The Forgotten Girl Read online

  “Mr. Bauman,” I said. “One more thing.”

  He was almost at the stairway. His sneakers squeaked as he stopped, swiveled at the waist, and looked at me.

  “What day is it?” I asked.

  “Friday,” he said.

  Five

  So it was slightly-better-than-average Friday. Or, on this occasion, woeful-shitty-painful Friday. Fortunately, there were only five hours and forty-three minutes of it remaining. I showered with the water cranked hotter than was comfortable, concentrating the jet on the achiest places. It was altogether excruciating. The blood that flowed from my dreads was like terracotta paint from a brush. The water ran tepid before I was clean.

  Three Advil, and each felt like a finger bone in my buckled mouth. I crossed my junked living room to the window, peered through the blinds. A casual glance showed all was well on Franklin Street. The setting sun inked slender shadows along the sidewalks. Traffic rumbled and honked. The patio outside Juke Johnny’s was thronged with clientele; happy hour ran until 8 p.m. Fridays.

  The scene was a wholesome slice of American pie, until I checked the periphery. There was an unmarked silver cargo van outside Cramp Hardware, no doubt loaded with tracking equipment and nondescript muscle. A dude in a Yankees cap stood in the doorway of a beauty salon, playing with his cell phone but occasionally stealing glances at my window. Something winked—a camera lens, perhaps—from the top floor of the office building across the street, where the workers would have left hours ago, and even the cleaners would have packed up by now.

  They were everywhere.

  Or maybe—maybe—it was just a cargo van parked for the evening, a dude waiting for his ride, the evening sun glinting off the office windows.

  Jesus Christ, I was turning into my father.

  The Advil numbed me, body and mind. I shuffled through my apartment, making a half-assed effort to clean up. This amounted to sweeping up some broken glass, brushing crumbs from my kitchen counter, and flipping my mattress back onto the box spring.

  It was a start.

  I boiled an egg. It sat unbroken in its cup, my appetite—such as it was—gone in the time it took to cool. I found a clear space on the floor and strummed my guitar, more interested in the abrasions on my wrists than any chord I was playing. Eventually, I popped two more Advil and went to bed, but not before cracking the blinds one last time.

  It was too dark to see anything.

  * * *

  I woke in the small hours, positive the hunt dogs were in my apartment. I couldn’t hear them, but I felt them. I fumbled for my lamp but it was broken on the floor. Pain crimped the left side of my body as I rolled out of bed. I stumbled into the hallway and hit the light.

  Nothing. Just the shit show as I had left it. Didn’t mean they weren’t there. In a closet, perhaps. Behind the shower curtain.

  “Motherfuckers,” I breathed, sliding into the kitchen, grabbing a breadknife from the counter. I gave it a couple of experimental swipes and it made a sharp, satisfying sound, although the thought of having to use it was only marginally better than the thought of being back in that cinderblock room.

  “Motherfuckers.”

  Into the living room. The light from the hallway made deep shadows of the corners. Easy to imagine the hunt dogs skulking there. That they wouldn’t bother hiding, or even skulking—would simply grab me like they had before—didn’t factor into my logic. I was scared and paranoid. The mind runs at least three paces left of center at such times.

  “I can see you,” I said, even though I couldn’t. My hand crawled along the wall, found the light switch, flicked it. The shadows disappeared. I saw my jumbled living room and nothing else. I checked behind the sofa, the coffee table, even behind the plastic banana tree. It was then that I began to suspect my emotions were getting the better of me.

  I lowered the knife.

  So tired, I thought.

  But yes I checked the closets, yes I checked behind the shower curtain, yes I checked the kitchen cupboards.

  “I’m losing my mind.”

  I couldn’t live like this. No fucking way. I looked out the window again at Franklin Street bathed in 3 a.m. atmosphere, sidewalks bare, the stoplight red. How long before I stopped living like a frightened mouse?

  I returned the breadknife to the kitchen drawer, then grabbed my bloodstained jeans and took the red feather from the front pocket. I sat on the windowsill with one leg hanging, the blinds partway open, looking from the silent street to the feather. I relived it all—pain, threat, humiliation, violation—many times, hoping it would wane with repetition. The fear was boundless. The dread weighed me down.

  Everything … red as the feather in my hand.

  There was anger, too. It gathered inside me. Along with that other deep emotion—that Sally thing—that perhaps I was afraid of admitting to. And yes, these emotions were also red.

  I twirled the feather.

  5:40 a.m. The sky paled. A delivery truck grumbled to the intersection of Franklin and Main.

  The light changed.

  * * *

  The next few days were spent healing and cleaning. By Wednesday my apartment was more or less back to normal and I could do some light exercise. I hadn’t spoken to a single soul since Bauman had thumped on my door. I left my apartment only to check my mail. On one occasion I found my mailbox open, and surmised the hunt dogs had been there before me, obviously hoping to intercept any possible correspondence from Sally. I wondered if Bauman had given them a key along with a copy of the rental agreement, then realized he wouldn’t have to. It was a basic lock, any doofus with a pick could open it.

  They were probably checking my e-mail, too. You didn’t need to be an elite black hatter to gain access to a Gmail account. I considered changing my password, for all the good it would do, but didn’t bother. I had nothing to hide, and if Sally was careful enough to wipe my computer’s hard drive and my memory, she certainly wasn’t about to send me an e-mail.

  Loneliness kicked in on Thursday. Okay, I’m not Captain Sociable, I admit to that, but I’m not a recluse, either. I missed being outside, amid the buzz of day-to-day life. I missed the sunshine on my face, the metallic glow of the river, the sound of the halyard tapping the flagpole in Veterans Square. I missed playing my guitar at Green River Park and smiling at the townsfolk who dropped money into my case. And the birds, man, pecking breadcrumbs and chirping along to Cat Stevens. Yeah, I really missed the birds.

  The walls of my apartment had never seemed so close. I opened the windows and gulped the sunshiny air, but it didn’t help with the loneliness. I ended up taking a load of washing to the laundry facilities on the ground floor and waiting around for someone to talk to. Eventually, some old cat shuffled in with an empty basket and I chatted to him while he folded. We had nothing in common. We discussed the exorbitant per-unit price of the detergent in the vending machine. It was the dullest, shittiest conversation I’ve ever had. I retreated to my apartment, more depressed than when I’d left.

  Saturday (still-hurting-and-hating-my-shitty-life Saturday) I thought, Fuck it, and grabbed my guitar, headed outside. I got as far as the front step before a wave of fear broke through me and I shrank back to my claustrophobic coop. It took an hour for my heartbeat to return to normal.

  Determined not to be outdone, I broke up a handful of graham crackers, then opened both windows in my living room and scattered the crumbs on the ledge. First little dude on the scene was a bright-eyed oriole with a pretty voice. I started to play my guitar and two house wrens joined the party. Pretty soon the ledge was hopping, and I smiled for the first time in over a week.

  It wasn’t Green River Park, with the smell of the water and the summery breeze in my hair, but it was better than nothing.

  * * *

  Feeling somewhat buoyed, I tried calling my dad. A waste of time and hope. I knew he wouldn’t answer; he was convinced that the NSA was spying on the nation’s telephone and Internet communications, using backdoor loophol
es to violate the privacy of 320 million blissfully ignorant Americans. He had a working landline, but used it only to call Truth Matters USA (the nation’s number-one show for conspiracy theorists and idiots) and to order pizza.

  Mom insisted that he wasn’t always so unstable. They’d first met in 1966. Mom was a ten-year-old schoolgirl, and Dad, nineteen, along with two other young men from Green Ridge, had been paraded into her classroom by the principal. “These fine young Americans,” the principal fiercely intoned, “from here, your very own hometown, will soon be sent overseas to fight the slope-eyed devils of Asia. Know that they are fighting for a people who are not our friends, neighbors, or cousins, but who live half a world away: the Vietnamese, besieged by tyrannous and vile communists.” He whispered the last word for maximum sinister effect. “Communists!” Again, emphasized this time with a stomp of the foot. “Who but America will stand against the unjust, and will go gun-in-hand to fight for the freedom of others?” And apparently the principal became quite emotional and had to excuse himself, at which point the children asked the three brave men any number of informed questions, like, “What kind of dog is your favorite?” and “Do you know Gomer Pyle?” But it was Mom—in pigtails and horn-rimmed glasses—who stood up and, instead of asking a question, offered the peace sign, which she had seen some pretty groovy teenagers exhibiting at a protest in Green River Park, and it was only the jug-eared man in the middle—my dad—who returned the gesture.

  After training at Fort Riley, Kansas, he was deployed with Charlie Company, 4th/47th, 9th Infantry Division, in January of ’67. He saw nine months of service before a Viet Cong ambush cut down his platoon on the outskirts of a village in Long An province. Thirteen of the “Old Reliables” were killed. Dad—who lost the left side of his face when a VC frag grenade exploded less than twenty feet from him—was one of the lucky ones.

  He spent ten weeks at hospitals in Saigon, Japan, and the US, before being discharged from the army on Christmas Eve of ’67. Adorned with his Bronze Star and Purple Heart (actually, they were rolled up in a sock in his luggage), he returned to Green Ridge, and following a handshake from the mayor and some frigid flag waving, he was all but ignored. Perhaps it was his grotesque injury, or the growing tension over the war, but people became very uncomfortable around him. Except for little Heather June Fountain, now eleven years old, who remembered the young man who had come to her classroom and returned the peace sign. She started to go to his house after school and read to him on his front porch, only for fifteen minutes or so, but it was a part of the day they both looked forward to. Time passed. The books went from The Wolves of Willoughby Chase and A Wrinkle in Time to The Catcher in the Rye and Slaughterhouse-Five. Also, the townspeople adjudged that if a girl just out of pigtails could engage so agreeably with the unfortunate young veteran, then they should make a greater effort. Dad was thus employed at the textile mill, where he spent three years operating a spinning frame, and then at the post office—but way in back, where he couldn’t be seen, sorting parcels.

  Mom said this was when the cracks started to appear. He had frequent nightmares and flashbacks. One time he locked himself in the safe at the post office and refused to come out until they’d swept the area for mines. In the mid-seventies, after the last US troops had returned from ’Nam, his fears shifted from the Viet Cong and their assorted weaponry to … well, just about everything else: asteroids, Russians, politicians, aliens, nuclear war, demonic possession, oil companies. Mom assured me that, for all these occasions of frailty, Dad was often discerning and considerate. He once—using Swan Connor’s music industry contacts—arranged for Little Anthony and the Imperials to doo-wop in Mr. and Mrs. Fountain’s backyard: a little thank-you for being so selfless in regard to their daughter.

  It wasn’t until the late seventies that Mom and Dad’s relationship ventured into a more romantic territory. Mom—now in her early twenties—was promoted to assistant editor at the Green Ridge Sentinel, and my dad was so thrilled for her that he scooped her into his arms and danced her around the garden. Mom responded by kissing him on the mouth, thereby initiating their romantic involvement. There was a delicate period at the beginning where Dad struggled with confidence issues, and it must have been difficult for him to separate—but not disassociate—the woman with whom he now shared a bed from the little girl in pigtails who’d read to him after school. It took time, but he got there. They got there.

  They were married in the summer of 1982. A nonreligious ceremony in Green River Park. They honeymooned in the Poconos before renting a three-bedroom split-level on Wilson Avenue.

  I came along seven years later.

  One of my earliest memories is of Dad blowing raspberries on my belly, his face struck with joy and not at all unusual. A rare memory, in that he is clearly delighted. I have searched my brain—a spider to myself—for similar moments of happiness, but they are obscured by occasions of distance and insecurity. Like the time he hollowed out a tree trunk and lived inside it for a week, and Mom had to feed him through a hole made by a woodpecker. Or when he drew an eye and half a mouth on the scarred side of his face and walked around as if we wouldn’t notice (and we—God love us—pretended not to). Mom had hoped the responsibility of a child would complete his healing, and draw out his beautiful inner character. In fact, the opposite happened: Dad feared the world more. He feared it for me.

  I used to blame him for my social shortcomings, which wasn’t fair. He was an older dad—forty-two when I was born—so wasn’t inclined to run around with me on his shoulders or shoot hoops in the yard. Even so, I wondered if I could relate more to other kids if my old man—like theirs—had taken me to baseball games or taught me how to fly a kite. He did introduce me to his vinyl collection, a universe of sound that kindled my love of music. He also taught me some evasive driving techniques in case I ever got into a high-speed car chase with terrorists or shapeshifters, and what to do in the event of an alien invasion.

  Mom was my balance—my go-to parent on the many occasions I needed one. Her death had the paradoxical effect of further rifting my relationship with Dad, in that we’d lost our common denominator, and bringing us closer together, in that all we had was each other. I thought college would provide the distance we needed. I applied to Mom’s alma mater—Vassar—and got in, but dropped out after a year because I couldn’t bear the thought of Dad being totally alone. He’d moved from Wilson Avenue to a converted barn in the country outside Green Ridge. I rented an apartment and visited dutifully.

  We each found our coping mechanism—our groove. I started busking (made pretty good money, too) while Dad distanced himself from reality. He ascribed to wilder conspiracy theories, wrote articles about the microchips implanted in our brains and how Kentucky Fried Chicken causes impotence in African-American males. He scrutinized the night sky for extraterrestrial activity, and used what he’d learned in the Mekong Delta to turn his sprawling, jungly land into a death zone of booby traps. He also adopted stray cats, believing them to be reincarnations of deceased celebrities. I once discovered one of Johnny Carson’s hairballs in my granola.

  But I loved him, in spite of his eccentricities. And as I sat holed up in my apartment, alone and afraid, I longed for him to relinquish his distrust and answer the goddamn telephone. I couldn’t ask him about Sally or if the hunt dogs had been snooping around (assuming the likelihood—not to the mention the irony—of my phone having been tapped), but to hear his voice would be enough … to feel his strange comfort.

  Jesus, I wanted my dad.

  So I called him, and of course he didn’t answer. I tried several times, because persistence usually pays off. But not on this occasion.

  I tried not to fear the worst as the phone rang and rang at the other end: that the hunt dogs had paid him a visit—that he’d responded aggressively to their inquiries, and as a result was slumped in the living room with a bullet to the head. I quashed this terrible thought by telling myself that the hunt dogs—for all their threats�
�had no interest in killing. Not with the spider crawling around, who could do all the damage he wanted with the power of his mind.

  No, the old man was alive and kicking, probably deconstructing the Zapruder film or listening to Truth Matters USA. He just didn’t like answering the phone. I promised myself I’d go see him just as soon as I could leave the apartment.

  I wasn’t ready for that yet, but I was getting there.

  * * *

  I burned the next forty-eight hours eating and sleeping, and by Tuesday felt more like my old self. Not 100 percent, but a little stronger, for sure. My bruises were yellow and black and the cut beneath my eye was healing nicely. I tried to leave the apartment again—I needed sustenance; my refrigerator was empty of everything but a few shriveled mushrooms—and this time made it all the way to Main Street before fear and paranoia sent me scampering back into my shell. I studied the red feather while repeating the mantra, “Fuck you, I’m not a coward. I won’t be bullied, so fuck you…” That evening I tried again—didn’t make it as far as the Health Nut, but got to the Happy Filler Gas and Convenience, two blocks west. I bought trail mix, eggs, and protein bars. On Friday morning I managed a full Ashtanga routine. It left me hurting, breathless, but exhilarated.

  I played four songs at Green River Park that afternoon. A nervous, distracted effort. I strummed a few bum chords and forgot the words twice. Didn’t make a dime. Even so, this was as close to normal—to average—as I’d been for some time, and I was foolish enough to believe that things might be looking up.

  * * *

  Sally, meanwhile, was never far away. That single, incomplete memory pushed and enticed, and I wondered, not for the first time, if she’d left it for a reason. She dominated my dreams, too. Sometimes as a lover: raw, feverish fantasies. More often as a scared, lonely girl running from something that slathered and swooped. In each case, I woke with her name on my lips, clutching the empty half of the bed, knowing beyond all doubt that she should have been there. She should have been next to me.