Another Little Piece (17 page)

“But then there’re the few times when you see something evil. And if that is part of the bigger plan, then there’s no more believing anything other than the plan sucks. Unless maybe me seeing it is part of the plan. Me stopping it
is
the plan.”

The word
evil
thudded around inside me. Everywhere it touched, I hurt.

“I usually avoid kids. It’s hard to see them die. Even if they’re really old when it happens. It’s like seeing time fast-forward. But I was waiting in the checkout line at Wegmans, and she was at the register next to mine, whining about wanting candy. Her mother told her no, and then she had a total meltdown. Temper tantrum on the floor—kicking, screaming, the whole deal. The mom was mortified and dragged her out of there. I shouldn’t have turned to look, but I did. I saw her little face, red and tear-streaked. And then I saw how she would die.” Dex shook his head, correcting himself. “No, how she would be killed.”

His eyes had been locked on mine this whole time, and his gaze was still directed toward me, but I could feel it turn inward. Could tell he was watching it happen once more.

It turned out that our secrets were more alike than I’d known. We both had uncontrollable nightmares in our heads. Real ones. Except I was the one who brought about my own nightmares. I deserved to see them. Whereas he saw everyone else’s and sometimes tried to stop them. I’d known he had secrets. I’d assumed that all secrets were like my own—dark and damning. Although perhaps not to the same degree. But his secrets weren’t merely lesser sins, they were something else entirely.

As if my thoughts had triggered it, the color peeled away like strips of faded paint. Dex’s hands suddenly felt burning hot against my face. I tried to pull back, but it was too late—I was already somewhere else.

REMOVE

A black rectangle is all I can see. Then words appear.

REMOVE LENS CAP.

The black slides away, and a picture takes its place.

A child. Tear streaked and terrified.

Then a beep.

REC.
The three red letters appear at the bottom left corner of the screen.

The picture zooms out. The child becomes smaller, dwarfed by the man straddling her small body.

My head won’t turn, my eyes won’t close. But I can shift my focus. Stare at the date at the far corner of the screen.

November 17. In my peripheral vision, the man’s body begins to move.

No. Look at the date. I do the math, desperate not to see her little pink sneakers thrashing, the little red lights on them flickering against the looming, dark trees.

Another part of the screen records the time.

Three minutes, twenty seconds.

This is when she stops crying.

It zooms in again, this time finding the man’s face. In profile, so I can only see half of the satisfied smirk, and one remorseless eye.

SEEING

“No!”

The word ripped from my throat. I blinked at Dex’s face in front of mine. Too close. I was already pulling. Pushing too. We were too close. I couldn’t get far enough away.

“You saw it. You were seeing it too. With me.”

I tugged at the door handle and lunged for the opening, not even feeling it when I hit the cold cement. Dex reached for me, but I evaded his grasp, skittering backward on all fours. I put my hands over my ears. Afraid of what else he might say. What else he might make me see.

“Anna, please. Wait.” Dex stepped from the car, but he was slow, wincing with pain.

I scrambled to my feet, and then I was running.

“Anna, please!” I heard behind me, and then maybe an “I’m sorry.”

Or maybe those were my words, ricocheting against my own skull.

DAWN

OKAY

Okay

truth time.

I am the other girl

a boyfriend stealer

or maybe just borrower

. . . for now at least.

He can’t get enough of me

that’s what he says.

And I hope it means

he’s had enough of her.

I want him full-time

and official as my bf

and for her to be the ex.

Because I can’t get enough

of him either.

With every stolen

—or borrowed

(like a cup of sugar

from the neighbor

next door)—

kiss

I only want him more.

I tell myself it’s

okay.

Because I love him more.

I tell myself she’s the

twenty boys by twenty kind,

but for me he is the

one and only.

This is how we take

what’s not ours.

This is how we make

the bad things we do

okay.

—ARG

SEARCH

I ate cornflakes by the handful straight from the box, shoveling them in as if I hadn’t eaten in years. The crunch between my teeth acted like a sort of white noise, blocking out everything else. Like the memory of walking down the street, frozen from the cold as Dex followed beside me in his car, begging me to get in. I finally did after he promised not to touch me. Or talk to me. Or look at me. Even so I sat in the backseat, with my eyes squeezed closed for the whole ride home.

Now I opened my eyes to find the dad standing directly in front of me.

He looked as surprised to see me as I was to see him. Like I was some forgotten houseguest who should’ve had the decency to leave by now. The dry cereal became glue in my throat.

“Annaliese.” He rubbed his eyes. “Don’t you have school?”

I swallowed. I’d completely forgotten. He must have too, because he was my ride, and the school day had started over three hours ago.

“I was scared,” I said at last, because it was true and because it would make the dad immediately back down.

And he did. “Of course. I—” He seemed almost not there, as if half of him was with the mom still. “I’ll call the school, let them know there’s a family emergency. But right now I’ve got to get back to the hospital. I only came to pick up a few things.”

He was already drifting out of the room, moving in one direction and then another, as if he’d forgotten how the house was laid out.

“Is she okay?”

My question stopped him. And for a horrible moment I thought maybe the mom was dead, and he couldn’t tell me, couldn’t even process it himself. But when he turned, he merely looked guilty, not grief stricken.

“She will be. They said she can probably go home later today, or maybe tomorrow morning. Everything will be okay. When your mom is home, we’ll talk. But right now . . .”

Again he moved away. This time, I let him go.

Whatever the mom had, the dad still wasn’t telling. Sitting at the kitchen table, I could hear him in his room above me, opening and closing drawers. He was probably trying to gather everything the mom could ever possibly need or want.

As he came down the stairs, I dashed into the living room and, reaching behind the couch, grabbed the mom’s knitting bag. Running back into the kitchen, I caught the dad as he opened the garage door.

“Knitting,” I said, thrusting the bag at him. “If she gets bored or anxious.”

The dad stared at the bag and then me, as if he’d never seen either of us before. Finally, he took it from my hands, giving my fingers a little squeeze in the transfer.

“I told her I’d bring you for a visit, but she doesn’t want you to see her in the hospital. Your grandmother—you never met her, she passed away in the hospital of pneumonia when your mother wasn’t much older than you, and your mom thinks—honestly, I don’t know what she thinks, except that she really hates hospitals.”

The dad looked at me helplessly. He was caught between us. And I could see how lost he was without her. He always seemed like the strong one, holding the mom up, but in truth he depended on her as well.

“It’s okay. I really hate hospitals too.”

The dad smiled at that. Almost a real smile. Then he was gone, and I was alone once more.

I grabbed the box of cornflakes, but I wasn’t hungry anymore. Instead, I shoved a few breath strips into my mouth and went upstairs, past my own room and into the mom and dad’s.

Methodically, I walked around straightening the drawers the dad had dug through in his haste, leaving some of them half open. This finished, I drifted toward the computer desk, stuck into a dark corner behind the bed. This had been my destination from the beginning. Sinking into the faux-leather chair, I gave the mouse a few wake-up shakes. The computer blinked to life.

A cheery screen of sunflowers lifting their faces to the sun greeted me. At the center a blinking cursor waited for me to enter my password. I tried different ways of typing Annaliese. All in caps. Then lowercase. It was useless.

I turned to the little nooks and tiny drawers built into the desktop hutch. Receipts. Those tiny pencils you use to keep score when playing golf. And then a scrap of paper, crinkled and torn at the edges, as if it had been curled up into a tight little spitball and then only much later carefully unrolled and smoothed out.

It was one of Annaliese’s poems.

The mom or the dad had found it. Read it. There was no telling when, or what they’d thought of it . . . but I could almost feel the panic of seeing the mom with the poem in her hands, while she asked what it meant.

“Just a school assignment. Based on a book we read, from a character’s point of view.” The lie comes easily.

Mom looks down at the poem in her hand, studying it. This is what it must feel like to be strip-searched. I force myself not to squirm. “Let me guess.
The Great Gatsby
?
Right?”

Nodding. My head bobs up down up down up down, while at the same time saying, “Yes, yes.” Eager to accept this easy answer. Anything to not explain about Logan and the crush and the strange deal that was made and has in some insane way worked better than I’d ever hoped. There is no way to explain that . . . even if I wanted to. I snatch the paper. From now on I’ll have to be more creative in where I hide these.

My eyes opened. I didn’t even remember closing them. Was I imagining that, drawing on what I knew of the mom and Annaliese? Or was it a memory, hidden somewhere inside of Annaliese’s stolen body even more cleverly than she’d hidden her poems?

They were unanswerable questions, and I shook them away. Carefully, I tucked the poem back into the spot where I’d found it. I fell into the chair and, not really hoping for anything, lifted the keyboard. There sat a yellow Post-it note with the phrase
dogdays58*
written across it in the mom’s careful script.

I typed it into the waiting computer, and the desktop full of icons appeared. Opening the internet browser, I hesitated, my fingers hovering over the keyboard. Then I typed in my name. My original name.

Anna Martin.

There were too many of them. Anna Martins were lawyers and dentists and even an aspiring actress on IMDB, but none of them were missing girls.

Anna Martin
,
I typed again. This time I added the other girl’s name: Katie Campbell. And the few other things I knew. 1973. Indianapolis.

And there it was. The very first result. An article from 1993, revisiting the case after twenty years. Anna and Katie were still missing, and Katie’s mother was still searching. She believed that her daughter had been just as much a victim as Anna. The only proof against Katie was Mrs. Martin’s statement that Katie had been in Anna’s room, going through Anna’s things, on the same day the girls disappeared. That was the last time anyone ever saw Katie. Mrs. Campbell said everyone knew Mrs. Martin had a drinking problem, and that Katie had been Anna’s best friend. She also said she left the porch light on, and would until her daughter came home. There was a quick recap of the case, mostly the same as what I’d read in the older article. But one thing had been added.

Three years after the girls went missing, the case had gone cold, and detectives held little hope of finding them without any new leads. Then on August 17, 1976, the Martins’ family home was burned to the ground with both parents and the older son inside. After finding traces of gasoline, detectives determined that it was arson. No suspects were ever named, and no connection to the case of the missing girls was ever found.

“It’s a shame,” Mrs. Campbell said, pointing to the spot where the house had once stood, across the street from her own. “That whole family gone. And Anna—if she’s still out there . . . I keep my light on for her too. I’m still waiting for both her and Katie to come home.”

I clicked the browser window closed, and stumbled from the room. My head swam. I grabbed hold of the wall, wishing it could keep me anchored here, but it couldn’t and I drifted out and away into the sea of memories.

LEMONADE

I hear Mrs. Campbell’s voice. “If you girls want some lemonade, you need to help me squeeze. You know how bad my hands are on these rainy days.” I can taste that lemonade. She likes it sour. “Put too much sugar in, you might as well get one of those mixes, make it that way.” Katie always sneaks more sugar into her glass. But I like the sourness too.

“Mrs. Campbell makes her own lemonade. Mrs. Campbell makes cakes from scratch. Apparently, Mrs. Campbell has a big crank in her basement to make the sun rise and set every day too.”

My mother. She doesn’t like Mrs. Campbell. She doesn’t like anybody. She mutters beneath her breath all the time. Mean things like that. People are either not good enough or trying too hard. She stares out the window, a cigarette in her hand. Or a drink. Sometimes both.

Lipstick. Dark red. It leaves a perfect mark of her kiss on my cheek. But that doesn’t happen often. More often it marks her cigarette butts overflowing the ashtray. And toward the end of the day it stains her teeth. She hates being told when that happens. When did I start finding joy in watching her scrub at her teeth with her finger, trying to wipe it away? She looks foolish then. And human. Sometimes I want to take it back. Do something to earn a kiss instead. But what? What she wants is a mystery. Maybe it doesn’t exist.

“She’s a sensitive lady.” That’s what Daddy says about her moods. And although moods suggest something passing instead of constant, this is what we all call them. My brother and I. “Mom’s in one of her moods,” he’ll say. At some point I start answering, “Same shit, different day.” It makes him laugh. Every time it makes him laugh. It’s too easy to get a laugh out of him, but those laughs never feel cheap.

“Johnny was always easy.” My mother again. The subtext being,
Anna was difficult
.

“Well, boys and girls are different. Give it time.” My daddy’s reply there. He doesn’t say much really. Just a few stock phrases he recycles over and over again. “This is the life” is for sitting by a warm fireplace with a whiskey or outside in a lawn chair with a beer. All complaints are met with “Give it time.” He is a doll with a pull string in his back.

“You’ll understand when you’re older.” She is looking at the TV when she says this, but not really watching it. Her eyes are pointed in that direction but seem to be focused somewhere else, like there is some other show playing, beyond the
Press Your Luck
board, that only she can see. “Things happen in life. Things don’t go the way you plan. And even when they do, it doesn’t feel the way you thought it would.”

CLOSER

I hesitated outside Dex’s door. What I’d seen last night with Dex had been someone else’s nightmare, and one that hadn’t even happened yet. Now, in the light of day, I felt embarrassed. And cowardly. He’d let me in, and I’d . . . run away.

The right half of the door flipped up, and a moment later Dex’s head popped out like a groundhog that had the power to make spring come early. Without him saying a word, I knew.

I’d been forgiven. Relief poured through me, bringing tears to my eyes. More tears came. A flood.

“I’m sorry,” I choked out. “I’m so sorry.”

“No, no, no.” Dex winced as he came up the stairs toward me. “I’m sorry. I never should have brought you there. I felt terrible, and then when you saw . . . I didn’t know you would see. You gotta believe me. It’s never happened before. I don’t really know how it did happen. I mean, you haven’t read my mind before . . . have you?”

I shook my head, unable to find my voice.

“Okay, good.” Dex smiled slightly. “I didn’t think so because you’ve never slapped me, and I’ve totally had some thoughts that, well . . . you probably would’ve slapped me.”

I laughed a little shakily, but the tears kept coming.

“Come on, let’s get inside.” Dex took my hand, not pulling me but simply giving the comfort of his own. “It’s starting to rain.”

Actually it was more like sleet. Cold and stinging.

Squeezing Dex’s hand tight for courage, or maybe so he wouldn’t run away like I’d done, I prepared to give back. To share with him as easily and freely as he did with me.

“Sometimes I see things too. Horrible things. Horrible like what we saw last night. But my visions aren’t showing me other people. They’re of me. I’m the one doing the horrible things. Not in the future but the past. I think I’m remembering what I was.”

I released Dex’s hand, allowing him to escape. To run. But he held tight.

Maybe he didn’t understand.

“I think I’m— No. I don’t think. I know. I’m not Annaliese. Annaliese is dead, I guess. Or . . . I don’t know. She’s gone. Because of me. I tricked her. I took her. And now I’m tricking her parents too, ’cause they think I’m their daughter. But I’m not. I’m not their daughter. I can’t even make myself call them Mom and Dad, because it’s not fair when I’m not her and I’m not even . . . I’m not even a real girl. What I am is a . . .” I gulp, and then force the rest out. “I’m a monster.”

Still he didn’t turn away. Didn’t slam his door. Icy rain dripped from the tip of his nose as he studied me. Intently. I stood patiently, letting the rain soak through every layer of clothing while I awaited his verdict.

Finally, he tipped his face up toward the dark sky. He sighed, and his breath hung like a ghost between us before fading away.

“I saw Annaliese die. I saw it years before she disappeared. The funny thing is . . . I still don’t know how it happened. What I saw was almost exactly what I got on tape. Annaliese covered in blood, running out of the woods. Screaming too. I can’t forget that. I’ve tried, but it must be superglued inside my skull somewhere. As terrible as the screaming was, it was worse when it stopped. Like someone hit Mute.” Dex ran his hand over his face, sluicing a layer of water away.

“And I wanted to stop it, but I didn’t know how. When she—when you—came back, I thought it couldn’t be her. And whatever or whoever you were must be bad news. That’s what I figured. My plan was to stay away. That worked for all of—what? One week? At first, I think it was guilt that drew me back. That first time, with the camera. I couldn’t even look at her—at you—without the lens between us, but then I watched the footage from that night when you passed out. Over and over. And I saw something else there.”