Afterward (2 page)

“We are so grateful to have Ethan back, I can't even express it in words,” said a tearful Megan Jorgenson. “We've finally managed to wake up from our nightmare.”

Dylan's parents, Andrew and Mindy, were equally thankful as was Dylan's sister, Caroline, 16.

“I want to hold my little brother tight and never let him go,” she said to reporters.

 

ETHAN—92 DAYS AFTERWARD

These are the sounds from home that I hadn't realized I remembered until I came home after four years and heard them again:

•  The yip-yip-yip of Missy the Chihuahua next door

•  The clunk-plunk of the ice maker

•  My dad's car pulling into the driveway and the thud of the driver's side door shutting, and then exactly eight beats later his keys in the front door

•  The sigh my mother makes after she takes her first sip from her nightly cup of Earl Grey decaffeinated tea—how it starts really loud and then gets smaller and smaller like it's running downhill or something

•  The theme song to
All Things Considered
on the kitchen radio

•  The screech of the garbage truck brakes on Monday mornings

All those sounds kept happening while I was gone. The refrigerator kept making ice. Missy kept barking. The garbage truck kept stopping. And I wasn't here to hear them.

*   *   *

It's been three months since I've come home, and I keep remembering sounds. And smells. All summer long they've been coming back to me. As soon as I remember them I realize I never really forgot them. Maybe I just kept them somewhere deep inside me that Marty couldn't get to. Which makes me glad, I guess. But it makes me depressed, too. Because I realize how much I missed those sounds. Even the Chihuahua.

These are the smells from home that I hadn't realized I remembered until I came home after four years and I smelled them again:

•  Fabuloso floor cleaner in lavender that Gloria uses to clean our floors

•  Yankee Candles in Honeydew Melon and Kitchen Spice—my mom orders them in bulk online

•  The Irish Spring soap my dad uses in the shower

•  The stink of my old gym shoes, which were still in my room four years later even though they didn't fit me anymore, and which still managed to smell like my middle school locker room

•  Clean sheets on my bed. I don't even know what Gloria uses to wash them, and I don't care. Clean sheets. I can't tell you how much I fucking appreciate those now.

•  Venison-and-pork sausage grilling on the stove top—my dad's favorite on Saturday mornings

Damn, now that I think about it, I could make a whole list of tastes I'd forgotten/secretly remembered.

I've wondered about asking Dr. Greenberg about all of these smells and sounds, but I'm not sure how I'm supposed to phrase the question. Like, is it normal to think about sounds and smells so much, Dr. Greenberg? Do all the other guys that you treat who were kidnapped when they were eleven and a half and then were found after four years also think about sounds and smells? I mean, it's not like there are a lot of us who fit this description. He's probably as clueless as me about to how to deal with me. We've been meeting twice a week for three months now and basically all we talk about is the weather and how I'm sleeping. He always wants to know how I'm sleeping.

My answer is always, “Not so good.” Which is why I'm on one medicine to help me fall asleep and one medicine to help me stay asleep.

Neither one helps me sleep with the lights off, so I have to sleep with them on.

The nights are the worst.

*   *   *

These are the sounds from when Marty had me that I don't realize I've kept somewhere deep inside me until I hear something that reminds me of them:

•  That clicking sound a doorknob makes when you shut it

•  The squeaks a mattress makes sometimes

•  Heavy bass in hip-hop music

•  Microwave beeps

•  Cigarette lighters clicking

And these are the smells:

•  Cigarette smoke

•  McDonald's

•  Italian carryout heated up too many times

•  Palmolive dish soap

•  Red wine

Maybe next time I go see Dr. Greenberg I can ask him about the smells and the sounds. But probably I won't. Probably I'll do what I usually do, which is sit and nod at what he's saying while on the inside I'm wondering all these weird things that I can't say out loud to this Dr. Greenberg guy who I barely know. Probably I'll do what I usually do, which is look out the window at this huge pecan tree growing outside of Dr. Greenberg's office and think about how for the four years I was gone it was there, growing and getting to be this pecan tree. Doing its pecan tree thing. Waking up every morning under the sun and becoming a little bit bigger each day. Not worried about anything.

 

CAROLINE—96 DAYS AFTERWARD

All day long my mom has been after me to haul the stacks of old newspapers and magazines that have been breeding in the garage out to the garbage can at the back of the house. When the sun starts to set, I finally get around to it. As I struggle to lift the lid and dump the junk, I notice one of the yellowing papers has a big picture of Dylan under the front page headline. It was taken the day he was rescued. I stare at the picture of him standing between me and my parents, clutching my mother's arm, and I can't believe it's been just over three months since Dylan came home and we were on the front page of almost every major paper in Texas.

I mean, never once in my soul-sucking, mind-numbing, small-town Texas life did I think that one day I would be standing in front of CNN anchor Gloria Conway in all her hair sprayed, stiletto-wearing glory as she asked me what any rational person would qualify as The Stupidest Questions in the World.

How does it feel to have your little brother back?

How did you keep it together these last few days?

Have you felt like a support for your parents as they've dealt with this unimaginable situation?

Gloria fired questions at me while I was standing in the Dove Lake High School gymnasium, the only place the local police could think to put all the reporters and cameras because it was the one space in town that would hold all of them. Blinking as the camera flashes went off. Stuck in the very same spot where my best friend Emma Saunders and I regularly lied to that rat-faced Coach Underhill about having cramps so we wouldn't have to complete the volleyball unit. There I stood, clutching my baby brother's hand as he rocked back and forth and pushed his face into my mom's armpit. My parents cried, and I thanked the God I wasn't sure I believed in for bringing Dylan home to us. I even answered all of Gloria Conway's stupid questions as a sign of thanks to some higher power.

And I said a silent prayer, too, that she didn't ask the questions that I didn't want to answer.

Why was Dylan outside unsupervised?

Who normally would have been keeping an eye on Dylan at that time?

How are you planning to help Dylan recover from this traumatic event, given his special needs?

The reporters, some of them from as far away as England, were pretty interested in us, but Ethan Jorgenson got most of the attention. To be gone four years and found just over an hour away? And to have apparently had the chance to leave and not have left? That's what everyone was talking about under their breaths.

The police kept our two families mostly separated in the aftermath. I didn't see Ethan during the interviews at the police station. Or the examinations at the hospital. I'm not sure why. But we were all hustled into the gym together for the news conferences, and I caught a glimpse of him through the crowd of reporters. Tall. Dark hair. A bunch of piercings in his left ear. Not bad looking, to tell you the truth, but skinnier than I remembered him. Maybe that bastard who took him and Dylan didn't feed him much, I don't know. He looked so different, but of course that makes sense since he'd been gone for so long, and a lot happens to you between eleven and fifteen. I mean, at eleven I could wear clothes from the boy's department, but by fifteen my boobs were as big as my mother's.

Ethan had been a year behind me in school, but Dove Lake is tiny enough that it was easy to recall how he always played basketball at recess during elementary school and whacked away at the drums in the school band. I still remember his lopsided smile staring out at us from the MISSING posters taped to the front doors of the Tom Thumb and the Walgreens and the Wal-Mart and the Dairy Queen and the waiting room at his dad's office. Dr. Jorgenson is my dentist just like he's the dentist for every kid in town because he's the
only
dentist in town, and for years, even after everyone was pretty much sure that Ethan Jorgenson was a skeleton at the bottom of a lake somewhere, even after all the other flyers had been taken down because it was just too sad to keep them up, Ethan's smile stared at me from the bulletin board in the waiting room when I went in for a cleaning every six months. And when Dr. Jorgenson would come in during my checkups and nod and examine my teeth and ask me about how school was going, I would think about Ethan Jorgenson and his crooked smile and I'd feel so sorry for Dr. Jorgenson. I don't know how he even managed to get up each day, much less stare into the mouths of squirming preschoolers and pimply teenagers who probably reminded him of his son every second of every hour. He and Mrs. Jorgenson didn't have any other kids. They just had Ethan.

And then one awful day they didn't anymore.

Ethan and his parents got booked on the Carlotta King show a few days after he and Dylan were found. The reporters were done asking my family questions, but the Carlotta King interview aired nationally on a Wednesday night, and there were promos running for it every hour on the hour in the days leading up to it. My parents didn't want to watch it.
Let's leave well enough alone. Dylan is back. He's safe. He's unharmed. We don't need to watch that, Caroline. We don't need to get ourselves all worked up.

But of course I recorded it and after everyone was asleep—well, after Dylan fell asleep crying in my mother's arms and my mother passed out on the floor next to his bed because it was the only way he'd drift off and my father acted the whole time like nothing was going on by shutting himself inside his bedroom, after all of that—I crept into the family room and watched it. I watched as Carlotta King tilted her head, furrowed her brow, and parted her lip-glossed pink lips just so before asking another probing question. She had this way about her, Carlotta King did, of making you feel like you were just sitting at the bus stop with her having a chat. It seemed like talking to her would be like talking to your favorite teacher from elementary school, the one who gave generous hugs and smiled sweetly when you accidentally called her Mom. No wonder Carlotta King scored all the big deal interviews with politicians who'd cheated on their wives and celebrities who'd gotten arrested drunk driving.

Phillip and Megan, you moved here to Dove Lake from Austin when Ethan was a preschooler in the hopes that you'd be raising your son in a safe, almost idyllic environment. Small Town, USA. And then this tragedy happens. How do you settle that in your minds?

Ethan, this question is delicate, but can you tell me how you got through these past four years? What was your day-to-day life like?

So what's next for the Jorgenson family? Will you be continuing with the foundation you've started? You've done such wonderful work for the families of other missing kids across this country.

I texted Emma,
This is so freaking weird
.

No shit
she wrote back. She had watched the interview earlier, and she wanted to know what I was thinking as I watched it. But pretty soon I was ignoring her texts, totally immersed in listening to my dentist and his wife and their son—a kid I used to pass by in the cafeteria at Dove Lake Primary—talk to the entire country about what had happened to them. They looked pretty put together considering. Ethan's piercings had disappeared from his ear. Dr. Jorgenson was wearing a tie and a blazer, and Mrs. Jorgenson had on a swanky plum suit she must have found in the city or at least online. No store in Dove Lake would carry something so pricey.

They talked like they'd gone over the questions ahead of time, and maybe they had. Ethan's answers were short, and he kept glancing at his parents in between. I felt sorry for him, but a lot of people were saying the Jorgensons were doing this to get the media off their backs. One Carlotta King interview and then hopefully everyone would leave them alone.

I waited for Carlotta King to ask Ethan why he didn't try to run away, especially since reporters were finding out he'd been seen biking and hanging out outside the apartment complex in Houston all by himself while that bastard was at work. Some reports even said he'd made friends with other kids in the neighborhood. But she didn't ask those questions.

I waited for her to ask about Dylan, too. About how that bastard had managed to kidnap him from practically in front of our house. About what had happened to him while he'd been gone. But she never said a word about us. I guess she figured like everybody else that my little brother was only gone a few nights. That was nothing compared to what Ethan had been through. Never mind that on the evening I was watching Carlotta King and Ethan Jorgenson and his parents, I heard my little brother waking up in his bedroom down the hall, shrieking at the top of his lungs so loud that I couldn't begin to make out the words my mother was using to try to calm him down.

It's been three months since that interview aired. Three months since I saw Ethan Jorgenson in the Dove Lake High School gym. Three months since Dylan came home. And he still wakes up screaming, and my mother still sleeps on his bedroom floor a lot of the time, and my dad still comes home later and later. As for me, I hide in the shadows of my house, my mind unable to stop wondering and worrying about what happened to my baby brother when he was taken from us.