“Now, what did I tell you before, huh?” she said, still choking up. “Mommy’s friend is going to watch you, okay?”
“No!” Shouting this between sobs, trying to cling to her mom’s leg, but her mom fending her off as if she were a stray dog.
And then suddenly, she felt someone’s arms around her, lifting her right off her feet.
“Now, Jobeth, you stop crying and we’ll get you a nice ice cream cone,” the man said.
But she didn’t stop crying, she couldn’t, and the man, who smelled of some kind of perfume, said, “You going to listen to me or not?” not sounding friendly anymore like before when he’d said she had a pretty name, but sounding like her mom when the little girl did something bad.
“Only good girls get ice cream cones,” he said. “You going to be a good girl or not?”
“Mommy!” the little girl shrieked, but her mom had turned and was already walking away. “Mommy!”
But the man was taking her back to his car, holding her as tight as the straps had, and when the little girl squirmed around enough to look for her mom, she was already disappearing around the corner of the motel, and the little girl couldn’t hold it in anymore, she just couldn’t, and the man yelled, “Dammit, what did you do?”
And that was the last time the little girl, who I don’t really remember anymore, ever saw her mother.
THIRTEEN
Karen Greer.
Alexa Kornbluth.
Terri Charnow.
Sarah Ludlow.
Jenny Kristal.
Sometimes I’d slip up.
I counted at least two times already. Once when I called Dad’s mom Eloise, which was the name of a different grandmother belonging to an entirely different girl, and once when I talked about going to first grade at Hollyhock Elementary School, when Jenny Kristal had gone to Lakeside. Both times, I corrected myself . . . Whoops, I meant Lakeside, I said, and Mom hadn’t seemed to notice.
Of course, it was three times if you included what I’d said to Ben. Sure I remember Brent tickling us till we said uncle. And Ben mentioning how weird it was that I remembered something that never happened.
Usually, they’d cut you some slack. You’d been kidnapped and abused, and everything was so long ago. Of course you were going to get some things wrong, jumble a few names, forget a few faces, screw up a few dates. It was to be expected, wasn’t it? It was a miracle you could remember anything, considering the hell you’d been put through. Isn’t that the word Mom used with the FBI? If you haven’t noticed, she’s been through hell. Go, Mom.
And since most everyone else had noticed what I’d been through, most of them wouldn’t catch the other things, like me calling Grandma the wrong name, or mentioning a first-grade class that happened to be in Ohio, or even me laughing over the corny antics of Uncle Brent—though Ben had certainly caught it, since he’d made a point of nailing me on it.
I was just trying to be nice. That’s what I’d tell Ben if he brought it up again. I really didn’t remember Brent tickling us like that and making us say uncle over and over, but since you did and you seemed to get such a goddamn kick out of it, I played along. And on that subject, why’d you make it up in the first place? Could it be you don’t trust me, Ben?
There were always Bens.
Sometimes it was the dad. Or the mom. Or the sister. Or the uncles. Or the grandmother or grandfather—though they were usually too old to notice anything. But sometimes it was Ben.
The key was to absolutely believe it. Not just pretend to believe it.
Really believe it.
Kind of like that visualization thing that policeman suggested, except he was talking about imagining something in the future, while I needed to imagine things in the past.
Being six years old, for example, and having my mom let me out the front door to go play with my best friend, Toni Kelly, and then being taken. And all the stuff from my life before that. Riding my dad around the bedroom floor like a horse. Watching a kick-ass fireworks show in the backyard every summer on the Fourth of July. Going to Disney World, where my big brother, Ben, got himself lost in Tom Sawyer’s cave, boohoo. Ben had graciously filled in most of the blanks for me on that weird Facebook page of his, the one he’d dedicated to his dead sister, crammed with all sorts of scattered memories, including that useful tidbit about the family gorging on Happy Meals right before Jenny went missing. I just remembered something, I’d told Detective Mary—and I had. Sometimes it was only a few words—I remember my sister Jenny fighting with me because she caught me shooting BBs at Goldy—but usually it was long, rambling, stream-of-consciousness stuff, like when he wrote about being lost in that cave, ending that particular entry by wondering, Is this what it was like for my sister, being lost in a deep, dark hole, but never being found?
Yeah, Ben, kind of.
And I hadn’t just read things. Remember, the internet’s an interactive medium. I struck up a conversation with the grieving brother, because, after all, I’d lost a sister, too, I told him, so we were virtually kindred spirits. And he’d written back, warily at first, just yeses and nos. It was only after I went ahead and shared some very intimate and painful memories—I’ve never told anyone this before—that he started reciprocating, and after a while, he was like a faucet you couldn’t turn off. Not that I wanted to.
What was she like? I asked him. What do you remember most about her?
That’s just it, he’d told me. He must’ve blocked a lot of that stuff out, because for a long time he couldn’t remember very much at all. That’s why he’d started the page in the first place—to fill in the holes. And it was working, he said. Things were coming back. He remembered being in the backyard with Jenny and her pushing him into a tomato stake. He still had the scar. He remembered being up at the lake with her where they played wild Indians—he always made himself chief—and at the beach where Jenny helped him build sand castles with Timmy the Truck. And swimming in the ocean with her—that, too, remembering being terrified when a wave toppled him over into the surf, and he hadn’t known which way was up and thought he couldn’t possibly hold his breath a second longer, that in a moment he was going to be gulping in all that green water. Until he was suddenly standing upright and sputtering for air, and his kid sister, Jenny, was there hugging him, or maybe it was his dad, he couldn’t remember. Just that he was alive and he hadn’t drowned after all. He remembered retreating into a deep, dark hole the day she disappeared, and never really making his way out.
This is what she was like, he wrote me. This and this and this. And not just words, but pictures. A shot of Ben and Jenny, circa 2005—the kind of photo moms used to drag their kids to the Sioux City Mall for, the whole family getting to sit in front of an imitation Christmas tree wearing ugly reindeer sweaters. Jenny squirming in her big brother’s lap in this particular shot, a bunch of oversize holiday candy canes in the background. And there was a picture of Jenny with her grandfather on the Kristals’ front lawn, standing in a dripping-wet bathing suit as if she’d just been running through a summer sprinkler. Do you remember him? Mom had asked, pointing to a white-haired man holding just-born Jenny in the hospital. Grandpa, I’d answered, and Mom’s eyes had gone all misty at that thought—twelve years of living in abandoned houses and wrecked trailers with the Mother and Father from hell and I’d managed to hold on to her dad. Ben had too. I remember my grandfather making Jenny guess which hand the Tootsie Rolls were in and she’d always guess right, Ben wrote on the page, evidently unable to figure out how I’d managed to pull off that amazing feat, which didn’t exactly take rocket science. Maybe it was all that weed Ben was toking—he wrote how it helped him remember stuff, though my experience was pretty much the opposite, that grass was good for kissing memories good-bye, at least when you were sky-high.
Now and then Ben would ask me to share memories of my sister, and I’d just borrow things from the differe
nt sisters I’d been reunited with over the last two and a half years. Mousy Allison Greer for one, whose sister Karen disappeared when she was three years old, and who solemnly promised me after our tearful reunion that she would never, ever, not on pain of death, ever let me out of her sight again—sisters forever—until things soured, of course, and I had to get out of her sight pretty damn quick.
Sometimes I wasn’t fast enough. I’d let my guard down and start thinking I was home free and stop believing I was who I said I was. I’d start going outside the role and begin fucking up my lines. I’d mistake those funny looks from Dad for being just funny looks from Dad, and completely miss that I was in serious shit. Twice I’d been sent to juvie hall, where they’d pretty much thrown up their hands—I’d been fostered out the first time (two lowlifes who stockpiled foster kids for the government assistance checks) and jailbroke out the second, pilfering the keys to the front door and sneaking out in the middle of the night. I was a serious puzzlement to the various authorities I came in contact with, not to mention a major pain in the ass. What to do with me? It wasn’t like I’d attacked anyone or committed a break and enter, though, okay, there was one social worker who thought that’s pretty much what I had done. You assaulted this family, Jobeth, she lectured me. You played on their hopes and dreams; you devastated them. How does that make you feel? She should’ve asked me how it made me feel before the dad began giving me funny looks—which was safe and warm. And maybe she should’ve asked them, too—those devastated parents who couldn’t keep the smiles off their faces those first few weeks. Besides, as far as I knew, devastating dreams wasn’t exactly listed in the penal code.
Why do you do this? the social worker had asked me. Good question. But I didn’t provide a good answer. I just shrugged, which didn’t earn me any brownie points with her. I suppose I could’ve taken her back to that morning by that dog-shit motel, when someone else’s hopes were pretty thoroughly devastated, but I didn’t bother. I didn’t like going there, no, thank you, because before I knew it I’d start getting the stupid quivers again. Not going there was the whole point, wasn’t it? The answer the social worker was really begging for. I didn’t want to be her—the little girl pissing all over a fucking pervert who’d just traded Grade B meth for me. Would you? Would anyone?
I walked out of a house of horrors as Jobeth. Then I became them:
Karen Greer.
Alexa Kornbluth.
Terri Charnow.
Sarah Ludlow.
Jenny Kristal.
In case you’re counting, that’s five different girls in two and a half years. Five sets of parents whose names I’d needed to memorize, five different schools, groups of relatives, nosy neighbors, best friends. Five different lives. Sure, that’s a lot—but here’s the best part. Not a single one of them was mine.
Think of it as my meth, Mommy, keeping the helpless heebie-jeebies at bay. Whatever gets you through the night, and trust me, it can get pretty damn black out there.
A few times I’d thought it might really last, that I’d wormed my way in good and tight. I could see family vacations and college graduations—okay, a bit of a stretch since I’d never actually graduated high school, but still—I could even picture me being walked down the aisle one day by a beaming Mr. Charnow, who once started sobbing at the dinner table when I said, Can you pass the salt, Dad? I could visualize it clear as day. Then that guard I couldn’t let down would turn into Mr. Hammered, and it would be just a matter of time.
There were shorter stays, too. The last one with a family in Le Mars, Iowa, Becky Ludlow and her husband, Lars—who seemed so dumb-assed at first that he might’ve been from the planet Mars—only it turned out he had more going on than I gave him credit for, since about two seconds after I walked through their front door, he was mentioning my three least-favorite letters in the English language. Would it be okay, not that I don’t believe you or anything, but just so we’re all on the same page here and there’s not the slightest doubt, would it be all right if you took a DNA test, Sarah?
Well, now that you mention it, Lars, it might not actually be okay if I took a DNA test. I said, No problem, can I just have a few days to settle in? In a few days Sarah was gone, and Le Mars was on my growing list of places I must not come back to.
Truth be told, I wasn’t crazy about dashing that mom’s hopes and dreams, because Becky, who was dead set against me having to take any test—probably because she was afraid of what she’d find—had seemed like the kind of mom you’d pick from a catalogue. Apple-pie sweet, but with just enough Granny Smiths in there to make her interesting. When she came down to the station to get me—I usually presented myself to the nearest police station, though once I’d walked right up the front walk and said, Ding-dong, I’m home—it was as if she’d lost ten years in ten minutes. Seriously, she seemed to be one age when she walked into the room, and then an entirely different one when we headed home. That night I heard her weeping through her bedroom door, and Lars saying, It’s okay, honey . . . and Becky saying, That’s just it, Lars, it is okay. Finally . . .
Sarah, who’d let go of her dad’s hand in a Home Depot ten years ago and was last seen holding someone else’s hand as she walked out of the store in grainy security camera footage, had been a real daddy’s girl, Becky confided. That’s why he’d gone ahead and asked for a DNA test—because even with all those lost years, something just hadn’t felt right to him, even though it had felt right to her. When he dropped that little bombshell on me and I took off one day later, I thought more than once about Becky doing a different kind of weeping through their bedroom door.
That’s when I thought about maybe finally stopping the whole thing for good, breaking the pattern, so to speak. Just two days later I was combing through the net in search of missing children again—or to be one hundred percent accurate, searching for the parents missing them. It wasn’t hard . . . America’s got tons of them. The missing girls needed to be the right age, of course, the right eye and hair color—and they needed to have been kidnapped young enough so that no one would accuse me of not looking like them. And I needed some general info, too, but all that took was searching Facebook and the local papers, which would usually spend the week after a kidnapping writing about nothing else—telling the world about the missing girl’s family, her friends and classmates and neighbors and teachers, all of whom couldn’t believe that she was gone, and writing lots of highly useful stuff about the victim herself.
That’s it. That’s all.
Of course, once in a while you got stupendously lucky and stumbled across a memorial page created by the stoned-out brother of a missing victim, where all sorts of juicy tidbits were there for the taking. Add that to the hundreds of articles that came out when Jenny first disappeared and a virtual thesis in Vanity Fair, written years after Jenny’s kidnapping. A real artsy-fartsy piece called “A Meditation on Loss” or something like that.
The first poster was put up within a day of the disappearance. In the end, there’d be over 1,500 of them, plastering what seemed like every available inch of the village. All of them mass-produced by the owner of a local printing company who barely knew the scared-out-of-their-minds parents but figured it was the least he could do.
It was nail-gunned to a telephone pole in front of Fredo’s Famous Pizzeria. . . .
Gracias.
There were pictures in the article. Jenny sitting on a gym mat wearing a pink tutu. An eight-year-old Ben standing next to Jenny by a lake. Her parents at a rally they’d held at the local gym after Jenny disappeared, standing behind a podium with Jake holding Laurie around the waist as if he were keeping her from falling down.
There was something about Laurie’s face I liked—a little Becky in there, and someone paying attention might’ve noticed that most of the moms I walked out of police stations with looked a lot like my real one. Before the meth got to her, when she could still manage to turn some heads,
though God knows she ended up turning all the wrong ones.
Jenny Kristal. Jenny Kristal. Jenny Kristal.
I began practicing it in front of the mirror. And maybe it made me remember that pipe my mom couldn’t let go of, too, the one I’d said looked like crystal. I’m not saying it did or it didn’t—I’m just saying there’s a chance it crossed my mind. And then I was trading Facebook messages with Ben and starting to think like Jenny Kristal, too.
I became Jenny Kristal.
When I washed my face every morning in the rat hole I’d ended up in after Le Mars, I looked up and saw Jenny Kristal staring back. My memories were her memories. My past was her past. I ate and slept and walked and talked her. And when I finally walked over to that telephone pole and up to that faded missing-child poster, that was my face on there. It was mine.
And I was home.
Where Becky Ludlow had just shown up, banging on my front door and telling me to please stop.
FOURTEEN
You seem a little jumpy tonight, Jenny,” Dad said.
That was because every time the phone rang, that’s what I did. Jump. I was praying the landline was still in lockdown mode, but what if it wasn’t? What if Mom needed to take a call from a client, or Dad from his mother in Florida, or what if Ben decided to pick up the phone just to be an asshole? And the voice on the other end said, I have news for you. That lost and found headline in the paper was only half-right.
What then?
And there was the front door.
It was growing bigger, just like the door in the police station, capable of letting in all sorts of people I didn’t care to see, number one being someone who’d last seen her daughter going off to Home Depot with her husband, Lars.
Halfway through a pretty silent dinner—Mom asked Dad how work was and he said fine, then asked Ben how school was and he said, Fucking fantastic, and Mom said, Can you please not curse, and Ben said, I’m not sure—halfway through all that scintillating conversation, someone rang the doorbell.
Safe Page 9
