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Finally, I found my voice. “Mom . . . ”
“You’re not real,” she said. It wasn’t said like someone who actually missed their daughter and was thrilled to have her home. It was said as if my appearance on her doorstep screwed up her 12-step plan to deny I’d ever existed. Such was the way of the Vargas clan.
Perhaps I should have gone somewhere else. But it was a perverse revenge, and I was unwilling to play this morbid scene out with anyone who didn’t deserve it.
“I’m real, mom.”
“But we didn’t bury you. You’re covered in dirt.”
My father stood behind my mom, his hands on her shoulders, steadying her as if he controlled anything in that house.
“No, you didn’t bury me. Did you not think that maybe I wasn’t dead, or was that not convenient for you?”
I understood they must have suffered when they’d thought they’d lost me. The sleepless nights, the fear for my safety. But it didn’t change the fact that they’d buried me to make their lives easier, so they could go on when I hadn’t had that luxury.
Then the tears started. Not mine. I was fairly certain I didn’t have tears left to cry. I’d used up my lifetime supply, and from now on my sobs would be verbal rather than wet. No, it was my mother crying. I was hurting her feelings.
“How could you say such a vile thing to me? We were worried sick. Where were you? What happened to you?”
Now it was time to accuse me. I’d not yet been invited into the house. I was still standing on the porch next to a giant plastic illuminated jack-o-lantern with a goofy grin on his face. A trail of trick-or-treaters stopped me from speaking.
“Trick-or-treat!” they caroled out, their treat bags held out like little beggars. One of the girls was dressed up like a witch. She’d managed to wipe off some of her green face make-up, and the wart was about to fall right off her nose.
My mother grabbed me by the arm and pulled me inside before giving the kids candy and sending them on their way. She shut the door and whirled on me.
She looked ridiculous wearing a pink bathrobe and slippers because Halloween was the one day of the year she could get away with being a slob. She had the bowl clutched in her hands so tightly I thought the glass would shatter and the candy would go flying onto the floor like a pinata. Her hands had gone white from gripping, and her face matched her hands. And yet . . . she was angry, not afraid.
“Where have you been?” She said it as if I’d been out playing hooky or something. Like I would disappear for months without a word on a joy ride and then come back looking like I did just for the hell of it.
I opened my mouth and then shut it again. Now that I was back, everyone would want to know. The police would want a statement, as would the media and all my friends and family. They felt they were entitled to know. I’d been gone, throwing their lives into a tailspin, and now I owed it to them to tell them, at least something. At least the barest, most TV movie-of-the-week version.
But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. To be forced to tell what had happened felt like rape, another violation and another choice that wasn’t free. I’d exposed every inch of my body and soul to one man for months, until force became voluntary. I wasn’t doing it again just in a different form.
Besides, I thought it was reasonable to think that once you bury someone, you give up rights to hearing their story. I wasn’t going to forgive them easily.
“I can’t talk about it,” I said. My voice quivered. I’m sure they thought it was trauma, but it was anger.
My mother nodded in understanding; my father still hadn’t said a word to me. Oh he loved me, in his way. He just wasn’t good at expressing it.
“I need to get cleaned up,” I said. After hours of dirt caked on me, I was becoming less and less appealing.
“You can use the guest room and bathroom, and wear some of my clothes. I’ll make you something to eat,” my mother said.
I wished I’d brought the clothes from the Mercedes, but I didn’t want any evidence that would help the police find my captor. It was irrational. I should want him locked up forever for what he’d done, but I didn’t. The thought of him locked in some cage turned my stomach.
I stopped off at my mother’s closet and got a T-shirt and some jeans in my size, which was six sizes ago for my mother. But like most women, she kept the hope alive that someday she’d get back into her skinny jeans.
The guest bedroom had previously been my bedroom. I wondered how long it had taken after my disappearance for them to start the erasing process? Packing my stuff up and redecorating the room.
The last time I’d been in this room had been a little more than a year ago. At that time it had remained untouched from my childhood, as if my parents expected that one day I would age backwards and they’d need it again.
There had been Barbie dolls and toys, as well as nail polish and posters of then-current rock stars, items from a room gone from childhood to teen. It had stood as some sort of unnatural shrine to keep me there, even after I’d freed myself from my cage and gone to college and then created a life of my own.
Now it was all gone. I wondered if they’d had a massive yard sale, or if it was all in storage somewhere, or up in the attic, out of sight out of mind. Now it looked like a country bed and breakfast. White wicker furniture and soft pale lavender carpet.
There was a delicate white crocheted bedspread and a border on the wall of wisteria, then the bottom half more pale lavender, stripes on white. An antique lamp and an old-fashioned alarm clock stood on the nightstand. There was not one shred of evidence I’d ever been there, as if it were my parents who had a crime to cover up.
I’d taken my shoes off at the door, so as not to track dirt into the bedroom. The bathroom had that same hollowguestfeeling. Like the bedroom, it was warm and cozy but it looked like it belonged in a magazine, not that anyone could actually live in there. If I couldn’t find a friend to stay with until I got my stuff back and figured out, then I’d be stuck staying here in this warm sterility.
