

  “Not one person ever knocked on the front door?”

  “Sure. I mean, I guess so.”

  “Okay. Who?”

  “I don’t know. . . . no one specific comes to mind.”

  “You sure? You want to think about it?”

  “I told you. I don’t remember anyone in particular.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t badger her like that,” Mom said, standing up for me again. “If you haven’t noticed, she’s been through hell. She told you she doesn’t remember anyone showing up wherever they happened to be living. We’re talking about abandoned houses here. Junked trailers. So who exactly was going to pay them a visit?”

  “You’d be surprised, Mrs. Kristal. As much as people keep to themselves, they still have to go out into the world. They run into people; people run into them. Maybe some of them came by the houses. Or the trailer. If there are other people who actually knew them, who saw them, even spoke to them, it’d obviously be a major help to us. Your daughter’s description to the police was kind of vague.”

  “I told them exactly what they looked like,” I said.

  “I’m not sure that’s accurate, Jenny.” Kline looked down at his notes. “You described Father as being about five ten. Brown eyes. Graying hair. A beard about medium length. No other distinguishing features. Mother as being about five five. Brown hair. Brown eyes. Medium build.” He looked up. “Doesn’t give us all that much to go on.”