The Vanishing Year(30)

“Have you been able to get in touch with your husband?” Yates asks.

I shake my head. “Um, no. I tried. Twice.”

“Okay, this is pretty much it. You can hang out here until we clear your place. It’ll be another hour or so.” She squares the folder in front of her and half-stands up, clicking stop on the recorder.

“Um, I have one thing. I feel like it’s important.” I take a deep breath and wipe my palm on the table top. I jostle the Styrofoam cup and coffee spills onto the table. Yates says nothing, but sits back down and opens her file. She clicks the recorder back on and waves her fingertips in my direction. Go on.

“I’m . . . God, I haven’t told another person this, ever. In 2009, I testified against two men, Michael Flannery and Jared Pritchett, in a human-trafficking case in San Francisco. I was threatened and kidnapped. I left San Francisco, changed my name, and started over here. Could they have found me? Come back for me?”

Yates stares at me, unflinching. I know she’s a New York City cop and has heard and seen it all. I still imagine she wasn’t expecting this from a routine break-in.

“It’s possible. Let’s not jump to conclusions.” Kindly, she touches my hand. She has a long scar that runs along her jawline and I wonder what it’s from. She holds my gaze and reaches over, hitting the off button on the recorder again.

“This.” She runs her hand along her scar, turning her head slightly to the left so I can see it, glinting and silvery in the bright light. “Isn’t from the job. It’s from a man. A man who owned me and beat me, within inches of death until I ran away. I had to hide, too, for a while. Then, fuck it, I became a cop. I was the oldest one at the police academy.”

“Where is he now?” I play with a small lock of hair, twirling it between my index and middle fingers and as I wait for her answer, I pull. Hard. My eyes tear.

“He’s locked up now. Couldn’t get him for what he did to me, but I got him for what he did to the next girl. Almost killed her. I have guilt about that.”

I nod again. I feel tongue-tied around this weathered woman who wears all her scars on the outside. I’m jealous of her many physical reminders, the ones that tell the world she’s a warrior. Sometimes, I forget who I am. I have one thin pink line on my right wrist to remind me.

She pushes away the file and folds her hands. Her nails are manicured bright red. She catches my stare and fans her fingers out for me to see. “I’m Not Really a Waitress.”

I shake my head, confused.

“That’s the name of the color. It’s a . . . reminder.” She winks at me. She takes one of those red manicured hands and touches my arm. “Tell me.”

I know she’s not talking about nail polish. I tell her. I tell her about San Francisco and Mick, and I find myself loosening, spilling long locked-up details. Jared twisting my arm behind my back, that glint of the gun in his coat. Things I thought I’d forgotten. The smell of Mick’s aftershave, mingling with the tang of sweat. The sharp sting of betrayal from Mick, how I’d thought he was shady, a borderline abuser, but never really evil, until later, then I knew. I wondered how close Evelyn came to his circles, how involved he’d been when he’d known her. I said all this, and more, rambling and disordered. She nodded like she was following.

I told her how later, two men—Jared’s lackeys, I assume—broke into Evelyn’s apartment and, pressing a gun against the small of my back, threw me in a white utility van, the back stripped and separated from the front with a stainless steel cage. They cut my clothes off, tied my wrists and calves together with electrical cable. I tell her how they wound duct tape around my middle anchoring my wrists to my back. I tried to knee the larger of the two between the legs, and he brought his boot down on my forehead, quick and shockingly forceful.

I tell her how sometime around the three-day mark, near as I can figure, the smaller guy came back in the middle of the night, alone. He’d asked me, where are the girls? And no matter how I pleaded, he wouldn’t believe I didn’t know. I don’t know how he thought that I had the resources to hide anyone. I was barely getting by. He was a bottom-feeder, scared and hung out to dry. I had shrugged. I was gagged. My seeming indifference enraged him and he pushed a gun against my temple, screaming in my face, Tell me where the fuck they’re hiding! I know she talked to you. You helped her. But I couldn’t. Before he got out, he kicked my foot so hard, he snapped my left ankle, clean in half. I could see the white knob of bone pushing out against my skin.

I studied the inside of the van, favoring my right side so my left ankle was supported. In the corner lay a child’s white sock, the kind trimmed with white lace. A sock for church, or preschool graduation. Maybe Easter Sunday or Christmas Day. I was able to flip it over with the toe of my shoe, exposing a quarter-size bloodstain. I was tortured by images of a little girl, blonde and freckled. Pink-ribboned pigtails. Covered in blood.

When I began to lose my grip, my sanity sliding through my fingertips, I began to dream I was little again, going to church with Evelyn and her lady friends, bright lipstick and large hats. Sunday best. Lacey socks. Bloody feet. I’d wake up screaming.

I tell her how they left me there for five days—a time I couldn’t discern and would learn later. They might have left me there forever, to rot in the back of an unidentified vehicle parked outside an abandoned construction site. Except I had figured out how to kick the metal floor in the right way to make a racket. Initially, I kicked for hours. Then later, I faded in and out of consciousness, waiting for the right moment, listening for a noise, straining my eyes against the crack in the van door, searching for any faint light. I heard the muted whirp of the siren before I saw the quick glint of headlights, and I hit my right heel against the gas tank, banging hollow and empty, again and again. My left ankle, flopping lifelessly. I don’t remember it hurting. The headlights beaming in after they’d crowbarred the van doors open—that hurt. The noise, the sirens that came later, the ambulance, and inexplicably a fire truck—that hurt. My body did not. My body felt blissfully numb.