My notebook again. Fiona’s handwriting:
Came over today to find you uncharacteristically subdued. Anger we see a lot of. Bewilderment. And a surprising degree of intelligent acceptance. But rarely this resigned passivity.
You were slumped at the table, your face flat down, your hands hanging at your sides. I crouched down and put my arm around your shoulders, but you didn’t move or say anything. Wouldn’t answer any questions or give any sign you knew I was there.
Eventually you sat up, pushed back the chair, and slowly went up the stairs to bed. I didn’t dare follow you. Didn’t dare ask any more questions for fear of what you would reveal about the dark place you were residing in.
I had never been afraid like that. I wasn’t always sure what you were thinking, but I could always ask, and sometimes you would even tell me. If the truth had the power to hurt, you made it palatable by your calm acceptance of it.
You don’t really like me very much, do you? I asked you when I was fifteen. No, you said, and you don’t like me very much either right now.
But we’ll find each other again. And we did. If I’d known that within a decade I would lose both you and Dad, would I have acted differently back then? Probably not. I probably would have gone out and gotten another tattoo.
That tattoo. You keep asking about it, Mom, so I’ll write it down here. It’s a pretty good story. I already had two tattoos. There was the one I got with Eric when I was fourteen. You didn’t know about that one. It’s very discreet—on my left buttock. A tiny Tinker Bell. Well, I was fourteen.
Then when I was sixteen, the youngest freshman in my class at Stanford, I got another one, this time on my ankle. A cannabis sativa plant. Yes, you can guess why a kid really too young to be away from home would think that was cool.
But the rattlesnake. That was my junior year. I’d done okay the first two years, better than I’d done in high school socially, actually made some friends, did the things you’d expect. Drank too much. Slept around.
But in my junior year, things fell apart. My best friend had a sort of breakdown and went home to West Virginia. He wrote a couple times, made jokes about the skinny dogs and the ugly women, and that was that. Two of my other friends started dating each other, retreated into their own private world, put up a barrier against others. It felt oddly personal.
At that point, I was living off campus in a room rented from this Silicon Valley marketing type. She wasn’t there half the time, either traveling or staying up in the city with her boyfriend. The house was up in the redwoods, high above the university.
When people came up to visit they’d sit in the hot tub and ooh and aah, but I never got used to the place. The quiet disturbed me, as did the fact that the sun went behind the hills at two in the afternoon and suddenly the day was over.
Coyotes trotted boldly through the yard, rats scratched under the floors and in the woodwork, and even the deer spooked me. They’d come right up to the house to forage, and since there were no curtains on the windows—the house was on three acres of redwoods, so there was no need—I’d woken up several times to deer faces pressed against the glass, solemnly observing me as they chewed.
So I took to spending a lot of my time down on the flats, in Palo Alto. There was one coffeehouse I liked, and I’d sit there for hours, drinking cup after cup of black coffee and studying. By then I was taking grad classes, and my professors were telling me I had a career in academia if I wanted one. Because I wanted one, badly, you could find me at that coffeehouse working pretty much every night.
I was there one Friday night as usual, hyped up on coffee and lonely as hell, and not wanting to go back up the hill to that house without curtains. I had resigned myself to doing just that, however, when a nice- looking young woman—just a little older than myself, I’d guess—came up to me. She had a question about what I was studying—was it math? Sort of, I said, and we fell into a conversation about what economics was and why it mattered.
After a while she motioned to a young man sitting at another table and said, We’re going to a party in Santa Cruz, you want to come? I thought,Well, this is strange. And, I’m not sure I like these people. There was something too eager about them. The woman’s teeth were too large for her mouth when she smiled. And then, recklessly, Why the hell not?
They told me not to bother with my car, that they’d bring me back when the party was over. That should have alerted me. But I got in the car, and the first thing that happened was they started going up the hill toward where I lived.
I said, Wait a minute, this isn’t the way to Santa Cruz, and they told me it was a back way, a really pretty one. Since I’d had enough of that kind of pretty and was beginning to think I’d done a very foolish thing, I asked them to just drop me off at my house—we were passing right by my street—and said that I’d pick up my car in the morning.
But they refused. Said, No, you’re coming with us. And I was both very angry and very frightened. I had a kind of a crazy idea that I would wait until the car slowed to go around a corner and then jump out, but when I tried to open the door I found they’d put the child-safety locks on. So I just folded into myself and waited to see what happened.
We got to this old ranch house up in the Santa Cruz mountains—where, I’m still not sure—and there was another poor soul like me who they’d picked up in Santa Clara. We were all in this room and this man came out and welcomed me and this other girl to what he called “the family.” Said we shouldn’t be alarmed. Said we could go home whenever we wanted, we just had to give them a chance. Keep an open mind.
At that point, I got up and left the room. Didn’t run, didn’t hurry, just walked right out of that house and down the long driveway and into the road. Astonishingly, no one followed me.
Later, maybe a half mile down the road, I found my hands clenched into fists. I kept walking, it was pitch-black, and I had no idea where I was, but had a vague idea of getting to the nearest house and calling the police. And then I saw headlights. I stuck out my thumb, and a truck with two sixteen-year-old kids from Ben
