“Did you drop out of school or have you already graduated?” Jeffrey asked.
“I don’t like this,” she said. “It isn’t fair.”
“No, it isn’t.” Nolan’s voice softened. “It’s completely unfair what we’ve done to you. But the one thing we’re going to need from you in order to get through this together is honesty. We’ve done a terrible thing, the three of us. We know that. But we’ve also been straight with you from the beginning. This was an accident. We never planned for it to happen. I really hope you believe that, because it’s the truth. And it’s also the truth that we want nothing more than to get you home, and the sooner the better. Do you believe me?”
She sighed. “Whatever.”
“I really hope you do, Marie.” I wondered if she cared whether or not we were truthful. None of it changed the fact that she was here, and we were here, and several hundred pounds of musical equipment blocked her exit.
“But this truth,” Nolan was saying, “this honesty, has to cut both ways. Because the more we find we can trust you, the more we’re inclined to keep on trusting you. But if we find that we can’t trust you, then that’s a problem. So please, tell us the truth. Are you or are you not still in high school?”
First, nothing. Then a barely detectable shake of the head.
“Is that a no?” Nolan asked.
She said, “I graduated last year.”
“So that makes you, what? Nineteen?”
“Yeah,” she said.
I was confused. “Why did you tell me before that you were still in—”
“Because you’re all a bunch of kidnappers! I’m sorry. I know you think you aren’t, but you really, really are. And I thought that if you believed I was just some high school kid, maybe you’d feel bad and let me go.”
“Thank you for being honest,” Nolan said.
Easy for you to say, I thought. I was the one she’d confided in. Now, hearing the truth, I couldn’t help feeling a little betrayed. “What about your grandmother?” I asked. The pink sweaters. The jet black hair. I felt as if I’d be able to recognize the old lady shuffling down the streets of Newfield. I’d even begun to think that maybe I had. “Is she just someone you made up?”
“No!” She sounded offended but then caught herself. “I wouldn’t lie about her. She raised me, just like I said. Only, I don’t live with her anymore.”
“So who do you live with?” I asked.
“I don’t live with anybody.”
I hadn’t considered that Marie might have been fabricating parts of her story. But why shouldn’t she? From the moment Jeffrey had forced her into my car, her one concern would have been her own survival. If she’d had money, surely she’d have given it to us in exchange for her freedom. But the only currency she had was our perception of her. And so why shouldn’t she bend her life story a little, mold herself into someone she thought we might feel protective toward and unwilling to harm?
“Look,” she said, “I’d show you my ID except, like I told you, my purse is in a locker back at the Milk-n-Bread. But I swear I’m not lying.” She must have felt the need, now, to prove her candor beyond any doubt, because she began to describe for us her lonely life. A life unlike the one I’d pieced together from the few details she’d already told me. I’d envisioned a difficult but comfortable life with her grandmother, energized by school and friends, punctuated with her after-school job at the Milk-n-Bread to help pay for clothes and movie tickets. I had it wrong. There were no movie nights in Marie’s life. The Milk-n-Bread job was full-time. She lived in her grandmother’s house and paid whatever bills she could. Her grandmother’s dementia, meanwhile, had become bad enough that last year Marie had to put her in a nursing home. “Some depressing place in Elizabeth called Timber Cove.”
I knew the place, and it was depressing—from the outside anyway. The old structure stood ominously on Route 1, its bricks yellowed and tarnished. I assumed it used to be a psychiatric institution or maybe a veterans hospital. You could tell it wasn’t where people of means took their aged and infirm to live their final years in serene dignity. When you drove to the airport, you passed it just before miles and miles of power plants, or, as I’d called them as a kid, “fog factories.”
“Is it Alzheimer’s?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Parkinson’s. But she’s eighty-three, you know? And Parkinson’s can make you senile. Or it was the medications she’s on. But it was getting bad. I couldn’t leave her alone in the house. I came home once from work and she’d burned her arm really bad from the iron. I had to rush her to the ER, and in the car she kept screaming the whole way, and I had to roll down the windows because I could smell her burned skin.”