Don't Try To Find Me: A Novel

by Holly Brown

  “You’re staring at me,” she says. She doesn’t sound annoyed. It’s more of an observation.

  “I can’t believe you’re here,” I say.

  She stuffs the last quarter of the banana in her mouth. It’s a grotesque and beautiful sight. “I really want to take a bath. Is that okay?”

  It’s not the kind of thing I’d expect her to ask permission for. It makes me wonder for the hundredth time what went on with Brandon. “Sure.”

  I feel like we should be having a deeper, more meaningful discussion in light of what I said in the video and what I’ve gleaned about her and Brandon. But I’m back to being taciturn. I’m probably even more so because I have to be careful not to upset her. She’s like this skittish animal that could bolt at any time. We can’t keep her cage door locked, much as we’d like to. No one can live like that for any length of time.

  How will we live? That’s the real question. I feel like I’m in a state of suspended animation. I’m waiting for something to happen. For over three weeks, I was waiting for her. Now what?

  Paul is upstairs, sitting on our bed, updating all the different sites with the good news, thanking everyone for their help and support. I shut the door behind me and sit on the bed facing him. “How long are you going to leave everything up?” I whisper, not wanting Marley to overhear. I’d like the pages and sites gone as soon as possible, but then, they’re not my babies.

  “Long enough for everyone to eat their words about you.”

  “That’s sweet, but I don’t think it’s going to happen.”

  “Why not? Marley’s home. Obviously you didn’t have anything to do with her leaving.”

  I tilt my head, a touch incredulous. “I didn’t try to hurt her, but we don’t really know why she left. It might have to do with me. Or you.”

  “Marley left to be with Brandon.” Paul infuses the name with maximal distaste, even at this low volume. “That’s the story here.”

  “It’s never just one reason.”

  “Sometimes there’s only one reason that matters. You can make yourself crazy trying to sort the motivations of a fourteen-year-old.”

  This is normally where I’d bail on the conversation. He bugs me with his pragmatic dismissiveness, and I walk away. Instead, I force myself to say, “I wish you wouldn’t do that.”

  “Do what?”

  “Insult Marley and me.”

  “How did I do that?”

  If he has to ask, he’ll never know, right? This is never going to work. He’ll never change.

  “You think there’s more to it than just Brandon,” Paul says slowly, like he’s thinking aloud on an oral exam, “and I was telling you you’re wrong. I was telling you Marley can only have one reason when you think she’s more complicated.”

  I smile. “You got it.”

  “I still need work on my listening skills. But I’m a quick learner.”

  “We need to get her a new therapist, don’t you think? She needs to talk to someone about what really happened with Brandon.”

  He nods immediately as he shuts the laptop. Another sign of growth. He wasn’t a fan of therapy even before Dr. Michael came along.

  “I was standing there in the kitchen,” I say, “and I had no idea what to say to her. Just like always. And it’s not because she’s so surly or angry like other parents describe their teenagers. It’s worse than that. I have no clue what she’s thinking. She had a relationship with Brandon for months, and never said anything, and then she took off. I can’t read her.”

  “So when she’s done with her bath, go knock on her door and tell her that.”

  Paul’s phone rings, and he grabs for it. “Hello,” he says. “Yes, this is Paul Willits . . . Yes, Marley’s home . . . No, we won’t be doing any interviews. No press at all . . . No, that was just to bring her home. She’s home now . . . No, we don’t need that . . . No . . . Thank you for getting the word out, but we need to go back to our lives. No . . . No . . .”

  My phone’s been ringing a lot, too. None of the calls are Michael. I’ve blocked him. But first, I let him know that if he ever shows up here again, I’ll be calling the police. He’s got enough trouble with the law as it is. He’s being investigated for prescribing me addictive medications. I still haven’t decided on my level of cooperation. I need some time to weigh out his relative good versus harm for my family and me. It’s no easy equation. Trigonometry, at least, when I’m barely up for arithmetic.

  “Have a good night,” Paul tells the reporter. He hangs up and smiles at me. Then he turns the phone off. “It’s going to be this way for a while. Candace said they’ll come to our door and to Marley’s school. They’ll want to know what she was doing with a convicted felon.”

  “I want to know that, too.”

  “We did all this to find her, and now we need to protect her from the fallout.” Does a small part of him wish he hadn’t done it?

  “What are people going to say about us now? Have you thought about what it’ll be like when you go back to work?”

  “It’ll be Wednesday.”

  Can it really be that simple for him? Well, maybe I can try to learn from him, too.

  I hear the water draining from the tub and the bathroom door opening. I find myself listening to make sure her feet aren’t on the stairs, that they’re padding down the hall. No, I won’t sleep tonight. I’ll have to get rid of my pills, because I can feel their allure. I’ll need a therapist myself, maybe. Definitely.

  I changed her diapers; I read her stories; I cleaned up her skinned knees. We’ve had thousands of conversations. What’s one more?

  I knock on her door, stomach knotted.

  “Yeah?” she says from behind the door.

  “Can I come in?”

  “I’m pretty tired.”

  I should respect that. She’s telling me no, she doesn’t want to talk. But I have needs, too. “I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep tonight unless we talk a little.”

  A long pause, and then she opens the door. The lights are blazing behind her. “What do you want to talk about?”

  “What you’ve been through.”

  “I don’t think I can talk about that.”

  “Then what I’ve been through.”

  She steps aside to let me in. She gets under the covers of her bed, leaning against the headboard. Her hair dampens her white nightgown. She hasn’t worn that nightgown in a long time. I’ve always thought it makes her look like a Victorian heroine. There are no bruises visible on her face or on her collarbone. I checked at the station but can’t resist checking again.

  I’m standing, because she hasn’t invited me to sit.

  “You’re staring again,” she says.

  “You look pretty in that nightgown.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Would it be okay if I sat on the bed?” I ask.

  She nods.

  I take a seat. I want so badly to reach out and brush her wet hair back from her forehead. To bring her soup. To take care of her like when she’s sick. I want to erase years of mistakes and missed opportunities. I want to make it all right with one conversation. It needs to be a conversation that cements that everything will be different now, that we’ll all go forward and become some other family, the kind where the daughter stays put until college.

  No pressure.

  “Can I bring you anything? A heating pad? More food? Bernard?” Bernard the Bear is sitting on her dresser, his onyx eyes seeming to rest on us.

  She shakes her head.

  “I feel like there’s so much to say, and I’m drawing a blank. Do you feel that way?” I ask hesitantly.

  “Sort of.” But there’s something wary in her reply. Something she doesn’t want me to know?

  Of course there are things she doesn’t want me to know. She ran away from home. She was living with a felon. She didn’t call us. She never wrote. She told the police she wasn’t ready to come home.

  But she did watch my video.

  “What was
it like to watch that video?” I say. I know what it’s like to have this conversation—it’s like jumping into the deep end of the pool when you’ve never had a lesson and you’re not sure you put on your life vest correctly.

  “It was like watching a different person.” Her eyes move down to the bedspread, which she smooths with her hand.

  “Did you like that person better?”

  She shrugs.

  I’m trying to think of another question when she says, “What was it like to make the video?”

  “Have you ever heard of a runner’s high?” She indicates no. “I’ve never been a runner but apparently, toward the end of a marathon, people can get really euphoric. It’s like they’ve just let go of everything. And that’s how I felt doing that video. Like I was high.” I feel embarrassed, realizing she knows that I’ve actually been high on my pills.

  But she’s smiling a little. “So talking to me was like getting high?”

  “I felt like I didn’t have anything left to lose. It was like, I’d tried so hard for so long to appear a certain way and it obviously didn’t work. The plan failed. Because you were out there somewhere, and the only way I could even try to reach you was through this camera. And all these other people were going to see it and judge me, and I was just thinking, Fuck it all.”

  She plucks at the bedspread and her voice thickens with unshed tears. “I said fuck it, and I took off, and it ended up being so bad.”

  I feel like crying, too. Brandon hurt her. I knew it.

  She looks up at me. “I don’t know how I’m supposed to trust anyone. I don’t know how I can trust me.”

  “That’s the whole trick,” I tell her.

  Her lips tighten. “Did you get that from Dr. Michael?”

  “No.”

  “That’s what he used to say about therapy. That he was teaching me tricks.” Her eyes are so vulnerable. Have they ever been so vulnerable before? “I don’t know what to think about him. Was he manipulating me the whole time? Trying to make me think bad things about Dad? Stealing you away from us?”

  “I don’t know what he was trying to do.”

  “I think I loved him.” She goes back to plucking at the bedspread. “Did you?”

  “I wasn’t in love with him.”

  “But he loves you.”

  “That’s what he calls it, yes.”

  We lapse into silence. It kills me, but I wait for Marley to break it. “Mom, he told me what a narcissist is. The same definition you used in the video. That’s what he called Dad. And he said narcissists can’t change, so you might as well quit loving them.”

  I find I can’t quite speak.

  “I blamed you for a lot of things, and they might not have been you at all. I thought you and Dr. Michael chose each other over me.”

  “That’s why you left?”

  “Part of it.”

  “I think”—and it’s time to finally say it out loud—“he was trying to choose both of us. I think he wanted to be my husband, and he wanted to be your father. There was no room for your dad.”

  “He told me something else,” she says. “That it’s okay not to love your parents. That sometimes it’s better that way. He was talking about Dad, but . . .”

  I feel a surge of anger. When Dr. Michael talked about leaving the door open, it turned out to be our front door. He thought he was only hurting Paul, I imagine, saying those things. He didn’t see that we were a family, and that has value. He didn’t consider what he was destroying.

  Tried to destroy, I tell myself. He hasn’t succeeded.

  “I’m not sure about anything,” she whispers.

  I don’t ask permission to get in bed with her; I take a chance and do it. I stroke her hair and she doesn’t lean into me but she doesn’t protest either. I want to give advice or tell her it’ll be all right.

  Instead, I wait.

  “You can ask me things,” she says. “I might not always answer, though.”

  “Okay.” It’s so huge, this invitation. I don’t want to blow it. “Did Brandon—” I stop myself. I don’t know if I’m equipped to handle the answer. But then I tell myself I need to keep going, to say it as brutally as it might have happened because being honest is the only way forward. “Did he rape you?”

  An interminable minute goes by. “It’s like I said. I’m not sure about a lot of things.”

  “How did you meet him?”

  She doesn’t look like she wants to answer, but then she does. “On Facebook.”

  “He contacted you?” A grown man contacting a fourteen-year-old. I feel nauseated as she nods.

  “I’m so messed up. I can tell because even though I gave the police Brandon’s name, I was kind of sorry that they caught him. I kind of hoped he’d go on Disappeared.com and start a new life. Because he’s not all bad. He’s had a lot of bad things happen to him. I turned out to be one of them. But then I remember things—they’re not memories, exactly, because it’s like I’m back there—and I want him locked up forever.”

  I want that, too. “He’s much older than you. He convinced you to run away from home and to live with him. None of this can be your fault.”

  She looks me in the eye. “I’m not just some victim. We did it together. We both wanted to be someone else.”

  “Disappeared.com, was that something you were going to do together?”

  She nods miserably. I never thought someone could seem so tormented at fourteen. Surely never thought my own daughter would.

  I move my lips to her temple and say, “You don’t need to understand everything right now. We’ll figure it out together. And when we do, whoever needs to pay, we’ll make him—or them—pay. Okay?”

  I’m not sure it’s what a good mother would say. I don’t know what comes next, or what will happen tomorrow, or whether I can believe in her, or if she can believe in me. If I can believe in me. My daughter and I both have some serious credibility issues, and that might be the least of our problems. Still . . .

  “You survived,” I say. “You’re stronger than—”

  “Than I think,” she finishes. “Dr. Michael told you about that, huh?”

  “I was going to say you’re stronger than I thought. I underestimated you.”

  “I guess I underestimated you, too.” Another pause. “I had a journal I wrote in. I think that helped. It kept me from going crazy. And sometimes it was actually kind of fun. I felt like I was good at it.”

  “You’ve always been talented. Maybe you could . . .” Write for the newspaper. Write short stories. Study creative writing in college. But I don’t let myself finish the sentence. She can think about all that later and decide for herself.

  “Maybe I could,” she says. She’s quiet again.

  “I’m going to keep holding you, until you tell me to stop.” I feel like I can hardly breathe, I’m so sure I’ll hear that word. I’m that sure she’ll push me away. But I have to give her the choice: yes or no, stop or go. Otherwise, it doesn’t mean anything.

  But what she says is, “Do you still have Kyle’s phone number?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good.”

  She wants to reach out to a boy who’s almost her age. It’s so amazingly normal. “I really liked Kyle, too.”

  “He protected me. There were some scary people on the bus.” She pauses. “Maybe more sad than scary.”

  From here on out, I’ll do a much better job protecting all of us. “We’ll be okay,” I say. Then I feel a little silly, having inadvertently quoted her good-bye note.

  But she quotes it right back: “We’ll be better.”

  As she rests her head on my shoulder, I know that we already are.

  First_Day_of_the_Rest_of_My_Life

  IT’S A CLICHÉ, BUT it’s true. You get fresh starts and second chances. You can keep trying. Or, in my case, start trying. I’m not sure I ever gave this town, or the people in it, a real go. It’s not like anyone was begging me to eat lunch with them, but I can’t blame them. I was Invisi
ble Girl.

  I am definitely not invisible anymore. There were like a ton of reporters outside when we got home yesterday.

  But for now, Journal, it’s just you and me.

  I’m not going to lie. I thought about getting a new journal, or just writing on my iPad. It didn’t feel right, though. That’d be like trying to forget everything you and I went through. Hard as it all was, I don’t want to let it go. It feels—important, somehow.

  So instead, I turned the page. Another cliché that might be true, I don’t know yet.

  I kept waking up last night. I had a bunch of dreams about B. Some were nightmares, some weren’t. Is it stupid that I still think, in his way, he really loved me?

  I want to ask someone’s opinion. Mom? No, it’s too soon to talk to her about that. She’d be all traumatized. Kyle, maybe. I think I’ll call him later. He’ll probably be shocked to hear from me. The cool thing about Kyle is how much he talks. If I don’t feel like saying much, I can just float down on the river of his words.

  Mom wants me to get a new therapist ASAP. Yeah, right. Like I could ever trust a professional again.

  Mom and Dad are downstairs. They’re making breakfast together: He’s making the smoothies, she’s doing French toast. It’s been years since they did that. I can hear the murmur of their voices. A couple of times, I even heard her laugh.

  Dad said we’re having a “staycation” for the next few days: None of us are leaving the house or turning on our phones or computers or anything. He’s waiting for the reporters to leave and for the online coverage to die down. But I’m not sure I agree. I might want to step outside and make a statement. This could be my chance to be seen.

  The blender whirs like a propeller, and when it stops, my dad calls, “All ready, Marley!”

  I’ll let you know how it goes.

  About the Author

  HOLLY BROWN lives with her husband and toddler daughter in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she’s a practicing marriage and family therapist. Her blog, Bonding Time, is featured on PsychCentral.com.