If You Find Me

  What if someone swiped it? It’s the nicest coat I’ve ever owned. When I wear it, I feel like civilized Carey. Carey with a hope.

  “Suit yourself. If you get too hot, you can always hang it up later.”

  Back in the great room (Pixie knows these things), the noise squashes me like a bug against the wall.

  “You’re the literal definition of a wallflower, you know that, Blackburn? Don’t you want to dance?”

  I shake my head no, my smile glued in place. I can’t breathe. Can’t think.

  “You, um, go ahead. I’ll—I’ll be fine.”

  Pixie sashays off across the polished marble, the room’s furniture huddled against the back and side walls to make way for dancers. She stops at the glass fireplace in the center, rubbing her hands together. She smiles and waves at a group of girls from English lit, who wave her over. They dance together in a circle, laughing and shouting over the din.

  She makes it look so easy. I feel a twinge, watching her. Jealous. Jealous of Pixie.

  I imagine dancing, something I’ve never done in my life, and Delaney and her ladies-in-waiting laughing and pointing.

  I jump when a skinny guy leans in toward me, his head wagging to the beat.

  “Want some?”

  He holds out what looks like a homemade cigarette, the smoke sweet, like when Ness and me threw moss into the campfire.

  “What is it?”

  “Fun.”

  I stare at him blankly.

  “You’re joking, right? You really don’t know what this is?”

  I shake my head no, and he laughs like a hyena, so loud that the group next to us turns to stare. He leans in toward me, and I recoil at his breath. Like Mama on the moonshine. I inch away.

  “Stuck-up bitch. All girls like you are stuck-up bitches.”

  I think of my shotgun. Just the sight of it, steadily pointed, could set the knees of grown men quaking.

  Pixie catches my eye and gives two dancing thumbs-up. I smile a shaky smile. I can do this. I inch along the wall. I have no idea where I’m going. I’m a scientist in the wild, I tell myself, observing the social behavior of caribou. But I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that a part of me keens to be a caribou, too.

  “Sorry,” I mumble as I bump into a couple. I catch my foot on a root, only here, it’s someone else’s foot. My arms flail.

  He catches me, his body shielding me from the gyrating crowd, and I hang in his arms. It’s as if I’m one of Nessa’s Disney princesses; we’ve been dancing, and he dipped me.

  “You,” he says.

  But Lancelot mused a little space;

  He said, “She has a lovely face;

  God in his mercy lend her grace,

  The Lady of Shalott“

  I fall into those eyes that feel like swinging real high with your head thrown back.

  “Lucky I was here to catch you. You could’ve been trampled.”

  By caribou. Just the thought alone hurts.

  I think of the way it felt, screaming at him in the woods. My face screwed up. The words ugly. I’d come undone. I’d never come undone before.

  “Ryan,” I say, my voice barely a whisper. I search his face, but it’s like the open book has closed.

  He sets me back on my feet.

  I stand next to him, our arms touching, watching the crowd. I want to say something, anything, but the words won’t come. He leans in toward me and forces a smile, a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes.

  “I haven’t seen you around all week.” His breath is minty fresh, like Delaney’s Tic Tacs. “I’d say you’ve been avoiding me. Have you been avoiding me?”

  I look away, my chest expanding with that all-too-familiar ache that seems to await me around every corner.

  “No. I don’t know.”

  “Well, is it yes, or no?”

  “It’s just . . . I just—”

  “Just what? I no longer deserve any common courtesy? People make one mistake with you and they’re out in the cold?”

  “No! I didn’t think you’d want to see me. I thought—I mean, I thought that—”

  He turns my face to his, but unlike Mama’s, his grip is phoebe-belly soft.

  “I thought we were friends,” he says.

  My eyes fill, but he doesn’t let go.

  “I was hoping we were more than that, but at least friends.” His hand drops to his side. “Either way, that’s not how you treat people who care about you. At least not where I come from. Was I wrong about you? I thought . . .”

  I wait, until I can’t wait any longer. “What? Thought what?” “That you were different. That’s all.”

  Right then, my heart breaks. It’s like it’s been waiting to break forever, and Ryan’s words crack it wide open.

  “I am different,” I squeak as the tears slide down my cheeks. “That’s the problem.”

  My life’s a tangle of past and present, like two separate puzzles with their pieces tumbled together. Nothing fits.

  “No kissin’, ya hear? Touchins fine, but no kissin’. This ain’t romance; it’s b’ness,” Mama says, her words spit out like buckshot.

  The man’s eyes glint. His face is already flushed. But they always listen to Mama.

  He expects me to be afraid. His eyes register his disappointment when he sees I’m not. But it’s been this way as long as I can remember.

  “Time rubs the shine off things,” Mama says later, when she finds me crying on the cot. “You’ll get used to it.”

  “I don’t want to get used to it. I don’t like it.”

  “We need ya’ pullin’ your weight around here, girl. No one wants to be the garbageman or the undertaker, but someone has ta do it.”

  It’s a vicious circle, what a girl can get used to. And compartmentalize. That’s what the psychology textbook called it— “compartmentalization.” “Sexual desensitization.”

  Out flew the web and floated wide;

  The mirror crack’d from side to side;

  “The curse has come upon me,” cried

  The Lady of Shalott.

  Ryan reaches out a tentative hand and catches a tear as it glides off my chin.

  I’ll always be different. I tried to tell him, that day in the courtyard. That picnic in the woods.

  “I’m sorry for upsetting you or scaring you or whatever I did that day, CC. But don’t you know I’d know what a big deal it is? I can’t begin to imagine what you and your sister must’ve gone through. You could’ve trusted me, you know. I’d look out for you.”

  For me? Or the girl in the woods? I can’t tell where one ends and the other begins.

  “I get it, Ceec. I mean, literally, I get it.”

  I wait, listening. I reckon it’s the biggest gift a human being can give to another. It’s what I should’ve done all along.

  “I live with my mom. She’s a single mom . . .” He pauses, taking a deep breath. “My father went to prison on domestic-abuse charges. He knocked out my mom’s front teeth and broke my arm one night when I was seven. My mom was in the hospital for a week. All because we were out of beer.”

  I listen with all I have.

  “No one knows. Well, except for you, now.”

  The color green. Bright green. Then it’s gone.

  “I can’t believe you’re telling me this.”

  I didn’t mean to say it out loud, but it’s too late. I said it.

  He reddens. “Why? You don’t want to hear about it?”

  “No, of course I do.”

  “What, then?”

  “I’m just surprised, I guess. I thought—I mean, Delaney said—”

  “What?”

  I blush. “Delaney said you only liked me”—I fumble for the words—“because of my face.”

  We look at each other, but I look harder. I need to know the truth.

  “It’ll do, I guess,” he says, smiling—a real smile—for the first time tonight. “But I wouldn’t listen to everything Delaney says. Don’t you feel it, too?”
br />   “Feel what?”

  “The affinity.”

  “ ‘Affinity’?”

  “Kinship. Like parallel roads. A history. You and me.”

  More pieces fall into place, thudding down soft as snow on snow, the memories resurrecting familiar bruises barely visible but still there.

  “Ryan? Tell me.”

  “You sure you want to know?”

  I’m not. I nod anyway.

  “I don’t know if I should.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know if it’s my place. My mother said—”

  “Your mother? Ryan, please.”

  “Okay, then. My mom and your mom were friends. You and I used to play together in my backyard. You really don’t remember? Not even the swings?”

  Not until now. The cogs and wheels turn, and I swing into the past. I see a golden-haired boy, older than me, hanging on to the swing next to me. Looking back is like looking into the sun.

  “I remember,” I croak. “It’s in flashes, but I remember.”

  “Your mom went off her meds. She said it made the music sound furry. That’s what she told me, out in our backyard.”

  “She meant her violin,” I offer.

  “My mom said she’d gone off her meds before, but this time, she wouldn’t go back on them. My mom tried to help, but she couldn’t.”

  “You come here this instant, Carey Violet Benskin!”

  I jump from the swing, landing sideways on my ankle.

  “What, Mama?”

  I limp toward her. She meets me halfway, holding up a gold tube of lipstick, rolling up the tube until, broken in half, the color spills to the grass.

  “Makeup is expensive. It’s not a toy. What did I tell you?”

  Her hand wraps around my upper arm, yanking me through the air. She spanks me, open-handed, so hard that my skin burns right through my shorts.

  “Joette! She’s only four!”

  My eyes catch the eyes of the golden boy. Tears slide down his cheeks.

  “Old enough to know right from wrong, Clarey.”

  “You mom is Clarey,” I say, dumbfounded.

  “Clare. She saw the bruises on you. She said it was all the time, toward the end.”

  “I remember you.” I squint at him in amazement. “I remember her.” “I remember the day she took you. I’ll never forget that day. My mom had no idea. She said it was like any other day. Your mom picked you up from our house, but then you both disappeared. My mom followed your story through the newspaper, and your dad even went on the news a few times.”

  “Ryan! Joelle and Carey are here!”

  Climbing trees, becoming the leaves.

  Offering me half of a perfectly split cherry Popsicle.

  Wrapped in the sun like a giant blanket, my golden friendship.

  Swinging to the moon. Gone too soon.

  “And you thought I was some random nice guy who liked your face,” he says with a shoulder bump.

  I just stare at him.

  He rode between the barley-sheaves

  The sun came dazzling thro’ the leaves

  And flamed upon the brazen greaves

  Of bold Sir Lancelot.

  “I remember. I can’t believe I remember.”

  “Your mom used to read that crazy poem to us. About that lady in the boat floating down the lake.”

  “ ‘The Lady of Shalott.’ It’s by Tennyson,” I say. Only, I’d thought it was mine.

  He smiles, and it’s the boy smiling, the boy from before the woods.

  “Right. It used to scare the bejeezus out of me.”

  “Because she dies.”

  “Right.” He stares at me, relief softening his features. “I thought you’d died. When no one could find you.”

  “And then you found me. That first day at school.”

  “Guilty as charged,” he says. “I saw your transfer records in the office one morning. At first, I couldn’t figure out why you had your mom’s last name, and not your dad’s. But then I figured out you didn’t want anyone to know.”

  “Why didn’t you say anything?”

  “I wanted to, but when you didn’t remember me . . . I don’t know. I thought for sure you’d remember me.”

  I want to give him a gift, too. So he knows I understand.

  “You are nothing like your father, Ryan. I remember him, too.”

  I think of Mama. I know how much that matters.

  “Thankfully. But the point is, everyone has a past, CC. Everyone has skeletons in the closet.”

  “ ‘Skeletons in the closet’?”

  “Things they want to forget. Things they’d rather keep hidden.”

  He pulls me close and I let him, his body as sheltering as the hundred-year hickory that shaded our picnic table.

  “Does Delaney know what happened to you? That it was a kidnapping?”

  “Melissa says she grew up dealing with the fallout.”

  “It doesn’t seem like she’s ever told anyone.”

  “She’s has her reasons, I reckon.”

  I follow his gaze to the ceiling, the middle carved out and replaced with a large glass dome. Stars in the house.

  If I try real hard, I can imagine the sky is the Obed sky, virgin-pure and safe as a baby’s suck. The stars chirp in Morse code dots and dashes, just enough to keep me lookin’, and Jenessa, sleepin’.

  “So, you’re supposed to forgive me now, and peck me one right here,” he says, pointing at his cheek.

  He leans down as I stretch toward him, but before he turns his head, I kiss his lips. I, The Carey I Already Am. When I don’t reconsider, he kisses me back, his lips soft as gosling fuzz. I press my body closer in the places that count, and he puts his other arm around me. I lean into him as the music crashes and roils. I find his tongue, and set us both on fire.

  And then he pulls back. Like he knows about the white-star night and the men in the woods, and doesn’t want me anymore.

  Looking through the throng, I see Pixie eyeing me, her mouth round and her eyes dancing.

  “No breakin and enterin’,” Mama says, cockin’ her head toward my crotch and winkin’.

  This man is thinner. Twitchy. I don’t like his hands. His nails are dirty. I watch as he crosses Mama’s palm with gold: a fifty-dollar bill.

  As if it’s already pourin’ down my throat, I retch, then swallow it back down.

  “Mama, please. I don’t want to do this.”

  “Do you want me to wake up Jenessa, then?”

  I tremble, my legs wobbly. “No, Mama.”

  “Then get goin, girl.”

  “Carey, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that.”

  Ryan steps back, only a few steps, but it feels like miles. My eyes fill with tears despite my best efforts.

  “Why? Because of my past? Because I’m fourteen? I’m not a little girl, Ryan.”

  He pants, working on slowing down his breathing.

  “You’re definitely not a little girl. But you have a lot going on. It might not be the best time for us to be—”

  I reach out, take his hand, and put it between my legs.

  “Carey!” He pulls away, fast, like he’s touched a hot coal. I stare him down. That’s what men like. But what I see is shock. Disgust.

  I make my way down the wall, heading in the direction I’d been going before he found me.

  “Carey!”

  I keep going, ignoring him.

  Caribou, of the Rangifer genus, related to the old-world reindeers. Both males and females grow large, branched antlers. Name derived from the Algonquian maka-lipi—snow shoveler—due to their habit of using their front hooves to push aside snow in their search for winter food.

  “Carey, wait!”

  He grabs my upper arm, and I tear it away.

  “Carey. Please.”

  I shake my head, my cheeks burning, and take a step away. But he takes a step closer.

  “Look at me.”

  This time, I do.

  ??
?Right now, I’m more interested in touching this.”

  He places his hand on my heart. Barely an inch to the left or right, and he’d be just like the men in the woods. But his hand doesn’t move. I put my hand over his, and he pulls me to him, enfolding me in his arms. He holds me, my body racked with sobs.

  “Hey. It’s okay, Ceec. It’s okay. Just slow down. Okay?”

  I nod, the material of his coat crinkling in my ear.

  He kisses the top of my head. “I’m sorry about our picnic, about tonight, all of it.”

  He gives me a squeeze. I study his feet. He wears boots like my father’s, but fancier.

  “I’ve wanted to tell you ever since that afternoon.” I fight for the words, fight for the sake of this new life. “I reckon I’m so used to being private and all, it’s hard to get the feelings into words. But I’m sorry, too.”

  “Prove it,” he whispers.

  This time, I kiss his cheek like he wanted me to, smiling through the middle of it.

  “Good girl. Let’s get out of here.” He takes my hand and weaves us through the crowd. I catch Pixie’s eye again, and she motions at the girls she’s with, waving for me to go with him.

  “She’ll be okay,” Ryan says, following my gaze. “That’s Sarah and Ainsley. I’ve known them since kindergarten.”

  He snakes us through the dancers, knuckle-bumping people I don’t know and shouting above the music. I crane my neck for one last look at Pixie, but the icy blue eyes that grab mine aren’t Courtney’s.

  Delaney looks like she could strangle me right here, right now. Our eyes stay locked until Ryan pulls me through the doorway into another room, shutting the door behind us.

  A redbrick fireplace pops and crackles, the flames dancing in crazy shadows against the walls, and smack in the middle of an Oriental rug sits a grand piano, the mahogany polished to a mirrored shine. Outside, nosy snowflakes press against the sliding glass doors before flitting off into the night.

  “Don’t tell anyone,” he whispers, sinking onto a crushed-velvet bench and lifting the lid to display the piano keys. “A secret for a secret.”

  My jaw drops as he plays the same piece I played for him in the courtyard, Vivaldi’s “Spring.” His fingers fly over the keys and the emotion builds, the notes delicate as a necklace of raindrops, ferocious as a wild boar protecting her young.