Unaccompanied Minor (8 page)

So when the kidnapper came knocking on my door, I was prepared for two reasons. One, my mother and Grammy Mae are addicted to those true-crime shows on television, the ones that detail the terrible circumstances surrounding horribly murdered young people at the hands of sociopaths and serial killers. Almost always, their targets fall victim because they literally took one wrong step; like they stepped into the van with him (Ted Bundy), or they stepped inside his house (John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer), or they stepped aside to allow him into their own house (Derrick Todd Lee). One wrong step, remember? In instead of out. Forward instead of back.

My mother, who knew she was under court order to let me live half the time with someone who would mind me like a house plant, suddenly got all obsessed with teaching me how to fend for myself. She was the one who showed me all the YouTube videos on how to escape handcuffs, for example. She and Grammy Mae also took turns locking me in the trunks of both new and older-model car sedans, and then shouted the instructions at me on how to get my “own ass out.” My mother knows I am big on lists, so she made lists for me all the time. Following is one of her lists that I kept folded up in my flight attendant manual. It’s titled “Mom’s Top Twenty Ways to Keep Your Young Ass from Gettin’ Killed” (by the way, I realize this is a list-within-a-list, which is
awesome
) (and the word “ass,” by the way, is not official profanity):

1. Stay off the Internet.
   I know that’s impossible, but seriously, the Internet is just a giant bog of murdering, child-molesting masturbators. Seventy-seven percent of the targets of Internet predators are fourteen and older. The first sign that you are vulnerable to Internet predators is thinking that you are not vulnerable to Internet predators.
   
2. If a stranger approaches you
   and tells you he’s a famous photographer and you’d make a wonderful cover model, kick him in the gonads.
   
3. Don’t get married.
   Sorry. When they say fifty-five percent of marriages end in divorce, they are not even counting the thousands of marriages that end in murder each year. Roughly a quarter of all female homicide victims got that way at the hands of a husband, boyfriend, or ex. Bad news, I know, but just bear that in mind.
   
4. Lock the door.
   Lord Christ. Derrick Todd Lee picked his victims just by jiggling doorknobs. Don’t be an idiot.
   
5. Don’t go jogging down wooded paths all alone.
   And if you do, don’t make it worse by wearing earphones so you can’t hear the killer coming up from behind. I swear, it’s like the landscapers consulted rapists when they designed those paths.
   
6. Learn how to escape from zip tie handcuffs.
   It’s easier than you think. Rapists and killers like to use zip ties to subdue their victims. (It doesn’t hurt to learn how to escape from regular handcuffs, too. John Wayne Gacy tricked his victims into
   putting the handcuffs on themselves
   . Oh yeah—don’t put the handcuffs on yourself!)
   
7. Don’t leave your door propped open.
   For Christ’s sake, that’s how Ted Bundy killed two of his last three victims. Some bovine at a college sorority left the door propped open, and all Bundy had to do was step inside. And if you yourself are about to step into a secure building, for God’s sake, don’t hold the door open for the stranger behind you. Let them enter their passcode their own-ass self.
   
8. Get a dog.
   Preferably one with a big bark. Rapists really don’t like dogs.
   
9. Learn how to escape from a chokehold.
   There are tons of tutorials on this on YouTube. (I know Number 1 on this list is to stay off the Internet, but I know you won’t, so at least use its power for good.)
   
10. If a stranger asks to use your phone, say no.
    If a stranger is holding an unfolded map and asks you for directions, ignore him, or keep your distance and call out the information. If they ask you to get in the car and show them the way, don’t you goddamn dare.
    
11. If someone knocks on the door, don’t open it.
    Look through the window. If you don’t recognize him, keep the door closed. If you do recognize him, like if he’s an acquaintance or a neighbor, talk to him through the door. Twenty-seven percent of abducted kids are kidnapped by acquaintances. Pretend someone else is home. Call out something like, “Hey, Sluggo, someone’s at the door!” And your dog should be barking, too.
    
12. Never go near a man in a van.
    Seriously.
    
13. If a plainclothed stranger approaches you
    anywhere in any situation (department store, gas station, side of the road, your own front door, etc.), shows you a badge, and/or tells you they are law enforcement and then says you have to leave with him, start screaming. Dial 911. Kick them. If it’s a real police detective he should have known better. Tell him your mom said he deserved it.
    
14. If you ever get lost in a crowded place,
    pick
    another mother
    to ask for help. Less than ten percent of predators are female, so go with the odds.
    
15. Never get in the car!
    If someone pulls up beside you, points a gun at you, and demands that you get in the car—don’t! They probably won’t call attention to themselves by shooting at you. And if they do, they only have a thirty percent chance of hitting you, and of that even a lower percent chance of hitting anything vital. Whereas if you get in the car, your pretty young ass is almost certainly dead—unless you jump out. Oh yeah, if you find yourself in the car,
    jump out
    .
    
16. Learn how to escape from a locked car trunk.
    Here are some tips: In recent-model cars, glow-in-the-dark escape handles have been installed for you to pull and free yourself. If you can’t find an escape handle, yank out the wires to the taillights so the killer/rapist will get pulled over by the police.
    
17. If someone jumps in your car,
    pulls a weapon on you, and demands that you drive to a secluded area, jump out of the car and run. If you can’t do that, then floor it and steer straight into the next streetlight. The airbag will deploy. You’ll be fine—maybe a little banged up, but that’s better than dead. If there is no streetlight nearby, rear-end a police car.
    
18. Don’t succumb to peer pressure!
    Your friends are idiots. Don’t listen to them when they say things like, “Drink this” (said the date rapist with the roofie cocktail), or, “It’ll be fun” (said the soon-to-be-dead friend who wants to hitchhike to Bisbee), or, “It’s not addictive if you only do it once” (said the crack dealer/future pimp).
    
19. Improvise a weapon.
    Plenty of everyday things can be deadly. Why do you think I wear a chopstick in my hair? If the day comes I won’t think twice before shoving it into someone’s jugular. Believe me.
    
20. This bears repeating: Go for the gonads.
    Don’t be shy.
    

And two, the second reason I was prepared when I got abducted was because of
MacGyver
. Flo is also a mad
MacGyver
fan and now she and I are both red-star commentators on the
MacGyver
community website. That means we can post comments without having to wait for them to be screened by the moderators. You have to
earn
a status like that. Flo earned hers by pointing out that in episode fifteen of the first season, when Mac is making a homemade defibrillator, he uses a cable cut from a microphone as a power supply when—this is probably common knowledge to you—microphones don’t have electricity running through them. So that was a huge faux pas on the part of the writers, and Flo is pretty legendary for pointing it out.

Flo has been flying for forty-six years. A funny thing about the airline business is that once someone gets hired they never quit, especially the flight attendants. The longer you have the job, the more control you have over the trips you can fly. So someone like my mother, with only seventeen years of seniority, is still relatively junior and would need a secret weapon to be awarded the “turnaround” trips with high flight hours that would still have her home in time to make me dinner. For example, a San Francisco turnaround, which would take her to SFO and back with no overnight layover to keep her away or connections to eat up her day, would put such a hefty chunk of hours on her schedule that just four of those trips each month was enough to maintain her full-time status.

This is the job the GAL said was bad for a single mother to have.

My mom worked as little as four days. A
month
. Thanks to the fact that she taught me the WorldAir crew computer interface. She needed to make sure none of her flights overlapped her custodial periods, because the common assumption about flight attendant mothers is that their jobs keep them from being able to care for their kids. It’s a false assumption, and one that pilots never seem to face.

So I was her secret weapon. While my mom was working her trips and dealing with family court, I was working the flight attendant swap boards for her, grabbing those high-time trips when they showed up. I was good at it. My mother wasn’t the only one I did it for. I processed bid schedules for my Grammy Mae (also a flight attendant), because her airline was an affiliate of WorldAir and their employee computer interface wasn’t that different, and Flo Davenport, although both of them are so senior they hardly needed a secret weapon. By the way, the top five most popular trips to work, according to the WorldAir Atlanta-based flight attendant seniority graph, are (I love lists):

1. Narita
   
2. São Paulo
   
3. Buenos Aires
   
4. Honolulu
   
5. Beijing
   

These routes have high-time payouts and utilize the Boeing Triple Seven aircraft, which has the luxurious flight attendant rest area completely separate from the passenger cabin, where the crew can sleep fully reclined and watch movies if they want. Occasionally my mother got to fly those trips when I’d find one for her that fell during Ash’s custodial time. I constantly worked the swap boards on her behalf, so that when a senior flight attendant needed to drop a prime-time trip, I was there to snatch it off the screen and move it to my mother’s schedule before anyone else could get it. But never did my mother’s job interfere with her custodial time with me—or her “court-ordered visitation,” as Ash called it.

By the way, there is no such thing as court-ordered visitation (he also called it “court-supervised visitation”). It was just Ash’s way of trying to make my mother sound crazy—to anyone who would listen—crazy as in an unfit mother. The fact was a lot less dramatic than that: my mother shared custody of me with her ex-husband Ash Manning, a man who is not my father, who adopted me when my mother really was in a vulnerable state after my dad’s death. This gave Ash legal rights as though he were my real father. The shared custody schedule was bound by an “agreement” my mother was railroaded into signing under threat of the GAL’s recommendation to the judge.

Ash Manning never had any use for me, so I didn’t know why he was so hell-bent on that. As I got older I was determined to find out. Especially in light of recent events. Like the kidnapping.

When the knocking came of course I did not answer the door, seeing as how I’m good at minding my lists. And of course I had set the extra deadbolt. I’m a third-generation flight attendant (although a fake one for now). We always click the extra deadbolt.

At first when I heard the key in the lock I assumed Ash was home, so I had already begun grabbing my things to get ready to leave. But then I heard the knock and thought that was curious. Did Ash forget that the same key unlocked both the doorknob and the deadbolt? The knock came again. I tiptoed over.

I didn’t look through the peephole on the door, because predators always expect you to look through that. I looked through a clear spot in the intricate stained-glass panel beside the door instead, because it gave a much better vantage. For example, I could see the person knocking was a no-neck stocky guy about five-foot-eleven with rheumy thyroid eyes behind glasses as thick as the bottom of glass bottles. He was wearing a blue jogging suit and a ridiculous pitch-black toupee. I could also see that his hands, which he hid behind his back, held two things: a large roll of silver electrical tape, and a packet of plastic zip-ties.

Then he said my name! “April,” he called. “I’m Ash’s friend. I’m a fellow pilot at WorldAir. I need to pick up some stuff for him. Can you let me in? He forgot to give me the key to the other lock.”

I knew this guy was not a pilot for WorldAir. Pilots undergo mandatory retirement at the age of sixty, and this guy looked like he was a hundred years older than that. Also, his eyeglass lenses were thick as a stack of nickels. WorldAir didn’t hire half-blind pilots. The kidnapping kit he held behind his back did not help his case, either. I turned to tiptoe away and got maybe four steps down the hall when he kicked the door open. He must have had feet like Frankenstein, because it took one single kick and that was it.
Bang!
It was way louder than I expected.

I thought I’d have more time to make it to the sliding glass doors and out the side patio, but no. He moved fast for a big fossil, and my backpack didn’t help me, either. He grabbed it like it was a convenient handle and pulled me back. I ineffectively kicked and scratched. Suddenly it occurred to me to be terrified, and the fear gripped me like a giant squid. I began to scream.

“Shut up, you lousy little brat!” he growled at me.

I did not shut up. I screamed so loud my face felt on fire. I was surprised no one came to my rescue. I think if I were screaming like this in Atlanta someone would have at least meandered over out of curiosity. I managed to wriggle free from the backpack, but then he caught me by the arm, grabbed my hair, and dragged me back to the foyer with his hand over my mouth. I could smell the nicotine on his fingers, and he didn’t even seem to flinch when I bit his leathery hand so hard I was surprised I didn’t draw blood.