by Nicole Thorn
She stroked the toad’s head while he enjoyed the attention. He looked kind of smug for an amphibian.
“Did you enjoy my taste in music?” I asked when it got too quiet.
Riley’s ears dipped, and her eyes widened. “Oh no. I forgot to tell you.” She looked so scared, and it was painful to watch. “It was working when I fell asleep, and then when I woke up, the screen was dark, and the buttons wouldn’t turn it back on. I didn’t mean to break it. I can get you a new one. I don’t know how, but I’ll figure it out.”
I patted her head. “Calm down. It was almost dead when I let you borrow it. It must have died when you were sleeping.”
She literally breathed out relief. “That’s good. I thought you would be mad. I can go get it if you wait here.”
I thought about the look on her face when she heard the music I let her listen to. How she slipped away right in front of me. It was peaceful in an odd way. And then she made the comment about not hearing music for a while. She’d been home for days, and she’d not had any.
“How about you keep it for now,” I suggested.
Her eyes were nothing but light, and her brows went back up. “Really?”
“Sure. My phone plays music anyway.”
She lit up again. “It does?!”
I grinned as I reached into my pocket and pulled the phone out. “Do you have a phone like this?”
She probably did if her parents picked up one for her.
She nodded. “Yup.”
“Good. That charger will charge the iPod.”
God, she looked so happy. If something like that could bring her joy, I could only imagine why it was so important to her.
Then I got my answer.
I looked to the toad as she pet him and I saw two thick and jagged scars running vertically on either wrist. They looked a little faded, but that did nothing to quell the dread in my stomach. She was so… perfect, other than that one thing. Her eyebrows were immaculately shaped, her arms and legs perfectly smooth. Long hair that was almost white. Upsettingly thin. She really did look like a doll. Her face when Jude said that…
“You smell like smoke,” she accused me.
I looked down and shrugged at her wrinkled nose. “You caught me.”
She pursed her lips to the side before biting the corner with perfect white teeth. “Why?”
“Why what?”
“You smoke, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?” she asked like it should have been obvious.
I didn’t have much of an answer. “I don’t know. I guess it relaxes me, gives me something to do during down time.”
“Never thought about just getting a yoyo?”
When I cocked an eyebrow at her, she laughed at me. Laughed. I guess my expression was funny to her.
“It would be a lot cheaper.”
“And it wouldn’t kill you. Unless you were really stupid with it. And if you were, then you kind of have the death coming.”
Oh, don’t start getting cute with me, baby. “I couldn’t agree more.”
Riley looked over at my house. “Do you and Jude live all alone?”
“No, we live with our dad. He just sleeps during the day. Your mom watches Jude when I need it. I work down at that mechanic shop a few miles away.” And why do I think she’d care?
“You fix cars?” she asked with what looked like real enthusiasm. “Do you have one of those roll-y things that lets you go under the cars?”
I laughed. “Yeah. A few.”
“I bet those would go downhill really fast.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
Her look was so earnest. “Then you are doing life wrong, sir.”
Sir? Kind of cute. “Don’t worry, miss. I have other ways of living life on the edge. I don’t even look both ways before I cross the street.”
“For shame, sir. You could get yourself killed. Then the cancer will never have its shot at you.”
My brow arched again. “You seem awful concerned about the state of my lungs.”
“Or the air around us.” She looked around, too profoundly. “If you get to be outside, you should appreciate it more. Take care to keep the world pretty. Some people live in the dark.”
Damn. “I’m sorry, Riley,” I said, oddly gentle. “I strike a chord?”
Her eyes were drawn down. “It’s fine.”
“It’s not. Did he keep you in the dark?”
For whatever reason, she looked back up. Her face said it all. “Could you do me a favor and not mention this to my parents? They already know too much.”
“They’re your parents. They probably want to know.”
“Not about that place. Tell me you’re not going to say anything.” She sounded stern.
“My lips are sealed.”
Thunder cracked above us, and Riley looked up like it was scorning her personally. Her nose twitched. “I better go.” She looked down and did her best impression of Kermit. “Come on, Kermy. We have to show you to Mom,” she said as she lifted him to eye level. Then she smiled at me like the act itself was invented for this occasion. “Thank you for helping me with him.”
“Not a problem. Sleep well.”
A strange, uncertain look crossed her face, and she nodded before walking back up to the door.
I didn’t go home until I knew she was safe and inside.
y mother was on the phone when I got downstairs in the morning. She looked pensive as she chewed on her thumbnail and paced the kitchen. My father leaned on the glass door of the backyard, and my brother was nowhere in sight, so I figured he was already at school. I’d gotten up a little later than I intended.
“She’ll be there,” Mom said, and she hung up the phone. After she set it down, she put her hands on her hips and looked up at my father. “They want her there by three.”
I stopped just at the bottom of the stairs, using the wall to hide behind. I realized I was frightened at the idea of them seeing me: my own parents. My heart thudded painfully behind my ribs; I feared punishment if they caught me listening.
“Don’t you think we should have talked to her about it first?” Dad asked.
“No,” Mom responded coldly. “You think she’s going to volunteer to go talk to someone? Not a chance. And there’s also not a chance that the girls’ parents are letting them choose to go.”
“They’re all adults.”
“I don’t care,” she said. “They’ve just gotten through with seven years of abuse, and they need to talk to someone about it. Especially Riley. She took a life, and she needs to talk it out. She’s obviously not willing to do it with us.”
She was right, because I didn’t want to talk about it at all. I didn’t want to think about what I had to do to get us all free. I’d do it over a million times if I had to, but there was no good reason for me to have to relive it with some stranger.
I heard my dad sigh as a chair scraped against the kitchen floor. “You’re right. She should talk to someone about it. How do we tell her?”
“We just tell her the truth.”
That felt like a cue if I ever heard one, so I carefully entered the room, trying not to look like I’d been listening. I faked a smiled and greeted them as I made my way to the cubby to get a glass. I grabbed one and filled it with tap water.
“Sleep well?” Dad asked.
I leaned against the counter and sipped my water. “Yeah.”
Awkward silence made my parents exchange a look before my mom sat next to Dad at the table. “We actually needed to talk to you about something, Riley.”
I nodded. “Okay…”
She forced a smile. “Don’t worry, because it’s not that big of a deal. You and the girls have been assigned a counselor to talk with.”
I wanted to groan, but I held back and stared at the water in my glass. “A counselor? Like a therapist?”
“Sort of. Her name is Jessica Carpenter, and you’ll all be meeting with her this afternoon. It’s really important tha
t you’re honest with her and that you listen to what she has to say. She’s very experienced with trauma and victims like you.”
Victim. Was that my label now? Free for a few days, and now I was more victim than daughter? “I don’t want to talk to anyone,” I admitted. “It doesn’t matter how many people she’s talked to, because there’s no way she’s talked to people that went through stuff like me and my—” I stopped myself before I could call them my sisters. I felt like my parents wouldn’t understand the term I held for those girls. “The girls.”
Mom made a face, and I saw her throat work as she swallowed. “Riley,” she said, too harshly for the tone I used with her. “You don’t have a choice here.”
“Because the police want it?” I asked.
“No. Because I want it. I’d feel a lot better if you talked to someone.”
“I don’t want to talk to anyone,” I told her. “I just want to see the girls and be allowed to get better on my own.”
With a hard glare, she said, “Riley, you are not allowed to leave this house until a professional takes a look at you.”
She made me sound like a broken down car that she wanted someone to change the oil out on. Was I even a person to her anymore, or just some ghost that resembled her long lost daughter?
“You’d lock me up here?” I asked, feeling stinging betrayal from the person who was supposed to keep me safe.
She reacted like I’d hit her, and her eyes widened as her mouth hung open. “That’s not what I was saying. I just… I just want to make sure that you’re well, honey. There could be something really wrong, and we need to know. You went through hell, and that changes a person. Trust me when I say that this is good for you.”
It was abundantly clear that what I wanted didn’t matter, and I doubted my sisters were getting an option on this. Our minds wouldn’t be trusted when this wound was so fresh and cut so deeply. Maybe it was a good idea since I was probably crazy after all.
I nodded. “Is that it? We just talk to someone about what happened, and it’s over?”
“Pretty much,” Dad said. He set his hands on the table. “They might want you to talk to her a few times. The woman will sign off on it when she thinks you should move on, probably to a permanent therapist. They might want to put you on medication.”
That was what I was scared to hear. Since the moment I got home, it had been in the back of my mind. They would want to pump me with chemicals to try and fix what was broken. I spent the last seven years being forced into a box, made to be what someone wanted me to be. I didn’t want that again. My cage was bigger now, but I still felt bars around me.
I wanted to refuse what my parents were telling me I had to do, but I could see when I looked at my mother she wouldn’t put up with that. She looked scared for me. I could understand that, considering she thought I was dead for almost a decade. It was a small price to pay if it would make my parents feel a little more at ease to have me back. With the way they looked at my scars, I had to assume they were terrified of losing me again.
“We’ll all be in there together?” I asked.
“Yes,” my mom said with a smile, looking pleased she could give me an answer I wanted.
It put a sense of calm in me that I would be sitting with my sisters in the same room. This separation was already starting to poke at me, so I would take any amount of time I could get with them, even if we were being scrutinized the entire time. It would be just like it was with the cops. We could just tell this woman what happened to us, and then she would decide if we were sane enough to move on from her. I wasn’t keen on a real shrink, so I was hoping my parents would let up on that one if the counselor said we were okay.
I headed up to my bedroom to get ready for this horrible day, feeling sick the entire time I was showering and getting dressed. I put on tights and a dress with stripes on the skirt part of it, and I topped it off with a denim jacket so that I wouldn’t freeze my butt off outside. I threw on boots before I headed back downstairs.
My father had to go into work, but my mom would bring me to see the counselor. She promised she wouldn’t leave the waiting room the entire time, and I was counting on her to be there if I panicked and ran out. My body felt jittery just thinking about walking into that office to be judged by another stranger. It would be a lot easier if they all just let me feel what I felt without having to poke at me like a dissected frog.
When it came time, I got in the car, and we started the drive. The place was an hour away, and that gave me plenty of time to think about doing a tuck and roll out of the car to avoid this meeting. How could I feel so frightened over something Mom said wasn’t a big deal? I should just believe her, right? I wanted to, but my pumping heart said differently.
“You’ll be okay,” my mom said, reaching out to put her hand on my shoulder. “You’re not in any trouble. It’s just a good idea for you and the girls to talk this out with someone. I think you’ll feel a lot better once it’s all over.”
That made one of us.
“Are you sure I’m not going to prison?” I asked.
Mom made a sound of surprise, and her hands both went back to the wheel. “What? Why would you be going to prison?”
“Well… I killed a person. A station full of people saw me covered in blood, and I told them I did it. Murderers go to prison.”
My mother’s hands gripped the wheel and she sighed. “Honey, what you did was self-defense. He was causing you harm, and you killed him to save yourself. No court in this country would dare put you in prison, and someone would have to press charges against you in the first place. The man is dead and gone. That part of this is over.”
Again, I wanted to believe her, but nightmares painted themselves inside my mind. I saw myself cuffed and thrown into a prison cell with a bunch of angry people. They would kill me in a second… I was just a girl who got lucky. Lucky and unlucky. That was me. Going with my track record, I’d probably get charged and find myself in front of a very unsympathetic jury.
We got to the boring-looking building, and I scanned the cars in the parking lot, hoping I would see one of my sisters getting out and heading in. I would have given anything for a familiar face and a person I felt like I could seek comfort in. That just wasn’t my mother. She was little more than a stranger to me right now, as horrible as that sounded.
Mom walked in with me, and we were silent as we got in the elevator and then as we walked to the counter to check in. My eyes were on the floor the entire time, so I didn’t see Adalyn in the corner until I turned around. I began to run to her, and she saw me. We met in the middle of the room, embracing like we hadn’t seen each other in weeks.
We sat beside each other with our parents on either side of us. I held hands with my sister and ignored the look my mother gave our interlaced fingers.
“Did the police call you too?” Adalyn asked me.
I opened my mouth to talk, but my mother cut me off. “I talked to them for her.”
Adalyn closed up like a clamshell, and she fell dead silent. She wouldn’t talk to the woman behind the door if she couldn’t even respond to my mother. Or maybe it had something to do with her tone, or the way she just cut Adalyn and me off.
“Is it bad?” I asked my sister.
When she wouldn’t talk, her father did. “They’re doing the investigation. So far, they haven’t found much out. They couldn’t find any evidence in the bunker that he lived anywhere else, and they couldn’t find a car.”
He had to have one, because I couldn’t imagine he could walk back from the store with all the things he brought home: the food, clothes, and machines he had down there. It would probably just be a matter of time before they stumbled across it.
“I think that’s enough for now,” Mom said with a false smile. “Let’s not upset the girls before they go in to talk.”
Too late.
Within fifteen minutes, Kylie and Layla arrived. Our parents didn’t look too happy when we abandoned them to all sit toget
her. We had to move to the other side of the room if we all wanted seats together, and it made perfect sense to me. I wanted to be with who made me feel the safest, and that was those three girls.
“This better not last too long,” Layla said with a pout, crossing her arms and sinking into her chair. “I never said I was cool with some random person making me spill my guts. Why is it not my choice if I talk to a shrink?”
Kylie shrugged. “Because they don’t trust that we can make our own choices. We’re just those twelve-year-olds to them.”
That was our curse, and it would probably last for a very long time. Our parents last saw us when we were kids, and we didn’t get to have our teen years. Our development was all wrong, and to them, it would be more than enough reason to not trust us.
Layla huffed and crossed her arms and legs, looking annoyed at the whole darn thing. “I’m not taking pills. Not a chance am I swallowing anything they give me.”
The sentence was barely out before we were called in. Mom waved at me when I looked at her, and I nervously waved back at her before I slipped through the door. The secretary left us in an office, and we went to sit on the couch.
I looked at the desk across from us and eyed each object on the surface. The backs of seven photos were placed on the edges, and I thought the cherry wood frames looked nice, even though they faced away from us and I couldn’t see the photos inside. In between them sat little toys and knick-knacks. She had a yoyo, a few little stuffed animals, and books, so many books.
“Jeez,” Layla said, looking at the same thing I was. “She could have cleaned up a little bit, huh?”
Kylie shrugged. “Lots of files on that desk. You think ours is on there?”
“Probably,” I told her.
We waited quietly until a woman rushed in. Her brown hair had been tied up in a messy bun, and her glasses slipped to the tip of her nose as she dropped a handful more files on the desk. She sighed and looked up at us with a smile.
“Hello. I’m Dr. Carpenter.”
“Hi,” I deadpanned.
The woman brushed stray hair out of her eyes and took a seat. We watched her dig around her drawers until she found a yellow legal pad and a pencil. She pressed it to the paper and began taking notes she didn’t tell us about.
