There was nothing but silence for a moment. I waited, tense, to see how Patrick and Lex would respond. I’d been waiting for the Tates to send me to therapy ever since I’d arrived almost two weeks ago and had been dreading it just as long. I’d worked over my share of mental health professionals, but it was risky, and I had no idea what a real kidnapped child would act like. I was fucked up, but nowhere near the level the real Danny Tate, abducted and abused for years, would have been.
“When he’s ready for help, we’ll get it for him,” Patrick said. “He’s not ready to talk about what he went through yet.”
“They told us not to push him,” Lex added. “He just needs some time to settle in first. Readjust.”
“You’re both crazy,” Nicholas said. “What does Mom say? And what about the cops? Why are you hiding him here?”
“We’re not hiding him; we’re giving him time to get his feet back under him,” Patrick said.
“And Morales is all right with that?” Nicholas said, sounding dubious.
“I’ve taken care of it, okay?” Patrick said. “If it makes you feel better, I’ll ask him again about therapy. After all, Danny knows better than we do what he’s ready for and what he needs. Then will you lay off, Nicky?”
“Maybe.”
A chair moved. I took several quick steps backward, so it would look like I was only just entering the hallway when Patrick stepped out of the kitchen.
“Hey, D!” he said. “How’d you sleep?”
“Fine,” I said.
“Want to play some more backgammon after breakfast?” he asked.
“Sure.”
Lex made me a bagel and poured me a glass of orange juice, and then I followed Patrick downstairs to the backgammon table. As he set the pieces, he asked me if I wanted to watch a baseball game with him that night and told me about the two teams that would be playing. He advised me on backgammon strategy and told me a story about a disastrous family vacation where the car my dad had rented caught on fire, and by the time we’d played a few games, I’d forgotten all about the conversation upstairs.
? ? ?
It didn’t take much longer for Nicholas to come home one day and say something else I’d been waiting for.
“Everyone’s asking me when Danny’s coming back to school,” he said.
“Danny’s not ready for that yet,” Lex said immediately.
She’d been true to her word since my little walkabout the week before: She’d barely let me out of her sight except to bathe and sleep, and I was only guessing about the second one. I’d decided on the walk home from the movie theater that Danny needed to go back to school, where I could escape Lex’s constant surveillance and catch my breath. I didn’t want to live inside the walls of this house forever. It was a big house, but it felt smaller every day, and if I was going to be Danny Tate, I needed to be Danny Tate. Start living a real life again.
“Actually,” I said, “I think I am.”
Nicholas stared at me. “Really?”
“Yeah,” I said. I’d been planting seeds that week, asking Nicholas questions about school and making sure Lex saw me reading books on history and science I’d found on a bookshelf in Robert’s library. I’d spent late night hours looking at the website for Calabasas High and the Facebook pages of my future classmates to prepare. For a while, I knew, I would be an object of intense curiosity, which would be hard. But it would pass, and then I’d be able to disappear into the press of bodies and noise just the way I always had. “I should be getting back to normal things, don’t you think?”
“Danny, honey, are you sure?” Lex said. “You’ve only just gotten home. There’s no need to rush this.”
“I don’t even know if they’d let you come back,” Nicholas said. “You’ve been out of school for a long time.”
“I know,” I said. “I’m really far behind, and most things won’t make sense to me, but I just want to be there. I need to start acting like a regular person again or I’m going to go crazy.”
“I don’t know . . . ,” Lex said.
I could see she wasn’t moved, so I reached for her hand. “I want to get on with my life, and . . . I want you to get on with yours, too. You shouldn’t have to spend all day here keeping an eye on me. We’ve both missed enough already.”
She frowned at me, but I could see her starting to waver.
“Please?” I said. “I need this.”
She sighed. I had her. “I’ll talk to Patrick about it.”
? ? ?
Patrick was harder to convince than Lex had been. When he came over that night, I cornered him alone in the kitchen after dinner to talk about it. Lex had already tried and gotten nowhere, but I was determined. He was a stone wall of prevarication and denial. All of my talk of being ready to reenter society and longing for normality had no effect on him the way it had on her.
“Danny, no,” he said. “I just don’t think it’s a good idea. Not yet.”
I took a hard look at him. He was clever and ambitious, working long hours for a prestigious firm in L.A. He’d been spending a lot of time with the family since I’d arrived, but that didn’t seem to be the norm. He was barely on speaking terms with his mother and didn’t seem particularly close with Nicholas or Mia, either. Sentimentality worked with Lex, but it wasn’t the right tack to take with Patrick. He’d require a different strategy.
I took a step closer to him and lowered my voice. “Please, Patrick. I have to get out of this house.”
He looked up at me, and I felt a little rush down my spine. This was going to work.
“I’m so happy to be home—you can’t even imagine how happy—but being cooped up here all day?” I continued. “It’s starting to make this place feel like just another prison, and I can’t handle that.”
His expression shifted, softening ever so slightly.
“That’s why I ran off the other day,” I said. “I feel too isolated here. Too trapped. Please help me.”
And that’s how I got Patrick.
? ? ?
“He wants to go back to school,” I heard Lex say. Her voice drifted down the stairs from the door to Jessica’s room to where I stood in the shadows on the second floor landing.
“So?”
“So I need you to go enroll him,” Lex said. “I’m not actually his parent, you know.”
There was nothing but silence for a long moment. Then the door slammed closed.
? ? ?
A week and a half later, I started school at Calabasas High. I’d been surprised to learn that Nicholas went to a public school, but then this wasn’t your typical public school. If my own research and the fact that Nicholas went there hadn’t clued me in to that, the percentage of luxury cars in the parking lot would have.
But what really shocked me? Jessica was the one who was taking me to enroll.
I’d come downstairs that morning expecting to find Lex, full of worried looks and questions about whether I really wanted to do this, ready to take me to Calabasas High School. What I found was exactly that . . . plus Jessica in full makeup and hair and a fine silk blouse, the rich white lady’s equivalent of armor. She even looked sober.
While Lex, Mia, and I ate breakfast, Jessica turned to me with a weak smile and said, “How did you sleep?”
I swallowed a dry mouthful of toast. “Fine, thanks.”
“Are you nervous about today?”
“A little,” I said.
“You know, you don’t have to go,” Lex said. “We could put it off another week or call it off entirely if you’re not comfortable—”
“I’ll be okay,” I said.