“Yeah.”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“I’m scared . . .” It just came out. I hadn’t meant it to, but that happened with me sometimes, like when Detective Mary took my picture and I said, Smile for the camera, even though I was just thinking it. You’re talking to yourself again, Father would say to me. Shut up.
“Yeah,” Farley said, “it must be . . . well, it must be really weird for you. I understand you being scared, I mean, it makes sense.”
I didn’t answer him. Partly because I’d been only ninety-nine percent sure that I’d actually said this thing out loud, but him responding to it had made it one hundred percent positive. And also because I was scared, I was scared shitless, and being scared shut me up.
I won’t say anything again . . . I promise . . . please . . . don’t . . .
“You know . . . ,” Farley said, “when I used to get nervous out on patrol—I did two tours in Iraq, and trust me, if you were sane you were scared. I saw some bad shit go down over there. I used to focus on the end game, understand? I’d imagine being back at base—actually picture it and everything, like what I was eating, and who I was jawing with—because that made it, well . . . real. It’s called visualization.”
Farley was trying, but he was talking over someone else.
You bet your ass you won’t say anything . . .
“So what I’m saying is . . . think about being home with them. And I know even that must be kind of scary for you, but after a while, it won’t be, right? Everyone will get to know each other again and it’ll be just like . . . well, like it never happened, maybe not exactly, of course not, but close maybe. So visualize it. You’d be surprised—it really works.”
Okay, Officer. I hear you. I’m trying.
“See. You look better already,” he said.
I was visualizing sitting in my old living room, with the big TV where I used to watch Arthur and Dora, and on top of the TV were Monopoly and the Game of Life, which we would play as a family, and I always chose the pink car because I was a girl, of course, and now we were all sitting there together, Mom, Dad, and grown-up Ben, and we were eating a pizza and Mom was saying, Eat over the plate, Jenny, and Dad was telling one of his corny jokes and we were a big, happy family.
Only other things were starting to crowd into my head, like when that security guard had opened the doors at the Sioux City Mall on the day after Thanksgiving to let me get to my job at Bed Bath & Beyond and all the customers waiting outside surged in after me. Good luck keeping anyone out, even though it was fifteen minutes before opening time. The security guard kept shouting, Please, it is not opening yet, please . . . , but he might’ve been talking to himself for the amount of good that did.
The security guard in my head was like that Sioux City Mall guard—Mr. Hammard his name was, though we called him Mr. Hammered because you could sometimes smell alcohol on his breath when he opened the door for you in the morning. He wasn’t threatening or anything, which was maybe the problem, because as a security guard he basically wasn’t worth shit. Neither was the security guard in my head—because no matter how many times he said, Stay out, tried to keep certain persona non grata out of my head, they’d sneak in anyway.
They were doing that now, sneaking into the living room where we Kristals were pigging out on pizza and making up for lost time. There were Father and Mother suddenly standing there telling me it was time for me to go to my room and I was getting that sick, sour feeling in my stomach.
“Hey . . . ,” Farley said, “hey . . .”
Now Officer Farley was in the living room with us, only the living room had turned into the room at the police station and it was just the two of us.
“I want my mommy,” I said. “Now.”
FOUR
I’d pictured them the way they looked then.
Mom still looking like Snow White—the one at the Magic Kingdom who’d posed for photos with my brother, Ben, and me. She would hug me the way Mommy Bunny hugged Baby Bunny when he promised never to run away from home again.
Dad would look very big because I’d been very small. He probably wouldn’t let me ride him around the room anymore, but he might lift me in his arms and carry me all the way home to Maple Street.
When they walked into the room, Mom looked like Snow White’s aunt on her cousin’s side. Her long brown hair was short, layered, and streaked with iridescent blond highlights. Her pale white skin had been zapped by one of the several hundred tanning salons I’d passed on Forest Avenue. She’d made a few too many trips to Dunkin’ Donuts.
Not Dad.
He’d shrunk.
They were standing just inside the door and I was clear on the other side of the room, and I was trying to calculate the actual physical distance between us.
Twelve years.
I think they were doing the same thing I was—photoshopping the picture they’d carried around in their heads, the same one still plastered to that telephone pole.
Maybe Mary had played the tape for them—about Ben getting lost in Disney World and riding Dumbo and Jenny Penny and maybe she’d played them some of the uglier stuff too.
Where did Father take you?
To bed.
I meant where did you live, Jenny?
All over. Ohio. Iowa. Michigan. Arizona. We kept moving. We squatted a lot. You know, houses nobody lives in. Last place was an abandoned trailer outside Sioux City. It had a hole in the roof.
Maybe the detective showed them the photos she’d snapped of me and said, Is this your daughter? Before you book the family reunion, how about we make sure. Or maybe she’d done it just to prepare them for what time can do to a six-year-old. And they’d stared and stared at those pics the way they were doing now.
“Mom . . . ?”
Don’t cry, I was thinking, don’t cry, only I went and said it out loud. Like I was saying it to them instead of me, Don’t cry, Mom and Dad, don’t . . . which was okay, because suddenly that’s what they were doing, Mom at least. Crying.
Me too.
Both of us crying, and the tears somehow meeting, because—and here’s the weird part—I’d been on one side of the room and now I was completely on the other side. Somehow I’d traveled twelve years just like that. Mommy had her arms around me like I was back on those roller skates, and she was making it better, just like she’d promised she would several eons ago.
FIVE
After they’d led me into the house and asked me if I remembered it and I said yes and no, after they’d shown me my old room where my toys were not lined up like I’d left them, but where there was a TV, Xbox, and fold-out couch—We’ll get you a beautiful bed tomorrow, Jenny—after we huddled around the kitchen table, because that’s what it felt like, huddling around a fire to keep warm but the fire was me, after we talked a little about this and that but not really about it, after they asked me what I wanted for dinner—Dad said let’s order in, but Mom said I was getting a home-cooked meal, chicken and mashed potatoes, that was your favorite—Ben came home.