The Year We Hid Away

by Bowen, Sarina

  She looked me straight in the eye. “I would tell you. Of all the issues I have, that’s not one of them.”

  “Then why are you crying?”

  She pushed the tears away with one hand. “Nobody ever asked me that before. They were all too busy running the other way.”

  Jesus fuck. The smolder of fear in my chest flared into anger. And it was stuck somewhere right near the center of my chest. Slowly, I took a few deep breaths. “I was worried maybe that’s why you never told me your real name.”

  “That wasn’t it. I promise.”

  Andy’s shadow appeared. “This has turned into a pretty exciting game,” he said, sitting down on the other side of Scarlet.

  Trying to calm down, I checked the scoreboard. The game was now 3-3.

  “Quinnipiac is on a six-game streak,” Scarlet said, looking down onto the rink. “They’ve got great foot speed. But they’re graduating a fuckload of players, including most of their blue line guys.”

  A laugh got stuck in my throat, and I pulled her a little closer to me on the bench. “What hurts the most is that I never got to hear you talk hockey before.”

  Andy grinned. “Shan…” he caught himself. “Scarlet owns this place.”

  “Used to,” she corrected.

  “You were such a queen bee in High School,” he said.

  “Gee thanks,” She gave him a shaky smile. “If I was, I’m sorry.”

  Andy shrugged. “It’s just high school. I don’t get shoved into lockers anymore.”

  She stole a piece of his popcorn. “You missed it, Andy, but I got a taste of how the other half lives.”

  “You got shoved into lockers too?” He tipped the popcorn in her direction. “Have some more.”

  “Not exactly…” she broke off, eying a family was threading its way across the bleachers to sit down just in front of us. They settled themselves on the bench, and the mother began passing hot dogs to her two boys, who were middle school age.

  Scarlet pulled her hood down and took off her baseball cap, shaking her hair free. Then she leaned forward to put a hand on the woman’s shoulder. “Hi Mrs. Stein,” she said, her voice cheery. “Happy Thanksgiving.”

  The woman turned with a neighborly smile. And then when she recognized Scarlet, her face closed up tight. Then her husband, sensing a disturbance in the force, looked first at his wife and then craned his neck to see my girlfriend. He cleared his throat. “I think we forgot the…”

  “…Mustard,” his wife supplied. “Boys?” She stood up, nudging her sons toward the aisle.

  It was unbelievable. “Did they just…” I didn’t even want to say it out loud. “…Move their seats because of…?” You.

  “Yeah, I think they did,” Andy said, his eyes still following the family.

  “I used to babysit for them,” Scarlet said. She put her hat back on and pulled up her hood. “You have to understand the mindset around here. Those people are probably shuddering every time they remember leaving their kids with me.”

  “That makes no sense,” I argued. “You’re not…”

  “Him,” she finished my sentence. “To them, it doesn’t matter, okay? They’re freaked out, because they just figured out that monsters under the bed are real. They’re out of their minds, wondering how everyone missed it. So our name is like a toxin. You can stop wondering why I don’t have any friends, or why I changed my name, or why I remained a virgin until that night on Andy’s bed.”

  Andy choked on his soda.

  “I had one friend last year. Only one person would be seen with me, would sit with me at lunch. Andy — remember Anni Boseman? Blond, skinny?”

  “Sure,” Andy coughed.

  “Well, she had a nervous breakdown right before graduation. All year long she stood up for me. And then in May she just couldn’t get out of bed.” She swallowed, then looked up at me and Andy in turn. “I’m trying to tell you that being my friend is not that much fun.” She stole one more bite of popcorn. “You two are the only people in this four thousand seat arena knowingly sitting next to me. And if you both suddenly thought better of it, I wouldn’t call you crazy.”

  I hated that there wasn’t a thing I could say that would make things better for her. I could only flatten my hand against Scarlet’s back, and rub circles of warmth into her skin. Scarlet closed her eyes in appreciation. When she opened them, Andy was studying her. “What?” she asked.

  “You must have been recruited by Harkness to play goalie.”

  She swallowed. “Sure. The coach was not terribly happy when I quit the first week of school.”

  “You and Bridger both,” he said. “That sucks.”

  “We’re the hockey quitters club, party of two,” I said.

  “That just leaves you more time for…” he cleared his throat. “Each other.”

  Scarlet put her head in her hands. “I can’t believe I said that out loud.”

  Andy shook his head. “At least somebody has fun in my bed.”

  “We’ll drop you at home,” I said as we left the stadium after the game.

  “I’m going to walk,” she said quickly.

  “Why?”

  “Well, there are TV vans in front of my house. Can you just let me be the only one who’s…” she stopped in the middle of the sentence, looking for the right words. “Tainted by the whole thing. Please?”

  The parking lot lights illuminating her small face. “If that’s really what you want.”

  “Trust me, it is. And hey — I can save you the whole meet-the-parents drama.”

  “Yeah? We can skip that at my house too.” I held up a hand for a high five, and she slapped it.

  “Will we see you this weekend?” Andy asked, his grin friendly. My neighbor was such a good guy. And my debt to him grew a little larger every day.

  She chewed her lip. “I don’t think so, actually. I might not stay the whole weekend, if I can help it.”

  “Call me,” I said, hugging her one more time. “It wasn’t nice of you not to answer all afternoon.”

  “They took my phone.”

  I stepped back from her. “Seriously? How will I know you’re okay?”

  “I’ll be fine,” her face had closed down again. She looked as rattled as I’d ever seen her. “I’ll jump through their hoops, and in a couple days, we’ll all be back at school.”

  “You could ride back with us on Sunday,” Andy offered. “There’s room in the car.”

  “Thanks, I’ll ask my overlords,” she said. “And I’d fit, because it’s not like they let me pack any luggage.”

  I kissed her quickly. “Everything about this stinks.”

  “Welcome to my world,” she said.

  — Scarlet

  When I woke up on Thanksgiving morning, it was to the smell of onions and garlic. My mother had a rule — she’d always doubled the garlic in recipes. “For a good result, double the garlic,” she’d said more times than I could count. I’d probably hear her say it today, too.

  My mother was a piece of work. There could be a lynch mob on our front yard, burning a cross into the lawn, and she would stand in the kitchen with a perfect manicure and spout cooking advice.

  By the time I made my way down to the kitchen, my mother had made stuffing and wrestled a turkey into the oven. “I could use your help peeling the potatoes,” she said.

  Peel the potatoes. Speak to your father’s defense attorneys. Welcome to Thanksgiving at the Ellison residence.

  I found a peeler and got to work. When my father eventually wandered into the kitchen, he greeted me with a single question. “Who won the game?”

  I bit back the litany of things I would have liked to scream. Who cares? Why is hockey the only thing you’ve ever talked about? Why do I have to come home to the insane asylum for Thanksgiving? How on earth did it come to this?

  What I said was: “Quinnipiac, in overtime.”

  I peeled the vegetables and then went back upstairs. Walking into my room, my eye went straight to the c
orner where I used to keep Jordan. Without my favorite escape, it was so hard to pass the time. Exams were coming up, but of course I didn’t have my books with me.

  When you found yourself missing your statistics textbook, things were really going poorly.

  Beneath me, the house was quiet. Thanksgiving had always been like this, just the three of us. My mother’s parents were killed in a plane crash when she was seventeen. And my father’s parents were out of the picture too. He’d grown up in Canada “under the thumb of that drunk,” as he referred to his father. Apparently I’d met them once at a hockey game in Calgary when I was four. I don’t remember.

  Then there was my uncle Brian. He was six years younger than my father, and they’d never been close. We saw him maybe once a year when he came through town, usually during my hockey season. I’d heard my mother tell her friends that Uncle Brian was in jail when I was born. The last time I saw him was last fall, during the thick of the investigation. He’d come to the door unannounced, startling both my parents. “We have to talk,” I’d heard him say. “You need to take my calls.”

  At that, my parents shooed me upstairs and closed the door to the den. I heard about ten minutes of muffled shouting, and then he was gone.

  Now I wished he was here to break up the stillness. There was a lot of thick irony over Uncle Brian’s absence, now that I thought about it. He was never around because my parents — with their love of success and appearances — couldn’t stomach having a felon for a family member. Uncle Brian was a perfectly respectable social worker now, from what I could gather. My mother had let that slip out once when I asked about him.

  He lived in Massachusetts, which was not all that far away. But even so, he was never invited for Thanksgiving. And now my father was on his way to having the mother of all criminal records, a string of felonies after his name.

  So much for keeping up appearances.

  I did not dress up for my interview with the lawyers. When I went into the kitchen the morning after Thanksgiving, it was in a pair of jeans too baggy to have made it into the suitcase I packed for school, and the hoodie I’d worn to the hockey game.

  “You look terrible, Shannon,” my mother said, her eyes hard. “Have a little respect.”

  “Maybe if you’d let me pack for the weekend like a normal person, I’d have something nice to wear.”

  That shut her up. We spoke no more words until Azzan nodded toward the door. “It’s time to go,” he said.

  I followed him out. Because I had no choice.

  “Can I get you coffee, Shannon?” The female lawyer was impeccably dressed in a dove grey suit and pink silk shirt. She paused, her fingertips resting on the polished wood of the conference table.

  “My name is not Shannon,” I corrected. The objection sounded petty. But I didn’t want them to think they could treat me however they wished.

  “Sorry, Scarlet,” she said smoothly. “My mistake. Would you like a beverage?”

  “No thank you. Let’s just get this done.”

  Two more people entered the room — another lawyer and a legal assistant. The assistant adjusted a video camera standing on a tripod in the corner, where a red light winked on.

  “Why are you videotaping me?” I asked.

  “In case we need to review,” she said.

  Lovely. “Okay, whatever.”

  She sat down in front of me, a yellow legal pad and a pen poised in front of her. “Could you state your name and address for the record?”

  The questions started out slow and dull — facts of my life, birth date, how long I’d lived in my father’s house. “Far too long,” I said, wondering if I could shake them off by acting like a bitch.

  “Measured in years, how long have you lived in your father’s house?” the lawyer asked.

  With a sigh, I told it to her straight.

  Eventually, the questions got meatier. “Scarlet, has your father ever touched you inappropriately?”

  “No,” I said. “Never.” It was an easy question. “In fact, he never touched me in any way — no pats on the head, no hugs. He’s the opposite of affectionate.”

  The lawyer paused. “This works better if you just answer the question. No need to fill in details unless I ask.”

  “Fine,” I shrugged.

  “Did your father ever hit you?”

  “Once,” I said. “I yelled in his face, and he slapped me.”

  “When did this occur?” she asked.

  “I was fifteen, and it only happened once. But two days ago, your guy Azzan slapped me after kidnapping me off the street.”

  I wanted her to break her pretty facade, but it didn’t really work. “Please answer the questions you’re asked.”

  “I thought you’d want to know what your employee did.”

  “You may take that up as a separate matter after this interview, if you choose. Did your father ever hit you on another occasion?”

  “No.”

  “Have you ever seen your father hit, assault or molest anyone?”

  “No.” Not unless verbal abuse counted. “Not physically.”

  “Hitting, assaulting and molesting are all physical actions. Did you see your father do any of those things?”

  “No.”

  “Have you ever seen your father touch his hockey players inappropriately?”

  I shook my head. “There’s a lot of butt patting in hockey, between coaches and players. But that’s everybody, and there’s about an inch of foam between players and their butts.”

  “I’ll repeat the question. Have you ever seen your father touch his hockey players inappropriately?”

  “No.”

  And so it went. Every question she posed produced a harmless answer. As the interview went on, I came to understand that they were using me to construct a family narrative that implied: nothing to see here! My answers painted what was actually a bland portrait of the man.

  Of course, she never asked me if he screamed like a lunatic every time I missed a shot in practice, if his face turned the color of raw meat when he was angry. She didn’t want to hear about that.

  When all her questions were finished, I let Azzan drive me back to the house. I climbed the stairs to my room wondering what Bridger and Andy and Lucy were up to. I hoped they were all on a sofa somewhere, watching a movie. Or maybe they’d taken Lucy ice skating, or bowling. That’s what normal people did on the Friday after Thanksgiving. People who weren’t me.

  Chapter Thirteen: You Have a Future at the CIA

  — Scarlet

  “Can I have my phone back now?” We were finally on our way back to Harkness. Azzan hadn’t let me ride with Andy and Bridger. He insisted on driving me back himself.

  “Maybe,” he grunted. “There’s something I need to ask you. In your call history, I found a missed call from the State of New Hampshire. The caller left a voicemail, which you erased.”

  My heartbeat went wild. “So?”

  “The prosecutor’s office called you.”

  “Well, Sherlock, did you check my outgoing calls too? Because I didn’t call them back. It’s not personal. I don’t want to talk to anybody about the trial.”

  He smirked. “The thing is, Shannon, I believe you. I’m sure you’d like nothing more than to forget your family exists. But we’re not going to let you do that. Your name is officially on the witness list, which will be filed tomorrow.”

  “It is?” Damn it.

  “Yes it is. So I need you to listen to me right now. Don’t talk to anyone about the case. And if the prosecutor contacts you again, I want you to call me immediately, and tell me who it was and exactly what he or she said.”

  “Okay.” Instinct told me to agree with everything that came out of his ugly little mouth.

  “They might promise you they only need fifteen minutes, they only want to talk about you personally. But that would all be a total lie, understand?”

  “Sure.”

  “All you have to do is keep it together for a few
months, sit in the courtroom a few times like a good kid, and this will all be over.” He slipped my phone from his breast pocket and handed it over. “I put my number in your contacts.”

  “Okay Azzan.” That’s it. Play the good girl.

  He leaned back in his seat. “It looks like it’s pretty serious with this Bridger guy. He’s the only one you ever call or text.”

  It squicked me out to think of Azzan sifting through the calls on my phone. “So?” I asked. “That only proves that I don’t have many friends. Harkness is hard work.”

  “Uh huh. Who’s Lulu?”

  My mouth went completely dry. “Just another friend. What do you care?”

  “You’re right, I don’t really. But you probably do.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Shannon, you do what your family needs you to do, and I won’t have to go crawling up your boyfriend’s ass, okay? With just his name and phone number, I can find out who he calls, who he owes, and whether or not he’s ever had a parking ticket. Maybe a little bag of pot turns up in his dorm room if you’re not a good girl. Think about it.”

  I tasted bile in my throat, and my view of the road began to go blurry at the edges.

  “Breathe, Shannon,” Azzan said. His laugh sounded like a stutter. “These are simple things we ask of you. Answer all our questions. Don’t answer any of the other side’s questions. Do it right, and everything will be fine with you and lover boy.”

  I forced myself to face him. “I don’t think my father would like you threatening me.”

  He only smiled. “Honey, your dad is a washed up old man with a weakness for fucking little boys up the ass.”

  My stomach clenched, and I struggled to keep my face impassive.

  “See, I don’t work for your dad. I work for his lawyer. And his lawyer took this shitty case knowing that everything had to go exactly right. And that’s my job. Even if you go whining to daddy, it won’t make a difference. He can’t fire his lawyer right before jury selection.” Azzan switched on the radio.

  I spent the rest of the trip looking out the window, counting down the mile markers.