Safe

by S. K. Barnett

  It started around four. Her problems. One day she was a perfectly normal little girl. Then one day she wasn’t. She just changed.

  Four years old. When something else changed. When Jake must’ve stopped reading Jenny bedtime stories and begun making up his own. When he began paying her early-morning visits, with Laurie and Ben still safely asleep.

  He’d paid her a visit that last morning—after she’d dutifully locked her brother in the downstairs closet during a game of hide-and-seek.

  He’s locked in, she’d whispered to her imaginary friend that morning. Be right up . . .

  Then she’d tried to set Ben on fire.

  She looked like she wanted to kill me, Ben said, the morning he’d woken up with a pillow over his face.

  I understand, Jenny. I do. I do.

  Ben wasn’t the one being sexually abused every night.

  He was magically exempt.

  Those friends of hers—them, too. Toni and Jaycee. Able to go to sleep at night without having to wonder if they’d be getting a visit from the tooth fairy.

  Jenny couldn’t lash out at her tormentor. At Jake. It’s not allowed—the fucked-up heart won’t allow it. The rest of the world would have to do. Anyone within arm’s length.

  What had Toni said? You were violent. As in physically the fuck harmful to me and Jaycee.

  The trees were thicker here. Crowded together at jagged cross angles. I felt a sharp stitch in my side. Stitch one, slip two . . .

  Snakes.

  The one part of Ben’s dream Krakow hadn’t bothered explaining. Maybe the symbolism was lost on a priest—at least, a priest who wasn’t ass-fucking altar boys.

  Snakes equal dicks. Dreams 101.

  I wasn’t aware till this second that I was crying. This whole time tearing ass through the woods. Sobbing. Snot and tears and scratches making a mess of me.

  Then I heard it.

  I was making the tangled twigs and roots snap, crackle, and pop.

  So was someone else.

  First my racket, then seconds later another one. Like an echo.

  We weren’t in Tom Sawyer’s cave.

  He was coming after me.

  I went down again. Twisted an ankle. When I sprang back up, pain shot straight through my leg like an electric current.

  I needed to move faster. Faster and faster and faster. I was slowing down.

  I saw a patch of light through the trees.

  I went for it.

  When I stumbled out the other side, gasping for air, holding my side, I was staring straight into the sky. As if I’d been running toward heaven.

  I was.

  I was standing on a cliff. Eagle Cliff.

  Jake had burst out of the brush and was standing there blocking the only way back.

  * * *

  —

  You sick motherfucker.”

  This time I understood I’d stated it straight out loud. Screamed it.

  “Daughter fucker. Jenny fucker.”

  It tumbled out of me—an incoherent torrent of rage. I knew I wasn’t just shrieking at him. At Jake. Father and Mother were here. See them? I was letting them know what they’d done. To that little girl they’d bought for a bag of crystal meth. The girl in the closet. The girl with the Raggedy Ann mouth. The girl they’d strapped to a bed. The girl who’d grown up and wanted to be anyone on earth but Jobeth.

  “You had no right . . . you destroyed her . . . you killed her . . . you did . . .”

  “I didn’t mean it. It was an accident,” Jake stated calmly.

  Huh? What?

  Jake had killed her? Jake . . . not Ben?

  I’d been raging at him about murdering the child inside. Her tiny innocent soul.

  He’d murdered the child.

  Jake had.

  “You told Laurie it was Ben. All these years. Blamed it on him.”

  Jake didn’t bother answering. His eyes were scanning the surroundings—the thick trees . . . the flat area of cliff . . . the steep drop.

  And now, what should have been obvious the moment I’d turned around and seen my only way out was blocked suddenly became ice clear. My anger morphed into something else. Fear. Searing heat into sudden bone-cold chill.

  “Too bad . . . ,” Jake said.

  How far was I from the edge of the cliff? Five steps, maybe less.

  “You getting on that computer. You seeing. I loved her, you know. She loved me. We had a special relationship.”

  I almost gagged.

  “Is that what you call it?”

  “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “I understand fine. I had a special relationship too. My parents were real fuckers. I was the fucked.”

  “Jenny loved me.”

  “She didn’t have a choice. She was six. You did.”

  Jake shook his head.

  “Shit. I really wish you hadn’t gone on that computer. Fuck . . . fuck . . . fuck . . .” Like he was wrestling with what I was forcing him to do. One thing to have an accident. Another to make someone else have one.

  Eagle Cliff is like a hundred million feet high . . .

  “I’ll keep my mouth shut. Just like you said.”

  Jake snorted. “Sure you will.”

  “It’s mutually beneficial. You’re right. I don’t want to go to jail.” A strange thing to beg for your life. I’d begged for plenty of other things—food, money, a place to sleep, not to have to walk into a pitch-black closet or get strapped to a bed or let a stranger in a tracksuit come into my room. This time was for keeps.

  “Sorry. Neither do I.” His face was flushed. Not just from running after me through heavy brush. From what he was about to do.

  “Please . . .”

  “Shhh . . .” He was walking toward me. Face flushed, eyes narrowed, arms out as if he were zeroing in for a hug.

  When I first went to my new house, I would try to dodge them, dart past their outstretched arms and down into the basement, where I’d hide, shivering and terrified. I made it a few times. Mostly they’d manage to snag me—by my neck, my nightgown collar—then I’d be dragged back to bed. Tied down. Raped.

  It felt like death. Every single time. It was death now. For real.

  I almost got by him.

  Almost.

  He hooked me by my belt—the one Laurie bought me that day at the Roosevelt Field Mall. Jammed his fingers in there good and tight and yanked me back hard. The back of my head hit the hard stone. I felt the jolt of pain all the way down my spine. He began dragging me to the edge of the cliff.

  I fought back.

  Hard as I could.

  Just like I’d done at the edge of the sink that morning when they’d forced my chin up so they could sew my mouth together. Just like those times in the basement, when they’d yank me out from behind those mildewed cardboard boxes stacked with old Superman comics—I wasn’t Super Invisible Girl—and I’d imagine Superman flying right out of those comic books to save me like the girl in the burning house.

  He didn’t ever.

  Not once.

  Eighteen years old and way past believing in comic book heroes and my last thought on earth was that: Superman coming in to cradle me in his two superstrong arms as I went flying out into space.

  Because I could swear—really swear—he was there flying toward me—as I tumbled, tumbled, to my death.

  AFTER

  Thelma and Louise.

  I kept bringing it up on the endless drive to Minnesota.

  “Which one am I?” Tabs said. “And didn’t they end up going over a cliff?”

  “Bingo.”

  We were about halfway through Ohio. There was some question as to whether Tabs’s weathered blue Mustang would make it all the way to Duluth. I put it at fifty-fifty. The car had a persistent coug
h and a serious case of the shakes, debatably making it in only slightly better condition than me.

  The final toll: Four broken ribs. One fractured clavicle—collarbone for the anatomically ignorant. A few other grotesquely misaligned bones here and there. I had four pins in me—I’d have to inform airport security about that from now on—or risk being strip-searched by some latex-gloved TSA agent. Not that I’d be getting on a plane anytime soon.

  “Hey, Thelma,” I said, seeing myself more as the spunky Louise. “Thanks again.”

  I was thanking Tabs for the road trip. I’d already thanked her plenty for taking me in and helping nurse me back to a reasonable facsimile of a functioning human being. Her parents too. I think my notoriety made me something of a novelty—even for two soulless dullards—though to be honest, they seemed pretty okay to me. I guess if you’re trying to keep up with the Joneses, this was something the Joneses couldn’t possibly match. Her dad even made the evening news: “Jobeth is doing fine but would rather not speak to reporters right now.”

  He could’ve added: Or ever. Way too much to explain.

  I’d already been forced to sit down with Hesse and Kline, this time to spill the beans on the real Father and Mother—but I made sure to mix in enough half lies to send them in the wrong direction.

  “No problem, Louise,” Tabs said, squinting through the windshield, bathed by a blinding late-afternoon sun.

  “Fuck it . . . stick with Jo,” I said.

  Now that I was out of my adopt-a-family phase, I enjoyed hearing my actual name said out loud. I’d spent my life doing everything I could to not be Jobeth—but I’d made a kind of peace with her. Not an easy one. Eternally wary of each other but willing to give it a shot to prevent further bloodshed.

  There’d been enough.

  I would’ve been added to the list if it wasn’t for the root of a dead tree. Maybe the very same tree whose branch Ben grasped thirteen years ago to keep himself from going over Eagle Cliff. Call it the Kristal Family Tree—where even fake members get to claim a piece of it.

  I’d grabbed on for maybe all of ten seconds—just enough for it to halt my free fall and deposit me on this sort of ledge. When I looked at the photos later—news photos splashed across the internet—it looked more like a dent. Maybe it was the perspective—the ledge was at least twenty feet down from that gnarled hanging root. Which explains why I have four pins in me and needed Tabs to help me to the toilet for three straight weeks.

  What happened on that cliff was pieced together by those news articles, by Tabs, and by yours truly, once they took the methadone drip out of my arm, which I screamed for them to do as soon as I understood it was in me, screamed at them to replace it with something else—anything else, something without the word meth in it, thank you. You understand.

  Jake had thrown me off Eagle Cliff.

  Jobeth—yours truly—discovered 384 pictures of Jake Kristal raping his daughter. Jobeth (alias Jenny, but that’s another story) ran out of the house. Jake followed her. Cornered her. Tossed her.

  Then Jake jumped off Eagle Cliff.

  Killed himself.

  Unable to live with what he’d done. To his daughter, Jenny. To the girl pretending to be Jenny. Blah, blah, blah . . .

  That flying figure I’d seen hurtling toward me—remember? It wasn’t Superman. It was Jake. On his way to the bottom.

  And that was that.

  Except.

  It wasn’t true.

  The Jake-killing-himself part.

  Okay. This is between you and me. Deal? You, me, and Ben.

  Once I could move around without saying ouch, Tabs drove me to the house to get my stuff. Laurie had let her know that all those clothes she’d bought me were still mine. I could have them. Tabs had been sharing her own stuff with me, but I’d gotten tired of Alice Cooper T-shirts, Metallica tank tops, and bell-bottoms with yellow plastic daisies on them.

  I stayed in the car waiting for Tabs to reappear—milking my convalescence for all it was worth. Plus, I didn’t want to go in. Someone else appeared. Ben stepped out on the porch, staring at me through the car window. For almost the first time I could remember, his expression was devoid of any fuck you.

  I say almost.

  Because the only other time I’d seen his face like that was on Eagle Cliff.

  Sure, it was upside down, so maybe I got it wrong, but just as I was going over the ledge, I could swear I saw Ben standing right there behind his father, staring at me with a look that seemed, well, almost empathetic.

  This was seconds before Jake came tumbling down after me.

  Ben had that same look now.

  Like, I get it. Like, I understand.

  So I returned it in kind.

  I get it, Ben. I know. I understand.

  I do.

  * * *

  —

  It’s 1,197.6 miles from Long Island to Minnesota. According to Google Maps. Eighteen and a half hours, if you don’t break it up.

  I didn’t want to. Because I was afraid if you gave me half a chance, I’d turn back. Exhaustion won out—we stopped at a Motel 6, where we watched Thelma and Louise on Netflix while munching on popcorn we procured from an outdoor vending machine.

  When they sailed over the cliff at the end, I cried.

  Hard as nails, meet soft as sugar.

  Somewhere during the drive, Tabs had asked me what I wanted to be when I grow up.

  We both knew I already had. In a real hurry. Anyway, I’d been giving it some thought—amazing what things you can think about when you’re not spending every second thinking about just making it to the next day. You can start to see the next year. And the year after that. And you can maybe see yourself doing something worthwhile with it—this thing called the rest of your life.

  “I don’t know . . . maybe something with drawing . . . art therapy or something like that. For kids who’ve been through trauma.”

  “That’d be pretty cool, Jo,” Tabs said. “Really.”

  Yeah, I thought. It would.

  But first this.

  When we got within a mile or so of her house, I said, “I want to turn around, Tabs.”

  “But we’re here,” she said.

  “Yeah. That’s the point. We’re here and I don’t think I can do it.”

  “Sure you can.”

  I’d called J. Pennebaker.

  Rang him up after everything went down—my rescue from the ledge after Laurie wandered out looking for Jake, the police and ambulance showing up, the fifteen minutes of lurid news stories that followed—and told him he’d been right. Half-right, anyway. Jenny hadn’t been kidnapped on her way to Toni Kelly’s house that morning. She’d been murdered. But Ben wasn’t the murderer.

  He’d been wrong about that.

  And I told him something else.

  “You were my Facebook friend. Lorem.”

  “Guilty as charged.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? You want the short answer or the long one?”

  “I’m covered in casts. I’ve got time.”

  “Okay. Let’s just say I was close to figuring it out—until you showed up, of course. So I called off the dogs. Called you, I believe—think you were the one who answered the phone—and I said to please tell them I’m sorry, I won’t be calling again. But then I got to thinking. Occupational hazard. How it seemed just a little too perfect. For them, I mean. The timing and all. So I started looking at you. It wasn’t that hard. Discovering you probably weren’t who you were saying you were.”

  “So why didn’t you say something?”

  “I said probably. Wasn’t one hundred percent sure. Besides, you made the cover of People. I’m a retired detective about to start cashing social security. When I called off the dogs, there was just one dog—a pretty toothless one these days. I thought I’d make
sure you stayed safe instead. At least warn you. Try to. That you weren’t the only one in that house who was lying. Someone else was—even if I wasn’t exactly sure who. Guess I did a fairly shitty job on the keeping-you-safe part.”

  “I was a fucking imposter.”

  “Life is relative, sweetheart. If you learn one thing as a policeman, you learn that. You were an imposter—fine, and by the way, I think we can probably find it in our hearts to excuse you just a little bit for that, no? They were worse. He was, anyway. As it turned out, a whole lot worse.”

  Imagine that. A Facebook friend who really was one.

  “Anyway, thanks for calling and letting me know,” Pennebaker said. “I spent a lot of time looking for you. Well . . . not you. Your namesake, I guess we’ll call it. You mend up . . . okay?”

  But before I said good-bye, I asked him for a favor.

  It was the actual reason I’d called.

  “You probably can track down just about anyone, can’t you? Being such a hot-shit detective, I mean.”

  He laughed. “Maybe so. Who you talking about?”

  I gave him a name.

  It didn’t take him very long. Less than a week.

  Then two weeks more as I went back and forth deciding if I was really going to contact her.

  Yes. No. Yes.

  When I got a response back, I didn’t open it for a day and a half. I just stared at it like it was maybe a bad test result from a doctor. Like if I actually opened it, I’d be finished.

  I clicked on it.

  Is this really YOU? she’d written. I’ve been looking for you. For YEARS.

  I burst into tears—right there in front of the computer. Shook and sobbed and bawled like a baby.

  I answered her. Tentatively.

  She answered me in a New York City minute.

  We kept it up.

  A conversation that turned into a dialogue that turned into a plan.

  She’d been straight for almost six years. Stone-cold no-relapse swear-on-Scout’s-honor straight. She had a job counseling other addicts. A nice place to live. Even a nice man to live with, who sounded like someone I might even like to know.

  The one thing she didn’t have was peace.