Page 32 of Snow Creek

“I’ll call your Aunt Ruth,” I say, “but it would take her a day at best to get here.”

Joshua nods. “Yeah. Thank you.”

“Do you have anyone in the neighborhood you can be with?”

He shakes his head.

“I mean there are people around here, but we only know them in passing. I don’t even know their names.”

“Are you going to be all right? Should I send someone out here tonight? Otherwise, I’ll be back when I have more news. You call me if you need anything, Joshua?”

“We’ll be fine,” he says, tucking his shoulder-length hair behind an ear. He’s acting strong for my benefit, showing me that he can deal with the tragedy. I also see the hope in his eyes. “Our dad has to be out there,” he says. “Someone must have abducted them. Maybe he escaped or something?”

I doubt it, though I don’t say so.

“We’ll do our best to find him.”

Fourteen

I try Ruth Turner three times but no one picks up. Maybe she’s at the church caucus, whatever that is. Or her husband won’t allow her to take my call. There’s no answer on her so-called borrowed cell phone, either. Though I wonder how close the sisters actually were—after all, she hadn’t been to Snow Creek in a half dozen years, I know that my words will crush her.

I order a pizza from an Italian place across from the courthouse on my way home. I want thick crust with a mountain of cheese and pepperoni. I’ll probably burn the roof of my mouth with the oil that pools on each little round slice of pepperoni. I don’t care. The pizza is so good and maybe I deserve a little pain to shift me from what I know I’ll do when I get home.

I pull a triangle of cheesy goodness from the box and eat it as I drive. Oh perfect, I think… I feel a burn.

The house is surprisingly cool when I go inside and I set down the pizza box next to the tapes. Analog tapes. I suddenly feel old. The world today is a vapor. Nothing, not even photographs, exists in tangible form. Just ether floating around your phone or computer. I crack a cold beer and open the windows to suck in the maritime breeze.

My fingertips roll over the little rectangles, each like a pair of coiled snakes in a clear, plastic case.

I insert the next one into the little recorder.

Dr. Albright tells me to take off my shoes. The command puzzles me for a moment. What kind of therapy was I getting anyway? What else did I forget? I breathe a sigh of relief when it dawns on me that there’d been a cloudburst on my way to my appointment that afternoon. My hair, my feet and the front of my shirt where my jacket was unzipped were sopping.

“Feel better?”she asks.

“Thanks,”I say.“It was a dumb day for sandals.”

She murmurs something that I can’t make out.

“Let’s start where we left off last time. Close your eyes and tell me everything; tell me the story that you’ve held inside all these years, Rylee. I want to see what you saw, hear how you felt. Put me right there in real time.”

“Okay,”my younger self says.

I drink my beer, the first of several I’ll have. The pizza, that I told myself when I ordered it would be great for lunch the next day, will be nearly gone.

I tell her about how Hayden and I slept in the bathroom of theWalla Walla, the ferry from Bremerton to Seattle. I mention the sepia-toned photograph of Princess Angeline and how she watched me.

Dr. A: Tell me more about that.

Me: Princess Angeline, Chief Seattle’s daughter, was born in 1820, died in 1896. I remember looking at her picture. She had skin weathered like silver driftwood and her eyes were wide and light in color—like amber beach glass, I think. I felt like she was watching me as I plotted my way to the end of the night.

Dr. A: You didn’t really think that, did you?

Me: I’m messed up, Doctor. I’ve done crazy things, but no, I’m not crazy.

Dr. Albright offers an apology, and I carry on with my story. I tell her how I monitored the cleaning crew’s routine with the bathrooms, going in and out, with a mop and bucket every fifteen minutes.

I knew that inside the door was a sheet of paper that indicated when the restroom was last cleaned. It was a farce, of course. They were only in there long enough to sign their name to the card affixed on to the back of the door that indicated they’d done what the captain had asked.

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