My head snapped up as Patrick—clad in pajama bottoms, his hair rumpled—walked into the rec room.
“Hey,” I said, reaching for the remote and pausing the video. How was I going to explain this? It must look suspicious as hell, especially given the timing.
“Couldn’t sleep?” he asked, sitting down beside me.
I shook my head. “Did I wake you?”
“No, I was just getting a snack and I heard the TV.” He looked at the screen. “Which video is this?”
He didn’t seem to think it was odd that I was watching old home movies in the middle of the night—maybe because he was too sleepy to think too much about it—so my heartbeat started to return to normal.
“Um, Lex’s play,” I said.
“Oh, right.” He smiled, took the remote from me, and started the video again. The screen switched from the parking lot of Calabasas High to a darkened auditorium where the only thing visible was a red curtain illuminated by footlights. Patrick fast-forwarded. “She wasn’t in the first scene. Do you remember any of this?”
“Not really,” I said.
He hit play when the scenery changed. Lex was standing on stage in a white dress, her hair curled around her face, softening the sharpness of her chin and cheekbones. She was still alarmingly thin, so fragile-looking it was hard to believe she could even stand, but when she smiled, it looked real. Her voice was clear and bright when she recited her lines, romping and laughing and flirting her way across the stage, a confident and sassy creature who was entirely unlike the Lex I knew.
“She was good,” I said.
He made a noncommittal sound.
“Did she ever try to pursue it?” I asked.
He shrugged. “When she was younger. She made a couple of commercials.”
So she gave up. I wondered if that was because of Danny. Losing her father and her brother in quick succession must have been devastating for such a sensitive girl. God, how I envied Danny, being loved like that, missed like that. The air conditioner blowing cool air across my skin suddenly felt like the biting wind of a snowstorm many years before, and I shivered. No one was missing the person I had been.
“Hey,” Patrick said softly. “You okay?”
A lump rose in my throat. I didn’t want this all to be taken away from me. Not just because it meant I’d end up back on the street or in a group home or in prison. Not just because this life was easy or because it meant never having to be myself again. But because, improbable as it seemed, I’d actually started to give a shit about these people, and I felt like they gave a shit about me, too. I didn’t want to lose that.
I bit my lip hard.
“Danny?”
Patrick put a warm hand on my shoulder, and I couldn’t hold it together anymore.
“I’m scared,” I said softly.
He put his arms around me, hugging me tight, and I unwound a little further.
“I know,” he said. He rubbed his hand up and down across my back. My brother. “I know.”
? ? ?
Patrick and I sat at the dining room table for most of the next day, going over my story for the FBI. He said he didn’t want there to be any surprises. That it would be easier for me if I knew what to expect and that the clearer my story was, the more likely it was that the FBI would be able to catch the people who’d done this to me.
“I was walking beside my bike, because the chain had come off, and I didn’t know how to fix it,” I said. “I was taking it home to my brother Patrick, because he would know. A white van—”
“I’m going to stop you there, Danny,” Patrick said. “This sounds really similar to when you first told Lex and me what happened. I’m sure you’ve gone over those events in your head a million times and that’s why, but the FBI is going to ask you to tell your story more than once. I worry they might start going down the wrong track if you sound at all rehearsed.”
“Right,” I said, heart jumping into my throat. Dammit. How had I not thought of that? “I, uh, I guess I use the same words because it’s easier, you know? I don’t have to think about . . . what they did to me . . . as much.”
“I totally get it,” he hastened to reassure me.
Patrick and I continued to work through my story, and I made an effort to switch up the way I told it from the way I’d rehearsed it in my head. Patrick offered comments and asked questions along the way, and though I was sure it wasn’t his intention, he helped me flesh out the story, find and plug the holes in it.
Jessica emerged from her room sometime before midday. I saw her walk past the dining room on her way to the kitchen while Patrick and I were going over how the men who kidnapped me smuggled me and the others kids across the Canadian border. As the lies grew inside of me, they became more and more real to me. This always happened whenever I spoke a lie out loud; it gained its own life and energy. I began to feel like I was breathing in the stale air of the hidden compartment in the eighteen-wheeler, listening to the muffled whimpers of the other children packed in there with me as I tried to free my hands of their bindings and my mouth of its duct tape gag.
But some part of me was still in the dining room, monitoring Patrick’s reactions, and that part of me noticed when Jessica appeared in the dining room doorway with a bottle of the fancy French water the Tates bought by the case. She hovered there, clutching the bottle instead of opening it. Patrick’s eyes flickered over to her once, then twice, as if he didn’t really believe she was there. Which was understandable.
“Sorry, Danny,” he said, stopping me. “Do you need something, Mom?”
She shook her head. “I’m fine.”
He frowned. “Well then, maybe you should . . .”
Jessica just stood there, unmoving, and Patrick finally turned back to me.
“Okay, Danny,” he said. “Then what happened?”
“We drove for a long time,” I said. “It was hard to tell inside the compartment, but I think it was at least a day.”
“They kept you in there the whole time?” Patrick asked. “What about food or water?”
I shook my head. “They didn’t give us any food. Didn’t even take our gags off. I got so nauseous from fear and hunger and the bumping in the compartment that I threw up, but I had to just swallow it back down again.”
Jessica abruptly turned and walked out of the room. A moment later, we heard the front door close behind her.
“I didn’t want her to hear any of this,” Patrick said. “It’s too hard for her. She thinks it’s her fault.”
“What? Why?” I asked. I’d researched Danny’s disappearance. There had been surprisingly little news coverage outside of the immediate area—the effect of the Hidden Hills bubble, I’d guessed, although it seemed pretty strange—but the story was clear. It had just been one of those freak things, the kind of random tragedy that fueled suburban nightmares and the Lifetime original movies Lex liked to watch.
Patrick shrugged. “For not being a better mother. For drinking too much and letting you ride your bike in the neighborhood. For not noticing you were gone sooner. Anything and everything a person could blame themselves for.”