Iphigenia Murphy

by Sara Hosey

  “Who the fuck is this?” My mind raced. Would Oscar take the bait? He couldn’t know it was me, could he? Maybe he already knew that Layla ran around on him; maybe he even knew that she cheated on him with my stepbrother. Maybe he didn’t care. No, even if he didn’t care about her, he would definitely care about that.

  It was my stepbrother’s own damn fault if Oscar killed him, I reasoned. I almost felt bad for Layla, but honestly, she was bad news too. Once, I was sitting on the couch, a.k.a. my bed, and on her way out the door she flicked a lit cigarette at my head. It grazed my shoulder and I winced and jumped, shaking my arm like I was on fire. She laughed. My stepbrother laughed too, before barking at me to pick the smoking butt off the floor. I did, quickly, like the mouse I was, my eyes on the ground, as they laughed themselves out the door.

  That was the kind of person Layla was.

  “Who the fuck is this?” Oscar barked again.

  “3730 83rd Street. 3C,” I barked back. “Door’s unlocked.” Then I hung up.

  I was almost hyperventilating, I was breathing so hard. Blindly, I broke away from the phone, got on my skateboard, and rattled away as fast as I could. Next stop, Army Navy Store.

  Nine a.m. on the dot, a really old black guy showed up.

  “Morning,” he said, his eyes fixed on his keys as he flipped through them one by one.

  I clicked off my Walkman and nodded, giving a quick, tight smile.

  The metal security gate, covered in purple indecipherable graffiti, thundered up under his hand. “Gimme a minute,” he said, entering the store. I waited, leaning against the glass, thinking and listening. My body felt too light, shaky, and I wondered how conspicuous I looked standing outside of the store. What if Marco came looking for me? What if Oscar did?

  I wondered if my stepbrother was getting his ass kicked at that very moment.

  I jumped when the man knocked on the window and waved me inside.

  The store smelled like canvas and dust and firewood. I took a deep breath to steady myself and then I went right on down my list: tent, sleeping gear, a cook set, pepper spray, a Swiss Army knife, trowel, a lantern, a big backpack …

  “You gonna put it all in now?” the man asked as I started packing on the floor next to the counter as he rang up each item.

  The old guy was wearing a green army tee and camo pants and a tool-belt fanny pack with all sorts of gadgets and hardware peeking out of pockets and from under straps. I kind of appreciated how he apparently lived his inventory.

  Looking up at him, I shrugged, noncommittal.

  “Where you going?”

  “Camping.” I avoided his eyes, my face almost all the way in the bag.

  “Upstate?”

  I just nodded into the bag again. When I stood up to pay he looked at me hard and frowned deeply and then handed me my change in silence.

  As I skated down the block to the Met Supermarket I wondered if the Army Navy guy knew I was up to something. I started imagining him calling the police, saying a girl had come in and it looked like she was running away from home.

  What would the police say? Nothing, probably. They’d say, sorry, old man, but teenage girls buying sleeping bags isn’t high on our list of priorities. I sort of imagined the old man feeling sad, wishing he’d said more to me, asked me more about where I was going. Maybe even following me out of the store.

  I actually looked back behind me to make sure he wasn’t there.

  Pathetic. Totally pathetic. What, did I want to be adopted by some weird old Army Navy dude? No, thank you. Probably a perv, I thought to myself. Probably, or probably he didn’t even notice you at all, Iffy.

  At the supermarket, I bought more supplies and only a few things that weren’t already my list: granola bars and peanut butter and apples and Doritos. Triple-A batteries and toilet paper and maxi pads. Cans of beans and lentils and more, stuff that didn’t need a fridge.

  I left the supermarket with my backpacks and shopping bags and skated to the subway station, where I jumped on the 7 train, which took me to the E. From the E train, I skated, awkwardly balanced with all my bags, to the park. The stop I got off at was pretty far from that park entrance, and I coulda taken another train or a bus, but I didn’t want to leave too much of a trail.

  I probably didn’t need to worry so much. There are some girls that nobody looks for. Turns out, I was one of those girls.

  Just like my mother.

  Chapter 3

  The first night went on and on.

  I lay in my tent, my stepbrother’s voice in my head so clear that it was hard for me to believe I was actually alone. I sucked the tip of my thumb and tried to distract myself, to listen to the noises beyond my nylon shell. There were sounds I had never noticed while sleeping on 83rd Street: the early spring crickets, the rustle of the wind through the trees, the soft hooting of what I guessed was an owl. And beneath that were the sounds beyond the park: the ever-present hum of the traffic on the expressway, a woman’s laughing scream, the brief pounding bass from a passing car’s radio.

  And then there would be his voice in my head again.

  “You should be thanking me.”

  I snatched my finger from my mouth and shut my eyes against the memory. I imagined a movie shot panning out from a close-up: there I am, little me, in a tiny tent, in a huge park, in a huge city, the lights just dots from outer space, and then not even that anymore. Gone. Anonymous.

  And then the camera rushes back to my face and I am so obvious, my breathing loud, my every move echoing in the tent. Exposed.

  How could I have been so naive, so stupid, so … optimistic? Almost sixteen, skinny, shy, and stupid. And now here I was, alone, in the dark, in the woods, in a park in the middle of Queens.

  What made me think I could do this? It was cold in the park. It was dangerous. I was alone.

  I shuddered.

  And yet, I reminded myself, I had been pretty alone at home too.

  My dad was never home. He worked a lot, always picking up extra shifts, or at least that’s what he said he was doing. It wasn’t strange for me to go weeks without having to slide past him on my way out of the bathroom or to nod at him as I went to put a glass in the kitchen sink. And even when he was home, sometimes he still didn’t acknowledge me at all.

  Of course, two other people lived in the apartment.

  Although I wasn’t completely sure that my stepbrother really was a person. In my experience, he was actually a monster.

  My stepmother, too. She was even monstrous-looking, with her scary-skinny arms and her weird, bloated belly, her violent red lipstick and her cheap wigs. She was always angry and usually her anger was directed at me. She’d stopped short of kicking me out, but the possibility was always there—the looming threat that if I complained, if I made too much noise, if I ate too many of her Pop-Tarts or drank her SlimFast shakes, that I would no longer be welcome in my father’s apartment. Well, it might have been his place initially, but it was her apartment now, and we all knew it. She always gave me the sense that I was an unwelcome freeloader, that I’d stayed long past what was acceptable, that her patience with my face was wearing thin. I imagined that she would probably be pretty pleased when she realized I was gone for real. I wondered if she would bother mentioning it to my father at all.

  While living with them had been, quite simply, the everyday normal of my life, I knew that it wasn’t really normal. I knew that this wasn’t how families acted. I knew this because I had once had a mother.

  Snap.

  A branch cracked and I sat bolt upright.

  The panic flashed into my head: He’s here. He’s found me.

  I felt my eyes widening, as though looking hard at the tent walls would help me hear better in the dark. I didn’t dare turn on my flashlight for fear of drawing attention to myself. And yet I yearned for the light.

 
My heart was pounding so loudly in my ears that I couldn’t hear over it. I couldn’t be sure there wasn’t someone there, right outside my tent. Just waiting for me to lie back down.

  A moment passed and then another moment and still I didn’t hear anything. No one crashed into the tent, no one slowly unzipped the arched entry.

  But I stayed cowering in the dark for long after. I was the kid who just knows there’s something in that closet, but who can’t bring herself to fling open the door and confront it and instead just postpones the inevitable. Because you have to fall asleep eventually. And then it crept out: there was a whimper in my throat and I surprised myself when it worked its way out and I heard it in my ears. God, I was so scared. I sat there, then, succumbing to the fears I had promised myself not to indulge in—I would not think of Silence of the Lambs, and I would not think of psycho killers, and I would not worry about the devil worshippers everyone said hung out in the park.

  More time passed.

  Eventually, slowly, I lay back down.

  I tried to distract myself, thinking about people who might miss me, or at least notice I was gone. It was a short list. Lizette. Maybe some of the skater dudes, or at least Jorge and Jess. My English teacher, Mrs. Cacciola.

  Mrs. Cacciola had once stopped me after class. She was short and shaped like a bowling pin and she always wore reading glasses on a string around her neck. She had many different pairs, and I imagined she thought several of them were “funky.”

  The ones around her neck that day had cat-eyed purple frames.

  “Iphigenia?” She was one of the few teachers who had actually learned how to pronounce my name. “Iphigenia, what’s going on with you?” She had smiled vaguely and tried to look me in the eye.

  I shrugged, focusing on those dumb glasses, and then looking past her, at the blackboard behind her. Someone had written “Kill Me” on the board and Mrs. C. had erased it at the beginning of class, but it was still there, just smeared.

  “Is something going on at home?”

  I’d brought my eyes to hers and kept them blank.

  She’d gestured toward my face; I had had a split lip. I’d shrugged again, my signature move, and held up my skateboard. “I fell,” I’d said.

  She’d smiled again, but in a sad way.

  “Can I go?” I’d said, and she nodded and sighed and turned to her desk and I escaped.

  I had thought of that day many times since.

  I thought of it again now.

  I started to relax a little. What was the worst thing that could happen?

  Someone might murder me.

  I mentally shrugged.

  As long as it wasn’t my stepbrother. And he wasn’t in the park.

  No, I told myself. He isn’t here. At least not yet. Because I knew that the choice to call Oscar had probably put me in serious danger. Because my stepbrother was the kind of person who would search, who would make it his business to find me. I had to never forget that, to not ever get sloppy. He would show up, eventually, of that I was sure.

  But before that happened, I had to find her.

  I allowed myself to turn on the flashlight and check my watch.

  It was 3 a.m. I didn’t think I’d ever sleep.

  I closed my eyes again, thought about the parakeet I’d put out the window. Wondered if he was okay. Was he cowering somewhere, alone and scared, but maybe also happy to be away from that awful apartment? I thought again of Mrs. C. I thought of Lizette. How much she loved that guy on 90210 … Dylan. He was cute, I had to admit. I’d only seen the show once, over at Lizette’s, and now I thought about California and the palm trees and a boy on a motorcycle who would come and rescue me, and I felt myself begin to float.

  But then, I heard the sound of the front door opening. The light from the hallway spilled into the living room where I lay on the couch pretending to be asleep. His face above mine. “You should be thanking me.”

  I sat up in the dark, gasping for breath, filled with a very precise terror.

  My heart beating in my head, my hands shaking so hard that clasping them only made my elbows jerk around, I thought, I’m not there anymore, I’m not there.

  No, I was in a park, a public park in the city. And as scary as that was, a wave of relief washed over me. My lungs seemed to loosen as I exhaled.

  I had escaped. I had escaped them all. For now.

  I lay back down, surprised at my own relief. Surprised that I could feel safer out here in the dark than I did at home on the sofa.

  I thought about my mother.

  My father, my stepmother, my stepbrother—they had words for my mother. Crazy. Slut. Junkie.

  But I had words too. Beautiful. Gentle.

  Mommy.

  I remembered being little and standing on the floor in the back seat of someone’s car. She was in the front and she had draped her long black hair over the seat and I combed my fingers through it. It was silky and smelled sweet and I remember taking strands and running them over my lips. It felt so good and made me want to fall asleep.

  I remembered trying on her shoes. Green leather platform sandals. Trying to walk around the apartment and her laughing at me. I wanted to look just like her. Of course I did. She was the most beautiful woman in the world.

  I remembered coming to a park—this park, I thought—sitting on a bench, eating the most delicious animal crackers out of a red cardboard box that looked like a train car. There were never enough cookies in the box, so I ate them slowly, biting off one leg, one tail, one trunk at a time and waiting for her to come back from wherever it was she had gone. I thought of myself like Hansel and Gretel, except that I didn’t have to leave a trail because I never doubted that she would return to get me.

  I remembered riding on the subway, sucking my thumb and leaning against my sleeping mother. One of those times, a stranger, holding on to the pole above our heads, had leaned down and asked me if I was okay. I had hidden my face under my mother’s arm.

  I finally fell asleep in my tent.

  I only know that I fell asleep because I became conscious of a wet spot of drool next to my mouth, and when I opened my eyes, it wasn’t as dark outside anymore. Although it wasn’t yet dawn, the tent was illuminated with a dim glow and I could see the green nylon walls around me, the little hanging pocket with my extra flashlight. I unzipped my window and my spirits lightened with the sky: I had never known the birds woke up so early, singing and chirping, making a real racket while it was still dark out, as if they just couldn’t wait to see the sun.

  Something in me responded to that singing. I had made it. I had made it through the first night. I was alive. I hadn’t been murdered or gotten so scared that I ran home or to Lizette’s or even to the nearest subway station.

  And so now I had to do it. I had to find my mother.

  Chapter 4

  Each night got a little easier.

  It was chilly on the second night, so I was glad to be in the tent, snug in my sleeping bag, my nose cold but my body warm. I’m getting used to it already, I thought. It’s funny how quickly something can begin to seem normal. Even if it’s not. Even if it’s the least normal thing in the world.

  That night, I’d had a bit of an ache lurking behind my eyes. It was my nose. It’d been broken a couple of times, I knew, although I’d never seen a doctor about it. It was flat where it should be ridged, crooked where it should be straight. And I knew that was why I always got headaches before the rain. I didn’t want to waste the Advil I’d brought, so I pinched my nose between my thumb and forefinger, massaged my temples.

  On the third night it was raining so hard and the ground was so damp that I didn’t bother with the tent. I walked over to an old railroad bridge I had noted, but when I got there I saw other people—other homeless—taking shelter beneath it. They squatted on their heels; one of them had a little fire going.

/>   Without thinking, I turned away, startled at myself because I was afraid of them. I didn’t even want them to see me. I tried to put it out of my mind as I walked, forlorn, for a long time in the cold rain, before coming upon a big evergreen, Christmas-type tree. I peeked through the branches and was astounded to find a completely dry bed of pine needles underneath. It was a small space and the branches scratched and poked me as I climbed inside, but it was almost magically dry. I stayed there that night and the next.

  It was on the fifth night that I awoke to the noise of scratching and a distinctly animal chirp. My heart began racing.

  I took a deep breath and sat up.

  It was almost dawn, already a little light within the tent. I coughed—a deep, manly-sounding cough, I hoped, thinking it might scare away whatever it was. I grabbed my flashlight and mace and unzipped the tent—it seemed like the loudest noise in the world—just enough to see out.

  There were three of them—a big one and two smaller ones—huddled in a circle. They’d taken the food that I’d hung in a plastic bag from a tree branch. One held an open bag of Doritos.

  The raccoons turned to look at me, not dropping the food. For a moment it looked to me like a commercial, the kind of dumb ad they show during football games, “Wild for Doritos?” or something. Then the big one bared its teeth and made a terrible, guttural, noise.

  I pulled my head back in the tent and zipped it up and sat, cross-legged and terrified. I was sitting up straighter than I ever had before in my life, at complete attention. I didn’t move, not even to scratch my nose, for what seemed like hours. I tried to breathe deeply, to tell myself that those raccoons weren’t going to bother me, that they just wanted my food, but I was practically hyperventilating, I was so scared.

  Sitting there, unmoving, I imagined telling Lizette about the raccoons. She would hoot and swear, talk about how crazy I was, how dumb it was of me to be living in a park. “But, like, for real?” she would say. “There is something wrong with your brain.”

  I smiled thinking of Lizette, and it was strange, because I couldn’t remember the last time I’d smiled. But it was also strange because, even though I hadn’t been smiling, I also hadn’t been sad. And then, pretty sure that the raccoons were gone, but not ready to go out yet, I thought about what I’d done and I was, honestly, a little amazed.