“What if they find out? People will print anything these days. Maybe not the New York Times or the real papers, but one blogger. That’s all it takes. I mean, the Post didn’t print Rachel’s name, but it’s all over the Internet anyway. It only took me a couple of minutes to find out she was cheating on her boyfriend with that other intern. Pretty soon the trolls will start looking for secrets about you and me.”
“Would that really be so bad?” Jason asked. “I know your parents had their reasons for protecting you, Angela, but it didn’t have to be that way. You’ve never had anything to be ashamed about.”
I gathered up the wire hangers and left the room without saying a word. I’d given him my answer the last time we talked about this, and I wasn’t going to change my mind now.
It was four years since the last time Jason had encouraged me to “come out of the closet.” It might help you to talk about it. Maybe go to a therapist. Or go big and write that book Susanna offered to help you with. Or give her an interview. You could help other people, Angela, including yourself.
I was surprised he brought it up. At the time, I even wondered if he was thinking more of himself than me. Being known as the man who married that “poor girl” could only help book sales and his growing public image.
I had made my answer—a resounding no—crystal clear. I didn’t need help, and I certainly didn’t need to help anyone else.
I also can’t change the world.
Every time I read an article about a child missing or a woman abducted, I am reminded of all the reasons that my parents decided that it was better to protect my privacy when I came home than to tell the town that I hadn’t run away. Admit it. When you hear about a missing kid, or a murdered woman, you scour the article for clues. Not clues about the perpetrator. No, we search for clues about what makes that woman or child different from the women and children we know and love. Mom was having an affair. Kid was using meth. We need an explanation, something to reassure us that the horrible things that happened to them could never happen to us.
In my own case, you wouldn’t have had a hard time finding facts to comfort you.
I started cutting class here and there in the ninth grade. My teachers and parents blamed my best friend, Trisha Faulkner, because it was easier that way. Various Faulkners were in and out of prison. They sold drugs, drove drunk, and picked fights in public over the slightest offense. Just like you feel better when you find out that the missing kid kept bad company, it was convenient to think that the Mullens’ beloved daughter had “changed” because of the influence of a troubled girl from the most troublesome family on the East End.
I wasn’t an exceptionally bad girl. I got As and Bs in school, despite my occasional detentions. I was sent home twice for back-talking teachers, but had justifications that I stand by to this day for both outbursts. When I first got my learner’s permit, I got stopped in my dad’s car with beer in the trunk. The cop was nice and let me pour it all out, can by can, at the side of Old Stone Highway rather than call my parents.
Any signs of my rebellion were basically under the radar until one summer night when Trisha and I were in the car with some guy from the city who crashed his BMW. Dad made it seem like I was some kind of hostage, under the control of a cokehead who was “only after one thing.” The reality is that Trisha and I thought the guy was a joke. He bought us wine and let us blast music he had never heard of and told us stories about closing deals and making money. He was more like a drunk uncle for the night than any kind of predator.
After my parents were called down to the police station, my father was determined to keep me from getting into any more trouble, and that’s when things got really bad. Because here’s the thing: the fact that adults made the BMW guy seem like the bogeyman made me believe there was no such thing as the bogeyman. It was the boy who cried wolf, flipped on its head. Instead of a child sounding too many false alarms, it was my parents. Because that one guy had been harmless, I assumed the same of others who were happy to goof off on summer weekends with some local girls. And because my father prohibited me from hanging around with Trisha, she took on a new importance in my life. We became inseparable. If she cut class, I did too. If she rode the train into the city, I followed. But where Trisha was willing to run off for days at a time, that was a line I never crossed. Missing curfew by hours was one thing; sleeping at a stranger’s house because anyone was better than your own family was another.
Ironically, the reason I was alone the night I was kidnapped was because I declined Trisha’s invitation to crash for a few days with a friend she’d made a few weeks earlier in Brooklyn. On a summer weekend, it wasn’t hard to find something to do without her. I showed up at the beach with a joint and found a bonfire party to join. Usually I’d end up running into someone I knew, but not that night. They were all city people. I left once the sun was down and it was starting to get cold.
As I was walking to the bus stop, a white Lexus SUV stopped and rolled down the passenger window. “Need a ride?”
“I’m good,” I said. The 10B ran a loop all the way through Springs. It was practically door-to-door service.
“You sure? Walking on the road in the dark’s not exactly safe.”
He had a point. Only a few weeks ago, a minivan had swerved to pass a turning car and run right into Corey Littleton on his bike. He was going to spend the entire summer with a cast on his leg.
He offered another gentle nudge. “Plus . . . no bonfire.” He made a brrrr motion.
It was the first of many clever things he did to work his way into my brain. To this day, I don’t really know whether I actually recalled seeing him around the fire. But that comment sealed my impression that he had been there, too.
I got into the car, and just like that, I was gone.
I don’t know why no one from that bonfire remembered seeing me. Maybe they had all left town by the time my mom started blanketing the South Fork with my photographs. Or maybe I just wasn’t that memorable.
But because my parents didn’t know I’d been at the beach that night, they didn’t know what time I went missing. All they could tell the police was that I was gone when they came home from work. It didn’t help that when the police called Trisha’s to see what she knew, her mom said she hadn’t been home for three days. Once Trisha did return, she said she “didn’t think” I’d run away without telling her, because that was the kind of thing Trisha would say.
I didn’t come home for another three years, and when I did, I had not only my reappearance but one-year-old Spencer to explain. My mother went from the woman searching for her missing daughter to the lady who told everyone it was “none of their beeswax” who Spencer’s father was. The Mullens had made their decision—better I be seen as yet another single teenage mom than as a freak show for life. As I had explained to Jason too many times, they were protecting my privacy. But they were also protecting me.
I smoked pot. I was partying. I was bad. I got in the stranger’s car. And then I stayed in that house with him for three years.
If some intrepid blogger decided to out me, I knew how that story would read; I know it’s only human nature to blame the victim. After all, wasn’t I the woman who was helping my husband’s lawyer paint Rachel Sutton as the “kind of girl” who would lie about her professor, even as a pair of Jason’s boxer shorts was hiding in the bottom of my gym bag? I, of all people, knew I did not want to be the Rachel in the story.
13
When Jason’s alarm pierced the silence at 5:30 the next morning, I wasn’t sure whether I had ever managed to fall asleep. Every time I turned to face Jason, he was dozing peacefully, but I had no way of knowing whether it was from a lack of worry or the sleeping pill he took before turning off the light.
He hit the snooze button, rolled onto his side, and pulled me into a tight spoon position. “You’re awake,” he whispered. “Did you sleep at all?”