“Mom?” I called repeatedly, as we made our way along the edge of the gate, until we could be sure there was nowhere left to hide.
I shivered in the night air, and I felt too exposed all of a sudden. Like my mother would be, standing in this very spot. My eyes darted from shadow to shadow in the darkness. There could be people watching, from every corner of the woods. My blood was thrumming.
Inside. Inside was safety.
“Let’s go,” I whispered. I led the way back into the house, locking the doors behind me on instinct. I wandered down the hall, my hands trailing along the walls, trying to orient myself. Like I was waking in a strange place for the first time.
The alarm was off, and she was missing.
What the hell was going on?
—
I sat down at the kitchen table and stared at my cell, hoping it would miraculously provide answers. Ryan hopped up on the countertop, like he used to do at the Lodge. Like my two worlds were overlapping. As if I could be both people at once.
“Should we call someone else?” he asked.
Ryan was not nearly as worried as I was—because Ryan didn’t understand how improbable this situation truly was. The fear was too great. It had no boundaries. It seeped into every aspect of our lives, binding her here. I imagined it like the ivy, creeping up the iron gates. Tangling together until you couldn’t see one without the other.
“Kelsey?”
Ryan Baker, who asked you out, is hanging out in your kitchen in suit pants and a button-down shirt, two feet away from you, with his brown hair falling in his eyes, waiting for you to do something. Snap out of it, Kelsey.
I didn’t want to explain how delicate my situation in this house was already. I was always just one moment from being pulled. One call from Jan, or one call to the police, and the whole thing might tip too far, my whole life might slip away from me.
“She doesn’t have a car,” I finally said. And then I gave voice to the thought that had begun in my room when I was texting Jan. The thought that dug in and circled and wouldn’t let go. “What if someone broke in and hurt her?”
Lightning striking twice. Her biggest fear.
He pushed off the counter. Surveyed the room. “Is anything missing?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t think so.”
Because that was why people broke into homes, in Ryan’s world. Not to take people. Not to keep them, and hurt them, and ruin them.
He looked around the room, his eyes lingering on the closed doors, the locked windows. “It doesn’t look like a break-in to me, Kelsey.”
I nodded. Except. Except we had locks and security and a panic room for a reason. What if her fears were not so ungrounded? What if she knew the danger was real? That someone was still out there, just waiting for a chance?
The fears started skittering along my skin, threatening to shut me down. I wanted to give myself over to them. Crawl into bed, stare at the walls, surround myself with them.
Ryan grabbed my shoulder, crouching beside me so his face was just inches away, his eyes wide and worried. “You okay? You look pale. Like you might pass out.”
My mouth had gone dry, and it felt almost like my throat was closing off, the air scratching along the surface, and I was a balloon, drifting farther and farther away….
“Kelsey?” he called, but his voice was on another planet. Didn’t he see?
My mother was gone.
My mother was gone.
Jan didn’t come into our lives until I was nine.
Before that, we’d been coasting along at a pretty decent clip, under the radar.
And under the radar was my mother’s number one goal. Jan and I were the only ones who knew who my mother had once been. She told Jan because she had to. She told me because it was always just the two of us against the world. And what she wasn’t able to tell me herself I could find out easily enough with an Internet search.
Amanda Silviano was famous.
She was famous for the horror. For the media circus. For the tragedy of what had happened to her, and also what happened because of it. She was one of those names that lingered. Elizabeth Smart. Jaycee Lee Dugard. Girls taken and kept, like so many others. But she was one of the few: girls miraculously found again.
The difference was she no longer had a place to return.
The Amanda Silviano in the news stories was raised in a middle-class neighborhood by a single father. She lived in a beige ranch with a white picket fence, in a grid of houses that looked exactly the same. I’d seen the pictures from old articles. Her father reported her missing—kidnapped—after coming home one morning from working the night shift to find the house ransacked. The front windows had been smashed in. The neighbors had heard a scream.
My mother was beautiful, and seventeen, and a Girl Who Followed the Rules. The perfect trifecta for media attention. The attention got more police involvement, and then more people involvement. And then the allegations began. Allegations of a long history of abuse. The cigarette burns. The black eye. The reports from her classmates. The screams, not so unusual, the neighbors said. But nobody had spoken up. Nobody had protected her, then or later. Only in hindsight did anybody care.
It was a past that, in the eyes of the public, could only lead to one single truth: that he was guilty. And that perhaps this was a cover-up. Perhaps his daughter was dead and buried, and he had staged the whole thing.
He was vilified. The police brought him in for questioning. He took, and failed, a lie detector test. He was all but declared guilty, before a trial, and he overdosed on sleeping pills as rumors of his impending arrest swirled. Impossible to tell whether it was accidental or not. Suicide over the Guilt, one headline claimed.
But then, later that year, my mother reappeared—alive. She escaped from the man who truly held her. She was found running on the edge of a highway, in the woods of Pennsylvania, delirious, dirty, smelling of gasoline—and four months pregnant. The hospital ID’d her, and the reporters were there almost as fast as the police. She was alive, and what a tragedy, they said, what had happened to her father. What a tragedy, what they themselves had done.
Is it any surprise she changed her name? She checked herself out of the hospital as soon as she could, and she left. She took the money that her father had left her, and she used it to set us up here. Given the media circus surrounding her reappearance, her request to have the records sealed on her name change was granted.
She had no memory of her abduction, and I had no memory of her ever leaving the house.
Though I believed, based on the fact that she would never talk about her life before her abduction, either, that she was more than happy to leave all of Amanda Silviano behind. To become someone new. To give us both a fresh start.
She took classes online, eventually finding herself some part-time bookkeeping work for a local business. She slowly set up a life for herself, one where she could provide for the both of us without ever having to leave these walls. I played out in the backyard, inside the gate, while my mother watched from the kitchen. I’d turn to see her, always at the window, smiling and watching. I was healthy and loved, and I grew and thrived.
She registered me as homeschooled. I took the state tests. I scored well. I hadn’t had a checkup, or a vaccine, which wasn’t illegal then—but it raised some flags with social services, over time.