The Girl in the White Van Read online

  When I was a little kid, it had been cool to have a cop for a dad. I could bring him on career day or even for show-and-tell. Looking at him in his uniform made me feel so much pride.

  As I got older, it became slightly more complicated. I started noticing how cautious my dad was and how little he trusted anyone but himself. He was always grilling me and Orlando and even my mom. Whenever me or my brother made a new friend, the joke was that before we could even think of going over to visit, my dad had to know the full legal name and date of birth of everyone who lived in the house. All my friends were allowed to go to birthday parties or the mall by themselves years before me.

  My dad had taught me a lot of things. Not to trust strangers. To always treat a gun like it was loaded. That most people didn’t understand what it was like to be a cop. (He ruined any TV show or movie with a cop in it, complaining loudly about how wrong they got everything.)

  And because my dad was a cop, people expected me to be either a narc or a rebel—as if there weren’t any in-betweens.

  He was the one who got me into kung fu, way back in third grade. He wanted me to know how to defend myself. But lately whenever I talked about Sifu Terry or even Bruce Lee, he looked impatient.

  Now he said, “Tell me more about what happened at kung fu class.”

  “It was just a regular class. We did grab counters.” The whole time I was talking, my anxiety was increasing. “Why? What’s wrong?”

  He jerked his chin in the direction of the door. “That’s Savannah Taylor’s mom out there. She said Savannah never came home last night. And she’s not at school today.”

  “What? But her mom picked her up after class.”

  My dad’s thick eyebrows drew together. “The mom couldn’t have picked her up. She works swing shift. And Sifu Terry told her that you two closed up the dojo together.”

  Did my dad think I was hiding Savannah someplace? “Are you asking if I know where Savannah is? Because I don’t.”

  “I’m just trying to gather information. What made you think her mom was picking her up? Did you see Savannah getting into a car?”

  “I asked if I could walk her home. She said her mom was waiting for her in the upper parking lot. Why would she lie to me about that?”

  “Maybe she was meeting someone else up there. Does she have a friend she might be with?”

  I thought of the times I had noticed Savannah at lunch, always with a book. “I haven’t seen her talking with anyone else at school. She just moved here last summer. All I know is that she was upset when she came to class. She looked like she’d been crying. And she said something about a fight with her mom’s boyfriend. I think his name is Tim.”

  My dad leaned forward. “What did she say about him?”

  “I don’t remember exactly. Something about how Tim said it was stupid for her to take kung fu.”

  “Tim told Savannah’s mom about the argument. He said the last he saw of her was when she left for class.” Dad tapped his lips with his index finger. “Do you think she might have run away rather than go back home?”

  “No.” I shook my head.

  “Why are you so sure?”

  “If she was running away, why would she bother to go to kung fu first?”

  My dad shrugged. “Teens can be impulsive. Maybe she started walking home and realized she didn’t want to face him.”

  “She was upset,” I said slowly. “And she definitely didn’t like that Tim guy. She might even have been afraid of him.”

  My dad considered this. A muscle flexed in his jaw. “Do you think he was hurting her?” The specifics of hurting hung unspoken in the air.

  “I don’t know. Maybe.” Why had I been so focused on myself last night, instead of on her? The inside of my nose started to sting as I followed things to their logical conclusion. “Dad—do you think he did something to Savannah?”

  TIM HIXON

  When the cop, some guy named Diaz, said “your stepdaughter,” I stopped him. We were standing outside my work bay. Next to us, a Dodge Ramcharger hung suspended, waiting for me to figure out what was making the strange noise its owner could not describe in any way that made sense.

  Savannah was Lorraine’s daughter. She had nothing to do with me. And that was by her choice.

  I had tried to be friendly. But she never liked me, not from the get-go. She was always shooting her mom a look or rolling her eyes when I talked. As if I wasn’t right there.

  I knew how to recognize disrespect.

  That girl had no idea how good she had it. Had I ever laid a finger on her? No. Not even when she was just asking for a spanking. And no matter what some people might think, she wasn’t too big for that. You were never too big, not when you insisted on talking back. Insisted on acting like a spoiled brat.

  And she was spoiled. I’d even let her have her own room, put my motorcycle outside, let her and Lorraine paint it this pinky-purple color called “Violets in the Spring.”

  When I was a kid, I slept on a couch. Never had my own bedroom. And that didn’t hurt me one bit. If anything, it made me stronger.

  The cop kept badgering me. “Why didn’t you report your girlfriend’s daughter’s disappearance right away?”

  “What disappearance? She left for that karate class she takes.” I knew it was kung fu, but it felt good to call it karate.

  “But she didn’t come back. Why didn’t you alert her mother at work? Why didn’t you call the police?”

  “I figured Savannah was just mad at me, but I knew she’d come back eventually. I mean, where else was she going to go? And by the time Lorraine came home, I was already asleep. She didn’t say nothing. I thought Savannah must have come back.” This morning, Lorraine had been hysterical. But I wasn’t worried. Savannah was probably just being stubborn.

  That girl didn’t even know how lucky she was to be getting a free ride. When I was her age, I was working thirty-six hours a week at a TacoTime. I was a shift manager, and proud of it. A sixteen-year-old shift manager.

  And I didn’t have any adults to live with. My mom was living with a friend. My stepdad had moved out before she did. Which was one way of saying he was in Multnomah County Jail awaiting trial.

  My little sister was in foster care. My mom had kicked me out for telling the school counselor what my stepdad was doing to my sister.

  I’m the one who betrayed him.

  When he was the only dad I’d ever known.

  And it turned out that nobody was happier and nothing got better.

  After everything went to hell, I wished I’d kept my mouth shut. But I’d seen how my sister cried. And then how she closed herself off.

  Since I didn’t want to go into foster care, I disappeared when the social workers came around. At sixteen, I had to figure out how to make it on my own. If I didn’t work enough hours, I didn’t eat, except for mistakes. And when the owner is watching you like a hawk, you have to be careful about making mistakes on purpose. Something had to give. And what gave was school.

  But Savannah got to go every day. She’d already had more schooling than me. And she had lots of opinions, which she was more than happy to share.

  “You’ve already admitted that you argued that night. Is there anything else that happened that you want to tell me about, Tim?”

  There was no way they were going to pin this on me. “No.”

  The cop shook his head, looking grave. “You’ve had a DWI.”

  “Only once. It was a mistake, and I took a class.” It had been tough not driving, even if it was only for a few weeks. My car was a real classic. A 1968 Camaro. Right now it was parked on the back lot, waiting for the increasingly rare parts it needed to be shipped.

  The car had belonged to my stepdad. When he went to prison, he gave it to me.

  The thing was, I actually liked him. How messed up was that? But he was the closest thing I ever had to a father. He even took me fishing. He showed me how to tie knots, how to cast the line, how to gut the fish.

&
nbsp; Using the knife he handed me, I followed his instructions on how to split open the white belly. I wanted to throw up, but I didn’t. I just swallowed hard and pushed the sick feeling back down.

  I was good at that.

  I ignored the way the flat silver eye of the fish stared at me. The way the white flesh resisted. And then parted. The way its tail wiggled back and forth as I sawed. He said it was just from the knife. I kept doing what he said. Holding the head between two fingers, sticking the fingers of my other hand into the slit I’d made. It felt like I was putting my fingers into a mouth. I pulled out the red and pink and white guts and dropped them into the water.

  And I didn’t feel a thing.

  Now the cop took a step closer. “And what about that other arrest, Tim? The one for domestic violence?”

  To see a thing uncolored by one’s own personal preferences and desires is to see it in its own pristine simplicity.

  —BRUCE LEE

  SAVANNAH TAYLOR

  My first conscious thought wasn’t made up of words. Instead, it was a silent scream. It felt like it had been echoing inside me for an eternity.

  I had to move, to get up, to run. Had to get away. I no longer knew from what, just that I would surely die if I didn’t.

  But as I started to push myself upright, pain even stronger than my terror ripped through me. I slumped back with a groan.

  “It’s okay,” a girl’s voice said. A gentle hand patted my shoulder. “You’re safe.”

  The events that had brought me here slowly filtered into my memory. When I had tried to run in the parking lot, I had fallen, hit my head, and passed out, which meant I probably had a concussion. And I hadn’t improved things by leaping out of a van while it was moving. Now my wrist throbbed, my head pulsed in time with my heart, and my ribs hurt when I took a breath.

  “Where is he?” The words came out slurred. Wear see? My tongue felt like a piece of leather.

  “Don’t worry,” said the girl. I could tell she was sitting next to me, on the edge of the bed where I lay under the covers. “It’s just you and me. But we should be quiet. He doesn’t like noise.”

  Finally I forced open my heavy lids. I was in a dimly lit room. The double bed filled the small space nearly edge to edge. Short brown curtains covered the windows.

  Wincing, I slowly turned my head to look the girl in the eye. And shrieked.

  She looked like Frankenstein’s monster, if he were a teenaged girl. Barely healed scars crisscrossed her face. The edges of a torn nostril didn’t quite meet, and there was a red hole in the middle of her lower lip.

  The girl didn’t flinch, but steadily met my gaze with her blue eyes. Her eyes and her forehead were the only untouched parts of her face. With the back of her hand, she wiped her wet-looking chin.

  “What happened to you?”

  “A dog bit me.”

  My own face hurt. Suddenly fearful, I tried to bring up my hands to touch it, but found my left arm was in a makeshift splint. I frantically ran my right hand over my forehead, eyelids, cheeks, nose, and chin. While parts felt scraped and bruised, my features seemed whole.

  “I’m Jenny,” she said as I pawed at my face. “And you’re Savannah, right?”

  Hearing my name come out of a stranger’s mouth sent another zap of adrenaline through me. “How do you know my name?”

  “Sorry. I went through the wallet in your backpack.” Jenny’s straight dark hair fell past her shoulders. Under a gray cardigan, she was wearing skinny jeans and a tight red sweater with a deep V-neck. She leaned closer. “He took me, too.” Her whisper was as light as a breath.

  “We have to get out of here.” But where was here? My best guess was some tiny shack in the woods, but that still didn’t seem quite right.

  Jenny shook her head. “You need to rest. You’re hurt.”

  For an answer, I threw back the covers and pushed myself up with my good hand. I swung my legs over the edge of the bed, ignoring how the room tilted. When I steadied myself on the ivory-colored wall, it felt cool and oddly slick. The wall was made of plastic.

  I went to the window, with Jenny trailing behind me. But when I pushed aside the curtain, all I saw was flat silver. At first I thought it was paint, but then I realized the window had been covered from the outside with a shiny plastic tarp.

  Increasingly light-headed, I made for the doorway, ignoring Jenny telling me to stop, to come back.

  I staggered down the short hall. When the elbow of my bad arm banged against the wall, pain turned the edges of my vision white. I passed a tiny bathroom with a half-open folding door. This wasn’t a shack, I realized. It was a motor home.

  As the space opened out into a carpeted living area, Jenny grabbed my shoulder. With a twist, I shook her hand loose and made for the door in the far wall. Its window was also covered. I grabbed the handle.

  “Don’t open that!” Jenny said urgently behind me.

  I turned the handle and pushed. It started to open, revealing a sliver of light. Cold air rushed in through the crack. Metal rattled. I was already moving my foot to step outside when the door’s movement abruptly stopped. The gap was only about three inches wide. In frustration, I bashed the door with my shoulder, ignoring how it set off echoes of pain. But the door refused to budge.

  Putting my eye to the gap, I caught a glimpse of a heavy metal chain that was preventing it from opening all the way. Below it was dark, muddy ground. “Help! Help us!” I shouted through the gap.

  Suddenly the door vibrated under my palm when something scrabbled and scratched at the metal. And in the gap I saw a dark and terrible eye, a monster’s eye with no white at all.

  It tried to thrust its head in farther, just below my face. A growl filled the room. With a shriek, I pulled back. The dog’s mouth snapped open and closed, black-rimmed lips stretched over long white teeth. Silvery threads of saliva bound together the top and bottom canines.

  Jenny pushed me away with one hand while she wrenched the door closed with the other. Outside, the dog began to bark, angry and urgent.

  “I told you not to do that!” She brought her hands to her stitched-together face. Her nails were ragged, bitten to the quick. “Did Rex bite you?”

  The adrenaline and fear that had propelled me this far suddenly disappeared. I fell more than sat on the small couch. “No.”

  She scurried to the window, bent down, and pressed one eye to it. There was the tiniest of gaps at the bottom where the tarp had slipped. “If Sir hears Rex, he’ll come back, and he’ll be so mad. He hates noise.”

  “We have to get out of here.”

  “Even if we got out of here, we won’t get past Rex. I already tried to escape, months ago.” Turning back to me, she gestured at her ruined face. “And you can see how far that got me.”

  “You said that guy took you, too. When was that?”

  “Back in February.”

  But this was December. Jenny had been here for months and months. Nearly a year. The feeling of the room closing in, of the edges of my vision dimming, crashed back over me like a sneaker wave.

  BLAKE DOWD

  “Two weeks until Christmas break,” IAN said as he handed me a red Solo cup. “I cannot wait.”

  I nodded as I took the beer. School was mostly torture, because it meant staying still, and I was terrible at that. But being home would not be any better. I headed to the back of the basement and leaned against the wall, on the edge of the party but not really part of it.

  Thanksgiving had been bad enough, but at least that had been only four days. Lately my mom was either at work or sitting silently on the couch, a glass of wine in her hand, staring at nothing. My dad hadn’t lived with us since the summer, when they argued about him buying presents for Jenny’s birthday. And whenever I was at home, I was hyperaware of Jenny’s room lying empty, like a rotting cavity hidden deep in a mouth.

  I was the one that lived. Did my parents ever regret that? Jenny had always been the easy one. Pretty. Obedient. Smart.


  Now Jenny was gone. And not gone.

  My mom was sure she was dead. My dad was sure she was alive. And me? I felt like Jenny was stuck. Both living and dead, like Schrödinger’s cat.

  My friend Ian, who was way smarter than me, had told me about this physicist, this Schrödinger guy, who had created something that was called a thought experiment. It imagined that you put a cat, a Geiger counter, a bottle of hydrochloric acid, and a tiny bit of radioactive material into a steel box.

  Geiger counters detect radioactive emissions, and the second this imaginary Geiger counter detected even a single atom decaying, it was set to trip a hammer that would shatter the bottle of poison, which would kill the cat.

  So sooner or later, in the thought experiment, the cat would die. You just didn’t know when. Some physicists believed that after a while, the cat would be simultaneously alive and dead—at least until someone opened the steel box to look. Of course once you looked, the cat could only be alive or dead, not both.

  Jenny was the cat, but she was still inside the box. Unobserved. So she was both dead and alive.

  All around me, kids were laughing and talking. A few people were dancing, and a few more were making out. Ian was walking around with a sprig of mistletoe over his head, trying to get girls to kiss him.

  Just like Schrödinger’s cat, just like Jenny, I was here and not here.

  Christmas Day would probably be a repeat of Thanksgiving, only worse, because it was Christmas. My grandma was again insisting that the whole family get together. She would make food that no one in my immediate family would do more than push around their plates. My uncle would “share” Bible verses about God’s plans and the afterlife, while my aunt laid her hand on his arm and whispered at him to stop. Their little girls would run around, high on sugar cookies, while my mom watched them, her face a mask. Looking like if you touched it, it would crack and then crumble into dust.