Safe Page 2

  “You’re not from around here,” he said, half as a question.

  “Who said?”

  “Never seen you, thas all . . .” He was trying to grow in a goatee—emphasis on trying, because it looked like the scraggly tufts you see on cancer patients.

  “Okay, you got me,” I said.

  “So you’re not . . . ?”

  “Not what?”

  “From around here.”

  “Sure I am. Just not lately.”

  “Oh . . .” He looked confused by that. Stared at the pole for a second, where I saw his eyes connect with mine. My old eyes. Before they saw a bunch of things they shouldn’t have.

  He shifted his feet, seemingly out of things to say now.

  I turned away and resumed looking at the pole, a nonverbal Screw off. After a few more seconds, he took the hint—okay, more of a directive—and slunk away, mission still accomplished, I guess, since I heard muted hoots and high fives from the peanut gallery.

  When I glanced back at him, after finishing my face time with my own face—what was left of it—I saw him still staring at me, but this time without the put-on smirk. Something else. For a moment, I thought I knew what it was. A look of recognition, only the kind where you’re not sure what it is you’re recognizing.

  No. Not possible.

  I walked on, faster than I’d intended, even if it was still kind of aimlessly, although I had a vague aim in mind. It didn’t feel as if I were floating anymore. I was good and grounded. I felt a sudden gut-gripping panic as people flowed past me on either side—it was a Saturday, right? Lots of people out and about, enjoying the surprisingly balmy weather.

  I was being swallowed up by them—this surging crowd that seemed in a hurry to get somewhere and to take me with them, and I’d been there, done that, thank you very much, uh-uh. I was losing control of the situation. I was not the boss of me.

  Stop.

  Deep breaths. In, out. Deep breaths . . .

  I found myself leaning against a gray car in the middle of the sidewalk. Finding yourself doing something you didn’t know you were doing was a weird feeling, as if I’d been sleepwalking and someone had just turned on the lights.

  I saw a woman staring at me—someone with a stroller and a kid in it with a blue pacifier stuck in its mouth. Blue is for boy. She was hovering there, seeing what was up with me, I guess.

  “Are you . . . uh, okay?” She was suddenly next to me—had left the stroller a few feet away to attend to this girl in a tan zippered jacket and dirty jeans. I wanted to say to her, Don’t, don’t leave that stroller. You don’t know what can happen. You think you’re this close to it, sure, but you’re this close to the unimaginable. The unforgivable. Go back.

  That’s what I wanted to say.

  But what I said was this:

  “I need a policeman. Please. I’m Jenny Kristal and I need a policeman.”

  TWO

  The detective questioning me was a woman, which must be standard operating procedure. They’d passed me from a cop who kept eyeing me in his rearview mirror, the entire ride to the station, to the desk person, who was about fifty pounds overweight—on a good day—to this woman detective who said her name was Mary.

  She was pretty courteous, asking me if I was hungry—Yeah, starved; if I needed to use the bathroom—Yeah, I’ve been holding it in for hours; if I needed a doctor—No, I’m fine.

  Then she asked me my name again—for the record.

  “Jenny Kristal.” This was the third person I’d told my name to in the last half hour—fourth, if you include the woman wheeling the baby stroller, who’d called 911 for me, but only after telling me my name sounded kind of familiar.

  She’d told the same thing to the cop who showed up five minutes later, after he’d placed me in the back seat of his cruiser for safekeeping.

  There was a little girl that vanished when I was in high school, the woman whispered. It was kind of a big deal around here. I think her name was Jenny Kristal . . . It can’t be her, can it . . . ?

  The cop said he didn’t know. But when he got into the front seat, he asked me.

  He’d already asked me if I was on some kind of narcotics—the woman thought I might be high on something since she’d found me hugging a parked car. She just kind of collapsed, she’d told the cop, whose name was Farley.

  I told him I wasn’t on drugs and he could test me if he didn’t believe me, that I just needed to talk to someone at the station.

  Well, what’s wrong with you? She said you keeled over—you on percs or something?

  I haven’t eaten in a while. Please, can you take me to the station?

  I’m going to call an ambulance, Miss . . .

  I don’t need an ambulance. I need a Big Mac.

  So you’re refusing an ambulance . . . ?

  Can you just take me to the station . . . ?

  I need you to say that you’re refusing an ambulance. That’s the protocol. You’re allowed to refuse it if you want to, but you have to say so. Are you over eighteen?

  Yes.

  And you’re refusing an ambulance.

  Yes.

  That’s when he put me in the back seat.

  But before starting the car, he turned around and stared at me through the mesh partition—pretty much at tits level—and asked me if I had ever been a kidnap victim.

  Your Good Samaritan said someone with your name—she thinks it’s the same name—was kidnapped from here about twelve years ago. Is that you . . . ?

  My Good Samaritan thought she was reporting a drug addict who needed to be yanked off the streets. I wanted to talk to someone at the station instead of Officer Farley, because when he’d asked me if I was over eighteen, he’d asked it like he wanted to be sure he wasn’t committing statutory.

  I stopped talking.

  I counted corners instead, trying to ignore the various people— an old lady using a walker, a black UPS guy balancing six packages in his arms, two kids on bikes—peeking into the back seat to see who was being carted off to jail today. One, two, three, four, five . . . Counting gave me something to do other than talk to Farley or think about what they were going to look like now and what they were going to say and what it would feel like to hold them again. One corner pretty much like another, leaf strewn and empty, though I spotted chalked hopscotch lines on the corner of Elm, trying to remember what it was like to play hopscotch—throwing a pebble into a chalked square and then hopping over to grab it without falling down, that was the tricky part.

  Eleven was a corner with a deep weblike crack stretching from one end to the other, and just like that, it caught me and wouldn’t let me go.

  What’s the matter? Farley asked from the front seat.

  Had I shouted something? Had I banged on the window and pleaded to be let out?

  Maple Street . . . Is this where you used to live . . . ?

  Detective Mary had her hair pulled back in a severe bun—in fact, her whole face was pretty severe. I guess that’s how you look when your job is dealing with lowlifes every day.

  “Okay, Jenny,” Detective Mary said, “Officer Farley said you told him you used to live on Maple Street. That’s where a girl named Jenny Kristal lived before she disappeared. Are you saying you’re her?”

  Note to self: Detective Mary hadn’t said when Jennifer Kristal disappeared—the actual date it happened. She was going to make me say it.

  The crack on the corner of Maple Street was suddenly front and center. Was it really wide enough to have swallowed me whole?

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’m . . . Jenny Kristal. I was walking to my friend Toni Kelly’s house and I was taken.” Detective Mary had sent someone out to get me that Big Mac I’d been jonesing for, and I suddenly remembered something. “The night before . . . before I was kidnapped, we’d all gone to McDonald’s. It was the l
ast night I saw my dad, because he was gone the next morning, you know, for work . . .”

  Detective Mary lost some of her severity then. She was recording everything, had asked me if I minded—Nope—I think because she wanted to maintain eye contact with me instead of having to scribble everything down, and I saw it there in her eyes, a kind of softening.

  “When was that exactly, Jenny? When you were taken?”

  Okay, she was still verifying.

  “It was summer. July tenth, 2007.”

  “Hmmm . . . ,” Detective Mary said, as if I’d said something really interesting. “Just wondering—you were how old then . . . ?”

  “Six,” I said again.

  “Uh-huh. You were six years old and you remember the exact date? Just curious about that, since most children that young don’t really take account of time the way we do.”

  “I remember the date because it’s my birthday.”

  She looked up as if she’d just caught me in a huge lie, a sudden tightness to her mouth.

  “You were taken on your birthday?”

  “It became my birthday.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “My new birthday. He said it was the beginning of my new life, so it would be my new birthday.” I felt something wet at the corner of each eye.

  “He. Who’s he, Jenny?”

  “Father.”

  “Father? The one who took you? What was his actual name?”

  “That was his name. Father. That’s what I had to call him.”

  “Before we get into that, which I know must be very hard for you, Jenny, you mind if we talk about that day again—about the time before it all happened?”

  “Why?” I knew why—of course I did—but I wanted to make her say it this time.

  “That’s the way we do things, I’m afraid. Procedure. Proceed chronologically. From A to B. Is that okay?”

  “Sure, no problem.”

  “Great. So can you take me back a little? What was that summer like? What do you remember about your mom and dad, for instance? And the rest of your family . . . do you have any siblings?”

  “Ben,” I said, “my brother,” even though she knew damn well whether I had any siblings, and she knew his name was Ben. She probably knew he had a scar on the inside of his left knee, too, where I’d pushed him onto a metal tomato stake in the backyard when he was six. And that his favorite food was jelly beans—at least it was back then—and at Halloween I would trade my jelly beans for his Almond Joys. And that Ben’s middle name was Horace because our grandfather’s name was Horace. And that Ben liked to build sand castles at the beach, and his favorite cartoon character on TV was Thomas the Train—and he would use his toy train, which he’d named Thomas too, to move the sand from one pile to another.

  She probably knew all of that already, but she was going to ask anyway.

  “Right, Ben,” she said. “Younger?”

  “Two years older. He was eight when . . . when it happened.”

  “Right. And your mom and dad?”

  “What about them?”

  “I don’t know. Tell me about them. If you don’t mind.”

  I wondered what would happen if I said, Yeah, actually I do mind. I was kidnapped, so is it okay if I don’t undergo the third degree here? Is that all right with you? Do you mind if I mind . . . ?

  I kept talking.

  “My mom, sometimes it was hard for me to remember, you know. I had this new mother—but I had to hold on to my real one . . .”

  “This Father—he had a wife?”

  “Uh-huh. Mother. Mother and Father and Jobeth. My new name. They let me pick it and they even let me keep the first letter of my real name. Really kind of them, don’t you think? Such nice people. Such selflessness.” Stop crying, I told myself. Stop.

  “I know this is hard for you, Jenny. We’re going to get to all that . . . promise. Can we stick to your family first?”

  “You asked me. About Mother.”

  “I did, I know. Got a little ahead of myself there.” She smiled, at least what passes for a smile from someone who looked like that lady in American Gothic. Okay, I was being mean—she wasn’t that bad. She was just getting on my nerves, Detective Mary was. “How about we stay with your mother for now,” she said.

  “Okay,” I said. “I tried hard to remember her. Tried every night, to hold on to her, you know? They wanted me to forget. Told me my mom and dad didn’t want me. That they were my mom and dad from now on. That my mom and dad had asked them to take me. I knew they were lying. I knew it. But you’re like six, you know? And part of you doesn’t know. But part of you does—and that part was the part I held on to. The part I listened to every night, after . . .”

  If you move, it’s going to hurt more . . .

  “. . . when I was back in bed. When I was by myself. I forced myself to remember things—everything I could, about Mom and Dad and Ben and Grandpa and Grandma, and everyone. Going to Disney World when I was five—how we waited for like two hours to ride the Dumbo, and it only lasted like six seconds, but I asked my dad if we could do it again and we waited on line for another two hours. And how Ben got lost on Tom Sawyer Island—he got lost in the cave there—and we all had to look for him, and when we found him, he was crying and we bought him this humongous ice cream cone—he got a bigger one than I did just because he’d been the one lost—and I thought that was so unfair—and after I was kidnapped, when I was lying in bed remembering this, I’d think if they found me, if my mom and dad ever found me now—then I should get a whole ice cream store, a whole Baskin-Robbins of my own.”

  I told you to stop moving, didn’t I?

  “You okay, Jenny? We can take a break if you want.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “And your dad?”

  “I told you. He was a . . . dad. I loved him. He took me to Disney World. He would let me ride him around my room as if he was a horse. ’Cause when I was little I loved horses. He called me Jenny Penny because he used to do this trick with a penny where he hid it in between two fingers and then he’d pull it out of my ear—and I could never figure out how, and I would always ask him to do it again, do the penny trick, so he started calling me Jenny Penny.”

  Detective Mary asked me if I needed a tissue.

  I shook my head.

  “After a while,” I said, “they became like my storybook mom and dad. Like the kind you make up, because I started to forget what they looked like. And what they sounded like, their voices, you know? And Father and Mother were real because they were there. And you’re six and seven and eight and nine, and this is your family now. And, okay, it was a real bizarro family—you know those Superman comics about the planet Bizarro. Father had whole stacks of these old comics. Anyway, there’s this planet Bizarro where there’s another Superman and Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen but they’re all, well . . . bizarre; they’re like the opposite of the ones here on Earth. And it used to, like, terrify me . . . those Bizarro Superman comics—because that’s what I was living, see? That’s what this family was . . . because back on Earth, your father doesn’t well, you know . . . he doesn’t . . .”

  I took the tissue from Detective Mary. This was what happened— I talked about being six, and seven, and eight, and nine, and I turned into six and seven and eight and nine. I reverted.

  “Where did they take you?” Detective Mary said. “After they kidnapped you . . . where did you go?”

  “Down the rabbit hole,” I said.

  THREE

  This is what I found out later.

  Detective Mary called the house on Maple Street. No one answered because both my parents were working and Ben was at school—high school, even though he should’ve easily been in college by now, meaning he must’ve screwed up big-time. Some detective there did some detective work and found out Mom worked at Mooney Realt
y and called there. When she answered the phone Detective Mary said, I don’t want to get your hopes too high, but there’s someone here claiming to be your daughter.

  Mom fainted—that’s what she told me later. The next thing I saw was the ceiling.

  After she was picked up off the floor by Tom Mooney—the Mooneys used to show up at our Fourth of July blowouts and somehow he’d become her boss, just like somehow she’d become a Realtor—Mom called Dad, who still worked at the same production company in the city but was now its executive producer, whatever that meant. He takes people to lunch, Mom explained.

  Mom told Dad what the detective had told her—word for word, because she didn’t want to get anything wrong. I don’t want to get your hopes too high, but there’s someone here claiming to be your daughter. Mom’s hopes were apparently already floating somewhere past Jupiter, but Dad reminded her that the year after I’d disappeared, they’d been told that two separate girls might be me.

  One of them was black, he said.

  He was coming to the station anyhow.

  Before Detective Mary slipped outside to call my parents, she asked me if taking my picture would be okay—still being courteous. I asked her what the point was, even though I kind of knew what the point was. “Is this my mug shot or something?”

  “No, Jenny. No one’s arresting you.” Fake smile. “Just standard procedure.”

  Smile for the camera, I said, or thought I said. Or both.

  Mary snapped two—I smiled in one but not in the other. Then she said she’d be back in a few minutes.

  “In the meantime, I’ll send Officer Farley in to keep you company, okay?”

  “I’m fine with me, myself, and I.”

  “Afraid it’s procedure again.”

  I was tempted to ask if it was procedure for police officers to drool all over you, but I was starting to hyperventilate.

  “My parents?” I asked her. “Have you talked to them yet?”

  But Mary was already out the door, and Officer Farley was in.

  “Hey there, stranger,” he said, still his friendly lecherous self.

  “I really don’t need babysitting, you know. I’m legal.”