Safe

by S. K. Barnett

  “I said he had scraggly gray hair.”

  “Right. Scraggly . . . sorry, that’s in the notes. Did you sit down with a sketch artist at the precinct?”

  “Detective Schilling asked us about it,” Mom said. “Frankly, we just wanted to get Jenny home at that point.”

  “Of course. I completely understand. You mind if we send one over tomorrow, Jenny?”

  I shrugged. “Sure.”

  “I know we’ve been over this already, but you never heard them exchange actual names? Real names? It was always just Father and Mother?”

  Stop . . . I’ll be good . . .

  Stop, WHO . . . ?

  Please . . . I promise . . .

  Please, who . . . ?

  FATHER . . .

  “Yeah.”

  “And you never asked them? About their real names? The way kids, you know, like to ask their parents about everything?”

  “They weren’t my parents.”

  Kline reiterated that there’d be just a few more questions, but he lied, because the questions kept coming.

  “What about doctors—they never took you to one?” Father didn’t believe in them, I said. “Never took you shopping?” Nope—they stole clothes out of the Goodwill bins. “Never took you to a grocery store?” I don’t remember. And so on. They asked about all the places we lived, most of which I couldn’t recall, and then they asked about them again, and I still couldn’t remember most of them.

  Finally, Mom said, “Enough.”

  I’d begun unconsciously shrinking into the couch, as if I was trying to physically get away from them, from Hesse and Kline and all their stupid questions, and I guess I was. I was tired of being a good sport.

  Hesse and Kline reluctantly agreed to end the interview.

  Kline shook my hand and Hesse patted me on the shoulder and told me that it was very common for victims to remember other things after talking to them, and if that happened, to please get in contact with them right away.

  “If you could remember other people who met Father and Mother, who knew them, no matter how briefly, we need to hear about it,” she said.

  “Haven’t you asked people in Sioux City? People around the neighborhood?” Mom asked.

  “There isn’t a neighborhood,” Kline said. “The trailer’s at the edge of a dump. There’s some houses about a quarter mile away—pretty run-down. A few of the people have remembered seeing Jenny. No one remembers seeing anyone matching her description of them. Father and Mother. Don’t worry”—Kline looked over at me—“we’ll keep digging.”

  TEN

  Ben

  Ben was trying to explain it to his best bud, Zack.

  But how exactly?

  Even his dad had trouble spitting it out on that ride home Saturday, Ben stewing in the front seat, wondering why he’d been hunted down—two of his friends texting him that his dad had put out a virtual APB on him—and Ben still percolating on some nice Skywalker weed, which usually made him chill but not when his dad was making him leave his car parked outside Dom’s house and dragging him home like he was eight years old.

  “So what’s the problem?” Ben had asked him in a perfectly polite tone, that politeness somehow eluding his dad, who asked him why he always had to be so snotty.

  “Perception isn’t reality,” Ben answered, which was a line he’d seen in a car ad in his senior communications course and then immediately appropriated. He’d already used it on the boys’ dean, who’d asked him if he was high, and then on his history teacher, who’d asked him why he hadn’t studied for the test on which he’d just received a big fat F. Both of them not exactly amused by it, so it wasn’t totally surprising that his dad wasn’t either.

  “Guess I’m making it up,” his dad said. “That it?”

  “Intent is two-thirds of the law,” Ben said, although he suspected he’d jumbled that up, that it was possession that was two-thirds of the law or something like that. What he was really trying to say was that he hadn’t intended to be snotty so therefore was innocent as charged.

  “Huh?” his dad said. “Intent is two-thirds of what? Look, forget it, I need to tell you what’s happened.”

  Except he couldn’t seem to manage that. Ben could see his jaw trying to formulate the words, as if he’d just gotten two shots of novocaine at the dentist, and Ben, still high, found it pretty funny.

  “We got a call today . . . ,” his dad said. Then: “Your mother got a call today . . .” Then: “You won’t believe this . . .” Then: “Okay, I’m not sure how to tell you this . . .”

  By this time, Ben was trying so hard not to laugh out loud that he’d completely lost focus on what his dad was saying, or trying to say. So that when his dad finally said it, Ben didn’t react, because he hadn’t actually processed it.

  “Did you hear what I said, Ben?” his dad said, in this soft, reverential voice that Ben found perfectly hysterical.

  “Sure.”

  “You heard what I said just now? You heard me?”

  “Aye, aye, Captain.”

  His dad pulled over to the curb and stopped the car, which finally brought Ben’s hysteria to a screeching halt.

  “Are you stoned, Ben?” his dad asked. Ben was about to repeat his perception-reality line, the one he’d already offered to that very same question in the dean’s office, or maybe he would just remind his dad that he was legally an adult so he could do whatever he felt like—even though that would mean suffering through one of those “you’re still under my roof” speeches—but his dad’s overly earnest face made him stop.

  “Dope . . . I mean . . . nope.” He’d done that on purpose, a response he’d honed in the past, figuring that if he was cool enough to joke about it, then he obviously wasn’t. Stoned, that is.

  “I just told you about Jenny. And you’re cracking up.”

  “Huh? Who?”

  “Jenny. Your . . . sister.”

  “My sister?”

  It went like this for a while, his dad saying things and Ben repeating them, like they had to do in Spanish class, and with just about as much comprehension. His dad saying, “Jenny, your sister”—and Ben wondering WTF he was talking about, although starting to feel his pot head going up in smoke, so to speak. Because there was some dark, urgent undertone here, or was it undertow, this scary force insistently trying to suck him under.

  “Jenny . . . what? I don’t . . .”

  “Your sister,” Dad said. “She’s come back. Didn’t you hear what I said?”

  And now, at last, he had. But it was like the kind of thing you hear when you smoke too much weed laced with speed, and the words aren’t real, just coming from your own buzzing brain. This couldn’t be real either, could it?

  “My sister’s what? She’s . . . back? Back where . . . ?”

  “Here. Jenny’s home, Ben. I know this must be absolutely incomprehensible to you, it’s incomprehensible to us too, but sometimes amazing things happen; they just do . . .”

  “Whoa . . . ,” Ben said. “Wait a minute . . . You’re telling me that . . . my sister, she’s home. Home . . . like our house?”

  “Jenny escaped from her kidnappers. She got away from them. And now she’s home.”

  The undertow had him now, and he couldn’t breathe. He was going to drown right here in the front seat of his dad’s car, and then the family would be three people again, except a different three people: Ben gone, and his sister, Jenny, here instead.

  “You okay, Ben?” His dad reaching out, as if he were going to hug him, and Ben not remembering the last time his dad had done that—maybe when he’d scored two goals in soccer when he was twelve—so he found himself instinctively shrinking back, because it was just too weird, everything, his sister, Jenny, back . . . back home, and him dying here in the car when he got the news, and his dad trying to hug him.

&nbs
p; “It’s okay, Ben,” his dad said, “I know this is a shock to you,” and Ben thinking no, a shock was when the boys’ dean caught you in mid-toke and you had to swallow smoke, or when you saw a picture of your supposed girlfriend, Darla, swapping spit with your supposed friend AJ on Snapchat, those were shocks, but this was more like being hit by lightning—he’d once seen this news shot of a smoking body being carted off to the morgue.

  “When . . . like, today . . . ?” Ben asked, which seemed pretty stupid even as he said it, because of course it was today, since yesterday his sister was dead and buried—well, not buried, because they’d never found her. And maybe she wasn’t buried metaphorically either—kudos to his English teacher for last week’s assignment on metaphors versus similes—because Ben had kept her alive all these years, created a kind of shrine to her, or what he remembered of her, which he visited religiously along with a number of other devotees. If you didn’t believe him, check out the number of Facebook visitors, which currently stood at 983, excluding his parents, who had no idea it even existed.

  The thing was, when he looked in the mirror, he felt like he saw a kind of thalidomide baby staring back. Zack had turned him on to that particular horror when they were twelve or so—this website on medical malformations, which featured kids without legs and arms, the result of this sleeping pill called thalidomide that all these pregnant women had taken back in the Stone Age. And when Ben saw these kids—wanting to look and needing to look away at the same time—he thought, That’s me. Maybe no one else could see it, but he could. When they took his sister, Jenny, that day, whoever they were, they’d ripped out a part of him as well—he couldn’t say exactly which part, only that he never felt entirely whole again. He’d apparently lost all memory of what happened that day Jenny disappeared because he’d completely freaked out—childhood traumatic grief being the official diagnosis—and he was stuck in a kids’ funny farm for more than a year. Sure, they’d called it a school, but every student was dumbed down on meds of one kind or another, and if it was a school, why did he end up two grades back when he finally reentered the general population, huh? Already twenty, and still stuck in high school.

  He couldn’t put it together in any logical way. It was like playing pickup sticks, trying to pull out one memory or another, but the whole thing crashing down before he could finish. Sometimes on particularly good weed—a blunt of mellow Sour Diesel, let’s say—he felt like he was getting this close, like he was right there, only he never got any further. What was perplexing, particularly perplexing, was he’d never felt that he and his kid sister were that close, as much as any eight-year-old could understand that sort of thing. They were practically Irish twins, yet it seemed to him that they hadn’t been tight at all. In fact, he seemed to remember them fighting half the fucking time. But when she disappeared, so did a crucial piece of him—his ability to function like a normal kid, for one thing, at least, for a while—and when he tried to remember things about her, about that day, it was like someone had turned out the lights. Wanting to know and frightened of knowing all at the same time.

  Which is why he’d started that memorial page on Facebook, which was as much a shrine to that lost part of himself as to her, and where, bit by bit, he’d been letting in a few cracks of light. And where other people, some of whom had lost family members of their own, had started to congregate to more or less cry on one another’s shoulders.

  His dad had eventually pulled away from the curb—after Ben somehow pulled it together enough to look happy about this great news, which somehow he wasn’t happy about, another thing he was forced to mull over on the ride home, namely, why exactly that was.

  Maybe because it was entirely too amazing to be true, or maybe because his whole being had been shaped by the absence of something—his sister, Jenny—so suddenly having her back was like erasing himself. Like, who was he now exactly?

  They remained dead quiet on the rest of the ride home, his dad giving him time to digest it, he guessed, even though he could hardly breathe, much less think. Just about the time Jenny disappeared, he’d gone flying down the stairs like he always did when his mom called them to dinner, only he’d missed a step and went literally flying down the stairs, landing on his left arm, which went crack. It didn’t hurt at first—just this all-encompassing numbness that was somehow worse, because you knew, you just knew what was coming. Ben felt like that now, struck numb, with a world of pain lurking right around the corner.

  When they got to the house, Ben didn’t actually want to walk in, but it wasn’t like there was exactly an alternative.

  For a second, he thought this was all some stupid prank. The hot chick from Fredo’s was sitting next to his mom on the couch.

  “Hey, Ben, long time no see,” she said, after they finished their staring contest.

  No, it wasn’t, he thought. It was just a few hours since he’d last seen her.

  He was going to say that, then thought maybe he shouldn’t, then thought why not, then didn’t know what to think, as his mom began begging him to come and join the family reunion.

  These lyrics from the Clash started playing in his head . . . maybe it was the pot—should I stay or should I go—and as a result, he did neither, just stood there as his mom kept asking him to come in and his dad gave him a push from behind. “Say hello to your sister,” they both begged him, but she wasn’t his sister, she was the girl from Fredo’s, and besides, everyone knew his sister was dead. You could look it up on Facebook.

  When he finally entered the living room, because there was only so long he could stand there doing nothing and he couldn’t just turn around and walk out, he picked the spot geographically farthest from everyone.

  His mom asked him if he wanted to say something to his sister, and he felt like saying, Sure, where is she? And then the girl from Fredo’s said she was tired and wanted to go to sleep, so they all got up—excluding himself—and they disappeared upstairs.

  Ben stayed right where he was, on the pumpkin-colored love seat, which made him think of that stupid fairy tale, the one where the girl turned into a pumpkin at midnight—or was it her coach that did? He couldn’t remember—but maybe something like that would happen here, the girl from Fredo’s turning into a pumpkin and ending this fairy tale, because that’s what it was. Of course it was.

  Eventually his mom came back downstairs and asked if he was all right and murmured something about taking time to let it all sink in, and Ben just nodded, because he suddenly felt very tired too, as exhausted as the girl from Fredo’s. They’d put her in the den, and when Ben walked by the closed door on the way to his room, he had a sudden memory of running into this room when he was eight years old, or had he been running away from it? Whatever. The girl inside it was going to disappear at midnight.

  Ha.

  The next day, she was gone—the couch bed back to being just a couch again, and no sign of her anywhere, and Ben was beginning to attribute the whole thing to that pretty intense Skywalker OG he’d toked with Zack.

  But when he went down to the kitchen to grab some OJ, his dad was drinking coffee by the sink and said, “Jenny and Mom went to the mall.”

  There went that theory. Ben was going to ask his dad to stop calling the girl from Fredo’s Jenny, but he was still suffering from shock, or maybe aftershock—that thing after the original earthquake when everyone sticks their heads out of the rubble thinking it’s all over, and they all get a big surprise—so he said nothing, and even forgot why he’d come down to the kitchen in the first place. His dad tried to start a conversation with him, but Ben bolted out of the kitchen as if he’d just heard a text popping up on his cell, which he’d left somewhere in the hall, only he sent one instead—to Zack, telling him Ben needed to come over pronto.

  When he got to Zack’s house and Zack asked him, “What’s up?” he said nothing, and he kept saying nothing until the next day, when his house was plastered all over the T
V news.

  ELEVEN

  Mom was at her real estate office and Dad was in the city being an executive producer. Maybe I’ll take you to work one day and show you around, he told me, and I said, Cool. Mom had asked me if it was okay if she went back to work, and I said, Why not?

  I want to be sure you can handle being alone, Jenny.

  I felt like asking her what was so bad about being alone, given that there were plenty of times when being alone was exactly what I was down on my knees praying for, when I wasn’t down on my knees doing something else.

  No problem, I said to Mom. It’s fine.

  I was tired. Not “physically can’t keep my head up” tired, though I wasn’t exactly getting what you’d call a good night’s sleep. The freak-show nightmares took care of that. Just tired of us all dancing around each other—what we could talk about and what we couldn’t, how I should or shouldn’t act. Trying to navigate between the past and present, like constantly switching a car radio from contemporary to oldies.

  Last night Dad called me Jenny Penny, as he pulled a penny out of my ear.

  I almost said, How’d you do that, Dad? Still wanting to believe in magic.

  Penny for your thoughts, he’d said, sticking it into my hand.

  Sure. My thoughts were about being six years old again and still feeling like you could be carried through life on your dad’s back. My thoughts were I just might take him up on that offer to visit his production company, just so he could parade me around the office and say, This is my daughter, Jenny. She’s home. She’s back.

  We’re never going to let her out of our sight again.

  My thoughts right now were about falling into a long, sweet nap where I’d dream about old times, the kind where you wake up feeling like you’re on fake Xans.