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 last 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?”