Ted sighs again, but there’s something theatrical about it. And now, behind the sadness or confliction, or whatever it is that’s in his eyes—there’s something else. A spark.
“You seemed to forget all of that so thoroughly. But you must have remembered something, to ask me that question. So how much do you recall?”
I stutter through my response. Like a person whose teeth are chattering. Only mine feel hot. My tongue a flame. “Nothing, I-I-I remember a girl. And a-a man in a…”
“I can tell you the truth,” Ted interjects. “If you think you’re ready to know. I should warn you, though. Your mind would have blocked it for a reason. And telling you the pieces I know could make it all come flooding back. So are you sure?”
I nod.
“Okay,” Ted says. He rubs the side of his face, hand pressed hard to his cheek, as if struggling for where to begin. “You were twelve, I think.”
Twenty years ago. My pulse feels electric.
“And during that summer, there was a period of time when you weren’t at home.”
“My vacation with Kyla.”
“No,” Ted says. “A couple weeks after that, I think. You left one day and didn’t come home. We assumed you were staying at Kyla’s. You were always doing that. Going off for days at a time. Always happier there than here.”
I shake my head. Not true. I was not happier there than here. Even though there was lasagna around the table—strings of cheese stretching between pan and plate, looking like they could keep on stretching for miles—and here was chips for dinner, straight from the bag, knuckles greasy the rest of the night. There was TV shows that made us laugh until our stomachs hurt, and here was blank walls, clacking keys. But there did not have Ted. So there was lonely in ways that here never was.
“It was for the best,” Ted continues. “Mara and I were both in the midst of important projects. We figured it was better for you to be with a friend. And perhaps we…”
He hesitates. His face pinches with something. On anyone else, I’d call it guilt.
“Well, we might have lost track of time for a bit.”
“How much time?”
Ted looks past me, through the window screen.
“How long was I gone, Ted?”
His gaze comes back. Clicks onto mine.
“About a week,” he says, and I buckle.
There was a mother who called us in when we were playing in the yard past dark.
There was a father who made us recite his phone number, forward and back, before he’d let us ride scooters down sunny streets.
There was a brother who held me down, dug his arm into my mouth, but still warned me and Kyla about the potholes on Maple Lane.
And here was a woman in her studio. A man in his office. Neither of them noticing their daughter was gone.
“When you did come home,” he says, “it was like you materialized right out of the woods. Mara says you burst in here hysterically. Dirt on your face. Leaves in your hair. Crying about a basement. Some red-haired girl. A man in a mask.”
My body is still. Hard as Mara’s pottery fresh from the kiln. This room is a kiln.
“We gave you some sleeping pills,” Ted says.
“Sleeping pills?” My voice sounds far away. Someone else must be speaking and I’m just mouthing along.
“Yes,” he says. “You weren’t making any sense. Mara had some pills, so we gave you a couple. Just to try to calm you down. But then you slept for nearly twenty-four hours. It was… fascinating, actually.”
Fascinating. Part of me knows to store that word in my head for later. I cannot linger on it now.
“I don’t—I don’t remember this.”
Ted scratches the back of his neck. “When you woke up, it was as if nothing had happened. We asked about the things you’d said, of course, but that only confused you. Made you agitated. Otherwise, you went on as if everything was normal. So we figured it was. Until we saw the newspaper.”
I wait for him to continue. He doesn’t. He’s looking at me and I can tell there’s a part of him—probably a large part—that is relishing this moment. That, perhaps, he has looked forward to it for a very long time. “What was in the newspaper?” I ask.
He responds with a question of his own. “Does the name Astrid Sullivan mean anything to you?”
My breath hitches. My skin burns from the inside out.