North Fork (11 page)

Leaving wasn't a choice.

Even after all those years living in that house, talking with Bonnie and Sterling every day, I never could connect with them. I tried, but they didn't touch me, not the part of me that counts. All the water that came through their faucets was freezing. Remember the valve image I described? I picture myself alone in this cement box, like a big bathtub or a tomb, all cold, damp and drippy with a bunch of faucets sticking through the cement, and if you open Bonnie's or Sterling's faucet, the water that comes out is so cold that you can hardly stand it. I couldn't go on giving them my words and my life. I gave it my best shot for as long as I could. I really did want to die. The poems may be what saved me.

But there were also a few other things.

I was watching the news on TV with some of the other ASB kids at Leslie's house. We had been planning the Martin Luther King Day assembly for school. Anyway, there was this news story about one of the coaches of an NBA team whose eighteen-year-old son had committed suicide. The story didn't deal at all with the kid, just the famous dad and how everyone felt bad for him and was praying for him. Then Leslie said something and it stuck. She's not the deepest person, so I don't expect things she says to stick, let alone influence major choices, but this one did. She said she couldn't imagine wanting to kill yourself, which I can believe, but then she said,

“Why didn't he just leave? I mean why would you kill
yourself? That's so final. The guy was eighteen. He could just leave if he wanted to. No one could stop him.”

She was right. It is so final.

So between Leslie and Whitman and Emily, I had a lot to think about. Then I found myself hearing things from other unlikely sources, like Corey. I'll talk more about him later, but for now I'll just say it was building up inside. I was living all the motions of that life, but underneath, I had this fantasy going, like when you're a kid playing with dolls or stuffed animals. I've seen boys do it too, with action figures. You imagine this whole alternate world with its own story playing out. I imagined just leaving. And I started to do things, set up props, like I did with my stuffed animals when I was little. The bike was the first prop.

It's how I met Grant.

It's an older road bike, silver with skinny tires and a French name, Peugeot, like the car, and nothing on it was broken or missing. I could have ridden it away. I was driving to Anacortes alone from Natalie's, on the back road along the beach where there are a lot of expensive houses. Leaning against a gatepost at the end of a driveway there was this bike with a sign on it that said, “Free.” The decision was spur-of-the-moment, not really a commitment, though it ended up being a turning point because it was the first real thing I did and it made it easier to keep fantasizing about the plan.

I hid the bike in this old shed behind Amanda's family beach house. There's a road along the beach that runs out to a point called “Pull and Be Damned” because back in the day, some guy had to row a boat around it to get to town and the tidal current made the rowing hard. Anyway, the property out there belongs to the tribe and is leased to white people for beach houses. Since the land is leased, people don't like to build expensive houses, so there are mostly summer homes and some of the kids at school have cabins there. Amanda is also in the ASB crowd and sometimes
has parties at the cabin when the adults are gone. There's this old, fallen-down shed in the woods between the cabin and the road, and I put the bike in the shed, thinking because it was free, it wouldn't matter if it was found, but it might come in handy in my plan.

That was when I was starting to get to know Corey. Natalie hates him because of this video camera incident. She and I have never talked about it, but I've heard about it in great detail from other people. He taped her from a closet at a party while she was having sex with this jerk. Then she smashed the tape. I know it makes him sound creepy, but I don't get creepiness from him and I think they were both being stupid in different ways, and if she could learn from it, so could he. Anyway, he has this real alone side, like Emily Dickinson. He even has this cool campsite out on the river with a tent and stuff hidden where he can go to escape his stepdad. He took me there and told me a story about his uncle. I think hearing the story was the tipping point.

His uncle had a rebellious stage when he was young, like Corey. His parents were pretty strict and made him work for the family construction business whenever he wasn't doing a sport after school, and on Saturdays and all summer. They paid him but wouldn't let him spend the money. He wanted to buy a nice car and could afford it, but had to put nearly all the money he made in the bank to save for college or to buy a house or something. He got this small allowance for movies, burgers and clothes, but he had to beg to use the family car, which was this old-lady, four-door Buick.

So one day he was at the bank depositing his paycheck like he was supposed to, and the teller, who was a girl not much older than him, made a comment about how much money he had saved and how cool she thought it was. He said he'd buy a car if he could, but he couldn't take any of it out. She said she'd go to Hawaii if she had that much money, but it was probably good
that he was saving it.

He kept the bankbook in the same kitchen drawer at home where it had been kept since he started working when he was ten or so and old enough to do clean-up around a building site. His parents could look at it whenever they wanted, and kept track of how much he had. Up until that moment he was talking with the teller, he had thought it was impossible to get the money out of the account without his dad's signature, but now it occurred to him that he didn't know that for sure, so he asked. She told him it was a joint account and that either he or his dad could withdraw from it, but it only took one signature.

Back then you could do a lot of things you can't do now, like buy a car without your parent's signature, and he was able to divert enough money from his pay to buy an old Chevy for a hundred and fifty bucks from a kid at school. He parked the car at a supermarket parking lot half a mile from his house. He would leave home in the morning, saying he was going to catch a ride with a friend up the street, then walk to his car and drive to school. His school was huge, not like ours where everyone would notice and it would get back to your parents the first day. Eventually he got caught and of course there was a huge fight, and he was grounded forever, but it didn't stop him. He had learned a lot about what you can do over the telephone from watching his parents run their business. From TV he knew enough to make the key calls from the pay phone at the supermarket.

He was really pissed and he had all that money in the bank and he knew he could get it just by going in there and signing for it. He also knew it wouldn't take long for his parents to find out after he got the money, so he needed a plan. His family had been to Hawaii, which was a big deal back then; the construction company did pretty well sometimes and when it did, they celebrated with a vacation. So he knew how to buy plane tickets.

While he was on restriction, he had time to scheme and work
out the details of the plan. He didn't tell anyone, not even his closest friends, because he knew that as soon as he disappeared, they'd be questioned. The amount of planning he did was amazing. He got his money out by making a big show at the bank, saying his parents had finally agreed to let him buy a car. He even described it. It actually existed on a lot nearby where he'd talked to a salesman about it.

So he ran away to Hawaii and lived on the beach and bummed around for three or four weeks before he got caught. He might not have gotten caught if he hadn't sent a post card to one of his friends. Either the parents of the kid he sent it to intercepted it, or the kid talked. Corey's uncle's parents were worried the way you'd expect them to be, and they made a big fuss about how he might be dead or kidnapped, but they knew he was pissed and that he took the money, so they and the cops strongly suspected that he had run away.

While Corey was telling the story all I could think about was how I had been doing all this secret escape planning myself, like a fantasy game in my head. Hearing about someone who had actually made it happen allowed me to take a pretty significant step forward.

That, and finding the birth certificate.

The birth certificate was huge. I mean it was bad enough, feeling disconnected from my mom and her life with Sterling, but finding out that I have a completely different last name that nobody had ever mentioned, and that I'm not even an American citizen, and that I'm a year and a half older than I thought I was, about blew me away. I felt like downing a bottle of Sterling's scotch, flooring the Taurus on Reservation Road and letting the steering wheel go, but I didn't.

Instead, I took Leslie's advice, played out my fantasy like Corey's uncle did and put the birth certificate to use. I haven't cut myself once since I left, and I don't have to fight off the urge
to let the car veer into a tree or power pole or off a cliff, because I don't have a car. Maybe this isn't better, but it feels real and it's not final.

Not yet, anyway.

It's strange how losing someone can make you feel. The significant people I've lost in my life are my dad (he died last year), Kristen (you know her story), and also my mom. My mom is alive, but she's pretty much missing from my life. She still calls once in a while. Last time it was from Florida, the day after Christmas. She was drunk and full of excuses for not sending a present, and promises that she would never make good on. My dad was never around, but I used to fantasize about him coming to fix my life. It was pretty much a pipe dream. He was a loser too. When I heard my dad died—he was murdered—I didn't feel much. Maybe I'm holding it inside and am screwed up in my subconscious, but when someone was never present, it's hard to muster much real emotion when you learn his absence is permanent. I think I gave up on the dream version of my dad long before he died. But that's all he ever was to me anyway—a dream.

My mom has been harder to let go of because I lived with her when I was young and you make those attachments, you bond, but I've been with Aunt Trish for so long now, and she's the person who has been there for me when I needed someone, that I don't miss my mom anymore. If she disappeared entirely, I would feel bad for a while, but I wouldn't feel her as an actual absence from my life. I wouldn't be reminded of her every day when I was just doing normal stuff. There wouldn't be this big hole in my life, the way there is now, with Kristen missing from it. The worst part is not knowing what happened. I really miss her.

I trust instincts, gut feelings. I can't pin down a feeling about
Kristen. Sometimes I get the big sadness, grief, about her, and I just feel stuck, like nothing matters anymore. I used to tell her nearly everything. The few things I held back weren't because I thought she wouldn't understand, but because I just didn't want to go there. Like I never told her the blow-by-blow about Corey and the camera, and now I think I should have. It might have saved her. Sometimes I get this light, good feeling about her, like she's out there somewhere doing fine and I don't need to be sad. I've heard about people having dreams after someone they're close to dies. The person comes and talks to them in a dream and says or does something that allows them to let go. Kristen hasn't come to me yet, and I haven't let go.

I keep wanting to call her up so we can talk, because that's what I always did when something important happened. I want to tell her about Brad. It's killing me that this new and crazy thing is happening to me and there's no one to tell. They're probably going to let Corey out of jail in a week or so. It's not really jail, even though he deserves the worst; it's Juvie. He can rape and kill my best friend, but because he's only seventeen, they have to protect him from getting hurt in jail. What a bunch of bull. Now they have to let him out because they haven't found her body, and they can't prove that she's dead or that the weasel bastard did anything, even though we all know he did it. He's been in there for almost two months, and even though they found a lot of pot in his room, that isn't enough to keep him locked up any longer.

They haven't found any new clues and he sticks by his story. They even looked for her body in the drainage ditch next to where Brad and I parked that night. There's all this talk on the news about prisoners' rights in the Iraq war and about whether the government has the right to torture people to get them to talk. I would have said no before all this happened, but if torturing Corey would get him to tell us the truth about what he did to her,
they should do it.

Brad came and got me yesterday morning. He was here by ten. We got off I-5 north of Seattle because he said there would be less traffic if we went the back way and avoided the city. I was surprised by how, once we got off the freeway and onto the residential streets on Mercer Island, the neighborhoods were so quiet, like people might have gardens and grow organic vegetables. The road near Brad's house is wooded on both sides, and the houses are spread out. They aren't all mansions or anything, but you can tell people have money.

Brad's family has a ski boat and we spent a great day on the lake. He pulled me around on an inner tube for a while, but I couldn't drive the boat, so he didn't get a turn. Mostly, we just drifted around, talking, and jumped in when we got too hot. We cruised along the shoreline, looking at people's houses and yards for some of the time. There are a lot of rich people on Mercer Island. I have to admit I felt more than a little out of place, and it started to depress me, so I got quiet, which made Brad ask what was wrong. The cool part was I felt that I was able to just come right out and say it. I mean he feels like my friend, and I haven't let myself get any big expectations yet, so I don't have anything to lose. I know he's way out of my league. We live in different worlds. But we have fun together and I feel comfortable with him in a way I've never felt with a guy before, so I just keep saying what I feel. We're having this kind of cross-cultural experiment and it still feels good, even after what happened before he brought me home.