Don't Try to Find Me: A Novel (2 page)

I NEVER SHOULD HAVE
named her Marley. Not only because of
Marley & Me,
which forever links her to a poorly behaved dog (though in my defense, I couldn’t have foreseen that), but because I first heard the name on a soap opera I watched when I was a teenager. On
Another World,
there were twins named Marley and Victoria. Marley was the good twin.

Terrible things were always befalling TV Marley, but that was to be expected. It was a soap.

Marley was raped by her own husband. Then she was wrongly accused of shooting him. And all I thought was, That’s a pretty name.

I’ve cursed my daughter.

“Mrs. Willits,” the officer is saying. He’s bringing me back, like Paul sometimes has to. He and Paul are both watching me. I’ve missed something important, or I’ve made us look foolish. Unconvincing. We’re concerned parents, but we’re also playing the part of concerned parents. There’s always a fear when dealing with the police that you’ll be misconstrued and become a suspect. Maybe I should say, that’s my fear. I might have watched too many soap operas in my formative years. I remember when an actor would disappear from the show, but the character would remain. A voice-over would intone something like “The role of concerned parent is now being played by Rachel Willits.”

“You should have been out here yesterday,” I say to the officer. Officer Strickland, is that his name? I’m suddenly pissed off. All night, I was awake and terrified. No pill could help me sleep through this. I want a new emotion, and righteous indignation will do.

“We’ve been over this,” Paul says. He trades a quick look with Officer Strickland(?). They’re acting like old friends. The officer looks about thirty, but his nose is red like an alcoholic’s and his dark hair already has some silver in it. Frosted hair, that was what my mother used to call it when she got hers done at the salon.

“Marley was registered as missing yesterday, when you called,” he says with a trace of defensiveness. “She was entered into the NCIC.”

“The FBI’s National Crime Information Center computer,” Paul adds. “And she’s listed with the state clearinghouse.” They’re like a vaudeville act, these two. Meanwhile, Marley’s out there somewhere, and it’s not the old neighborhood. I made enough calls, browbeat enough teenagers and their parents, had my friend Dawn driving up and down enough streets, to feel confident of that.

I glare at the man I believe to be Officer Strickland. “She wasn’t important enough for you to come by yesterday.” There’s no Amber Alert when the police have written you off as a runaway. I’m raw; my edges are ragged. If I stay angry, I won’t be able to cry anymore. I don’t want to cry anymore. I don’t want to be scared. I need this new emotion. “Officer Strickland,” I add, experimentally, to see if he’ll correct me.

“Ma’am, I understand that you’re upset.” At least I got his name right. I’ve got that much working for me. “But you need to remember that most runaways return within a few days.”

“Fifty percent of them,” Paul says. “And another twenty percent within the week.”

He has a brain for acronyms and statistics. Even though he stayed home today, he’s dressed for work: a pressed button-down shirt, wrinkle-free pants. His sandy hair is thick and perfectly placed, like a TV anchor’s. Why isn’t this disheveling him?

“And if Marley isn’t a runaway?” I ask.

“Dispatch asked us all those questions on the phone last night, remember?” Paul says. “She told you not to pick her up after school. She took clothes and toiletries. There’s no sign of a struggle. There was a note, in her handwriting—”

“What if she didn’t struggle because there was a gun pointed at her? Someone could have wanted her to look like a runaway.” I turn to Officer Strickland. “The police should have been out here last night, looking for clues. They should have started questioning people from her school.”

“I know it hurts, Rachel,” Paul says, “that she ran away. But everything points to that. Yelling won’t solve anything.”

Paul’s tolerance for volume, for strong emotion of any kind, is low. Marley doesn’t storm away from tables, and I don’t yell. “She wouldn’t run away from me. She’s got no reason.” But even as I say it, I feel the pain of the truth. Marley left us, on purpose.

“We don’t know her reasons. But the statistics tell us she’s likely to come back on her own, sooner rather than later.” Paul finds his solace in numbers, aggregates, probabilities. But I think of Marley, alone in the world for the first time. I wonder why she would leave and what’s happening to her. There’s no relief for me.

I did my own reading last night, while Paul was driving up and down every street in town hoping to spy Marley. I learned that the number one reason teenagers give for running away is family dynamics. Some other reasons they might run away: school problems, substance abuse, pregnancy, mental health issues, questions about sexual orientation, attention seeking . . .

None of those fit Marley. Her recent math quiz aside, she’s doing fine in school. She’s never been bullied. As far as I know, she’s never had sex. She’s fourteen. Does that still mean anything? She tried alcohol once at a party, and she told me when she came home. Well, she had to. She could barely stand up. But that was before we moved here. She doesn’t go to parties anymore. Her mental health issues were
resolved years ago; her psychiatrist told us so. Gay? I wouldn’t mind if she was, but I’ve never seen any evidence. When she was twelve, her friend Kendall came out, and it was no big deal. Attention seeking? Marley doesn’t like to stand out; she blends.

That leaves family dynamics.

“Paul is right,” Officer Strickland says. “She’ll probably show up in a day or two. She’ll realize that living on the street is a lot worse than whatever she was dealing with back home.” He glances around at our well-appointed living room: the freestanding wood-burning stove, the built-in bookshelves, the high ceilings with their exposed beams, the French doors we painted red for a pop of color. I’m not sure how to interpret his lingering glance. Is he saying she’ll want to come back to all this, or no wonder she ran away from her pretentious, bourgeois life?

“It feels so hostile,” I say, the tears making a comeback. “She must know how worried we are. For her not to get in touch, just to let us know she’s alive . . .”

Her note said she’d be okay, but what does she know about the wider world? About staying okay? About being better?

“Was she angry with you?” Officer Strickland asks.

“No,” Paul answers instantly.

I recall something else from my three
A.M
. Internet reading. Teens who end up on the streets have to fight to survive. They steal, or beg, or sell drugs. They Dumpster dive. They prostitute themselves. Whatever made Marley leave was big enough for her to take those kinds of risks.

“Marley used to have some problems,” I say. “Emotional prob—”

“Right,” Paul interrupts. “The operative words are ‘used to.’ This is about the present.”

“We don’t know what it’s about. You said that yourself. We don’t know her reasons.”

“You’re talking about four years ago. It’s not relevant.”

Paul needs it to be over and done and irrelevant. I address
Officer Strickland. “She stopped seeing her psychiatrist three years ago, when she was eleven.” It was almost four years ago, Paul, that you showed your true colors—that day at the fair. He may have forgotten, but I haven’t.

Focus, Rachel. Marley’s all that matters.

“The psychiatrist gave her a clean bill of health,” Paul tells Officer Strickland. “I don’t remember his name offhand, but he was at the top of his field. He said he had every confidence she’d be fine. She has been.”

I look to Officer Strickland, expecting questions, and instead he says, “We’re conducting a search within a mile radius of the school, where she was last seen. I’ll be talking to your neighbors.” He won’t contradict Paul; nobody does.

But maybe Paul’s right. A top-of-the-line psychiatrist did say Marley was fine. Paul might not remember his name, but I certainly do.

“There are things you can do,” the officer says. “You can conduct your own search. Have your friends, relatives, and neighbors help.”

I almost tell him that Marley’s not the only one who’s still adjusting. Paul and I haven’t made any friends yet either. We have colleagues.

What I would never say is that I still have Michael. I’ve been trying to shake him loose, like a dog from my pant leg, but it hasn’t worked.

That was mean. I instantly regret thinking it.

Michael was so distraught that last time. Desperate. It was out of character for him, like nothing I’d heard before. He knew that I was serious. When people are desperate . . .

I’m thinking crazy. Michael would never.

It’s just a hop, skip, and a jump from the funny things you think to the crazy.

Focus, Rachel.
Sometimes I feel like I’m always rejoining the regularly scheduled program already in progress.

“. . . you’ve already made calls to her friends, so that’s good,” Officer Strickland is saying.

I don’t bother to explain that where we have colleagues, Marley has classmates. No friends within a two-hundred-mile radius for any of us. But we called the school and the kids Marley worked with on school projects. No one had any information. Marley’s friends from our old neighborhood all said they haven’t heard from her in a while. They sounded uniformly surprised to hear she had “taken off”; they promised to call if they heard from her or heard anything about her. They’re good kids, from good homes. They know what they’re supposed to say, how to lie convincingly. Obviously, Marley does. But I have a strong feeling none of them were lying.

Her Facebook page hasn’t been updated in weeks. When we looked at it last night, we saw that the posts have been briefer, fewer, and farther between since the move. We insisted that she make us her “friends” so we could monitor her Facebook, and then we never did. What kind of parents are we?

The trusting kind. The overconfident kind. I thought she’d talk to me if anything was ever really wrong. What if we’re what’s wrong?

“. . . you can make up posters or flyers,” Officer Strickland continues.

“We already have,” Paul says. “We wanted to wait and see what you had to offer before we put them up.” As if this is a negotiation. As if he doesn’t realize just how little the police are prepared to do for the family of a runaway. That’s all Marley is to them. Another runaway. Even in a small college town, they see enough of those not to bother much. I can’t even fathom how little Marley will matter to the police in San Francisco, if that’s where she is.

“Will all her information be given to the police in San Francisco?” Paul asks, as if he’s read my mind.

“We don’t have any evidence that she’s in San Francisco.”

“If she’s not here in town, and she’s not in the suburb where we used to live, that seems like the most likely place she’d go.” Paul tilts
his head and gives the quarter-smile that gets things done in the business world. He doesn’t see it. He’s not in management anymore. Officer Strickland is.

“You’re welcome to drive to San Francisco and put up your posters. No one’ll stop you.”

“But is anyone going to help us?” I say. “That’s the question.”

“I’m helping you right now. But there are budget cuts. We don’t have unlimited resources to devote to your daughter.” Officer Strickland’s eyes flash for a second, and I see what we’re up against. We’re in a Lifetime telemovie. We’re the city slickers who just moved to his burg and are demanding special treatment. We want our daughter to have it better than the other runaways.

All runaways deserve better than this. “People should be looking for her,” I say. “We shouldn’t just wait for her to decide to come back. Who knows what could happen between now and then.”

“I’m not recommending that you just wait, ma’am. I’m being honest about what I—what the police—can provide.”

“We’ll handle it,” Paul says with a staggering degree of confidence. You’d think he’d been in this situation a million times.

“I’ll need to see her room,” the officer says. I excuse myself and let Paul give the tour. I can’t go back in there. It’s eerily tidy, supporting the theory that she’s a runaway who’s planning to stay gone for a while. She wouldn’t have cleaned so thoroughly for an overnight jaunt. She cleared off the surfaces, left her iPad on top of her desk, and closed all the drawers. I opened every one of them but there were no clues.

Once Paul’s done with the tour, I’m going to shut Marley’s door and I won’t open it again until she’s home, safe and sound. That’ll be soon. It’s rough out there, and she’ll find that out. But how rough does it have to be to send her back to us?

It depends on why she left. I don’t want to think of the condition she could be in when she arrives. I don’t want to think about any of this, but I have to. I’m her mother.

After Paul has shown Officer Strickland out, he finds me in our bedroom. He nods like he’s answering a question I’ve already asked and says, “We’ll handle it ourselves. I trust us a lot more than I trust them anyway.”

That makes one of us.

I CAN’T BELIEVE I’M
actually here, on this bus. It smells like air-conditioning and sweat and something sweet, bubble gum maybe. Once it takes off, my real life starts.

It’s so weird to be writing in this book, with an actual pen and everything. I had to leave my iPad behind, along with my iPhone. I didn’t want the police tracing me. If I’m going to be found, it shouldn’t be that easy.

My hand keeps cramping. I should have started training for this months ago, like people do for a marathon. I could have strengthened my muscles, a few paragraphs a day. Well, you can’t think of everything.

I thought of a lot of things, though. I’ve made so many plans, and now I’m going to live them. Saving all the money my parents gave me for food and movies and clothes—sometimes it seemed almost too easy, the way I’d ask my dad and then my mom and double up. Like, that weekend I went to stay with Trish, I really scored: $50 from each of them. They pretend like they’re this parenting team but really, they don’t talk to each other any more than they have to.

That note on the whiteboard was so generic runaway that they can’t read anything into it. Stuffing my backpack full of clothes instead of books, figuring I’d leave from school since it’s too much trouble to get back to the farm . . . I had to take the risk. I sat in my mom’s
car, trying not to panic, hoping she wouldn’t forget something in the kitchen and go inside and discover my note and ruin everything. She’s good at that, forgetting and ruining. But being her, she was clueless.

I still can’t believe they moved me out to a farm. It’s not like my dad needed the promotion that bad; he already made a lot of money. But I’m sure he convinced my mom it was a great idea. Maybe he told her it would be a back-to-nature experience. We could all learn to live off the land, except that we don’t grow anything. There are fields instead of a yard, with all the plants pulled out, so really, it’s just dirt. That means my dad doesn’t spend his Saturdays mowing, so in a way, he’s even farther from nature than he was in suburbia. His hands never get dirty anymore.

Did they even think about how it would be for me, having to start high school in a town where everyone’s known each other forever? Did they even care?

There’s only one high school in town, so it’s huge—twice the size of my middle school, but with way worse facilities: no tennis courts, no pool, bathrooms carved out of concrete, a lunchroom where the healthiest food is a turkey sub, a parking lot full of busted-looking cars. The dress code was full of things that should not have needed to be said, like “No visible nipple rings.” Some of the seniors were so old, they could have tacked on the word “citizens.”

It got around that I was from San Francisco (well, close enough) and that meant some people wanted to talk to me and some people assumed I was snotty. Mostly, they were nice enough, but it just felt like work. I mean, by ninth grade, they had all this history together, all their shared references and insider knowledge and private jokes; since I wasn’t planning on sticking around anyway, what was the point of trying to learn it?

I wasn’t eager to recount my own history, either. I didn’t want to tell people about how Trish and Sasha and I all used to be equal—I was even the pretty one, when we were little—and then Trish shot up into the stratosphere in the summer before eighth grade. At graduation, she was unofficially voted “best-looking” and “most likely to
succeed” (unofficially because the school didn’t sanction that kind of thing, we’re apparently all unique snowflakes in the principal’s eyes). I, obviously, was voted nothing.

It could have been worse, for sure. Eighth grade is like
Lord of the Flies
with eyeliner but I never got bullied, which might have had to do with my proximity to Trish. Suddenly, she was who the girls wanted to be and the guys wanted to do and I was her inner circle. So nobody called me fat, even though I’d become a juniors size 9. Maybe they just couldn’t see me through the solar eclipse of Trish’s hotness. Meanwhile, she kept getting shallower and stupider and I bet in high school, she would have replaced Sasha and me with new friends anyway. Well, maybe not Sasha. Trish loves having her ass kissed, and Sasha is permanently puckered up.

Then again, Trish might not have been the protective force I thought she was, since no one bullied me at my new school either. After the first week or two, I just became background. I’d make a great extra in a movie someday. I started eating lunch by myself in an empty classroom, ringed by the periodic table, where I could text or read. No one bothered me. Or bothered with me.

Right now, I could be in biology, dissecting something. This is way better.

Shit, this stooped old lady is about to take the seat next to me. I wanted to be alone. I just hope she doesn’t have that nasty old-person smell.

I’ve decided today is my birthday. It marks the first original thing I’ve ever done. I mean, I know running away isn’t an original act. But the way I’m doing it, and the reasons—they’re all me.

Happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me, happy birthday dear . . .

I haven’t come up with my new name yet.

Everything feels new. Even simple things, like this, sitting here writing in a journal. I used to write all the time when I was younger. I’d write stories and poems and entries in my diary. My teachers said I was talented, but they kind of have to say that (everyone gets
a ribbon). My parents were always pushing me to read poems in assembly or submit stories to contests. I think they needed me to have talent; they needed me to be bigger and better than I was. I liked writing, but it meant too much to them. It took the fun away. Besides, I found out the limits of words.

If you think about it, they’re just everywhere. All that texting, and on Facebook and Twitter. It makes communication itself seem pointless. We’re all so connected, it’s like no one knows anyone.

If someone finds this and reads it and calls me depressed, I’m going to scream. That’s not why I left. I’m nowhere near that simple.

This morning, it was surprisingly easy to hitchhike. Kind of cool, too. Retro. It’s like I’m in an old movie.

I don’t know if it’s technically hitchhiking. I wasn’t on the side of the road with my thumb stuck out or anything. A few blocks off school grounds, I saw this guy walking toward a big red truck, his keys in hand. I asked where he was going. The truck shimmered like a pearl, like it was his favorite possession and he spent all day waxing it. He looked like he was in his early twenties, almost cute, except he had bad skin, all these whiteheads that looked about to burst. “Where are
you
going?” he asked me back, in a way that was half sexy/half suspicious.

I almost said, “Bus station,” and then realized how completely stupid that would be. Like leaving a trail of bread crumbs for my parents. Instead, I said, “Downtown,” though it’s not much of a downtown, and the police are probably going to visit the bus station anyway. So come to think of it, it didn’t matter what I said. See? Words aren’t anything.

But still, I’m sitting here writing, even though I have to keep stopping to flex my hand, so yeah, I guess I can be a hypocrite, too.

I would never try to disappear around here. This place is so small that it would be impossible. But with enough of a head start, anything can happen. It’s not even 10:30. My mom doesn’t get home from work for hours. They never saw this coming, I’m sure of it.