What She Left Behind (23 page)

And, like when I was five, Dad now says, “Come on, Sara. Let’s get going.”

I pick up the bag and take long, quick steps—fast enough to make it outside a few seconds before my dad, but not so fast that it looks as if I’m trying to run away.

Outside, the birds sing and the sun shines, and the car going by at the end of our quarter-mile-long driveway seems as far away from me and my voice as stars in the night sky.

I toss Alex’s book across the lawn like a Frisbee. I’m sure that once he learns that I walked out on Robertson’s class and never came back, he’ll come by the house to try to find out what happened. Beyond that, I can only hope he’ll find the book he loaned me and realize that something’s wrong. That he’ll notice the
Soap Opera Digest
page and remember Zach teasing me about keeping my magazines in pristine condition. Hopefully he doesn’t think I’m incredibly careless or that I’ve taken to reading on the front lawn. But even if he figures out something is wrong, how will Alex know where to find me when I don’t even know, myself?

Although in my mind it seems about as discreet as a billboard, Dad doesn’t notice the abandoned book. He simply gestures toward the camper, parked as it always is next to the barn. As we pass the side door of the barn, I see that Dad’s parked his truck inside it.

Brilliant, Sara. You checked the garage but not the barn.
In my
defense, Dad never parks in the barn. Which means he planned all of this and knew I wasn’t going to go with him willingly.

I hesitate at the stairs to the camper. This is absurd.
Run, Sara, run! This is your last chance!
But where do I run? We’re in the middle of a twenty-acre field and our only neighbor won’t even open the door for me.

My dad is behind me. He prods me forward with the gun and my heart nearly stops beating. I force my feet up the steps and into the camper. It smells of tuna fish and Cheerios, my dad’s favorite camping foods. Now that I’m inside, will I ever come back out?

My dad takes the duffel bags and finds a place for them, then pushes me onto the bench next to the table. The walls seem to close in and the space becomes even smaller than I remembered it.
I have to get out!
There has to be something I can use to smash the window.

Dad opens a drawer calmly and deliberately and pulls something out. Handcuffs. He tosses them to me. “Put one on.”

Seriously?

He points the gun at me. What if I refuse? Will he really shoot me? He must have shot Mom. Which means he’ll shoot me and Zach. If not now, then later. Maybe I should just let it be now.

I hesitate, but only for a moment. As much as I hate my life right now, I don’t want it to end. Even if I can see Matt. And Mom. I click a handcuff onto one wrist.

“Sit on the floor.”

I don’t want to. I want to stay on the bench where I can try to pretend that things are normal. I don’t want to sit on the floor where I won’t even be able to see where we’re going.

“Move, Sara!” my dad barks.

I slide to the floor.

“Hands behind your back.” It sounds so absurd that I want to laugh and say,
Geez, Dad, you’ve been watching too much
Law & Order. Although, in Dad’s case, I guess he had just
lived
too much
Law & Order
.

Dad cuffs my hands together around the giant table leg, which is attached to the floor of the camper. He has to set down the gun to do it.
This is my chance!

I try to stand up and I scream, even though I know the rest of the world is too far away to hear me.

I’m not fast enough. The handcuffs are secured. I keep screaming. My dad picks up the gun again and points it at me. He looks angrier, like the next time he points the gun at me he’s going to use it. He’s going to pull the trigger.

I stop screaming. He picks up a roll of duct tape, cuts off a strip, and comes toward me. My heart beats wildly.

“Hold still,” he says, and covers my mouth with the strip.

Dad leaves and a few minutes later comes back carrying Zach. He props him up and handcuffs him to the table leg too. “I was hoping I wouldn’t need these.” He ruffles Zach’s hair.

I like to imagine that Zach is my brother, too. At least
I
know it’s just pretend.

I want to cry.

Dad takes another strip of duct tape and covers Zach’s mouth, even though he’s still unconscious. Then Dad gets out a plastic tablecloth that my mom always clips onto picnic tables. He shakes
it over the table so that it drapes down and covers us, and even uses the plastic clips to hold it in place. My world is darker still.

Dad’s shoes squeak on the steps of the camper and then the back door slams. The camper shifts ever so slightly as Dad gets in the front. He closes the door, turns on the engine, and starts to whistle.

The camper bumps and rattles and turns corners. Each bump spills a tear that I’m trying to will back into my eyes. I know if I really let myself cry I won’t be able to stop. I feel like I’m going to be carsick.
Please don’t let me throw up.
The handcuffs dig into my wrists, and I ache all over.

Then I hear the most beautiful sound: a siren!
Please let it be for us.

The camper slows. I feel us veer to the side, and the slight drop as we edge onto the shoulder. We stop. There’s a slight shake as a vehicle whooshes past us. Then we start rolling again.

I don’t remember anything in my
Worst-Case Scenario
guidebook about escaping handcuffs. I curse myself for not having bought the second book in the series. I’m on my own.

Mom, I’m so scared. I really thought you were coming back. I miss you.

You and Matt have to help me figure out how to get Zach away from here. He’s been so good to us. We have to make it up to him.

I close my eyes and try to think about something else. I imagine that Alex is next to me, rubbing my shoulders. What time is it? School will surely be over soon. I wonder what Alex thought when he got back to history and I wasn’t there. Did he go to the Dairy Dream? What did he think when I wasn’t at the Dairy Dream, when I wasn’t in math? Or maybe he skipped math. Would he try to find
me? I think about kissing him before he got sent to Altman’s office.

The ride gets more and more bumpy, and after a while, I don’t even hear the whoosh of other passing cars. We’re going a lot slower, but the potholes are horrific and I keep whacking my head on the top of the table. We’ve made so many turns that there’s no way I could have kept track of how to get home.

Finally, we stop. The engine noise fades into a bubbling sound. We must be near a river. My stomach bottoms out as I process what that means.
Is Dad going to drown us? Is that what he did to my mom?
Between that thought and the duct tape over my mouth it becomes doubly hard to breathe.

Calm down, Sara! Think this through!
What did Dad
say
when he told me to pack the bags?
“Now that Matt doesn’t have play rehearsal, we can
finally
go on vacation.”

Vacation.
It’s starting to make sense. What if this isn’t just any river? What if it’s the Au Sable? Dad said
vacation
. What if he brought us back to Ramona’s Retreat, where we spent all those summers? We stopped going there after Matt died, but Dad has been acting as if Zach is Matt and Matt is still alive.

The back door opens, Dad pulls back the tablecloth, and I see that I’m right. There’s the wooden eagle statue mounted on a stump that’s been here as long as I can remember. We’re at Ramona’s Retreat.

The next-closest cabin isn’t within screaming distance, which I’m sure is why Dad pulls the duct tape off my mouth. My lips sting and I cry out in pain. Zach is starting to come to and Dad rips his duct tape off too.

Dad opens a drawer, takes out a key, and unlocks my left handcuff. Once he takes it off I realize how tight it had been and I rub my wrist.

“Move,” Dad says, dropping the key back into the drawer. He gestures toward the door with the gun.

The air smells woodsy and is cool by the river. It’s hard to look at the cabin. If I focus on the front window, I see Matt chasing Mom with a water gun. If I look toward the river, I see Matt filling up a bucket of water to dump on me. If I look up, Matt’s sitting in a tree, smiling down at me. But I know that I’ve gone completely mad, just like my dad, when I walk inside the cabin.

“Mom!”

My mom sits in a kitchen chair, duct tape over her mouth, covered with a blanket. I start to cry. Whatever madness this is, I don’t want to get better.

I run to her and throw my arms around her. Her face is red and bruised. I touch the tears running down her cheeks, and reassure myself that she’s real.

For a moment, I feel a rush of joy.
She’s alive! My mom’s alive!

Dad peels the duct tape from her mouth. I hug her again but she isn’t hugging me back because she’s handcuffed to the chair. Her feet are tied at a horrible angle, so she can’t use them to stand. The joy I felt just moments ago is sucked right out of me. My mom is alive, but after this will she ever be the same? And if she’s been a prisoner here all week, how will any of us escape?

Dad yanks me away to the opposite side of the kitchen. He attaches my other handcuff to the refrigerator door. Then he straightens the
towel on the oven door and lines up three tuna cans along the back of the counter. So this is what happened to the fifty dollars’ worth of groceries on the credit card statement.

“I’ll just go get Matt,” my dad says, all cheery. Mom’s face jerks as if she’s been slapped.

“He thinks Zach is Matt,” I say as soon as he’s back outside.

“No, Sara. No, you can’t be here,” Mom says frantically. She’s shaking and her words run together. “You’ve got to get away. I’m sorry that I waited so long. I’d hoped you had run away. And now Zach—I love you, baby.”

“I love you too, Mom. It’s not your fault. We’ll find a way out of here.” I try to mask the waver in my voice. The truth is, I’m utterly terrified and without a plan. I instinctively reach for my ponytail and turn it round and round. “Have you been alone here all this time?”

She shakes her head. “No, your dad’s been here most of every day.”

Dad, who’s never late for work and never leaves early, has been coming
here
? I feel stupid as I realize that’s the reason he had Bruce working extra hours.

I look around the kitchen. “Where’s the phone?”

“Your dad cut the line, then he took the phone with him.”

Just like he did at home.

Zach stumbles into the room. He looks up, sees my mom, and almost smiles. “Mrs.—”

“Matt!” I shout over him. “Mom was just asking about the field trip you went on today.”

Zach’s expression deflates. “Fine,” he says. “The field trip was fine.”

Dad pushes Zach into a kitchen chair and fastens his handcuffs through the rungs. Dad grabs a coil of rope from the kitchen counter. Zach kicks, but my dad grabs his foot and twists until Zach screams. Then he makes a few quick, tight knots, just like when he ties up the trash, and Zach’s legs are as useless as my mom’s. Dad: 3. Us: 0.

I try to stay calm by looking around the cabin for a weapon or a way out. I wonder if my dad went to the trouble of renting the cabin or whether he just broke in. Either way, since it isn’t summer, it seems unlikely that anyone else will drop by to visit.

“All right, then, I’ll make us some dinner.” Dad usually does the cooking, if you can call it that, when we go camping.

Next to me in the kitchen, Dad opens a can of tuna, mixes it with some mayonnaise that he gets out of the refrigerator I’m attached to, and pops bread into the toaster. Then he puts a kettle on the stove for tea. When it’s all ready, he brings our plates to the table.

Dad slides Mom’s chair over to the table. Next to a pair of antlers, there’s a hook on the wall. Dad grabs a small key from it.
A key to the handcuffs? He must have two copies, since he didn’t hang anything there when he came in from the camper with Zach.
Dad frees a hand for Mom and Zach each to eat with. He moves me to a kitchen chair, only he doesn’t tie my legs like everyone else’s. I guess there are some advantages to being known as She Who Has No Voice When It Matters.

The tea is good. It always is when Dad makes it. I put my nose close to the cup to warm up. Then I take a sip—perfectly sweet.

The tuna sandwich is another story. It has the crunchy things in it that I hate. I want to pick them out, but I don’t dare. So I bite and chew and swallow and try to drown the taste and the texture with the tea.

Dad’s eyes are bright and shiny. Unlike most nights, he carries the conversation.

“So, Matt. Ready to do some canoeing soon?”

“Um. Yeah. Sure,” Zach says as he eats his sandwich. Long pause. “Dad.” The real Matt would have paused too, because Matt didn’t like canoeing. For our last canoe trip, Dad woke us up at five a.m. with urgent shouts to get outside. I leaped out of bed and threw on my clothes, hands shaking as if the fire alarm had just gone off. Outside, Dad had all of our life jackets lined up on a log next to the river. I reluctantly slipped mine on. It reeked from being stuffed in a plastic bag while it was still wet.