Gretchen

by Shannon Kirk

  Laura winked as if she read Mag’s mind, and indeed, later that morning, when Laura stood with Mag at the end of her driveway waiting for Carly to pick her up, Laura said, “There are three things I’ll tell you if you’ll compete with me, just me, in the Triple C treetop course next summer: one, where Lemon went; two, who helped me pull this off; and three, why they did.”

  Mag sucked in her cheeks, considered the offer. “Before I agree, is Lemon okay?”

  “Holy shit, everyone worries about the damn dog. Yes, for fuck’s sake, not any clumps of his stupid fur were harmed. He’s happy. Okay? Do we have a deal?”

  “So whoever helped you wasn’t anyone in the house? Not your grandparents, maid, chef, father, driver, nanny?”

  “Nope. None of them half-wits. Well, Grammy’s not a half-wit.”

  “And when you say compete in the treetop course, what do you mean?”

  “That’s up to you, Magpie. You’re the camp champion at everything. Come up with some challenges for us. Deal?”

  Mag, never one to shy from a competition, and beyond intrigued by this strange game with a baked-in secret of revenge on an abusive mother, and also fourteen, stepped into Laura’s space. “You better prepare yourself to lose and tell me everything. I never lose,” she said.

  “We’ll see about that.”

  Mag snapped out of her reminiscences in Boston Children’s Hospital when she felt a tapping on her shoulder.

  “Excuse me, excuse me,” a girl’s voice was saying.

  Mag looked up to find a skinny, strawberry-blonde girl in an apple-print dress.

  “Hi,” she said. “I’m Gretchen. Gretchen Sabin. Lucy’s landlord, or her landlord’s daughter. You’re Lucy’s mom, right? Your name is Gretchen too! How cool. I saw on the news. They, the cops, didn’t let me meet you the other day.”

  “Oh, right, yeah. Hi. I’m Lucy’s mom, yes. You can call me Mag,” Mag said, her voice unsure on the words Lucy’s mom, it being such a true title, but also false: her baby’s name was Laura.

  “Mag is such a cool name. I’m happy you guys are together again. I can’t stay long. My dad’s waiting on me outside, and the reception people won’t let me visit Lucy anyway. I tried. I just wanted to tell her not to worry about Allen. I’ll keep looking for him. Okay? Will you tell her? She can Skype me every day, and I’ll give her reports on my searching.”

  Lucy had been frantic to find Allen, her cat, but like Laura, he’d disappeared.

  “That would be wonderful, Gretchen. Thank you,” Mag said. Mag knew near to nothing about this girl. Lucy hadn’t talked about her, as far as Mag knew beyond whatever she might be telling counselors and doctors and law enforcement.

  Gretchen scrunched her shoulders around her neck and swayed. “I’m so happy for Lucy,” she said with a sweet, sweet, innocent smile. And then in a snap, she stopped swaying and jammed her fists on her sides and switched her tone and face and posture to that of an exuberant, confident game-show host, and, emphasizing words, wagged a finger as if a person decades older. Talking out of one side of her mouth with twisted lips, she said, “Okay, ’bye, but only for now. Because I’m going to find Allen. I promise you that.” It was an odd, possibly shocking, affect on such a tiny, young girl, an intimate comedy that breached boundaries between strangers—uncharacteristic of the sweet little girl Gretchen portrayed with the innocent smile and scrunched shoulders. In a word, the moment was awkward. The quick switch of personality, creepy.

  As Mag watched Gretchen walk away, she couldn’t tell if the cold shock crackling up her spine was from her memories of Laura Ingrace at age fourteen, or the present vision of an odd, awkward teen in an apple-print dress who shared her name.

  PART III

  EIGHT WEEKS LATER

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  LUCY

  I’ve been in California for eight weeks. I’m about to Skype-call Gretchen Sabin, my super-creep neighbor-landlord, in New Hampshire, sure to once again hear a negative report on her continuing search for my lost love, Allen. I miss my cat so bad my full-size heart feels compressed enough to fit in a thimble.

  I can’t make sense of the night I ran from Gretchen’s house and discovered the truth about my life. And there’s no way to make sense of Gretchen turning into a demon and slamming her body through the forest to come screaming up on me on the road—holding a bone. I think it was a bone. I don’t know if she meant to beat me with it. Honestly, though, my perceptions of that night are so warped, blurring with the insanity of everything that came right before and right after. Of the disappearance of Mom, Laura Ingrace. Of being reunited and moving to California with my real mother, Gretchen Bianchi. I believe whatever Gretchen Sabin had in mind that night, as she burned a hole in her throat in screaming at me, was malicious, but since I’m so confused about everything from that night, I focus on just one thing: checking in with her from afar on her search for Allen.

  Events over the past eight weeks have been a blur, but I think, maybe, they are starting to come into focus. When I think about the last eight weeks, snippets and scenes and conversations pop into focus with blurred edges around the beginnings and ends and around the actual physical place, like all I can remember is very specific details within the very circle I was in, such as sitting at an oval dining table as opposed to whatever the actual room or house looked like—blurs. I’m not sure if I have the series of events in chronological order, but I also don’t care to organize my life since finding out Mom is not Mom and Gretchen Bianchi is my mother. The feds still don’t know where “Mom”—Laura Ingrace—is. They believe she’s on the run. So she left me, stole me, and abandoned me.

  Special people in Gretchen Bianchi’s life call her a variety of names: G, Maggot, Magpie, Mag, lady girl. I’ve chosen to call her Mag because I can’t call her Mom. I just can’t. The blip-bubble of me that allows myself to love her thinks Mag could be the most perfect Jenny. Maybe Mag is the queen of Jennys. But that thought is hidden in the secret blip-bubble inside me that I don’t let anyone know about. It’s not safe yet. We’ve got boundaries to overcome. I have to be sure.

  We could have driven—not flown like we did—to California in Mag’s “beast” camper because a guy named Cord, who acts like he’s my grandpa but he’s not, and a big burly guy named D took shifts and drove Mag’s camper literally day and night to New Hampshire. But after what later happened at Nathan and Thomas Vinet’s house, there was no way Mag would make me drive across the country. Cord and D were worried that Mag and I would be stuck in New Hampshire for a long time and she’d need her comfort space. They seem like really nice, but also really scary, guys, especially D, who showed me this self-defense move he calls five will get you ten, ten will get you killed. Mag thanked them, and they flew back to Carmel. Mag wouldn’t let anyone else, except Nathan and Thomas Vinet, be around us during all the initial turmoil, not even any of my aunts—I guess my aunts, right? “Carly, please. When things are settled, please come meet us then . . .” is one such conversation I listened to while Mag thought I was sleeping in some bed—a hospital bed, maybe? Or the bed Dr. Nathan Vinet gave us in his guest cottage at his lakefront property, where Mag was staying while I was tested and interviewed and prodded at Boston Children’s. A bed. That’s what I remember.

  When all the “preliminary” work was done and I was “cleared,” I joined Mag at Nathan’s for a night. Once again, some odd blip-bubble let me lower my shoulders while we ate a goodbye meal. In the center of the Vinets’ oval dining table, they set out a blue bowl full of spaghetti and meatballs. Glistening glitter filled my head as I sprinkled fresh-grated Parmigiano-Reggiano from Dyson’s over my steaming pile of pasta. During the short time the four of us sat together, everything seemed happy and normal, even though that dinner was so sudden in the grand scheme of things. Just days since I’d found the truth in the metal box of lies.

  I think it was Thomas. Thomas took away all the awkwardness by being super funny during dinner. He’s a strange kid. First of al
l, everyone else had full glasses of soda. But Thomas poured himself a literal half gallon of whole milk into one of those leftover 7-Eleven Extra Big Gulp jugs. And when he took an overpour sip and milk sloshed not in but around his mouth, he said, “Guess I’m full,” in a very dry and matter-of-fact way.

  I don’t know why, maybe I was thankful everyone’s attention was on Thomas and away from me, but I thought it was the funniest thing anyone had said in the longest time. When I started to snort-laugh, like a pig snort, Mag and Nathan snort-laughed too. Encouraged, Thomas didn’t wipe away the milk, which surrounded his mouth in a mustache and goatee. Instead, he stood, went to a closet, found a top hat (who has a top hat at the ready?) and an umbrella, pulled a quarter from his pocket, stuck it in the socket of one closed eye, and pranced back to the table, saying he was the Monopoly Man. I guess the umbrella was supposed to be his cane.

  “The Monopoly Man doesn’t have a monocle,” Nathan said, laughing.

  “Yes, he very well does, Dad.” The quarter plopped from Thomas’s eye and splashed into his giant jug of milk. “Now you made me lose my eyepiece.”

  “The Monopoly Man does not have a monocle. Prove it. And be careful with my top hat.”

  “That’s your top hat?” Mag said.

  “Yeah,” Nathan said.

  Then the two of them stared at each other so long, both of them with twinkling eyes, pupils searching around the other’s face like spotlights, Thomas and I raised our eyes at each other, saying “WOW” with our expressions.

  “So you would be up to going to the opera in a tux?” Mag asked. She hadn’t blinked. And neither had Nathan. The only way I can think to describe the moment is this: Nathan’s blue eyes were like diamond-studded sapphires when he looked at her.

  “The opera?” he said in a dreamy tone. His pupils grew even wider.

  “Yeah, the opera,” Mag said in a voice that sounded drugged.

  “If you want to go to the opera, I want to go to the opera,” Nathan said.

  Double WOW. I was grinning wide from within my secret blip-bubble. I think I allowed the grin, the blip-bubble itself, probably out of self-preservation: it was exhausting to be so confused and angry and anxious and scared all the time. And I probably allowed the blip-bubble because nobody was peppering me with questions. And this dinner, with the perfect ingredients and the organic laughter over unexpected silliness and even the lighting and the background James Taylor Spotify station, this, like a sudden blip in a perfect dream you never want to leave, was always the fantasy I had conjured when I pictured what it was like to dine with other people. Sitting there in that blip-bubble at the Vinets’, I realized just how much the structured dinners with Mom led me to crave a comradery I had never experienced, only dreamed could happen. Certainly hadn’t happened in my first attempt at Gretchen Sabin’s house. And meals when Mom was in a “dark space”—weeks of her mind-numbing obsession with some bird project or editing job—I’d eat alone, not allowed to turn on any lights, for lights burned her brain, she’d say. So I’d eat alone by battery candlelight and silently tiptoe into her room, careful not to disturb her “thought process,” to collect her finished dishes of items I’d made for her—otherwise, if I hadn’t, she “starved” for her “art.” She could be dramatic. She could be relentless. She could be sharp and unloving and cruel. But after a spell of dark obsession, she’d emerge my mom again, and we’d eat tandem dinners with the lights on and discuss books and my homeschooling homework. Sometimes she’d splurge on a hug or rolling my hair in her fingers, but as I think on those moments, she did always seem to cringe in pain at the touch. Like I burned her.

  Thomas circled his lips in a silent WOW and whispered, “Dad hasn’t dated anyone since my mom died. Whoa.” Thomas seemed excited about the prospect. “I thought he was a eunuch or a priest or something.”

  Nathan overheard Thomas and told him to go find the Monopoly game. As Thomas left, the blip-bubble popped, because Nathan said to me, “Well, Lucy, so tomorrow you and Mag will start your drive across the country. That should be exciting, right? Make all the stops.”

  All my brain heard was “drive across the country” and Mom’s—I mean Laura Ingrace’s—face floated into my field of vision, overlaid Mag’s face, and an anxiety so fierce gripped my throat, it caused me to run from the table and hurl in Nathan’s kitchen trash.

  Sandra Dyson let Mag keep the camper in the back lot behind Dyson’s. Mag said we’d fly home. “I understand, Lucy. We’ve talked with the counselor. I know what driving across the country means to you. We’ll get the beast some other time. When you’re ready. If you’re ready. No rush. No worries. It’s all good,” Mag said.

  When Nathan dropped us off at Logan Airport, I rolled the luggage they bought me to enter the terminal. I didn’t realize Mag wasn’t behind me until I stopped at the automatic doors, turned to say something to her, and saw her long, tall body sealed against Nathan’s long, tall body in a mutual full-body bear hug. When they separated out of the embrace, he pulled her back to him, closed his eyes, set his hands on the sides of her face, and pressed his lips on hers, which she reciprocated even harder. This went on, them kissing and touching each other’s faces, for, I think, a literal eternity. I believe this was their very first kiss. That’s one of the other blip-bubbles of very specific, telescopic memories I keep from the past eight weeks.

  Every time I hear the doorbell, every time I hear a creak outside my window, I think Laura Ingrace has come to claim me. And when that happens, I seize up in fear and hives grow, but also my heart explodes in excitement to see her. It’s very confusing. They tried to give me meds to deal with the hives and insomnia from all this. But I said no. Maybe I’m wrong.

  “I’ve always gotten these hives,” I said to the counselor while sitting in some blurry space with red chairs and a brown couch, I think. Sometimes the counseling memories, and there’ve been several, shift to an amber-lit room with a green hanging chair and lots of plants. And sometimes a hospital room with no color. All the sessions blur together in a potluck of sessions.

  “Didn’t your mother take you to a doctor for these hives?” the counselor asked.

  “You can call her Laura. I get it. She’s not my mom.”

  “But you called her Mom for thirteen years.”

  “Yeah, I know. I get it. Let’s call her Laura, okay? I think calling her Laura would help me separate things and help me to make sense.”

  “You’re very brave, Lucy. That’s astute of you.” The counselor paused, dangling her smart-doctor glasses from her thin fingers. “Can we talk about these hives more?”

  “I guess.”

  “Why didn’t Laura ever take you to a doctor about these hives?”

  “I never told her about them. I hid them.”

  “Why?”

  Silence.

  “Lucy, why didn’t you tell Laura about these stress hives?”

  “Because, because, it was, mainly, it was her words.”

  “Her words?”

  “I mean, her words is what I think would sometimes make the hives. But it was after I provoked her.”

  “Hmm. We’ll talk about that, how you think you provoked her. But first, maybe some medication could help with the stress and the hives? Would you be open to that?”

  “Maybe later. Okay?”

  So on. Numerous counseling sessions like this, especially after I’ve clawed at Mag and screamed at her to step away. But I don’t want to push her away. I want to love her. The counselors say the roller coaster of ups and downs is normal.

  But none of this is fucking normal.

  Trust, they said. Give Lucy trust. Trust and time and space, and then give her more trust and time and space. I’m not sure whatever Mag did to nuke-bomb all the reporters, but she keeps them well away from me.

  Right now, I have the Apple laptop Mag bought me on my lap. There’s no restrictions or spyware, and she doesn’t monitor like “Mom” did, I mean, Laura. I’m sitting on my new bed in my old ba
by room. The wind is rustling through the leaves in the canopy right outside my high window, and the sound soothes me, as this sound always does. Mag says my treetop bedroom always sounded like this when I was a baby.

  I launch Skype and wait for it to load and my credentials to clear. Gretchen usually answers in two seconds.

  I miss Allen so bad I can’t sleep. Why is everything about my life before the box of lies stripped from me? Even the keepsake and metal boxes, the feds took those for evidence. I miss snuggling into Allen’s fur and his purrs so bad, I’ve considered running away in the middle of the night and trekking across the country to Gretchen’s so I can search for him myself.

  Every night for eight weeks, Gretchen’s reported that she can’t find Allen. I had looked for him before we left New Hampshire, after the cops cleared the ranch, saying Mom-Laura wasn’t there, and neither was her roller bag or phone, the two things I know I for sure saw when I opened the metal box. Jerry and Gretchen told the cops I left their house to leave with a friend, so they weren’t alarmed. Gretchen said she didn’t see I’d left my phone and clothes behind. They also said they had no reason to check in on Mom during the day. And it’s just now, this very second, I think some fog is lifting, but I shiver at the thought, but it really doesn’t make sense that a dad would have no alarm that a teen sleeping over his house just fled to meet up with another friend. Right? Why would they lie about that? To keep people from searching their property? Wasn’t Gretchen screaming that night about surprises on trails in her forest? Stop. Stop. Stop. Call and find out about Allen.