This never left me. In the three years I was away and as I walked back through my mother’s door, this fact about stupid people not believing the truth was as much a part of me as my lungs and my heart.
Dr. Winter and Agent Strauss stayed until the late morning, when my mother asked them all to leave so I could rest for a while. I was an adult woman and I had committed no crime, so they could not make me go to the hospital or the police station or do anything I didn’t want to do. I told them more things about the island that might help them find it. I gave them descriptions of the people they thought they might be able to find in their systems, like Bill and Lucy and the boatman. They asked a lot of questions about why Emma had not come with me, and I told them over and over it was because of the baby. I told them how the Pratts looked after her like their own child and how she slept in their room. It was one thing for me to slip out undetected and get to the boat. But a two-year-old? Who was sleeping in the same room with our captors?
I had thought about killing them. I did not say this to Dr. Winter or Agent Strauss. I had thought about how I could kill one without waking the other. I did not have a gun. It seemed like the simple thing—if you set aside the fact that killing is a sin. Just go in at night and kill them in their sleep. Take the baby and leave. Burn the house down. What would the boatman do then? Would he make us stay on that island? I did not make a plan to do this. But it is only natural when you are imprisoned to think about how to escape, and killing them was an obvious way to do that. It was more difficult than you might think. Without a gun, there was a risk of killing just one, and they were both equally capable of killing me right back.
I had to cut myself off then, as they pressed for details aboutthese two people I had lived with for three years. I could detect their concerns about Emma from the questions they were asking me. There could be no ambiguity about my imprisonment there, no wondering whether or not there should be a furious search for my sister. And yet, I had not been in a cage or locked in a room. I had not been chained to a radiator or bound in any way. I sat with them at dinner every night. I let them teach me things. I smiled and laughed and talked about my observations, my childhood, my life as it was evolving. Anyone looking in from the outside would never know how desperate I was to leave after the confusion about what was happening cleared, or how many times I thought about leaving after that and about doing terrible things to make that possible. What they would see would be two kind people taking care of me, loving me, believing in what they were doing. They would see what they wanted to see, like that woman from the court. Even like my father.
People could be stupid and not believe the truth.
Agent Strauss was a good man. He was old like my father and he wore a gold wedding ring. He was not very tall, but he seemed strong because his shoulders were broad and he had a thick gray beard that started to show by the early afternoon.
Something about that, about all of him made me think of him as strong and manly. I did not know anything about him that could justify my holding this opinion about him also being a good man. But I just knew. It was in his eyes and the expression his face held when he watched Dr. Winter speak. And it was in the concern he held for me and for finding Emma even when some of the other agents seemed skeptical. I decided I would like Agent Strauss.
He returned with Dr. Winter two hours and thirty-nine minutes later. The sketch artist was not available until the followingmorning, which seemed very strange to me, and which again raised alarms inside my head that the search for Emma was not going to be given top priority. We agreed I would see a doctor in the morning and let Dr. Winter conduct a psychological exam. This would satisfy my mother. She said I didn’t seem right in my head. I heard her say it to Mr. Martin when he finally came back upstairs. And I’m sure she said it to anyone else who would listen. She had stopped crying and started making the calls to friends and relatives, and the publicist she had used three years ago. The shock of my return was transforming into her new reality.
The focus when they came back in was on my final escape. They wanted every detail because, as Agent Strauss said, there could be something in the details that I didn’t even realize was important. I doubted that was true because I had given so much thought to them.
“Just tell us from start to finish,” he said.
So I did.
“The boatman, Rick, waited for me on the west side of the island, not on the dock. The west side was all rocks, like huge slabs of gray rock, not stones, and they just disappeared into the waves. In high tide, you couldn’t really see the rocks at all. The water came and crashed right up to the tree line. But in low tide, you could walk a long way out on the rocks. Bill liked to walk out there and fish. He would wear high rubber boots and take nothing with him but a box of fishing stuff, a rod and a six-pack of beer. They were cans of beer. They had blue writing on them. Is that helpful?… One time I followed him. This was before Emma had her baby. It was when I still looked at Bill and Lucy like they were good people who loved us.
“I started to walk on the rocks to catch up to him. I had this stupid idea that he would teach me how to fish and that we wouldbe, I don’t know, maybe like father and daughter because I was missing my father so much. I remember wanting that so badly as I walked on the rocks, you know, like that feeling when you get an idea to do something that might make someone love you? I used to get that same feeling when we made Mother’s Day cards in school and I would always write on mine ‘Number One Mom!’ or ‘Best Mom in the World’ and I would get that feeling, thinking that it might make you happy, Mom… do you remember?”
“Yes, of course, sweetheart,” Mrs. Martin said. “I always loved your cards.”
“But the rocks were so slippery. You couldn’t see it, this film of slippery stuff covering the rocks. Bill told me back at the house that day that the rocks are covered with diatoms, which are like algae. He told me after he’d stopped yelling at me because I fell on those rocks trying to catch up to him and I slid down a large one and into the surf. Even though it was low tide, once you go to the water’s edge, it got very deep very quickly, which is why you can fish there because the fish like to hide in the deep pockets between the places where the rocks stick out. I fell in and went under quickly. The current was so strong. I had no idea. You could not swim from any point off the island, so I had never been swimming and had never felt it before. When a wave came in, I got slammed against one of the rocks, and then when it went out, it pulled me with it and my head went under. And it was so cold because it was just early spring and the water never gets warm there anyway.
“Bill had to jump in to save me. I thought I was going to drown. The rock was too slippery for me to grab hold, so I just got slammed up and then pulled under like a rag doll. It was horrible. And then I felt his hand grab my arm. Bill had waded in from the other side, where he could stay standing, and he held on to thislittle tree that was trying to grow between the rocks, and then he grabbed me with the other hand. He held me while the water tried to pull me back under, and then when the wave came back in and pushed me, he used that force to bring me to his side and then up onto the rock. I lay there crying and gasping for air. Bill sat there staring at me, shaking his head with disapproval, but then he scooped me up and held me so I would stay warm.
“I don’t know why I told that whole story. The only important thing is to know that Bill would never have suspected I would make my escape there, by those rocks. And that made it the perfect place to meet Rick in his boat. We did it at high tide. He threw me a life jacket with a rope tied to it, and I put it on and got in that water, even though I could still remember almost dying there. I just closed my eyes and then let him pull me to the boat. He grabbed the top of the jacket and hauled me up until I was on the deck, shivering. He had dry clothes for me and a hat and a blanket. He drove the boat along the side you couldn’t see from the house and then he dropped me off up the coast, not inland where the harbor was, but definitely on the shore. His friend was waiting with the truck. I got in, and that was that. I think I told you the rest this morning.”
This story made my father cry because of the part about wanting Bill to be my father and it made my mother unnerved because she still could not understand how I did not know where this island was. She said we should wait until the examinations were complete before any more stories were told. She said this as if I were not in the room, but then she stroked my hair and kissed my forehead and told me,“Everything will be all right, sweetheart.”
My parents fought that day about where I should stay. My mother won. In spite of the excitement and stress that my homecoming had provoked, the irony of this did not escape me. I sleptthe first night in the guest room. My mother had turned our rooms into a study and a den. She said it had been too painful to see my things every day, so she put them all in the attic for a while and then finally gave them away to charities.
As I walked down the hallway, whose walls were now adorned with modern art, I remembered the second rude awakening I had in this house.
It happened the third weekend in April when Hunter was home from boarding school. He’d brought a friend whose name was Joe, and he was a junior like Hunter. Emma was a freshman. She had just turned fifteen.
On Fridays when it was Mrs. Martin’s weekend, Emma and I would try to make plans with our friends, even if we had to invite ourselves to the friend’s house. Sometimes Emma would let me sit on her bed and watch her pluck her eyebrows or put on makeup before she went out. And sometimes she would tell me things about her life because she had no one else to tell them to who wouldn’t gossip about her or judge her or try to steal her plan. On this Friday, we were staying home because Emma had a plan to make Joe her boyfriend.
I’m having Natasha Friar over because Hunter said she was hot and that will keep him busy. And while he’s busy with Nat, I’ll be busy with Joe.
Our mother and Mr. Martin had already left to go to the club for golf and dinner with their friends. They told us tobe goodand not to leave the house. Emma leaned into the mirror to finish putting on her mascara. I was sitting on the edge of the bathtub, thinking about her plan, and how clever she was, and how beautiful she looked when she put on her tight clothes and red lip gloss. I must have been too quiet, or maybe I stared so long that she started to feel my eyes burning a hole in her skin.
She stopped what she was doing and turned to look at me, one hand gripping the mascara wand and the other waving a finger at me.Stay out of the way, Cass. I mean it! You can have one drink with us but that’s it. If you mess things up for me, or Hunter, one of us will kill you!
Hunter and his friends arrived in a car service at 9:12. Nat had been at our house since 7:14 and was already drunk on Mr. Martin’s apricot brandy. Emma was too nervous to be drunk, though she’d made us both a fuzzy navel. I went upstairs to my room.
I don’t know what time it was when I came out of my room, because I had fallen asleep but then woken up. I felt unnerved, like I couldn’t get back to sleep until I knew if our mother and Mr. Martin had come home, and whether anyone else was asleep, and where they were all sleeping, and also what had happened with Emma’s plan. It’s strange to fall asleep after drinking and then to wake up and not know what’s going on outside your own door, in your own house. And so I went out, not with the intention of ruining Emma’s plan with Joe or Hunter’s plan with Nat, but just to get my bearings so I could go back to sleep.
From outside my room, I could see down the hall to the master bedroom. The door was closed and there was no light coming from the crack at the bottom. Hunter’s door was open and his room was dark, which meant he was downstairs in the TV room, probably, maybe with Nat. But across the hall, in the guest room, the door was closed and a light was flickering at the bottom.
I could tell you that I thought maybe someone had left it on and I needed to check. I could tell you that I was worried about Nat and thought she was in there, passed out with the light still on. I could tell you I thought the same about Joe, or the other couple Hunter had brought home. But none of that would be true. The truth is that I knew Emma was in that room, and althoughI had no need to open that door, I had an unstoppable desire to do it.
I will never forget what I saw in that room that night. Yes, Emma was having sex with Joe. She was on the bed and he was on top of her, between her legs, his face buried in the nape of her neck. And, yes, it was the first time I had ever seen people having sex, so it was shocking. But that image faded over the years. What lingered and became indelible was my sister’s face when she turned and looked at me. It was that expression, the one I tried to describe to my father and Mrs. Martin and the agents when I told them about how she looked at me from that window across the courtyard, like she was certain that what she was doing was the best thing anyone could ever do and that she was exactly where she was supposed to be, doing what she was supposed to be doing. That night, as I closed the door and went back to my room, where I waited for my nerves to settle, I was still a believer in Emma’s certainty. I remember thinking that she was always right—she said she would make Joe her boyfriend, and she had done just that.
