This never left me. In the three years I was away and as I walked back through my mother’s door, this fact about stupid people not believing the truth was as much a part of me as my lungs and my heart.
Dr. Winter and Agent Strauss stayed until the late morning, when my mother asked them all to leave so I could rest for a while. I was an adult woman and I had committed no crime, so they could not make me go to the hospital or the police station or do anything I didn’t want to do. I told them more things about the island that might help them find it. I gave them descriptions of the people they thought they might be able to find in their systems, like Bill and Lucy and the boatman. They asked a lot of questions about why Emma had not come with me, and I told them over and over it was because of the baby. I told them how the Pratts looked after her like their own child and how she slept in their room. It was one thing for me to slip out undetected and get to the boat. But a two-year-old? Who was sleeping in the same room with our captors?
I had thought about killing them. I did not say this to Dr. Winter or Agent Strauss. I had thought about how I could kill one without waking the other. I did not have a gun. It seemed like the simple thing—if you set aside the fact that killing is a sin. Just go in at night and kill them in their sleep. Take the baby and leave. Burn the house down. What would the boatman do then? Would he make us stay on that island? I did not make a plan to do this. But it is only natural when you are imprisoned to think about how to escape, and killing them was an obvious way to do that. It was more difficult than you might think. Without a gun, there was a risk of killing just one, and they were both equally capable of killing me right back.
I had to cut myself off then, as they pressed for details about these two people I had lived with for three years. I could detect their concerns about Emma from the questions they were asking me. There could be no ambiguity about my imprisonment there, no wondering whether or not there should be a furious search for my sister. And yet, I had not been in a cage or locked in a room. I had not been chained to a radiator or bound in any way. I sat with them at dinner every night. I let them teach me things. I smiled and laughed and talked about my observations, my childhood, my life as it was evolving. Anyone looking in from the outside would never know how desperate I was to leave after the confusion about what was happening cleared, or how many times I thought about leaving after that and about doing terrible things to make that possible. What they would see would be two kind people taking care of me, loving me, believing in what they were doing. They would see what they wanted to see, like that woman from the court. Even like my father.
People could be stupid and not believe the truth.
Agent Strauss was a good man. He was old like my father and he wore a gold wedding ring. He was not very tall, but he seemed strong because his shoulders were broad and he had a thick gray beard that started to show by the early afternoon.
Something about that, about all of him made me think of him as strong and manly. I did not know anything about him that could justify my holding this opinion about him also being a good man. But I just knew. It was in his eyes and the expression his face held when he watched Dr. Winter speak. And it was in the concern he held for me and for finding Emma even when some of the other agents seemed skeptical. I decided I would like Agent Strauss.
He returned with Dr. Winter two hours and thirty-nine minutes later. The sketch artist was not available until the following morning, which seemed very strange to me, and which again raised alarms inside my head that the search for Emma was not going to be given top priority. We agreed I would see a doctor in the morning and let Dr. Winter conduct a psychological exam. This would satisfy my mother. She said I didn’t seem right in my head. I heard her say it to Mr. Martin when he finally came back upstairs. And I’m sure she said it to anyone else who would listen. She had stopped crying and started making the calls to friends and relatives, and the publicist she had used three years ago. The shock of my return was transforming into her new reality.
The focus when they came back in was on my final escape. They wanted every detail because, as Agent Strauss said, there could be something in the details that I didn’t even realize was important. I doubted that was true because I had given so much thought to them.
“Just tell us from start to finish,” he said.
So I did.
“The boatman, Rick, waited for me on the west side of the island, not on the dock. The west side was all rocks, like huge slabs of gray rock, not stones, and they just disappeared into the waves. In high tide, you couldn’t really see the rocks at all. The water came and crashed right up to the tree line. But in low tide, you could walk a long way out on the rocks. Bill liked to walk out there and fish. He would wear high rubber boots and take nothing with him but a box of fishing stuff, a rod and a six-pack of beer. They were cans of beer. They had blue writing on them. Is that helpful?… One time I followed him. This was before Emma had her baby. It was when I still looked at Bill and Lucy like they were good people who loved us.
“I started to walk on the rocks to catch up to him. I had this stupid idea that he would teach me how to fish and that we would be, I don’t know, maybe like father and daughter because I was missing my father so much. I remember wanting that so badly as I walked on the rocks, you know, like that feeling when you get an idea to do something that might make someone love you? I used to get that same feeling when we made Mother’s Day cards in school and I would always write on mine ‘Number One Mom!’ or ‘Best Mom in the World’ and I would get that feeling, thinking that it might make you happy, Mom … do you remember?”
“Yes, of course, sweetheart,” Mrs. Martin said. “I always loved your cards.”