She stopped. I wished I could get a tape recorder, something to preserve her voice.
“I guess I was about to run home, to run back to you and Mom and tell you what happened, when a van pulled up beside me. A white van. The man rolled down his window and asked me what was wrong. I told him. He said if I wanted to hop in he’d drive me around a little and help me look for Frosty.” She took a drink of water, her throat bobbing as she swallowed. “I knew I wasn’t supposed to get in a car with someone I didn’t know. I knew all that. You and Mom taught me all of that.”
She didn’t go on, so I filled the gap. “Why did you get in with him?”
“I didn’t.”
“Then how . . . ?”
“I walked away. I turned around and started back for the house. And the guy in the van called after me—he kept saying he would help me. So I started to walk faster, and that’s when John came up beside me. He was walking his own dog, and he’d heard what the guy in the van said to me. He came up beside me and told me I should just ignore that guy, and if I wanted help finding my dog, he’d walk around with me, with his dog on the leash, and he said he bet we’d find him. ‘He couldn’t have gone far,’ he said. ‘Not with that leash around his neck.’ He seemed nice and safe, at least compared to the other guy. He seemed like a nerd, really.” She smiled. “So we started walking around the park with his dog, looking for Frosty. I don’t know what happened to the guy in the van. He drove off, I guess. Who knows what he wanted. I guess we’ll never find out. The world’s probably full of guys like that.”
She took another drink of water.
“So how did you end up going off with him?” I asked.
“We looked and looked for Frosty. We went around the walking track in the park and up and down the rows in the cemetery. I was still crying a little, and John tried to talk to me and make me feel better.”
John. She called him John.
“I started to realize it was getting late, that you and Mom were going to worry about me if I didn’t come home. I knew I’d have to go back and probably get in trouble over Frosty being gone. I told John I needed to go back to my parents. He offered me a ride in his car. He said he could drive me, and while we drove back we could look for Frosty some more. He said maybe Frosty just turned and headed for home, that dogs do that sometimes. They just follow their instincts.” She paused. “I didn’t know what to do. I was upset and scared, and John really did seem nice. He did.”
“We wouldn’t have been mad at you.”
“Mom would have. And you would have too. You always act like you don’t get angry about those things, but you do. Maybe you don’t even know you do it, but you get this look on your face. This disapproval. It’s there. I know it.” She looked at me, waiting for me to defend myself, I suppose. When I didn’t, she went on. “So I walked with him back to his car and got in. The car wasn’t anything special, just an old Toyota. And it didn’t feel that strange getting in and driving off.” She paused and held up her index finger. “Wait. It did feel strange. It felt different, I guess, and that’s really why I wanted to do it.”
“Different how?”
“Different like I wasn’t supposed to do it, but it still felt safe doing it. I felt a little excited, even though I was scared and worried about Frosty. It just seemed like the most unexpected thing I could do—get in a car with a strange man, even though he was just promising to help me look for my dog and take me home to my parents.”
“But you didn’t come home.”
“No.”
“Where did you go?” I asked.
“We went to his house.”
“How did that happen?”
“We looked for Frosty and drove back this way. We drove right past the house in fact.”
If only I’d been outside. If only I’d been watching for her.
If only.
“After we’d driven around looking for a while, he said I should go back to his house with him and clean my face off. He told me I didn’t want to see my parents that way, that if I cleaned up and looked grown up, it wouldn’t seem as bad as I thought it would be. I really think if I asked him, he would have just pulled into the driveway here and dropped me off. I don’t think he was intending to force me to do anything I didn’t want to do. I was in control of which way things went, and I liked that feeling. So I said to myself, ‘What the hell. Let’s see what else happens.’ And I told him I’d go back to his house with him.”
“You know you weren’t in control, right? You never were.”
But she had stopped. There was a finality to the way she broke off. She stood up and went to the sink for more water. She drank it down, then refilled and drank some more. She kept her back to me, acting as though I weren’t in the room.
“But you had seen him before? Colter? Right?”