Snow Creek(31)

Tonight, Chinese takeout from Happy Dragon. I normally order Moo Shu Pork, but I don’t this time. The girl running the drive-thru tells me the pork is “not so good today.” Good to know, I think. If I weren’t in the drive-thru queue, I’d probably bolt, yet I don’t. Instead, I ask for the Walnut Shrimp.

The girl on the speaker tells me Walnut Chicken is a better choice. Not really that word, she actually said fresher. I reluctantly order and vow that, no matter how lazy I am about cooking, I’ll never go back.

Happy Dragon, not so happy, I think.

I take the food home and study it carefully before I eat. I’m not super handy with chopsticks, yet somehow I think I can avoid food poisoning if I use chopsticks instead of a fork. Like a fork would tell the Walnut Chicken that I deserved to get sick.

That might not make sense to anyone, yet it does to me.

The tapes beckon as I pour the chardonnay that I hadn’t bothered to chill in the refrigerator. It’s bad, but I drink it anyway. As I sip, I lie to myself as I eat that I don’t need the drama of my own, younger life. Since I started listening to the tapes, images of my brother, mom, father have been coming back to me.

Especially my dad. My real dad. He’s the reason that I’m somewhat screwed up when it comes to love and the trust that’s needed to make it flourish. I don’t save Dan Anderson’s number in my phone. I delete his voice message after listening to it one more time.

I push PLAY on the next tape, and I’m instantly back with my little brother, trying to keep us safe.

Dr. Albright’s soothing voice recounts the date and the time. She asks me to continue, but I don’t answer. The tape hisses for what seems like a very long time.

Dr. A: Go on Rylee, you can do this.





Her voice soothes.

Leads.

I knew she wanted to help me.

Me: What if I don’t want to?

Dr. A: There isn’t a choice. We can’t free you from the past, without acknowledging it. Go on. Tell me about what happened after you got off the boat.

Me: I needed to look like Mom in order to get into the safe deposit. I had her ID and my hair was pretty much Mom-ready. I needed clothes though. I dragged Hayden to the Lost and Found office in the ferry terminal at Seattle’s Colman Dock, where I told the attendant that our mom had lost her jacket. I grabbed a bag. I still have it. It’s black leather with a fake Chanel clasp. Oh… I managed to find a white silk scarf and a pair of vintage Foster Grant sunglasses.





The clerk, a young man with an X-Acto blade-sharp nose and unibrow, looks over my ID and compares it with the signature card that he pulls from a file cabinet behind him. It seems like a very, very long time, but it was probably only a second. His hair is blond—golden, really. I wonder if my hair looks as bad as his.

“This doesn’t look like you,” he says curtly.

“I get that a lot,” I answer in a throatier version of my voice, one that I assume sounds like my mother —or at least someone older than fifteen. I offer no excuse. Sometimes the less you say, the better the odds are of getting what you want.

“Hair looks better the way it is now,” he says.

I wonder if he’s hitting on me and if he is, he is breaking the law. I am underage, no matter what that ID card states.

He leads me to a doorway and turns to face me. “Passcode?”

“What?” I ask.

“You need to enter your passcode,” he says, his eyes riveted to mine.

I feel sweat collect on the back of my neck. Passcode? I don’t have any passcode. His nicotine-stained index finger points at a keypad.

I think hard and fast. Now my face is hot. It must be red. Great. Nothing’s coming to me and I think Unibrow knows it.

He shifts his weight. “If you don’t have the passcode, you can’t go inside.”

Think. Think.

“You only have three chances and if you don’t get it right, we’ll need to arrange for the bank manager to create you a new one. He’s a real stickler for security around here.”

I know I’ll like the bank manager even less than Unibrow, who, by the way, is now in my personal top five of all annoying people.

I punch in my brother’s birthday.

“Let’s go see the manager,” he says. A slight smile on his face indicates that he’s happy that I can’t remember the code. He must want to go on a smoke break, because he smells like an ashtray to me.

Then it comes to me. My mind flashes to the day that my mom and dad set up the router for our internet connection. The password they used was the same one they used on everything— whenever anything required some kind of security code.

“Wait!” I say. “I have it.”

My finger goes to the keypad:

LY4E1234





Love you forever, and a digit for each member of our family.

A green light flickers on the keypad display.





I pause the tape and go to my office, where I dig deep into the bottom drawer of the Goodwill desk that I bought when I first came to Port Townsend. What I’m looking for is buried in a grave of other papers and clippings. I feel my muscles tighten even after all these years. There it is. It is a letter that I’ve folded, cried over, even once thrown away—only to retrieve it moments later. I no longer have the envelope that it came in, but I remember what it said in my mother’s handwriting: “For my daughter’s eyes only. Do not read this in front of the bank employees. There is a camera in the corner of the room. Turn your back to the camera before you read any more.”