In Her Skin(4)

I exhale slowly.

“The last thing I remember is someone pressing a smelly cloth over my nose and mouth. I woke up in a shed. And I stayed there. For a long time. I don’t know how long. The man fed me. Food you get from drive-throughs and gas stations. He hit me. A lot. I escaped through a rotted plank that I carved away at with a nail, every day. The next thing I remember, I’m here, on the steps of the police station.” I let my chin fall in dramatic silence.

After a respectful pause, Ginny whispers, “Thank you, Vivienne.”

I smile into my neck, because she called me Vivienne.

“I’d like to see my mother now,” I whisper. It sounds weird coming from my mouth, because my mother is dead.

As I remember this, my eyes fill with tears.

“Sweetheart,” Ginny says, “I know this must be very hard. I’m going to make a promise to you. I’m going to make sure that you get every resource you need. A therapist to talk to. Maybe a stress animal. Do you know what those are? They’re pets specially trained to sense when your anxiety level goes up, and when they do, they give you comfort—”

“No.”

Ginny’s eyelids shoot up. “No you don’t know?”

“No I don’t want one.” What kid doesn’t want a pet? Stupid Jo. “I mean, mostly, I’d like another doughnut.” I need Ginny to lay off and give me some time to work on the shed thing. I’ll have to soft-pedal Vivi’s lockup during those seven years. At a certain point, it’s easier for everyone, even a sourpuss like Curley, to think of a missing kid as dead than alive, because they don’t have to imagine what she must have gone through. We’ll talk about “moving on” and not giving my perpetrator one more minute of my life. Fuzzy details will be welcome. Therapy appointments will be made. A foster family will be assigned, as will a pet, funded by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Ginny might be mine, but if the cops don’t buy that I’m Missing Vivi, I’ll know right away by their headshaking disappointment, by how they back away a little. In that case, I’ll ask to go pee for the second time, in the bathroom where I’ve loosened the screws on the window grate. The back alley leads to the YMCA, and farther, down Huntington Avenue, where I can get lost in the sea of college kids from Northeastern.

Detective Curley pops his head in and gives Ginny a questioning look.

Ginny nods solemnly. “Make the call.”

I try to sound excited. “You’re calling my parents?”

The lines around Ginny’s mouth deepen and she looks away. I fake squinty confusion. Rule number one Momma taught me: stay in character, even when no one’s looking.

“Vivi,” Ginny says, leaning forward and grasping my hand; it’s the first time she’s called me Vivi, and touching me is not police social worker protocol, since you don’t touch the Maybe Diddled. She’s going off book, which means she’s stuck. There are no guidelines for magically reappearing orphaned dead girls, at least not ones she’s read. “There was an accident. Your father was piloting a small chartered plane to Nantucket, like he sometimes did. And there was weather, and he and your mother—their plane, that is—crashed. And they are no longer. I’m terribly sorry.”

There’s something crazy and wrong about this woman acting like a plane crash is the worst possible thing that can kill your mother. It’s the best possible thing that can happen, Ginny! Having your mother plunged into the Atlantic is better than having your mother’s cheekbones caved in by a fist. And Vivi never had to see any of it, and …

And Ginny’s hugging me. She smells like lilac powder and BO, and I heave once for effect and peek over her arm to the floor where her bag gapes. Inside is a fat file, probably about Vivi. A fat file I can use.

I peel away gently.

“Your parents never gave up hope that they would find you,” Ginny says with feeling. “Before they died, they arranged for your neighbors to get custody of you if anything happened to them. Do you remember Mr. and Mrs. Lovecraft?”

I look up, blinking back tears. “The Lovecrafts?”

She doesn’t miss a beat. “You remember! The parents of your friend. Her name is Temple. They live two doors down.”

I choke.

Ginny does a sad puppy face. “I’m deeply sorry.”

I nod hard. “I know you are.”

She looks at me strangely, like I am a wondrous creature, like I know she is awkward and I am making this easy on her and Ginny is hugging me again.

“How soon until they get here?” I squeak.

An angry rap on the half-open door. Detective Curley hears Ginny and wants her to stop talking to me. She’s giving away too much information, he thinks, but he’s already lost this one: Ginny’s on my side. I’m the success story that makes Ginny satisfied with a job that pays her less in one year than Momma made in one month of check kiting. And Temple Lovecraft, library Temple, fascinating Temple, is my new sister.

Then the detective and Ginny do the unexpected. They leave me sitting alone for what only feels like hours because the conference room has no clock. There is someone on the other side of this who is researching child-welfare laws and checking wills and making phone calls and it feels out of my control. They leave me with the soggy cup of Coke and a stained travel pillow from Ginny’s car where I rest my cheek, and I want to think about Temple but instead I am thinking about Wolf and our tent, and it seems like a million years ago since last night, when I lay awake staring through the half-light at his delicate chin, a chin not made for lives like ours, and the shadows that line his nose, thinking about how his beauty will always be his enemy, attracting the paying men he doesn’t want to attract, and knowing, traitor that I am, that it would be our last night. Wolf and I have been together since we arrived at Tent City on the same day, me helping him survive, him helping me not get raped by attaching himself to me. He’s older than me, but younger in the head. He is bored by the books I crave. Still, he doesn’t mind my days spent at the library, when by rights I should be helping him panhandle and Dumpster dive and carry water up from the rain barrels instead of reading. Wolf accepts my cravings and I accept his, which leave raised red rings on his thighs, because cutting on the street means infection, but burning with cigarettes kills germs. And in this way, we work. Wolf is the closest I’ve come to having a boyfriend, but one boyfriend does not a family make.