Safe

by S. K. Barnett

  “Dead,” I said.

  That seemed to be a buzzkill. Using a word like that. Anyway, it shut everybody up.

  “I’m really tired,” I said. “Can I go to sleep?”

  “Of course,” Dad said. “You must be . . . Jesus, we should have realized . . .”

  Mom said she’d make up the sofa bed for me.

  “Is that okay?”

  “Sounds comfy,” I said. Then we all stood up as if we were leaving a restaurant. Everyone except Ben, who stayed where he was, eyeing me the way security guards eyeball shoplifters—good security guards, not ones like Mr. Hammered.

  I waited inside my old room while Mom brought in sheets and pillows, Dad grunting as he pulled out the mattress from the inside of the couch, both of them trying very hard to show me how happy they were that I was back home.

  “Can I give you a nightgown?” Mom asked. “I think we’re about the same size.”

  “A T-shirt’s fine,” I said. “That’s what I’m used to wearing.”

  “Really, you sure? Okay, I’ve got plenty of those.”

  She brought in a blue T-shirt that said COSTA RICA on it, and Dad asked me if I wanted him to turn up the thermostat.

  “No, it’s fine, Dad.”

  It was the first time I’d called him that, Dad, and I saw him physically flinch, then blush. “Okay . . . well, good night,” he said, standing awkwardly by the door, looking like a first date who doesn’t know if he should kiss or quit.

  “See you in the morning,” he said.

  Mom gave me a hug—a real one—but after she left and closed the door behind her, she tiptoed back in with something in her hand. I’d already turned off the lights and slipped into bed, so I couldn’t see what it was at first. Then I did.

  “I don’t know why I kept it,” she said. “Dad made me throw everything out. After the third year. Because it was too painful, I guess. He was right. It was. But I kept one thing, just one . . . for in case. Good night, Jenny . . .”

  Goldy.

  I nestled it under my neck, where the soft mane tickled my throat. I thought it smelled of childhood. The good kind.

  Just before I drifted off, I heard someone walking up the stairs, then stopping just outside my door.

  “Ha,” Ben said.

  SIX

  Laurie

  She woke up at least five times during the night—she counted, the way other people count sheep. She’d been dreaming about Jenny—the six-year-old Jenny, who used to haunt her dreams on a regular basis, forever screaming for help that never came.

  Laurie had been given industrial-strength sleeping pills back then, courtesy of her psychiatrist, Dr. Leslie, but she’d never taken them, even though she’d sometimes pretend to in order to stop Jake from hounding her about it. She understood—it was him being jolted awake by his dissembling wife’s sobbing on a near nightly basis.

  Can you describe your emotional state? Dr. Leslie had asked her.

  No, can you?

  The thing is, she hadn’t wanted to stop seeing Jenny. She couldn’t see her daughter wide-awake, so seeing her in nightmares had to do. Being terrified awake or sleeping—was there really a difference?

  She was deep into her short-lived God phase by then—having run back to the church the way you run back to your mother’s arms when you’re desperate for the comfort of home. If psychiatry couldn’t save her, maybe the church could—where you were allowed to call dream figures souls, and your emotionally wrenching nightmares visions.

  Over the years, the frequency of those visions began to lessen, and Jenny became an unreliable guest. Laurie would go months without seeing her, years even, only to have her unexpectedly pop in like that family member who’d long ago moved away but couldn’t pass through without saying hi.

  Tonight was different. As if someone had blown the dust off that family album and made it magically spring to life. Jenny wasn’t screaming anymore. She was shrieking with six-year-old glee as she galloped through the house on her favorite Palomino—life-size and snorting plumes of hot vapor—then suddenly performing pirouettes across the basement floor in Laurie’s cavernous high heels. They may have been the best dreams Laurie ever had.

  After she woke up for the fifth time, she slipped out of bed. She had to see if an actual eighteen-year-old was sleeping down the hall.

  Was that actually possible?

  When she got to the door, she hesitated for a moment, wondering if all she’d see was a closed fold-out couch, unused Xbox, and dusty diorama—a daughter’s bedroom remodeled into virtual unrecognizability in an effort to obliterate memory. They’d been like Stalinists, Jake and her, airbrushing a once-important personage out of the picture as if she’d never existed.

  The most excruciating part had been removing Jenny’s things, because they were the closest things to Jenny. Each toy or doll or dress they threw into the cavernous packing box felt like throwing clumps of dirt onto her coffin—her final burial. Laurie had to take a break in the middle of it just in order to breathe. And there was all that unexpected stuff they stumbled across—a birthday card Jenny had drawn for her brother—Hapy birhdy Bne—three silver dollars and an Indian-head nickel she’d been given by her grandfather, a stable she’d constructed from Popsicle sticks and Elmer’s glue. Each item cracking open another door into memories they were dutifully trying to suppress, and each door opening inward, pressing painfully into what was left of her heart.

  Once the room was empty, it was easier. Then they could pretend it was just a room: four walls, a floor, and a ceiling. They bought the desk where Ben would do his homework and Laurie would pay her bills, they mounted that big flat-screen TV to the wall and hooked it up to Ben’s Xbox. A home office, a game room—call it whatever you wanted, as long as you didn’t call it Jenny’s bedroom.

  Of course, Laurie kept one toy from banishment to Goodwill, a golden horse belonging to a golden child, stashing it under a precarious tower of shoeboxes in her clothing closet—the one Jake never ventured into without a search warrant.

  She’d pretty much forgotten about that toy—until she’d seen it today in one of the photos in the album. Four-year-old Jenny dancing Goldy across the floor of her bedroom, oblivious to the camera being held by a mother equally oblivious of what was to come. That unimaginable moment, when life would be separated into before and after.

  Laurie pushed the door open.

  For a moment, blackness. She had to wait a few seconds for her eyes to acclimate to the dark before she could see that the fold-out couch was actually folded out, and, yes, there was a person lying on top of it.

  Laurie could hear her breathing, ragged and restless like a broken-down air conditioner. She wondered what she was dreaming about. Something horrible, probably, remembering what the female detective had told them.

  Why did she wait so long to run away? Laurie had asked her.

  They were her parents since she was six years old. They were monsters, sure—but they were her monsters.

  And Laurie had thought there was something awful about relegating monster to a relative term. Even if it was true. There were all sorts of monsters let loose in this world, the detective was saying, and some of them belonged to you.

  This is Jenny, she told herself.

  Their friends the Shapiros had adopted twin daughters from Colombia, and as they were walking into the room where two complete strangers were going to be ushered into their arms, Amy Shapiro had whispered a kind of mantra to herself: These are my daughters, she’d told herself, Meghan and Molly Shapiro, these are my daughters.

  That’s what Laurie was doing now.

  This is my daughter, Jenny.

  She didn’t look like Jenny—Jenny was six years old with dimpled knees. She didn’t act like Jenny—Jenny liked to gallivant around the house singing songs from Mulan. She didn’t talk like Jenny either, whose mi
ssing front tooth made her t’s whistle.

  It didn’t matter.

  This is my daughter, Jenny.

  Who suddenly shifted and moaned, throwing an arm up as if to ward off a bad dream, her hand clenched into a tight fist. Her hair was a tangled mess and so was the blanket, as if she’d been wrestling with it before finally pinning it into a kind of submission.

  Laurie let herself sink into the lumpy mattress the way you slowly lower yourself into a hot bath, then tentatively brushed away several strands of gold that were stuck to Jenny’s forehead. She stroked her hair and whispered, “Shhhhh.”

  “Shhhhhh . . .”

  Jenny’s eyes blinked open.

  Jake had once set a trap for a possum that’d been mauling their backyard gardenias, but it’d been Laurie who’d first discovered it hissing and writhing in its makeshift prison. It was the possum’s eyes that still haunted her—twin beacons of panic.

  That’s what Jenny’s eyes looked like now.

  “Once there was a little bunny who wanted to run away,” Laurie whispered, continuing to stroke her hair.

  “So he said to his mother, ‘I am running away . . .’”

  Jenny blinked.

  “‘If you run away,’ said his mother, ‘I will run after you . . .’”

  She blinked again, and Laurie could see a single tear slowly rolling down her cheek. The panic was leaving her, going back to that subterranean place where it caused sleeping hands to ball into angry fists.

  “‘For you,’ said his mother, . . .”

  Jenny curled herself into Laurie’s lap and shut her eyes.

  “‘. . . are my little bunny . . .’”

  SEVEN

  Where am I?

  It wasn’t the first time I’d asked myself that question. It should’ve been old hat by now.

  Where the fuck am I . . . ?

  I’d woken up in too many places not knowing where I was, and some of those places had turned out to be pretty awful.

  I didn’t recognize anything.

  A window of rippling silver.

  A potted cactus with a dead flower half attached to it.

  A desk with a blank computer sitting on it.

  A miniature universe.

  Focus.

  The window was rippling because a heating vent was blowing the silvery shades up and down, up and down.

  The universe was not a universe but a dusty diorama, slowly crystallizing into an actual and recognizable object.

  It belonged to Ben. Ben’s diorama. Ben had stopped outside my door last night and gone, Ha . . .

  But there’d been someone in this room last night.

  I could swear it.

  I’d been flitting in and out of half-remembered nightmares—that was old hat too—and when I managed to escape from a particularly terrifying one—I was chained to a tree at the bottom of a lake lit on fire—not exactly waking up, but not exactly sleeping either, someone was stroking my hair. And whispering to me.

  Someone like Mom.

  I stayed right there. In bed, which was really a couch, a couch bed, letting the sun creep through the shimmering blinds and up over my legs, like someone slowly pulling a warm woolen blanket up over me. I could hear waking-up sounds. They comforted me, those sounds: shuffling slippered feet, soft voices meant not to wake anyone, muted clanging from down in the kitchen.

  What day was it?

  Sunday.

  I’d always had a kind of love-hate thing going with Sundays, since it was the first day of the rest of the week, and usually the rest of the week was going to suck. It was also the day they made newbies work at the Sioux City Mall, so you had to watch everybody else enjoying themselves on their day off, while you busted your ass fetching them BB&B catalogues and plastic hanger racks.

  But before I joined the retail ranks, there’d be some Sundays where I actually did Sunday things. Like lying outside in the grass and picking out crazy shapes in the clouds or drawing my latest comic book—I’d started by tracing the Superman ones in Father’s stash. The hero of my comics was a thirteen-year-old girl with superpowers who was able to make herself invisible. Super Invisible Girl.

  Ha! Just try and find me!

  No need for invisible powers now.

  I’m home, I thought.

  Or said.

  Or thought and said.

  “I’m home.” This time purposely saying it out loud, so I could hear what it sounded like. Home at last. Home for good.

  I sat up and looked for my jeans, which I could swear I’d flipped over the chair last night but were somehow missing. I looked on the floor, under the bed, in the closet, but they weren’t there either. I tried the bed, but when I lifted the blanket, I saw Goldy’s dead eyes staring back at me.

  So now what?

  I went over to the door and cracked it open. I was in a blue T-shirt and panties. Cheap lime-green H&M, with my tattoo peeking out over the left hip, the only tattoo I’d ever gotten because having a needle punch holes in your skin actually hurts like hell. Zonked on Xanax, I had thought it was a great idea at the time, which says something about great ideas, because afterward I’d wanted no part of it, even though it was part of me. VIDI. That’s Latin for I saw. The whole point of tattoos, as far as I could tell, was picking a language no one speaks, so people have to ask you what it means.

  I saw, I’d tell them. That’s what it means.

  Saw what?

  Things.

  What things?

  Things you don’t want to know.

  Which usually ended the conversation, because most people don’t want to know, even when they said they did.

  Someone was coming up the stairs.

  “Hey there,” Mom said, spying me through the crack in the door. “Good morning. Are you okay . . . ?”

  “I can’t find my jeans.”

  “Oh, sorry. Hope you don’t mind. They were kind of . . .”

  “What?”

  “In need of a wash. I was doing a load anyway, is that all right?”

  “They’re my only clothes, and I didn’t know where they were.”

  “I didn’t want to wake you.”

  “Okay. Just didn’t know where they were, that’s all.”

  “Sorry about that.”

  “What do I, like, walk around in . . . ?”

  “I have some sweats. Is that all right for now?”

  “I guess.”

  “Hold on.” She passed by the door on the way to her room, where I heard her rummaging around a drawer. She came back and pushed a pair of red sweatpants through the door, like someone sliding a meal tray into the cell of a possibly dangerous prisoner.

  “Last night . . . ,” I asked, still holding the sweats in my hand, still talking to her through that crack in the door, “did you . . . ?”

  “What . . . ?”

  “I don’t know . . . come into my room? I kind of remember you being here . . .”

  “You were having a nightmare, I think.”

  “Why . . . was I saying anything?”

  “Not saying anything. Just, I don’t know . . . agitated.”

  “Oh.” It was like waking up draped over a car with that woman leaning over me. Someone seeing me do something when I didn’t know I’d been doing it.

  “I held you till you calmed down. I didn’t mean to invade your privacy,” Mom said.

  “Just not used to it,” I said.

  “To being . . . comforted?”

  “To privacy.”

  “I understand. Look, Jenny, I know I’m going to be making mistakes here. A ton of them probably. It’s going to take a while for all of us to get reacquainted, right? We’re making up for a lot of lost time . . .”

  Lost time, as if someone had simply misplaced it, draped it over a chair one n
ight and woken up in the morning to find it missing.

  “Oh . . . the FBI called.” Mom saying it the way she might’ve said, Uncle Brent called, or Oh, some guy selling life insurance called, as if it were a normal occurrence around here, getting personal telephone calls from the FBI.

  “Why?” I said.

  “Why? I think . . . I’m not sure about this, but I think the police, they need to alert the FBI when there’s a kidnapping across state lines . . . something like that. Anyway, they want to talk to you. The FBI. About the people who kidnapped you. This . . . Father and Mother. They need your help to find them.”

  “I don’t know where they are. I can’t help them.”

  “They’re hoping there’s things you do know. Things that might turn out to be important. They just want to talk to you, Jenny . . .”

  “I don’t have the slightest idea where they are. None. They could be anywhere by now.”

  Detective Mary had called the Sioux City police and directed them to the trailer. The deserted trailer, it turned out. Not surprising, Detective Mary had explained to Mom over the phone yesterday, since I’d left it more than two years ago, and they hadn’t really expected to find my kidnappers just sitting there waiting to invite the police in. Mom told me they’d be investigating the trailer for clues. Which is what they wanted to do to me now.

  That crack in the door—I felt like shutting it. Like crawling back into bed and staying there for a long time.

  “Look, Jenny,” Mom said softly, “I know this has to bring up horrible memories for you. I’m sure it’s the last thing in the world you want to do right now—talk about that. I get it. Would it help if I just put them off for a while?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then that’s what I’ll do.”

  “Thanks.”

  “They’ll have to understand. I mean, we just got you back. You need a little time to . . . come to yourself. To just be Jenny again.”

  “I am Jenny.”

  “I know you are. I meant you need some time to . . . acclimate to things.”