by Amy Gentry
Instead of finding out what he wants, I surprise myself by saying exactly what I’m thinking: “What are we going to do?”
“She’s back,” he says. “We don’t have to do anything anymore.”
I slide out of my jeans, keeping my T-shirt on to sleep in.
“She’s back,” he repeats, like a stubborn child.
“We don’t know what she’s been through.” I think of the detective’s card tucked into the pocket of my jeans as I hang them on the back of the closet door. “We have to be careful.”
“We should have been more careful then.” His voice breaks a little.
I emerge from the closet. “She may not be—the same.”
“None of us are,” Tom says. There’s a long pause. “You didn’t believe she would ever come home.”
I sit down on the edge of the bed. I can feel his eyes burrowing into the back of my head, and I close my own, tasting the accusation.
After a moment I turn to face him. “I didn’t believe we would find her,” I say, trusting him to know the difference.
He doesn’t answer. But as I lean over to turn off the light on my nightstand, I feel something shift, just a little piece of the night air between us moving aside, like a breeze wafting through a chink in a wall. He turns onto his side, facing away from me, but there’s something about this argument that reminds me of the marriage we used to have, the arguments that bubbled up only when we were in bed together. How gamely we entered every fight back then, knowing we’d still wake up next to each other in the morning.
Now, staring at Tom’s back, I think, Julie is home. Anything can happen.
I see her face again the way I saw it on the front porch, just barely familiar, the flesh melted away from her cheekbones and jaw, leaving a butterfly of bone.
“Good night,” I say.
I sleep until noon and wake to the noise of pans clattering downstairs, voices in the kitchen.
I know this dream. It’s the one where Julie shows up, and I say, “I’ve dreamed about you so many times, but this time you’re really home.” Now I get up and splash water on my face in the bathroom and look at myself in the mirror, waiting for the features to distort, to drift. Everything stays put. This one is real.
A chill runs through me and a faint headache alights in my frontal lobe. I pull on my jeans from last night and head downstairs.
The kitchen table is bathed in light. My radiantly blond daughter sits on the side nearest the window, still wearing Jane’s T-shirt, which is too big on her. Tom beams at her from the head of the table as they talk—about nothing, it seems: orange juice, the weather, does anybody want more eggs. For a moment it looks almost normal. Then Jane comes in with a glass in her hand and sits across from Julie, and a shiver walks down my spine as I observe the odd regularity that has returned to our family: a girl for each side of the table, four sides for four people. The words fearful symmetry pop into my head.
“Good morning,” I say from the doorway.
“You slept forever,” Jane says, but Julie is already getting up and in three long strides she has embraced me. It takes me aback. How long has it been since a daughter of mine came rushing into my arms from across the room? Just as I am starting to notice the scent of her hair, she pulls back and looks at me, her hands sliding down my arms to grasp my hands. “Hi, Mom,” she says, a little awkwardly, and for a moment we are looking straight into each other’s eyes.
I have become accustomed to looking at Jane, who shares my distinctive features, my sharp nose and deep-set eyes. As I stare into Julie’s woman’s face, I realize there are no moles, no bumps or blemishes or wrinkles.
She’s perfect.
She breaks away, embarrassed, and I realize I have been staring.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I haven’t seen your face in so long.”
“I know,” Tom says.
“Sit down, I’m just getting some coffee,” I say. “Did you sleep okay?” There’s a big pan on the stove with some scrambled eggs left in it, and I put some on a plate, suddenly ravenous.
“I slept very well,” she says, like a polite guest. “The air mattress was comfortable.”
“She’s only been up for a few minutes,” Tom says. “I’ve been fielding phone calls from the police department all morning. Come in whenever you want apparently means ‘If you’re not here by nine you’ll be hearing from us.’” His face darkens. “I suppose it makes sense. They’re worried about the press. I’m sure that’ll be starting anytime now.”
Julie’s smile fades. “I guess we should probably go, now that Mom’s awake.”
Tom puts a hand over hers on the table. “You take as much time as you need.”
“The sooner we go, the sooner it’ll be over,” I say.
Tom’s eyes tear up, and I realize he doesn’t want to know what she went through. At the same time, it occurs to me that I do.
Julie is studying my face with an almost grateful expression. “Yes,” she says. “I want to get it over with.” I can tell by the way she’s looking at me that Julie needs me there, and no one else. I can’t keep Tom away from the police station, but I decide I’m going to persuade him to stay out in the hall, which means Jane will have to come too, to give him someone to look after.
“Come on, Julie,” I say. “I’ll find you something in my closet to wear.” A skirt, I think, looking at her dwindled frame. And I’ll need some safety pins.
“He said he would kill me if I struggled. Kill my family.”
“You believed him?” says Overbey.
We are sitting in the police station—me, Julie, Overbey, and a younger female detective, Detective Harris—in a private room with frosted-glass windows and a single table. Tom is outside waiting in the lobby with Jane, per Julie’s request. Overbey wanted to question Julie alone, but she looked from his face to my face and then back, and he sighed and invited me in. I’m holding but not drinking a cup of black coffee so weak you can see air bubbles clinging to the inside of the Styrofoam, read the imprint of the serial number on the bottom. It was brought to me by Detective Harris—Typical, I think—while Overbey asked the questions.
“Of course I believed him,” Julie says now. “He had a knife at my throat.”
“A kitchen knife,” Overbey says, consulting his notes, as if he doesn’t already know everything in the case file. “Taken from the household. Any other weapons?”
“She was thirteen,” I break in, but Overbey holds up his hand and nods for Julie to go on, and it’s true she doesn’t seem upset.
“Not that I saw. But I believed him. And if it was happening to me again now, knowing what I know about him, I would still believe him.” She takes a breath. “Once we were out of the house, we got on a bus just by the CVS, there on Memorial Drive, and went to the bus station downtown.”
“Did anyone see you?”
“The bus driver, maybe, but I was too scared to say anything. At the bus station he bought two tickets. We got off in El Paso.” She pauses, and her eyes go dead. “That’s where he raped me for the first time.”
“Do you remember where you were?”
“Some motel. I don’t remember which one.”
“Motel Six? Econo Lodge?”
She glares at him icily. “Sorry. We stayed there for only a couple days and then we were gone again. We moved all the time. He stole a car in El Paso”—Overbey makes a subtle gesture without looking at Harris, who writes something down—“and for a while we drove that, but he sold it somehow, I guess. He just came back without it one day.”
“He left you alone?”
“Yes. He left me tied up and gagged when he had to go out. We were in Mexico when he sold the car, I think, but I’m not sure because I was blindfolded, and then I was in the back of a van for a long time.” The duct-taped-in-a-van dream floats before my eyes. “It took me a while to find out he’d sold me.”
“He what?” Overbey looks up sharply.
“He sold me,” she says. “Five me
n, maybe six.”
Harris nods and returns to writing.
“Did those men—”
“Oh yes.” She gives a cold, brittle smile. “Yes, they did.”
My eyes close.
“Mrs. Whitaker, are you all right?” It’s Harris’s voice. I am sinking, eyes shut, into a cold black vapor that prickles at my extremities. I hear Overbey correct his partner—“Mrs. Davalos goes by her maiden name”—and snap my eyes back open, but the black dots take a moment to clear.
“I’m fine,” I whisper. I want to reach for Julie’s hand, but her arms are folded tightly across her chest.
“Could you identify any of the men?”
“I was blindfolded,” she repeats patiently.
“Any accents?”
She thinks. “Some of them spoke Spanish to each other, but none of them talked very much. Anyway, that was a couple of days—I think? I can’t remember it very well. Then they sold me again. To someone important this time.”
The detectives look meaningfully at each other. “Who?”
“I never knew his name. The other men called him El Jefe when they were talking about him, señor to his face.”
“Go on,” Overbey says calmly while Harris scribbles furiously. “How did you know he was important?”
“He had a giant house, like a compound, with bodyguards and a household staff and a lot of men with big guns coming to him for orders.” She stops and takes a breath. “Please don’t ask me where, I don’t know. I didn’t go outside.”
“For how long?”
“For eight years.”
Later, I tell Tom as little as I can get away with, enough to explain the pages of thumbnail photos Julie looked through at the station, pictures of Mexican men in their fifties with high foreheads and thick chins. I narrate the various stages of her captivity, but not the cigarette burns she got when she tried to escape; the years of rape, but not the way she spoke of them, as if describing the plot of a not particularly interesting television show. I tell him that her captor tired of her, but not that she was too old for him once out of her teens; I tell him that she was blindfolded and taken in a helicopter to a rooftop in Juárez, but not that the guard was most likely supposed to kill her rather than let her go. I tell him that she hid in the back of a truck to get across the border, but not that she was afraid of the U.S. Border Patrol because she wasn’t sure she could still speak English, or anything at all, after so long; that she jumped out of the truck at a stoplight and ran, but not that she dragged herself foot after foot along the I-10 feeder road for miles, invisible from the freeway, like the people you learn not to see stumbling through gas-station parking lots, clutching their possessions in plastic bags.
“My God,” he says under his breath. We are at the kitchen table and the girls are upstairs in bed, a peculiar throwback to the quiet discussions we used to have long ago, about topics so trivial I can’t imagine why we bothered hiding them. “So she was sold to a human-trafficking ring, then to some drug lord?”
It’s strange how hearing him say those phrases out loud makes it into a story more than the jumbled words in the interview room did. “That’s what it sounds like, yes.”
Tom is leaning forward on his elbows on the kitchen table, holding on to himself, every muscle tensed. “Well, is that what the detectives say?”
“They didn’t say much at all, really. They were just taking her statement, asking questions.”
“Right. They don’t want to say anything that might upset us, like, you know, human trafficking or forced prostitution. That might imply they know about it and can’t do anything to stop it!” Tom’s voice breaks on this last exclamation. He’s not bothering to lower his voice anymore.
“I think they may know something. Harris mentioned a task force—”
“Yes, there’s a statewide task force on human trafficking,” Tom surprises me by saying. I am reminded of how much work he has done, how many search organizations he’s joined, the support group for parents of missing children, the Facebook pages, and wonder what else he knows that I don’t. “They formed it a couple of years ago, after a big report came out. Obviously it came too late to help Julie. But I guess we should be thrilled that she can help them.” He sighs heavily. “How was she in there?”
“She seemed—fine,” I say. “All things considered. One of the detectives told me she’s in shock and needs to see a therapist.”
“Of course,” Tom says. “I’ll find someone. I’ll call tonight.”
3
To get through the first week, I take her shopping. What else am I going to do with this twenty-one-year-old woman who has shown up to replace my missing thirteen-year-old daughter? Besides, she doesn’t have any clothes. The first few days, I lend her things of mine to wear—she’s closer to my size than Jane’s—but it gives me the strangest feeling to see her draped in one of my severe black tunics, her blond hair swallowed up in its oversize cowl, like a paper doll dressed for a funeral.
“I have some errands to run at Target,” I lie. “Want to come? We can get you some clothes.”
Julie used to love back-to-school shopping with me, especially picking out all the notebooks and pens and pencils in purple and pink and glittery green. On top of buying her the usual jeans and T-shirts and underwear, I always got her one completely new first-day-of-school outfit, and she would keep it hanging on her doorknob for weeks, counting down the days. I still go to the same Target, which has, of course, barely changed at all in eight years, and I wonder whether the memories it brings back of one of our few mother-daughter activities are as pleasant to her as they are to me.
But once we’re there, the red walls seem too aggressive somehow, the fluorescent lights glaring on the white linoleum walkways headache-inducing. Julie follows me obediently around the store as if it’s her first time in there, or indeed in any store, and I can’t help but wince at the racks of neon bikinis all tangled up on their hangers, the viscose minidresses lying on the floor under the sale rack, the red-and-white bull’s-eye logo suspended over bins of brightly colored underwear. If the clothes in my closet seem too dour for a twenty-one-year-old, everything here seems too flimsy and disposable for someone with a face like Julie’s. Hurrying us past the clothing department, I grab a cheese grater at random from the kitchen section and we stand, a little absurdly, in the express lane, waiting to check out.
Julie stares fixedly at the rows of candy bars in their bright boxes, and I am struck by how much this is like standing at the baggage carousel with Jane, the silence of two people trying to pretend it’s ordinary how little they’re talking. Except with Jane, I know she doesn’t want to talk, not to me anyway. With Julie—who knows. But whatever conversation I am waiting to have with her, we are not going to have it in the express lane of Target, not even with the extra two minutes gained from the woman in front of us arguing over a sale price. I’ve heard the story, but who really knows what she’s been through or how she feels about it? Look at her now, I think, staring at nothing.
But she’s not. Once we get through the line and out into the car, she says, “I used to love that movie.”
“What movie?”
“A Little Princess.”
Now I recall seeing it on the display stand near the register. I don’t remember much about the movie aside from its exceptionally lurid color palette. It’s one of those boarding-school stories, I know, where they’re mean to the orphan girl. They keep her up in the attic. I feel a hint of panic.
“You should have said something. We could have bought it.”
“It’s okay, I don’t want it.”
“We can go back.”
“Mom. I was just remembering.”
But I’m almost crying in the silence that follows. She turns her head toward the window and says, “The Indian Gentleman searches everywhere for her so he can pass on her father’s fortune, but it turns out she’s been next door to him the whole time.”
I try to speak, but nothing comes o
ut.
“I used to think about that sometimes,” she says shortly, by way of explanation, turning her head back to me. The veil of kindness has dropped back over her eyes. Outside, it starts to rain.
We speed toward Nordstrom, where I buy her heaping armfuls of silk tank tops, designer jeans, cashmere sweaters on ultra-sale, collared shirts and peasant blouses and plain, tissue-thin T-shirts at fifty bucks a pop. I buy her a purse, a wallet, a belt. A pair of brown calfskin loafers and some white sandals and three pairs of flats in different colors, all designer, but with the logo-print fabric tucked away on the inside, so you can’t tell how expensive they are. I’ll know, though.
Julie will know too, although I do my best to keep the price tags away from her after I catch her checking the tag on a blouse and then trying unobtrusively to hang it back on the rack. “Julie,” I say firmly. She nods with a small smile, and I feel a rush of elation, strong, like the first sip of coffee after a good night’s rest.
For the next two hours I stand outside the dressing room and hand her sizes and shades and styles of everything: bras, blazers, even swimsuits. While I am pondering which fancy restaurant we will take her out to first, she cracks the door open and holds out her hand for a smaller size of a fitted, knee-length dress in royal blue. Handing it to her, I glimpse, through the gaping sleeve openings of the too-big dress, a coin-size blob on her rib cage in a bluish-greenish shade of black that seems somehow wrong for a bruise. The door closes before I can ask her about it, and the dress doesn’t suit her, so we don’t end up buying it. We have plenty of other options.
We walk out with four giant shopping bags stuffed to their tops, two bags apiece, like a scene in a movie about rich and powerful women. And I do feel powerful, almost if we’ve gotten away with something, though the four-figure total on the receipt shows otherwise. Julie is smiling too, unabashedly, wearing a knit top and jeans that we ripped the tags off, right at the register, while the long receipt was still whirring its way out of the printer. The sun came out from behind clouds while we were inside and is now steaming away the new puddles in the parking lot, high and bright. Everything sparkles. I think with a sharp thrill of Tom, at his computer, seeing the transaction come up in his linked accounting software. It’s more than our monthly house payment.
