Safe

by S. K. Barnett

“Sure.”

  “Want some breakfast?” Mom asked, changing the subject.

  “I’m starved,” I said, and I was, and for more than just breakfast.

  When I got to the kitchen, Dad was staring out the window at the backyard, but he quickly turned and said good morning. He looked happy to see me but a little fuzzy on who I was, like my branch manager at Bed Bath & Beyond, who was always glad to see me show up but kept confusing me with another girl, named Josie.

  “What about some eggs?” Dad asked me.

  “You got any Nutella?”

  “Nutella? What’s that?”

  Mom had come in from the living room with a cup of coffee in her hand. “Yes,” she said. “What’s a Nutella?”

  I blushed. “It’s like half-chocolate and half-nutty. I don’t know. You put it on bread.”

  “Sorry,” Dad said. “All out.”

  “I can go get some from the market,” Mom said. “Take me a minute.”

  “That’s all right,” I said, “eggs are cool. Ummm . . . where’s Ben?”

  “Ben?” Dad said, as if I’d just said Nutella again. “Ben doesn’t deign us with his presence until dinnertime. Ben sleeps.”

  “Well, it’s Sunday.”

  “Yeah, well, he sleeps on Saturdays too.”

  “Ben’s in that phase,” Mom said. “Sorry about last night, by the way . . . how he acted.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about it,” Dad said. “You’re in good company. He acts that way with everybody.”

  “I was kind of just dropped on him. It’s cool.”

  “Glad you think so. How do you like them, sweetheart?” Dad asked. “Your eggs?”

  “Sunny-side up,” I said.

  After all, it kind of fit my mood.

  * * *

  —

  I was really hungry,” I said, after slurping down the yolks in two seconds—I always saved them for last.

  “You want more? Just take me a minute,” Mom said.

  “I’m good.”

  “The detective,” Mom said, “she told us you were out on your own. For like . . . over two years?”

  I nodded.

  “How did you manage?” she said softly. “I mean . . . what did you eat?”

  “Nutella,” I said.

  On the way back from the police station, Mom had promised they wouldn’t ask me any questions about what I’d been through unless I felt like talking about it. My days on the streets—that time between the worst thing that ever happened to me and the best—she must’ve felt that was a gray area.

  “Where did you . . . sleep?” Mom asked tentatively, like she didn’t really want to hear the answer.

  “Anywhere I could find. Not like I was used to staying in four-star hotels. I got by.” I decided to leave out the part about how I got by. She definitely wouldn’t want to hear about that.

  We reverted to small talk.

  Dad asking if I’d slept okay—Yeah, absolutely, even as I was wondering if Mom had told him about my nightmare. Mom telling me there was an extra toothbrush in the bathroom cabinet, and me saying thanks, Dad saying he hoped the warm weather would continue, and me agreeing that’d be nice, all right, the conversation doing some serious dwindling, and then pretty much coming to a stop. We were sitting around the kitchen table like nothing had changed, even though everything had.

  “How about we get you a real bed today?” Mom said, breaking the silence, which seemed on its way to eternity.

  “The couch is fine.” It was fine, more than fine compared to some things I’d slept on over the years. For one thing, there were no creepy crawlers in it. Sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite. For another thing, no one was going to try to come share it with me in the middle of the night.

  “Don’t be silly,” Mom said, “you need a real bed now. And some clothes. Why don’t we take a trip to the Roosevelt Field Mall?”

  Mom gave me a button-down shirt of hers, and my freshly cleaned jeans, which smelled of bleach. On the way to the mall, she let me blast the radio as loudly as I wanted.

  We went to T.J.Maxx first. Every time I tried something on, I came out of the dressing room so Mom could see it on me.

  Great, she’d say, or, I think you need a smaller size, or, You sure you like that color?

  When she told me how pretty I looked in a yellow scoop-neck blouse, I said, “Thanks, Mom. For taking me shopping.”

  “You don’t have to thank me, Jenny.”

  The final tally: three pairs of skinny jeans, five tops, two sweaters, three pairs of shoes, a winter coat, ten pairs of Hanky Panky panties, and a brown leather belt.

  In Bed Bath & Beyond I sat on three different beds because Mom said, “You need to try them out.” On the Sealy Posturepedic Plus with actual firmness controls, I pretended to conk out, closing my eyes and fake snoring. “Wake up, Sleeping Beauty,” Mom said. I opened my eyes and laughed, until I saw Mom staring at me with one of those “I’ve just seen a ghost” looks.

  “What’s wrong?” I said.

  “Nothing . . . ,” she said.

  “Seriously? Did I do something wrong? I’m sorry . . .”

  “You didn’t do anything wrong, Jenny. Nothing. It’s just . . . the detective yesterday—she asked us if you had any identifiable physical characteristics. Like beauty marks, things like that. You know, when we first got there, before we actually saw you . . .”

  “Okay . . . ?”

  “I told her how your eyes . . . they used to crinkle when you laughed.”

  “Huh . . . ?”

  “They just did. When you smiled.”

  A saleswoman was staring at the bed as if she wanted me off it. The PA system was asking, Will the mother of Leshaun Washington please report to the front register. I didn’t feel like Sleeping Beauty anymore.

  “They’re . . . beautiful, Jenny. Like little dimples.”

  “If you say so.”

  Say so . . . please . . . say so . . .

  I ended up picking the bed without firmness controls, which I believe is for older people with bad backs; then we picked out three sets of sheets with floral patterns and a pink comforter.

  When we went to pay for it, I stared at the girl across the counter, who looked about my age, and wondered if she was as bored as I used to be. Probably.

  The bed came later that day, and two delivery guys in stained wifebeaters carried it up the stairs after they’d taken the couch bed down to the basement. “Now Ben has two places to sleep all day,” Dad said.

  Speaking of which, he wasn’t there. Ben.

  “He’s sleeping at Zack’s,” Dad said.

  “Really?” Mom said. “On Jenny’s second day home?”

  He shrugged, one of those “What are you going to do?” shrugs, which maybe had become second nature when it came to Ben.

  “Jesus, Jake . . . ,” Mom said.

  Later, I heard them furiously whispering about it, thinking they were out of earshot, which they might’ve been, if I hadn’t been snooping outside their bedroom door.

  I only heard pieces of their back-and-forth, but it was enough.

  “. . . hard on him . . .”

  “. . . suddenly she shows . . .”

  “. . . he’s angry . . .”

  “. . . dammit . . .”

  After dinner—Mom made spaghetti and meatballs, my second-favorite dish—Mom said she was going to call the rest of the family and tell them the good news, that she might even ask them to come over the next day to see me, the ones who lived close by, anyway, like Dad’s stepbrother, Brent. Only if that was okay with me, though?

  “Sure,” I said.

  When I woke up after another shitty night—I was stuck to my new bed as if I’d sweated through it—I thought they were already there, and that the family must’ve been bigger than
I remembered, since it seemed like they’d all come at once to say good morning. It sounded like an honest-to-God commotion just outside my window.

  I opened the blinds to tell them to please knock it off.

  EIGHT

  Remember when Uncle Brent would tickle us till we said uncle?” Ben asked. “Remember that?”

  Ben talks.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “And then he’d say, ‘What?’ And keep tickling us, and we’d say uncle again, and he’d say, ‘What?’ It was his big, stupid joke, right?”

  “Right. I remember.”

  Uncle Brent was right there in front of us during this little discussion, looking older than the photo where he was holding a just-born me in the hospital, but then everyone else in the photo album had aged right along with him.

  He was the first member of the family to show up, looking me over like a window-shopper trying to decide if he’s going to splurge.

  “So,” he said after a few moments that seemed tons longer than that, “you going to give your uncle Brent a hug?”

  Sure. One of those perfunctory ones where you both keep your distance. He smelled of cigarettes.

  “I saw you had quite a show out there today,” he said. “Everything good?”

  “Terrific. I always like to start my day out with a riot.”

  No one laughed.

  When I’d opened the blinds of my bedroom window, I’d thought maybe I was still dreaming—it was possible, right? Just having one of my off-the-wall nightmares—and in a minute Mom would come in and wake me.

  When I blink, they will all go poof.

  They were taking up the entire sidewalk and half the street. It would’ve been the whole street if their vans weren’t taking up the rest of it—big ones with satellite dishes on the roofs and numbers painted on their sides: 2, 4, 7, 9.

  It took me a while to understand that they were all there for me. “Jenny,” I heard some of them shouting, “Jenny,” as if they knew me or something, and I almost shouted back at them: What the fuck do you want? I shut the blinds and retreated to my bed, but I felt like retreating even farther, to the back of my closet maybe.

  I was sitting there holding tight to Goldy when Mom rushed in.

  “So sorry about this, Jenny,” she said. “I have no clue how they found out.”

  I did.

  The phone had rung in the middle of the night, and since I was already wide-awake, I’d picked it up.

  “Hello,” a voice said. “Is this Mrs. Kristal?”

  “No.”

  Pause.

  “Is this . . . Jenny Kristal?”

  “Who’s this?”

  “Max Westfield. Newsday.”

  “Who?”

  “Max Westfield. I’m a reporter.”

  He’d gotten word from a source at the precinct, he said. That I’d been found. If it was me he was talking to, that is? And if it was, he’d love to be the first to say welcome back. And the first to hear my story, too, if that was okay. Being that this was a real bona fide miracle.

  I kept quiet.

  “Look, Jenny . . . I am talking to Jenny, right? You have no idea how many people have been praying for you over the years—for your safe return. And how a story like this will impact them. Not just them . . . everyone. Parents of other kidnapped children—give them some hope that maybe their kids will come home . . .”

  “I’m pretty tired . . . ,” I said.

  “Of course, Jenny. You have every right to be. With what you’ve been through. I can call you Jenny, right?”

  “It’s one in the morning. That’s why I’m tired.”

  “Right, sorry. I only need a minute of your time. If I could just ask you a few questions? I understand you were kidnapped by a couple of, well . . . sexual deviants, and they more or less . . .”

  Click.

  I didn’t tell Mom. Even as she was apologizing for the entire world finding out about me and telling me they were going to make the reporters go away.

  How the hell is she going to do that? I thought, but Mom said Dad had called the police.

  “You’re soaked, Jenny,” she said, putting a hand to my forehead. “Do you have a fever?” I didn’t bother telling her this is how I woke up most mornings, as if I’d been through the wash-and-spin cycle.

  “Why don’t you get dressed,” she said, laying out a new pair of jeans and that scoop-neck top she’d bought me at the Roosevelt Field Mall. “Stay here,” she said, “we’ll deal with this,” before shutting my door and marching back downstairs.

  After I slipped on my clothes, I peeked through the blinds again. Sure enough, there was a police car right in the middle of the crowd, one of the cops looking like he was trying to shoo all the reporters away. Only the reporters didn’t seem to really give a shit, because no one was actually moving anywhere.

  Then my dad was out on the porch.

  I heard him tell them to please respect our privacy, but they were shouting questions at him, questions about me, and it was so freakin’ weird to hear myself being talked about when I wasn’t actually part of the conversation—not that it was actually a conversation; it was more of a cluster fuck, since Dad was having trouble getting a single word in.

  That word being getthefuckouttahere.

  Dad was telling them that there wasn’t going to be any interview, there wasn’t going to be any anything, but they weren’t listening and they weren’t leaving either, so Dad did, slamming the front door so hard, it made the house shake.

  Mom had told me to stay put, but I felt trapped up there, so I went downstairs, slinking down each step as if the reporters could somehow see me. I ended up spooking Mom and Dad, who jerked around as if they thought one of the TV people had somehow snuck into the house.

  “I told you to stay upstairs,” Mom said.

  “Goldy didn’t want to.” I was still holding her in my hand. Mom motioned for me to come join them on the couch.

  “I don’t know if the police can make them leave . . . I mean legally,” Dad explained to me. “But maybe they’ll get the message we don’t want them here and we’re not going to talk to them.”

  Which was the same message Mom and Dad gave the people who began calling the house, then didn’t stop. Apparently some people still used landlines—at least when they didn’t have your cell number. Every time Mom or Dad put the phone down, it just rang again, ringggg, ringggg, ringggg, a network, a newspaper, a talk show. All of them asking about me. Finally, they took the phone off the hook.

  “Good thing Ben’s not here,” Mom said.

  “Shit,” Dad said, “I’ve got to tell him to stay at Zack’s. That’s all we need—Ben bouncing up the front walk.”

  Too late. Ben had seen the commotion on the news and was already worming his way through the crowd. We could actually see him on the living room TV—kind of surreal watching your house on the news as you’re sitting in it. And your brother flailing his way through a sea of mics like a swimmer about to go under.

  After he slammed the front door behind him, he blinked at me. Like, What’s wrong with this picture? A cat, a dog, a bird, a sister—circle which one doesn’t belong.

  He took his customary place on the love seat and asked Mom to please change the channel—he’d seen this show already. One Ink Master and half a Bar Rescue later, Dad said, “I think they’re gone.”

  “You sure?” Mom said.

  Dad peeked through the drapes. “Yep. They’ve left. Thank God.”

  Eventually two policewomen showed up at our front door and explained that the reporters might be coming back—they didn’t actually have the authority to make them disperse, just to make sure they kept off our property, but if they wanted to sit out there on the sidewalk all day, there wasn’t much they could do about it.

  “Thanks anyway,” Dad said. “Appreci
ate your help.”

  Given the all clear, Uncle Brent showed up an hour later, and then the rest of the family began trickling in. There was Mom’s aunt Gerta, who looked around sixty-five and suffered from emphysema, and her daughter Trude, who brought her two kids over—all of them my cousins, I guess. And there were some of Dad’s relatives—his cousins Arnie and Cecille, and his uncle Samuel. Dad’s mom—my grandmother—was living in Florida; his father had died years ago, but they called her on the phone and made me talk to her.

  “My darling Jenny,” she said. “Oh, my darling . . . This is Nanny. Do you remember me?”

  “A little,” I said.

  Which is what I told all of them—I remember you a little—because every single person asked me. Uncle Brent and Aunt Gerta and Trude and Arnie and Cecille and Samuel.

  The last time I saw you, you were two . . . or three . . . or one . . . or six . . . or just born, they said. You were laughing . . . or crying . . . or sleeping . . . or chattering away . . . or playing with your horses.

  And I said, Really?

  Aunt Gerta couldn’t stop crying. She kept a wrinkled tissue inside her sleeve, and she kept pulling it out to dab at her red-rimmed eyes, which reminded me of a magician pulling one of those long scarves out of their belly buttons. Samuel—who had to be eighty, easy—just kept shaking his head from side to side as if he couldn’t believe I was really standing there in front of him, and Trude just beamed at me.

  Samuel settled next to me on the couch and asked me what it was like living all those years with my kidnappers, and things suddenly went quiet.

  “Uncle Sammy,” Dad said gently. “Jenny doesn’t need to talk about that right now.”

  “Huh?” Samuel looked confused.

  “When she’s ready to talk about all that, I’m sure she will. But not yet.”

  All of them were looking at me now, while munching on the chips and pretzels and hummus Mom had bought from Trader Joe’s. Like I was the star attraction, and they were the audience waiting for me to do something interesting.

  “Yeah. I’d just rather not think about that right now, if that’s okay,” I said.

  That seemed to sour the air a little, Samuel asking about my kidnappers and me not answering. It reminded everybody that this wasn’t some ordinary family reunion, but the kind where everyone needed a police escort just to make it into the house.