Finding Claire Fletcher (36 page)

As the weeks wore on, I began enjoying my family again. My father stayed with us at Mitch’s house, using up years’ worth of unused vacation and sick time. My mother took as much time off from work as she could but eventually had to return. Still, I was almost never alone. One of them was always with me. All the fears I’d held onto over the years of returning to the fold were falling away one by one. My family had only love and concern for me. Their excitement over my return eclipsed the sadness of the ten years we had lost. Only Brianna kept her distance. I had a pretty good idea what was bothering her. One evening before dinner my suspicions were confirmed.

I heard her talking to my mother in the kitchen before I reached the doorway. My mother was cutting vegetables. I heard the sound of the knife against the cutting board. Brianna’s tone was hushed. “Have you asked her what happened?”

“What? Why would I do that?”

I pictured Brianna rolling her eyes. “Mom, don’t you want to know what happened?”

“I don’t need to know what happened,” my mother said calmly. “If she wants to tell me, I will be happy to listen, but I don’t need to know.”

“You don’t have any questions?” Brianna said incredulously. “None at all?”

My mother stopped cutting. “No. I don’t have any questions. All I care about is that Claire is alive and that she is home. Besides, the therapist said that the best thing for us to do right now is to live in the present moment. If Claire needs to talk about the things that happened to her, she is free to do so—in her own time. I don’t think we should use up any more of our precious time together on the man who took her by talking about him constantly.”

“You have got to be kidding me.”

My mother’s tone was a warning. “Brianna.”

“You don’t want to know what the hell she was doing with that guy for ten years? You don’t want to know why she slept with those men but didn’t come home? You don’t want to know why she didn’t leave? How can you
not
ask her? How can you not need an explanation?”

I stepped into the kitchen. My mother and sister stared at me. Brianna looked stunned, but she thrust her chin at me defiantly, daring me to answer. My mother’s face was sad. “Claire,” she said gently.

My hands shook. I met my sister’s eyes. “I slept with those men because I hoped that if they came to the house, you would at least know I was alive; I was okay.”

Saying it aloud, it sounded so ridiculous. Yes, I wanted my family to know I was alive. But I was not okay. Not at all.

“That makes no sense,” Brianna said. “You wanted to stay, didn’t you? Why else would you stay with that man when you were free to leave?”

I felt as if she punched me in the solar plexus. I backed up, leaning against the doorframe for support. I tried to gather myself together inside, all frayed edges and sharp, broken things. Sometimes family hurt you far worse than any depraved stranger. I let a moment pass.

“You don’t have to do this,” my mother said. She rounded the table and came toward me, but I put up a hand to signal for her to keep her distance.

“I know,” I choked, looking at Brianna. “Nothing about the last ten years of my life makes sense. I don’t have an explanation. I...”

During the last few years in the trailer, I had convinced myself I was protecting my family, protecting their lives, their innocence. The newspaper clippings about Tom’s auto accident and the fire at my mother’s house served as harsh reminders that if I wanted my family to remain unaffected by my abductor—the delusional psychotic I knew so well from years of forced intimacy and trauma—I had to stay.

“It wasn’t as simple as me walking away,” I tried. “He threatened to kill all of you. You don’t know the things he did.”

“Then tell us,” Brianna said.

“Claire,” my mother said again. “You do
not
have to do this.”

“He killed a girl in front of me. Seventeen years old. She was…” I couldn’t go on. I had only dredged up that memory aloud once to give my statement to the police. I could not do it again, not even for my sister. I squeezed my eyes shut and clenched my fists. I concentrated on my breathing, counting to five, and visualizing each number in my mind.

When the hysteria inside me receded, I opened my eyes and looked at Brianna again. I swallowed and tried once more to give her some explanation for why I had stayed missing. I saw myself now as she must see me—inexplicable and absurd. Tiffany had arrived three years into my captivity. My brain filled with all the times I could have left. There were countless days he’d left us alone. I could have escaped. I doubt Tiffany would have tried to stop me, so intent was she on being the sole focus of his attention.

All those opportunities.

Squandered by fear and shame. I had sat in a room I called prison or on a porch I felt invisibly chained to like a dog, paralyzed by the memory of violations that were not my fault. I let years pass by outside the realm of my abductor’s clapboard wilderness kingdom and for what?

“I couldn’t face you,” I said. “I was so ashamed of what he did to me.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” my mother said. She tried to get my attention, but my eyes were locked on my older sister whose face had now gone from incredulous disbelief to a cross between pity and horror.

“You don’t know all the things that he did to me. It was so disgusting. All those years.” I shuddered and Brianna winced. Her throat worked as if she was going to say something but no words came.

“I didn’t want anyone to see me. I felt so dirty. I didn’t think—I don’t know what I was thinking,” I added.

Tears streamed freely from my eyes, my composure leaving me with each one. I felt nauseous.

Brianna moved to touch my arm, but I swatted her away. I didn’t want anyone to touch me while I talked about it. How could I make her understand what had happened to me had changed who I was irrevocably? Every disgusting, hurtful thing my abductor had ever done to me had changed me. The vicious assaults chipped away at my sense of self, at my soul. There was no return to a former state once something like that happened. I was irreparably damaged in one of my soft places. Whatever that made me, the transformation was permanent.

“I feel sick,” I mumbled.

“
Goddammit, Brianna,” my mother said.

I turned and ran back down the hallway, reaching the toilet just in time for my lunch to come up. A moment later, my mother knocked on the bathroom door, calling my name.
“Go away,” I said, instantly feeling guilty for sending her away.

“Claire, please. Let me in, sweetheart.”

My mother’s voice cut me. I was thirteen again, locked in my room crying over something trivial that had happened at school, and she wanted to come in so she could hold me, soothe me, and mother me.

I had never been like Tiffany who had no one to look for her, no one to worry about her, no one to care whether she was alive or dead, safe or suffering. I had always had my mother, and she was on the other side of the door now as she had been my whole life—even while I was missing. I knew what she had done after I was abducted. Connor had told me. My mother had turned her life into a search for me, finding hope in the small nooks and crannies of lackluster evidence, and a family torn apart in my absence. She had done so because there was not a single thing that could change the fact that I was her child and she loved me absolutely and without conditions. Nothing I had seen or suffered could come near her love for me.

My mother had endured my absence while I squandered years of my life, ashamed of what my abductor had done to me. Too afraid that the family I had known would never accept me after the disgusting acts he had forced me to engage in. My mother took the pain of all those years, and she did it for me. But in my hell, I could not perform a single act of love for myself, least of all the most important one—leaving.

Her voice came again. “Claire, honey. Please let me in.”

I couldn’t bring myself to respond. I felt an overwhelming sense of guilt. How could I have doubted the love of my family for so long? Wasted were the years I had spent in the trailer and before that across the road, avoiding Tiffany’s snipes and taunts while the days slipped silently by.

Each day I stayed when I could have ended both mine and my family’s pain was a sin. I had accumulated a lot of them. I felt condemned. I did not deserve their love. If I had only believed in the strength of their love for me, if I had only been strong enough to bear the burden of all I had been through in their presence, I could have returned home years earlier.

The idea of staying captive in order to keep my sordid secrets and protect my family from the truth of my experiences seemed ridiculous, just as my explanation to Brianna had sounded when I tried to explain why I’d slept with Rudy, Martin, and Jim. Still, there were all of my abductor’s threats and the reality of the murders he had committed in my fictitious name. The landscape of my mind had turned to rubble. I could hardly muddle through the mass of conflicting feelings and contradictory thoughts.

My mother’s gentle knock came again.

“Mom, I’m sorry. I can’t. Please, not right now.”

She stood on the other side of the door for several minutes before turning away with a sigh. The bathroom was too small. In fact, the entire house suddenly seemed too small. I needed to get out. I waited a few minutes, and then I slipped into the bedroom where I kept my things and fished my cellphone out of one of my bags. My family had insisted that I have it even though I had no one to call. They had been with me daily since my return, and although their numbers were programmed into it, I had no need to call any of them. There was one other number that I had programmed into the phone myself. I dialed it.

Connor picked up on the third ring. “Hello?”

“Connor? Can you come get me?”

“Claire? Is everything okay?”

I swallowed. “Yeah. I just really need to get out of the house. Can you please come?”

“Sure. I’ll be there in twenty.”

True to his word, Connor pulled up in his car twenty minutes later. I waited for him at the edge of Mitch’s long driveway. He got out and smiled at me. His head had healed entirely except for a gnarly strip of scar tissue, surrounded by hair that was still shorter than the rest. He still walked with a limp from the stab wound, but he moved around much faster, with far fewer grimaces.

“Where do you want to go?” he asked.

I passed my cellphone back and forth between my hands and bit my lower lip. “I don’t know,” I said. “I didn’t think that far ahead.”

“Hungry?”

I wasn’t but I nodded. I wasn’t used to social interactions, and as I climbed into the car with Connor, I realized that I had no idea what I was doing. We pulled away, and as we drove my nervousness took on a life of its own, filling up the car until the air felt thick around me. I realized I hadn’t really been alone with him since the night we had met. Sure, we had been alone in my hospital room, or in the kitchen at Mitch’s house, but there had always been other people around. I knew I had nothing to worry about—that Connor would never harm me—but still my feet drummed against the car floor, my knees bobbing up and down at breakneck speed. Connor pulled over. My heart raced.

He put the car in park and undid his seatbelt. “Why don’t you drive?” he said.

I stared at him. “What? I don’t have my license yet.”

“Your dad says you have your permit though. You can drive with that as long as I’m in the car with you.”

“Oh. Okay. But I don’t know—”

“I’ll tell you how to get there,” Connor said before I could finish. His relaxed demeanor was in stark contrast to my near panic.

We switched seats. After driving for a few minutes my heartbeat slowed. I began to feel more relaxed. Connor gave directions to a diner outside of Sacramento. We sat ourselves and looked over our menus in silence. The noise of the diner—plates clinking, the door opening and closing, patrons talking—overwhelmed me. I hadn’t been out to eat since I was fifteen years old. It was just one more thing in a long line of mundane activities that I had been denied during my captivity. Anger boiled up from the pit of my stomach. It was astounding how much my abductor had taken from me—from my innocence to the simple pleasure of eating out.

I decided in that moment that even though I wasn’t hungry I was going to enjoy the experience. I was free. I could go where I wanted when I wanted—as long as I kept my family apprised of my whereabouts at all times. I could eat in a diner with a friend because I felt like it. I could order whatever I wanted. Even though it was dinner time, I chose Belgian waffles with strawberries and whipped cream. Connor ordered a cheeseburger.

After the waitress took our menus away, Connor met my eyes. “I had to shake a few members of the press before I came to get you,” he said. “They’re still wise to the fact that I am in contact with you and your family.”

“Thank God they don’t have my photo,” I said. “I wouldn’t be able to go anywhere.”

“Yeah, at least you still have some anonymity. Your mom said you guys had managed to visit your house without being photographed though.”

I swallowed. “I couldn’t go in.”