Amy Chelsea Stacie Dee

by Mary G. Thompson

  “I know you would try,” I say. I stare at them. I am going to sit here and stare until they give up and go away. But the woman won’t just let me do that.

  “Amy,” she says. She sits down next to me in the other chair in front of Dr. Kayla’s desk. “We know that you love your cousin. We know that’s why you’re doing this.” She reaches out and takes my hand. She has brown eyes. There is a doll that she looks like, but I can’t place the name. I don’t understand how I could have forgotten. I can see the doll as if she’s right in front of my eyes. And that makes me like this woman more. She could be like me.

  “You don’t know what I know,” I say.

  “That’s why we’re asking you these questions,” the woman says. “We want to understand. Amy, it’s been more than two weeks since you came home. Every day that passes makes it harder for us to find her.”

  • • •

  In the forest, there was a tree. There were lots of trees, of course, but there was this one tree that was bigger than the other ones around it. I used to tell Lola and Barbie that the tree was magic, that there were fairies, and that was why there were mushrooms on it. The fairies lived in the mushrooms. Lola would always ask me, if there were really fairies, why couldn’t we see them? I would say that fairies can make themselves invisible, and then I would put my hand over my face, and I would say, you can’t see me, I must be a fairy. And then she would laugh and say that I was not a fairy, I was just putting a hand over my face. But one night, I saw her doing it. She put her hand over her face and then Barbie said, a fairy! And then Barbie put her hand over her face, and Lola pretended that she couldn’t see her.

  They knew it was just a game, but they also knew it was magic.

  • • •

  “That’s enough for one day,” Dr. Kayla says. I hear the cops shuffling around and the door opening and closing, and I know that Dr. Kayla is still there. I can feel her breathing.

  “You can take your hand away. It’s just me,” she says.

  I do it, but I look down at my lap. When the police look at me, they see either a crazy person or a monster. They see a person who would let her own cousin die instead of telling them what they need to know. It’s right for them to see me that way because there is part of me that is a monster. And there is part of me that is crazy, because when you get beat up by a big man and you listen to your cousin being raped, and you disappear into the woods for six years, that is what happens. But there is another part of me that’s not crazy, that’s doing what’s right for Stacie and for Barbie and Lola. They will not convince me that what I’m doing now is wrong.

  Dr. Kayla sits down next to me. “Amy, your aunt has filed papers with the court to compel you to give a deposition. Do you know what that is?”

  “No,” I say.

  “It means that you would have to answer questions.”

  “Or what?” I ask.

  “Well, or be in contempt of court,” she says.

  “I’m not going to answer,” I say. My mind spins. I shouldn’t be surprised. Dee is Aunt Hannah’s daughter. She would do anything to find her.

  “My job will be to evaluate you and tell the court whether you will be harmed if you testify,” she says.

  It isn’t me who will be harmed. I say nothing.

  “You will be able to discuss this with your parents, and you can get a lawyer for yourself.”

  “Am I going to jail?” I ask.

  “No,” she says. “I can’t imagine that anyone would send you to jail. Your aunt just wants answers. She doesn’t know what else to do.” I’m still looking down at my lap, but I can see the lower part of her face, how her mouth turns a little bit up as if she’s trying to smile, but she’s sad. I don’t think she wants me to go to jail. But I think she wants me to talk. She thinks that if she helps me, then I will want to talk, and everything will be okay.

  “Thank you,” I say.

  “You’re welcome, Amy.” She puts a hand over mine and squeezes.

  Tears well up in my eyes. Dr. Kayla wants everything to be okay.

  MY PARENTS ARE LIVID. They can’t believe Aunt Hannah would do this. But at the same time, they look at me with those sad eyes, like they wish I would just talk. No one will say it; even Jay isn’t saying it as we sit at the dinner table. We eat in complete silence.

  Jay gets up and cleans his plate, and then he goes to the freezer and gets out an ice cream bar. He takes it into the living room to eat, leaving the three of us at the table.

  “We’re going to get you a lawyer,” my dad says.

  “Dr. Kayla is not going to let this happen,” my mom says. “You need time. After what you’ve been through, you deserve all the time you need.” But her eyes don’t agree with what she’s saying. Her eyes say that she feels what Aunt Hannah feels. It’s only because she loves me that she can hold it back behind her brown eyes, eyes like mine.

  No one says anything else, and we’re all done eating, but no one moves to get up from the table until the phone rings.

  Dad jumps in his chair, and he knocks over his water glass. It goes everywhere, soaking into the tablecloth. He curses and picks up his glass as Mom goes to answer it.

  “Hello?” she says. She stares at me with those sad eyes. “It’s for you.” She holds the phone out.

  I think that it must be Lee. I wonder if she had anything to do with what her mom has done. She said she doesn’t want to know, but maybe that isn’t true. Maybe she wants to make me talk, but she’ll pretend that she doesn’t. All of her being nice to me, it could be a trick. But if that’s true, I can’t let on that I know.

  I take the phone. “Hello?”

  “Amy! It’s Vinnie,” says the voice.

  “Oh, um . . .” It takes me a second to remember. It’s like the party two nights ago happened in another life, that parallel world where Amy never went away.

  “So I knew you probably wouldn’t call me. I mean, why would you? But Lee gave me your number, and she told me I could call but not to bother you, so I’m not trying to bother you, all right?”

  “All right,” I say.

  “Well, I was wondering if you want to hang out, like we talked about?”

  “Um . . . when?”

  “Well, tonight. You don’t have plans, do you? We don’t have to hang out at my house. I mean, that was a stupid idea. Who wants to do that? We could go to the library, though. They have graphic novels. Or maybe you like geography. I hear they have a lot of maps. I mean, atlases.”

  “Atlases?”

  “All kinds of atlases,” he says. “Africa, Venezuela, Europe.”

  “That sounds . . .” I know I don’t want to stay here right now. I know I can’t take another minute of my mom’s sad eyes, of the silence. Even though it’s all my fault.

  “Dumb, I know, but that’s me. I’m good for dumb.”

  “It sounds great,” I say.

  “Cool. I could pick you up.”

  “Okay,” I say.

  “Great!” He hangs up fast. I guess he was worried that I’d change my mind.

  My mom is staring at me.

  “It’s okay,” I say. “It’s just Vinnie. Mini Vinnie Openheimer. Lee introduced me to him again. He wants to take me to the library.”

  “I don’t know,” my mom says.

  “I need something to read,” I say. Now that my mom is trying to stop me, I know I need to get out of the house. Nothing could be more important. If I don’t get out, I’ll start to scream. It wells up in me, and I stuff it back. It’s like when you’re sick and you’re trying not to throw up. I almost can’t hold it back, but I do. But the scream is still there.

  “Honey, we’re going to have to prove that you aren’t able to talk about what happened,” she says. “What if somebody sees you?”

  “I’m going,” I say. I think this is what normal teenagers do. They
fight with their mothers over going out. I go into the living room, and Jay is watching TV and finishing his ice cream. As I walk in, he hurriedly flips the TV off.

  “Good luck,” he says.

  “What do you mean?” I ask.

  “You’ll never hear the end of it. You weren’t using drugs, were you?” he mimics. “Were there any parents there? What about girls? You didn’t answer your phone. What was I supposed to think?”

  What if you were kidnapped? That’s why Mom is always worried about him. It’s just one more way I ruined his life.

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  “Amy, come on, I didn’t mean it’s your fault.” He takes a last bite of ice cream and swallows it with a grimace that says cod liver oil, not sweet.

  “It is, though,” I say. “Everything.”

  “Amy—”

  But I don’t wait to hear what he has to say. I know what he really thinks, and it’s true. If I had never gotten in the car, if I had run, if I would just tell them, they would be happier. But I didn’t, and I can’t. It’s too late. I grab my Safeway bag, go out the front door, and sit on the curb to wait for Vinnie. I can see my mom peeking through the living room window. I put my head between my legs, and I scream without opening my mouth. I scream and scream and scream until I see feet in front of me. They are big, floppy man feet.

  “Hey,” Vinnie says.

  I jump up. “Hey.” I run toward his car, which is parked right across the street. It’s an old Toyota Corolla, and he rushes in front of me and opens the door. I jump in, and I guess he takes his cue from me, because he runs around to his side and stuffs himself in the front seat. The car is too small for him and he’s bent over as he puts the car into gear, and we shoot off down the street. A few seconds later, we jerk to a stop at a stop sign. I think his bad driving has rattled the scream out of me.

  “Are you okay?” he asks, gunning it again. We shoot across the intersection and careen along.

  “Y-yes,” I say.

  “It seemed like someone was chasing you.”

  “My mom doesn’t want me to go out,” I say.

  “Oh, well, I can see that. She’s a mom. She probably thinks about you like you’re still ten.” We speed around a corner and then take off again. “My mom doesn’t want me to drive, but since I got my license, she kind of has to let me.” He says this as if they’re the same thing, my mom believing I’m a little girl and his mom having a realistic fear that he will kill himself while driving. “You made it through that party all right,” he says. “Anyway, lots of crazy people go out. You can’t keep them all in.”

  “Right,” I say. “True.”

  “Not that you’re crazy,” he says, pulling into the library parking lot. We hit the curb in front of the parking spot, and I’m thrown back against my seat. “Unless you are. That’s okay, too.”

  “I think I’m a little crazy,” I say.

  “Oh, okay, cool.” He jumps out of the car, runs around to my side, and opens my door.

  I step out, and I can feel him above me. But there’s less of him than there was of Kyle. I didn’t notice that before, how Vinnie is thinner. Because Vinnie isn’t skinny. But Kyle had some fat hanging off him. No matter how healthy he ate and how much he exercised, he couldn’t get rid of it. Vinnie is solid. He probably doesn’t have any fat anywhere on his body.

  He takes a step back, and we walk across the parking lot with a foot between us. The parking lot seems long and looming. It takes a lot of steps to get across it.

  “I guess you need a library card,” he says as he holds the door open for me.

  “I had one,” I say.

  “Great. You just need to renew it. So what do you think? Graphic novels? There’s the teen section.” He points. “I always head straight for fantasy. You know, dragons?” He holds up his hands like they’re claws and grins big.

  “That’s your dragon?” I ask.

  “Sure.” He hisses. “That’s what dragons sound like.” He hisses again.

  I burst out laughing.

  The lady behind the desk glares at us, but she’s laughing a little bit, too.

  “I had this story about dragons,” I say as we head for the fantasy section.

  “Which one was it?” he asks.

  “Well, I made it up. There was this dragon that had green wings. But she wanted red wings like her sister.”

  “Did she breathe fire?”

  “Yes, but that didn’t matter,” I say. “All dragons breathe fire, but only some of them have red wings.”

  “What about gold? Seems like I’d worry about how much gold I had, if I were a dragon.”

  “I don’t think they knew what gold was,” I say.

  “Who didn’t know?” he asks. He pulls a book off the shelf and examines the cover. He acts like this question is nothing at all.

  I can’t believe I said that. I pick up a book, too. This one is not about dragons. It’s about a lady wearing improbable armor that shows off her boobs. She also has a sword that’s probably too big for her to use. I try to remember if I taught the girls about gold or not. I must have taught them about money. That must have been something we talked about. Kyle used to count it. He had a wad that he kept in his pocket all the time, like he was worried that we would steal it. Even after years had gone by, after he stopped locking us inside the cabin, he still kept that money in his pocket.

  “I’m sorry,” Vinnie says. “I know you don’t want to talk about it.”

  I keep looking at the book. I want to go away into my mind now. Why am I always going away when I don’t want to, and now that I want to, I’m still here?

  “Hey, want to do something more fun? I mean, books are nice but they kind of make you think about things, don’t they?”

  I nod. I’m not sure what he means, but suddenly the tall shelves are placed too closely together. They lean over me. The books seem to hover on the shelves as if they might fall at any moment. Or jump. I want to get out of this building.

  “We’ll just check out a few so your mom thinks we were here the whole time.” He heads for another section of the library and starts pulling books off the shelves. “Graphic novels, teen stuff,” he says. “And this one’s new? What do you think?” It has a picture of a girl on the cover, but her head is cut off. She’s facing away from the camera, too, looking off into the distance, her dress flowing around her feet. Vinnie doesn’t wait for me to answer, just brings them all up to the counter. I stand behind him, hoping the lady checking out the books can’t see me. I want to put my hand in front of my face, but I don’t. If I do that, people will just look at me more.

  It seems like it takes another hour, but finally Vinnie takes the books and leads the way back out the door. His jeans are dark and new, I notice. Not like Kyle’s, which were faded and ratty. And Vinnie wears a T-shirt that hangs loose and doesn’t stick to his belly. His hair is shorter and there’s no gray in it. There’s nothing about Vinnie that’s like Kyle at all.

  Vinnie throws the books in the backseat of the car and turns to me. “So I guess you don’t know how to drive,” he says.

  “No.” That’s just one more thing Kyle took from me. I’m supposed to have my license now. I’m supposed to be terrorizing my friends the way Vinnie terrorizes his.

  “Want to learn?”

  “From you?” I blurt. I put my hand over my mouth.

  He laughs. “You know what they say—if you can’t do, teach.” He smiles, and his mouth is normal sized, and his eyes light up. He’s not mad at me at all. He waves at the parking lot in front of us, which is attached to the parking lot for the elementary school next door. It’s almost all empty. “Plenty of space and nothing to hit. This is where my mom used to take me.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Come on, you’ll love it. Driving is what freedom’s all about.” He opens the driver
’s side door and waves an arm.

  “Freedom sounds good,” I say. I slide into the driver’s seat.

  “There’s a thing under the seat.” He reaches between my legs and pulls a lever. With both hands he moves my seat forward with me in it. Before I can do or say anything, he’s pulled away again and is running around to the passenger side. He hands me the key. “Let’s get this party started!” he says, grinning.

  I put the key in the ignition. Ten minutes later, I’m doing a circle around the parking lot, and the grin on my face is bigger than the grin on his. I imagine slamming my foot on the gas pedal and pulling out into the street. And then? I could go away. I could go somewhere where no one knew me, where no one would ask any questions. Instead, I make another circle and another. I stop and start and turn and park and start up again.

  Vinnie talks. He tells me about all the kids we went to school with together before and what happened to them, who got tall like him and who is still short and who got ugly and who got hot. “You’re lucky you missed middle school,” he says. “Middle school was terrible. In sixth grade I got beat up all the time. See this scar?” He points to something on his chin. “But then I got big. I don’t see why that means you have to beat people up, though.”

  I drive faster, around and around and around.

  “Once I got tall, people said I should start playing basketball, so I did, but then after a few practices, people started saying I should maybe not play basketball. Somebody said I should join the chess club, so I did that, but chess is hard. You know?”

  I stop the car and start it again.

  “Anyway, high school is better. People still call me Mini Vinnie, but nobody tries to beat me up. I joined the choir. Want to hear me sing?” He doesn’t wait for an answer, but launches into some song I’ve never heard before, something about the stars and the moon colliding. But his voice is actually good. I don’t realize that I’ve completely stopped the car until it’s over.

  “That was really good,” I say.

  “Thanks. I think I’ve found my calling. Something that doesn’t require coordination.” We’re both silent for a few seconds. It’s getting dark outside. The library has closed and the couple final cars have left the parking lot. “Do you want to go home?” he asks.