Girl, Stolen(39)

Every night Griffin lay in the dark and listened to monitors beeping, ventilators whooshing, machines monitoring the thin threads of life. He heard other patients pleading, praying, screaming. Most of them frightened him. One was a homeless man who had been set on fire by bored teens. Another was a boy only a few years older than Griffin who had tried to kill himself by soaking his clothes with gasoline and lighting a match. And there was a little kid, two or three years old, who had tugged on the cord of a deep-fat fryer and pulled it over on himself. One woman had been burned in a car accident. She had died on the third day he was there.

In Griffin’s nightmares, the nurses in their blue plastic gowns, rubber gloves, and paper bonnets were again wheeling him to the debridement room to scrub off his dead flesh with wire-bristled brushes.

Even after his burns healed, he was reminded of them constantly. Every morning, his fingers traced the red, hairless scars when he soaped his chest and neck in the shower, or touched the shallower scars on the insides of his thighs where they had taken the skin grafts. Strangers stared at the shine of tight skin on his throat. Every touch, every stare, brought it all back: the lights, the screams, the whispers, the smells.

When he was out of the house, he wore his shirts buttoned up to the neck, but people still noticed the scars. His shirt collar didn’t hide everything, and once people noticed, most of them couldn’t stop staring, whether it was in a movie line or at the grocery store. Some looked at him and quickly looked away. Some pretended not to look – and then stared if they thought he hadn’t noticed. And a few made a point of meeting his eyes and smiling, like he was some kind of a retard or a dog who might turn on them.

He hated the smiles worst of all.

Every day Griffin was in the hospital, his mother had visited him. And then one day, right before he was released, she didn’t come.

“So I’ve been kind of wondering – where’s your mom?” Cheyenne asked. It was spooky, like she could read his mind.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, you live here with your dad, but you obviously had to have had a mom, so where is she?”

“She and my dad didn’t get along,” Griffin said shortly. “So she moved back to Chicago. That’s where she grew up.” She used to tell him stories about Chicago, about the lake in the summer and the wind in the winter. Roy didn’t like to hear them, so she only told them when he wasn’t around.

When Roy finally came to visit Griffin in the hospital, he had told Griffin that his mom had left. She had fought with Roy about the drugs, said she had had enough, and she had left. Roy was expressionless when he broke the news.

It wasn’t until he got home that Griffin could see that his dad really had been experiencing emotions. First anger (there was a great deal of broken furniture and dishes) and then despair (he hadn’t cleaned anything up).

Griffin had thrown away the shards, straightened up what was left, and gotten on without speaking about it. Just as he had with his burns. Just as he had when his mother never wrote or called. He had Googled her a few times at school, but the few Janie Sawyers he found were never the right age.

Cheyenne was quiet for a long time. Then she said in a low voice, “Do you think your dad will really let me go?”

“He says he will.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

The truth was that with so much money at stake, Griffin wasn’t sure how far he could trust what Roy said. If his dad did let Cheyenne go, if he left the actual doing of it to TJ and Jimbo, Griffin thought now that they might just take her into the woods instead and kill her. Rape her and kill her.

Griffin realized the only one he trusted to let Cheyenne go was himself. He had to do it, even if it meant risking everything. Meant he ended up in prison, along with Roy and TJ and Jimbo. The alternative was Cheyenne being murdered. He couldn’t tell her, in case she somehow let it slip to the others. But when everyone was out getting the drop, he would take Cheyenne and go. When there was no chance that one of them would show up at the house and try to stop them. He would put Cheyenne in the truck and drive like hell until he could get someplace with a phone, someplace with nice bright lighting and lots of people. Where even if they caught up with him, TJ and Jimbo might think twice about killing them. And then he would turn her loose and go back and meet his dad and they would go to Mexico or wherever. And he would hope that Cheyenne would keep her promise and not tell the police their names. And hope that the police didn’t show up before he could get the hell out of there. Because if they did, they might decide he was one of the bad guys and kill him.