Birthday Girl Read online

  That left the trunk.

  Charlotte padded over to it and gingerly undid the snaps, then lifted the lid. Decorative paper in a cabbage rose pattern covered the inside, peeling from the humpbacked lid like dead skin. The smell of old cardboard and glue wafted upward, making her nose twitch. In the belly of the chest were five large shoe boxes. On the top box was written, in faded pencil, “Charlie” in a swirling script. Charlotte ran a finger under the name, then teased the lid off the box.

  Inside was a stack of envelopes. The top was faded and brown along the edges. “Charlie” was written on it again, still in pencil. Underneath the name was written “9/3/87–10/29/90.” The envelope crackled like it was made of dead leaves as she opened it.

  Inside was a single, fragile sheet of paper, torn in half. She pulled the pieces out with trembling hands and held them together to make a crude drawing. Four stick figures, two large, two small, stood in front of a house. Lines—Sister’s signature—had been drawn through them all. The artist had tried to fill in details, but the features were outsize and didn’t match each other. The mother’s figure had more detail than the father’s. A small brown dog with a lolling pink tongue danced on hind legs to one side, part of a rough collage of the boy figure playing with the dog—throwing a ball, feeding it from a trash can–size dog bowl. A black blotch at the top, cross-hatched and scribbled out, was where the name would’ve been.

  A small cry escaped her lips. She’d forgotten about the drawing Sister had forced her to make.

  Charlotte slipped the pieces back into the envelope, then placed it on the stack. She rifled through the envelopes in order. Each was marked “Charlie,” though as time went on the flowing, serpentine script changed to printed letters and, toward the bottom, block print. Each had a beginning and end date. The dates varied from envelope to envelope, but none overlapped and sometimes were months apart. Peeking inside, she found a torn picture and a crossed-out name in every one, twelve in all.

  The last was a crisp white business envelope. On it was written “Charlie” again in blue ink and block letters. Compared to the first few, it had a businesslike, transactional look, like the note she’d brought home from school one time from a disappointed Mrs. Dunlop, her fifth-grade teacher. Underneath the name was written a start date, but no end date. She stared at it. It was the first indication of the passage of time she’d had since being taken by Sister. Have I really been here that long? A knot formed in her stomach and she tore her eyes away from the date. Inside the envelope was the single-sheet torn drawing and the name “Jeremy,” crossed out like all the others. She lifted the sheet and sniffed; the heady, chemical smell of the marker was still there. It was new.

  She put it back and looked at the next-to-last envelope. The beginning date was from four years before. She stared at the end date, penned in recently.

  The picture inside was artistic, the best she’d seen so far. A tall high-rise rose in a forest of others. A bird flew around the top floor, and pillowlike clouds bunched above it all. In the foreground was a family of three: mother, father, boy. They stood straight as poles, not touching. Wide gaps marked the space between each. The boy wore a bow tie and a serious expression. Despite the detail, the picture seemed to project emptiness—there was little to look at or feel. She glanced at the top of the page. Written in a kid’s blocky script, and crossed out by a single black line, was the name “Jay Kelly.”

  Charlie. Her Charlie.

  Feeling sick, she put everything back in the shoe box, then quickly rifled through the others, finding similar stacks of envelopes for Tina, Buddy, and Maggie.

  Last, she pulled out the shoe box marked “Charlotte,” written in pencil on top. Inside were the same neatly ordered envelopes. Charlotte . . . Charlotte . . . Charlotte. Fifteen in all, with the dates much closer together than the Charlies, but ranging from yellowed and brittle to a last, pristine white business envelope.

  Hers.

  She opened it, staring at the picture Sister had made her draw the first horrible night. It was elementary compared to Charlie’s. Sister, she remembered—the memory sticking like a thorn—hadn’t torn the drawing evenly; she’d carefully ripped it so that she was alone on one of the pieces.

  She ran her finger lightly over her clumsy drawing, opening memories up that she’d long since sealed away. Feeling the tears getting ready to spill, she began to put everything back and set it next to the Charlie box when she was struck by a thought.

  She picked up her envelope again and turned it over. It sat in her hands like a dead thing. The month, day, and year she’d been kidnapped was written in a clear, steady hand. Next to it was an end date. She knew from the date on Jay Kelly’s envelope that it wasn’t far in the future.

  Her birthday.

  32

  Elliott

  The door clattered open. The driver glanced in the rearview mirror. “Sorry, folks. End of service means this is the end of the line.”

  Amy nudged Elliott awake, and the two made their way down the aisle, stiff from sleeping on the unforgiving angles of a Washington Metro Area Transit Authority bus seat. Five blocks from Mercy General, Elliott had spotted the bus pulling up to the stop, and for a couple of bucks, they’d hopped on board and had a place to rest and warm themselves for half the night.

  The driver stopped Elliott as they shuffled toward the steps off the bus. “Hey, man. There’s a shelter on McCandless Street. About two, three miles up Reece. Wish I could take you there, but I gotta get back to the depot before one.”

  Elliott asked, “Is this Reece?”

  “Yeah, man. This is Reece Boulevard.” When they didn’t say anything right away, the driver looked at them. “You’re in Maryland—you know that, right? Up past Olney.”

  “Sure,” Elliott said. “Is there a mall nearby?”

  The man’s eyes shot to the brim of his hat, but he said, “Washington Center.” He pointed out the window. “That’s the back of it. Follow the sidewalk until you get to Chambliss, then turn right. But it’s closed, man. There’s an all-night donut shop next door, but you know . . .”

  “I get it,” Elliott said. “We’ll stay away from the donut shop.”

  Mumbling their thanks, they dropped off the last step to the curb. The pneumatics hissed to life and the bus shuddered, rising in fits and starts like an old man getting to his feet. Interior lights flickered twice, then went black before the engine roared to life and the bus pulled away, heading down the boulevard and rounding a turn. The engine’s noise faded into the night. Elliott turned in place, taking stock.

  They were alone at a bus stop, a lonely blister of plastic and steel sitting next to a four-lane boulevard that wanted badly to be a highway. A string of white streetlights ran in regimented order along one side of the road like a diamond necklace. Boxwoods and mulched dwarf pines lined the edges and central median of the throughway in immaculate rows, highlighting a landscaping that was simultaneously pristine and utterly barren.

  He grimaced. They were in the suburbs, where life was segregated into discrete, manicured pods—home, school, work, store—but lacked any connective tissue. A city street was gritty, filthy, and usually dangerous, but at least life was present, jammed into every available open space, growling and snapping at the edges. Here, you could lie down to die in the three-inch grass, and your body would rot there until the landscaping crew showed up to trim the hedges.

  Elliott glanced at Amy. She leaned against the metal post of the shelter, her head hanging down with her chin touching her chest. “You okay?”

  She raised her head and nodded.

  “We have to find something to eat, find a place to hole up for the night, then put together a plan for the morning.”

  “What are you talking about?” Amy asked, her voice cracking. “We don’t have a car, my phone’s dead, and after bus fare I’ve got all of three dollars in my wallet.”

  He gave her a brief smile. “I could make three bucks stretch all week. And I’ve got two,
which makes five. Besides, if I know what I’m doing, we won’t need to spend any of it.”

  She put her hands to either side of her head. “What we should be doing is trying to get back to my place.”

  “The cops have already looked at the CCTV cameras in the garage, which will show us trying to get into your car. They probably ran your plates and traced it back to your address before we’d gone two miles on that bus. I’d be surprised if there isn’t a cruiser camped out there right now.”

  “Did we really do anything illegal?”

  Elliott hesitated. “Jay was recovering from what was meant to be a fatal overdose, and opioid ODs are notoriously fickle. If he had some kind of relapse, and it was damaging or worse, we’re the ones they’ll blame.”

  “Oh my god. What if we killed him?”

  “We don’t know that anything we did hurt him,” he said, trying to keep her calm. “But even if he recovered completely and is doing fine, the police would detain us and want to know what we were doing there. We don’t have that kind of time.”

  “So we just got the answer we were looking for, and now we can’t do anything about it.”

  He put a hand on her shoulder awkwardly. “One foot in front of the other, okay? We’re not out of the game just yet.”

  Elliott coaxed her into trudging down the sidewalk with him, praying as they went that Reece Boulevard wasn’t a regular beat for the local cops—the two of them, walking a lonely road after midnight and looking like they did, would be a sure pickup. But after fifteen minutes only a single car, going fast, passed them. Elliott caught the flash of a young face, tight with apprehension, eyes glued to the road: a teenager trying to make curfew.

  Chambliss was another four-lane suburban highway, but where Reece was a connecting artery, this was the showcase, full of the mattress stores, fast-food joints, and other shops that cropped up in the real estate around American malls like mushrooms. The donut shop the bus driver had mentioned was right off the main drag in a strip with a convenience store and a kitchen appliance outlet. Two squad cars sat in the parking lot. Beyond it, bright lights beckoned customers to a grocery store, a bank, and a Japanese restaurant.

  Elliott craned his neck back to take in the sign for the mall, a towering beacon that illuminated everything within a hundred feet, then glanced longingly at the tall, cream-colored walls—there’d be warm exhaust grates where the enormous building’s heating was expelled, maybe a hidden nook behind a hedge or a low wall to curl up and sleep off the rest of the night. But it wasn’t worth it. Circling the mall parking lots somewhere in a little SUV was a bored, underpaid security guard with a flashlight and a phone, just dying to have a reason to call the police.

  “What are we looking for?” Amy asked as he steered them away from the mall.

  “People tend to throw things away where they buy other things,” he said. “Food, clothes, shoes, even electronics. We should be able to find a few things to get us through the night.”

  They skirted the edge of the mall and headed for the back of the grocery store. Wooden pallets and empty shopping carts shared space with bins and buckets and rattling grocery bags. Behind the Japanese teppanyaki restaurant was a small tub-shaped container with a sign that warned GREASE THEFT IS ILLEGAL.

  Using a discarded milk crate as a stool, Elliott peered into one dumpster after another down the line before leading her to the next strip of stores. Amy watched as he pulled out undamaged packages of food, bunches of bananas, bottled water, and a quilted packing blanket covered in coffee grounds. For the next hour, they carefully and quietly sifted through trash cans and dumpsters, filling Elliott’s knapsack and several plastic bags, but freezing at each noise, real or perceived.

  “How old is your phone?” he called softly to Amy from inside the bin behind the convenience store.

  “Old. Really old.”

  She jumped as he tossed something out of the bin to her, catching it instinctively. It was a phone charger still in its unopened plastic case. “Does that fit yours?”

  Tilting the case one way and then the other, she tried to peer through the plastic to check the charger’s plug. “Looks like it. Is there a generator in there, too?”

  “Probably, but we have to scoot,” he said, his head popping over the edge of the bin. “There are cameras on the outside of that bank.”

  “Oh my gosh.” She looked down the alley of delivery bays and dumpsters.

  “Take it easy. If they’d seen us, they would’ve sent one of the cops from the donut shop by now. But there’s no reason to take chances.”

  Elliott crawled out of the bin and led them to the back of another building, a former car rental place by the looks of the peeling logo on the window. Next to a freight door was a raised outlet with weather guards on it. He plugged in the phone and was rewarded with a blooping noise as the screen lit up green and white. He put the phone gently on the ground by the length of the charger cord and got Amy’s help to slide several pallets and a barrel in front of the outlet to hide it.

  “We’ll have to leave it until morning,” he said, “but we’ll be coming back this way to grab the bus.”

  Amy slumped against a wall. “What’s our plan, Elliott? I’m so tired, I’m going to pass out.”

  He gestured behind them. “All that junk in those stores has to come from somewhere, and all the customers who want the junk need access.”

  “So?”

  “So, every mall in America is near a highway, every highway has an off-ramp, and every off-ramp needs an underpass.”

  “I don’t like where this is going.”

  “We don’t have much choice. It’s two in the morning, we can’t go back to your place, and we’re miles from the nearest shelter.” He spread his hands. “I’ve done it before, and it’ll work for the next six or seven hours.”

  Amy shuddered, but helped Elliott grab several sheaves of cardboard from a bin, then followed him as he led the way to where Chambliss turned into a sweeping off-ramp of asphalt and concrete. The road was empty in both directions, but Elliott forced them to wait for a moment to be sure, then walked calmly across the intersection, scrambled up the steep bricked slope, and hopped onto the ledge made by the junction of road, slope, and abutment.

  Elliott helped Amy clamber over the lip of the ledge. It was only high enough for a half squat. She peered into the darkness uneasily. “Are there rats?”

  Elliott pulled out a lighter and held it high, waving it at the back of the shallow, cavelike opening. It was empty save for some gravel, a few pieces of masonry, and a hubcap.

  He began laying out the items they’d liberated from the dumpsters. Dinner was two bananas and a peanut butter sandwich, with Graham crackers for dessert, washed down by water and a Gatorade. Elliott had also rescued two pairs of gloves, several winter hats, and three plastic ponchos. Seeing that Amy was shivering, he made her put on the hat and gloves and wrap herself in the freight blanket, then laid down the cardboard as a makeshift barrier against the grit and dirt.

  “That’s the best I can do,” he said, then looked at her. “And, sorry, but the only way we’re going to make it through the night is if we share that blanket.”

  She looked at him. “Are you serious?”

  “Would it help if I told you I only want you for your heat?”

  She laughed weakly. “I’m so tired, I don’t think I’d care either way.”

  With some convoluted maneuvering, they managed to get into a position where they could simultaneously spoon while making the most out of the blanket. The ground under the cardboard was still cold and hard, but as Elliott wrapped his arms around Amy and put his head down on his knapsack, he felt like it wasn’t the worst place he’d spent the night. He said good night to Cee Cee, waited, then sighed and closed his eyes at the silence.

  This is the way it happened.

  They’re at the playground. Elliott sits on a bench in the corner, his head in his hands. He agreed to take Cee Cee to the playground, but he’s got
the mother of all hangovers right now, having spent most of the night in the garage where he keeps his bottles.

  “Daddy, look at me!”

  He looks up and watches briefly as Cee Cee swings higher than she ever has before. “That’s great, baby girl!” he croaks, but moving his head and speaking causes a fissure to split in his skull. His stomach churns, and he wonders if he’s going to be sick. Across the mulched play area, a knot of parents huddle, coffees in hand, talking, and he knows he’s the topic of conversation this morning. He grimaces and drops his head back into his hands.

  “Come push me, Daddy!”

  “In a second, honey,” he calls. Unable to lift his head, he says it at the ground. The pain that had started in his temples is slipping along the sides of his head and meeting in the back to form a perfect crown of misery. Turning, he reaches into a jacket pocket and pulls out a flask.

  He would laugh if it wouldn’t hurt so much. A flask at eight in the morning. So trite, Dr. Nash. If he saw it in a movie, he’d walk out of the theater. But it’s his life, so he has to stay.

  A sip takes off the bleeding edge of the hangover, and five gulps flatten it completely. The last remaining atoms of his self-control keep him from emptying the flask. Cee Cee calls again and he holds up a finger—in a minute—when there’s a screech and a wail from the other side of the playground.

  He looks up despite the pain. A bundle of kids, trying to go down the sliding board at once, have tipped the entire contraption onto the ground. Children are crying. There are bloody scrapes and bruises. Parents rush over, are hovering, are upset. Elliott staggers to his feet and stumbles across the lot. Uncertain and unable to help, he stands stupidly, swaying in place as noses are wiped and tears blotted. He is mostly ignored, but a few of the parents shoot him looks of disgust—he hasn’t been fooling anyone, sitting by himself in the corner.

  Drunk and nauseous, he is worse than useless. He turns to go back.