A face in the van window yanks me back to reality.
In a minute, I will realize that the woman is probably the mother of the two rambunctious boys I’ve just seen. In a minute, I’ll note that her van in the next space over nearly matches Luke’s, and that she was “just checking out the newer model,” as she’ll shout to me as a means of explanation. In a minute, my pulse will edge back down to resting.
But right now, I am rigid. I am terrified of the woman’s big face, flanked by hands cupped so she can see inside the tinted windows. Right now, I am irrationally locking the doors and scooting my body away so that the stranger won’t get me.
Stranger?
Get me?
Even as I think it, I know it’s crazy.
But then something falls into place.
I see myself as a little girl. My dad is across the lot, pulling a cart from the return. I’m in the backseat. A toddler is strapped in across from me. It’s my brother, Jonas. I’m playing peekaboo with him. He’s giggling.
A woman knocks on the window on my side. She seems friendly. She has a nice smile. “I’m a friend of your mommy’s,” I hear her say through the glass. “Open the door so I can say hi,” she says sweetly. “You can see my puppy,” she says, holding open a big bag with a tiny dog inside.
I love dogs, especially tiny ones.
I unbuckle my belt. As I climb over the seat to the front, I see my dad over there with the carts. It’s fine. He’s nearby. He’ll be happy to see my mommy’s friend, too.
Like I do when I pretend to drive in the garage, I hit the locks. They all click.
Before I see the man, I hear Jonas scream. He doesn’t like strangers. I turn around to see the man taking him out of his car seat. Jonas doesn’t like it; he’s crying and kicking.
Then his cries are getting quieter because he’s going away.
“Daddy!” I scream as I watch my mommy’s friend and the man put Jonas in a van. I’m never supposed to get out in a parking lot but I do anyway. “Daddy!” I scream and scream until he hears me and runs.
Daddy listens to what happened and drives fast and chases the van, but we hit a car and that’s all I remember.
Tears are running down my cheeks when Luke rejoins me in the car.
“Take me home,” I say quietly, and he does.
41
“Are you all right?” Mom says as she rushes toward me. When she reaches the chair where I’m curled in a ball, wrapped in a woven blanket and otherwise attempting to shield myself from the world, the back of her hand instinctively flits to my forehead.
“I don’t have a fever,” I say, shaking her off. “I’m fine, I just need your help.”
She takes a step back in her business suit and heels and looks at me warily.
“Okay…” she says.
“We have to go to the police,” I say matter-of-factly, my voice slightly muffled since the blanket has crept up toward my mouth. I push it away and sit up.
“Why on earth would we—”
“I know who did it. I know who took Jonas. I remember them.”
I’m not surprised by the look of shock on my mother’s face.
“Them?”
“Yes, them. A man and a woman. I can see them. I can help the police find them.”
“Slow down, sweetie,” my mom says, sitting on the couch to my right. “Tell me what happened.”
I do, and the tears are unleashed again. It’s all my fault.
“Honey, it’s okay,” my mom whispers, reaching over and stroking my hair. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Yes, I did!” I wail. “I unlocked the doors! It’s my fault he’s gone. It’s my fault he’s dead!”
I pull the blanket back to my face and cry until there’s nothing left.
“Shhh,” my mom says, over and over, and I feel like shaking off her kindness. I don’t deserve it. How can she still love me, knowing I’m the reason Jonas is dead?
Will she still love me when she hears the rest of the story?
“Mom, that’s not all,” I say through my tears. As terrible as the past memory is, it’s done. What I haven’t shared is the part in the future that hasn’t happened yet. It weighs on me so heavily that I sink lower into the chair.
“What is it, London?” Mom says in a hushed tone, brushing back my hair and wiping away my tears as they’re replaced by new ones. “You can tell me anything.”
Desperate to tell someone, I open my mouth and creak out the words.
“Luke is going to die, too.”
In a voice so low that my mom has to crouch to hear me, I tell her the future memory that seeing the criminals’ faces has triggered.
I tell her that it must be in five or six years, judging by my reflection in the storefront window on a city street I don’t recognize. Luke is there.
I’m clutching a torn piece of paper with an address scrawled on it. We’re watching, until someone emerges. We’re curious. We plan to tell the police.
A man leaves the brownstone; he’s wearing knockoff dress shoes and a blazer so that he doesn’t look like a kidnapper and a killer, but then and now, I know the truth.
The man veers off the cobblestones to a side street, then again into an alley. We follow without meaning to, and, with just a couple of wrong turns, the bustling city that felt safe doesn’t seem that way anymore. Luke and I turn back, but it’s too late.
The man knows we’re there.
“What gives?” he shouts at us. He seems drunk or high. He’s definitely unstable.
We say nothing for a moment. Then, like that idiot in a horror movie, words that I want to vacuum back in fly out of my mouth.
“You took my brother,” I blurt with false conviction.
“London,” Luke whispers harshly, squeezing the hand he’s holding. Luke is sensible.
“That’s what you think, huh?” the man says, edging closer to us.
I know with every fiber of my being that we’re in the worst kind of danger. This was the wrong move.
The man is chewing a toothpick, tossing it side to side in his mouth like he doesn’t have a care in the world.
Instinctively, Luke takes a step forward as if to shield me. The man is no more than ten feet from us.
“Let’s get out of here,” I say quietly to Luke. I’m terrified. I step back and tug on his hand.
Without warning, the man reaches around his back, up and under his jacket, his right hand emerging heavy.
He has a gun.
I shiver as I describe this part to my mom, and she moves to the very edge of the couch so that she can touch my knee for support.
My cell phone buzzes as a text comes through, and I know without looking that it’s Luke. I ignore it.
“Go on, it’s okay,” she encourages me.
I tell her that the man points the gun at us and holds it steady. Of course the murderer has a gun. How could we be so stupid?
“I can’t let you leave now, can I?” the man asks, eyes narrow and dark.
He takes another step, gun still pointed, and Luke must know what’s coming, because at that moment, he does something heroic. Or stupid.
Luke drops my hand, shoves me away toward the mouth of the alley, and shouts, “London, run!” at the top of his lungs.
And I try.
But the bullets stop me.
My mom’s hands are covering her mouth now as I tell her the rest: the world going silent after the shots stop; the rhythmic footfalls of the man fleeing the scene; the minutes when I believe I’m dying, lying faceup staring at a starless city sky. The guttural groans that pull me from my trance and drag me toward my dying boyfriend.
I pause to take a few deep breaths and then tell my mom about Luke’s final moments. No last words. No sentiments. Just Luke, gasping for air, raw terror in his eyes.
42
I blubber my way through the end of the story, nose running, eyes overflowing, shoulders heaving. It’s contagious, and my mom and I cry together for the past a
nd the future.
When there are no more tears, my mom startles me by standing and slapping her thighs as she rises.
“Get up,” she commands me. I am now so buried in the cushions someone might mistake me for furniture.
“Get up, London,” she says again.
“I can’t,” I whisper.
“Yes, you can,” she says, leaning over to help me. When she finds one of my hands, she grabs tight and tugs. I can’t help but stand.
“You were right, we need to go to the police,” she says, drying my cheeks with her hands. “You were right. We need help. We’re going to fix this.”
“It’s so huge, I don’t know if we can,” I murmur.
“We can,” my mom says, in a voice so strong I almost believe her.
She leaves me standing alone in the center of the living room for a moment and then zips back into the room, keys in hand.
Before I have time to think about it anymore, my mom is pulling me toward the car.
“Let’s go.”
One good thing about living in a small town is that it’s possible that, way back in high school, your mother was friends with the man who is now police captain. It means that he might listen to you when others might not.
“So you just remembered all this?” Captain Moeller asks, looking back and forth between me and my mom.
Captain Moeller may have a potbelly and a bald head, but he’s got a kind face and, frankly, he’s our only hope.
“Yes,” I say sweetly. “I remember the day of the kidnapping now very clearly. I could help a sketch artist. Or look in a book?”
“They’d be a lot older now,” the captain says softly.
He doesn’t know what I see.
“We’d like to try,” my mom says warmly. After exhaling loudly, Captain Moeller gets up. He grabs a binder from the shelf and tosses it on the small table in the corner. Then he retrieves two more, each filled with photos, from the outer office.
“Start there, London,” he says, then turns to my mom and offers her coffee. She agrees, and he leaves us alone.
“I don’t think this is going to help,” I whisper.
“Just try,” my mom whispers back, bringing her chair over to join me at the table. She eyeballs the faces of criminals with me, even though she wouldn’t know the culprits if they walked up to her at the bank.
The captain returns and does paperwork while my mom and I examine the photos of criminal after criminal. An hour later, my butt hurts from the hard chair, and I’ve got nothing except that creepy feeling you get from looking at people who might want to do you harm.
I want to go home and forget all of it. I want to watch a Disney movie to scrub my brain clean. But I know now that I can’t. I’ve regained these horrible memories; all I can do is try to change the ones that are yet to come.
“How about doing a sketch?” I offer again.
“Like I said before, the couple you remember will be much older now. It probably won’t do any good,” Captain Moeller says.
“Couldn’t you try that age-progression software on it?” I ask. I’ll watch way too many crime dramas in my lifetime. “Do you have that here?”
The captain laughs a little.
“Smart kid you have there, Bridgette,” he says to my mom.
“She sure is,” Mom agrees.
Captain Moeller looks back at me. “Yes, we have that here,” he says. “I’m just not sure it would work with a sketch. And besides, our sketch artist has gone home.”
I glance at the industrial clock behind his head, as does my mom.
“Oh, Jim, I’m sorry to keep you,” Mom says. “You need to get home to your family.”
“It’s okay, Bridgette,” he says with compassion in his eyes. “Anything for you. I remember the incident like it was yesterday.”
I break away mentally and force myself to remember anything that might help the situation. There is one thing: the piece of paper. The problem is that I remember it from the future.
My mom chitchats with the captain as I ponder ways to get him interested in the address. In the end, lying wins.
“Back when it happened, when they took Jonas, the woman dropped a piece of paper with a note on it in our car,” I blurt out. Both adults snap to attention, Mom because she knows I’m lying and Captain Moeller because he seems to be the type of person who responds to carrots.
“What did it say?” the hound dog asks.
“Well, I’m not positive, but I think it was an address. There was something about Beacon Street. I remember because I thought it said ‘bacon’ at first.” I blink twice like an innocent child. My mom’s lips purse but she doesn’t say anything. “I really like bacon,” I add, feeling idiotic as soon as the words leave my lips. Thankfully, Captain Moeller ignores that part.
“No city?” he asks.
“No,” I say, shrugging. Does he expect this to be handed to him on a silver platter?
“Well, I’ll look into it,” he says before his phone rings. He answers, talks briefly, and hangs up. My mom stands to leave. I follow suit. The captain walks us out and shakes both our hands. We leave, dejected and exhausted.
Halfway home, before we’ve finished ordering our drive-thru meals, Mom’s cell rings. She answers, listens for a moment, and then pulls out of the restaurant sans food. We’ve turned around and are heading back toward the station before I have time to ask why.
“He said he’ll explain when we get there,” my mom says, sitting straight and gripping the wheel like it might fly off at any moment.
Captain Moeller is waiting for us at the front desk.
“Thanks for coming back,” he says as the three of us rush to his office. I wonder what the hurry is.
Once we’re settled, he explains.
“I did a quick search on Beacon, London, and it turns out it’s a street in the city,” Captain Moeller begins. “A squad there has been keeping an eye on a building on that street… suspicious activity, I guess. A friend down there was still at his desk: he told me that a man and wife recently rented the space—it’s an office downtown in that older area—and anyway, there have been odd complaints, so they’ve been watching it.”
“What type of complaints?” Mom asks, and I notice that she is clutching her purse like a life vest.
“Crying children late at night… in a business registered as a pawnshop,” he says quietly. “The squad has done routine checks twice now and there’s no sign of wrongdoing. But like I said, they’re keeping an eye out.”
Captain Moeller stops talking a moment and clears his throat.
I’m confused. My mom might be, too. I can’t be sure.
“What does all this mean, Jim?” she says aloud. “Why did you want us to come back down here?”
“Well, that’s the thing. It’s touchy, and maybe I’m wrong, but this new information piqued my interest,” the captain says, leaning back in his chair and running a hand through what hair he has left. He checks the clock and continues.
“You never did an autopsy on Jonas’s body, did you, Bridgette?”
The question slugs my mom in the gut, and she looks visibly hurt for a split second. Then she recovers.
“No, you know that, Jim,” she says. “There were his clothes—definitely his clothes—and with the decomposition, we decided it was enough.”
My mouth is ajar now. Hasn’t my mom seen a single crime drama? Maybe she just wanted it to be over. Maybe she just needed to believe, to bury him and move on.
“What does that have to do with anything?” Mom asks, seeming agitated now.
“I don’t know. Kids late at night… at a pawnshop that the locals say isn’t open in the daytime. It’s just suspicious.”
“Say what you mean, Jim,” my mom barks, and suddenly Captain Moeller sits straight in his chair.
“It’s possible that the pawnshop is a front for an illegal adoption agency. I think they might be stealing and selling kids.”
My mom’s jaw drops. “Selling kids??
?? she asks, clearly horror-stricken.
Captain Moeller rubs his eyes. “It happens more than you’d think. People can’t have them on their own, and they get impatient because regular adoption takes too long. They turn to illegal baby brokers and fork out thousands to buy Junior, no questions asked.”
My mom is quiet for a full two minutes before acknowledging the possibility. Finally, she dares to say it aloud: “You think they stole Jonas and sold him to new parents.”
“It’s possible,” Captain Moeller replies. “I don’t want to get your hopes up, but if that were the case…”
Mom grabs my hand before interrupting.
“Jonas could be alive.”
43
My eyes are still closed, but I’m awake now. The air in the room has shifted.
“London?” my mom whispers. I ignore her. She whispers again, but not to me. The sound is softer, as if she’s turned to someone in the hallway.
“I guess she overslept.”
“Guess so,” the voice whispers back. I wish everyone would shut up. It can’t be time to get ready for school already.
“London, it’s time to get up, honey. You’re going to be late for school,” my mom says in a singsong voice.
Finally, I let loose a long, audible groan and open my eyes.
My room is bright with the morning sun; apparently I forgot to shut the shades last night. The clock reads 7:00. Ugh. My mom stands in the doorway with a funny look on her face, blocking another person from view.
“What are you doing?” I ask, showing my displeasure.
“Good morning, London,” she says awkwardly, ignoring my question. “Do you want to read your notes?”
I furrow my eyebrows at her, and she smiles like a pageant contestant.
“No,” I grumble. “Who’s with you?”
The mystery visitor shifts and the floor creaks. I sit up in bed and try to see around my mom. She stays where she is for a few seconds, then throws up her hands.