Safe

  Her being me.

  Me being wedged up against the door wishing it was thicker, not only because that would make it easier to keep her out of the room, but because it would make it easier to keep that voice out of my head. I didn’t want to listen to the voice talking about how Becky wanted to kill herself. What losing Sarah had done to her. Because she was getting to the part where she’d lost Sarah twice. And I knew what that had done to her. It had put her on a plane from Le Mars, Iowa, to here. To hiding out in bushes, chasing me down the sidewalk, talking her way into this house.

  “I’m picking up the phone now,” Laurie said again. “I asked you nicely. I asked you to please, please, leave my house. You’re still here.”

  “Let them come. I don’t care. I don’t. You know how I felt the day I got the call. You pick up the phone and there’s this man on the other end saying he’s a detective down at the police station, and you think it’s happened, finally, they’ve found the body, they’ve found her remains, isn’t that what they call it on all those police shows? And your heart stops, for a second it just stops, and then he tells you something entirely different than you were expecting, something so utterly impossible that you ask him to repeat it, please just say it again, because you couldn’t have possibly heard it right, could you? And he does, he does say it again, and your heart that just a second ago was stopped, was absolutely frozen, it melts, it bursts, and suddenly you’re screaming out loud, you’re on your knees and you’re screaming. For joy, for Sarah, for the mother you stopped being. Was it like that for you, Laurie? Was it the same? Did you get down on your knees and thank God, thank the police, thank the kidnapper even, because he kept her alive. Did you?”

  “I’m not going to talk to you. I’m not going to share my feelings and my life with you. You’re making a horrible mistake here. This is a terrible intrusion and you’re making me call the police to have you arrested and I don’t want to do that to you, I don’t, but I’ve asked you nicely, and you won’t listen.”

  “I have a picture,” Becky said.

  I have a picture . . .

  We’d been sitting on the back porch.

  I have a picture . . .

  Becky and me, cradling two glasses of homemade pink lemonade, dead quiet except for the faint sound of buzzing insects, because we were all cried out.

  I have a picture . . .

  Slowly swinging back and forth on a wooden chair suspended by two rusty chains that creaked every time I pushed off the porch with my naked toes. And Becky calling into the house, telling Lars to please get his camera and take a picture to record my first day home, please, because Becky said she still couldn’t believe it, she could not believe it, and maybe seeing it sitting there right in her hand would make it one hundred percent real. And Lars probably already fighting doubts of his own about what was real or not, walking out onto the porch and snapping a photo.

  Click.

  “A picture . . . ?” Laurie repeated dully.

  “Before she left. Before Lars asked her to take a DNA test. No, I told Lars. Don’t be silly. All those memories she has. All the things she remembers from when she was a little girl—before it happened. Before he’d decided to take her to the Home Depot that Saturday morning. I never blamed him, by the way—not to his face, not once—even though I wanted to, God, I wanted to, but he took that away from me, because he couldn’t stop blaming himself. You understand? And then suddenly it didn’t matter anymore, did it, because she was back. Some sort of miracle had taken place and she was back home and all those memories that kept coming out of her—our camping trip to Yosemite, watching Finding Nemo a thousand times in her room when she had her tonsils out, the winter we built a snowman together and the crows ate the snowman’s nose—we used a big carrot and the crows ate it and she wouldn’t stop crying about it until we performed an operation and gave him a new one. Why on earth do we need a DNA test? I asked Lars, why? . . . Doesn’t she know things only Sarah would know? And Lars said it doesn’t hurt to be sure, does it? I mean, a lot of that stuff was in the papers back then. I’m just saying let’s be one hundred percent sure here, trying to be gentle with me, because he knew, knew what losing her again would do to me—even though I hated him, absolutely hated him for bringing it up. But Lars knew something was off, knew that something wasn’t right, and maybe the reason I hated him was because I knew it too, I did, somewhere I did. And this girl said okay, sure, I’ll take a DNA test, and one night later she was gone. No note, no nothing. Gone.”

  “I’m sorry for you. I really and truly am sorry, but this has nothing . . . absolutely nothing—”

  “I read about you in the papers. About Jenny. You’ve read articles like that, right? Articles about other children who’ve been found. Part of you thinking, well, if it could happen to them, after all this time, if their daughter can be found alive, then maybe, just maybe . . . only there’s this other part of you, this awful part, that hates reading about those other girls—about those other parents, their happiness, their ridiculous insane joy. Then I saw her picture. The picture of Jenny. My heart stopped again. It stopped. I have the picture Lars took of her. Please, just look at it . . .”

  Laurie was going to look at it. At Lars’s picture. Becky and Sarah on a summer day. On a summer swing. Curiosity would make her look at it. Or maybe just wanting to get Becky out of the house. Please look, and I’ll leave. So Laurie would. She’d look.

  And one look at Becky’s picture and she’d get the bigger picture. The one that had Ben telling them how he’d found his Facebook page sitting open on the computer screen in my room—all my memories in plain sight. And my slip-up about Ben scarring his hand on that Fourth of July I couldn’t have been anywhere near—that would be in the picture too, something she’d managed to turn a blind eye to so far, maybe for the same reason Becky had turned a blind eye to things she had no real desire to look at. And this bigger picture would contain a smaller one: a girl sitting on a summer porch who’d once said she was Sarah but was now saying she was someone else.

  I have a picture.

  “I don’t need to see it,” Laurie said.

  “I’m just asking you to take one second and . . .”

  “The day we picked Jenny up we took her to a doctor. Your husband was right. He was right about needing to know. We wanted to be a hundred percent sure. So we took her to a doctor and he performed a DNA test. She’s our daughter. She’s our daughter with 99.9 percent certainty. So you coming here, making these accusations—I was trying to tell you. I’m sorry the girl who came to you was a fake, I am. But Jenny isn’t. Our daughter’s back. Now will you leave . . . ?”

  There was a sudden silence; there was a soft, stammered apology—there was the sound of the front door being slammed shut. There was the sound of Laurie slowly trudging back up the stairs and stopping outside my door. And then, with me lying back in bed with my eyes squeezed shut, the sound of my door opening and Laurie walking in and standing there for a while, confirming that I must’ve slept right through it without hearing a word.

  Then this other sound.

  After Laurie tiptoed out of the room, this other sound that seemed to be coming from the direction of my bed.

  Crying.

  For just one moment, I’d thought: We did go to a doctor and get a DNA test that said I was 99.9 percent their daughter? Really? We did . . . we did . . . we did?

  No.

  We didn’t.

  Of course we didn’t.

  No.

  TWENTY-ONE

  I met Tabitha because she wouldn’t stop staring at me and I returned the favor—like let’s have a staring contest and see who blinks first.

  Let’s call it a tie.

  I’d gone to the library to draw my very own Bizarro comic book. Because it felt like I’d been transported there—to the planet Bizarro. I needed to get out of the house so no one could peek over my shou
lder. Besides, libraries felt like home to me—that’s what I’d used them as between families, ratty crash pads, and the occasional hour-rate motel (sorry, not going there).

  Maybe it was that shitty teen job at the mall that taught me it was actually possible. To walk out of Father and Mother’s house and never come back. Or maybe it was Father getting sick—not sick enough to die, but sick enough to spend more than two weeks in bed and suddenly look frail, like he’d lost his superpowers. Like from now on he couldn’t ever hurt me again. Or maybe it was something else—the day Father offered a customer something besides crystal meth.

  That day.

  When my bedroom door swung open and there was a sweating man in a tracksuit standing there who asked me if I’d like to keep him company.

  They’d stopped locking the outer gate a long time ago, but it still felt like I was locked in—like those invisible fences used to shock dogs. On the day I knew I wouldn’t be coming back, I stood staring through the iron slats at that world on the other side of it, the way you stare at the moon and say to yourself there’s no way anyone could’ve actually made it all the way there. I walked through the gate holding my breath, convinced it was going to slam shut in my face. That I was going to be dragged back inside and locked in the closet for eternity.

  When I finally stopped running, I found myself in a place that stayed open late, where nobody bothered asking why you were spending every single second there. Where an old People magazine and a Google search of missing kids on the library computer led me straight to Karen Greer.

  I was drawing my comic on the sketch pad Laurie bought me. She’d noticed me scribbling on a stained napkin and asked if I’d like one.

  Sure.

  I’d started drawing comic books for the same reason I’d started reading them. To be somewhere else besides that house. Tiptoeing downstairs late at night after Father and Mother fell asleep and strolling into the Daily Planet. Where super-evil villains were persona non grata, and help was just a phone booth away. The first comic I ever traced—over and over until I could just about draw it by memory—was the one where Superman saved this little girl from a burning house, crashing straight through the roof with the girl tucked safely into his arms.

  Don’t worry, Jane, my cape will protect you from the flames.

  When I came up with Super Invisible Girl, I decided to draw my own comic book. The girl no one could see. Or catch.

  Or touch.

  One day Father discovered some pages shoved deep in my drawer and said, Stick to your day job.

  I was putting the finishing touches on the last frame of my new Bizarro comic when I noticed Tabs staring at me. I didn’t know she was Tabs, of course—not yet—just this odd-looking girl peeking at me from behind a computer.

  I was at a table directly facing her—that’s what I saw when I looked up. Her staring face. When I said she was curiously put together I mean she borrowed from different stereotypes. She looked kind of like a Goth cheerleader. Like she couldn’t decide which personality to wear so she decided to wear a bunch of them. Or maybe she was saying she was none of them. Or saying Go ahead, good luck figuring it out.

  The staring contest ended when our eyes began watering. Later, she told me she was ready to say no más, when I quit at exactly the same time. She thought that meant something. The simultaneous finish. Tabs was like that—finding meaning in random things.

  “Boo,” I said.

  “Boohoo,” she answered.

  She’d recognized me, she told me later. The poor little kidnapped girl. She’d felt a kind of kinship right then and there. Not because she’d been kidnapped. Because she often wished she had been, since her parents were soulless dullards, she said, and it would’ve been nice if she’d really been born to two other people—parents less concerned with material crap and keeping up with the Joneses—which was, like, their only reason for getting up in the morning.

  “That’s so fucked-up,” I told her.

  “What? Wishing for other parents?”

  “Wishing you’d been kidnapped.”

  “Sorry. Not trying to diminish what you went through. Just being honest.”

  Apparently that was Tabs’s thing. Being honest. It made me want to be honest too—as honest as I could be given the circumstances.

  Eventually we ended up splurging on skinny vanilla lattes at Starbucks, where Tabs admitted she didn’t have many friends. Since she didn’t fall into any discernable group, she existed out in the nether regions, neither one type nor another. Yeah, I noticed, I told her. Not that she was complaining exactly—most people were soulless dullards like her parents—but still, it was nice to talk to someone else who kind of fell between the cracks.

  Step on a crack, break your mother’s back. When I was about seven, I’d tried. To break my mother’s back. Both mothers. Duck walking down the sidewalk searching for spidery fissures to stomp the shit out of.

  One of the nice things about Tabs was she didn’t ask me all the obvious questions. I couldn’t tell if it was because she was being polite or because she just wasn’t interested. Maybe both.

  I was grateful, because I was able to talk more like Jobeth and less like Jenny. As if I’d been let out of a cage.

  Tabs was taking a gap year, she said. A year you spent after one thing and before another. A limbo year.

  “Yeah. I had twelve of those,” I said.

  She was using her gap year to pretty much do shit. She was pretty good at it. Hanging at the library, where she hacked into various websites on the library computers—she was a hacktavist, she confided to me. Meaning she liked to fuck with organizations whose principles she loathed—like the local NRA branch, whose website she’d managed to sneak into and plant pictures of school gun victims on—those little kids from Newtown.

  “You got away with that?” I asked her.

  “It helps if you don’t use your own computer.” She circulated among five or six Long Island libraries—never going to the same one twice in a row.

  Tabs was an outlaw like me. That probably solidified it. Our new palship. We exchanged numbers and talked about maybe hooking up later that week.

  “What were you drawing?” she asked me just before we split in opposite directions—we’d walked at least twenty blocks together and hadn’t shut up once. “Back in the library?”

  “A comic book,” I answered shyly.

  “Like Spider-Man?”

  “Kind of,” I said.

  “Cool. Can I see it?”

  “No,” I said, tucking the sketchbook tightly to my chest. “I mean . . . it’s not finished.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  Bizarro characters are cracked—not just in the loony-bin sense. Their bodies have actual cracks in them, which is how you know that they’re not the real Superman and Lois Lane and boy reporter Jimmy Olsen. The Bizarro Superman, Lois Lane, and Jimmy Olsen live on Htrae, which is earth backward . . . get it? The Bizarro code states: Us do the opposite of all earthly things. For example, in one unpleasantly moldy issue I’d read and reread down in that basement—the heater had sprung a leak and saturated everything—a successful Bizarro bonds salesman proudly used this slogan: Guaranteed to lose money for you! Being called stupid was a compliment in Bizarro world. So was being called ugly, greedy, and lazy.

  Things were upside down and inside out there.

  In my Bizarro comic the main character was Hteboj. That’s Jobeth spelled backward if you’re dense—remember, dense is a compliment. Hteboj had cracked skin and a smart mouth—which means dumb in Bizarro world.

  Eirual and Ekaj were Hteboj’s Bizarro parents, faithfully following the Bizarro dictum and cheerfully doing the opposite of all earthly things. So when Hteboj slipped up and told Eirual a story about her brother Neb nearly blowing his hand off that could in no way have come from her own memory, what did she do? She gave Hteboj a shopping trip to
Tlevesoor Llam (Roosevelt Mall, spelled backward). When Eirual and Ekaj were informed by their son that he’d caught Hteboj pilfering memories from Neb’s Koobecaf page, what did they do then? They made Hteboj her favorite dinner of chicken and mashed potatoes, that’s what. And when Ykceb talked her way into the house on Elpam Street and told Eirual—one mother to another—that the daughter sleeping in their upstairs bedroom was the very same girl who’d pretended to be hers—even offering to show Eirual actual proof of it—I have a picture—what then? Huh . . . huh?

  Eirual told the mother of all whoppers.

  She took a DNA test. She’s our daughter with 99.9 percent certainty.

  Upside down and inside out.

  That’s the way it is in Bizarro world.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Downstairs with Laurie before she left for work in the morning, asking me what I’d like for my birthday, which was just around the corner.

  Remember my third birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese? I asked.

  Yes, Jenny . . . , Laurie said.

  Remember how Dad kept playing Skee-Ball again and again, just so he could get me the cutest stuffed animal in the place?

  Yes, Jenny.

  That’s how I got Goldy, right?

  Yes, Jenny.

  Later that night, watching Vanderpump in my bedroom—and Laurie coming in to ask about dinner. And me casually mentioning that pony ride I saw in the photo album, the picture of me—not me—of Jenny, being led around a dirt ring in a neon pink cowboy hat.

  I just remembered something, Mom. That pony ride when I was a kid. I asked you if we could take the pony home with us, remember? I wouldn’t stop crying about it, I think I drove you crazy—so you stopped on the way home and THAT’s when you bought me Goldy.