to Donald Marsden’s house (my kidnapping, to be perfectly blunt) was that there are also advantages.
One of them was not having to run a gauntlet of reporters and TV cameras at the inquest, because I didn’t have to testify in person. I gave a video deposition instead, with the lawyer Monty Grisham found for me on one side and my mom on the other. The press knew who I was, but my name never appeared in the media because I was that magic thing, a minor. The kids at school found out (the kids at school almost always find out everything), but nobody ragged on me. I got respect instead. I didn’t have to figure out how to talk to girls, because they came up to my locker and talked to me.
Best of all, there was no trouble about my phone—which was actually Liz’s phone. It no longer existed, anyway. Mom tossed it down the incinerator, bon voyage, and told me to say I’d lost it if anyone asked. No one did. As for why Liz came to New York and snatched me, the police came to the conclusion Mom had already suggested, all on their own: Liz had wanted a kid with her when she went west, maybe figuring a woman traveling with a kid would attract less attention. No one seemed to consider the possibility that I’d try to escape, or at least yell for help when we stopped for gas and grub in Pennsylvania or Indiana or Montana. Of course I wouldn’t do that. I’d be a docile little kidnap victim, just like Elizabeth Smart. Because I was a kid.
The newspapers played it big for a week or so, especially the tabloids, partly because Marsden was a “drug kingpin” but mostly because of the pictures found in his panic room. And Liz came off as sort of a hero, weird but true. EX-COP DIES AFTER SLAYING TORTURE PORN DON, blared the Daily News. No mention that she’d lost her job as the result of an IAD investigation and a positive drug test, but the fact that she’d been instrumental in locating Thumper’s last bomb before it could kill a bunch of shoppers was mentioned. The Post must have gotten a reporter inside Marsden’s house (“Cockroaches get in everywhere,” Mom said), or maybe they had pix of the Renfield place on file, because their headline read INSIDE DONNIE BIGS’ HOUSE OF HORRORS. My mother actually laughed at that one, saying that the Post’s understanding of the apostrophe was a nice parallel for their grasp of American politics.
“Not Bigs-apostrophe,” she said when I asked. “Bigs-apostrophe-S.”
Okay, Mom. Whatever.
68
Before long, other news drove Donnie Bigs’s House of Horrors from the front pages of the tabs, and my renown at school faded. It was like Liz said about Chet Atkins, how soon they forget. I found myself once more faced with the problem of talking to girls instead of waiting for them to come up to my locker, all round-eyed with mascara and pursed up with lip gloss, to talk to me. I played tennis and tried out for the class play. I ended up only getting a part with two lines, but I put my heart into them. I played video games with my friends. I took Mary Lou Stein to the movies and kissed her. She kissed me back, which was excellent.
Cue the montage, complete with flipping calendar pages. It got to be 2016, then 2017. Sometimes I dreamed I was on that country road and would wake up with my hands over my mouth thinking Did I whistle? Oh God, did I whistle? But those dreams came less frequently. Sometimes I saw dead folks, but not too often and they weren’t scary. Once my mother asked me if I still saw them and I said hardly ever, knowing it would make her feel better. That was something I wanted, because she had been through a hard time, too, and I got that.
“Maybe you’re growing out of it,” she said.
“Maybe I am,” I agreed.
This brings us to 2018, with our hero Jamie Conklin over six feet tall, able to grow a goatee (which my mother fucking loathed), accepted at Princeton, and almost old enough to vote. I would be old enough when the elections came around in November.
I was in my room, hitting the books for finals, when my phone buzzed. It was Mom, calling from the back of another Uber, this time on her way to Tenafly, where Uncle