I might’ve if it wasn’t for the phone.
It kept ringing.
We were still adhering to a strict “don’t answer the phone” policy around here. Mostly because there were only so many ways you can say no. Like, No, thanks, and, I told you we weren’t interested, and, If you call here again I’m going to call the police—which seemed to be Dad’s new hobby, calling the police. That reporter from Newsday who’d buzzed me in the middle of the night—what was his name? Max, right—had managed to weasel Dad’s cell phone number from somebody, and Dad had not so politely told him to fuck off. Just like he told the booking agent from Fox News, the reporter from Time magazine, the producer from Ellen, and Dr. Phil himself—kind of cool the Philster would personally call to try to get me on his show. Dad told him thanks but no thanks, refraining from using the F word only because Mom was a true fan.
The phone was ringing now.
I tried to ignore it, but sometimes trying to ignore something only makes you that much more aware of it, and the ringing started to sound like a car alarm in the middle of the night.
I picked it up, enjoying the silence for a moment before actually putting it to my ear.
“Hello, is Mrs. Kristal there?” A man’s voice.
“She’s out,” I said.
“Oh.” Quiet. “Is this . . . never mind. Wait—can you tell her Joe Pennebaker says sorry, he won’t be calling again. That’s all. Just please let her know.”
“Sure,” I said, wondering why someone would call just to say that they wouldn’t be calling. “No problem.”
After I hung up, I started wishing everyone else out there felt the same way. The phone had started in again.
When it reached earsplitting, I bailed.
Opening the front door took some real effort, not because it was particularly heavy, but because the last time I’d gone through it, it’d been from the other direction. We’d been under siege, and I was finally opening the stockade gates.
But there was only a police car moseying down the street, and the officer who’d picked me up that first day—I think it was him—waved at me.
“Hey. Everything okay?” he shouted.
“No,” I said.
“Why, what’s wrong?”
“I’m being questioned by the police.”
He squinted.
“Just kidding,” I said.
“Copy that,” he answered. “Your dad asked us to keep an eye out, that’s all.”
“Great.”
“Well, have a good day, miss.” Zoom. The police car accelerated down the street.
About a half minute too soon.
I spotted her halfway down the block.
A reporter, I thought.
She was hanging back, nearly blocked by a row of moth-eaten rhododendron bushes at the end of the block. Peeking. Which is exactly what a reporter would be doing, right? Trying to snap a photo of the girl who’d made it back. Mom had shown me the headline on the website of the local paper: LOST AND FOUND. On the left was the picture from the telephone pole, and on the right was one of the photos Detective Mary had snapped at the precinct—the one where I’d mugged for the camera. Mom didn’t understand how the paper could’ve gotten hold of that one and said she was going to call the precinct to complain. I couldn’t stop thinking that the girl on the right looked like she wouldn’t have much in common with the girl on the left.
I stopped dead, the sound of the police car pulling away still echoing in my ears, that face staring at me from behind the bushes.
Was a camera crew about to jump me?
When she walked out where I could see all of her, she was alone. It didn’t make her any less threatening. There was something about her face I didn’t like.
Her expression, for one thing, which seemed to be alternating between shyness and anger.
The other thing about her face was that I thought I recognized it.
“I just want to speak with you . . . ,” she said.
I ran. Fast. Panic can do that to you, suddenly turn you into Usain Bolt. I zoomed back down the block to my front door.
Which wouldn’t open.
It. Would. Not. Open.
It must’ve locked automatically. No one had given me any keys.
“Please . . .” I heard her voice behind me. “You need to stop this.”
If I don’t look, she’s not here.
I ran around to the back of the house. To the sliding glass door—did anyone ever actually bother locking it?
It slid open.
As soon as I dived through, I locked it shut from inside. I ran into the living room and pulled the drapes tighter than they already were—tight enough to pretty much block out every single molecule of light.
I retreated to the couch where Mom and Dad and I had huddled together the morning the reporters surrounded the house shouting my name. Now someone else was out there doing it.
Deep breaths . . . deep breaths . . .
Knock.
Knock.
Knock. Knock. Knock. Knock. Knock. Knock. Knock. Knock. Knock. Knock. Knock. Knock. Knock. Knock. Knock . . .
In between banging on the front door, she was shouting something. I couldn’t actually hear the words because I’d put both hands up over my ears.
If I wait and do nothing, she’ll go away.
She can’t keep knocking on a door that won’t open.
She can’t keep screaming at someone who won’t answer.
The knocking stopped.
It stopped.
I lowered my hands and held my breath. I’d been hugging my knees with my head between my legs—what they tell you to do when a plane’s about to crash.
I waited for the banging to start up again. Then waited some more.
After a while, I slowly unfolded myself from the couch, crept over to the blinds, and peeked. All clear. I should’ve felt okay then. I should’ve felt home free.
Only the phone starting ringing. Again.
There was a one-tenth of one percent possibility it wasn’t her. I started to believe in that possibility, to embrace it like faith. It was another talk show. Another newspaper. It was Mr. Pennebaker admitting he’d lied, that he was going to call back just one more time.
“Finally,” she said when I picked it up.
I didn’t say anything back. My lungs were pressing up against my ribs.
“Remember,” she said, “I know who you really are.”
TWELVE
Who I really am.
There was a little girl who I don’t remember anymore whose mom belted her into her stroller one morning, even though the little girl was five and three-quarters years old and had stopped needing to be strolled anywhere.
Maybe this had something to do with her mom’s decaying yellow teeth and several black gaps where her teeth were actually missing, and those big red splotches on her face—Sunburn, her mom explained, even though it didn’t look anything like sunburn to the little girl—or maybe it had to do with the fact that her mom had the helpless heebie-jeebies that morning, which seemed to go away only when she sucked on that glass pipe of hers, which the little girl said looked like crystal, making her mother laugh out loud.
It had been a few days since the little girl had seen her mom smoking on that pipe, and her mom had spent those days rocking back and forth in their bedroom and scratching herself like crazy—I got a bad itch. And then she’d stopped saying anything at all to the girl, racing out of the apartment a few times but always trudging back looking worse than before.
She’d made a lot of phone calls saying Please . . . please . . . but the little girl never heard her say thank you. And then her mom made another phone call that morning, whispering something into the phone that the little girl couldn’t quite hear, just the last part, where her mom said, Fine . . . yeah
. . . we’ll be there.
After that, her mom dressed her in a T-shirt and overalls, which had crusted food on them—the little girl couldn’t remember the last time her mom had actually washed anything—then stuffed some of the little girl’s other clothes in a big plastic bag, and the little girl asked her mom if they were going swimming, since that was the only other time she could remember her mom bringing clothes with them, that day they’d gone to the big municipal pool that stank of chlorine.
Her mom didn’t answer her, just told her to get into the stroller, and when the little girl said no, she wanted to walk, her mom screamed at her, then picked her up and stuffed her in the blue stroller herself, strapping her in tight. It hurts, the little girl said, because the straps were digging into her—it felt like that time her mom had squeezed her into the baby swing at the park when she was already too old for it, and she’d complained she couldn’t breathe, but her mom hadn’t listened and had even disappeared, leaving the little girl dangling there for hours.
Her mom told her to Shush . . . stop your complaining, so she did, because there was really no way to get her mom to listen when she was like this, all jumpy and frazzled and out of sorts.
They seemed to stroll for a really long time, and the little girl wondered where they were going, since she could swear the park was in the other direction, and the pool, too, and now that she thought about it, it had to be too cold for swimming anyway, since it wasn’t even summer yet.
“Where we going, Mommy?”
Her mom was huffing and puffing like the big, bad wolf in that nursery story, and she stopped for a minute to get her breath.
“We’re meeting Mommy’s friend,” she said.
“Who?”
But her mom didn’t bother answering—just started pushing the stroller again. They passed block after block with boarded-up stores and metal cages over the ones that were still open, and the little girl pretended that they were at the zoo and the people inside were animals. She was really good at pretending; her mom said she was going to grow up to be an actress, because she would imitate the people she saw on TV like Hannah Montana—back when they had a TV—and her mom would clap and tell her that she was good enough to be on TV herself. She would play pretend with kids she met at the playground, too, not just making believe that the plastic bridge they were running over was the one that the Billy Goats Gruff scampered across, but pretending other things—like when one of the kids asked her if that woman was her mom, pointing to the woman with red splotches all over her face who’d fallen asleep on the bench with a lit cigarette still in her mouth. No, the little girl had answered, she’s the nanny.
So when they kept strolling to who knows where, the little girl kept pretending that the people inside the caged stores were lions and tigers and bears, although it was the people outside the stores, the ones lolling on stoops and against cars, who seemed more dangerous.
Some of them looked like her mom, with the same red splotches, sunken cheeks, and missing teeth. They had the same look on their faces too, like they were sleeping even though they were awake, the way her mom looked after she’d sucked on that pipe that looked like crystal.
One of the men leaning against a rusted-out car stumbled toward them and asked her mom if she had any scratch, which maybe had to do with her mom itching so terribly before, but her mom didn’t answer him, just kept pushing the stroller forward. The man called her a bitch, which the little girl knew was a bad word, because her mom used it about Grandma, who she didn’t like anymore—Goddamn bitch, she’d mutter when she got off the phone with Grandma, you’d think I was asking her for a million dollars—the little girl wondering if Grandma was one of the people her mom had said please to over the phone before, but not thank you. She wondered what friend they were going to visit, because some of her mom’s friends were men who’d come over to the apartment and suck on that pipe with her, men who looked like the one who’d just called her mom a bitch.
They stopped in the parking lot of a motel, passing the office window, which had the same kind of metal bars over it and a glowing red sign. What kind of animal was in there? the little girl wondered. There was no one else in the parking lot, so the little girl thought maybe they’d stopped so her mom could catch her breath again.
But then a car door opened, and a man came out. He began shuffling over to them. He had a big belly and scraggly thin hair and he was smiling at her. He’d left someone in the car—a woman peering out the window at them.
“I want to get up, Mommy,” the little girl said.
“In a minute,” she said. “Mommy has to talk to her friend.”
The little girl tried to unlatch the straps herself, but Mommy slapped at her hands.
“I said in a minute.”
“I gotta go to the bathroom,” the little girl said.
“Not now.” Her mom looked even more jittery than she had this morning, shaking like their neighbor’s white cat, Lulu, when she got caught in the rain.
“Hey there, sweetheart,” the man said to the little girl—he was suddenly standing right next to them. “We’ll get you to the bathroom real soon, okay?”
The little girl didn’t answer him, because she didn’t know who he was, and the last thing she wanted was a stranger taking her to the bathroom.
“What’s your name?” the man asked. “Jobeth, right?”
The little girl nodded, because that’s what you’re supposed to do when someone asks you your name.
“Isn’t that pretty,” the man said. “Pretty name for a pretty girl.”
She looked down at her lap, where the pink strap was cutting into her stomach.
“Say thank you,” her mom said.
“Thank you,” the little girl mumbled. She didn’t like the way the man was talking to her, or the way he was smiling, which didn’t feel like a smile.
“Well . . . you’re very welcome.”
“Do you have it?” her mom asked the man.
“Impatient, aren’t you?” He chuckled and said, “Why don’t we step into my office.”
The little girl wondered if the man owned the motel, because that was the only office there, but after her mom told her to just sit tight, the man led her mom back to his car. The woman in the front seat was still peering out at them, and when she saw the little girl looking at her, she smiled back.
The man opened the back door and her mom got in, and the little girl felt a sudden panic, thinking that her mom and the man were just going to drive away and leave her there. But the car stayed where it was, and she could see her mom and the man talking in the back seat. Her mom looked like she was asking him for something—maybe that thing she’d asked about before—and the man was shaking his head at her, and then her mom was putting both hands together by her mouth like she was praying, which the little girl hadn’t seen her mom do since the last time they’d been to church, which was just about forever ago, and then the man nodded toward the little girl, and her mom put her face in her hands like she was crying, and maybe she was because her shoulders were heaving up and down, up and down, but then after a while, her mom lifted her head out of her hands and nodded. The little girl saw the man pass something to her mom, and then the man patted her on the shoulder.
Her mom was getting out of the car now, and the little girl thought, Good, we can go home now, even though her mom’s face was all red, even redder than usual, and she wasn’t looking at the little girl, but past her, at a place where the girl wasn’t.
“Can we go?” the little girl asked, waiting for her mom to start pushing the stroller back home.
“Mommy’s friend . . . ,” she said, choking up. “Mommy’s friend . . . he’s going to watch you, okay?”
“I don’t want someone to watch me,” the little girl said. “I want to go home.”
“You need to do what Mommy says . . .”
“No!” Sudden
ly that panic was back, because the car was going to drive away, and her mom was telling her what? That she was going to be in it? She didn’t understand . . . why was she asking those strangers to babysit her? Why couldn’t they just go home?
The man got out of the car and walked toward her again, with that same smile that didn’t seem like a smile, and her mom started to back away, and suddenly the little girl was grabbing at the strap buckles, trying to undo them.
“Hey there, Jobeth,” the man said.
She managed to get the straps open and was slipping out of them, even as the man was saying, “Whoa . . . whoa, there.”
She clambered out of the stroller and ran right to her mom, who was almost past the office window. But instead of picking her up, instead of taking her little girl into her arms for a warm, tight hug, her mom just stood there with her arms folded across her chest, as the little girl wrapped herself around one of her mom’s legs.
“I want to go home!”
She was crying now, the kind of crying that just pours out of you, like when you get sick and can’t stop throwing up. The man had stopped by the empty stroller and he wasn’t smiling anymore.
“Now, we had a deal here,” he said to her mom. “You’re not some kind of welsher, are you?” When her mom didn’t answer, he said, “You know what we do to welshers where I come from, don’t you?”
Her mom still didn’t say a word. Her leg—the one the little girl was holding on to for dear life—was shaking up and down like her mom was freezing or something.
“All right,” the man said. “I believe you have something that belongs to me, then. Give it back.”
“No need,” her mom said, “really . . . it’s okay,” and the little girl thought, Yes, it’s okay, because she was back with her mom and any minute now they were going to start heading home, where she would play with her Hannah Montana doll, but first use the bathroom, because she really had to go something awful.
Only her mom began prying the little girl’s arms off her leg, one arm at a time, even though the little girl was still crying like there was no tomorrow—which was what her mom always said to her, Stop crying like there’s no tomorrow, which meant there was a tomorrow, and it would be better than today.
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