Taken (4 page)

“Nothing.”

“How about you, Pauline?”

“Nothing. This is stupid.”

“Oh! Come on, girls. I saw you working hard on the cards. Hopewell? Do you want to say something in the segment?”

Hopewell let his head slide down to the right, and it remained in that position until Mickie gave up. “Okay, Charity. It looks like it’s back to you.”

I mumbled “As usual” as Kurt lined up his shot. Patience, ever faithful, slid closer and looked into the camera with me as we intoned, “Have a happy Edwardian Christmas.”

Mickie appeared to be satisfied with our greeting, insincere as it was. She immediately dispatched Kurt to the Square to set up for the second half of the shoot. She added, “Mrs. Veck, you and the children should follow quickly. All right? Each child should bring a finished card, one of the nice ones that Lena gave them. And a clothespin. Lena, do you have those?”

Lena reached into a coat pocket and produced a handful of red and green clothespins, which she tossed onto the table. Then she and Mickie hurried out.

I got jolted back to the present by a sound directly behind me, the sound of the ambulance cab door opening. This was followed by a violent sound, like someone’s head had been pushed into the cab wall.

I ventured a quick look past my feet. The dark boy was no longer there!

I heard a gruff, accusing voice from inside the cab. “You were asleep!”

Then I heard a weary voice. “No.”

“Shut up! Don’t lie to me, or…”

My whole body tensed. I pictured the evil face of Dr. Reyes.

The weary voice protested, “I was right here. She could not get past me.”

“You were asleep!”

“Just for one second.”

“You are to be awake every second!”

“It is way past my shift. It is Monnonk’s shift now.”

“I will tell you when your shift is over. Understand?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know what I will do if I catch you again?”

The voice didn’t answer.

Dr. Reyes continued, “You will never see it coming. One needle and it will be over. Do you understand now?”

The voice whispered hoarsely, “Yes, sir. Yes, Doctor.”

The door then slammed shut. Whoever was sitting in the front stayed completely quiet for five minutes. And so did I.

At last I let myself relax. I lay back and stared at the ceiling. My heart was racing; my mind was racing. I had to do something right away or I might have a full-blown panic attack, like a wide-awake night terror.

I rolled my head left and right, staring at the surrounding white walls of the ambulance. I pressed my hands against my temples, forcing myself to think about the white walls back at the satschool. What exactly did they look like? What was hanging on them? I remembered. Mrs. Veck’s posters were hanging on them—inspirational sayings beneath cute animal photos. A kitten clinging to a branch with the caption “Hang in there.” A grumpy bear looking out from a cave: “We all have bad days.” An eagle gliding in a bright blue sky: “Let your dreams soar.”

I saw them all in my mind. And I was back in that classroom again, on that Friday morning.

Mrs. Veck instructed us to gather our materials and to follow her out into the Square. She added, rather desperately, “Let’s all do our best to help Mrs. Meyers with her program.” That was an uncharacteristic slip of the tongue for Mrs. Veck, but it bothered me. I always resented hearing Mickie referred to as “Mrs. Meyers.”

My mother, the real Mrs. Meyers, died when I was seven. She died during my first week in second grade. Back then, we lived in Lake Worth, Florida, about forty kilometers southeast of The Highlands. We lived in a regular housing development, not in an armed military compound, and I attended a real school, not a satschool.

But my mother, who was a nurse, died of skin cancer, a melanoma lurking beneath her hairline that she never noticed. Neither did her husband, my father, a trained dermatologist. It all happened very quickly. From the first sign that something was wrong to her death was exactly 103 days. I counted them out on a calendar.

I remember my father being totally devastated by her illness. I wasn’t devastated at first. I was just confused, and then numb.

I remember my mother near the end actually urging my father, in front of me, to remarry. She told him, “Charity will need a mother. As soon as possible.”

But my father, as it turned out, had another plan. He spent the three years following my mother’s death working at home, nearly around the clock. He threw himself body and soul into dermatological research. He became a hermit hiding in his room, scanning hundreds of content files for papers published in the field.

Then, when I was in fifth grade, he emerged from his research cave to introduce a skin treatment called DermaBronze. When applied to the top two layers of derma by a trained physician during a ten-minute procedure, DermaBronze provided “a deep, medically safe tan for up to fifteen months.”

The DermaBronze treatment made us rich, and it made my father briefly famous. He was deluged with offers to appear on vidcontent shows, and he grudgingly started accepting those offers.

That’s where my future ex-stepmother came into the picture.

Mickie Denman (her name at the time) graduated from the University of Florida with an M.S. in psychology. She opened her own office in Hobe Sound and counseled rich women about their mental health problems. She wrote an advice column for rich women based on her (slim) experience, but it was a big hit. The column got picked up by a content provider, and her name started to appear on vidscreens around central and south Florida.

Soon her face started to appear, too, as she became an occasional guest for a medical show called
Living with…
Then she got her big break. She was asked to fill in for three days as the host of that show. The third of her three episodes was about the amazing new technique called DermaBronze. My father appeared with her that day, and the rest is history.

My father never knew what hit him. Mickie says that she dazzled him with her charms. I guess that’s possible. I say he had just been working too hard for too long in his lonely room.

Anyway, within a week they started slipping away together to the islands, leaving me with a series of professional sitters. Within ninety days (I counted that out on a calendar, too), they had gotten married, and my new stepmother was hosting nationwide content shows as “Mickie Meyers.”

Shortly after that, we moved to The Highlands. As they explained it to me, we had no choice but to move to a newer house in a better neighborhood. Our old house had been built before the World Credit Crash, so all we had to safeguard our currency was a steel safe bolted to the floor. We now needed a modern currency vault built into an inside wall, and many layers of electronic surveillance, and a private security patrol, all because my dad was rich and my stepmother was famous.

But I hated The Highlands. I had no friends there. All I did was hide in my room. In my solitude, I finally started to grieve for my mother and to miss her terribly. That’s when Victoria arrived in my life. Victoria was there to help me during that period; my father and Mickie were not. They could have been, but they were not.

Since those days, Mickie has gone global as the new host of the
Living with…
series of broadcasts. The first one was based on me and my departed mother:
Living with Loss.
The second was
Living with Stepchildren.
I guess that was partly about me, too, but I wasn’t in it. Her third,
Living with Divorce,
is still unfolding. I play at least a small role in that one.

Mickie’s parent corporation, SatPub, has its headquarters in New York City, so she spends most of her time there. On Friday, December 21, however, she was in The Highlands, in the Square, directing her crew’s actions on the ground and directing Albert’s drone helicopter in the air.

Whoever had decorated the public places in The Highlands was taking orders directly from Mickie. The theme in the Square was “An Edwardian Christmas.” There were twelve two-meter trees arranged around the nine-meter Scotch pine. Each of the twelve trees was decorated with items from one of the Twelve Days of Christmas—partridges, pear trees, et cetera. In addition, in front of the Sun Currency Bank was a golf cart that had been converted to a sleigh, complete with reindeer and a Santa (although I don’t think there was anything particularly Edwardian about that).

Everything was in its place and ready to go when my class arrived. Mrs. Veck tried to form us into a line, but Pauline Dugan made a fuss about standing in front of Sterling Johnston, shouting, “I’m not standing by any pervert!” and causing Kurt to momentarily turn off his camera. Mickie then took over, arranging us in a semicircle and cautioning Kurt to shoot Sterling’s top half only.

On Mickie’s signal, the Coventry Carol blared out of a speaker, the snowflakes started to flutter down, and one by one, we walked up to the Scotch pine and attached our Christmas cards with the colored clothespins. As this was going on, Mickie recorded a preliminary voice-over. She then walked in front of the big tree and recorded an intro and an outro. It was all over by 10:00 hours, which was lucky for Mickie because that’s when my father’s helicopter arrived.

I spotted it first, descending toward our helipad at the southwest corner of the development. It was easily recognizable by the orange-and-green Miami Hurricanes logos. Everything would have been fine if it had just kept going down for a landing. Unfortunately, though, my father must have spotted his 440 drone hovering above the Square and decided to investigate. The helicopter, a Robinson Beta Five, rose up again and tilted in our direction.

Mickie spotted the helicopter and called over to Albert, “What’s going on? What’s he doing here?”

Albert directed the drone away from us to a new spot above the security wall. He shook his head. “I don’t know, Ms. Meyers.”

“You didn’t expect him?”

“I didn’t. He hasn’t called me. He hasn’t even filed a flight plan for today.”

Mickie clenched her fists. “Terrific.”

Then Mickie, the crew, we students, and a few onlookers stood and watched as the big helicopter roared up over the Square and held its position. I could see my father’s face twenty meters above us. He had a goofy expression on, like he might have started drinking early, or like the previous night’s party hadn’t yet ended. He gave a thumbs-up sign to the crowd below and hovered there in the blue sky like Mrs. Veck’s inspirational eagle.

That’s when it happened.

The Edwardian Christmas cards, caught up in the wind from the rotors, began to snap off the big tree and swirl around the Square like so many colored and calligraphed pieces of litter. Then other items from other trees fell victim to the wind and let go—small plastic pears, partridges, French hens, turtledoves. They all ripped away from their hooks and got caught up in the vortex of swirling soap flakes, dirt, and paper. The Santa sleigh and reindeer fell over next. Finally, the twelve trees in the circle succumbed, bending like palms in a hurricane until they snapped off their bases and started flopping about crazily on the ground.

After a few more chaotic seconds, the helicopter roared away and returned to the helipad, leaving all that devastation in its wake. Only the Scotch pine remained in place, but it had been stripped of all its balls and stars and other ornaments. Hundreds of meters of Christmas tree lights now hung from the branches in twisted clumps, frayed and broken, spitting orange sparks of fire on the ground and into the air.

Mickie could no longer contain herself. She screamed, “That idiot!” She turned to Albert and ranted, “What is he doing here? Why isn’t he on some golf course? Or at some football game?”

Albert guided the drone downward to safety, landing it on a clear patch of pavement in front of the bank. He answered calmly, “I don’t know, Ms. Meyers.”

Mickie redirected the rant to her producer and her cameraman, making very unflattering comments about my father as they loaded their gear on a cart. Then they all drove quickly back toward the airstrip.

I looked around at the demolished Square. Everywhere was chaos, a condition rarely seen and never tolerated at The Highlands.

Taking advantage of the momentary breakdown in law and order and the lack of adult supervision, Maureen and Pauline Dugan suddenly ran toward Hopewell and jumped onto his back, knocking him down. They turned him over and pinned him to the ground behind one of the small trees. Maureen sat on Hopewell’s shoulders, immobilizing him, while Pauline reached over and pulled his clump of hair back, exposing his left ear.

Pauline shouted, “Oh, gross!” and pretended to gag.

Maureen made a horrible face, too, as Sierra and Whitney leaned in to see.

Patience yelled over to me, “Come on!” and we ran through the debris to help him.

I must admit I was shocked myself by the sight of Hopewell’s ear. I had never seen it before. I had never even thought about asking to see it. As far as I was concerned, it was a secret that should stay a secret.

But there it was.

It looked like a rotten apple, or a shriveled rose. It was bright red, like a wound, and it curled up at the edges like its skin was dying. It was like no ear I had ever seen before. (Patience told me that when Hopewell was returned by the kidnappers, he had nothing more than an open sore on the side of his head. Her parents were desperate for something, anything, to replace what had been there. Mr. Patterson found a donor to provide an ear right away, no questions asked, for a lot of currency.)

Patience stood over both Dugans and screamed at the top of her lungs, “Get off of him!”

I echoed her. “Yeah! Get off! Let him go!”

Maureen Dugan didn’t even look up. “Get lost, hors.”

Patience, without hesitation, threw herself on top of Pauline, so I did the same to Maureen. Neither of us could fight very well, but our momentum was strong enough to knock the Dugans back.

Hopewell rolled over and crawled away on his elbows.

Maureen Dugan grabbed my hair and snapped my head back so that I couldn’t move. I could see that Pauline Dugan had Patience in a headlock, too. Then Mrs. Veck ran up, shouting, “Girls! Girls! Things are bad enough without this horseplay going on. You stop right now!” After a few seconds the Dugans, each with a final twist, let our heads go, and peace was restored.