by April Henry
“It’s different now, Jenny. There’s two of us. With two of us, we have a real chance.” My words were as much for myself as they were for her. “A chance to get past the dog. A chance to escape even if Sir hears us. Besides, no matter what happens, we’re going to have to deal with him. Inside or out there. Whatever he’s planning for either of us can’t be good.”
I was so tired. My whole body ached, and my head felt like there was something inside that wanted out. Pressing the heels of my hands against my temples, I ignored the little voice that suggested I needed to lie down again.
“We can’t go out there.” Jenny shook her head, her face stubborn and set. “We’d die.”
I took a deep breath and made myself say the truth. “Face it, Jenny. All our choices probably end in death. It might just come down to how fast it is. And maybe faster would be better.” I couldn’t force Jenny to come with me. So I would have to leave her behind while I tried to go for help. “If you won’t go with me, at least help me get out so I can try. It’s better if I leave while it’s still dark. While Sir’s asleep and maybe the dog is, too.”
“Will you even fit?”
Ignoring how the room started to spin, I tipped my head back to measure the space with my eyes. The vent was a little more than a foot square. “I think I will if I put my hips on the diagonal.” I would do it even if I had to strip naked. Even if it left gouges in my flesh. When I dropped my gaze back to Jenny, a wave of dizziness rolled over me. With my good hand, I steadied myself on the wall.
Her dark eyebrows drew together. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” I lied. Everything hurt, and I was so tired. I forced myself to ask the question that had been circling in my thoughts like a shark. “Have there been other girls?”
“I don’t think so. And you’re the first person I’ve seen except Sir in the last ten months.”
I guessed that counted as good news. If we were the first two girls to get taken, then Sir hadn’t had a chance to get good at it.
I flipped the switch in the bathroom to get more light, then stood on tiptoe for a closer look at the screws.
The top of each one was marked with two grooves in the shape of a cross. “They’re uh”—I tried to remember the term—“Phillips head screws. And you’re sure you don’t have a screwdriver?”
She rolled her eyes. “Do you really think he’d let me have something I could stab him with?”
Sarcastic Jenny was better than freaked-out Jenny. “I’m assuming that means you also don’t have a table knife.” What else might fit in the groove? “Do you have a dime? Or wait—maybe I have one in my wallet.”
“I don’t have one, and neither do you.” Seeing my confusion, Jenny elaborated. “I looked in your wallet to figure out who you were, remember? All you have is two quarters and a nickel.”
It was weird to think about how she had gone through my things while I was unconscious. Maybe living like a caterpillar in a jar for the past ten months had made her forget the concept of privacy.
After retrieving my wallet, I still attempted to use the coins I had, but they didn’t fit in the slot. Next I tried to fit my library card into the cross. But the long straight edge was a tiny bit too wide, as was my Wilson ID card. My driver’s license fit but was too flimsy. When I tried to turn it, it just flexed.
Then my eyes fell on the CDs next to the boom box. “Maybe one of these would work.” With my good hand, I managed to open a CD case for a band I had never heard of. Four guys all with ridiculously overgrown beards.
She looked stricken. “But those are the only CDs I have.”
Jenny was really starting to get on my nerves. “If this works, I’ll buy you a million CDs. Besides, you’ll still have the tapes.” To demonstrate, I pressed the button for the boom box’s tape player. Instead of playing some greatest hit from 1985, what came out was a girl’s voice, high and pure, unaccompanied. The girl was singing about how she was going to fly away on a bright morning when life was over.
I pushed the button again to turn it off. I knew that voice. “Is that you?” I asked.
She looked away from me. “I’m in choir. Or at least I used to be. I record myself and then I play the song back and sing the harmony.” Her face colored, flushing the parts that weren’t already red. “It makes me feel less alone.”
JENNY DOWD
Savannah stood directly under the vent, her head tilted back and her good arm straight overhead. “Righty-tighty, lefty-loosey,” she chanted as she slowly turned the CD she’d finally managed to fit into one of the screws.
“What are you saying?” I asked.
Her eyes didn’t shift from the point where the CD met the screw. “It’s how you know which direction to turn.”
“Isn’t that just counterclockwise?”
She made a raspberry sound. “That’s kind of hard to figure out, especially when it’s over your head and not right in front of you.” As she spoke, the CD slipped out of the screw slot. She squinted, poked her tongue out of the corner of her mouth, and reset the CD. Slowly, she began to twist the disc.
Savannah was so focused, without a single doubt. She seemed to think that getting out was going to be easy. Like we could just unscrew the vent, pull it down, climb out, and go. Like there weren’t worse things waiting for us out in the dark.
But what if she was right? What if it had been possible to leave all along, and I’d just been stupid enough to accept it this whole time?
A crow of triumph interrupted my thoughts.
“Yes!” After setting aside the CD, Savannah used her fingers to finish twisting out the newly loosened screw. She set it on the bathroom counter. Then with a grimace, she shook out her arm.
Rex was still out there. But Sir was probably asleep, the way Savannah said. And maybe she was even right that together we could figure out a way to get past the dog. After all, my wrists wouldn’t be duct taped. And if I went with her, there would be two of us.
We could still fail. We could still be killed. But her question kept echoing through me. Which was worse? To die or to keep living like this?
For the past ten months, I’d been existing in a stupor. Hunkered down, telling myself that the most important thing was simply to survive. Savannah was forcing me to wake up.
She picked the CD up again and set the edge of the disc in the next screw, but this time when she turned, it didn’t budge. She kept twisting it even as the silver plastic flexed and started to bend. Finally it broke. The snapping sound made us both jump. The broken piece fell to the carpet as she turned the CD to an unbroken edge. Now it lacked its earlier rigidity. Each time she tried to twist the screw, it was the disc that gave instead, creating a series of small cracks until finally a second big piece broke off. Meanwhile, the screw didn’t seem to be moving at all.
“Maybe try a different screw?” I ventured.
Without saying anything, Savannah moved on to another screw. Eventually she was able to loosen it. But her victory came at the expense of all my CDs. She piled the increasingly smaller shards next to the bathroom sink.
When Savannah turned to set the second screw next to the first, she staggered and nearly lost her balance.
“Here. Let me do it.” I held out my hand for the biggest remnant of CD. “You’re so tired you can’t even stand up. You should lie down for a while.”
“I’m fine.” Her face was covered by a slight sheen of sweat.
“You don’t look fine.” Savannah was starting to remind me of toddlers I babysat. The more tired they got, the more they protested they were wide awake. My gaze fell on her splinted arm. Her fingers looked like sausages, red and plump. “Look at your hand. It’s all swollen.”
“Yeah, well I think we have more important things to worry about than my hand.” She made a face, but still handed over the CD shard. “Okay, okay, I’ll sit down for a second.” She leaned against the wall and slid down until her face was even with her knees. She tipped her head forward.
It
took me a long time to seat the piece of CD in the screw. Thoughts crowded my head. If I let Savannah go out there by herself, how would she manage against Rex with one hand? And meanwhile, I would be all alone. Could I stand to go back to never having anyone to talk to? And it wasn’t like staying put would keep me safe. Sir was already mad at me for things I couldn’t control, like my face not healing. How much angrier would he be once he realized I had known what Savannah was doing and done nothing to stop it?
The piece of CD kept slipping out whenever I tried to turn it. My shoulder burned, and the pain began to crawl up the side of my neck. Finally I found the point where I generated enough force to keep the shard in the slot and turn. A spark of happiness traced through me as I twisted the plastic. And then it snapped into two pieces, neither of them bigger than an inch across.
The sound roused Savannah. She swore. “There has to be something else we can use.” She awkwardly pushed herself to her feet. In the kitchen area, she rattled the cupboard door. “Why won’t this open?”
“There’s a latch. I guess you wouldn’t want all your glasses falling out every time the RV took a turn.” My fingers reached past her and pressed down on the plastic hook so that the door swung open. “Are you hungry?”
She swallowed hard at the sight of my food: SpaghettiOs, canned tuna and peaches, generic Wheat Thins, and a jar of peanut butter, as well as a glass and a plastic plate. “No,” she said shortly.
“You should be,” I said. “I ate while you were sleeping, but it’s been at least twenty-four hours since you did.”
With her good hand, she waved away the suggestion. “Please stop talking about food.”
She managed to unlatch the single drawer tucked under the counter by herself. It was filled with a jumble of junk, including two metal spoons and a spork. She tried the corners of the spoon handles in a screw slot, but they were too big. After putting them back, Savannah looked at me with bleary eyes. “How much longer do we have until the sun comes up?”
In the hallway, I squinted up at the dark sky. Was it getting lighter? “I don’t know. But it does seem like it’s been a long time since it got dark.”
Aimlessly, I pawed through the junk drawer. And then I saw it, wedged in the back corner. The metal potato peeler. It barely worked, taking big chunks of apple or potato along with the skin. But what about the rounded tip that was meant to dig out bruises? Could it also dig us out of here?
Ignoring the ache in my shoulder from holding my hand above my head for so long, I set it in another screw. The peeler was so flimsy that it bent in my grip as I twisted it. But eventually it loosened the third screw. Long minutes later, the fourth was free. I was starting to think that it all might actually work. There were only two more screws. If we could just climb out before Sir noticed and then find a weapon before Rex found us, maybe we would stand a chance.
But when I started on the remaining screws, they refused to budge. I pushed the peeler so hard that it broke, cutting the tips of my index and middle fingers. Pressing them against the palm of my other hand to stop the bleeding, I looked down at Savannah, curled up on the stained carpet, to see what she thought we should do now. The sound of her breathing, soft and regular, made me realize that she was asleep. I crouched to wake her. But what was the point? The screws weren’t budging. I found myself lying down next to her.
I don’t know how many hours went by. When I woke up, Savannah was swearing as she looked at the two remaining screws. “They’re both stripped!”
I got to my feet and looked at the vent, squinting. I realized it was easier to see the screws because the sun had risen. Both screws were no longer topped with crosses. Now they were more like circles.
“But there are only two left.”
Tears sparkled in her eyes. “It doesn’t matter if there are two or twenty. There aren’t edges to work against anymore.”
And then things went from bad to worse. Outside, Rex began to bark.
After dropping to the floor, I scurried to the door. I pressed my eye to the tiny sliver where the tarp had slipped across the window. Through it, I saw Sir. A lightning bolt of fear shot down my spine. He was coming back.
“Get back into bed,” I scream-whispered at Savannah, who was staring at me with blurry eyes. “Get back into bed and pretend you’re still unconscious.”
AMY DOWD
When I got the phone call about Savannah Taylor, the missing girl, I hadn’t thought about my Jenny for almost ninety minutes. Which was nearly a record.
Especially on a Saturday. On weekdays at the bank, I could lose myself in the minutiae of the day. Talk to customers about the houses and cars they were buying, nod along as they enumerated the merits of wrap-around porches and side-curtain air bags.
In my desk drawer was a photo of a four-year-old Jenny. She had her arms wrapped tight around my neck and her head tucked into my shoulder. Looking at that photo hurt. Physically hurt. It set off a hollow ache in my chest and stomach, even my arms and legs.
But that wasn’t the reason I had hidden it away. No, I had done it so that no one would ask about her. I’d also changed my nameplate and business cards to my maiden name, even though the divorce wasn’t finished yet. I couldn’t deal with the way people looked at me when they saw the name Dowd.
The pain was no longer fresh and raw. Now it was like a throb, as constant as the hidden beat of my heart.
I always hoped that Jenny would come to me in a dream. But she never did. Bob said she had for him. Why not me? Was she mad that I had accepted her death?
Over the past ten months, I’d gained twenty pounds. Eating mindlessly helped my brain go quiet, as I rhythmically chewed and swallowed until the bag or box or bowl was empty. And there was no point in working out, in running on a treadmill to nowhere.
No matter how I spent my time, I was always one minute farther away from Jenny. And the space between us just kept getting wider.
It wasn’t like she had fallen through the cracks. Night after night, her disappearance was the lead story on the local news and then the national news. A pretty white teen from an intact family? The media ate that up.
The cops used dogs, helicopters, psychologists, hypnotists, and even a psychic who offered her services for free. They searched creeks and abandoned buildings. Questioned known child molesters. Staked out Island Tan at the exact time and day Jenny had disappeared, questioning anyone who might have heard or seen something.
Only they turned up nothing.
They lifted hundreds of fingerprints from the tanning shop and, one by one, ran them through the system. A few turned out to belong to people with criminal records, mostly girls who had shoplifted. A sizable percentage belonged to unknown people.
It was like Jenny had been teleported into a different dimension. I still lay awake at night trying out different scenarios. Had the dad or boyfriend of a client taken sick notice of her? Or was it someone she knew well? Had someone robbed the place and then decided to take the only witness as well? Was it even possible that she had left, run off with the money from the register? But her phone never pinged, and how far could you get on a couple of hundred dollars?
At work, I sometimes let myself pretend that she was at school. On weekends, I might imagine for a few hours that she was at a friend’s house. My counselor called these thoughts “defensive delusions.”
Pretending was the only way I could summon the energy to draw up contracts or make a simple meal, but there were times the mental game was so easy it scared me.
“Is it normal?” I’d asked the counselor at our last appointment. “Is this something other people do?”
“There is no normal,” she had said. “There are only things that allow you to survive.”
Did Bob still go to counseling? Blake had gone a half dozen times and then refused to go anymore.
The day Jenny went missing was the day our family shattered. As the hours stretched into days and then weeks, I shut down. Bob accused me of being cold. Of the two of
us, I’d always been the realist. Certainly, I’d have liked to imagine that Jenny had fallen and hit her head and forgotten who she was. Or that she’d been forced to steal the money or perhaps been trafficked and now was too embarrassed to come home. But of course those things weren’t true, so I’d had to accept that our daughter was dead. I wanted to believe that it happened quickly and she hadn’t suffered.
But that was probably as much a fantasy as Bob’s belief that she was alive and we just needed to find her.
After Jenny went missing, Blake started spending all his time at his friends’ houses. At first because their parents could give him the things we couldn’t—regular meals, a schedule, adults who weren’t shouting or weeping. But when we tried to resume our lives, Blake still chose to be with his friends as much as possible. I remember surfacing once to think how strange it was that we had become like distant relatives to our own son, trying to maintain contact with phone calls and regular visits.
While Blake found replacement families, I didn’t want to keep pretending that we were a real family anymore. It was just too painful. Except that once Bob moved out, I didn’t feel any better. I had craved silence, but it turned out that being alone in a quiet, empty house was worse.
The only pleasure I could look forward to was taking a small purple sleeping pill every night. Once I had emptied all those tiny pills into my palm. If my daughter was dead, I wanted to be dead, too. Something made me pour them back into the bottle.
I didn’t even feel human anymore. Most of the other humans I interacted with seemed as stupid as lambs being raised for slaughter. Not realizing their days were pointless and would soon end.
The only ones who could reach me were those parents who had survived the death of a child. For a few minutes, I could respect their pain. But even then, I found it didn’t last. Yes, your five-year-old might have died from cancer, but at least you’d been there for those last moments. At least you knew what happened. Yes, you might have lost your twelve-year-old to a drunk driver, but now you’d be able to go through all those stages of grieving: denial, anger, whatever.
