Once Upon a Time, There Was You (16 page)

That was Irene. Right when you were ready to scream, she’d ingratiate herself with you. That was what Henry said about her mother, and it was true. That was what her mother said about Henry, too; and it was equally true.

Sadie gets up and stretches, calls out once more in the darkness. Like evening prayers, she thinks.

Finally, she is tired again, and she lies on the mattress and feels herself descending into sleep, a little mercy.

Sometime early the next morning, she is startled awake by the sound of a car door slamming. She scrambles to her feet, puts on her wrecked bra, straightens her blouse. Is she rescued? Oh, God, she is rescued! “Hello?” she says. Her voice is so hoarse, she can hardly hear herself. “Hello?” she says. Nothing.

He’s back. And he has brought someone else. She hears the sound of two men’s voices. Here it comes. It is coming and she sees that she has deluded herself in the most spectacular and ridiculous of ways. She is afraid, and that is all. She is not ready to forgive, she is not ready to die, she is not ready for anything. She is only afraid, she can taste it, she can smell it, and now she feels the back of her throat begin to tighten so that she can hardly breathe. “No,” she says, in what little voice she has left. “Please.”

“Stand back!” she hears, and the door is broken in and there before her is a police officer, who says, “I’m Officer Dickinson. Are you Sadie Marsh?”

She nods, squinting in the sudden brightness, astonished at how wide outside is.

“I’d like you to come with me. I have to ask you some questions.”

She is helped into the back of a squad car, where she is given a bottle of water and asked if she feels ready to talk. “Yes,” she says. She hears her own voice newly. She is aware that the girl she was when she left her house on Saturday morning is not the girl she is now. She doesn’t feel like a girl at all, anymore. She feels like a member of a species living for an indifferent amount of time on the planet Earth, a species in which most members assume a false security nearly every day of their lives. She is no longer among that group. She has been singularly and irrevocably educated.

17

“W
ant some of this?” Valerie asks. She’s standing at the stove in her flowered robe, flipping bacon in the pan and drinking her first cup of coffee. Irene had come over at eight, when Valerie and Ben were still in bed.

Irene doesn’t answer. She’s hardly slept. Early this morning, she went to the police station to file a missing person report, which she told Valerie was such a surreal experience. The endless and heartbreaking questions. The way she had to describe Sadie’s eye and hair color, the little birthmark on her chest, which, as a toddler, she used to try to wash off. When she described the clothes Sadie had on when Irene last saw her, she’d begun to sob. “Most times, these things turn out fine,” the cop had said. “No reason to get yourself all worked up until there’s something to be worked up about. Most times they turn out fine.”

“I told him thank you,” Irene said, “but what I was thinking was,
What about the other times?
” She told Valerie she couldn’t wait to get out of there and get back home, she kept thinking she should never have left home, but when she finally did return, when she opened the door and called, “Sadie?” no one answered. When she checked the landline, no one had called. When she pushed open the door to her daughter’s bedroom, it was just as
Irene had left it: the bedside lamp on, the covers turned back in anticipation of a daughter who, after she was good and yelled at, would surely need sleep. She sat in her living room for a while, then bolted over to Valerie’s and burst into tears.

Valerie had been sympathetic, but Irene sensed that her friend disapproved of her going to the police, thought she’d jumped the gun. When she asked Valerie that very question, Val said, “Well, to be honest? Maybe so.”

Now she comes to sit at the kitchen table with Irene. A shaft of morning sunlight lies wide on the tabletop, and Irene thinks that, under other circumstances, she would find this beautiful, the way the light bisects a vase of flowers. “Do you think I should call John?” she asks.

“Why?”

“Because Sadie is missing!”

“I’d give it one more day.”

“Well, if she lived with John and she were missing, I’d want to know. Why is no one taking this seriously but me?”

“Okay, Irene, you know what? This is Sadie’s declaration of independence. It’s here. And it’s been coming. You know that. You know you’re too close to her. I swear, you’re the only mother I know who used to get
sad
when school started. She’s not calling you because she
shouldn’t have to.
”

“I just wanted to know that she was safe, Val! She’s not on a class trip to Paris with thirty-five chaperones and looking at art, she’s
rock
climbing.”

“She’s done it before.”

“In a gym. And if she wasn’t going to call me, she wouldn’t have
said
she would. That’s the thing. That’s the real thing.”

“If she had said she wouldn’t call, you wouldn’t have let her go. Right?”

Silence.

“Right?”

Valerie goes back to the stove to turn the bacon again, pops some bread into the toaster. “Eat some breakfast. Then you’ll feel better. Then go and find something to do. She’ll be home before you know it. And then you can yell at her, won’t that be nice?”

Irene stares at her hands.

“Ben and I are taking the day off and going to Carmel.”

Irene nods.

“You want to come?” Valerie asks, but Irene knows a mercy invite when she hears one.

“No, I’ve got a lot to do at home.” What? What does she have to do at home?

“How do you want your eggs?” Valerie asks, moving back to the stove.

“On top of Sadie’s head.”

“I’ll make scrambled, okay?”

“Fine.” Irene picks up the miniature Magic 8 Ball Valerie keeps on the table. “Is Sadie all right?” she asks. She upends the ball, then holds it upright to let the message float up to the viewing window.
Better not tell you now
.

“What did it say?” Valerie asks.

Irene tells her, and sighs.

“Irene?”

“What.”

“It’s an
8 Ball
.”

“It’s always right. I think it says so right on the box.”

But when Valerie puts a plate of buttered toast and eggs and bacon before her, Irene starts to feel better. She’ll go downtown. She’ll go to a movie. She’ll go over to Mill Valley and take a walk down the Tennessee Valley Road to the ocean. There’s a massive three-hundred-year-old oak tree she likes to look at on that walk.
She’s seen people stand before it and pretend it’s a god of some kind. Lots of people do that. Maybe they know more than she does.

When she gets back, surely Sadie will be there, then. And everyone can say I told you so.

18

A
fter she leaves the police station and gets into Ron’s car to go home, Sadie says, “I can’t talk about it right now.”

“I understand,” he says.

He drives slowly, carefully, and Sadie wipes away the tears that keep gathering and falling. She thinks about what happened at the police station in order not to think about other things. The shed. The man.

Sadie was interviewed by a female police officer named Maria Sanchez with a very bad perm but a kind demeanor. Sadie woodenly recounted the sequence of events, then answered a few questions, most of which seemed designed to do two things: one, make sure she’d suffered no physical harm, and two, put the fear of God in her about ever getting into a car with a strange man again. As if she needed to be told! Next she was interviewed by a state’s attorney named Marilyn Woo, who told her she would not have to come to the bond hearing but would have to come to the trial—she would be notified as to when it would be held.

After she signed the complaint form, the attorney asked if Sadie would like to call someone to come and get her. Sadie called Ron.

“Would you like to call your mother, too?” Ms. Woo asked.

“Do I have to?”

The attorney shrugged. “You don’t
have
to call your mother. You’re eighteen.”

“Okay, well, no, then,” Sadie said.

The attorney cocked her head.
No?

“Not right now.”

Attorney Woo leaned forward. “Any trouble at home? Anything you want to tell me?”

Sadie laughed. “Only that I don’t want to cry in front of you. My mom will start crying when I call her. And then I will. She’s a very emotional woman. That’s why I didn’t call her to come and get me, she’d be so wound up she’d be a danger to everyone, including herself. But I’m going to use my boyfriend’s phone to call her as soon as I get in the car.”

Marilyn Woo rose and put her hand to Sadie’s shoulder. “Take care. And understand that it will take a while to get over this. It may creep up on you in unexpected ways. You might need a little help getting through it.”

Did the woman not understand what fortitude she had exhibited in getting through this experience? Sadie wondered. Did she notice how Sadie had not wept, and had answered every question calmly and thoroughly?

“I’m pretty strong,” she said.

“I know you are.” The attorney looked at her watch. “You’re free to go, Sadie.”

Sadie sat still for a moment, then bolted from the room and into the hall, where she sat on a wooden bench to wait for Ron. She thought about what would happen when she called Irene, about the histrionics that would surely follow, the blame, too.
You got into a strange man’s car?
She knew her mother must be worried, but Sadie needed a little time to think about what all this had meant—or not meant—to her and her alone. She didn’t want Irene to translate the experience for her, to tell Sadie what it
meant, and how to deal with it. Awful as it was, it belonged to her and not her mother. She felt that, if there were a way to come to peace with it, it meant seeing it not so much as something that happened to her but as a confluence of random events. That was something that was gently intimated by Marilyn Woo, who said, “Unfortunately, things like this happen all too often. I don’t want you to be thinking it was your fault. You need to accept responsibility for getting into the car, but not any blame for what happened afterward.
He’s
the bad guy, right?”

Maybe Sadie could ask the attorney to call her mother and let her know she was all right, and on the way home. Sadie went back into the office where she had been interviewed. It was empty now. But in the room next door was a woman sitting at a desk, working on a computer, a sweater over her shoulders, glasses perched at the end of her nose. “Excuse me,” Sadie said. “May I speak with Marilyn Woo? I forgot to tell her something.”

“She’s left for court,” the woman said. “But I can give her a message.”

Sadie hesitated, then said, “No, that’s okay.”

She went back out into the hall. She would call Irene herself, when she was ready.

Now, Sadie asks Ron, “Where
were
you? Why didn’t you come? I waited on that corner for so
long
.”

“I know, I know, I’m sorry. I was at a doctor’s appointment and it took way longer than I thought it would. I got some news. Anyway, I came to where we were going to meet just after you got into that guy’s car. I didn’t know what was going on; I was pissed, and I followed you. I tried calling, but you didn’t answer. Then I started thinking maybe you were in trouble or something; it wouldn’t be like you not to answer, and besides, the guy was driving like a maniac; I knew I was going to lose him. So I called the cops and gave them his license plate number.”

“I know; they told me. You saved me. You really did.”

Ron stops at a light, and she feels him looking at her. “You okay?” he says, and she nods.

“Did he hurt you, Sadie?”

“Mostly he scared me, is all. He locked me in a shed, and said he was going to bring somebody to me to … be nice to.”

“Are you kidding? I’m going to kill him.”

“He was crazy, that’s all. He …” Something rises up in her. “That’s all I want to say right now.”

“Okay. But do you need anything right now? Anything.”

“No.”
Just you
. She closes her eyes, and thinks about how, when she came out into the hall of the police station, she’d caught a glimpse of the man who’d taken her. He was in handcuffs, being led away, and he didn’t look so powerful or fierce now. He looked sad and sort of ridiculous. She considers the fact that this whole thing might have been not anything like human trafficking but rather some sort of elaborate hoax. But the box cutter. That would have been going too far, wouldn’t it? And his throwing her phone out the window. Maybe he’d been high, and irrational in the way that some drugs made you be. Maybe he
was
dealing in human trafficking. She supposes she’ll find out at the trial.

She opens her eyes and looks out the window, and nothing she sees seems to make its way into her. “Ron,” she says.

“Yeah.”

She starts to speak, then stops. There is too much in her brain; she doesn’t even know what she most needs or wants to say. She is still afraid, there is that—just now, when they were stopped at a light, a man passed close by Sadie’s side of the car and she gasped and grabbed the door handle. She thinks it will be a long time before she trusts strangers again, and she’ll never have the blind trust she had before today.

“Can you pull over?” she asks, and Ron goes into a parking space that has just opened up.

“I think … I’m not ready to go home.”

“You’re not?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I’m just … I’m not ready to face my mother yet. I’m not ready to tell her about everything that happened. I have to think about what I want to say, and how to say it.”

“But she must be so worried about you! Maybe you should at least call her and let her know you’re okay, that you’ll be home soon.”

“…  Yeah. I guess.”

He takes his phone out of his pocket, offers it to her.

Sadie punches in all but the last number, then hangs up. “Ron, I can’t. I just can’t yet! I mean, there’s too
much
. She doesn’t even know about you. I’ll have to tell her about you, and then about that guy, and she’ll conflate it somehow. She’ll blame you. And me, of couse, but she’ll blame you more. She’ll want me never to see you again. I
know
her; she’ll do all she can to get you out of my life. And when she focuses in on something like that, she’s relentless; she will not stop.