“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why’d you run a search?”
“I don’t know. A vibe. I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine.”
“No, it’s not. I . . . like you. I mean, we’re friends. I’m an asshole.”
“What picture came up?”
Had Becky put that picture online—the one of us sitting on the porch? Laurie had sent her packing with that bullshit DNA story—but maybe Becky had seen right through it. Maybe she’d gone home and posted my picture on some online site, like tacking a wanted poster on the post office wall.
No.
“It was from over two years ago. This family called the Greers? Some local news site.”
The Greers. The ones who’d left the night-light burning in their daughter’s room for more than ten years hoping she’d come back one day. Until she had. Kind of.
“I mean, you were younger,” Tabs said. “But the more I stared at it, the more I realized it was you. And then there were the circumstances . . . I mean, it’d be a super-colossal kind of coincidence that the app would find a hit with another girl who’d been kidnapped and made it home, right?”
I closed my eyes.
“What are you going to do?”
“What do you mean?”
“Give me a head start, okay? A day. That’s all I’m asking. A day to clear out and then you can tell whoever you want.”
“Why would I tell someone?”
“Because . . . ’cause . . . I’m a fucking imposter.”
“So?”
“So when people find out about me, they usually don’t keep it to themselves.”
“I’m not people.”
“So you’re not going to tell anybody?”
“Why the fuck would I? I told you about hacking into the NRA, right? Are you telling anyone?”
“That’s different.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. It just is. I’m pretending to be someone’s kidnapped kid.”
“I’m pretending to be a law-abiding citizen. See, we’re even.”
I looked at her. At my first real what . . . confidante . . . coconspirator . . . friend?
I’d go with friend.
Other than the one on Facebook, that is.
Are you being careful?
“Don’t you even want to know how it started? How many times? Why the fuck I do it?”
“Of course. Do I appear to you to be an unintellectually curious dullard? Why . . . you feel like telling me?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I do.”
THIRTY-SIX
Holy fuck,” Tabs said.
You ever look over at someone watching a horror movie with you? The way they try to look but not look at the same time?
This wasn’t a movie. Not rotten tomatoes. Rotten potatoes.
Rotten story. Rotten life. Rotten me.
It poured out like vomit.
I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t come up for air.
We’re going to meet Mommy’s friend.
Define friend, Mom.
Define taking your six-year-old to a motel parking lot and selling her.
Put a name to it. Say what you did.
Meet my new mom and dad, Tabs. Yours are soulless dullards. Mine were soulless baby fuckers.
I know, your lips are zipped. Great. Mine were sewn together with black thread. Stitch one, slip two.
Don’t look away, Tabs. Do not. I’m the one who gets to do that. To look away. To bury it so deep it can’t hurt anymore. Who gets to look in the mirror and see Karen Greer. Alexa Kornbluth. Terri Charnow. Sarah Ludlow. Jenny Kristal. Anyone but me.
You asked. You did.
“I’m sorry,” Tabs said when I’d finished purging.
“About what?”
“Everything. What happened to you. It’s fucking horrible.”
“Some people think I am. Fucking horrible. I mean, when they find out I’m not their long-lost child.”
“I can see how they might get a little upset about that.”
“I mean, it’s different at first. Before they find out.”
“Define different.”
“Like I just made their decade. Like I’ve just given them their entire lives back.”
Why are you crying, Becky? It’s all right . . .
That’s just it. It is all right . . . finally . . .
“Is it like that now? Your new parents—they don’t suspect anything? They think you’re Jenny?”
I hesitated. Once a bunch of us gangstas had snuck into a water park shut down for the winter, all of us high on X, and I’d strolled out onto the top diving board—the kind hot-shit divers do backflips from in the Summer Olympics. The drained pool said, Jump, Jobeth, jump. I’d thought long and hard about it.
Jump, Jobeth . . . jump . . .
“I think they want me to think they think I’m Jenny.”
“Huh? Why would they want you to think they think you’re their daughter if they don’t think you’re their daughter? Jesus, Jo . . . Should I start calling you that now? . . . My head hurts just saying that.”
Good question.
* * *
—
How good a hacker are you, really?” I asked Tabs.
This was later on, after we’d both fallen asleep from (a) the two bottles of primo vodka and (b) plain emotional exhaustion, then woken up blurry-eyed and disoriented—at least I had, like waking up on my first morning in whichever new house I’d laid claim to, and still believing it was the one I’d just been evicted from.
Tabs stared at me with one eye open and said, “I need a sheepdog.”
“What?”
“Hair of the dog. Sheepdogs are the hairiest.”
I got up and took a pee. Tabs stumbled into the bathroom as I was finishing up and filled the vodka bottles with water. I heard her replacing them in the downstairs cabinet.
“They like to look at them more than drink them,” she said when she made it back upstairs.
Which is when I asked for that hacker self-evaluation.
Here’s my second confession of the day—just in case you’re wondering why I’d told Tabs everything. It wasn’t just because she’d figured out who I really was—or more to the point, wasn’t. Or because I needed a good purging—I did, but no.
Call it a tactical decision. Or maybe just a massive leap of faith.
I was on a mission, remember?
We’re friends . . .
Okay. A friend in need is a friend indeed.
“Where do you rank? Say, one to ten . . . ?” I asked her.
“Can’t put a number to it,” Tabs replied.
Che was gazing at me with that tilted black beret on his head as if he wanted me to sign up for the revolution.
“Try. Come on . . . one to ten?”
“Shit . . . eight.”
“Okay.”
“And three-quarters.”
“Great.”
“Make that seven-eighths. Eight and seven-eighths. This guy I know . . . he hacked into US Central Command. Not shitting you. He’s a nine, easy.”
“Eight and seven-eighths—that’s good enough.”
“Good enough for what?”
“Ever hack into a school?”
“A school?”
“Or a hospital?”
“Which one?”
“A school-hospital. More hospital, I think. Ever hack into one of those?”
THIRTY-SEVEN
Ben’s middle name was Horace. Benjamin Horace Kristal. Good thing I remembered that because Ben Kristal turned up zilch. And we still didn’t hit pay dirt until we typed in Benjamin. Things must’ve been pretty formal at the St. Luke’s Center.
We’d gone to the Bellmore library—a new addition to Tabs’s circuit. The woman librarian looked half-dead but sprang to life when we walked in—probably because she wasn’t used to anyone under eighty being there. She stared at us like specimens in a zoo, until we made it past the thriller section to the completely empty bank of computers.
“You know Nancy Drew was my first girl crush,” Tabs whispered.
Tabs used this thing called BackBox—a hacker’s best friend—plugging a flash drive into the USB port.
“It should get me into the hospital system,” she said. “Don’t imagine they’re worrying a whole lot about cyberpunks.”
I pulled my chair up behind her.
Tabs’s fingers flew across the keys—as if they knew where they were going before she did. Numbers and letters accumulated on the screen like bugs on the windshield of a dangerously speeding car.
“What do they mean?” I whispered.
“Entrance this way.”
She wasn’t bullshitting.
In less than ten minutes we were looking at a page with ST. LUKE’S CENTER PROVIDER PORTAL splashed at the top. She stopped typing, turned around, raised a needed-to-be-plucked eyebrow.
“Now what?” she asked.
“Patient records, I guess. We’re looking for 2007–2008.”
She punched at the keyboard a few times. Frowned.
“It’s a little like being in a dark cave,” she said. “You can go this way or that way and you don’t really know until you go ahead and try it. You can get lost just like that.”
Like Ben had. I pictured the seven-year-old Benjamin Horace Kristal wending his way through Tom Sawyer’s cave. And then suddenly having no idea where he was—clawing at the blackness with both hands, surrounded by ghost chatter. Is this what it was like for my sister? Ben later wrote on his memorial page. Being lost in a deep, dark hole, but never being found . . . ?
It was taking Tabs a while to navigate through the dead ends. The librarian kept making the rounds like a sentry—probably checking to see if we were accessing porn.
Tabs looked up and flashed the librarian an innocent-looking smile—like Do you think little ole me would ever do anything even semi-unlawful?
Guess not. The librarian creaked on her way—her heavy orthopedic-looking shoes squeaking with each step, which would seem like a definite no-no in a library, but maybe not, since it had basically turned into a senior center.
“Here we go . . . ,” Tabs whispered. “User list . . . word list . . . hack-me subdirectory . . .”
She was talking to herself now. Lost in the task at hand. Fingers dancing, eyes zigzagging up and down the screen. Sighing a lot. That too. “It’s password protected,” she muttered.
“What’s that?” I asked her, pointing to words positioned directly beneath St. Luke’s Center that were in a language I didn’t recognize.
Sinite parvulos venire ad me et nolite eos vetare . . .
“Latin,” Tabs said. “I was stupid enough to take it junior year. Suffer the little children . . . and . . . and . . . forbid them not to come to me. I mean, this is a Catholic hospital, right?”
Latin, okay, sure. Of which I knew one word—the one imprinted on my left hip in florid red ink: Vidi. I saw.
And suddenly I did.
That it just might be possible I knew two Latin words.
Another word besides Vidi that suspiciously looked and sounded a lot like those other words on the screen.
“What if it’s in Latin?”
“What?”
“The password.” I told her to try that word—the one that had just come to me.
“Huh?” Tabs shrugged, then turned and attacked the keyboard again. Ten seconds later, she cackled out loud. Too loud. The librarian shot us a dirty look.
“When I said I wanted to take Latin, my dad said, ‘What the fuck is that good for? You planning on dating Marcus Aurelius?’”
“Were you?” Her head was blocking the screen.
“I was actually more into Sappho. Guess we just found out what Latin’s good for. The password for patient records. The word you gave me—it’s Latin for therapy. That’s it. It was that fucking simple. Okay, how’d you know that?”
I didn’t answer her.
I was too busy staring at the screen. At the password that had just unlocked St. Luke’s patient records.
L-O-R-E-M.
THIRTY-EIGHT
Okay, Facebook friend number 1,371. (Which wasn’t a boy’s name or a girl’s name but, surprise, surprise, a password name.)
I’m here.
My stomach wasn’t cooperating—I needed an airsick bag.
I felt like there was something in there I didn’t want to see. Something I shouldn’t be seeing. I’d been locked up twice for breaking and entering—breaking hearts, entering families hanging on by their fingernails—but this was the real deal. Like we’d smashed through a basement window at St. Luke’s—cleared the sticky cobwebs off our faces, landed softly on a cold cement floor, then directed a flashlight onto the rusty file cabinets, where we ticked off the alphabetically listed names down to the Ks.
Benjamin Horace Kristal.
Right you are, Tabs, St. Luke’s was a Catholic hospital. That also happened to be a Catholic school (like a school for traumatized kids?). Or a Catholic school that was also a Catholic hospital.
Emphasis on Catholic—most of the doctors and teachers had Father in front of their last names. Too bad for Ben none of those fathers were Jake. While the teachers were feeding the kiddies ABCs, the doctors were feeding them Depakote, Thorazine, and lithium—“Heavy-duty shit,” Tabs whispered—the dosage was listed right there in Ben’s file. Maybe I’d had it better than I’d thought in juvie hall—mystery meats, dykey roommates (sorry, Tabs), pissed-off social workers, and the rest.
Why a Catholic institution? The Kristals didn’t strike me as religious—Laurie seemed to worship tanning beds more than Jesus.
Maybe not back then.
When your daughter’s just been kidnapped, you probably want to hedge your bets. Grab some Muslim prayer beads, stick on a skullcap, pray to the Virgin Mary. Whatever it takes. I’d noticed a King James Bible in their bookcase that looked like it hadn’t been opened in years, when it must’ve become clear this whole prayer thing wasn’t working.
Ben’s therapist was Father Krakow.
“Priests can be psychs?” Tabs whispered. “Talk about multitasking.”
Krakow kept meticulous word-for-word records, starting from when a traumatized eight-year-old landed on his doorstep. As I began reading—as we both did—it was as if everything disappeared: the computer screen, the rows of tables, the library—the years.
SUBJECT: BENJAMIN HORACE KRISTAL.
I suddenly shivered—my whole body doing a kind of electric slide.
“Somebody walk over your grave?” Tabs asked.
“No,” I said. “Over Jenny’s.”
THIRTY-NINE
SUBJECT: BENJAMIN HORACE KRISTAL.
BACKGROUND.
Interviews conducted with both parents. Patient’s younger sister (Jenny age 6) disappeared outside the family home. Apparent abduction. She’s still missing—no progress has been made by the police. Laurie Kristal (patient’s mother) is exhibiting severe emotional distress and psychodynamic guilt. She states she allowed her daughter to walk to a neighbor’s house by herself. “God will never forgive me.” Jake Kristal (patient’s father) shows symptoms of repression, withdrawal, self-isolation. Emotional fraying clearly evident between spouses.
Laurie Kristal relates that patient has been disruptive in school. Nonverbal in family home. Emotionally unresponsive. Frequent physical outbursts.
Incident: Parents discovered daughter’s bed torn apart, with the mattress turned over and several of the wooden slats smashed. Some of the pillows had been
ripped. Patient denied doing it.
Incident: Patient covered himself in red paint at school. Has been violent in schoolyard with other children—school board is considering expulsion. Patient offered no explanation for these behaviors.
Incident: Mother (Laurie) discovered the patient had neatly laid out his missing sister’s clothes across his bed. She states this is the way she used to do it for her daughter every morning before school. Mother states the clothing was different color, but similar to the kind Jenny wore the day she was abducted. Father (Jake) disagrees. “Just some clothes he found in the hamper.” (Dissociative Identity Disorder?)
Laurie states the patient exhibits almost no recall of the morning his sister was abducted—it’s as if his memory of that day has “been erased.” Patient is suffering a recurrent nightmare: being locked in a closet with poisonous snakes with the closet set on fire. Patient is terrified by this very specific and recurrent dream. He’s resisted sleeping due to his fear of having to repeatedly undergo this clearly traumatic nightmare.
FIRST SESSION.
Benjamin exhibits markedly insular posture. Appears sleep deprived (nightmares). Notably underweight—mother (Laurie) says patient is not eating well since sister’s abduction. Shows little eye contact. Nonverbal. Unresponsive.
Insight-oriented play therapy instituted.
Patient piles blocks up, then repeatedly knocks them down. Robotic motions. Monotone responses to questions. What are you building, Ben? Nothing. Or: Don’t know. Why are you knocking the blocks down, Ben? I want to.
When offered animal play figures, he shows no interest. Noticeable aversion to the horse figures. Refuses to even touch them. (Follow-up) Don’t you like horses, Ben? No. Why don’t you like horses, Ben? (Shrugs) Didn’t your sister like horses, Ben? (Silence)
Drawing is aggressive. Breaks two crayons. (Relaxation techniques?) His picture is indistinct—black swirls. What’s that a picture of, Ben? Jenny’s room. Why did you draw your sister’s room? (Shrugs) Is your sister’s room black, Ben? No. (Patient tears up the picture.) Why did you destroy such a nice picture, Ben? (Patient unresponsive.)
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