Good as Gone

by Amy Gentry

  The Plan was an anti-plan, really. It was going to be a total surrender to God. That was all I knew. John David promised we would surrender ourselves to the source of the light together and sink into the sea of His love, and we’d never have to make a plan of any kind ever again.

  One night I typed out the verse about the lilies of the field. He corrected me.

  we won’t be lilies, he wrote. we’ll be nothing. we’ll be nothing at all.

  On the last night before the Plan, Jane looked at me while we were brushing our teeth and said, “I know something about you.”

  I was silent. I was counting to a hundred, like I always did when brushing. I could feel Jane’s eyes on me in the bathroom mirror but pretended I was alone so my face wouldn’t move.

  “You think nobody notices,” Jane said, trying again. Foamy toothpaste dribbled out of her mouth and she spat it into the sink. “You think you’re so cool.”

  I did not think I was cool. My parents thought I was cool. My friends thought I was cool, and some of them were even cool themselves. But I wasn’t. I only looked that way because of my friends, who were always calling me on the weekends to go to the mall, where somebody’s older sibling would drop us off so we could try on halter tops at Wet Seal and smell all the perfumes at Sephora. There were slumber parties at Kristian’s house with the whole team, and late-night chats with Lauren or Maya, some of which had begun to revolve around Aaron. I wondered if this was what Jane thought she knew. The made-up crush on Aaron had begun to take on such a life of its own that sometimes, in a moment of confusion, I thought it was real.

  I refocused on the mirror and noticed that Jane was still staring, but this time her face was flushed and there were tears wobbling in her eyes. “How come you don’t like me anymore?”

  I reached a hundred just as the subject changed. It was not a coincidence, I knew by now. Nothing was. I leaned over and carefully spat into the sink, then straightened up and rubbed my mouth with the towel. “Why do you think I don’t like you?” I asked.

  “You could have just said ‘I do like you.’” Jane sniffed.

  “I do like you!”

  “No, you don’t,” Jane went on. By this time the tears were squeezing out of the corners of her eyes and tracking down her reddened cheeks. Jane cried all the time now. Mom said she was hitting puberty earlier than I had, and at least it was all going to be over sooner that way. In her old-man pajamas, as I called them, the button-down flannel top and drawstring bottoms hanging off her, Jane looked bigger than me, even if she wasn’t quite as tall yet. She didn’t have boobs either, but there was something about her that looked like the beginning of something. Mom said she might even be taller than me soon.

  I won’t know, I thought with a pang.

  “You’re my sister,” I explained, “I don’t like you, I love you.” I had meant it to sound funny, but as I said it, I knew that it was true. We had played and fought and done everything together throughout our childhood, Jane throwing toys when I turned my back and ignored her, me running to Mom when Jane wouldn’t obey the rules of a board game or when she quit because she wasn’t winning. Tears started tickling my eyes and I wondered, automatically and dispassionately, if I should let them fall, if doing so would benefit the Plan.

  “How come you never want to hang out with me, then? You’re always hanging out with your new friends, and I have to stay home and watch TV by myself. You haven’t even watched Beauty and the Beast with me once all summer.”

  “That movie is kind of dumb, Jane,” I said. “It’s a kids’ movie.”

  “It’s not dumb! I like the songs.” Jane’s favorite song was the one in the tavern. Whenever no one was paying attention to her, she’d start singing it, and if you didn’t stop and do some of the voices with her, she would continue singing it, louder and louder. Jane was never afraid to be annoying, never afraid to take up space.

  “I’m not a little kid anymore, Jane. I don’t like princesses and cartoons and stuff.”

  “I miss you,” Jane said.

  Now the first tear came out, all of a sudden, after I’d thought the danger was over. I’m right here, I started to say, but the words stuck in my throat. “I’ll watch it with you this weekend,” I said instead, “I promise,” and the lie somehow made me stronger, straightened me up.

  Ordinary Julie would be there Saturday morning to keep her promise, I told myself. Ordinary Julie would stay behind to see what happened with Jane, watch over her, help her with her homework, tell her not to wear something that would make the kids tease her at school.

  “Really?” Jane said.

  “Yeah, sure.” I looked back at the mirror. “What was the thing you were saying? What do you know about me?”

  Jane’s tears were gone now. She didn’t smile, but she managed to look as if she wanted to. “I know you don’t really like track,” she said. “I know you’re only pretending to like it so you can fit in.”

  I paused. I had never really thought about whether I liked track or not. It seemed so obvious that if you could play a sport, you should, whether or not you enjoyed it, because with a swarm of friends around you, any lie could become the truth. Suddenly I pitied Jane with her awkward face, every emotion going straight from her insides to her outside.

  Jane would never be good at sports, I thought. She wouldn’t be popular in eighth grade like I was.

  “Good night,” I said, and I wrapped my arms around her for a moment, long enough to remind us both how much fun we used to have together. When I was ready to pull away, I counted to three first. Ordinary Julie wasn’t enough for Jane. She always wanted a little more.

  That night I woke up to a rough hand over my mouth. I tried to gasp but couldn’t, and, still half asleep, for a moment I thought I was drowning.

  When I opened my eyes, there was a bearded man leaning over me. He nodded, and after a moment of paralysis, I nodded back, and he slowly, slowly removed his hand—keeping it near enough to clasp over my mouth again should I scream.

  It was Charlie, but also not. His dark blond hair was straggly and long, long enough for a ponytail. His beard was darker than his hair, and a mustache covered his mouth with shadows. He smelled sweet and sour at the same time, like the smell that came out of the recycling bin when I emptied it after school.

  That was my first impression of John David, and I immediately wanted to scream.

  But I was Plan Julie, and so I repeated over and over in my head: It’s not really kidnapping. It’s not real. I’m running away to meet my destiny. This is what I was born for. I am being chosen. He is choosing me.

  I smiled at John David, trying to show him I remembered, I knew. If he smiled back, I couldn’t see it under his beard. His hand trembled as he pulled the blankets off me and reached out to help me out of bed, but when I put out my hand, he wrapped his around my wrist instead and pulled me to my feet slowly but forcefully.

  We moved deliberately, playing the mirror game, flowing together across the floor, me anticipating his movements so that he wouldn’t feel even a hint of resistance. I was so desperate to please him. My eyes did not leave his for a moment, as if we were dancing, his hand wrapped around my wrist, and the rest was all electrical current moving my feet silently across the floor. Then I saw what was in his other hand.

  Although the word knife had been part of the Plan, I had never actually associated it with the knives hanging in the kitchen; I had never looked at any one of them and thought Knife and pictured it in his hand. It drifted up slowly, almost lazily, until it was level with my chest, and I thought, He doesn’t want to scare me and tried even harder not to be scared. He circled around behind me and clamped his hand down on my shoulder. I felt the tip of the knife press into my back, not hard enough to cut, but hard enough so its cold metal tip separated the fibers of my nightshirt.

  Now there was the relief of knowing exactly what to do, because there wasn’t a choice.

  I thought I’d given up control when we’d started discus
sing the Plan, but I hadn’t—it had all been a game. But now, with him standing invisibly behind me, an unseen presence marching me forward with the pressure of a hand on my shoulder and the sharpness of a knife just to the right of my spine, I knew that the time to decide against the Plan had passed. Thoughts floated through my mind that did not sit comfortably next to one another; for instance, I did not know where he was taking me, and where was Jane? Oh, safe in bed, Jane was safe in bed. She’d stay there forever, tucked into a life that would never change.

  Then Jane’s face suddenly appeared.

  I caught sight of her as we approached the open door to her room—we usually slept with the doors open. I could barely see her hiding in her cracked-open closet, down low by the floor, looking at me with eyes that were not closed and warm with sleep but wide and red-rimmed with terror. John David and I stood on the landing. Jane’s face peered out at me from behind the closet door, desperately asking me what to do next.

  I motioned with my eyes toward John David and willed Jane to sink back into the closet’s darkness before he saw her. If she screamed once, it would all be over. He would get her too. And no matter where he was taking me, no matter what he was going to do to me, I would not let him do it to Jane.

  Just before John David marched me down the stairs, there was a noise from the attic. I felt the knife’s point lessen its tension for just a moment, the hand on my shoulder twist ever so slightly, and knew John David was looking away. As quickly as I could, I raised my hand and put a finger to my lips, Shhh, pushing the soft imaginary breath across the room to freeze Jane in place, shhh, and goodbye, shhh, and goodbye.

  And that is how I lost my family, my home, my life, and my self—everything, everything—in one night.

  16

  One afternoon when I was pregnant with Jane, and Tom was off in an accounting class and we still lived in the little house near my university, Julie sat on the wood floor of the living room in a patch of sunlight. Her baby feet stuck out in front of her, and her wisps of hair were lit up white by the sun. She was concentrating on moving a blue crayon over a newspaper in front of her. When she accidentally squeezed the crayon too hard and it skittered away, she didn’t cry, and she didn’t get another crayon, even though there were dozens lying all around her. She screwed her face up, made her fingers into clumsy pincers, scooted herself toward the rolling blue crayon, and recovered it. Then she resumed coloring until the whole cycle started over again.

  I watched her for maybe half an hour before it hit me: She likes the color blue.

  It was the first time I understood that there was a whole world in there I would never see, a world so distant from me, and so distinct, that to say that Julie was made from me, that she was my daughter and I was her mother, seemed meaningless. I think I loved her more profoundly in that moment than I have ever loved anyone.

  But that’s memory for you. At first, I wanted the world for Julie, like all mothers do. Then, for a long time, I only wanted a body to bury.

  Now, I just wish I could go back in time and hand her the goddamn blue crayon.

  Reading through the transcript, devouring it, in fact, I learn the shape of her trauma, I study the names of all the girls she had to be to survive: Charlotte, Karen, Mercy, Starr, Violet, Gretchen. In her testimony, they struggle, they fight, they fail, but above all, they survive. Even as I choke back tears thinking of all she’s been through, I hold each one dear, each of these girls, because each is a layer of my daughter, the one waiting at home with Tom.

  But the girl whose story hurts me most is Julie. She’s the one I thought I knew but didn’t. Worse still, she’s the one who knew me. Her words give me a picture of myself I don’t recognize. I try to remember each moment she describes of her unfolding adolescence, to remember and possibly justify the role I played in it, but that feeling of otherness is monumental. I recognize the outlines of the situations, Jane and Tom and me reduced to characters in her story, but it’s like seeing them, seeing us all, on an alien planet through an alien atmosphere.

  I try to remember Julie asking me about God, but I can’t. Who was I, what was I doing that I can’t remember? I was finishing up a postdoc, then interviewing for jobs. I knew she was laughing, but I thought she was laughing at me.

  My mom just sort of looked at me when I wore pretty clothes, her lips pressed together. I don’t need a mirror to know what that expression looks like. I saw it on my mother’s face over and over again. I didn’t know it was on mine.

  I had the answer all worked out, but my mom never asked.

  I’d believed the girls were benefiting from my example, if not my undivided attention.

  I guess she never thought about how uncomfortable it was to walk four blocks in church flats.

  I read somewhere that Puritans would sometimes explain the death of a particularly beloved child as the parents’ punishment for having loved the child too much. They blamed not the awful winters or the malarial swamps or the lack of good food or clean water, but a jealous God.

  I never loved Julie more than Jane, I can say that with confidence. At the same time, there was always something about her. She seemed so complete in herself, so serene. Somewhere deep down, I thought Julie was perfect. Now I wonder: Was I so afraid of finding out she wasn’t perfect that I almost killed her?

  When they unlock the cell door, they don’t tell me where they are taking me. It’s strange how little anyone tells prisoners outside of directing them to put their hands out to be cuffed and pointing them down hallways. I guess nobody wants to be responsible for sharing privileged information.

  I assume I am being taken to see my lawyer, because that’s what has happened every other time I’ve been brought down this particular corridor. But this time, we take a right instead of a left at the end and go through a door with a wired window in it. And then suddenly, I am standing by the front desk as my cuffs are being removed.

  Tom stands there too, awkwardly, his hand fiddling nervously with his keys in his pants pocket.

  The guard says, “The charges have been dropped. Your things will be at the front desk in just a minute, you’ll need to go over them and sign a paper saying everything’s there.” My eyes meet hers for only a moment before she looks away. Maybe it’s hard for them to make eye contact with us after we’re free.

  She disappears behind the door again, leaving us alone in the cramped waiting room, the woman who works the front desk presumably off rummaging for the box containing my clothes, my shoes, my purse with the book on Byron and landscape, still half read, tucked inside it. I’m suddenly overwhelmed with a craving to finish it.

  “Maxwell confessed,” Tom says. “Apparently he was on psych meds—for schizoaffective something or other. But they didn’t know that at the hospital, so he didn’t get any there, and before they could figure out what was wrong, he started talking to God about his—sins.”

  “Bet Judge Crofford didn’t know about the meds.”

  “No one did. Not even his top advisers. The drugs kept the worst symptoms under control, but—” He looks down. “Seven more victims have come forward.”

  Seven. And those are just the ones willing to talk to the police.

  “Thanks for coming,” I say.

  “There wasn’t time to schedule a call,” he says. “I guess once the charges are dropped, they’re eager to get you off the taxpayers’ dime.”

  “That makes sense.”

  We stand in silence under the fluorescent lights.

  “Anna,” he says.

  “It’s okay,” I say.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s not your fault,” I say. “I wasn’t there. I checked out.”

  “I shouldn’t have let you,” he says.

  “You’re a good man,” I say, too weary for this. “You always have to be helping someone. I didn’t want your help, so you gave it to someone else.”

  “If I could take it back—”

  “Don’t say that,” I interrupt. “Someone
got her daughter back because of you. You wouldn’t change that, so don’t say you would because you think it’ll please me. It won’t.”

  He looks stricken, and I soften despite myself. “Honestly, Tom?” I say. “It’s a relief to know that you’re not an angel. It’s a standard I could never live up to.”

  I don’t tell him how much it hurts to see him tumble from his pedestal. This is why people need God—because people are awful, even the good ones. I’ve always prided myself on being so rational, so unafflicted by spiritual yearnings, not realizing my personal gods were Tom and Julie, the good people. But nobody ever gets to be good except on the terms the world hands them.

  Finally, the front-desk matron emerges with a plastic bag holding my clothes and purse. I poke through the bag and sign the papers. Then I take everything into a visitors’ restroom, change back into my street clothes, fold the blue prison scrubs neatly in a pile. I reemerge looking something like myself again.

  Tom smiles.

  As I set the stack of prison pajamas on the front desk, I wonder if this is it for Tom and me. If he can smile this easily at the sight of me looking like I did before, before all this happened, if he can so quickly forget the image of me as a prisoner, then he is always going to misunderstand who I am and what I am.

  We exit into the bright sunlight. The sun is beating down on the Commerce Street port, and the air is scalding hot.

  “Do you think Janie will come home?” I ask, thinking of her first date with the guy on the kickball team. I haven’t heard how it went. I resisted telling her to meet at a public place, to let a friend know where they were going.

  Tom looks uncomfortable. “She’s staying up there for a while longer, Anna. She really wants to get back on track, finish all those incompletes and show her professors she can tough it out.” He sighs. “I’m sorry. You know Janie.”

  I do know Janie. The incompletes were nothing more than a cry for attention, but she has terrible timing. Jane functions well under duress, gravitates toward drama, and can be generous as long as no one expects her to be. Then, when the waters still and her dramatics would be entertaining, she’s back to her own world. I think of all the journals. “Wait for it. She’ll switch her major to creative writing before the year is out.”