by Gregg Olsen
“Sorry,” I say. “Just thinking. Give me a minute.” My eyes leave Hayden’s chocolate-lip and zero in on the crewman with the bucket as he departs the men’s room for the women’s. We sit there as the cars offload. The bang-bang of their tires as they hit the ramp is almost like a drumbeat. Mocking. Telling me that I had better get things in motion. Reminding me that time is passing. Somewhere out there, our mother is being held captive. She always said this could happen. I don’t know what is being done to her for sure and I want to throw up, but my stomach is empty.
When we are halfway to Seattle, I say to Hayden, “I need you to do something for me”
He looks up. “What?.
“When I tell you, you’ll need to plug the toilet with a big wad of toilet paper”
He seems confused, but says nothing.
“Once the water gets flowing, you’ll need to hide”
He thinks I’m a moron, but I don’t care. I have a plan.
“Where?” he finally asks.
I tilt my head in the direction of the restroom. “There’s a storage cabinet in there. They use it for paper towels and stuff. The lock is broken”
“How do you know that? And where will I hide?.
I let out a muffled sigh. More of a sisterly reaction than how I really feel right now. But the truth is Hayden doesn’t get anything. And I’m tired of his constant questioning. If he wanted to be in charge of everything, then he should have been born first.
“I broke it, that’s how I know,” I say, reeling in my annoyance. “And you’ll hide in there”
Once more the look. “How could you have broken it? You’ve never been in that bathroom”
“You’re not going into the men’s room,” I say, softly, trying to control my exasperation. “You’re going in the women’s room”
“But, I’m a b—” he begins to protest.
I put my fingers to my lips, signaling my little brother to hush. I want to say the words “Shut up, you brat!” but that won’t do. This is about being able to disappear, like Princess Angeline.
“It will work,” I say. “Trust me. No one will know a damn thing”
He looks startled by my language, the least of my worries. And, really, not that bad, if you ask me. I know plenty of worse swear words.
“After you hide, I’m going to get help. A man will come in there and shut down the toilet’s water flow. Since it’s the last run of the night, he’ll leave the mess for the morning crew to clean up”
“How do you know that?” Hayden asks.
“I know it from watching him. He’s never in there long enough to do the supposed cleaning of the bathroom. He’s a slacker. Big time. Just goes in there for fifteen seconds to check off the fact that he was in there by putting his initials on the sheet posted next to the door”
The bathrooms on the ferry are old-school, smelly and noisy. The women’s room is bad enough that I don’t even want to imagine what shape the men’s room might be in. Having a little brother who never manages to leave the bathroom in any semblance of cleanliness gives me a pretty good idea. Add a hundred men and boys on a ferry run with the complication of the motion of a ferry boat and it isn’t hard to imagine. No one likes to sit on a wet toilet seat, right.
I watch the security guard in his cheap black slacks and dingy white shirt that has been ironed only in the front. He looks nothing like someone who could help me. Even so if I were any other girl in the world, I’d fling myself in his arms, crying about my father, begging for the security guy to help me find my mother. But I’m not any girl. I’m a girl who knows that no one can be trusted. Especially anyone working in security, or the police. I know that many of them mean well, but they have too many rules. And when they had a chance to help my family, they failed. I will never trust them. I see how the police have done things to help others. My family, however, wasn’t one of those others. Not by a long shot.
I AM PLAYING BACK EVERY moment after the bus stopped on the corner and I walked toward our house on Salmonberry to find Dad lying in a pool of blood on the floor. Caradee and Gemma got off the bus with me, and they stopped to catch a quick smoke before ducking into their houses. Caradee is a sullen girl who hides behind a frown. Her nose is in a permanent state of being scrunched up, like she just smelled something in the refrigerator that went bad. Or maybe it’s the halo of cigarette smoke around herself that she’s smelling. She stinks like an old smoky motel room or maybe even a wet ashtray. Gemma is the more pleasant of the two. She has nice, blue eyes and zitless skin that suggest either good hygiene or an acne prescription from a dermatologist. She always smiles at me and occasionally asks me over to her house at the end of the street, but I almost always come up with an excuse to get out of it. I have no room for girlfriends in my life. I do the bare minimum to be friendly without getting close.
Gemma and Caradee talk incessantly, which suits me. Their chatter can fill the air. It means that all I have to do is nod and say “Oh my God” or “No way!” or if it’s about a guy, “What a prick.” As long as I punctuate their silliness with some kind of supportive remark they think I like them. Having them think that is fine. I don’t want or need any more enemies.
I left the girls smoking on the corner. It’s not that I felt some kind of urgency to get home. You know, like I knew something was wrong. I’m not that dramatic. You don’t have to be dramatic if you’ve lived my life, anyway. Drama has just always been there. No need to create it.
AS I SIT HERE NOW on the Walla Walla, looking out at the city of Seattle as it blushes pink with the sunset over the Olympics to the west, I think about what I might have seen or heard. What might be helpful later. Hayden has taken one of every brochure off the rack by the bathroom—destinations for tourists, real-estate offerings for locals. Right now he’s looking at a brochure for whale watching on Neah Bay, over on the Olympic Peninsula. He seems occupied. It gives me a break, time to replay more of what happened.
Colby, a neighbor’s cocker spaniel with sad droopy eyes, barked at me as I passed by—after I left Caradee and Gemma. Even though that dog knows me, and even though I gave him treats nearly every day all school year, he still treats me like I’m a stranger on my own turf, and it unnerves me. Dogs, I know, can be very smart. As I rounded the corner of our street, I stopped a moment to shift my backpack from one shoulder to the other. And then I noticed the fire department truck flashing its red strobe over the soggy green grass of the white house with black trim next door. My heart beat a little faster.
I hoped that Mrs. Swanston was all right. She and her husband have been so nice to me and Hayden. Not grandparent-nice, but as close as we could get to that kind of relationship. The aid car had been there three nights ago, and once the month before. The lights were flashing as I approached, and my eyes widened . . .
“She’s going to be okay,” a young paramedic told me when he saw the look on my face. He was handsome. Fireman-calendar handsome, I thought then. Even for Port Orchard. He knew how I felt, because in that moment I wasn’t wearing the mask that is my second nature.
“That’s good,” I said.
Peter Swanston came over to me. He is in his sixties, maybe even a bit older. His eyes were rimmed with red. He breathed in short puffs of emotion.
“Rylee,” he said in that sandpaper voice of his, “Steffi is going to live to make trouble another day. It’s just her diabetes. We have to get that in check”
I wanted to hug him, but I didn’t. I have never really hugged anyone but my mom, dad and brother. Instead, I nodded silently and, for the first time, I noticed Dad’s car in the driveway. With everything going on around me, it didn’t register as odd that his car was there, that when I went inside a minute or so later that he’d be there. It was too early in the day for Dad to be home.
“Steffi had a fit that the sirens were so loud,” Peter was saying. “She thought it would blast people out of the neighborhood. You know, she doesn’t like a show of things”
“Tell her I’ll
be over tomorrow,” I said, not knowing then that it was a commitment I wouldn’t be able to keep.
“Your company left. Like a bat out of hell,” Mr. Swanston said by way of answer. I said nothing, still shaken about the aid car and Mrs. Swanston’s condition. I wasn’t thinking of any company that came and went. Just the thought of that nice old lady and her umpteenth medical emergency.
Then I went into the house, dropped my backpack by the door and went to turn off the running water in the bathroom. And after that, my brother and father in the kitchen. Red everywhere.
THE FERRY LURCHES TO A STOP and I’m sitting here thinking, remembering, registering Mr. Swanston’s remark properly. Mr. Swanston had seen a visitor, a visitor who had left in a hurry . . . when the sirens came screaming down our street. Maybe my father’s killer, my mother’s abductor, had been scared away by the sound? Maybe he thought the police were closing in on him.
A couple who smell like a cloud of body spray and marijuana scurry past, toward the stairway that leads to the car deck. A woman in a black suit with a carnation-pink scarf follows. Hayden, still looking at the breaching killer whales on a brochure, is motionless. I don’t move.
I wonder if Mom told the man who killed Dad that she’d already called the police. It was something she taught me at a very young age.
“Even when your back’s against the wall, you lie,” she told me when I was eight or nine. “You tell him that you’ve pushed a panic button or something and the police are minutes away”
Him. I’ll come back to him later.
I turn to Hayden and nudge him away from the real-estate magazines that hold his rapt attention.
“Let’s move now”
He nods slowly. “Okay. I’ll plug the toilet”
NOT SURPRISINGLY HAYDEN DOESN’T LIKE the idea of us taking over the women’s restroom but I figure it will be a safer location than any other to stay the night. At one time there was a black vinyl couch in there, a place where nursing moms are invited to sit and rest with their babies. But when I go in there to break the cabinet lock I notice the couch is gone that night. Or maybe it was on another boat? Hayden and I wad toilet paper in the first toilet and send the water overflowing. I lead him to the back of the restroom and the storage locker. I push some rolls of toilet paper aside and he goes inside. He’s compliant and I wonder why he doesn’t protest at least a little. I don’t want him to, of course. But still? I shut the metal door and it seals like a rickety coffin.
“You’re not locking me in, are you?” he says, muffled behind the door.
“No. And be quiet”
I hurry out to find the lazy ferry worker. He’s chatting up a woman too young and too smart for him, I think.
“Excuse me,” I say, “but someone clogged the toilet in the bathroom”
He looks at me with irritated eyes.
“Jeesh!” he says.
“It wasn’t me,” I shoot back. No one wants to be the source of a toilet clog. “It was like that when I went in there”
“Just a sec,” he tells the woman. She looks relieved when he walks toward the bathroom.
“He’ll be right back,” I say.
She mouths, I hope not.
I smile.
The lazy/horny crewman does exactly what I thought he would do. He stops the flow of water and puts an out-of-order sign on the door, locking it. I hover by the brochure rack until he goes off looking for the woman he was chatting up—smartly, she has left for her car. When it is safe to do so, Hayden opens the door and I go inside and turn the lock. We are safe. We are alone. We’re also in a bathroom, which isn’t anything to brag about. But what choice do we have? We don’t have any place to go. We don’t have any family. We are alone.
I look at Hayden. “We’ll be fine. Just fine”
He doesn’t respond. Being shut in a storage locker has made him mute. Like I said, I wonder how much his life so far has affected him that he has this instinctive response to these situations? But the fact is I don’t need him peppering me with questions and complaints. Even worse, I don’t need him crying. Because if he cries again, then I will fall apart too. I’m not without feelings. I just do my best to hold them inside because that’s the only way anyone can get through the really hard stuff. My mother told me that.
I remove paper towels by the fistful from the dispenser next to the sink and lay them on the floor. I’m not trying to make a bed, not in the true sense. I’m thinking like a hamster or gerbil and just trying to get some insulation between me, Hayden, and the hard, cold tile floor that will surely suck any of the warmth our bodies can generate in the short night in the bathroom. With the engines turned off, the boat becomes surreal in its silence. I never knew a quiet as loud as the roaring of the engines. Hayden snuggles next to me and I cradle him like a baby.
“I’m scared, Rylee,” he finally says.
“We’ll be fine,” I say for the umpteenth time.
“I know,” he says, in a way that almost suggests that he really does have faith in me.
I put my fingers to my lips and Hayden closes his eyes. I wait. Keeping your emotions inside is a bit like holding your breath. You can only do it so long or you will pass out. Or worse, if you don’t suck in any air, you will die. I feel his breathing slow. I feel the weight of his body increase as he falls into much-needed sleep. Then, and only then, one tear manages to crawl out from the corner of my eye and I just let it roll, then another. My face is hot and wet, but I do not move my body. I do not wake my brother in the middle of my moment of weakness. Mom told me that she learned to control her feelings. She said that she knew that emotions only made the punishment greater. Her reactions, she said, made the man who held her captive, who hunted her, dig into her misery and revel in it. Don’t get me wrong, Hayden isn’t like that monster. Not at all. He is good. He is my brother. He needs me to be strong because I’m all that he’s got.
Hayden is asleep and I gently lift him away, deeper into the nest of paper towels. I get up and look in the mirror. My hair is the longest it’s been in years. I realize I love it even in its current nondescript brown. I can twist it into a luxurious ponytail. I can French-braid it. I know that I should not even be thinking about my hair, but suddenly I feel really attached to it. My mother is missing. My father is dead. My brother and I are alone. I turn in the dim light of the ferry bathroom and hold up my hair with one hand. I reach for the crappy scissors and start cutting. Locks fall like autumn leaves over the dingy countertop and into the bottom of the pitted white sink. I cut and I cut. Tears roll down my cheeks but I don’t make a sound. I have lived a life in which I’ve had nothing of my own. No family pets. No birthday parties with relatives. No true friends. Nothing to brag about. Nothing to tell the world that I am here, that I am an individual. Now even my hair must go. I cannot look like the girl that lived on Salmonberry. Hayden is a little boy. Little boys blend in. A girl never does. A girl’s hair, even in its nondescript brown, can be memorable.
“She sucked a strand of her hair, ugh!” “She had soft, loopy curls.” “Her cut was terrible.” “Her bangs swallowed her eyes.” I can no longer look like the me of Salmonberry Avenue, the
me of South Kitsap High School. Even though I’m not pretty like Mom, I am young. A girl. Mom always said that a teenage girl is remembered by other girls, other boys, all men. I guess this is flattering but it’s also creepy.
Mothers look at girls too, and they see a younger version of themselves.
I open a box of dye and apply it with the thin plastic gloves that come in the box. I smell the chemicals as my hair eclipses from brown to blond. I rinse in the sink, the acrid odor wafting through the still air of the bathroom. I use the paper towels to wring out the water and then, in what I think is a brilliant move, I turn on the hand dryer and rotate my head against the warm spray of air. I am in Maui. I am in Tahiti. I’m on the beach and I have a tan. A handsome boy looks at me and I smile.
The dryer stops and I look in the mirror and I see
her. Mom. I look just like my mother. It was unintended genius.
Hayden, awakened, seems to agree.
“I miss Mom. Do you think they found Dad?.
I indicate the second box of hair dye. “Your turn, Hayden”
My brother knows what to do. He climbs up on the counter and lays his head in the sink as I wet his hair with lukewarm water. It reminds me of when he was a baby and Mom washed him in the sink instead of the tub. I hold onto that memory for a second. He scrunches his eyes shut as I rub in the dye. When I’m done, he will be transformed. He’ll no longer be the little boy with the shock of blond hair, the one that makes him look like he’s stepped out of the home page of a cute kids’ clothing website. While he was getting his disgusting green apple gum, I was shopping for a dramatic change, a way to erase what happened to us. To no longer be the kids we were. I didn’t really notice the name on the dye box until that very moment.
Dark and Dangerous.
I break into a smile for the first time in hours. It is a weak smile and kind of twisted, but it’s real. It makes me think of my mother—she would have laughed at my choice for Hayden’s dye job. And I would have laughed right along with her.
Chapter Four
Cash: $113.30.
Food: None.
Shelter: Ferry bathroom.
Weapons: Same crappy scissors.
Plan: Going to the bank.
THE NEXT MORNING WE SNEAK out of the bathroom. The front page of The Seattle Times stares out from the blue metal vending box and my heartbeat starts hammering like a nail gun. Fast. Despite a mostly sleepless night, I am now as awake as if I’d guzzled ten lattes in a row. The ferry smells of fresh coffee and donuts, but as hungry as I thought I was, I no longer want to eat. I cannot focus on anything—only the photographs of our house in Port Orchard and the image taken of me at the beginning of the school year.
I despised that photo back then.
I hate it even more now.
