MRS. KLEIN: What’s the difference? What’s it have to do with Jenny being kidnapped? That’s what’s happened here, right? Someone’s taken her?
L: I’m trying to get a sense of how things work in this neighborhood, Mrs. Klein. Regarding playdates.
MRS. KLEIN: Why?
L: Look, if this was unusual, letting your kid walk to her friend’s house—then, okay, maybe someone just happened to be there. Wrong place, wrong time. Someone got an idea. A crime of opportunity. If kids do that all the time around here, someone could’ve planned it—understand? On that subject, have you noticed anyone around the neighborhood lately who didn’t seem to belong?
MRS. KLEIN: No . . . I mean, not that I’ve noticed. Honey . . . ?
MR. KLEIN: No. Don’t remember anyone like that.
L: Okay, if something occurs to either of you later—some car you saw that seemed to be going a little too slow or someone you noticed loitering around—you’d be surprised how these things lay on the brain and then suddenly, pop, you remember them—call me. Jenny disappeared in broad daylight—somebody’s likely to have seen something.
MRS. KLEIN: You mean that morning?
L: Yes, that morning. But I’m interested in other mornings too. It’s possible that person—whoever might have taken her—was here before. You live almost perpendicular to the Kristals, right? On the opposite side of the block?
MRS. KLEIN: Almost. They’re actually one house over. On the other side.
L: Right. So how often do Jenny and Jaycee play together?
Jaycee Klein—I remembered now. Another one of Jenny’s friends.
MRS. KLEIN: You mean like playdates? Oh, I don’t know . . . I couldn’t say exactly. You know, now and then.
L: Now and then. Okay. We asked Mrs. Kristal for a list of Jenny’s friends and Jaycee’s on it.
MRS. KLEIN: Yes. They’re in the same class.
L: But they don’t play together that often?
MRS. KLEIN: They’re really school friends. They played together more when they were younger. As far as playdates and everything. You know how kids are. Especially girls. Friendships are pretty transitory at this age.
L: Right.
Looper asked the Kleins—though Mrs. Klein seemed to have been doing most of the talking—the same thing he’d asked the Kellys. What was Jenny like?
MRS. KLEIN: Normal. Just a sweet, adorable, six-year-old little girl.
L: Thank you. If anything else occurs to you, please contact me.
The Mooneys went next. Tom Mooney owned the realty company Laurie worked for now. His wife’s name was Cindy. They’d shown up at the house around the same time Mrs. Klein had.
Halfway through, something began nagging at me. What? I didn’t know exactly. I flipped all the way back to the Kelly interview where Looper asked them about Jenny.
L: What’s she like?
MRS. KELLY: Normal. Just a sweet, adorable, six-year-old little girl.
Then back ahead to the Kleins, where they’d been asked that same question.
MRS. KLEIN: Normal. Just a sweet, adorable, six-year-old little girl.
Weird, right?
I flipped ahead to the end of the Mooneys’ interview, the very end. And there it was.
The same question Looper had asked everyone else. What’s Jenny like?
And there was the answer.
MRS. MOONEY: Normal. Just a sweet, adorable, six-year-old little girl.
You didn’t have to be the FBI to smell something fishy.
It wasn’t just an answer. It was the same answer. And it wasn’t just the same answer. It was exactly the same answer.
Word for word.
TWENTY-SIX
Looking through the photo album felt different this time.
Before it was like a surprise pop quiz—let’s see how well I’d studied up on Jenny Kristal. I’d graded myself a solid B—having nailed Grandpa in one try—with deductions for missing on the stepbrother.
Now I wasn’t supplying the answers anymore—I was looking for some.
Jenny’s First Day.
There was me in the hospital again, nestled up against Laurie’s throat. Okay, not me . . . her. Newborn Jenny. There was Jake, cradling Jen by the hospital window, looking like he’d just won the fucking lottery. And Ben forced to sit next to this thing called a sister and looking frankly bewildered by it all. And there was the Tootsie Roll dispenser himself, planting a kiss on Jen-Jen’s bald head. And cigarette-smoking Brent, who looked like he couldn’t wait for someone to relieve him of his baby-holding duties.
Then there were shots of Jenny back home. Welcome Home Jenny, said the paper cut-out strung across the front hallway. Jenny being cradled in my upstairs bedroom, which had once been a nursery with pink elephants on the walls before turning into Goldy’s pasture.
Jenny had that startled baby look in every shot, probably because everyone and their uncle—that’s you, Brent—were sticking their faces in her crib, when they weren’t sticking their cameras there instead.
There was Jenny on her back in the middle of a blanket somewhere in the Kristals’ backyard, dressed just in diapers—pink for a girl—looking like a turtle who’d been flipped on its shell. Or that woman in those annoying ads they used to run a hundred times a day. You know, I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.
Jenny posed next to a Christmas stocking that had her name sewn on it, wearing a teeny-tiny Christmas hat—the first in a series of “let’s see how many stupid things we can put on Jenny’s head and then take pictures of it.” That cone-shaped birthday hat with a big fat 1 on it, for example, which is what she was wearing on the Jenny Turns One page. Looked like she was suffering from some kind of skin disease, since gobs of chocolate cake had turned her half-black and half-white.
There was the standard opening-the-present shot, a pile of crepe paper, ribbons, and wrapping paper littering the floor like cheapo torn-off lingerie—and Jenny still wearing that traffic cone on her head and looking even more startled than usual. Why not? Most of the birthday gifts seemed to be baby clothes instead of the kind of loot a one-year-old really wants—rattles, I guess?
I had a memory. A real one, as opposed to the ones I force-fed myself in preparation for a new starring role.
One of my birthday celebrations, let’s say around four or five. My present from Mom was a scratch-off lottery ticket—it could be worth a million dollars, she’d breathlessly proclaimed, no doubt hoping it would stop her from having to beg Grandma for handouts. It wasn’t so much the terrible littleness of the gift that had bothered me; it was that she’d already gone and scratched it off—much to her disappointment, since we hadn’t won one cent.
Jenny seemed to have done a lot better. By birthday two she had her first Breyer horse—not Goldy—a black-and-white-spotted stallion she seemed to be chewing on. Not to mention a plastic corral to keep it in, assembled by Jake, I guess, since there was a shot of him staring at an instruction manual with a WTF expression.
The cake was different this time around—they must’ve discovered vanilla frosting washed off a lot easier than chocolate—but the guest list looked pretty much the same as Jenny’s first birthday. There were the grandfolks, each of them posing with Jenny plunked down in their laps, and Aunt Gerta standing next to a smiling man who must’ve been her now-dead husband. And Jenny and Ben sprawled out on the floor next to a toy train—hello, Thomas. And wasn’t that a teenage Trude sitting sullenly over there on the orange love seat? And what would a birthday party be without stoned-looking Uncle Brent grinning goofily by the cake—nice to know Ben was upholding the family tradition in that regard. Another grandmotherly woman was present too—Jake’s mom, I decided—the one mothballed down in Florida. This is Nanny. Do you remember me . . . ?
I couldn’t resist skipping ahead, wanting to see what cool shit Jenny had raked in for
birthday number three. This time all the presents were assembled on a table in what looked like the Chuck E. Cheese Ben had mentioned on his memorial page—a fuzzy shot of Jake trying to lift a sorry-looking bear out of a pile of stuffed animals with a pair of mechanical tongs. The table was piled with several boxed horses—the rest of the family must’ve gotten the memo: everyone had to pony up with Breyers from now on. And wouldn’t you know it—Goldy was in one of them.
I wouldn’t stop crying, so you stopped on the way home and got me Goldy, remember, Mom?
Yes, I remember, Jenny . . .
Liar, liar, pants on fire.
A loud squeak. I shut the album.
I should’ve mentioned that it was the middle of the night. I’d woken up in the middle of a dream—okay, nightmare, since Mother was in it, cheerily threading a needle while I watched her and peed myself, literally. After I shot up out of the bed, I rolled up the stinky sheets and threw them in the bottom of the upstairs hamper.
I couldn’t get back to sleep, so I went downstairs. Right to the photo album. After reading the police transcript that morning about the day Jenny disappeared, I thought I should take another look at her life before that.
I felt like I was breaking and entering, a housebreaker about to be caught red-handed and hauled off to jail. Except the happy homeowners didn’t seem to mind that they had an intruder in their midst, did they?
Footsteps were padding across the upstairs floor.
The first night I spent in the house with the locked gate, I thought my mother was going to show up any minute. Honest. I refused the greasy KFC they offered me for dinner and bided my time sitting on their ratty couch in front of the TV. Until they pulled a dirty nighty out of the plastic bag Mom had left with them and told me to get ready for sleep. I just sat there. Mom was going to come get me so I needed to be awake for that. I might’ve kept sitting there, except my new mother, the woman who’d smiled at me from the front seat of a car, walked over and backhanded me across the face. I ended up upside down on the floor, seeing stars, and not the kind in Ben’s upstairs diorama.
You’ll learn, she said.
I did.
A toilet flushed upstairs, followed by the sound of padding footsteps and then the soft creak of a sagging bed. I waited a minute, then opened the album again.
Where were we . . . ?
That’s right, loading up on presents at Chuck E. Cheese, enough horses by now for the sixth at Pimlico. One of Mom’s meth-smoking buddies had liked playing the horses—I only remembered that because he’d blown all their drug money at the racetrack and Mom had screamed and thrown things at him before collapsing in a sobbing heap in the middle of the floor.
I’d never been on a horse, or even seen one up close.
No Breyers for little Jobeth’s birthdays either.
I galloped ahead to birthday number four, passing a few Jenny-at-the-playground shots—mostly her sitting alone in a sandbox, Jenny wearing that pink cowboy hat during her first pony ride, Jenny in what looked like preschool, playing with Legos over in a corner, Jenny standing in the middle of one of those plastic backyard pools, Jenny sitting morosely on Santa’s lap.
Birthday number four was back at the house and depressingly similar to the previous three. The only thing that seemed to change was the cake—a pumpkin-colored thing—and, of course, Jenny herself, who’d left babyhood behind and was on her way to blond and pretty.
I wondered—for just a moment I did—what I’d looked like at that age. Mom had packed kind of light the last day I saw her—no mementos included. The kind of photos Mother and Father took of me later weren’t of the keepsake variety. Okay, sweetheart, move your legs apart a little, that’s a good girl . . .
I turned the page.
There was Jenny dressed up as an Indian with a seven-year-old Ben, feathered headdress and everything. Somewhere upstate, I guessed—Ben had written about it on his page, that place they’d stopped going one summer in favor of Montauk, where they would dig for clams and bury memories.
We all loved Montauk, didn’t we?
There were other shots of Jenny upstate—holding a fishing pole with a sorry-ass minnow attached to it, sitting cross-legged by a campfire, standing by a cliff staring off into space with a curiously disinterested expression. And then Ben standing next to her in the very same spot looking like he wished he was pretty much anywhere else on earth, which is how he looked most of the time.
There was a whole year to go, I knew. Only soon enough, I’d be coming to the end of the movie.
But not before a trip to that place where dreams come true. There was Jen-Jen hugging it out with Mickey himself, and a shot of Mom and Dad mugging at the camera on some kind of raft.
Maybe it was on its way to Tom Sawyer Island—that’s what the fake wooden sign said in the next picture—Ben and Jen sullenly posing beneath it. Mostly Ben, who looked really pissed now—that’s where he’d gotten himself lost in that cave, right? I’d made sure to mention that to Detective Mary when I was recounting my precious childhood memories pre–falling off the face of the earth, dropping just enough of them to close the deal.
Ben had that still-traumatized expression on his face, as if he’d been led out of that dark cave and into the blinding Florida sunshine just a second ago. Maybe he had. Jenny had her arm around him—pals forever—only it looked like Ben was trying to shrug it off and get to that humongous ice cream cone he’d been promised.
There were a couple of shots of Ben and Jenny taking Dumbo for a spin. We waited for like two hours to ride the Dumbo, and it only lasted like six seconds . . . and something called the Country Bear Jamboree, where the bears were dressed like a bunch of inbred white trash. Then the whole gang—Laurie, Jakey, Jenny, Ben, Grandma, and Grandpa waving from a choo-choo—well, five of them were waving; Ben, who might’ve still been reliving his near entombment, was resolutely resisting the temptation. Who was the picture taker? I wondered. Some other dad who’d wished upon a star and ended up waiting two hours for some shitty ride. Probably grateful to be taking pictures of somebody else’s family, instead of staring at all those fat asses in front of him.
We were quickly getting there. To the end.
One more ho-ho-ho Christmas—Jenny back on Santa’s lap looking as disinterested as she had on that upstate cliff. Then the requisite Jenny-by-Jenny’s-Christmas-stocking shot—complete with a couple of striped candy canes peeking out over the top. And some more horsies under the tree.
Enjoy it, Jenny . . . , I thought, only I heard myself say the words out loud.
Please, I hope you enjoyed it . . . I do . . . I really, really do . . .
* * *
—
I’d been racing from birthday to birthday out of sheer jealousy, I think. Looking at everything Jenny got to remind me of what I hadn’t. The Breyer horses and the nice parties and all those Xmas celebrations. And one other thing she’d gotten that I hadn’t—a mom who didn’t lavish most of her attention on a meth pipe.
I wasn’t feeling jealous anymore.
I knew what was coming. I could feel it beginning, like creeping nausea.
Maybe she wasn’t going to be strolled to the parking lot of a decrepit short-rate motel and dumped like trash. But she was going to walk out the front door to oblivion. The movie was ending.
Her last birthday.
Six years old now and the surrounding cast quickly thinning out. Maybe Jake’s mom had already hightailed it to Florida. Aunt Gerta was a no-show. So was Trude. Maybe that’s what happens when it’s not your first or second birthday anymore—the guest list gets cut. No one’s obligated to make the trek to Maple Street laden with presents. They just dump checks in the mail and call it a day. I wouldn’t really know about that.
Still, something more than people seemed to be missing in her last happy birthday. The happy part. Or maybe I was just imagining that—
everything colored by what I knew was about to happen. Jenny wasn’t just blowing out six candles; she was breathing her last breaths. She was ripping open presents she’d never get to play with. Still, why did it seem like every smile was forced? Like they were all playing a part in this thing called Jenny’s last birthday? Maybe because it was the middle of the night and I was in the middle of something I didn’t understand.
There was that one beach shot left.
Kristals’ Castle. Mom and daughter making up the palace guard and casting these crazy-long shadows on the sand because the sun must’ve been going down any minute. Jenny’s shadow like the phony promise of a future that would never come. There’d be no getting bigger for her—she’d be eternally stuck at kid size.
I knew what was missing in Jenny’s last birthday.
I knew.
It wasn’t a lack of happiness.
It was the lack of something else. Not just in Jenny’s last birthday, either. In the whole fucking photo album.
I flipped through it again just to make sure I wasn’t making it up.
Jenny standing in playgrounds, in classrooms, in swimming pools, and in backyards. In crowded malls, on summer sidewalks, on ponies and on people’s laps, and in her own room surrounded by fat pink elephants.
Jenny here, Jenny there, and Jenny everywhere.
Except never with even one other kid.
Ever.
Jenny, Jenny, Jenny.
And always, always alone.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Ben
They’d driven to Hunter Park to blow off steam, but Ben was still fuming, so good luck with that.
“What the fuck’s wrong with you?” Zack asked, having just taken a humongous hit from his custom vape.
Darla asked him the same thing—Darla was someone Ben was hooking up with on a semiregular basis, which made her think she could ask him things like what was wrong with him? She’d been crowding him the whole night—in the car, at the park, grabbing at his hand, when she wasn’t begging for a hug or, okay, promising him an amazing BJ, which he knew wasn’t exactly her favorite activity since she had to be really baked to even consider it—all this lovey-doveyness probably having to do with the fact that he was suddenly some kind of celebrity by proxy, or was it proximity . . . due to his sister being all over the fucking news.
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