“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
After 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?”
“N
o.”
“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.
“You know, I think I understand for the first time that my life is my life. This horrible thing that happened somehow showed me that. Even if the attorney said I’m eighteen; I don’t have to call my mother. Maybe … I mean, I might not tell her about this at all. That might be the best thing.”
“I don’t know,” Ron says. “It just seems strange, is all. I mean, you’re really close to your mom, aren’t you?”
“Well, you’re really close to me, right?”
“Yes.” He smiles. “Yes, Sadie.”
“But you keep certain things from me.”
He looks away. “Yeah.”
Sadie stares past him. She watches people going down the sidewalk: a middle-aged woman walking a dog wearing a pink dress with ruffles; a group of tourists, fanny packs on, smiling and pointing at this and that. Saturday morning, she leaned into a car window to give a strange man directions and he took her. What if he had killed her? She tries to imagine this, herself lying sprawled on the floor, her eyes wide open and lifeless, but it won’t compute. Already the whole event is beginning to assume fantastical proportions, to fade like a bad dream, and she’s glad about that.
If she tells her mother what happened, Irene will ask a million questions and Sadie will have to relive the experience. Then, because of her own fears, Irene might tell her not only that she has to stop seeing Ron, but that she has to live at home when she goes to college. And it’s certain that Irene will tell Sadie’s dad—“I have to!” she’ll say—and it will hurt him, it will kill him, and this kills Sadie.
So no, she decides. She’s not going to tell her mother. What good can it possibly do? Ron’s the one who can console her; he’s the one who saved her, he’s the one she can talk to about what happened. He won’t push her; he’ll wait until she’s ready to talk. Sadie will think of some excuse to offer her mother for why she was missing. She doesn’t really feel bad about deceiving her. It’s self-preservation. And besides, if there’s anyone who can understand keeping things to herself, it’s Irene Marsh.
A couple of weeks ago, Sadie read an article in the paper about kids living in college dorms who were allowed to have pets, and she asked her mother if they could go to the shelter and adopt a kitten for Sadie to keep in her room, so long as her roommate agreed. Irene thought it would be a good idea; look how much joy Shadow had brought to both of them.
They were in the kitchen when they were talking about this. It was late at night, and Irene had just finished an Indian-style marinade for the chicken she would be serving to Valerie and a couple other women friends the next night. Her mother was tired, and when Sadie saw the bags under Irene’s eyes, the sagging of the flesh on her cheeks, she got that mixed feeling of tenderness and irritation that she felt toward her mother more and more often, lately. Irene was older, and it was starting to show. It seemed to bother Sadie even more than it did Irene, though Sadie was hard-pressed to say why. It wasn’t because Irene’s getting older suggested too blatantly that Sadie’s own youth would inevitably fade. It wasn’t that she was embarrassed by a woman who used to be undeniably good-looking who now looked washed out and weary. No. It was that Irene’s aging had launched something inside Sadie that she didn’t understand, and that she was ashamed of: a hard-edged impatience, a burgeoning anger; at times, a near revulsion.
But that night, Irene sat at the banquette in the kitchen and smiled up at Sadie. It was an invitation to join her, and although what Sadie really wanted to do was go and talk on the phone with Ron, she slid in opposite her mother. “What kind of kitten do you want?” Irene asked.
“Orange guy,” Sadie said.
“That’s what my first kitten was,” Irene said. “An orange tabby, with blue eyes.” And then she told Sadie the story:
Irene was twenty-two, and had just moved into her first apartment. And this was the first pet she’d ever had, chosen from a big litter that Irene had driven out to a faraway suburb to see. She’d always wanted a kitten, but her parents had disallowed it, so as a little girl, Irene used to cut pictures of cats from magazines, keep them in a shoe box, and rotate them out. Her paper kittens got laid on her pillow for sleep, got put beside her plate when she ate her meals. She taped them to her window so that they could watch for her to come home from school. She had names for every one of them.
She told Sadie that she was so excited to go and get the cat, she had to keep taking her foot off the accelerator to avoid speeding. When she got there, she had no difficulty at all in making a selection: the kitten she chose, chose her—it walked up to her, sat at her feet, looked up and meowed. Irene named the kitten Gracie, and she bought it a blue collar with a silver name tag, two toys, and the best food she could afford. She prepared a bed in a box, using one of her flannel nightgowns to line it, though the kitten preferred to sleep with her.
After only four days, it died. Irene had no idea why; she woke up one morning and the kitten lay unmoving at the foot of her bed. She wondered if the tenants before her had put down some sort of poison that the kitten had found. She wondered if the kitten had been born with a fatal anomaly. She didn’t take it to a vet, for what could they do? Instead, she buried it in a nearby field, and decorated the little grave with the kitten’s collar and a bouquet of wildflowers. “I never told anyone about this,” she said, and then laughed at the tears she wiped away. “Good grief; I don’t know why I’m crying, it was so long ago!”
“You didn’t even tell Valerie?” Sadie asked.
Irene shook her head no.
“Why not?”
“Oh, she was out of town when I got it. And then, when she came back, there didn’t seem to be any reason to tell her. The cat was gone.”
“But it would have helped you to tell Valerie!” Sadie said, and Irene said, “No it wouldn’t. She would have tried to make me feel better, but she wouldn’t have been able to. And anyway, telling her about it would only make it bigger in my own mind. It would move it out into the world. I wanted to keep it as small as possible, so that it would go away sooner. I needed to keep it to myself.”
So this need for a kind of secrecy, for autonomy, is something Sadie comes by honestly. And anyway, isn’t sparing her parents the details of what happened to her a kindness? They’ll only worry. Or blame themselves. She’ll call home when she’s feeling a little more stable. When she feels sure of the story she’ll tell.
She looks over at Ron. “Can we go somewhere and just talk?”
Ron drives to Golden Gate Park, and they leave the car on the Fulton Street side. In a wooded area, they find a grassy place and lie down beside each other. When Ron very gently takes her into his arms, she begins sobbing.
Ron says nothing, just holds her.
“I thought he might kill me,” Sadie says, finally. “And I was thinking how to be about that, I was trying to think of how to be. And I was going to try to be like my cat.”
“Like your cat?”
She laughs, despite her tears. “I know it sounds stupid, but he was … When he died, he was okay. And I wanted to be okay. I wanted to be grateful. Ev
en though I was dying. I know it doesn’t make sense. But you can’t imagine what it’s like when you think you might die!”
“Yeah, I can, Sadie.”
“No,” she says. “It’s just an abstraction until something like this happens. You have no idea, Ron.”
“But I do know what it’s like. That’s part of what I was going to tell you today.”
“What do you mean? You said it was good news, what you were going to say.”
“Yeah, it is.”
“So tell me.”
He sits up, and she does, too, wipes her face and takes his hands. “Tell me!”
“Okay, so … When I was fourteen years old, I was diagnosed with cancer.”
“What? What kind of cancer?”
“Colon,” he says, then adds quickly, “But it’s gone. That’s the good news. Last week, I was at the five-year mark and I got all the usual tests. I went in yesterday for the results, and they told me everything was negative.”
She stares at him, doesn’t move.
“Negative meaning good,” he says. “He told me I’m one hundred percent cured.” He laughs. “It’s gone, man.”
Now she breathes out. She looks over at him: his hair, his ears, his soft mouth.
“I don’t get it,” she says. She means life.
“Me, either.”
“But you … Why didn’t you tell me this?”
“It wasn’t time.”
“Well, tell me now,” she says.
“What do you want to know?”
“I want to know everything. I didn’t even know kids got colon cancer.”
“They don’t, usually. One kid in one million is the statistic we were given. It was so weird, the day I was diagnosed. I had no idea anything big was wrong. I’d been having a little trouble with, you know, my bowels, and my mom took me in for a quick look-see, it was time for a regular checkup anyway. So he does this and he does that and then he says, ‘Ron, did you know we have some new fish out in the waiting room?’ He had this cool aquarium in his office, I used to love to watch the fish there. He said, ‘How about you go and check out the fish? I want to talk to your mom for a bit.’ I wasn’t really worried. Nothing hurt. I was fine. The day before, I’d hit a grand-slam home run. I was fourteen.