Crash & Burn

by Lisa Gardner

  Marlene Bilek appears before me.

  * * *

  WE DON’T SPEAK right away. It’s one of those moments . . . What do you say? Instead, we stand, we stare, we absorb. I’m holding her quilt. Her eyes go right to it; then she smiles.

  “I knew that quilt was going to where it needed to be,” she whispers.

  I’m crying. The tears pour down my face. I can’t stop; I can’t move; I can’t even wipe them away. I just stand there, staring at this woman, with water coating my cheeks.

  Not everything is as I expect. The image I’ve pictured in my mind all these years is of a twentysomething mom, a little lost, a little resigned to her fate even before her beloved daughter was snatched from her. I thought of her as softer, her body rounded in a comforting mom sort of way. This woman, on the other hand: Her face is drawn, features stamped by years of tough decisions. Tessa mentioned that she kicked her abusive ex to the curb, stopped drinking, turned her life around.

  She still carries an unmistakable air of sadness. A woman who’s lost much and knows she can never get it back.

  “Why don’t we, um, take a seat,” Wyatt says. He gestures to the two beds. “Make yourselves comfortable.”

  He and Tessa exchange a glance. Tessa has her iPhone out. She is recording us, I realize. But of course, even this “private” reunion is still the subject of much scrutiny.

  Marlene enters the room slowly. She is wearing her dark-red uniform from the liquor store, as that was the ruse they devised to throw off the press. But I’m surprised she didn’t bring a change of clothing, something more personal for her first meeting with her long-lost child. It unsettles me further. I’m looking for Mom but mostly seeing state liquor store cashier Marlene Bilek.

  I take a seat on the edge of the bed closest to the door. She takes a seat on the bed opposite me. Wyatt and Tessa move to the small circular table shoved in the corner of the room, trying to give us privacy, while still very much part of the space.

  “Your hair is exactly as I remember,” Marlene murmurs now, her gaze raking over my face. I find myself rounding my shoulders self-consciously. “Long brown waves. Once a week, I used to bathe you in the kitchen sink. Then, if it was sunny outside, we’d sit by a window and I’d brush your hair until it dried. You had such gorgeous locks, much nicer than my own.”

  She touches her short, graying brown curls as if embarrassed. I’m trying to remember exactly what her hair looked like back then, long, short, curly, straight, but coming up blank. She looked like Mom; that’s what I’ve preserved after all these years. Not an image of a specific woman, but a generalized ideal.

  “It’s funny, though,” Marlene says now. “Your eyes were much grayer when you were a child. Now they look more blue. I guess that’s the way it is with some kids. I had a friend whose son was a blond until he was eight or nine. Now he’s a brunette.”

  “You have another daughter,” I hear myself say. Is my tone accusing? Surely I don’t intend that.

  “You mean Hannah?” Once again Marlene’s expression falters. She glances down at the carpet. “She has brown hair, gray eyes, like you did. First second she was born, my heart nearly stopped in my chest. It’s Vero, I thought. My God, I’ve gotten my daughter back!

  “I had to work hard on that, to let Hannah be Hannah. Because there is only one Vero. Lord, child, I’ve missed you so much.”

  She bursts off the other bed. I’m not prepared. I can’t get my hands up in time. Her arms go around me, hold me tight.

  She is hugging me, I think, nearly bewildered. This is me, being hugged by my mother.

  I should open my arms. I should hug her back. I should declare, “Mommy, I’m home.”

  But I can’t move. I can’t say a word.

  I’m too aware of Vero, who’s back in my head, laughing hysterically.

  * * *

  “YOU MAKE QUILTS,” I say finally, two, three, ten minutes later. Mine is setting next to me on the bed, one more thing I suddenly don’t know what to do with.

  “I started twenty years ago,” Marlene tells me. In contrast to my constantly ping-ponging gaze, her eyes remain locked on my face, as if mesmerized. “I, um . . .” She takes a deep breath. “The years, right after your disappearance. They were a dark, dark time. And Lord, I’d already thought I’d been through some dark times. I’m sorry I took you to the park that day. I’m sorry I fell asleep. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

  “You’d been drinking.” My voice is sterner than I expected. I don’t soften it. “You were drunk.”

  “I’m sorry.” She speaks the words automatically, the syllables nearly worn out from thirty years of utterance.

  “The moment I realized I couldn’t find you,” she says. “When I’d been all around the park, calling your name over and over, and you still weren’t coming . . . I knew. I knew immediately the worst had happened.”

  “Vero just wanted to play with dolls,” I murmur. I’ve switched to third person. I can’t help myself. I don’t know how to tell the story any other way. For too many years, Vero has been a little girl inside my head, one prone to shedding her skin in times of distress. Even knowing she is me, or I am her . . . It feels too surreal. Vero is Vero. I’m just a gatekeeper. I know things because she tells me things. A way of disassociating myself from the horror, I guess, a quirk of coping. But it has worked for so long, I don’t know how to magically undo it now. Even sitting face-to-face with this woman—my mother, I keep telling myself—feels strange. She is Vero’s mom, I think. I’ve always wanted to meet her. But my mom . . .

  I’m just not ready for that.

  “Vero followed the girl away from the park,” I continue now. “But Madame was waiting for her. A stab of the needle, a quick shove into the car. By the time you missed her, Vero was already gone.”

  Marlene’s fingers dig into the edge of the mattress. But she nods. I’m not telling her anything she hasn’t already imagined over the years.

  “I tried so hard to find you,” she assures me now. If my use of third person bothers her, she doesn’t show it. “I answered all the police’s questions, went around to the neighbors. I was sure it was only a matter of time. They’d find you wandering down the street. Maybe you’d followed a stray dog or an ice cream truck, who knew? But the police were on it; even all the locals turned out to search. You were mine, but after you were lost, you became everyone’s. Except we still couldn’t bring you home.”

  “Madame Sade took Vero to a house,” I tell her. “A beautiful mansion where Vero was given a room fit for a princess. Soft bed, beautiful hand-painted rose mural. Her very own china tea set.”

  “The first few days, I didn’t drink a drop,” Marlene murmurs. “I was sober. Stone-cold for the first time in a decade. No sleeping, no drinking, no eating. I waited. I waited, waited, waited, because at any moment, the phone would ring, and it would be the police returning you to me.”

  “Madame gave Vero new clothes, then took them away when Vero couldn’t stop crying. Madame left Vero alone in this huge cold room for days and days. No sleeping on the bed. Vero found a closet instead. She curled up naked on the floor and cried for you.”

  “Ronnie beat me the first night,” Marlene whispers, her eyes locked on mine. “Called me a stupid whore for losing you. Then he beat me the second night because I wouldn’t stop crying. Then the third and the fourth. The fifth night, the officer who’d come over to update me on your case ended up taking me to the emergency room. They had to screw my jaw back together. That officer, Hank, told me I should never go back to that apartment again. The first step to saving my daughter, he told me, was saving myself.”

  “There were classes. Madame Sade came every afternoon. ‘Girls can’t afford to be stupid,’ she said. So Vero learned reading and math and geography and history. Then there was dancing and fashion and makeup and hairstyling. She told Vero she was her mother now. Th
ey were family. She would live in this beautiful house forever; she just had to do as she was told. Then Madame Sade would leave again and Vero was alone. Every morning, every evening. Hours and hours and hours, all night long, so very alone.

  “Vero wanted to be brave,” I whisper. “But the isolation . . . It became harder and harder to remember who she was. And easier and easier to be whatever Madame wanted her to be. Especially once she turned twelve and the first man arrived. When it was over, she didn’t cry. Vero simply locked it all up, something that happened to someone else, and stuck it way back in her mind. None of that could’ve been done to the real Vero, because the real Vero was a princess from a secret realm, whose mother was a magical queen who’d vowed to keep her safe from the evil witch.”

  I stare at Marlene. “Vero made up stories. Or maybe she did her best to remember her story. It is very hard to be yourself in the dollhouse.”

  Marlene can’t look at me anymore. I’m not sure that I blame her.

  “I returned to Ronnie,” she continues now, for this is as much her confession as mine, and thirty years later, there’s much to get out. “Second they released me, of course I came back. I didn’t know how to live alone. I’d been a young, stupid girl, already pregnant when we met. I couldn’t support myself, had never managed to hold down a job. Ronnie took care of me. And if he had a temper, sometimes drank too much, hit too hard, well, at least he put a roof over my head.

  “But after you were gone, things got worse. Six trips to the emergency room later, the responding officer, Hank, said he’d had enough. I was coming home with him. He’d take the sofa. I got the bed. But in return, no more boozing, no more crying, no more dying. It was hard enough, one year later, to know he’d failed some little girl he’d never met. He’d be damned before he failed her mother, too.”

  “Girls grow up. Even a beautiful princess . . .” I grimace, feel a spiderweb of memory brush across my mind. He doesn’t want you anymore; now what good are you? Madame Sade was angry. You didn’t want her anger. You couldn’t afford for her to be angry.

  I shiver, struggling to shrug off the recollection. When I speak again, the image is gone, safely locked back up, and my voice is matter-of-fact. “Vero moved downstairs. She gained a roommate, a girl several years older than her, Chelsea. Chelsea also had dark hair, blue eyes, because that’s what Madame’s best customer preferred. Vero was happy to have a roommate, thinking that finally, she wouldn’t be alone. But Chelsea hated her on sight. No one had ever loved her the way Vero had been loved. Chelsea’s own mother had sold her to Madame Sade for a quick fix. At least at the dollhouse she had been the favorite, living in the pretty tower bedroom. Until, of course, Vero came along. Now Chelsea ripped Vero’s clothes, ruined her makeup.

  “She made Vero sleep on a rug on the floor. She told Vero she was nothing more than Madame Sade’s pet. Except Madame Sade never kept her pets for long. Soon enough, she told Vero, they’d come for her. The only way out of the dollhouse was death, and Vero’s time was up.”

  “The nights were always the worst,” Marlene says. “Watching the sun set, knowing another day was gone and I still didn’t know where my baby was. I wanted to drink. All the time. Instead, I dreamed of you. I’d sit on Hank’s sofa and I’d remember your first birthday, your second birthday, your third. Then, after a bit, I imagined your seventh birthday, your eighth, your ninth. But for your tenth birthday, I made a vanilla cake with blue frosting because you were older now, and I had to believe you were growing up. I had to believe you were okay.”

  “Vero slept on the rug. She did her best not to make Chelsea angry. And every night, she whispered her stories to herself. Of the secret realm and the magical queen and the evil witch. Except one night, she discovered Chelsea listening. So Vero told another story, of a closet that was a portal between the worlds, and if she could just find the right door, she could escape again. Chelsea kept listening.” I close my eyes, and for a moment, I see it clearly. Two girls, both with dark hair, heads bent close as they huddled together. A happy memory, like freshly mowed grass. A moment when the dollhouse almost felt like home. I hear myself whisper: “Vero didn’t sleep on the rug anymore. She moved to the bed, right next to Chelsea, and they began to talk and trade secrets and exchange dreams. They became sisters. And Vero wasn’t alone anymore.”

  I’m crying, slow, silent tears. Why am I crying? Then I see Vero again, twirling across that terrible blue rug, needle in her hand, track marks on her arm. An unbearable pressure grows in my chest.

  Marlene takes my hand. I feel her fingers trembling within mine. Giving me strength. Drawing strength. We are in this together.

  She goes first: “One day, I fell off the wagon. Just like that. I was out taking a walk and I passed a liquor store and I . . . I went inside. I bought a fifth of whiskey. Then I took it back to Hank’s place and downed the whole thing. When I finally came to in the emergency room, Hank was a wreck. He made me swear to never do that again. He . . . He told me he loved me. He asked me to become his wife. But there was a condition: I had to make it sober for an entire year. I had to want to live, he told me, because otherwise, I would only break his heart.”

  “Things in the dollhouse started to change,” I say. I’m back in my head, walking down the shadowy corridor, steadily closer to Keep Out, Keep Out, KEEP OUT!!! “No more younger, fresher models entered the home. Instead the entertaining became less frequent, Madame Sade more desperate. She needed money. ‘Do you think a house like this supports itself?’ she’d say. And the food we ate and all the clothes we demanded. We were nothing but ungrateful girls; no wonder no one wanted to play with us anymore. She drugged us. The first time, she simply strolled into the room and jabbed us with the needle. I thought this was it; she’d sedated us again, only this time our bodies would be taken into the woods and left there to rot. Only way out of the dollhouse, right?

  “But it wasn’t a sedative. Instead it was . . . melting and floating and bliss. We giggled; we smiled; we danced. And within a matter of weeks, we’d do whatever Madame wanted, party, chat, entertain, live it up, more men, lots of men, whatever she wanted, as long as she kept the happiness coming.” I pause and it comes to me, what I’ve been half remembering for a long time now: “Vero learned to fly.”

  “I took up quilting as part of my sobriety,” Marlene says. “In the mornings, I’d visit craft stores, pick up scraps of fabric. I’d pick out the gray of your eyes or maybe the chestnut brown of your hair, or the pink of your first dress. I sewed my grief into quilts, and before I knew it, people were asking if they could buy them. So that became my first job, first honest dollar I earned on my own, selling a quilt to my neighbor. Later, Hank helped me figure out how to sell on the Internet. Then I learned I was pregnant.”

  “Life in the dollhouse . . . unraveled. You could feel it. The rooms became more frayed. Madame Sade angrier, edgier. And we became . . . tired. We didn’t talk anymore, didn’t huddle together and tell stories for comfort. We were either up, up, up or passed out cold as part of the down, down, down. Dinnertime became more strained. Looking at the two older girls sitting at the other end of the table. Harsh. Gaunt. Knowing. Vero and Chelsea know they must escape. But how?”

  “I made a family,” Marlene whispers. She sounds embarrassed, having finally put together a life just as her first daughter faced the abyss. “I married Hank. I gave birth to a beautiful little girl. I got a real job at the liquor store. And I haven’t touched a drop of alcohol in twenty years. I’m so sorry I didn’t sober up sooner. I’m so sorry I didn’t learn my lessons quicker. If I could go back in time, if I could undo what I did—”

  “You failed Vero.”

  “I’m sorry—”

  “But what I did was worse.”

  She doesn’t talk; her fingers tremble in my own.

  I have arrived at the end of my mental corridor, outside the largest door of my memory banks. The one clearly marked “
Keep Out.” But my hand is on the knob and I’m going to do it. I have to do it. Right now, this moment. There’s no turning back.

  “I stopped shooting up the drugs. Bit by bit, day by day, I took less, stashed more. I couldn’t do it anymore. The life, the slow decay. We had to get out. Maybe if I could just think straight.

  “I stuffed the vials in a hole in my mattress, where Madame Sade wouldn’t find them. My roommate watched me do it, but I didn’t worry. We were in this together, her and I. We were sisters. I tried to get her to stop, too, but it was harder for her. She was tired by then, even more tired than me. Even if we got away, she would say, where would we go?

  “I tried . . .” My voice breaks. I’m turning the handle now. I can see the door opening, watch the dark crack yawn open before me.

  “I knew,” I say flatly, staring at no one, my gaze locked on the sight of this woman’s hands folded in my own. “I told myself I didn’t, but I knew what she was going to do.”

  “I’m sorry,” Marlene whispers, as if she already understands what’s coming next.

  “She took my stash. Every single vial. One afternoon when I was down in the kitchen, my turn to cook. By the time I returned, she was dead, collapsed on the rug. I didn’t know what to do.” Screaming, begging, pleading. Don’t leave me, don’t leave me, don’t leave me. I can’t do this alone. “Madame came. We’d never had anything happen like that before. She was incensed, furious. Nothing to be done, she announced. Just have to wait till nightfall when the caretaker could deal with the body. Then she left her. Just like that. And I was all alone in the room with my best friend’s corpse.

  “I brushed out her hair, long dark locks so much like my own. I closed her eyes, a pale blue like my own. And then . . . I knew what I had to do.”

  Marlene is still clasping my hand, willing me to finish. The cops, Tessa and Wyatt, have moved from the corner table, are standing now, waiting with baited breath.

  I will myself to look up. I will myself to stare them all in the eye as I say what I have to say next.