“Mr. McConnell, there’s no reason—”
“Excuse me,” Patrick interrupted, “but I’m Danny’s lawyer and his legal guardian, so how about we cut through the bullshit?”
Morales’s smile was tight but not displeased. “You’re right. Mr. McConnell, of course you may stay. Miss McConnell, we’ll make you comfortable in the waiting room.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Lex said.
“I’m afraid I have to insist.”
“No!”
“Lexi.” Patrick caught Lex’s fingers in his own and drew her to the corner of the room, where they exchanged a few low words. Whatever he said subdued her. She drew her hand out of his, kissed my head, and walked out of the office.
The rest of us sat down at the table—Patrick and me on one side, Morales and Lynch on the other—and Lynch started the recording. He began with a few simple, establishing questions to ease me into the interview. My name, age, that sort of thing. At first I was surprised he was the one questioning me, since it was obvious Morales was the one in charge here, but I quickly understood. Morales wanted him to ask the questions so she could focus on watching. She was leaned back in her chair in a way that was designed to look relaxed, but her eyes betrayed her. They saw everything, moving back and forth between Patrick and me as I answered Agent Lynch’s questions, and I wondered what she saw.
“So if you’re ready, Danny,” Lynch said, “I’d like to move on to the day you were abducted.”
I took a deep breath and looked at Patrick. He nodded and squeezed my shoulder. Morales watched us.
“I’m ready,” I said.
“Great,” Lynch said. “Just tell us what you remember. Take your time.”
I swallowed once, then twice, then cleared my throat. I added a small waver to my voice when I said, “I was out riding my bike . . .”
I started the story I’d worked on with Patrick the day before, making sure to switch up my language as I went. I told them about the white van that came out of nowhere, the hidden compartment in the eighteen-wheeler, the tense ride over the border into Canada. Everyone was silent as I spoke. The lies started to gain momentum as they tumbled out of my mouth, and I found myself leaning in toward the recorder. As soon as I noticed, I slowly drew back and curled my shoulders in on myself instead.
“We drove for a long time,” I said. “Every once in a while, they’d stop the truck in some empty place and drag us out to let us pee or give us something to drink. Then they’d shove us back inside, and we’d start to drive again.”
“Any idea how long this lasted?” Lynch asked.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “Maybe two or three days.”
I sank into the lie. Never enough to lose sight of my surroundings, keeping an eye on Lynch’s and Morales’s reactions so I could adjust if necessary, but enough that I saw the lies superimposed over the present, like film that’s been double exposed. A dark road lit only by the headlights of the truck, which made my eyes—so used to the darkness of the hidden compartment now—contract painfully as someone with rough hands and a bandanna over the lower half of their face pushed me toward the trees so I could piss. Barely able to stand because my legs were so weak beneath me from fear, hunger, and lack of use. The stench inside the compartment as I was shoved back in, not even resisting anymore, knowing that it was pointless to fight. One glimpse into the eyes of the terrified girl with the freckles and strawberry blonde hair whose body warmth would be my only comfort once we started driving again before the door clanged close and took all the light away.
Lynch was blinking a lot. Patrick was rigid beside me. Morales was watching Patrick.
It began to feel like the driving would never end. Like the rest of the world had disappeared, and there was nothing and no one outside of this truck and this road. We never stopped during the day, so the day had ceased to exist too. I began to think the whole world was dark.
Then we stopped again, and something felt different. I don’t know why, but we all felt it. I could tell by the way the other little bodies in the compartment tensed, the way they started to breathe differently. There were voices outside, muffled through the layers of metal separating us, but definitely raised. My heart started to pound wildly. I was convinced it was the police, that someone was about to save us. But when the doors opened again, it was one of the same bandanna men, the one with the scar through his right eyebrow. And that was it, the moment that I realized that hope was more dangerous to me than anything else.
Lynch had his head turned now, looking at the wall. I had upset him. He recovered quickly and put on his brave boy face, but my story had gotten to him. Morales wasn’t similarly moved. Her expression hadn’t changed the entire time I’d been speaking.
The man with the bandanna blindfolded me again before hauling me out of the truck. I felt warmth on my face and realized it was sunlight just as he led me back into shadows. My feet were on a solid surface; I was inside a building. We went down a flight of stairs, and it grew colder around me. The smell of moisture and moldering surrounded me, like rotting leaves, brown decaying things. I imagined the walls dripping with fetid water, moss creeping across the floor, slime oozing up between the cracks. He put me in a small room, more like a cell, with no window, no light, nothing but a thin foam mattress on the floor, a blanket balled up on top of it, and a bucket in the corner. He locked me in there, and he didn’t come back. I curled up on the mattress, pulled the blanket over my head to hide my face, and prayed to God with all the words I could barely remember from infrequent visits to Sunday school to wake up back at home in my own bed, with my own family.
Patrick shifted beside me. I turned to glance at him, realizing that between visualizing my lies and keeping an eye on Lynch and Morales, I hadn’t been paying him any attention. He was staring down at the surface of the table, blinking his eyes rapidly. I felt a sudden, sick twist of guilt in my gut. I hadn’t even considered what it would be like for him to hear these things. We’d gone over the story a hundred times yesterday, but I’d been embroidering it as I went along, and each new detail must have been like another blow to him.
“Are you all right, Mr. McConnell?” Agent Lynch asked.
“Perhaps you’d like to step outside for a moment,” Morales added.
Patrick shook his head and took a sip from the glass of water Agent Lynch poured for him. “I’m fine. We can continue.”
“Are you sure?” Morales asked. “It’s no problem—”
Patrick’s expression was carved from marble. “I’m fine.”
“Okay,” Morales said at length. “Danny, whenever you’re ready.”
I stuck to the story. No more embellishments. I told them how they left me alone in that room for many days, the door occasionally opening to admit some food or water or to take the bucket for emptying. Sometimes a man would come in and ask me my name. When I said, “Danny,” he would hit me. What did I say my name was again? he would ask. “Danny,” I would say. Defiant. Lower lip wobbling but chin raised. Then I would be beaten and left with no food for days. This happened again and again until every inch of my skin had been broken and reknitted a half a dozen times. After the third beating I stopped telling him my name. After the twentieth I genuinely didn’t remember it anymore.
Once they had broken me, well. That’s when things really began.
Morales leaned forward in her chair, clasping her hands together on the table in front of her.
“One day the man who always came to ask my name showed up with another guy,” I said. “He was different. Cleaner. He seemed like someone important. He asked my name, and I told him I didn’t know what it was, which was true. He told me they were going to call me ‘J’ from then on. We all had names like that, just letters of the alphabet. He asked where I was from, and I told him I was from that room. I could barely remember anything else. I think . . . I think it was probably too painful for me to remember, you know? So I just forgot. It was easier for me to think I’d been born there i
n that room and never known anything different. I remember the man smiled at that.”
Agent Lynch glanced over at Morales. She gave a nod so small that it seemed to come more from her eyes than anything.
“We’ll come back to that man, Danny,” Lynch said. “For now, just tell us what happened next if you can. Unless you need a break first?”
I shook my head. “I’d rather just get through this,” I said, and it was true. Telling the lies, making myself believe them as much as possible so I would sound convincing to the people listening, took its toll.
“Of course. Go on.”
“They took me out of my room and gave me a shower,” I said. “It was only the second or third one I’d gotten since I’d been there. They dressed me in new clothes and then the clean man put me in a car and drove me somewhere. He didn’t bother blindfolding me or trying to tie me up or anything. I guess he knew I wouldn’t run.” I faked a crack in my voice, but it wasn’t hard. All good lies contained some truth, and I knew what it was like to be young and scared and feel beyond saving. “He took me to another house in the middle of nowhere. There were other children there too. That’s where we lived when we weren’t . . . being used somewhere else.”
My stomach started to feel unsettled as I continued the story. What they told me I’d have to do. What they did to me when I refused. How bad it got before I finally agreed, and how much worse it got after that.
“This one guy, he was always smoking. If I made him mad, he would burn me.” I pulled down the neck of my shirt, showing them a circular cigarette burn just under my collarbone. Might as well put my real scars and the healed breaks any X-ray would detect to use. “They broke my ribs a couple of times. My arm, too.”
“Did they take you to the hospital or a doctor?” Lynch asked.
I shook my head and rubbed my arm where the phantom pain of bones grinding together still lived. “No, they just made me a splint. Couldn’t risk anything else.”
The more truth I wove into my lies, the more the constructed memories blurred with my real ones. The dark room where I slept on a mattress on the floor was no longer in some human trafficker’s safe house but in a trailer home in Saskatchewan, the screaming voice suddenly a familiar one, the close walls those of the closet where I tried to hide. The metallic tang of fear in the back of my throat as I heard footsteps in the hallway at night was as vivid now as it had been then, and soon tears I had never cried for myself were building up in my throat for my invented Danny Tate, so thick it was hard to breathe.
Patrick reached out and slowly, carefully touched my shoulder. That did it. I broke down. “Crying” is too delicate a word for what it was. Patrick put his arm around me, but I flinched away violently, because I wasn’t in that room anymore, with the man who’d been nothing but the perfect big brother to me. I was back there, in the dark and the cold with her and with them.
“Danny,” Patrick said. “It’s okay. You’re okay.”
I looked up at him, remembering where I was. Patrick looked bewildered and worried, and I let him squeeze my shoulder.
“Okay?” he said.
I took a deep breath and nodded. I was safe now. I was okay. And that very rare, very real display of emotion surely wouldn’t have hurt my cause here.
“I know this can’t be easy for you, Danny,” Morales said. “We really appreciate your bravery in telling us all of this. Take a minute if you need to.”
I shook my head and swiped at my eyes. “I just want to get this over with. I just want you to stop them.”
Morales nodded at Lynch, who asked, “Can you tell us how you got away?”
“They accidentally left a door unlocked,” I said. “I made a run for it.”
“How long ago was that?”
“About a year.”
“Why did you never seek anyone out?” Morales said, asking her first question of the day. “Go to the police?”
“You make that sound like an accusation, Agent,” Patrick said. “My brother is the victim in all of this. He’s not here to defend his actions.”
“I did go to the police,” I said. “That’s why I’m here now.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to sound accusatory,” Morales said. “I’m just wondering why you didn’t reach out for help in the year before you arrived at the juvenile facility in Vancouver.”
“I was scared,” I said, thinking about that first time I ran away and the look on my mother’s face when she had to come get me and take me back. “To me, the men who had taken me were like gods. All powerful. I was sure if I told anyone who I was, they’d find me and take me back.”
“Even the police?” she asked.
“Especially the police. I’d been abused for years, and the police had never done anything about it,” I said. I tasted bile at the back of my throat and tried to swallow it down. “They never found us kids and saved us the way I thought they would for so long. Never investigated any of the houses where we were kept or any of the men who did this to us. I thought the only way that could be was if the police were a part of it.”
Morales sighed, and her eyes were a little softer when she looked at me. “I’m sorry we never found you, Danny.”
“Me too,” I said.
“So what changed when you got to Short Term 8?” she asked. “Why did you decide to come forward then?”
“I started to remember who I was.” I looked at Patrick. “I started to remember my family.”
Patrick met my eyes for a half a second before looking down at his watch abruptly. “I think that’s enough for today.”
Morales frowned. “Actually, I still have some—”
Patrick stood. “He’s told you everything you need to know about his kidnapping and imprisonment. Nothing else is relevant to finding the people who did this to him. Are we free to go?”
Morales stood as well, buttoning her jacket. “Mr. McConnell, if you could just—”
“Agent, we’ve been very cooperative,” he said, “and we’ve also been here for hours. My brother’s still in a delicate state, and I can see that he’s exhausted. I don’t want to overtax him.”
“I think Danny’s been clear that he wants to do everything he can to help.” Morales turned her sharp eyes on me. “Right, Danny?”
“Thank you, agents,” Patrick said, without waiting for my answer. “Come on, Danny. Let’s go.”
I got up and followed Patrick from the room. I was holding up and would have been happy to stay if it meant getting this part of the process over with, but I suspected Patrick needed a break more than I did. His face looked drawn and clammy, and the least I could do was let him use me as an out.
Lex tossed aside a magazine and jumped to her feet when we entered the lobby. “Finally! How did it go? Are you okay, Danny?”
“I’m fine,” I said. “Tired.”
“It was fine,” Patrick said. “Let’s get out of here.”
I glanced back at the building as we reached the car. Morales was standing just outside the door watching us, and the sight of her gave me a cold feeling in the pit of my stomach I couldn’t explain.
• • •
Lex climbed into the backseat with me and wrapped her arms around me while Patrick drove home. I gave in and leaned against her. It was starting to hit me now. I had expected the nerves and fatigue from so many hours of thinking through every word I said, but the grief that had bubbled up from inside of me had caught me off guard, and Lex was surprisingly solid for such a wispy, dandelion person. Maybe she treated me like a little kid, but at this moment it felt nice to be held, surrounded by her softness and the smell of the lavender hand lotion she kept in her purse. Made me understand why normal people sought this out.
“Was it awful?” she asked. “I can’t imagine how awful it must have been.”
“It . . . it was okay,” I said.
“He did great,” Patrick said, glancing at us in the rearview mirror.
“Well, we’re not going to make you do that again.
Right, Patrick?” she said. “They got everything they need, right?”
“We’ll see,” he said. “I doubt it.”
“It’s just going to have to be enough.” Lex leaned her cheek against the top of my head. “They’re not making you relive all of that again. It’s all over now.”
And I realized, slowly, that she was right. The cold, lonely boy I’d once been was gone. I had a home now, people who loved me. People I was starting to love back, as impossible as that seemed. Maybe I didn’t deserve it, but Danny Tate did, and I was him now.
I wondered if this was what happiness felt like.
• • •
A few hours later I was lying in the sun out by the pool, watching Patrick try to teach Mia how to do the front crawl. Lex was sitting in the lounge chair next to mine working on her second glass of wine. My phone buzzed in my pocket. It had taken a while to get used to, but I actually kept it turned on and with me now.
“Who’s that?” Lex asked as I pulled the phone out to check it.
It was a text from Ren. You okay? Didn’t see you around today.
“Just that girl from school,” I said.
I’m fine, I texted back. Had things to do. Be back tomorrow.
Good, because the leeches were very disappointed at your absence and lunch is booooring without you.
I smiled.
“I think Danny’s got a girl-friend,” Lex crooned.
“Shut up,” I said.
“Ooh, he does!”
“Is she cute?” Patrick asked.
“I’m not talking to either of you,” I said.
“Danny and his girlfriend, sitting in a tree . . . ,” Mia sang.
“Not you too!” I said while Patrick and Lex laughed.
Doing anything right now? Ren asked.
Not really, I said.
Want to come over?
I thought of a dozen things simultaneously. Ren’s eyes on mine and her laugh and the feel of her skin against my hands and the pleasant queasiness I felt when I was talking to her.
“Hey, Patrick, can you drive me somewhere?” I asked.
“What, now?” he said. “She must be really cute.”