Safe

by S. K. Barnett

  There was a basement closet to the right of the boiler.

  The one Ben was locked in, in his nightmare.

  My legs refused to go there. Walk over to that closet, I commanded, chop-chop, but they were suddenly on strike.

  It was Mr. Hammered’s fault.

  He was lying down on the job again. Ignoring my explicit instructions and letting two psychopaths back onto the premises.

  They used to make me walk into the closet myself.

  Stuffing their faces with Domino’s pizza. Laughing at some stupid sitcom on the kitchen TV.

  You know where to go . . .

  A million times worse than them dragging me there—kicking, screaming, crying, pleading . . . No, please, no, Mother, no—which is what used to happen before I learned that making them madder meant I’d be locked in longer.

  You know where to go . . .

  Into a closet whose door would always lock shut behind me—sometimes not right away, not till they’d taken their sweet time polishing off a slice, or until their show ended. Standing there waiting for that click of the lock and stupidly praying it wouldn’t happen. That I wouldn’t end up trapped in a place so dark I couldn’t see my own hands clawing at the door. Maybe that’s why I can’t sleep much anymore—because being covered in darkness is being trapped in a closet I can never get the fuck out of.

  You know those World War II photos that are always turning up on TV? Grainy black-and-white shots of Nazis forcing Jews to dig their own graves—the ones they’d soon be lined up and machine-gunned into. Those awful photos show up on TV too. But it’s the ones taken before all those bodies lay naked and bullet riddled that made me nauseous. The Nazis exerting power that was total, complete, casual—shots of them grabbing smokes and cracking smiles while doomed Jews shoveled away in the background.

  You know where to go . . .

  Why use force when you can use fear?

  I felt it now—it refused to go away. Just got stuffed in a basement smelling of dead things—and sometimes, no matter how hard you tried, you still had to walk down the stairs and face it.

  The closet seemed five miles away.

  Like I’d need to be some kind of power walker to get there—those bags of bones you see every four years in the Olympics who move like herky-jerky marionettes on speed.

  Then I thought: This is Ben and Jenny’s closet. Not yours.

  There are no sacks of moldy potatoes sitting in it. No Jobeth in there either.

  And suddenly, I could move.

  But when I opened the closet door, I found myself searching for scratch marks. The ones caused by a little girl’s fingernails. The ones I’d counted . . . forty-one, forty-two, forty-three . . . before I’d finally taken off for good.

  They belonged to a different closet door.

  In a different house. Belonging to a different girl.

  None here.

  The sickly fluorescent lighting only penetrated so far—I could make out the edges of bunched hung clothing, but I couldn’t tell what kind. The closet reeked of old person’s smell.

  I flicked on the flashlight app on my phone.

  I didn’t know why I’d walked down here or what I was looking for. Dreamscapes, I guess.

  Poisonous snakes?

  An eight-year-old Ben huddled against the door?

  No, Ben was upstairs listening to music.

  I think I just wanted to see the closet of Ben’s nightmare with my own two eyes. His nightmare. And mine.

  Consider it anticlimactic.

  It was a basement closet filled with closet stuff.

  The kind of musty-smelling crap—old raincoats, faded blouses, a Boy Scout uniform (Ben’s?) that wouldn’t have made it into the Goodwill bins Mother and Father dressed me from—if you were willing to believe the just-resurfaced Jenny, that is, which Hesse and Kline weren’t.

  Not anymore.

  We need answers and sooner or later we’re going to get them.

  Yeah, me too.

  There was an orphaned black glove on the floor. A ripped scarf. An old leather belt coiled up in the corner.

  That’s all.

  Except for . . . those.

  Those . . . what?

  I didn’t know. I had to kneel down—something you don’t really want to be doing in a basement, any basement, but especially this one—and eyeball them up close.

  I’d thought they were shadows at first. Black puddles where the door met the closet floor.

  Except when I moved the door, they stayed where they were.

  The black flaked off in my fingernails. The kind of thing Lysol can’t do squat about: spilled OJ, scuff marks, piss—the crap I had to wipe up when they stuck me on juvie hall KP.

  This wouldn’t be listed on the Lysol bottle.

  Black and crusted particles of wood.

  Scorch marks, I think you’d call them.

  You know—the stuff that’s left behind after a fire goes out.

  FORTY-THREE

  You up?”

  “Huh?” The answer was, Not really.

  I’d had a hard night.

  Screwy dreams where I was chatting with my Facebook friend. Face-to-face with him. Who kind of looked like Dad, which made no sense except it was a dream, so why not? I was back on the couch in my loose cutoffs and splaying my legs out like when Dad had been trying to watch the Knicks but I’d wanted him to watch me—please, Dad, ME—and I felt that sickening nausea again, because maybe I was doing everything but selling tickets, but before he’d looked away, he’d looked.

  Only it wasn’t Dad—in the dream anyway. It was the Facebook friend who’d sent me down a rabbit hole. He wanted to know about the downstairs closet. About the fire. He asked me if I was being careful.

  Then he’d whispered: Shhhh . . . I hear something.

  So did I.

  A door opening.

  And because this was a dream where you can be one place and then suddenly another, we weren’t in my room anymore—or maybe it was Tabs’s room—but in the actual basement of St. Luke’s. As if we’d broken in for real.

  A door was opening and I was in a panic.

  They were going to catch us.

  I woke up sweating—jolted upright in bed, it taking me a second or two to realize that’s where I was, in bed—and feeling this “thank you, Lord” sense of relief. Which didn’t last, because a door had opened. It had. And I knew it was my door.

  Just like a few nights ago.

  I heard another door slamming as I stumbled out into the hall.

  The wooden floor felt ice-cold on my naked feet, or maybe I was. As if I’d wandered into that cold spot and was about to pronounce this house haunted.

  “Who is it . . . ?”

  I hadn’t decided if I should shout or whisper, so I’d compromised. A hush with real purpose.

  Nobody answered.

  “WHO IS IT?”

  The hall was gloomy—just enough light seeping from the downstairs blinds to see that the other bedroom doors were shut tight.

  I waited till I stopped sounding like someone’s panting dog.

  Till I could catch my breath.

  I went back into my room, shut the door, crawled back into bed. I pulled the covers up over my head. I must’ve finally fallen asleep.

  Till my cell rang.

  “You up?” the person on the other end repeated through the fog.

  It was Tabs.

  She sounded rattled.

  “Now I am. What time is it?” Early. The little light eking through my window was the color of dirty dishwater.

  “Don’t know. Think I’ve been up all night.”

  “Join the club. Why were you up?”

  “Poking around St. Luke’s.”

  “Huh?”

  “I
went back in, Jo. Couldn’t help myself. Kept wondering why Ben’s case file ended there like that. Seemed fishy.”

  “You hacked into the system again?”

  “Pay attention. Yeah. I hacked into the system again.”

  She was speaking faster than normal, like when you’re worried the voice mail you’re talking into is about to cut off. Like Pennebaker.

  “Ben’s file didn’t end there,” she said.

  “Don’t understand. There was nothing there. We looked.”

  “Trust me. The rest of the file’s in there. Just not there, there.”

  Either I was too tired to hear straight or she was too tired to talk straight.

  Or both.

  “It’s filed in a different place, Jo. Capisce? The files we broke into were password protected. Five letters. L-O-R-E-M. Remember . . . ?”

  Yeah, Tabs. I remember—it was my suggestion.

  “Translation: therapy,” she continued. “Okay, makes perfect sense, right. But they put the rest of his case file somewhere else. I had to go exploring, okay?”

  “Why would they move it?”

  “Because it doesn’t belong. Because . . . look, follow me. There’s this whole different section with a different password. Latin again, of course. It wasn’t rocket science—I just needed to find out which word. I mean how many Latin words could there be for psychiatric terms, right? That’s what I tried first—you know—treatment, trauma, grief—whatever. Nothing worked. So I went in the other direction.”

  “What other direction?”

  “The Catholic one. That’s when I found it. The other section.”

  “I don’t understand. What kind of section?”

  “The one no one was ever meant to see. You don’t even have to know Latin to understand the password for this one: C-O-N-F-E-S-S-I-O. That’s the password. That’s where it was—Ben’s second EMDR session. I just emailed it to you. It was in Confessions, Jo. Understand? Do you?”

  Her voice sounded like a taut guitar string right before it snaps.

  “Get the fuck out of that house.”

  FORTY-FOUR

  I tried.

  Promise I did.

  Didn’t pack a single piece of clothing. Just went.

  It was predawn. Coast clear.

  I would make it downstairs and out the front door and over to Forest Avenue. I’d grab a lift from your average horny truck driver. I’d fend him off till at least Albany. Or Pittsburgh. Or who-the-fuck-knows-ville.

  I’d been staying put, but now I wasn’t.

  It was time to kiss the Kristal house good-bye.

  And Jenny Kristal. Yeah, her too. The kid who kept plucking at my sleeve. Save me. It’s too late, sweetheart.

  I saw her walking down the block that morning in reverse, backward, through the front door and up the stairs and back into her room.

  I needed to save myself.

  The hall was still black. It felt like the house was holding its breath. A pall hung over it like at a funeral.

  It was years overdue.

  Amen.

  Someone had fastened the chain lock on the front door.

  I’d only seen it locked once before—the day the reporters turned the front yard into a rager.

  That should’ve been my first clue.

  Jake’s open laptop sitting in plain sight on the kitchen counter was the second.

  The download was sitting there on the screen.

  The rest of Ben’s file.

  Tabs had warned me to create something called a hole-in-the-wall—a hiding place on the upstairs computer since I didn’t have my own (next up on Jenny’s wish list). Tabs had sent me directions how to hide it in Program Files—inside a picture or game file. I’d been too panicked.

  Yeah, it was just like juvie hall.

  They’d been watching.

  Online. And off.

  “Come in,” Laurie said.

  She and Jake were fully dressed—as if I was late for something. As if I’d forgotten we were supposed to be on our way somewhere right this very minute.

  We were.

  “We’re going up to the lake,” Jake said. “We need to talk.”

  * * *

  —

  Wondering why I went with them?

  Why I walked into the back seat of their car like I used to walk into that closet? Out the door, down the front walk, using my very own two legs? Probably for that very exact reason—because I was conditioned to. Because they brought the fear.

  When I discussed not going, they discussed calling the police.

  I said, “Not if I call them first.”

  “Who do you think they’re going to believe?” Jake asked calmly. “A con woman—excuse me, con girl—who’s committed fraud? Impersonating someone for monetary gain—new clothes, new furniture, new rent-free life—someone who’s been locked up before, who preys on people devastated by personal tragedy?”

  Versus them.

  The two parents who’d been preyed upon?

  It was a rhetorical question.

  Each accusation—con girl . . . fraud—landing like a hammer blow. Picture the hammer I’d spotted on that downstairs worktable. Jake bringing it down here, down there, and soon enough you’re beat to shit. You’re fractured.

  Because that’s who you are. Those things. They’re you.

  “Look,” Laurie said, with the same too-wide smile I remembered from our strolls down memory lane—except now it gave me the trembles instead of the warm fuzzies. “We just want to talk things over, okay?”

  That first day when she’d pulled out that photo album on the couch, I thought.

  It wasn’t to fondly reminisce with her newfound daughter.

  It’d been a crib session.

  To get me ready for all those relatives who’d be coming over the next day. Remember who this is, Jenny? And her? And him? And if I didn’t remember, she was there to help. That’s your uncle Brent . . . Prepping me for the FBI too—making sure to stop that first interrogation like a concerned mom who was not going to put up with them badgering her daughter. Not after the hell she’d been through.

  We stayed mostly quiet on the trip up to the lake, as if the mournfulness of the house had decided to hitch along for the ride.

  Except when Jake asked if I’d read all of that stuff on the upstairs computer—what Ben told the doctor about that morning in 2007.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Couldn’t put it down.”

  FORTY-FIVE

  BENJAMIN KRISTAL. SECOND EMDR SESSION.

  Watch your back.

  My arm woke me—it’s itching like crazy.

  Watch your back.

  Itching under the cast where I can’t scratch it. Mom says I’m going to have to wear it for FOUR more weeks. The teacher made the whole class write stuff on it with Magic Markers—like ‘hope you get better’ and ‘sorry about your arm’ and John wrote ‘stop falling down the stairs ANUS’—but it weighs like two tons and the itching’s driving me nuts.

  Watch your back.

  Dad said you got to be more CAREFUL going down the stairs. That I wasn’t looking where I was going. Mom too. While Jenny was putting on this whole NICE act.

  “Poor Ben, let me draw you a picture to make you feel better,” and Mom and Dad saying AWWW, say THANKS to your sister, Ben.

  The picture was ME falling down the stairs, and guess who she drew standing at the TOP of the stairs. Smiling. Standing right where I lost my balance and took a header all the way to the bottom. That’s when I remembered. I’d FELT someone behind me.

  Watch your back.

  I tried to tell Dad. That it felt like someone, well, PUSHED me before I fell—and there was only ONE someone there. And he said what are you saying—are you blaming your SISTER for being a klutz? For not looking where YOU w
ere going? And I said I WAS looking where I was going but maybe I should’ve been looking BEHIND me.

  Not the FIRST time.

  We were playing “Indian Trail” at the lake last summer and I was leading the scouting party and we marched up to Eagle Cliff, where you can look over the whole valley to see if settlers are coming, and I walked right up to the ledge because Jenny kind of dared me to. And I turned around to peek down, and suddenly she was right there behind me—like SHOVING me—and I grabbed a branch of this big dead tree and I said are you CRAZY, and she said she SLIPPED. But the ground wasn’t wet or nothing, it wasn’t—so how’d she SLIP, huh?

  Watch your back.

  Jaycee’s brother told me Jenny isn’t allowed at their house anymore.

  Other kids too. Jenny like put Legos in Jaycee’s mouth and Jaycee started choking, and she did something to Toni too—I don’t know what, but SOMETHING, but when I asked Mom about it she said those girls are just being mean and making things up.

  Watch your back.

  One night I was dreaming I couldn’t breathe—and I woke up and guess what—I COULDN’T breathe, because there was a pillow over my face and Jenny was there on top of me holding it. When I yelled at her she said she was starting a PILLOW FIGHT, but like I’d been SLEEPING, and it’s not just that, it’s the way she LOOKED at me when I finally got her off me, like she hated me or something. Like she wanted to kill me.

  Watch your back.

  I would’ve DIED if I went over Eagle Cliff—it’s like a hundred million feet high—I could’ve died falling down the stairs too—that’s what Mom said—that I could’ve BROKEN my NECK.

  Jenny’s younger and she’s a GIRL, so good luck getting them to believe ANYTHING bad about her. They won’t. They just won’t. EVER.

  Watch your back.

  But this morning, I forgot.

  FORTY-SIX

  Ben

  He’d come back from school and immediately sucked up the last of the blunt he and Zack had lit up behind the bleachers, stepping over used condoms and crushed Budweiser cans.