by Schow, Ryan
“Real quiet woman, as you’d expect of most librarians, but in a sad way. We all thought she was being abused. She had scratches sometimes. Once she had a black eye, though she did a pretty good job of covering it up with makeup.”
I feel sorry for this woman, Rebecca’s potential mother. So many questions pop up, and I need answers. Was she abused? Was Rebecca abused? That’s the number one question on my list. I can’t help but fear for the life she lived before being kidnapped and dropped into the pink goop.
In the course of our conversation, I explain to the librarian (Molly) that Rebecca and I are trying to reconnect with Rebecca’s mother, that Rebecca went missing between eight and ten years ago.
“And you’re sure she was a librarian?” Molly says to Rebecca.
“I am,” Rebecca says.
“The woman’s name was Mary Conner.”
“Conner?” I ask. Not Taylor?
Molly nods, then looks at Rebecca and says, “Mary’s girl was eleven or twelve back then. A real reader. I’m just not sure you were that girl.”
“Why not?” I say. Molly doesn’t look at me or even acknowledge me. She’s all about Rebecca right now.
“You’d have been much cuter than that girl back then,” she says to Rebecca.
I hate that I have to say this, but it’s prudent to our search. “Rebecca was the ugly duckling that became a swan.” Molly recoils, stunned that I would say such a thing. “I was the same way.”
“What did you say your name was again?” Molly turns and asks me. Finally, her attention!
I open my mouth to say Abby, but Rebecca surprises me by saying: “Savannah.” I look at her and she’s looking back at me, her eyes saying everything and nothing. I think she’s tired of the lies and it’s all coming out.
“Well, Savannah, calling someone an ugly duckling isn’t polite,” Molly replies. “Especially a child, since all of God’s children are beautiful.”
“Rebecca and I share a similar past. I assure you, Rebecca understands what I’m saying is only meant to help her find her mother.”
My mind is on autopilot, searching my memory banks for how Rebecca heard my birth name, Savannah. Then the memory catches.
Brayden.
My father was pressing him about leaving his cell phone in Vegas. The lie Brayden told to cover for me not being able to call my father when we were in Santa Monica was that “Savannah” needed him fast. Brayden quickly realized his mistake and called me Abby, but apparently Rebecca caught it.
Note to self: Do something about this later.
“If I remember this right, and this mind of mine was always a steel trap”—Molly says, pointing to her head—“she went to work at Spanish Springs Library. In Sparks.”
“That’s the one that sort of looks like a UFO?” I ask. They have pictures of the libraries online, and Spanish Springs is the most unusual of the bunch.
She flashes a crooked smile and nods, like she’s being polite. It’s obvious she doesn’t like the association. It’s what stuck first in my mind when I saw photos of the place.
“Thank you so much,” Rebecca says. She smiles, gives Molly a hug. Molly seems to appreciate the girl’s affection.
To me however, Molly frowns and sticks out her hand. I give it a shake, and it’s like holding a dead fish. “Thank you,” I say.
Her frown deepens. I remind myself I’m not here to make friends. I’m here to find Rebecca’s mother.
3
The drive to Sparks is short. It’s the next town over from Reno, and parts of it are nice. Very nice. All brand new. It’s funny how anything new feels unusual in this corner of the Silver State. I’m actually pretty impressed.
The library, on the other hand, is every bit as old and outdated as the other libraries we’ve been seeing. At least on the outside.
We walk in and the first thing we notice is the atrium. It sort of takes me by surprise. You don’t see this kind of thing anymore.
“Wow,” Rebecca says. “A tree.”
“I know, right?” I respond in wonder.
“Can I help you?” says a nice looking woman who does not fit the description of your everyday librarian. She’s thin and fit, dressed to the nines. A real beauty. Part of me wants her to be Rebecca’s mother, but the truth is, she looks too young. Thirtysomething for sure. She has that Hollywood vegan look about her I like so much.
We tell her exactly what we told Molly back at North Valleys and the woman points us to an older librarian near a bank of computers. A real blue-haired granny of a woman.
“She’s been here like forever,” the Hollywood vegan says. “If anyone knew her, it’d be Judith.”
Judith turns out to have a pretty decent memory for a gal of her advancing years. She says, “Yes, I remember her well. She left years back to open a daycare center.”
“Do you happen to have her business address?” I ask. I’m praying she does, because a lot of daycare providers use their homes as their place of business.
“I do. If you’ll wait here, I’ll fetch it.” She slowly, crookedly heads out of sight and Rebecca looks excited enough to scream.
“Contain it,” I say, smiling. “Just a little longer.”
She can’t. She’s all smiles. At least until Judith returns. Then my gorgeous red headed pseudo-sister regains her composure, but barely.
“It’s in Reno,” Judith announces. “Morningside Drive.” She hands me a slip of paper with the address written in block lettering on the back. “It’s between Virginia Lake and the county golf course.”
“Thanks, I’ll put it in my GPS,” I say.
4
Back in the S5, I tell the navigation system the address then get moving. Rebecca’s giddiness seems to have vanished. Her face looks white. Snow white.
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
She pulls her seatbelt on and says, “What will happen to us? You and me?”
I take her hand and say, “Things have changed since you were…you know, taken. Technology I mean. We can communicate over the internet easily. We can even see each other while talking on our cell phones, if you can believe that. We’ll talk every day if you want.”
“Do you want to talk to me that much?”
“Of course! I love that we’re so close to finding your mother, but I don’t like it either. The truth is, I like you right where you’re at. With me and my dad.”
“I do, too. But I have to find my mother. She’ll want to know I’m okay, won’t she?”
Part of me wonders what we’re going to find. “If she’s a good mother, then yes, she’ll want to know.”
We get back on the 80, then take Virginia Street south until we hit Plumb Lane. There’s an ugly Motel 6 and a Quality Suites and a lot of bare concrete mixed in with a few out-of-place trees. Damn, even the trees look outdated!
The GPS says go right; I go right. It says to go left on Watt Street; I go left. There are wooden phone poles with dry rot, their sagging wires crossing the street everywhere. Most cars are ramshackle at best, some nicer than others, some downright derelict, and the neighborhoods are largely ranch style single-story homes.
And OMG, there’s still entirely too much concrete!
“I hate this place,” Rebecca says, taking it all in. “Are we close?”
“Unfortunately.”
“It won’t be like your house,” she tells me.
“Most people don’t live like we do, Rebecca.”
“I figured.”
“I’m just wondering how you got to be the way you are,” I say. “The way you look, I mean.”
I was ugly and it cost my father twenty-five million to make me beautiful. And that was with the family discount. So how could Rebecca’s parents afford for her to be this beautiful? Living in a dumpy part of town like this, it all seems unlikely. Is that why she was taken? Was she ugly, expendable? Or was she stolen? Bought? Was she one of the first guinea pigs?
“What do you mean, the way I look?”
“When you woke up,�
�� I ask, trying to phrase this as delicately as possible, “did you recognize yourself?”
“No.”
“Because you’re around twenty years old, or because your face is different?”
“This isn’t my face,” she says in the thinnest of voices. I look at her and she looks frightened by the admission.
“You’ve been gone almost half your life. You’re bound to look different. To feel different.”
“Yes,” she says, “but I could never be this different. I think Molly was right. I was not a cute child. I remember being…not pretty. And now I’m beautiful.”
The GPS tells me to turn on Morningside next.
That’s three blocks up.
“This isn’t my nose,” she says. “These aren’t my eyes. And this mouth and teeth? No way. My teeth were a mess.”
“Your eyes were different?” I say.
We pass Hillcrest Drive.
We pass Sunset.
“Yes. They were brown. These are blue. And my hair was black, not red.”
“What about your nose?”
The GPS says to turn right on Morningside; I turn right. Thankfully the neighborhood has long lines of mature trees and cut grass. I can see from one end to the other and there isn’t a telephone pole or a crummy car in sight. Still, this nervousness congealing inside of me, it’s coming from everything Rebecca is saying to me. She’s practically in a tailspin right now.
“Everything’s different.”
“Rebecca, do you recognize this street?”
Her eyes start to water and her face fills with uncertainty, or dread. She says, “I think so.”
“Why are you crying?”
“Because it doesn’t feel right.” She’s wiping her eyes, trying to stop the tears. They won’t stop dripping.
“What do you mean, it doesn’t feel right?”
We pull up to the house and it’s a clean, single-story ranch home. It’s all brick with a red roof set thirty or forty feet off the sidewalk. The lawn is freshly mowed. All the flowers are pruned and in bloom. Everything looks Stepford clean. Like the person living here takes tremendous pride in their home’s appearance.
“Let’s go,” I say, shutting off the car.
“I don’t want to,” she says. “I mean, we can’t.”
“Wait a sec, are you serious?” She nods her head and I’m looking at her thinking, WTF child? “Is it nerves?” Her eyes are ghosts without names, her face the tell-tale sign of something awful. I’m not sure what happened to her, but it sure left its mark. “Is it your memories? Are they returning?”
She shakes her head again, but slower. “Not whole memories,” she says. “Just bad feelings.”
5
The home’s front door opens up and a woman with blonde curly hair stands in the doorway. I smile. She doesn’t. Rebecca turns and sees her and there’s instant recognition.
“That’s her, isn’t it?” I say. “That’s your mother.”
“I think. Maybe. I don’t know.”
“I’ll go,” I tell her, “you stay here.”
She gives me a weak nod. Hides her face from the woman.
I’m trekking up the concrete walkway smiling. The woman steps onto the front stoop and looks past me at Rebecca.
“Mary Conner?” I ask.
The woman shades her eyes from the brightness of the day and says, “Yes?” She’s an average looking woman with sun damage on her face and a small potbelly that could be ice cream related. Or wine. At least she has all her teeth. I reach out and shake her hand and say, “I’m Savannah.”
Shit! Why did I just say that?
All this thinking about Rebecca knowing my real name, it totally tripped me up. I was going to call myself something else. Just not Savannah or Abby.
Up close, her skin looks bad, like she had a rash of acne as a child. There are pock marks and a few small scars, but nothing a few hundred glycolic peels can’t smooth out. She smells like All laundry detergent, but not in an offensive way. I feel better already knowing her clothes are clean.
“The reason I’m here is because you had a little girl about eight or ten years ago that I think went missing.”
Something moves through the woman’s eyes. Pain? Remorse? She shifts on her feet, stuffs her hands in her oversized jeans pockets. She has to be pushing fifty; then again, a hard forty-five can look a lot like fifty. Losing a child, I once read, can age you decades.
“I did.”
“Rebecca?”
Mary nods, her face bent to an unreadable emotion, a look that has me full of questions, but still on edge. It could be I found Rebecca’s home, or it could be warning bells clamoring in my head. I just don’t know.
“How old was she when—”
“That her?” she says, giving a slight nod in Rebecca’s direction.
She says it like she’s only half interested, but maybe this is just a defense mechanism. If she lost Rebecca that long ago, she wouldn’t let herself believe her baby was alive. To cling to such hopes, then chance not being right, the torrent of emotion would break her down to nothing. I nod.
“Don’t look nuthin’ like her.”
“How long has it been?”
“Nine years. That girl’s too pretty to be mine.” Suddenly that sad or confused thing in her eyes becomes dark, almost hostile. Her nostrils flare, the skin between her eyebrows pulls tight and she says, “This ain’t funny. You need to go.”
“It’s okay, Mrs. Conner. We’re not here because we want anything. It’s just…what happened to her?”
“She wasn’t mine anyway,” she says.
“What…what do you mean?”
“The kid I lost, she was my foster kid.”
I look back at Rebecca and her hands are still covering her face. Like she’s crying. I can hardly believe this is happening.
“And?”
“Child Protective Services came and took her on account of my husband—the fuggin’ dirt bag—he tried to kill me. He beat her up pretty bad, too. Left the side of her face with a nasty scar. That girl scared on the face?”
Now things are making sense. Rebecca’s breakdown must have been triggered by the traumatic, repressed memory of her abuse
“So CPS took her?”
“Yes.”
“Do you want to say hello at least?”
She takes her time thinking about it, looks over my shoulder at Rebecca, then back at me. “Told you, that girl ain’t mine. Never was. Now go away lessen I call the cops.”
“Call the cops?” I stammer. “For what?”
“Don’t matter, does it?” she says, her voice jumping a few octaves. “Just leave.”
So many thoughts are banging around in my head, so many insults, pleas, retorts. It leaves my mouth paralyzed. She walks back into her house, shuts the door a little too hard, the slaps the deadbolt in place.
I return to the car. Rebecca looks at me with watery, red-rimmed eyes.
“What are you remembering?” I ask.
“I remember that woman.”
“She said her husband tried to kill her, that you were her foster daughter.”
“No, she did the library part time and she worked for the…I think the…child protection…something part time. She took me and gave me to a man, and that man took me away.”
“What do you mean?”
“She said I was going away. She said I was going to a place where they would take all the things wrong with me—all the wrong things no one loved about me—and make them right. I saw him pay her money. She said he helped with…some kind of…I don’t know…I can’t think of the name—”
She’s really struggling to think here, and it’s pushing new tears from her eyes. Her entire body is rigid. The bluish vein in the side of her head, just above her temple, it’s full of anxious blood.
Then it hits her. “Monarch something.”
“Why would she lie to me?” I ask. I don’t know if I’m asking Rebecca the question or if I’m asking myself th
e question out loud.
“Because she was never my foster mother. She took me from my parents, then she sold me.”
“Do you remember what happened after that?”
“Yes, but let’s go,” she says, thoroughly undone. “I want to go, Abby. Now!”
6
My finger hits the push button start, I slap the S5 into gear and stomp on the gas. Me leaving doesn’t mean I’m letting this go. No way. Not by a mile. For Rebecca’s state of mind, however, we have to leave.
“The man took me in the back of a van,” Rebecca says when we hit highway 80 heading west. “He put a foul smelling cloth over my mouth and I woke up someplace else. I don’t know where.”
“How old were you?”
“Eleven.”
“What about your real parents? Do you remember them now?”
She nods, her face so sad and scared. Honestly, seeing her wounded like this, it’s breaking my heart.
“My father killed my mother, then he tried to kill me. What that lady said is pretty close to true. She just wasn’t my mother. The police took me to the station. They said I’d be safe. Then that woman, Mary Conner, came for me. She said that I’d suffered a horrible tragedy, and that I deserved better than I had. She smiled at me and told me I would finally be safe. I was at her home for at least a week, maybe more. She took me to the library five days in a row, introducing me to the others as her daughter. I didn’t mind because she had to work and I was just happy to be safe.”
“Where did you end up? After you were taken?”
“I don’t know. A lab. There was an ugly man with an ugly accent. He put a needle in my neck. That’s the last thing I remember. And then you.”
Everything in me is trying not to think about my next question. I shouldn’t even ask it. But I have to.
“Why did your father try to kill you?”
“Because he tried to sell me and my mother wouldn’t let him.”
My mind is spinning in tight, furious circles. Murderous parents? Child Protective Services selling kids on the black market? No way. “Your father tried to sell you to whom?”
“To the same people as before. To this Monarch something or other. What’s a business called? A big business?”
