Girl, Stolen (11 page)

The blow to his belly came out of nowhere. The next thing Griffin knew, he was on the floor, huddled up. The air was stuck somewhere inside him. His mouth opened like a fish hauled onto the bottom of a boat, but nothing came in and nothing went out. Time seemed to slow down and he could see everything – a paper clip on the carpet, the scuffs on the tips of Roy’s work boots – with a kind of sparkling clarity. Was he going to die?

And then finally the air came rushing back in. It hurt just as bad as when it hadn’t been there at all.

“Like that’s such a bright idea.” Roy leaned over him, shouting. “Like they’re going to overlook what it is we do here?” With every word, spit freckled Griffin’s face. “This chick could be our ticket out. On New Year’s Eve, I want to be on a beach someplace warm, drinking mai tais. And now that could happen. But only if we play our cards absolutely right.”

Griffin managed to sit up. He turned his head and rested his cheek against his bent knees.

“Sure, you screwed up when you didn’t look in the backseat. But now that could be the best thing that ever happened to us. Go get her. I want to get those phone numbers again so I can talk to that fat-cat dad of hers.”

Griffin had just learned – again – that it wasn’t worth talking back to his dad. He got up and went in to get Cheyenne. She was asleep. When he touched her shoulder, she jerked awake, then pushed him away with both hands, her breathing rushed and panicky.

“Easy, easy,” he said. “It’s just me. My dad wants to talk to you.”

“What did my parents say?” Looking both scared and excited, she sat up. “How come they acted like they hadn’t talked to him yet?”

“Because they haven’t. He needs you to give him the phone numbers again. He lost the paper that had them. But don’t say nothing to him about it. He’s in a real bad mood.”

Cheyenne wiped her face clean of all expression and nodded. Griffin untied her ankle and walked her down the hall.

Holding a mobile phone so big it was almost funny, Roy was waiting for them. “All right, what’s your home number again?”

Cheyenne recited it in a dead voice.

Griffin watched his dad’s expression as he listened to the phone ring. His face changed when someone answered.

“Listen,” Roy barked. “I’ve got the girl. I’ve got Cheyenne Wilder. I’m offering you a trade. You give me money, and I’ll give her back. It’s that simple.”

His eyes narrowed. “You want proof? I’ll give you proof.” Forgetting she was blind, he thrust the phone at Cheyenne. When she didn’t take it, he swore and fumbled it into her hand. “Don’t say anything stupid,” he warned her.

“Daddy?” Her face changed. Suddenly she looked like a little kid. “Daddy?” She bit her lip at the answer. “Oh. I’m okay, but—”

“That’s enough.” Roy yanked the phone away from her and put it back to his ear. “I’m sure you got that taped. You run that through your computers or have her parents listen to it, and they’ll tell you that I’m telling the truth. And you tell them we’re gonna need five million dollars. Nothing larger than a fifty. Unmarked, nonconsecutive bills. Or you’re gonna get her back in pieces!”

Griffin’s mouth fell open. Five million? Geez, why hadn’t his dad just asked for five hundred zillion quadrillion? Five million was impossible. Even if it was all in fifties, that would still be – he thought about it for a second – a hundred thousand bills. They would need a forklift for that.

“We’ll be in touch,” Roy said, almost jauntily. He clicked off the phone and gave Griffin a grin. His anger seemed to have evaporated. After seventeen years of living with him, Griffin knew that looks could be deceiving.

“That wasn’t even my dad you had me talk to,” Cheyenne told Roy. “Do you know that? That wasn’t even my dad.” Tears shone on her cheeks, but her voice didn’t tremble at all.

Roy shrugged. “It was probably a cop. I heard a clicking on the line. They’re probably trying to trace the phone. That’s why I hung up, just to be on the safe side. Next time I call, I’ll tell them to put the money into a bag and drop it off someplace we can watch to make sure that nobody’s followed it. After we get the money, we’ll check it out to make sure there’s not a tracking device or dye on the bills. And then we’ll let you go.”

Cheyenne nodded. She looked like she didn’t believe Roy.

Griffin didn’t think he did, either.

For the first time, he had an unsettling thought.

Roy would eventually let Cheyenne go – wouldn’t he?

C
heyenne swam out of a dream where she had been lost and running into things.

“Are you hungry?” Griffin asked from the doorway.

It took her a minute to orient herself. She was in a room in an old house in the middle of nowhere. Only four people knew where she was. And they were the ones who were holding her captive.

“Are you hungry?” Griffin asked again.

She wasn’t hungry. She wasn’t anything. She was empty. After her escape attempt had failed, Cheyenne had pinned her hopes on the idea that Griffin’s dad was setting up a trade. She had told herself that she might even be home tonight. She had tried not to think about the details too much, intentionally kept them fuzzy. The only concession she had made to reality was to admit that maybe it might not happen until after midnight.

When Cheyenne still didn’t answer, Griffin continued on as if she had. “I’ve got to get some food into my dad to balance out what he’s had to drink. There’s some frozen pizza I can heat up. How about that and some orange juice?” Griffin was forced to shout over the music that thumped in the living room, some kind of heavy metal that made her head hurt.

Cheyenne nodded. She pulled the quilt back over her and closed her eyes. She didn’t need to do that for it to be dark, of course, but it was a way of signaling that she didn’t want to talk anymore.

She half dozed until Griffin sat down on the edge of the bed and lifted the quilt away from her. “I thought I would eat in here with you.”

As she pushed herself into a sitting position, Cheyenne could smell herself, the rank scents of fear and fever. It was strange how quickly things could become normal, she thought as she took the plate from Griffin’s hand. She didn’t like to be dirty or cold, she didn’t like people telling her what to do, but here she was, feeling almost like it was an expected part of her routine. The same with the cord knotted around her ankle. She didn’t even really notice it anymore. At least someone had turned down the music to a more tolerable level.

“There’s a glass about six inches to the left of your elbow,” Griffin said. “Um, at ten o’clock.”

She picked up one of the two slices on her plate and took a bite. Pepperoni, tasting mostly of salt and fat, with a big, pillowy crust. Danielle was really into healthy eating. She would be horrified by this pizza.

Cheyenne took another bite. Maybe she would be home by tomorrow. Maybe in twenty-four hours she would be just getting out of the shower and sliding between fresh sheets.

Griffin spoke around a mouthful of food. “What’s it like being blind?”

“Do you think about what it’s like to have hair every second?” Cheyenne blew air out of her nose. “It’s just who I am now. I try not to think about it all the time.” Which was true. But it didn’t work. She never really forgot that she was blind. And even if she did for a minute, she could count on there being a reminder. Usually painful. She sighed. “At first, it feels like someone has thrown a blanket over your head. Some days you just want to scream, ‘I’m inside here! Doesn’t anybody out there see that? Doesn’t anybody remember me? I’m still the same person!’” Cheyenne fell silent. She knew the last sentence wasn’t true, even if she wanted it to be. She wasn’t the same person. “Being blind gave me a whole new life. I didn’t ask for it.” She licked the grease from her fingers. “That’s why I’d rather talk to someone on the phone or computer. Because then we’re the same. We’re equals.”

“What do you mean, equals?”

Cheyenne tried to put into words what she had never before said out loud. “Think about how much of talking has to do with what you see and not what you hear. When you meet new people, you can tell a lot about them even before they’ve opened their mouth. Just by their clothes, how they stand, the expression on their face. But I don’t see any of that stuff anymore. Plus, in real life I’m always talking to people who have already walked away, or I answer people who aren’t really talking to me. But when I talk to someone on the computer or the phone, we’re at the same level. We know exactly the same amount of information.”

While she spoke, Cheyenne slipped her hand into her coat pocket and felt the piece of glass nestled in the kibble. It reassured her a bit. The glass was like a secret weapon. She ran her finger lightly along one edge, even as she spoke without a pause. She knew Griffin had no idea what she was doing. Sighted people always had to look, even at things their fingers were already telling them about. They couldn’t find what was in their pockets without looking down, couldn’t hunt through a purse without sticking their head inside. She knew because she had once been one of them.

But blind people knew how to do things without giving themselves away. Their hands could work in the dark, like moles, blindly tunneling but always getting where they needed to go. Blind people could look like they were paying attention to you when they were really paying attention to something else.

“What happened, anyway? Your dad said you were in an accident.”

The silence stretched out before Cheyenne finally found herself answering him. “It was the summer I was thirteen. My mom grew up in Medford, and we were down there visiting my grandmother. Just the two of us. My dad was on a business trip. Because of Nike, he travels a lot.” She took a deep breath. “We had gone for a long walk, and the sun had just set. It was me, my mom, and my dog, Spencer. We were facing traffic, walking down this long, straight road without any sidewalks, just gravel on the side of the road. Each car that came up behind us would throw our shadows way ahead of us, so they were as long as the block and really thin.” As she spoke, she saw it with her mind’s eye. “Then as each car got closer, our shadows got closer and closer and shorter and shorter. I told my mom it looked like our shadows were walking backward. That was the last thing I ever said to her.”

She remembered how her mom had smiled in the half light, her curls wild as they often were by the end of the day. Her mom had been beautiful, at least that’s how Cheyenne remembered it. Her mom didn’t spend nearly as much time at the hair stylist or the gym as Danielle did. But she did have plenty of time for Cheyenne. They had laughed at the same jokes, jokes her dad never thought were all that funny. Every Saturday, her mom had taken her to the library and they had each come home with a big stack of books.

When anybody asked Cheyenne what had happened to her, she always just said “car accident” in a tone that made it clear she didn’t want to say one more word about it. She never talked about it. Never.

Now she took a shuddery breath. “One minute we were walking, watching our shadows come back to us. The next minute, two cars were coming up behind us. It was two kids racing, so one was in the wrong lane, the lane closest to us. Then that guy saw the headlights of a car coming toward him and panicked. He swerved and hit us.” She didn’t say that her mom’s body had ended up almost a block from where they were first hit.

“The car ran right over Spencer. That was my dog. It didn’t hit me full on, or I’d be dead, too. Instead it threw me into a speed limit sign. The top of my head smacked into the pole.” Cheyenne realized she was unconsciously pushing her fingers through her bangs, which she always carefully fluffed so that the scar wouldn’t show. Her index finger traced the twists of its raised edges. “And my brain got bounced off the back of my skull, and when that happened, it killed the part that tells me what I’m seeing. So my eyes still work. My brain just can’t understand the message.”

There was a long silence. Then Griffin asked softly, “Were you knocked unconscious?”

“Only for a few seconds. When I woke up, I couldn’t see anything. I could feel the blood running down my face, and I told myself that was why I couldn’t see. I knew my arm was broken, but everything else seemed to be okay. I was screaming for my mom, feeling around with my good arm. All I could find was one of her shoes. I guess she was literally knocked out of them.” Cheyenne fell silent, her head crowded with memories.