by Kim Powers
Last night, the house had been jam-packed with our friends. Celebrating. Now, twenty-four hours later, it was jam-packed with people I didn’t know. People in uniforms. People not in uniforms, but in mismatched suits, a different kind of uniform, detectives with their guns and badges occasionally showing, when a jacket flashed open. Their leader, Detective Mizell, had turned the back of the house into her own personal war room, the dining room table now home base for a search-and-rescue mission. Sig was gridding off maps with his track team, for searching in the morning; Wendy was going through photos from the party, clicking from one frame to the next on Skip’s digital camera and telling one of the cops the names of everyone there. The kids guzzled Red Bull and scarfed down pizza that somebody had ordered in; as soon as one box got emptied out, another one got opened and moved to the top of the stack.
Mizell paced back and forth, talking on her cell phone to the FBI, trying to get them involved.
“I know that, I know it’s not twenty-four hours yet, but she’s thirteen years old and we need . . . ”
Mizell was too fucking polite, too official. Too goddamned nice. Not me. I grabbed the phone from her. “Listen, this is her father. Please. Some sick fuck has my daughter and we need help. Please. Send anybody you can. The more people we have . . . ”
Mizell grabbed it back from me, with a glare. “I’ll take it from here,” and back on the phone she went, to whoever was on the other end. I didn’t know. I never even gave them a chance to talk. “Sorry about that . . . you can understand . . . yes, I know . . . ”
Blah blah blah. It was all blah blah blah. Nice nice nice.
I wanted to fucking do something! Get my hands on somebody! I’d already driven to all the places I could think of, that Skip might go—just in case it was a joke. I knew it wasn’t, but I couldn’t just sit still. I’d already gone to the theater building where Skip hung out with the drama club; searched high and low through all of it, the kids taking a break from one of their rehearsals to help me. I’d gone to the houses of her three best friends, the first three names on her speed dial. Nothing. I’d even gone to Genna’s house, to see if she was camped out there. Nada, everywhere I went. Just new people crying, instead of me.
I couldn’t cry anymore.
Nobody else was crying in the house either; they were just doing. Maybe they’d been told not to cry in front of me. Activity was everywhere, but every time a phone rang, whether it was my cell or somebody else’s, it all stopped. Everyone froze and looked at me.
We were all on standby, waiting for a call from the hospital or the morgue to say it’s her.
Waiting for a call from the kidnapper to say what he wanted.
Waiting to find out who I’d kept waiting long enough.
But who? Who the fuck was it? Who wanted to hurt us so much? Hurt me, not her, if Mizell was right?
It was the only thing that gave me hope: that he, they, whomever it was, wouldn’t hurt her.
Please God, not her. The first conversation I’d had with him since her mother died. When I yelled at Him for taking her away.
I’d had the conversation with Mizell ten different ways, but it always ended up the same. “You’re the professor, the guy who deals with words, so you tell me. It’s all there in the note. ‘You’ve kept me waiting long enough.’”
“But what did I do? I’m a nobody. A teacher.”
“But you used to be somebody. And you beat people. You won. There’s a whole line of people whose places you probably took.”
“From fifty different countries! Multiply that by four different guys on every team and you’ve got . . . it can’t be. That’s insane. That was thirteen years ago.”
“Then some teacher you kept from getting a job here then. Somebody who was pissed off that you got it just because you already had a name . . . some student you didn’t pass. Somebody you pissed off at a faculty meeting. Who are those people? That’s what we need to know.”
But the truth is I didn’t have enemies. I wasn’t perfect, but I made friends. I served on committees; I took on the junk classes that nobody else wanted to teach, the Heritage of Western Man intro courses you really had to prep for. I led the Marshall’s Parade at graduation every May, holding the school flag so ably because I was already used to running with a big stick out in front of me. I hunkered down and did my best as a single father, when that was the last thing I had ever expected to happen. I made mistakes along the way, but I did my best.
No, the only person who ever got mad at me was Skip.
Maybe some stranger? Some crazy person, just fucking with us? For some reason, that idea was even worse. We’d been robbed once, years before, just after we moved in, the TV and coffee maker and a few other things taken. Patti and I both said we felt it, something off in the house, the minute we’d walked in. The DNA of the house had somehow changed. At first, the cops thought it was somebody who wanted to see where the big Olympic champ was now living, but none of my sports stuff had been taken. It took Skip to discover the real purpose, showing the cops around.
“They took all the spoons. Look.” My gleeful daughter. Fearless. Excited to have her house broken into. She opened the silverware drawer to show that all the spoons were gone except for one that had been left behind in the dishwasher.
“They’re freebasing. That’s what they use. Spoons. They told us about it in school.”
The cops looked impressed; I thought great, the grade school is teaching my seven-year-old how to do drugs. Seven going on seventeen. Maybe whoever took her thought she was older than she was; everybody did. I let her watch too much grown-up TV. It was my fault. I should have put one of those parent lock things on the TV and her computer. Nobody really took kids as young as Skip, did they?
Not in Mt. Gresh, Massachusetts, population 38,000. It just didn’t happen.
That robbery. It was the only time a policeman had been in the house, until now.
After the break-in, I’d bought a pistol, a .38, even though Patti told me I was being ridiculous. Maybe I was: I didn’t even keep the gun and bullets together, for fear that Skip would find them and have an accident. I kept the pistol high up on a shelf, under a pile of sweaters in a rattan basket, and the box of bullets taped upside down to one of the slats, under the bed.
Genius move, Patti had chided me. Just ask the burglar if he minds waiting while you dig through your sweaters—hey, you want this one? Looks like it might fit, the one with the reindeer on it—actually, why don’t you try it on, while I load my gun?
I knew she was right. I could never pull a trigger. But that was before Skip was gone.
Before. After. Now there was always going to be a before and after, but I didn’t know what the after was going to bring.
“We’ll get her back. We’ll find her. She’ll be okay.”
Wendy had come up behind me at the window upstairs, without me even hearing her.
I was still hearing Patti laugh at me; I was smiling, remembering how I laughed with her, at how goofy I was. Reindeer sweater indeed, that Patti had bought for me. Wendy put her arms around my waist and I reached for her hands, expecting to smell the Persian lime crème that Patti always put on her hands, after she washed the dishes.
Wrong woman. Wrong everything.
I closed my eyes and held Wendy’s hands to my mouth, so she’d feel my breath on them as I prayed. I didn’t care who heard me now. I’d scream it from the roof, if that’s what it took. “God, take my legs from me, however you want them. In an accident, a disease . . . I don’t care. I can take the pain. Take my arms. Take whatever you want, just don’t take Skip. Don’t let her hurt . . . ”
It was another one of my bargains with God: Take anything you want, as long as you bring Skip back. Tit for tat. This for that. I started crying again.
This is no time to make your fathers cry.
Or your mothers.
When I was little, my mother would take me to an orphanage where she did charity work, reading to kids for story
hour. Most of them looked ill or disabled in some way, different physical handicaps. “See how fortunate you are,” she’d whisper to me, even though the children could hear. “This could have been you.” Maybe my father was in on it too, to get me to work out harder, so I wouldn’t be one of them. My mother would end up crying so much the various staffs started telling her not to come back. She upset the children too much.
She upset me too much, seeing her like that.
Now, for some reason, I thought back to that, something I hadn’t thought about in years, and it became part of my prayer. God, I’ll do it. I’ll be it. Take whatever you want, make me like those kids I used to see, just bring Skip back. How Patti and I had been, when she was first born: every little finger and toe so perfect. Her little mouth, her wet, slicked-back hair. Wanting another child right away, to feel that love again. Never wanting another one, because nothing else could ever be as perfect as Skip was at that first moment, could ever be more than the love we felt just then in the hospital . . . Don’t let her get hurt. Oh God please God . . . don’t let her come back . . . different.
And then it was Wendy talking back to me, answering me, not God. “We’re gonna find her. Aretha’s good, I’ve been talking to her . . . ”
“Aretha?”
“That’s what she told me to call her. And Guillory, he’s the one who set up the phone trace stuff, he said that . . . ”
I had to get away, away from the police, away from a detective named Aretha, back to Skip’s room. Back to where her DNA and dust motes still were, where her breath was still trapped, where I knew she was still alive.
“Hey dude, look at this,” I heard one of the police say, as I got up the stairs. Maybe they’d found something. I threw open Skip’s door to see two policemen, looking at something.
My gold medal.
One of them had put it over his neck, fingerprint powder and all, and was posing and flexing with it in the vanity mirror.
“Yeah, work those muscles, baby . . . you wanna feel my medal? Yeah, come on, touch it, bitch . . . ” The cop shifted to a different angle in the mirror, the better to see himself, and saw me instead.
“Oh shit man . . . I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—it was just here and . . . oh fuck. Don’t tell Mizell.”
He gave me the medal and I stuffed it in my pocket.
I didn’t feel anger because he’d taken something of mine, but because he’d taken something of Skip’s. That medal was hers now; she loved it, as much as she loved those snowballs that reminded her of her mother. It said that I was here to her, that I was strong—the fucking strongest man in the world. That I’d always be here, to protect her.
And then today, I wasn’t.
I should have just let those cops keep it. It didn’t mean anything anymore.
“We’ve got something.” Mizell. Downstairs.
I ran back down, and saw her pointing some kind of blue fluorescent light on the kitchen floor, moving it back and forth from the kitchen island to the back door.
“What?”
“Scuff marks.”
“I guess there would be,” I said. “Nobody mopped up after the party last night.”
“No, these. See?” She got down on her knees, using a long wooden spoon from the counter to show me where to look. “’Bout a foot and a half apart, two lines, white rubber. Those long marks, there? Like a car skid? She have anything with white rubber soles? Like erasers?”
“Her running shoes. From this morning.”
“Thank God she was still wearing ’em.”
“Why?”
“Because that’s what left these marks, when she got dragged out the back door. Now we know this is real. Now we can really get to work.”
CHAPTER NINE
Skip could sense him slowly moving in the room, coming closer to her, but something was off about the way he walked. And she didn’t feel a change in temperature either, as he got nearer. More like somebody who was cold most of the time and didn’t give off much body heat. She almost wished he did, because that would mean he was scared. That would mean he was hot and out of breath. That would help her, if she knew that this person felt afraid, like she did. Maybe his voice was a sign he was afraid, that weird stopping and starting he did, or catching his breath, or whatever it was that kept breaking up his sentences so much.
“I know you’re not. Asleep. Even though it’s well past. Your bedtime. So we might as well. Talk. Might as well. Live.” He laughed, as he moved the tape off her mouth again. She licked her lips, as little as she could so he wouldn’t get any ideas, but he didn’t offer her any more water this time. She bit the inside of her cheeks, to try to make saliva.
“Do they teach her. Anymore? Dorothy Parker? ‘Guns aren’t lawful. Nooses give. Gas smells awful. You might as well. Live.’ Perfect for my vocal . . . range. Well, almost perfect. That last. Live. Gets me every time.”
Should she talk to him? That’s what they always said to do on Criminal Minds and Law & Order—talk to the bad guy to humanize yourself, let him know you were a person. Use your name. But this guy seemed like he would already know all those tricks. He’d figure out what she was doing and get even madder because of it.
“Does my father know I’m here?” Her own voice sound rusty, from how little she’d been talking. She had to clear her throat, to make any words come out.
“That would defeat. The purpose. Let him. Imagine.”
She tried to listen to him with one ear and then sort of scrunch up her face so she could hear what else was in the room with the other ear, but it didn’t work. She couldn’t hear anything except him. She couldn’t hear anything except her heart, beating fast and heating up her ears.
“What does your. Father do? When you’re upset?”
Was it a trick question? What should she do? Answer him? Cooperate? Stay quiet? A dozen possibilities, all wrong except for one. But which one? If she could just see his face, she might be able to figure it out, like reading a scene partner in Miss Davenport’s class. But she couldn’t. All she could do was hear him.
“He . . . he . . . reads to me.”
“Ah! Fairy tales? Harry Potter? Percy Jackson and the. Olympians?”
The way he said it, did that mean he knew who her dad was?
“Books. To Kill a Mockingbird. A Wrinkle in Time. Ray Bradbury. I like him because he’s sort of real and not real at the same time . . . ”
“That would be. Sur . . . real. Real and . . . not real. Like now.”
“I read at the tenth-grade level. I know what surreal is. I’ve been tested.”
“Tested. As have I. I knew we had . . . something in common!”
Why did she say that? He’d think she was bragging. He went quiet, but more like he was gathering a breath for his next set of words than getting mad.
“Once upon a time . . . is that how your father’s stories. Would start?”
“When I was little, but . . . not anymore.”
“Then I’ll tell you a grown-up story. About being little. About a little boy . . . oh, let’s call him. Harry. Harry Potter. He was smart, but he was alone.”
“Harry Potter has friends. At school. Hogwarts. Not a lot, but . . . some.”
The minute Skip said it, she was terrified he’d think she was making fun of him, of all his starts and stops. She made her face go tight, so it wouldn’t hurt as much if he hit her again. But nothing happened.
“He made some. Friends then. The only thing my . . . little boy made. Was a volcano. For the science fair.”
She heard him take another big breath, closer to her. She pulled her face back; she pushed her whole body as far back into the school desk as she could, to get as far away from him as possible. But without looking like she was; that would make him mad. That would make him hit her again. Or worse.
“A paper-mache volcano. It erupted when you mixed baking soda with . . . what was it? Something acidic. Wet newspaper, chicken wire, flour and salt, and a battery. It was easy to make. So was maki
ng it explode. Boom.”
He stopped, and she didn’t know if he was catching his breath again, or just stopping to think.
“That’s what he won a prize for. The explosion. The . . . boom.”
She heard him take a deep breath, as if he were trying to smell it. The burnt, gassy mixture of an explosion. Skip could smell something in the room—age, decay, mold, neglect—but not that.
The man coughed, then continued. “He was good with his hands, our boy. What were we calling him?”
“Harry,” said Skip, afraid because he’d forgotten so quickly.
“Ah, yes. All those hours Harry spent, all alone, clicking away on a game box with his thumbs. It was just a short hop, skip, and a jump . . . ”—he laughed—“ . . . from using his thumbs at video games, to using all ten fingers on the computer. He got into computer hacking and learned things. He walked into the stock market and made money. He walked into real estate records and found things. He walked into doctors’ records and took the drugs he needed. He hired helpers and . . . ”
What was he talking about? He was going too fast now. He was throwing clues at her and she was trying to keep track but something was different. He’d jumped into being a grownup all of a sudden, talking about grown-up stuff, not about being a little kid, and . . .
He wasn’t stopping and starting anymore. He wasn’t having trouble breathing. That was it. He wasn’t telling a made-up story anymore. He wasn’t talking about a little boy named Harry. He was talking about himself.
“So by the time I finally came out here, so far from civilization, and I smelled those back country roads again, it was the smell that said, ‘I’ve come home.’ I mean . . . Harry had.”
Now he was moving around. Skip could sense shadows come and go, light and dark, even through the covering over her eyes. And she finally felt body heat, as he stopped in front of her. He was excited. Or scared.
“Vinegar, that was it! The acid in the volcano! That’s what made the explosion!”
He leaned even closer, to whisper in her ear.
“Boom.”
