CHAPTER 8
ISLA
1995
“Don’t wake her up,” Mom said as she flipped a pancake on the smooth stone griddle.
“But we’re having pancakes,” I said, as if that were a critical reason for anything.
“She needs rest,” she replied without looking up, then reached for the glass measuring bowl full of yellowish batter. Her face was placid but her grip on everything was hard, her hand on the handle a little too tight, each flick of her wrist sharp and restrained.
Dad looked over his morning coffee and swallowed whatever comment he was about to send her way.
I sat perched on my stool at the counter. “Then why did you wake me up?” I asked, looking over at Dad as if to say if you’re not going to speak, I will.
I slid an inch off my seat. “I’m going to go get her. It’s Saturday and—”
“Isla. No,” Mom cut me off fast, holding up her spatula warningly.
She was always doing this—holding on to any moment she could without the girl. A Saturday morning of pancakes, yes, wonderful. But not with her. Let’s keep her away. Just for a little bit longer.
It had been a month since the girl had been living at our home.
Her silence remained. Every time she didn’t answer a question or gave us a blank look, it was another reminder of that night. How her being here was not of the ordinary.
The first week she mainly stayed in the spare room upstairs, sleeping. Moni would tend to her as Mom and Dad were on the phone relentlessly—it was always ringing. A reporter wanting to ask questions for a follow-up story. Child services scheduling a visit. Mom talking to the doctor and repeatedly asking when she should bring “the girl” in next for an evaluation.
And of course, Dad’s back-and-forth with Sheriff Vandenberg.
“Any leads? I’m sorry to be calling again but it’s been nearly a week. Don’t you think anyone who knew her would have reached out by now?”
He would hang up the phone in his office, throw a Tic Tac into his mouth, and chew it rapidly. When he noticed me standing at the french doors to his office, he would quickly smile and offer me one.
“We don’t know where her mom and dad are yet?”
He would shake his head and pretend to turn back to his work.
By the time school started, the calls became less frequent, the conversations with Sheriff Vandenberg sparser.
In class, my third-grade teacher, Mrs. Elefson, would pull me aside and quietly ask me how I was doing.
“Fine,” I would say each time.
“And—that little girl. Is she doing okay?”
Her face was sympathetic, but I could still see it, that sloppy, gossipy eagerness in her eyes, wanting the latest on “that girl found near Grand Marais.”
Most of the time I’d just shrug.
When she was strong enough, she finally emerged and joined us for meals. Otherwise, she remained in what was now turning into “her room.” The doctor and child psychologist had both agreed: “too much stimulation” would be ill advised right now.
“She needs consistency. Stability. That’s what the doctors told us,” Mom would say—her rationale for keeping the girl in her room.
“What’s wrong with her?” I finally asked one morning, as Mom folded laundry into neat stacks on her and Dad’s bed. A tower of white socks here, a column of folded shirts there.
She didn’t even pause as she kept her focus on a towel she placed against her chest and brought the corners up. “She suffers from PTSD. That means something bad happened to her before we found her. It was enough to make her not talk.”
“Something bad?”
“Yes. Something that . . . scared her.”
I sat on the edge of the bed. “Do we know what was so scary?”
Her hands tightly held the folded towel.
“Will she ever talk again?”
She finally looked up at me. “I don’t know, Isla.”
Dad walked by the room. He looked at the two of us, but longer at Mom. She seemed to hold her breath around him. The same way she did that night at the cabin.
I saw them again from that night. Dad standing by Mom in the foggy bathroom mirror. The careful caress of her neck.
But it had not been simply a tender moment. That had been their truce. A ceasefire between them after the dust had settled from the days before.
Those days before were not as adoring. A livid whisper, quick and scorching, replaced by straight smiles when I entered the room. Moni, hastily taking me by the hand and outside, while the faint shouts of their fight echoed after us.
“What do you expect me to do now? Just ignore it again?”
