Somewhere Out There (17 page)

“Suit yourself,” he said with a shrug.

Later that afternoon at my hearing, I pleaded guilty to attempted kidnapping and reckless endangerment of a child, for which the judge issued me a sentence of ten years. It could have been much worse, he told me, if I’d used a weapon or tried to put the little girl in a car and drive away. He cited my past offenses of theft and neglecting my children as adding weight to his decision to put me away for as long as he did. I didn’t argue. I simply stood in the courtroom and listened to the litany of things I’d done wrong. Each word was like a jagged nail pounded into my body, confirmation of how broken and useless I was.

After the sentencing, I spent four weeks in King County jail, waiting to be assigned to a prison. It was only dumb luck that returned me to the women’s facility in Mt. Vernon and the regimented life to which I’d become accustomed over the previous year.

“Well, well, look who’s back!” O’Brien said as she walked into the small space on the cellblock that held my bed and one other. “What happened, Walker? You miss us or something?”

“Something like that,” I said, not wanting to relive what I’d done in the park. I’d tried several times to write my daughters another note after the few sentences I’d written my last morning in the motel, but was only able to get down two words:
I’m sorry.
I wrote them over and over again, filling page after page, knowing that tiny sentence would never be enough to express just how deeply the roots of my regret were planted inside my heart.

“You get your work assignment yet?” O’Brien asked as she dropped down to sit on my bunk with me. She smelled like grease and bleach.

“No,” I said. “I just got here this morning.” It was late afternoon, and I’d spent the entire day lying in my bed, staring at the ceiling tiles, counting them, trying not to think about anything at all.

She put a hand on top of my thigh. “I’ll see what I can do about getting you back in the kitchen, okay?” She smiled. “It’ll be like old times.”

“Thanks,” I said, grateful she wasn’t pushing me to tell her what I’d done to land back there so quickly. The old hollow sensation had returned and taken over my body, ever since the moment in the woods when I saw the blood rushing down that little girl’s face. It felt as though I were hovering just outside of my skin—me, but not me. There, but not part of anything going on around me. My soul tethered to my body by only a thin wisp of thread.

The next morning after breakfast, my counselor, Myer, called me into his office. I sat down in the same metal chair I’d been in just a month before and folded my hands together in my lap. I stared at the floor.

“So,” he said, leaning back in his own chair. “I guess you didn’t listen to my advice.” I kept my eyes cast downward and didn’t respond, so he sighed, then continued. “You’re being assigned to the vet program. You’ll need to report to the community room for orientation this afternoon at two o’clock.”

“Vet?” I said. “As in war vets?”

“No, Walker. You’ll be working with dogs. Learning how to train them to be guides for people with disabilities. It’s a pilot program, led by a local veterinarian.”

“But I don’t know anything about dogs,” I said. “I’ve never even had one.” Of course, I’d wanted a puppy when I was a little girl. My dad had even brought one home as a surprise for my seventh birthday, but after three nights of the sweet little mutt whining and chewing up the edges of my mother’s couch, she insisted that my father take it back to the pound.

“He’ll teach you,” Myer said. “That’s the point. Now go on. And don’t give me any flak over this. I know your friend in the kitchen wants you there, but the warden’s on my ass to get more inmates into the antirecidivism programs.” He pushed a brochure across his desk. “Take this, too.”

“What is it?” I asked as I stood up and reached for what he was giving me.

“Information on getting your GED. Now that you’re here a while longer, you should do it.”

A “while” longer,
I thought.
As in ten times longer. I’ll be thirty-one when I get out.
I took the brochure and thanked him before I left his office and headed toward the kitchen, where I told O’Brien about my new assignment.

“That fucker,” she said, pressing the bottom edge of a clipboard against her stomach. “What the hell do you know about dogs?”

“Not much,” I said. “But I guess I’m going to learn.”

“Hey,” O’Brien said, reaching out one of her long arms to pull me into a side hug. “Glad you’re back, bitch.”

I nodded and gave her a perfunctory smile before I went back to my bunk to wait until I needed to be at the orientation. At noon, I went to the cafeteria, but only because not showing up at meals was against the rules unless you were in the infirmary. I didn’t eat, though. Since the day in the park, I seemed to have lost my taste buds. Everything I put in my mouth had the texture of sawdust. It took a huge amount of effort to chew, and the only way I managed to eat anything at all was to wash down each bite with large swallows of water.

After an hour of sitting alone at a table with an untouched tray of mushy spaghetti and limp, slightly browning iceberg lettuce in front of me, I returned to my bunk until the clock read a quarter to two. I didn’t want to go learn about this stupid program; I didn’t want to go anywhere. I only wanted to stay in my bed, counting my breaths, counting each minute until a decade was done. But not wanting to incur Myer’s wrath, which could include ending up in solitary for refusing to follow an order, I forced myself to wander toward the community room. Looking through the windows, I saw a short, stocky man with a bright shock of thick, red hair sitting at one of the tables. He wore blue slacks and a long-sleeve, pink button-down, which I couldn’t help but think was an unfortunate choice with his coloring. It made him look like an overripe strawberry.

I opened the door and entered the room. There was no one else there; it was just the two of us. Myer must have made it off-limits to anyone else during this meeting. The man looked up and smiled, then rose from the table. “Jennifer?” he asked, and I nodded, then made my way to the table, as well.

He held out his hand, and I took it in my own limp grasp for less than a second. His fingers were warm and a little sweaty.
Is he nervous?

“I’m Randy Stewart,” he said. “And this is Bella.”

I glanced down next to his feet, noticing for the first time there was a dog in the room. It looked like a yellow Lab, and its snout rested on top of its outstretched front legs. It wore a red-and-black harness over its back, which had some kind of writing on the side, but I couldn’t read it from where I stood. I’d never encountered a dog who didn’t freak out the minute someone new entered the room, demanding to be petted, but this one hadn’t even raised its head.

“Have a seat,” Randy said, gesturing to the chair across the table from him. He sat down, and I joined him. “So,” he continued. “How much do you know about our program?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“Okay, then!” he said, with so much cheer it raised the hairs on the back of my neck.
You’re inside a prison, you idiot,
I thought.
What the hell is there to be so happy about?
Then it hit me. He got to leave. He had a life outside of these walls. I looked at his left hand and saw a gold band. He probably had a family, too. Kids, even. He wasn’t anything like me.

He reached down inside a black leather bag next to his chair and pulled out a large blue binder, then pushed it toward me on the table. “This will be your bible,” he said. “Everything you need to know about how to raise and train a guide dog, like Bella here.”

“How am I supposed to do that?” I asked. “I don’t know anything about dogs.”

“That’s what the bible is for. And me.” He looked at me expectantly, but when I didn’t speak, he went on, ignoring my disinterest. “I own a vet practice in town. We train guide dogs as a community service, as well as providing free obedience training for local rescue shelters. Part of this program, after you’ve worked with me here and earn approval for work release, is to come to the clinic and get some basic, hands-on training as a vet tech. You can even start working toward a two-year degree in veterinary sciences, if you want.” He glanced down at a folder in front of him. “I understand you need to get your GED, but as soon as you do, if you want, you can start taking college courses.”

I scowled, wondering what else that file had to say about me. “Is this supposed to be some kind of fucking rehabilitation bullshit?” I wanted to shock him, but my foul language didn’t make a dent in Randy’s jovial demeanor.

“Only if you let it,” he said. “What you get out of this is entirely up to you. If you don’t buy into learning all you can, doing all you can do with the dogs, I’d be happy to tell Mr. Myer that you’re not suited for the program.”

I stood up, pushing my chair away from the table with a loud screech. “You can tell him that now,” I said. I wasn’t interested in being rehabilitated. This man was crazy if he thought working with dogs would fix whatever was wrong with me. My head began to buzz again as I flashed back to the moment in the park, to running through the woods with another woman’s child, thinking that child was mine.

“Jennifer, please,” Randy said, as he stood up as well. He was only a few inches taller than me, and his stomach strained the buttons on his ridiculous pink shirt. He picked up the binder and held it out to me. “Just read through it. If you’re still not interested, fine. I’ll talk with Mr. Myer. But this is a new program here. You’d be the first inmate I’d get to work with. I’d hate to be a total failure right out of the gate.”

I stared at the binder, then back at Randy. “Bella, door,” he said, and the dog, who still hadn’t moved, got to her feet and trotted over to the room’s entrance. She jumped up and, using her front paws, pushed down on the silver handle and slowly walked on her hind legs until the door was fully open. She looked back at us, waiting, it seemed, for someone to come toward her.

“Holy shit,” I muttered, and Randy smiled again.

“Impressive, right?” he said. “And that’s only a basic skill. There’s so much more to it than that.” He shook the binder in the air. “So what do you think? Are you in?” he asked. “Will you give it a chance?”

I glanced over to Bella, who stood on her hind legs, motionless. I reached out and snatched the binder from Randy’s grasp. “I’ll read it,” I said. “But I’m not making any promises.”

“That’s all I ask,” he said, and then I walked out of the room, past Bella, reluctant to admit I just might be holding a tiny scrap of hope.

By the time Natalie said good-bye to Gina at her apartment and made it home, it was four o’clock and she only had an hour before Hailey and Henry were due back from their playdates. She considered using the time to get started on the order prep for the party she was catering the next night, but after her conversation with Gina, she couldn’t think of anything else but trying to find her sister. Work would have to wait.

She grabbed her laptop from her desk in the den, opened a search engine, and typed in her sister’s name. The first link that came up was for Facebook, suggesting that Natalie search for Brooke Walker on the social media site. Natalie clicked on it and logged in to her personal Facebook account, which she really only used to post pictures of the things she baked, then typed in her sister’s name again. A list of over three hundred women came up, all living in various cities across the United States. Natalie had no way to know where Brooke might be living. Had she stayed in Seattle, or did she flee the area when she turned eighteen? She scanned the list and then filtered it by adding the modifier “Seattle, WA” to the search field with her sister’s name, and the results came up blank. Similar searches of Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr came back empty, too. If her sister was in the Seattle area, she certainly didn’t spend any significant time online.
Of course, she could be married,
Natalie thought. She could have been adopted and have an entirely different last name. If that was the case, it was a pointless endeavor to search on social media platforms for the name her sister had had when she was four.

Frustrated, Natalie closed out the web page and opened a fresh tab. She remembered Gina’s words about the various online adoption registries, so she did a search for the largest, most reputable one. Natalie clicked on the link at the top of the list and saw that it was a mutual consent registry, meaning that if her sister—or even her birth mother—was already registered on the site, Natalie could be contacted within a couple of days of when a data match was found. While the site didn’t have access to court records and couldn’t confirm a relationship as authentic, it could at least provide first contact with a possible blood relative. The FAQ page recommended that if necessary, once the two individuals connect, they could petition the court to open their records, or voluntary DNA testing could be done.

This could be it,
she thought as she eagerly used her email address to create a log in and filled out her own profile with as much information as she could about herself. She listed her maiden name as Natalie Walker, thinking that would be the name Brooke might search for if she was, in fact, looking for her sister, too. She filled in her date of birth and the dates and details of her infancy as best she could, using the same story her mom had told her and Natalie had passed on to Hailey. She noted her brief stint at Hillcrest before she had been adopted, she described her physical characteristics, and then she went on to fill out the limited information she knew about her older sister. She entered her name, and all the information about how they had both lived in a car with their mother, how she had signed over her parental rights to the state. She entered the fourteen years Brooke had stayed at Hillcrest, as well as Gina’s name and contact information, in case Brooke had included that in her profile.

Natalie was just about to hit submit when there was a knock at the front door. “Mommy, I’m ho-ome!” Hailey called out from the porch. “Let me in!”