Safe

by S. K. Barnett

  I dropped my fork, which would’ve been okay if it was onto my plate, but it was smack onto the floor, and it had spaghetti all over it.

  For a second, no one said anything.

  Maybe because they were still treating me like I had HANDLE WITH CARE stamped on my forehead. So, no one was going to say Jesus, Jenny, eat over the fucking plate, or even Can you please be more careful? Everyone just looked at the floor instead, where the spaghetti sauce had splattered in ten different directions. I could see some on the bottom of the picture frame that held the four of us—Mom having scoured the family archives to produce a photo of the Kristals BTK—before the kidnapping. It looked like blood.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “It’s fine,” Mom said. “Accidents happen.”

  One of them was about to happen now. The doorbell rang again.

  “I’ll get it,” I said, Mom already heading to the kitchen to clean up the spill, Dad edging out of his seat, Ben leaning on his elbows and warily eyeing me as if I’d just upchucked all over the table.

  I was thinking this:

  If she’s standing there, I will slam the door in her face and tell everyone it’s a reporter. Then we will all huddle in the living room like last time and outwait her.

  Dad had stopped in mid-rise—looking like a kid who’s afraid the music’s about to stop in a game of musical chairs.

  “Seriously, I’ll get it,” I said.

  “No,” Dad said. “If it’s one of them we don’t need you answering the door.”

  Them being a reporter. I couldn’t think of a good reason why we would need me answering the door if it was a reporter. I sank back down in my seat.

  I will deny knowing her.

  I will say she’s crazy—one of those loony tunes Detective Mary warned us would start coming out of the woodwork.

  I will say, Who you going to believe—her or me?

  Dad peered through the eyehole. He hesitated, then swung the door open.

  “Come on in,” he said.

  “I’m going to my room,” I said. “I feel sick.” I lurched off the chair and headed for the stairs.

  “Wait a minute,” Mom said—she’d made it back from the kitchen with a dripping dishcloth in her hand.

  I wasn’t waiting a minute. It was Le Mars all over again. And Peoria. And Duluth. And Wichita. And . . .

  “I really feel sick.”

  Someone was walking through the front door.

  “Look . . . ,” I said. “Look . . .”

  But I wasn’t looking. I was refusing to look. Instead I was staring at that picture of the four of us. Which reminded me of a different picture, the one that had given me the whole idea in the first place—a story in an old People magazine about a kidnapped girl who’d been rescued somewhere in Texas after ten years or something like that, and the parents saying they’d never given up hope even after all that time and other parents shouldn’t either. And something else—that they’d hardly recognized their daughter at first because she’d been so young when she was kidnapped, they could’ve passed her on the street and never known it was her. And this picture of the four of them going to church and playing in their backyard pool and saying grace at the dinner table and they looked like a family you wouldn’t mind being part of—okay, that you’d kill to be part of. Which is when I started looking for those other parents they’d talked about, the ones whose daughters hadn’t come back.

  And found the Greers.

  Who’d kept a night-light on in their daughter Karen’s upstairs bedroom every single night since she’d disappeared. So she could find her way home. Karen Greer was blond and blue-eyed and fair-skinned like me, which got me to thinking that it could be me, why not, why couldn’t it? Why couldn’t I have had a best friend named Samantha and a cat called Puss and a knack for drawing flowers and a crazy love for trampolines and all the other stuff I read about her? Why couldn’t it have been me at the neighborhood pool with the rest of my day camp that morning when the counselor took one of the other kids to the nurse for five minutes and the lifeguard was too busy staring at the counselor’s ass to notice some perv ushering me away? Why not?

  And the Greers were only two states away, two little states that on the map looked small enough to almost walk across.

  I am Karen Greer.

  I am Karen Greer.

  I am. I am. I am. I am. I am. I am. I am . . .

  Saying it and saying it until I finally believed it.

  “What do you want?” Dad said to the person who’d walked into the house.

  “I cleaned up the leaves this morning,” the landscaper said in a thick Spanish accent. “Eighty-two dollars.”

  “Sure,” Dad said. “No problem.”

  * * *

  —

  There was another reason I’d been jumpy at the dining room table.

  I should’ve mentioned. I’d created my very own Facebook page.

  Counting my friends made everything realer.

  Jenny Kristal’s friends.

  Currently at a whopping 1,372 and counting.

  Sure, okay. I’d basically friended everyone who’d friended me. Most of them the same people who’d barraged the house with phone calls—the ones Jake had told to screw off.

  Reporters. TV people. PR people. Agents. People with companies attached to their names, trying to make an end run around the Kristal palace guards.

  Some regular people too.

  Welcoming me home. Praising the Lord. Asking me to marry them.

  And then there was this one:

  Be careful.

  You’re not safe in that house.

  FIFTEEN

  The next morning, I played a game.

  It was called “How long can I sit here without checking to see if Becky’s back?”

  Mom and Dad had left in two separate cars—Mom creaking open my bedroom door to see if I was still sleeping—I wasn’t but managed to pull off a good imitation. She’s out like a light, Mom whispered to Dad, who must’ve been standing behind her.

  I was picturing something: Becky waylaying them—planting herself right in front of their cars and saying, You need to hear something. And I pictured Dad not stopping to hear something, because he was in the middle of checking his work texts—pulling out from the driveway and absolutely flattening her. A tragic accident, the papers would say—some crazy lady obsessed with kidnapped girls, who’d maybe gotten what she deserved.

  But when I remembered her crying through the door—That’s just it, Lars, it is okay now—I felt ashamed, and she magically unfolded herself back into Becky.

  I listened as both cars pulled away, the sound of their engines—Mom’s nice and smooth, Dad’s hybrid kind of ragtag—becoming part of other sounds, a rumbling garbage truck, a garage door closing, a school bus jerking to a stop.

  I felt relieved on two counts. She hadn’t waved them down. They hadn’t run her over.

  When I went to the bathroom, I heard Ben slam the door on his way to school. High school. I’d gotten the lowdown from Mom, who said Ben had some issues after I was kidnapped and needed more than a year of treatment. That’s why he was so behind in school.

  Speaking of which.

  A refresher course in Jenny Kristal, JK 101, was in session.

  I’d fucked up at least three times already. I needed to bone up.

  Ben hadn’t written any Facebook entries since I’d shown up, which made sense, since coming back from the dead had to be a real buzzkill for a memorial page. I went back to the beginning to see if there was anything I might’ve missed.

  My sister Jenny disappeared when I was eight.

  That was the very first line he’d written.

  This page is dedicated to her was the second.

  One of my last memories of her was at a Fourth of July party in our bac
kyard, he continued. My uncle Brent blew off bottle rockets and cherry bombs, and Jenny and me wanted sparklers, but he wouldn’t give us any because he said we were too young. Maybe he was right about that, ’cause the next summer, he let me light a firecracker and I didn’t let go fast enough. I still have the scar.

  Then Ben started talking about the scar on his knee, from when Jenny pushed him into something in the backyard, which led him to talking about the scars in my heart. You needed to play “guess that segue” with Ben, because he insisted on jumping all over the place.

  He wrote about shooting BBs at Goldy, and his sister finding out about it, and the two of them getting into a huge fight. Mom had to put us in different rooms, he wrote, and we had to play by ourselves the rest of the day. I’d completely forgotten about that . . .

  Jenny stayed in her room the whole day, Ben wrote. Not even coming down for dinner. When she finally ventured out the next day, Ben snuck into her room and found the pictures she’d been hard at work on—all of them of Ben with his head cut off, or shot dead with a big bloodred crayon mark on his forehead where an imaginary bullet had blasted into his cranium.

  Sometimes brothers and sisters don’t get along, Ben philosophized.

  One of his last entries was about the day she disappeared.

  Apparently, they didn’t get along that day either.

  I was upstairs in bed cause I had this humongous cast on my arm—I’d done a real 360 on the stairs and broken it, and I couldn’t scratch it and it was driving me nuts. Me and my sister had started getting into it about something the night before—don’t remember what—just something—and this time my dad made her leave MY room. But what I remember was going into her room that next morning, because I was still pissed at her I think, or maybe I went in there to declare a truce—it’s all kind of hazy—but what I really remember is opening her door and then like completely freaking out—because she wasn’t there, I guess. And then my mom came in looking for her—for Jenny, because she was supposed to have been down the block or something, only she wasn’t. The rest of the day is still kind of a blur, with the police coming and everyone starting to lose it, my mom going absolutely nuts, and me too—literally nuts, I guess . . .

  I tried to keep reading, but I was having difficulty multitasking. Studying up to be the best Jenny I could be, but wondering if the woman who knew I was a cheap imitation was or wasn’t lurking behind the rhododendron bushes, patiently waiting for some kind of acknowledgment from me—an apology? A solemn pledge I would never, ever do it again?

  Please, you have to stop . . .

  I was losing this game—the one where I had to outwait the impulse to go outside and find out.

  I opened the door by degrees—first taking it off automatic lock, then inching it open, then standing there on the front mat for a while before stepping out.

  The coast was clear.

  No sign of any woman hiding behind the hedges.

  I put my foot out the door as if testing the water, then slowly eased the rest of me outside. So far, so good. There didn’t seem to be any harm in strolling down the front walk, in crossing the sidewalk to the curb.

  An older woman was dragging her empty garbage can back from the street.

  A guy was raking a lawn.

  A kid was thumping a basketball in his driveway.

  I was strolling down the block.

  Okay, negotiating my way down it, fiercely bartering for each step—If you don’t show up, I will take one more step, if you still don’t show up, I’ll take another . . .

  This is the block I walked down that day.

  It was summer and I was on my way to my best friend Toni Kelly’s house, and I was taken. Did he come up behind you and just grab you, or did he stop you? Maybe he said something to you first?

  He said, Hey there, sweetheart, we’ll get you to the bathroom real soon . . .

  I am not Jobeth, I said to myself. I am Jenny Kristal.

  He said, Your mom asked me to pick you up.

  Wait a minute. He said, What’s your name? . . . Jobeth, right?

  No. He did not say that. He did not say Jobeth. He didn’t say anything. He grabbed me and he pulled me into his car.

  Did you scream, Jenny?

  Yes. I screamed.

  I was screaming: No, Mommy, I want to go home . . .

  I was not screaming that. He had his hand around my mouth. He pulled me into his car.

  Was it just Father? Or both of them?

  Both of them. He handed me over to her and he said, She pissed all over me.

  No, just him.

  I was on my way to Toni Kelly’s house and I was taken. He stopped me and said, Your mom said I should pick you up.

  Then he drove me to their house.

  Was it a house . . . an apartment . . . ?

  A house. With a locked front gate that people needed to be buzzed through, ’cause the only people who ever showed up were customers.

  An apartment. It was an apartment, I think . . .

  Get your story straight.

  I’d borrowed from the truth to create the lie—it’s easier that way—but sometimes it got all tangled up. The real Father and Mother were meth-dealing pervs who kept me in a locked house. The made-up Father and Mother were transient pervs who squatted in abandoned apartments and junked trailers. Get it?

  Not one person ever knocked on the front door?

  I told you, I don’t remember anyone in particular.

  Okay, one person in particular.

  A policeman.

  He came into the house because someone had passed him their names. Some skank bartered us for time served—we’ll need to give her a visit, Father said later. The real Father. I was standing in the corner of the living room even though they’d told me to stay in my room. The policeman smiled at me and tousled my hair. Help me, I thought, help me, please help me, and that was the first time it happened, where I was just thinking something and it came out of my mouth.

  What? The policeman had turned away, was surveying the living room for places to stash drugs maybe, but he turned back and peered at me.

  What did you say?

  I was frozen solid—picture one of those Scooby-Doo ice pops they’d give me when I was the little girl with the curl and did all the stuff they asked me to—because I could see them staring at me behind the policeman. Don’t you dare, their faces were saying, don’t you . . . a double dare with real consequences.

  So, I didn’t dare.

  Nothing, I said.

  The policeman did that thing adults do when they want to make you feel that they’re on your level—just one kid to another, so they make it literal—kneeling down eye to eye.

  Now, honey, is there something going on here you need to talk about?

  No, I said.

  You just said . . . I could swear I just heard you say, “Help me.” Is that what you said?

  I shook my head. Father and Mother had inched closer, right behind the policeman, so when I looked into his face, I could see their faces too.

  There’s no reason to be scared, honey.

  Yes, there was. I could see the reason to be scared, plain as day.

  If there’s something . . . if something is bothering you here, you need to tell me.

  She’s kind of shy, Officer, said Father. She’s being punished for lying, so she’s none too happy with us today. You know kids. She has to learn that’s the one thing we won’t tolerate.

  The policeman kept looking at me. He had light blue eyes, the kind of color you paint on Easter eggs.

  Is that right, honey? Are you being punished?

  Sure I was. That’s why Mommy had left me and hadn’t come back. I was being punished for being bad.

  If you keep moving, it’ll hurt worse . . .

  The first morning I woke up the
re I didn’t know where I was—rows of pink baby bunnies had somehow hopped off my wallpaper, leaving wet brown stains instead. My crayon drawings of sunflowers and Grandma and Hannah Montana were gone. The empty cage where I’d kept Peanut until Mom forgot to feed him—it was missing. I screamed.

  I was terrified.

  I screamed.

  Until the pillow covered my face. Both of them running into the room—red-faced and grunting like pigs, and stuffing the stained pillow over my mouth and saying, Shut up shut up shut up.

  I couldn’t. I knew where I was, why my room didn’t look like my room. I kept screaming, even with the pillow over my mouth, I kept screaming and screaming and screaming.

  You know what happens to bad girls who won’t shut their mouths, Father said.

  They showed me.

  Mother put on the radio. Loudly. I wanna dance with you . . . romance with you . . .

  They carried me into the bathroom and forced my head up over the sink. It had a brown rust stain.

  Mother said, If you keep moving, it’ll hurt worse . . .

  She was pulling something out from under the sink. A metal box. She was opening the box and taking something out of it.

  We told you to shut up, Father said. He was pressing down on my head. We told you . . .

  Mother was shimmying her shoulders in time to the music.

  Go ’round with you . . . get down with you . . .

  Moving to the music even as she was trying to concentrate on something else. A gleaming needle in her hand. She was pulling a black thread through it.

  I tried to squirm out of Father’s grip—one hand forcing my chin up, the other pressing my head down over the sink. I tried. I tried. I know I did.

  If you keep moving, it’ll hurt worse . . .

  Mother took her time.

  Fathers work, and mothers sew.

  Stitch. Stitch. Stitch. Stitch.