He didn’t have to tell them any of this. And what he was really doing was trying to find out if they had begun to believe that Emma did not want to come home. That maybe she had gone with the Pratts of her own free will. After all, how could they move her and a two-year-old child off an island in a rowboat without her being able to alert the authorities? This thought was terrifying.
The officer sat with us for a while. He started talking to us about “kidnap” victims who really don’t want to ever leave where they’ve gone. Not just the Patty Hearst stories, but also people who join cults or communes, things like that. Their families have it pretty bad. They never stop believing that they can reach inside their loved ones and reprogram their brains, or pull out the demon that’s taken them over. Like Linda Blair in The Exorcist. And they are right. I believe that people never change, and so if their child or sister or brother or husband or wife was once one way, but then got sucked in by a group of psycho hippies, they could get sucked back out. People don’t change. But no one is willing to help them—except for a lot of money.
I learned all this after I returned, in those countless, endless hours I spent waiting and talking to people. Grown-ups are allowed to do what they want as long as they don’t break any laws, so if they want to be freaks and live on an island with other freaks, they are allowed to do that. And they are even allowed to raise their children that way.
My father grilled me relentlessly that afternoon about Emma’s disposition, her beliefs, her sanity. I couldn’t stand watching him unravel, so I was glad when he left. I needed to be alone with my mother. I needed to see if she was still unraveling. The Pratts were gone. Emma was still missing. I needed something to come of this. If not revenge, if not finding Emma, then what was the point? Mrs. Martin had been curled up on her bed like a baby when I finally left her room the night before. I thought that was the end of it, the end of her. I thought they would find the Pratts and find my sister and all of this would be over. Come on! I wanted to yell at everyone. Everything I had done was like pushing on a string—it just coiled up but didn’t move. Nothing was moving! Nothing was happening!
But then I heard Mr. Martin’s car pulling into the garage, which meant she had called him during the night.
I heard them fighting the moment he walked up the stairs to their bedroom. I didn’t have to listen at all, because I knew what she was saying and what he was saying back about his affair with Lisa Jennings, and what it meant for everything else that had happened between them. She was not falling into his arms and forgiving him. He was no longer someone she believed when he told her he loved her—just like what happened with me and Emma when we were little.
The switch had flipped.
I pictured that witch from The Wizard of Oz when they pour water over her. That was my mother. Only it wasn’t water. It was reality. And although she obviously wasn’t saying these words, I heard them in my head as I watched her nervously puttering around the house, chewing her nails and sneaking cigarettes on the back porch that whole day that they found the island but not my sister.
I’m melting.…
*
In September, the year before we disappeared, and after the summer of manipulating wounded men, Hunter went to Costa Rica to build houses, and Emma and I went back to school. It did not take long for Emma to find a new boyfriend, or I suppose for a new boyfriend to find her, but either way, she was with someone new by October. His name was Gil and he was twenty-six and the manager of the deli where we all gathered after school.
I will admit that Gil was very cute. He was tall and thin and had blue eyes and dark hair, and what I remember most about him was that he had an attitude like he didn’t care about anything. Even in our fancy town waiting on spoiled rich kids, making their sandwiches and selling them beer if they had really good fake ID cards, he was above it all. This appealed to Emma. She was so used to everyone falling all over themselves for her, our mother being jealous of her, Mr. Martin being tortured by his conflicted feelings toward her, and Hunter being obsessed with her—this guy from the deli who didn’t care less about her was intoxicating.
Emma started talking about him on the way home from school. She said he was real. I just listened because I did not want to spoil it. If I agreed with her, she might think less of him because she thought less of me in general. If I disagreed, she might start to see that he was really just a big loser being twenty-six and working at a deli with no plans for his future, and that he actually did care, and care very much, about the spoiled rich kids he had to make sandwiches for but that he covered it up with his attitude of not caring. Either way, I did not want Emma to lose interest in Gil. I did not want her to keep coddling Hunter like a little baby and taking all the air in our house so that I could not even breathe.
That was how I had felt—like I was not even worthy of one breath with everything being about Emma. Hunter desperate to have sex with her. Mr. Martin being so worried and angry but also so curious, and Mrs. Martin being so threatened by his curiosity and so insulted by his cruel words, like when he called Emma Lolita all the time. I wished it would all end before it ended very badly.
I got one wish but not the other.
When Hunter returned from Costa Rica, he expected things to be the way they were over the summer. Emma had not been on her social media with Gil, because she did not want Mrs. Martin to find out and Mrs. Martin had some very clever ways to infiltrate Emma’s life. I also think that somewhere inside her, Emma was ashamed of her relationship with Gil the deli manager, and that the shame was part of the attraction. It was hard to understand. If I had what Emma had, I would have used it much better. I would have used it for nothing short of true love or absolute power.
When Hunter came home and found out about Gil, it destroyed him. And whether he had been sincere in his summer of kindness toward her, or just winning the war, it didn’t matter, because the war was on again and it was hotter than it had ever been. Emma came right out and told him that they both needed to date people and try to be friends. She reminded him that they were technically related and that as much as they liked each other, they could never really be together, because the world would think they were monsters. Incestuous monsters. The world is very critical of incest, even though if you believe what the Bible says, we are all blood relatives and so we are all incestuous. I’ve never really understood that. But it doesn’t matter what I understand or don’t understand. It was the first time either of them admitted what was really going on between them, and it made Hunter hate Emma again. And for the rest of the year, our house was a battlefield of insults and slammed doors and cold stares. Hunter told everyone about Gil and Emma. Emma stole his pot and cocaine and flushed them down the toilet. Hunter called her nothing but “whore” again. Emma called him “loser.”