Remember when Uncle Brent would tickle us till we said uncle?” Ben asked. “Remember that?”
Ben talks.
“Sure,” I said.
“And then he’d say, ‘What?’ And keep tickling us, and we’d say uncle again, and he’d say, ‘What?’ It was his big, stupid joke, right?”
“Right. I remember.”
Uncle Brent was right there in front of us during this little discussion, looking older than the photo where he was holding a just-born me in the hospital, but then everyone else in the photo album had aged right along with him.
He was the first member of the family to show up, looking me over like a window-shopper trying to decide if he’s going to splurge.
“So,” he said after a few moments that seemed tons longer than that, “you going to give your uncle Brent a hug?”
Sure. One of those perfunctory ones where you both keep your distance. He smelled of cigarettes.
“I saw you had quite a show out there today,” he said. “Everything good?”
“Terrific. I always like to start my day out with a riot.”
No one laughed.
When I’d opened the blinds of my bedroom window, I’d thought maybe I was still dreaming—it was possible, right? Just having one of my off-the-wall nightmares—and in a minute Mom would come in and wake me.
When I blink, they will all go poof.
They were taking up the entire sidewalk and half the street. It would’ve been the whole street if their vans weren’t taking up the rest of it—big ones with satellite dishes on the roofs and numbers painted on their sides: 2, 4, 7, 9.
It took me a while to understand that they were all there for me. “Jenny,” I heard some of them shouting, “Jenny,” as if they knew me or something, and I almost shouted back at them: What the fuck do you want? I shut the blinds and retreated to my bed, but I felt like retreating even farther, to the back of my closet maybe.
I was sitting there holding tight to Goldy when Mom rushed in.
“So sorry about this, Jenny,” she said. “I have no clue how they found out.”
I did.
The phone had rung in the middle of the night, and since I was already wide-awake, I’d picked it up.
“Hello,” a voice said. “Is this Mrs. Kristal?”
“No.”
Pause.
“Is this . . . Jenny Kristal?”
“Who’s this?”
“Max Westfield. Newsday.”
“Who?”
“Max Westfield. I’m a reporter.”
He’d gotten word from a source at the precinct, he said. That I’d been found. If it was me he was talking to, that is? And if it was, he’d love to be the first to say welcome back. And the first to hear my story, too, if that was okay. Being that this was a real bona fide miracle.
I kept quiet.
“Look, Jenny . . . I am talking to Jenny, right? You have no idea how many people have been praying for you over the years—for your safe return. And how a story like this will impact them. Not just them . . . everyone. Parents of other kidnapped children—give them some hope that maybe their kids will come home . . .”
“I’m pretty tired . . . ,” I said.
“Of course, Jenny. You have every right to be. With what you’ve been through. I can call you Jenny, right?”
“It’s one in the morning. That’s why I’m tired.”
“Right, sorry. I only need a minute of your time. If I could just ask you a few questions? I understand you were kidnapped by a couple of, well . . . sexual deviants, and they more or less . . .”
Click.
I didn’t tell Mom. Even as she was apologizing for the entire world finding out about me and telling me they were going to make the reporters go away.
How the hell is she going to do that? I thought, but Mom said Dad had called the police.
“You’re soaked, Jenny,” she said, putting a hand to my forehead. “Do you have a fever?” I didn’t bother telling her this is how I woke up most mornings, as if I’d been through the wash-and-spin cycle.
“Why don’t you get dressed,” she said, laying out a new pair of jeans and that scoop-neck top she’d bought me at the Roosevelt Field Mall. “Stay here,” she said, “we’ll deal with this,” before shutting my door and marching back downstairs.
After I slipped on my clothes, I peeked through the blinds again. Sure enough, there was a police car right in the middle of the crowd, one of the cops looking like he was trying to shoo all the reporters away. Only the reporters didn’t seem to really give a shit, because no one was actually moving anywhere.
Then my dad was out on the porch.
I heard him tell them to please respect our privacy, but they were shouting questions at him, questions about me, and it was so freakin’ weird to hear myself being talked about when I wasn’t actually part of the conversation—not that it was actually a conversation; it was more of a cluster fuck, since Dad was having trouble getting a single word in.
That word being getthefuckouttahere.
Dad was telling them that there wasn’t going to be any interview, there wasn’t going to be any anything, but they weren’t listening and they weren’t leaving either, so Dad did, slamming the front door so hard, it made the house shake.
Mom had told me to stay put, but I felt trapped up there, so I went downstairs, slinking down each step as if the reporters could somehow see me. I ended up spooking Mom and Dad, who jerked around as if they thought one of the TV people had somehow snuck into the house.
“I told you to stay upstairs,” Mom said.
“Goldy didn’t want to.” I was still holding her in my hand. Mom motioned for me to come join them on the couch.
“I don’t know if the police can make them leave . . . I mean legally,” Dad explained to me. “But maybe they’ll get the message we don’t want them here and we’re not going to talk to them.”
Which was the same message Mom and Dad gave the people who began calling the house, then didn’t stop. Apparently some people still used landlines—at least when they didn’t have your cell number. Every time Mom or Dad put the phone down, it just rang again, ringggg, ringggg, ringggg, a network, a newspaper, a talk show. All of them asking about me. Finally, they took the phone off the hook.
“Good thing Ben’s not here,” Mom said.
“Shit,” Dad said, “I’ve got to tell him to stay at Zack’s. That’s all we need—Ben bouncing up the front walk.”
Too late. Ben had seen the commotion on the news and was already worming his way through the crowd. We could actually see him on the living room TV—kind of surreal watching your house on the news as you’re sitting in it. And your brother flailing his way through a sea of mics like a swimmer about to go under.
After he slammed the front door behind him, he blinked at me. Like, What’s wrong with this picture? A cat, a dog, a bird, a sister—circle which one doesn’t belong.
He took his customary place on the love seat and asked Mom to please change the channel—he’d seen this show already. One Ink Master and half a Bar Rescue later, Dad said, “I think they’re gone.”
“You sure?” Mom said.
Dad peeked through the drapes. “Yep. They’ve left. Thank God.”
Eventually two policewomen showed up at our front door and explained that the reporters might be coming back—they didn’t actually have the authority to make them disperse, just to make sure they kept off our property, but if they wanted to sit out there on the sidewalk all day, there wasn’t much they could do about it.
“Thanks anyway,” Dad said. “Appreciate your help.”
Given the all clear, Uncle Brent showed up an hour later, and then the rest of the family began trickling in. There was Mom’s aunt Gerta, who looked around sixty-five and suffered from emphysema, and her daughter Trude, who brought her two kids over—all of them my cousins, I guess. And there were some of Dad’s relatives—his cousins Arnie and Cecille, and his uncle Samuel. Dad’s mom—my grandmother—was living in Florida; his father had died years ago, but they called her on the phone and made me talk to her.
“My darling Jenny,” she said. “Oh, my darling . . . This is Nanny. Do you remember me?”
“A little,” I said.
Which is what I told all of them—I remember you a little—because every single person asked me. Uncle Brent and Aunt Gerta and Trude and Arnie and Cecille and Samuel.
The last time I saw you, you were two . . . or three . . . or one . . . or six . . . or just born, they said. You were laughing . . . or crying . . . or sleeping . . . or chattering away . . . or playing with your horses.
And I said, Really?
Aunt Gerta couldn’t stop crying. She kept a wrinkled tissue inside her sleeve, and she kept pulling it out to dab at her red-rimmed eyes, which reminded me of a magician pulling one of those long scarves out of their belly buttons. Samuel—who had to be eighty, easy—just kept shaking his head from side to side as if he couldn’t believe I was really standing there in front of him, and Trude just beamed at me.
Samuel settled next to me on the couch and asked me what it was like living all those years with my kidnappers, and things suddenly went quiet.
“Uncle Sammy,” Dad said gently. “Jenny doesn’t need to talk about that right now.”
“Huh?” Samuel looked confused.
“When she’s ready to talk about all that, I’m sure she will. But not yet.”
All of them were looking at me now, while munching on the chips and pretzels and hummus Mom had bought from Trader Joe’s. Like I was the star attraction, and they were the audience waiting for me to do something interesting.
“Yeah. I’d just rather not think about that right now, if that’s okay,” I said.
That seemed to sour the air a little, Samuel asking about my kidnappers and me not answering. It reminded everybody that this wasn’t some ordinary family reunion, but the kind where everyone needed a police escort just to make it into the house.
“So,” Trude said, with her smile still stuck on high beam, “what are your plans now?”
“Yeah,” Ben said. “What are your plans now, sis?”
“Just take it easy, I guess.”
“Sure,” Trude said. “That makes sense.”
“How about after you take it easy?” Ben said.
Mom shot him a nervous glance. Ben ignored it.
“I don’t know. I haven’t really thought about it.” They were still staring at me, these pretty much perfect strangers—asking me questions like I’d just come back from college or something, because they needed to tiptoe around where I’d really come back from.
“There’s no rush,” Mom said. “Jenny can figure that all out later.”
“Of course she can,” Trude said.
“Want to play Gobble Gobble now?” Melissa, the nine-year-old, asked me, showing me her phone.
“Sure,” I said.
She demonstrated the finer points of the game, using her middle finger to stuff pieces of candy into this fat frog’s mouth. There were thirty-nine different levels and she seemed determined to take me through all of them.
“That’s one full frog,” I said.
“It’s not a frog,” Melissa giggled. “It’s a monster.”
“Yeah,” Sebastian, the five-year-old, said. “It’s a monster.”
“That’s one full monster, then.”
“You’re funny . . . ,” Sebastian said.
“Yeah, I’m hysterical.” I’d always felt irritated around kids—probably because I’d never been allowed to be one. Chalk it up to jealousy.
“Don’t annoy your cousin,” Trude admonished them.
Good idea, I thought.
“Someone should take a picture,” Aunt Gerta said, and finally Arnie obliged, using his cell phone to snap a family portrait. This one would be titled: Melissa and Sebastian Annoy Their Cousin Jenny.
Ben was staring at me from across the room.
“Want a turn?” Melissa asked me.
“I’d rather eat the candy myself,” I said. “Screw the frog.”
“Mommy . . . Jenny said a curse word.”
Trude looked like she was about to say something to me, but then the little voice in her head must’ve said, We have to make allowances for poor Jenny, and she scolded Melissa instead.
“I said don’t annoy your cousin.”
“But she said a curse word.”
“Yeah,” Sebastian said, giggling, “she said screw!”
“Sebastian! Do we use language like that? Do we?”
Sebastian tried to explain that he was merely telling her what language his cousin Jenny had used, but since cousin Jenny was apparently off-limits to any parental correction, Trude remained purposelessly oblivious.
“Never use language like that again, Sebastian.”
Smash. Sebastian flung his sister’s iPhone to the floor.
“What are you doing, mister!” Trude wagged her finger at him.
I would’ve been happy to explain. He’s telling you to screw off in five-year-old.
Melissa started to cry because her iPhone had a big crack in it now—See what he did, Mommy . . . see—and then Sebastian joined in, creating a kind of stereo bawling.
“I’m sorry for my children’s behavior,” she said, directing most of that toward them.
“No problem,” I said.
Everything had been knocked off-kilter. Trude wasn’t smiling anymore; Aunt Gerta wasn’t dabbing at her eyes; Arnie wasn’t taking pictures. Dad’s uncle Samuel still looked confused, as if he was wondering where all the forced cheeriness had gone.
Ben was still staring at me.
Trude said it was time to get her incorrigible kids home, and that started a mass exodus, everyone probably tired of maintaining their smiles for that long.
I received a rapid-fire series of good-bye hugs and kisses.
Before Ben stomped upstairs, he brushed past me and whispered something in my ear.
“That game where Uncle Brent tickled us till we said uncle? Guess what? I made it up. Never happened. Weird that you remember it, huh?”