Girl, Stolen

  “What happened? What’s the matter?” Griffin’s voice sounded higher pitched. Scared.

  “Not in front of her. What’s she doing out here, anyway?” Roy didn’t wait for an answer. She could hear him pacing back and forth. “Put her back in your room. Then we need to talk.”

  Griffin hustled Cheyenne away. He tied her ankle to the bed but left her hands free. “Sorry,” he said. She wasn’t sure, but she thought she felt his hand brush the top of her hair. She felt oddly reluctant for him to leave. Who would come through the door next? Griffin might be bad, but she knew the other three men were worse. And why was Roy so angry?

  What had happened? Had her parents refused to pay a ransom? But that was impossible. Even before she heard him on TV, Cheyenne had known her dad would do anything to get her back.

  Maybe while she had been napping, Griffin had called Roy with the news about her escape attempt. Was that why he had thrown her cane into the woodstove?

  Smoke from the elastic cord still hung in the air, and Cheyenne started to cough. Echoing, wet, tearing coughs, like she was going to cough up one of her lungs. When it finally stopped, she was covered with a light sheen of sweat, even though Griffin’s room was cold. She found the quilt and pulled it over her. There was nothing else to do. She closed her eyes.

  Using a cane had been the first skill Cheyenne had had to learn after the accident, and the hardest. Her dad hadn’t wanted to let her go to the residential program, but Danielle had persuaded him. That was before Cheyenne’s dad and Danielle started dating, before Danielle became her stepmother, back when she was just one of the voices of the nice nurses who cared for Cheyenne.

  Although in Danielle’s case, not so nice. Danielle hadn’t believed in spending too much time mourning what was lost. Instead she wanted Cheyenne to focus on what she had, on what she could do.

  For the first two months after the accident, Cheyenne was basically in bed. First, it was because her broken body needed to heal. After the initial ten days, when she was out of danger, the hospital recommended that she be sent to a nursing home to recuperate. Her father wouldn’t hear of it – his thirteen-year-old daughter surrounded by old people with strokes and broken hips? Instead, he paid for private-duty nurses to be with her twenty-four hours a day. One of them was Danielle.

  Once Cheyenne realized that she would never see again, she shut down. What was the point? The world was a scary place. The physical therapist wanted her to go to a special school where she would learn how to be blind. Cheyenne said no to everything, and her dad didn’t argue. She didn’t like to get out of bed. There was nothing around her, and how could she walk on nothing? If Cheyenne had to go someplace, she slid her feet as if she were on roller skates, so that she could still have one foot on the world.

  All she had left for sure was her body, trembling and sweating. The churning in her stomach, the pounding in her temples, the sounds of her breathing. She no longer knew anything about the world. All she knew about was herself. Her world had shrunk to the edges of her skin.

  Every time her dad encouraged her to get up, Cheyenne complained that her head ached or that she felt dizzy. Sometimes it was even true. Sometimes she didn’t know if it was true or not. Mostly she stayed in bed and listened to music. Her dad would stand in the door of her room watching her – she could hear him, even if he didn’t always say he was there – and Cheyenne would just turn her music up louder.

  Then one day Danielle popped the headphones out of her ears.

  “Hey!” Cheyenne protested. Her hands scrabbled over the bedcovers, trying to find them.

  “Listen,” Danielle said, her voice brisk and matter-of-fact, “this is going to be one long, boring life if you don’t learn how to function independently. At this rate, you might as well be dead.”

  Cheyenne had held it together so well for weeks, but now she snapped. She was tired of sympathy, but this woman’s expectations were way out of line.

  “Might as well be dead? I am dead! I’ll never see anything again – not a movie, not a person’s face, not even my own face.” She got bogged down thinking of all the things she wouldn’t see – flowers and dogs and the colors of her clothes and sunsets, leaves turning, TV shows and books, concerts, cute boys, cute actors, cute babies, what exactly was making a strange noise, the colors of gelato and the shiny metal tubs they were lined up in, cracks in the sidewalk, people laughing at her.

  Danielle’s voice remained calm. “You’re only thirteen. You’ve got your whole life ahead of you.”

  “Don’t give me any of that crap about how I’m only thirteen. My life is over. I’m never going to drive a car, I’m never going to go on a date, and I’ll be lucky if I get a job in some shelter for the disabled.” Cheyenne made her voice singsongy, furious that she could still hear the tears underneath. “I’m sick of people saying ‘you’re still young,’ ‘you’ll adapt,’ ‘God never closes a door but he opens a window.’ Well, that’s all BS! I won’t adapt. I’m blind. My mom’s dead and I’m blind!”

  There was a long pause. Then Danielle said quietly, “You’re right. But it is what it is, Cheyenne. You can’t change it, so you have to deal with it. You have to figure out how to do things for yourself. You can make a life. And it can be a good one. But you have to try.”

  From outside Cheyenne’s closed door, her dad called, “What are you girls talking about in there?”

  “Go away!” Cheyenne shouted. She didn’t want him to see her with tears spilling out of her useless eyes. Then he would start crying too. She didn’t want another pity party. She just wanted to forget. She just wanted to go to sleep and wake up and have it all be a bad dream.

  She waited until she heard her father’s footsteps turn away. Then she said softly, “But it’s too much. It’s just too much.”

  Danielle was relentless. “Aren’t you getting tired of living like a baby? Of having everyone do everything for you? Don’t you want to learn how to do some things for yourself?”

  It was true. Cheyenne was starting to feel like a baby trapped in a thirteen-year-old body. Sometimes her dad even fed her.

  She kept still for a long time and then, slowly, she nodded. She felt Danielle settle on the bed beside her. Her arms went around Cheyenne. For a second, Cheyenne stiffened, and then she let herself be rocked back and forth while Danielle made sh-sh sounds in her ear.

  That was how her dad had found them. Later, after Danielle and her dad told Cheyenne they were getting married, she wondered if Danielle hadn’t somehow planned being found like that. To show that she could take Cheyenne’s mom’s place.

  Still, Danielle hadn’t been wrong. And because of her encouragement, Cheyenne had learned how to do a lot of things for herself, more than she had ever thought possible in the first horrible weeks after the accident. Most of what she had learned had been at a residential school two hours from her home.

  Many of the people there were like Cheyenne, in shock, wondering what had happened to them. She remembered in particular one guy who kept saying, “But how will I be able to do things if I can’t drive?” After a while, she wanted to slug him. He was forty at least, so he had had a life. He had had his chance. Cheyenne hadn’t even really gotten started. Her mom had let her drive once in a cemetery near their house, but now she would never get to for real. And her mom was buried in that same cemetery. Cheyenne had never even been to her grave.

  At first when she was at the school, Cheyenne had felt like an alien who had just landed on the planet. She had had to relearn things that she had known how to do for so long that she didn’t remember not knowing them. How to feed herself. How to dress herself. How to walk without bumping into things.

  One of the first things she learned was how to use a cane. Surprisingly light, the cane had a rubber handle like a golf club and a plastic tip. The cane could be folded up into a neat little bundle of sticks. Cheyenne resolved to keep it folded up and hidden away as much as possible. When the instructors told her it glowed in the dark, she
imagined how it would give her away at night, the one time she might have a slight advantage over sighted people.

  Still, while she was at the school, surrounded by other blind people, she decided to learn how to use it. Danielle had told Cheyenne a Bible verse, “For we walk by faith, not by sight.” Using a cane was like that. Each step was like stepping into nothing until she felt solid ground under her feet again.

  It made a tacka-tacka sound. “Touch, don’t tap,” the instructors said. They taught her how to sweep it from side to side like a metal detector, touching the spot where the next foot would land. When she stepped forward to the left, she tapped on the right. If there was a hole, or something in her way, the cane would find it first. Going down stairs, she held her cane directly in front of her and learned to trust that it would tap when she reached the bottom. Through the feedback she got from the cane, Cheyenne learned to feel grates, ups, downs, carpeting, tile, wood, gravel, curbs, grass, and swishing revolving doors.

  And she learned that it wasn’t just that the cane could tell her what was directly in her path. If she listened closely, she could tell whether the sound it made was bouncing off a brick wall or echoing in an open doorway or rebounding off an awning overhead. Even without the cane, she could sometimes tell if there was something ahead of her, like a tree or a telephone pole. As a blind person, Cheyenne had to interpret every shred of information she could get from her other senses. Everyone thought the blind had special abilities, but it was really that they had just learned to pay attention. That they had to pay attention.

  Now as she lay on Griffin’s bed, Cheyenne remembered the first time the instructors had had her venture out on her own. She had walked down a city street, listening to other people’s footsteps around her, fearful she might hit one of them with her cane. (That was before she realized that a cane was good for crowd control – once they saw it, people usually gave her a wide berth.) She wondered if they were staring. At one point, she thought she heard someone whispering, but she told herself she was imagining it. After a couple of blocks, her breath finally began to come easier.

  “Are you blind?” someone asked, startling her. The voice belonged to a young boy.

  Cheyenne turned, not sure she was looking in the right direction. She took a deep breath and let it out. “Yes.”

  “You must be really bad!” Then she heard the sound of his footsteps running away.

  At the end of each day – she was there for three months, coming home only on weekends – Cheyenne had fallen into bed and slept so hard she didn’t even dream. In some ways she was glad. In other ways she wished desperately to spend time with her mother again, even if it was only in a dream. The few times she did dream about her mother, Cheyenne was always searching through a huge crowd, only to finally catch just a glimpse as her mom left a room.

  When the yelling began outside Griffin’s door, Cheyenne was so deeply asleep she didn’t hear it.

  YOU WANT PROOF, I’LL GIVE YOU PROOF

  Griffin hurried back into the living room. “What’s wrong?” He hadn’t seen his dad this angry for a long, long time. Back then, his mom had been around to try to jolly Roy out of it. Not that she usually succeeded.

  For once, TJ and Jimbo were quiet, watching Roy with a look they normally reserved for Duke.

  “Nothing,” his dad snarled. He had taken the bottle of Maker’s Mark out of the kitchen cupboard. He took a swallow of the whiskey and then looked at the two men who worked for him. “How come you’re still hanging around? How come you’re not at home?”

  Jimbo knew enough to keep quiet, but not TJ. He said, “Because we wanted to hear what her folks said. How long till we get the money? How much are we going to get?”

  “Who said anything about ‘we’?” Roy roared. “It’s my stupid kid who brought her back to my house. I’m the one who’ll take the fall if this thing goes south. When this thing goes south. You guys can turn state’s witness and come out of this smelling sweeter than a rose.”

  “But—” TJ really didn’t know when to shut up.

  “But nothing. Go home. Now.” Roy took another slug, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “We’ll talk about it tomorrow.”

  “Can we just see her?” TJ asked.

  “No,” Griffin said firmly. “She needs to rest.”

  “Did you tucker her out?” TJ asked with a leer. “Come on, let TJ take a little peek. She’s one sweet thing.”

  Griffin took two steps so that he stood between them and the hallway. “You heard Roy – go home.”

  TJ looked at him in surprise. He didn’t back away, but he didn’t go forward, either.

  Jimbo was the one who finally showed some sense. “Come on, Teej, let’s go. It sounds like nothing else is going to happen tonight.”

  “Dad, what’s the matter?” Griffin asked after the door closed behind them. “They showed her parents on TV” – he decided to leave out the part about just how nice the house was – “and they said no one had contacted them. Didn’t you call them?”

  Roy looked away. “It took me a while to score a mobile phone that I could use. And then when I finally had it, I couldn’t find the piece of paper with the numbers on it.”

  Griffin felt confused. “What are you talking about?”

  His father leaned forward until their faces were only inches apart and carefully enunciated each word. “I … lost … it.” Griffin realized how bad Roy’s mood really was. “I lost the goddamn slip of paper. So I couldn’t call. I was trying to think of the best way to do this. So I was down at the Green Roof, making notes.” The Green Roof Inn was a dive of a bar about twenty miles away, where Roy sometimes went to shoot pool and drink Fosters until he got kicked out for fighting. They always let him back in the next time, though, because if they barred all their customers for that type of behavior, they wouldn’t have any left. “So, yeah, I watched those rich bastards on the TV above the bar. All” – he pitched his voice higher – “boo-hoo, my baby’s gone.” He switched back to his normal voice. “And then when I went out to the car to call them, I couldn’t find the paper. Maybe they’re just covering up. I mean, come on, it must be a drag, having to watch after this disabled girl all the time. Maybe they want to get rid of her and start fresh.”

  “I think Cheyenne’s pretty independent,” Griffin said. He suddenly felt the need to defend her. “She’s got a seeing-eye dog and everything.” He paused, then said in a rush, “I’ve been thinking. Maybe we should just let her go. Without asking for money. And if the cops figured out who we were, which they probably wouldn’t, we could explain it was all a mistake.”

  The blow to his belly came out of nowhere. The next thing Griffin knew, he was on the floor, huddled up. The air was stuck somewhere inside him. His mouth opened like a fish hauled onto the bottom of a boat, but nothing came in and nothing went out. Time seemed to slow down and he could see everything – a paper clip on the carpet, the scuffs on the tips of Roy’s work boots – with a kind of sparkling clarity. Was he going to die?

  And then finally the air came rushing back in. It hurt just as bad as when it hadn’t been there at all.

  “Like that’s such a bright idea.” Roy leaned over him, shouting. “Like they’re going to overlook what it is we do here?” With every word, spit freckled Griffin’s face. “This chick could be our ticket out. On New Year’s Eve, I want to be on a beach someplace warm, drinking mai tais. And now that could happen. But only if we play our cards absolutely right.”

  Griffin managed to sit up. He turned his head and rested his cheek against his bent knees.

  “Sure, you screwed up when you didn’t look in the backseat. But now that could be the best thing that ever happened to us. Go get her. I want to get those phone numbers again so I can talk to that fat-cat dad of hers.”

  Griffin had just learned – again – that it wasn’t worth talking back to his dad. He got up and went in to get Cheyenne. She was asleep. When he touched her shoulder, she jerked awake, then pushed h
im away with both hands, her breathing rushed and panicky.

  “Easy, easy,” he said. “It’s just me. My dad wants to talk to you.”

  “What did my parents say?” Looking both scared and excited, she sat up. “How come they acted like they hadn’t talked to him yet?”

  “Because they haven’t. He needs you to give him the phone numbers again. He lost the paper that had them. But don’t say nothing to him about it. He’s in a real bad mood.”

  Cheyenne wiped her face clean of all expression and nodded. Griffin untied her ankle and walked her down the hall.

  Holding a mobile phone so big it was almost funny, Roy was waiting for them. “All right, what’s your home number again?”

  Cheyenne recited it in a dead voice.

  Griffin watched his dad’s expression as he listened to the phone ring. His face changed when someone answered.

  “Listen,” Roy barked. “I’ve got the girl. I’ve got Cheyenne Wilder. I’m offering you a trade. You give me money, and I’ll give her back. It’s that simple.”

  His eyes narrowed. “You want proof? I’ll give you proof.” Forgetting she was blind, he thrust the phone at Cheyenne. When she didn’t take it, he swore and fumbled it into her hand. “Don’t say anything stupid,” he warned her.

  “Daddy?” Her face changed. Suddenly she looked like a little kid. “Daddy?” She bit her lip at the answer. “Oh. I’m okay, but—”

  “That’s enough.” Roy yanked the phone away from her and put it back to his ear. “I’m sure you got that taped. You run that through your computers or have her parents listen to it, and they’ll tell you that I’m telling the truth. And you tell them we’re gonna need five million dollars. Nothing larger than a fifty. Unmarked, nonconsecutive bills. Or you’re gonna get her back in pieces!”