Safe

That psych from juvie hall told me I’d been continuously trying to recapture my stolen childhood by stealing other childhoods. Maybe so. But what happens when you stop being a child? What then?

  This.

  Jenny had asked me to save her in a dream. She’d whispered I was the only one who could.

  Okay. I’m trying.

  I owed it to her, I thought. To that dream Jenny in a striped T-shirt and pink shorts. The one who’d never gotten to grow up. And maybe I owed it to myself.

  When I’d found her, fixated on the photo of this smiling blond kid who looked a lot like me, practiced her name in front of a cracked bathroom mirror—it hadn’t sounded much different than mine.

  Jenny . . . Jobeth . . . Jenny . . . Jobeth. See?

  When I’d tried Jenny on for size, she’d fit.

  We were members of the same stolen-childhood club. Maybe I was trying to steal hers back. For both of us.

  I was getting close to something. To an answer. To what really happened to her on that morning twelve years ago.

  I’d been staying for me.

  Now I was staying for her.

  Even with a knot that was slowly tightening in my stomach. As if I was back in that locked house dreading the sound of heavy footsteps coming up the stairs.

  THIRTY-THREE

  I forgot to give you a message,” I said to Laurie.

  “What’s that?”

  We were eating dinner—KFC instead of home cooked, one of those humongous buckets that come with different kinds of chicken, so everyone in the family can have their favorite—memo to the Colonel, that only works if everyone has different favorites. Me and Jake both reached for the Extra Crispy—and after a brief standoff, I let go and said, All yours. KFC was one of those foods that tastes good when you eat it but afterward makes you nauseous. Actually KFC generally made me nauseous even before eating it—because I associated it with the first night in that locked house, when I kept thinking Mom was going to come get me but I got smacked in the face instead.

  Jake said, Sure you don’t want it, honey? and I said, I’d be happy to sign an affidavit, then added, Just kidding, because he forgot to smile. Then I told Laurie about the message I’d neglected to give her.

  “This guy named Joe Pennebaker,” I said. “He called to say he was sorry and he wouldn’t be calling anymore.”

  A look passed between them, the kind you probably wouldn’t notice if you weren’t making noticing your new hobby. Dad had stopped gnawing on his chicken bone. I should’ve mentioned, Ben was MIA again.

  “Oh . . . ,” Laurie said. “When was that?”

  “Like last week. Sorry. Forgot to tell you.”

  “No problem.” Jake.

  “Who is he?” I asked.

  “What?” Laurie again.

  “Joe Pennebaker. Who is he?”

  “Why?”

  “Just curious. I mean, what’s he so sorry about?”

  Silence.

  “I wouldn’t know, honey,” Jake said.

  “You wouldn’t know what he’s sorry about? Or you wouldn’t know who he is?”

  “He’s a policeman. That’s who he is.”

  “You mean a policeman around here?”

  “No. He’s retired.”

  “So why was he calling you?”

  Silence again. Mom shifted in her seat. Dad wiped the grease off his upper lip.

  “He used to work on your case,” Laurie said.

  “My case?”

  “He was the cold case detective put on it.”

  “Guess he didn’t do a very good job,” I said.

  “Guess he didn’t,” Jake said.

  “Did he have, like . . . a theory?”

  “A theory?” Mom said, as if it were a word she wasn’t familiar with.

  “Yeah. Like what he thought happened to me?”

  “Like you said,” Jake said, “he didn’t do a very good job.”

  Poker, I thought.

  We juvenile delinquents used to play it after lights-out, for commissary food—Twinkies, Yodels, and Suzy Q’s. I was good at not showing any emotion—I’d had a bunch of practice—so I pretty much ended up with my own personal commissary.

  This was a poker game where we all knew one another’s cards.

  We were forbidden to put them on the table. House rules.

  “I’m trying to remember,” I said. “Did me and Ben fight a lot when we were kids?”

  Laurie scraped her fork on the plate. It sounded like fingernails across a blackboard.

  “I don’t know,” Laurie said. “The usual, I guess.”

  “The usual? Is that a lot?”

  “Now and then.”

  “Who started them?”

  “What?”

  “The fights? Who started them? Ben or me?”

  Laurie shrugged. “Who remembers?”

  You, I thought.

  “How did we fight with each other? Like those Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots Ben had?” (Thanks, Facebook page.) “Did we fight like that? Actually start punching each other?”

  “I don’t know, Jenny. Sometimes you fought. All brothers and sisters do.”

  “I’m just wondering why Ben doesn’t seem to like me.” I actually knew why Ben didn’t like me—because he didn’t think I was me. But that was one of those cards I couldn’t put on the table. That I knew he’d gone and blabbed to them about me. I know that you know that I know . . . My head was starting to throb.

  “I think Ben just feels . . . pushed aside,” Laurie said.

  “That’s it? That’s all?”

  “I’m sure he’ll come around.”

  “I’m thinking maybe I did something to him. Back then, I mean. When we were kids.”

  “Did something?”

  “Like maybe I was this little terror. Maybe he remembers that.”

  Silence again. Then: “You were a perfectly normal sister.”

  Normal. A sweet, adorable, six-year-old little girl.

  “Who always fought with her brother. How did Ben break his arm?”

  What’s that expression—so quiet you could hear a pin drop? I could hear something else dropping. Almost. The pretense—as heavy as a beach towel you mistakenly leave out in the rain.

  “He fell, honey,” Jake finally said.

  “Just like that? All the way down the stairs?”

  “I thought you didn’t know how he broke his arm.”

  “I wasn’t sure.”

  “That’s right. Down the stairs. He didn’t look where he was going.”

  Jake looked like he wanted to ask me where I was going. Wanted to tell me to stop going there.

  “What happened after I . . . went missing?”

  “What do you mean?” Laurie.

  “To Ben. You said he flipped out or something? That’s the reason he’s still in high school, right? You sent him away somewhere.”

  “Ben was traumatized,” Laurie said. “By your disappearance. He needed help.”

  “Sure. That must’ve sucked for him. Not as much as it sucked for me. But I get it. Where?”

  “Where what?”

  “Where did he go? Where did you send Ben?”

  “A school.”

  “A school? Like what kind of school? A school for traumatized kids?”

  “Sort of.”

  “You mean like a mental hospital?”

  “Like a school.”

  “What was it called?”

  Can we please drop this? Jake’s face was saying. Drop the Hesse and Kline–like interrogation. Drop the playing pretend. Drop the “you’re our daughter and we’re your parents.” Drop it. Stop it. End it.

  “St. Luke’s Center,” Laurie said.

  She looked down at her plate, but when she looked b
ack up, she suddenly looked like Laurie again, complete with that toothpaste smile. Asked me if I might help her clean the dishes? Was I binge-watching anything on Netflix? Did I need a warmer winter jacket?

  I felt a sudden chill breeze, but when I glanced at the dining room windows, they were shut tight.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  My Facebook friend had messaged me again. Lorem.

  Just this morning.

  It’d been a while.

  I’d briefly de-friended him.

  Then wondered what if he wasn’t some crackpot messing with my head?

  And friended him back.

  Then de-friended him again seconds later.

  Because of course he was some crackpot. Who else would it be?

  A friend. That’s who.

  The kind that looks out for you. One I didn’t even know I’d had. But a friend.

  Welcome back, he messaged.

  Gee thanks.

  Ask them.

  Ask who?

  Who do you think? Laurie and Jake . . .

  It was the first time he’d mentioned them by name.

  Sure. Ask them what?

  Are you being careful?

  Absolutely. Scout’s honor. With a capital C.

  Ask them where they sent their son.

  What . . . ?

  The year you disappeared. Ask them where they sent BEN.

  So that’s what I’d done.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Never have I ever rubbed one out in school,” Tabs said.

  I picked up my vodka and orange juice halfway. Was juvie hall a school? Yes and no. I opted for no and put the drink down. We were in Tabs’s room—a pretty nice-size one, meaning her materialistic parents must’ve been doing a good job of keeping up with the Joneses.

  “Your turn,” Tabs said.

  “Never have I ever thrown up during sex.”

  Tabs took a swig of her greyhound. “Like who hasn’t?”

  “Me.”

  If you’re trying to get to know new friends, this is a great way to go about it! What better way to get to know someone than by learning about their past experiences, no matter how trivial? Tabs’s parents had the Never Have I Ever party-game edition—which provided the statements for you, so you didn’t have to think of any yourself. Mostly of the pretty boring variety—like Never have I ever double-dipped and Never have I ever danced in the rain. The raciest one was Never have I ever gone commando.

  We’d decided to go off the reservation and make up our own.

  “Your turn,” I said.

  “Never have I ever peed in my pants.”

  Mom was walking away from me in the motel parking lot. Turning the corner and then gone. Dammit, what did you just fucking do . . . ?

  I downed my drink.

  Tabs had a poster of Kurt Vile on her wall. Next to one of the Brooklyn Nets. Next to that ubiquitous one of Che Guevara. Her room an odd mix—just like her. We were the only ones in the house—her mom was a tax lawyer and her dad a professional asshole who both worked long hours, so we’d taken our sweet time raiding the liquor cabinet.

  “Never have I ever used the same sanitary pad twice.”

  “Eww,” Tabs said. “Really?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Does anybody?”

  Yes. A girl in the first juvie hall, where pads were hard to come by. I stayed quiet.

  “Never have I ever sent nudes on Snapchat.”

  “Never have I ever been with two guys in one day.”

  “Never have I ever had a foursome.”

  “Never have I ever been with a friend’s dad.”

  We veered into the sex stuff and stayed there. Maybe it was the vodka.

  Confession. I might have been sexualized at an early age like that social worker said, but like most things with Jobeth, I’d been playing pretend. Starting way back then. Pretend you like it. Pretend you’re somewhere else—back under the Billy Goats Gruff bridge in that kids’ playground. Or out rowboating on Shanshaw Lake. Or circling Pluto.

  Anywhere but in that house. In a bedroom with shit-colored water stains on the wall.

  Sex was my personal bartering system. If I did it without trying to run out the front door, or down to the basement, quietly agreed to lie there without their having to strap me to the bed, I got to stay out of that pitch-black pantry. Thanks, Mom and Dad.

  If I flashed Mr. Charnow in the shower, I got to live in the house a little longer. Or I would’ve, if his wife hadn’t caught me and sent me straight to juvie hall. On the street, sex sometimes got me fed and clothed and out of the rain. It was something I used when I had to—IN CASE OF EMERGENCY BREAK HERE.

  My head was starting to swim. More like a bad dog paddle, in clear danger of going under. I’d never been much of a drinker or a huge druggie—though I’d tried pretty much every one in the book and some that weren’t. I had this fear of losing control—probably because I’d lost every single bit of it at the age of six. Couple that with one more fear. Getting kicked to the curb—it was hard to stay hypervigilant on eighty-proof vodka.

  Things seemed safe with Tabs, though, safe enough to blow through two bottles of her parents’ best.

  “Never have I ever mixed coke and X.” Tabs’s turn.

  I took a drink.

  Tabs’s text had suddenly popped up on my iPhone—courtesy of Laurie and the new Verizon Family Plan. Wanna hang?

  I’d sent her back a thumbs-up emoji.

  She gave me a house tour for laughs, making fun of the furnishings—like My parents saw this in Martha Stewart’s house in some magazine so of course they had to run out and buy it. And This is my parents’ idea of humor—pointing to the TIPS ACCEPTED sign above the liquor cabinet.

  I provided a laugh track, but I actually thought the house was pretty impressive. Maybe because the ones I grew up in featured Naugahyde couches, dirty shag carpeting, and pitch-black pantries where you had to bang on the door to be let out.

  After we’d tapped the liquor cabinet, we scoured the party-game drawer—Clue, Trivial Pursuit, Boggle.

  Never have I ever played Never Have I Ever, Tabs had said.

  “Whose turn?” Tabs, starting to slur her words.

  “I forget,” I said.

  Tabs giggled. “Never have I ever been so drunken.”

  “That’s not a word.”

  “What do you mean? Tabs got good and drunken.”

  “Good and drunk.”

  “Who are you, Alex Trebek?”

  “I spent a lot of time in libraries.”

  “Why?”

  “Somewhere to go where they wouldn’t kick me out.”

  Tabs was lolling on the carpet in her skinny jeans and Alice Cooper T-shirt. “Jesus . . . the room’s actually spinning,” she said. “Like stop the merry-go-round, I want to get off.”

  “Want to stop playing?” I asked.

  “No. Never have I ever wanted to stop playing.”

  “Okay. So, you go.”

  “Little old me?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay, let’s see. I got one. Never have I ever pretended to be someone I wasn’t.”

  I almost reached for my drink.

  “You sure?” Tabs asked. “Like you’re absolutely positive about that?”

  My heart was beating faster.

  “Yes.”

  “Like you never, ever pretended to be someone you weren’t?”

  “No.”

  “Even when you were like six? You never pretended to be Ariel or Dora the Explorer? Really?”

  “Sure. I guess.”

  “Buzz. If you’re caught lying, you have to take two drinks. When I press the buzzer, you have to get more buzzed.”

  “Huh?” The game was starting to a
nnoy me.

  “Them’s the rules.”

  “Okay. Fine.” I took two swallows—two small licks of flame.

  “What about when you weren’t six?”

  “What?”

  “When you got older. You never pretended to be someone you weren’t then?”

  “I said no.”

  “I know what you said . . .”

  “I want to stop playing. This game sucks.”

  “Never have I ever been a party pooper. Go ahead, you’ve got to take a drink. Because you’re pooping on this party.”

  “I’m going home.” I got up—the room was spinning crazily.

  “Never have I ever pretended to be a kidnapped girl who came home,” Tabs said.

  And things went dark.

  * * *

  —

  A cold compress.

  When I was four or five, during one of my mom’s “I’m getting straight” periods—which generally lasted only as long as my periods did later on—I’d come down with the flu. Your forehead feels like I could fry an egg on it, my mom said when she rested her hand on it, but her hand itself felt like cool water, like sticking your head in a playground fountain in the middle of August.

  It felt like love. The closest thing to it, anyway. After that, I used to pretend to be sick in the hope I could get her to rest her hand on my head again.

  Get up, you’re fine, she’d say, having no patience for me in the middle of the heebie-jeebies or when she was spacing out on the couch with the crystal pipe practically falling out of her hand.

  There was a cold compress on my head.

  Tabs’s hand was attached to it.

  I was on the floor.

  “Shit,” Tabs said. “Sorry. Did I do that to you? You scared the living shit out of me.”

  I shook my head.

  “Too much vodka.”

  “Really? Really and truly? It wasn’t what I said to you?”

  I shook my head again. My throat felt like sandpaper. I waited for the room to come into focus. I needed my brain to do that right now.

  “How did you know?”

  Tabs sighed. “I did a search. There’s a face recognition app you can run with someone’s picture—I used one of the pics we took at the mall. The app hits on anything similar. You know, sometimes it fucks up. Sometimes . . . bingo.”