Taken (6 page)

I'd pictured it a hundred times—my dad tooling along the highway, nodding slightly to the tape like he always did when he was trying to concentrate. He was watching the traffic too and being careful to keep the correct distance between his car and the one ahead of him. My father never tailgated—“If you're too close to the car in front of you, you won't be able to stop safely if anything happens,” he always said. My dad was a very careful man.

He checked his rearview mirror regularly too. If anyone was tailgating him, he always pulled into the right lane to let whoever it was get past him.

Maybe he glanced into the three lanes of traffic going in the other direction on the other side of the median, but probably he didn't. What happened over there didn't matter, not to a careful driver. It was all about what was happening on your side of the median. My dad had no patience for people who slowed down to look at accidents on the other side of the road. He called those people rubberneckers.

If I'm right, if he kept his eyes on the traffic directly in front of him and behind him, then he probably hadn't noticed the massive eighteen-wheel truck that was barreling along in the right lane on the other side of the median. He probably hadn't seen that one of its enormous tires was wobbling crazily. He hadn't seen when that tire finally came loose from the truck. In fact, according to the police traffic experts who had made all kinds of measurements of skid marks and distances, he probably hadn't seen the tire fly away from the truck at 150 kilometers an hour. He hadn't seen it hit the six-inch-high concrete divider that marked the grass-filled median. He hadn't seen it bounce up into the air right after that.

At about the same time that the truck lost its tire, I was walking home from school with Allison, hoping my mom would be out when we got there. We liked to have the place to ourselves so that we could do whatever we wanted without my mom always asking, “What are you two up to?” But my mom wasn't out. She was in the kitchen, getting supper started.

“Hi, girls,” she said cheerily as we came through the door.

“Hi, Mrs. Rawls,” Allison said. She was always polite.

Not me.

I ignored my mom. I grabbed a bag of chips from the cupboard and a couple of sodas from the fridge, and I dragged Allison upstairs before my mom could trap her in a conversation.

We were in my room until five thirty, when Allison had to go home for supper. While I was seeing her out, a car pulled into our driveway. A police car. My mom must have heard tires crunching on the gravel because she called, “Is that your father?”

“It's the cops,” I said. I remember thinking, What are they even doing here? Stupid cops, they must have the wrong address.

My mom came to the door, wiping her hands on her apron. The expression on her face startled me. She looked worried.

It wasn't just any cop who showed up at our door. It was Clark Adderly, the chief of police. He came up the walk and onto the porch.

“Evening, Trish,” he said, removing his hat. “Stephanie.”

I don't know if it was the sad look in his eyes or whether the worry I'd seen on my mom's face was contagious, but I got a sick feeling in my stomach.

“I'm afraid I have some bad news for you, Trish,” he said. “Can I come in?”

From what he said and from what the traffic experts later confirmed, my dad probably hadn't seen that truck tire flying directly at his car until it was too late to do anything about it. It hit my father's windshield head-on and smashed right through the glass. My father's car veered out of control. The car immediately behind him swerved to avoid him. The car in the lane next to him swerved too. Cars behind my dad's car slammed on their brakes. Miraculously, no one was hurt.

No one except my dad.

His car kept moving after the tire crashed through the windshield. It finally ran right off the road and into a ditch. A number of drivers called 9-1-1 on their cell phones. The police and the paramedics arrived. It took them three hours to pry my father out from under the truck tire. But it didn't matter. According to the pathologist, he'd been killed on impact. My careful father was dead, and my whole life changed.

EIGHT

W
hen I was in grade five, Megan Campbell's father died. It wasn't an accident like what happened to my dad. Megan's father had cancer. Megan didn't come to school for a whole week. When she finally showed up again, she kept her head down most of the time and stood by herself in the playground at recess. I didn't know her very well, so I never went over to her and talked to her or anything. After a couple of weeks, one of the girls I hung out with said, “She should just get over it already.” Another girl said, “He was going to die anyway.” And, after a while, Megan did seem to get over it. At least, that's what it looked like. She started participating in class again and hung around with a couple of other girls at lunch and recess. She seemed normal instead of being poor sad Megan. It never occurred to me what it must have been like at her house after her father died. In fact, I never gave a second thought to her—until my dad died. Then I wondered: Is this what Megan went through? Is this how she felt?

After Clark Adderly left our house that night, I felt like someone had ripped open my heart and stuffed it full of all the things people never want to feel: grief and pain and hurt and sorrow. I thought I would never stop crying. I stayed away from school for two whole weeks. When I went back, I didn't want to talk to anyone—well, except Allison. Cindy Houghton came up to me outside school before the early bell and said she was sorry about my dad. Right there, in front of everyone who was waiting around before they had to go inside, I started to cry. No one came up to me after that. No one said anything at all to me about my dad after that day. I guess they were all afraid I was going to cry. If it hadn't been for Allison, who stuck to me the whole time and who never freaked when I got all weepy, I don't know what I would have done.

It wasn't any better at home. My mom wept—not cried, but
wept
—for days. She wept when Clark Adderly told her the news. She wept all that night. She wept the next morning when two of her closest friends came over to help her with “the arrangements.” They had to hold her up at the funeral. Over the next few weeks, she lost a ton of weight. She barely ate and couldn't sleep unless she took a heavy-duty sleeping pill. She was a mess. I thought a lot about Megan Campbell.

I found out later from my grandpa, who had come for the funeral, that my mom hadn't called him about me. Instead he had called her and offered to take me for the summer: “To give you a chance to pull yourself together, Trish.” My mom refused at first. She didn't want to send me up there alone, but her friends said they thought it would be a good idea: “Not just for you, Trish, but for Stephanie too. She's hurting too. Maybe getting away for a while will be good for her.” So off I went for nearly three months.

When I got home again, my mom had stopped crying. She had met Gregg.

They met at a support group that my mom's friends had dragged her to. Gregg's wife had died the year before, also in an accident. He and my mom spent the summer going to weekly group meetings in the church hall where people talked about their dead loved ones and how lost they felt without them. According to Allison, who overheard it from her mom, who, as a hairdresser, heard all the best gossip in town, it wasn't long before my mom and Gregg started having coffee together after group. Then dinner. Then…well, you get the idea. I couldn't believe it.

At Thanksgiving that year, Gregg sat at my father's place at the dining room table and carved the turkey. Right after that, he started showing up for supper a couple of times a week. And staying the night. He didn't out-and-out move in with us; it was more like he was doing it by stealth. His shaving stuff took over one of the little shelves in the shower. He left a change of clothes at our house, “just in case.” Then a couple of changes of clothes. His dirty jeans and T-shirts showed up in the laundry. He started keeping his run book on the little desk in the corner of the kitchen where the phone was, and he would sit there after supper some nights, figuring out how many runs he had made to fill those vending machines and how many miles he had driven so that he could bill his buddy. Half the time when I answered the phone, it was someone calling for Gregg. It was right about then that my mom and I started fighting. I told her that no one was going to replace my dad, ever. I told her that people were talking about her. I told her that she must not have loved my father if she could start seeing someone else so soon after he died. When I said that, she slapped me. I was so surprised, so hurt and so angry with her that I took off, just like that. I hated her. I didn't want to be around her anymore. I walked out to the highway and stuck out my thumb. I wasn't even sure where I was going— north, I guess, to my grandpa. But anywhere would have been fine, so long as it was away from my mom.

Mr. Whitten, the director of the choir at the church we went to, pulled over and picked me up. He asked me where I was going. I said I had to visit a friend in the next town. He dropped me there, and I stuck out my thumb again. The second car that picked me up was a police car with Clark Adderly at the wheel. It turned out that Mr. Whitten had been worried about me and had called the police. Clark Adderly drove me home. When he told my mom where he had found me, she started to cry. Didn't I realize how dangerous it was to hitchhike? Didn't I know that I could get killed? I screamed at her that I didn't care.

I ran away a few more times after that. Every time I did, my mom freaked out. Every time I got home again, she cried. But it didn't change anything. She kept seeing Gregg. He spent more and more time at our house. Two days before I was taken, she told me that she and Gregg had started talking about maybe getting married.

“Married?” I couldn't believe it. “It's only been two years since Dad died. How can you think about getting married? I thought you loved Dad.”

“I did,” my mom said. “I still do.”

“No, you don't. You love Gregg.”

“That doesn't mean I don't love your father too. I'll always love him.” Her eyes got all teary, but she wasn't fooling me. If she had really loved my dad, she wouldn't have started seeing Gregg so soon after he died. She wouldn't be talking about getting married again. “But life goes on, Stephanie.”

“Not for Dad, it doesn't.”

My mom stiffened.

“I'm thirty-six years old, Stephanie,” she said. “You can't expect me to spend the rest of my life alone. I'll never forget your father. But I can't change the fact that he's gone. And I know he'd want me to be happy. He'd want the same for you.”

“I
am
happy. I'm happy with the way things are. But I won't be happy if you try to force a new father on me. He's a mechanic. Dad was an engineer. He was a million times smarter than Gregg.”

“Gregg is smart in his own way. He's going to start his own business.”

“So he keeps saying.” Like
that
was ever going to happen. “It takes money, Mom, not to mention brains, to start a business.”

“He has a plan. It looks good.”

“But he's broke. You've seen his truck.” It was rusted out in a few places, and one of the bumpers had a huge dent in it from when he backed into a utility pole one night after a poker game. “Look at where he lives!” His so-called house was a crummy basement apartment in a six-plex up near the lumberyard. “He can't start a business. He doesn't have any money.”

“We're going to be partners,” my mom said. She was angry with me now.

I stared at her. She didn't work. She had never worked. She was living off what my father had left her. She'd also received a big settlement from the insurance company—they'd paid double because his death had been accidental—and from a lawsuit she had filed against the trucking company. She had gotten some good advice and had invested it so that it would last. We would be okay. There was even enough set aside to pay for my education. But we still had to be careful. Usually when people were partners in a business, they both put something into it. What was my mom planning to put in?

Suddenly it hit me.

“You're not going to lend Gregg money, are you?” I said. “The money we got from Dad is supposed to look after us. You're not going to throw it away on some business Gregg wants to start, are you?”

She didn't answer, but I knew that was exactly what she was planning to do.

“No way,” I said. “No way.”

“Stephanie, please. I need you to be okay with this. I need you to say that it's okay with you if Gregg and I get married.”

“It's not okay,” I said. “And I have rights too. If you try to use that money for Gregg's business, I'll talk to Martin.” Martin was a friend of my dad's. He was a lawyer. He had handled my dad's affairs. “That money is for us, so that we don't have to worry about anything. It isn't for Gregg.”

“Stephanie—”

I walked out on her and slammed the door as loudly as I could, but even still, I heard her yell, “You're impossible.”

I
was impossible?
She
was impossible. I told myself I hated her.

That was then.

Now I would do anything to see her again. Anything. I would even put up with Gregg. He wasn't so bad. He made my mom happy, and I guess that was something. He'd even tried to talk to me one time. He'd sat down on the couch while I was watching tv and he'd said, “I know I could never replace your dad, and I don't want to, Steph. But you and me can be friends, right? I mean, we both care about the same thing. We both care about your mom.”

Of course I hadn't even looked at him, much less answered him. But he had tried. He really had. And maybe my mom was right—maybe he was smart in his own way. Just because he wasn't a success now didn't mean he couldn't make a go of it. Maybe he just needed a break. Maybe my mom was that break. She sure seemed to believe in him. Tears dribbled down my cheeks as I huddled under my ratty old blanket. I wanted to go home. I wanted to
be
home. I would have given anything to have been tucked in my own bed in my own room in my own house. But what if that never happened? What if I never got home? I started to sob.