“Janey-Pain, I’ve got something to show you. A secret passage.”
I should have known better than to go with him. But I was happy that he wanted to show me something special, that he had thought of me at all. I followed him up to the attic. It had been a while since anyone had gone up there, and a thick layer of dust
coated the cardboard boxes that held our old toys and family photo albums. Behind the rocking horse, Mark dropped to his knees.
“Look.” He pointed to a door that came to my waist. “What do you think is in there?” He unlatched the door and pulled it open.
“What is it?” I crouched down beside him. “Is that a closet?”
“Something even better. It’s a tunnel. There’s a door on the other side.”
“Where does the other door open?” I asked. “Mom and Dad’s room?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe. Or some other room we’ve never even seen.” He stuck his head through the door, then popped back out into the attic with me. “Go ahead. Check it out.”
I liked the kindly tone of his voice and wanted to do as he said, but I was scared of the dark and afraid of spiders. “You go first.”
“Are you
scared?
” Mark asked, scorn creeping into his voice. “I show you something this cool, and you’re too big a baby to explore?”
“I’m not afraid,” I told him. “I’m not a baby.”
“Then go ahead.” He scrambled to the side so I could get by him. “Go on.”
And I did. I crawled in as far as my waist. The space was dark, with only a square of light from the open door. “I don’t see the other side,” I told him.
“Keep going. You’ll see it.”
Feeling my way along the floor with my hands, I crept a few inches forward, then a few inches more, until my feet had passed the threshold. Then the door slammed shut behind me, and I heard the latch being fastened.
“Mark!” I pleaded. “Please don’t. Please!”
I listened for a moment. “Mark?” I expected him to laugh on the other side of the door, or to blackmail me for some of my leftover Halloween candy or the contents of my porcelain piggy bank. Or maybe he just wanted to hear me beg. “Mark,
please
let me out. Please?” But there was no sound, no footsteps, no creaking floorboards. I waited and waited, but Mark was gone.
I curled up in a ball, making myself as small as possible. When I moved, cobwebs brushed my arms. I lay there whimpering until my eyes grew used to the dark. Then I crawled forward, foot by foot, until I reached the wall. I felt along it, all the way from side to side, from floor to ceiling, looking for a secret exit that wasn’t there. Then I crawled back and banged on the entrance, screaming for help. Maybe a neighbor would hear me? It would be hours until Mom and Dad got home. How could I stand it in there for so long? I screamed and screamed until my throat felt torn.
A long time passed. I fell asleep — maybe I passed out with fright — but I woke with a start, feeling something crawl across my face. A spider? A mouse? I screamed some more. Was it day, night? Had my parents come home? Would they look for me and be surprised not to find me in my room? Would they ask Mark where I was, and would he tell them?
Then I had the most terrifying thought of all, one that seemed truer and truer the more I contemplated it: nobody would even notice I was gone.
“Miss Jane? Come get me. Miss Jane?” Maddy’s crackly voice over the intercom summoned me from my memories. Had I fallen
asleep? It took a few moments to recall where I was. I jumped up and pressed the intercom button.
“I’ll be right there. Hold on.” I straightened my clothes and rubbed sleep out of my eyes with hands that were undeniably shaky.
Calm down,
I told myself.
Don’t be silly. You’re safe
. My parents hadn’t realized I was missing until the next morning, when Mom came into my room to wake me for school. They had run around the house calling my name until I heard their muffled voices and screamed back in return. When they found me, they were angry at me for scaring them. I opened my mouth to tell them about Mark’s part in the episode but took one look at the expression on his face and swallowed my words.
“We thought you’d gone to bed early,” Mom told me, brushing cobwebs out of my hair. “How were we supposed to know you weren’t in your room?”
Why didn’t you come in to kiss me good night?
I wondered, but knew better than to ask. Instead I threw my arms around her waist and hugged her hard, refusing to let go until she pried me loose and sent me off to get dressed for school.
Get over it. You’re an adult now. Maddy needs you
. I started toward her room but, still sleepy and disoriented, turned a corner and found myself in a darkened wing I didn’t recognize. Maddy’s room was down the hall from mine; I had gone right past it and taken an unnecessary turn. I hesitated. It was then that I heard a laugh, so indistinct at first I thought I had imagined it. I froze, then heard the laugh again, louder this time.
“Maddy?” I called, though the laugh hadn’t sounded like hers.
Then I heard it again, still louder. It seemed to be coming from somewhere above me. Rough and mocking — it wasn’t a pleasant sound. Instinct told me to walk away from it, to go back in the direction from which I had come. I rounded the corner and almost bumped into Lucia.
“Slow down,” she chided. “You almost knocked me over.”
“Sorry. Maddy called me on the intercom, and I got a little lost and…” My voice trailed off. “Did you hear someone laughing?”
“Laughing?” Lucia asked, hands on her hips. “No, I don’t think so.”
“It was pretty loud. It seemed to be coming from the third floor.”
“Must have been Brenda,” Lucia said briskly. “Her room is up there.” A few times since my arrival at Thornfield Park I had passed a broad-shouldered, mannish woman, older than the rest of the housekeeping staff. That must have been Brenda. But hadn’t I been told the third floor was unsafe and off-limits?
Anticipating my question, Lucia said, “I know, I said it wasn’t safe up there. Brenda’s room is the only structurally sound bit — the turret’s a death trap.”
“I’d better get to Maddy.” I excused myself.
By the time I reached her room, she was calling out my name. When I opened the door, she ran to me. “I was calling you,” she said. “Why did you take so long?”
“I got a little lost. I came as fast as I could.” I put my arms around her and held her, and she didn’t pull away. “I’m sorry, Maddy, I really, truly am.”
Five weeks passed without incident, and it had begun to feel as though Nico Rathburn might never show up. My days with Maddy and Lucia had fallen into a peaceful rhythm, but instead of being relieved by the calm, I found myself feeling restless. On one of my days off, cold rain kept me in my room until late afternoon, when the sun finally broke through. I pulled on my rain boots, grabbed my raincoat and my tackle box full of art supplies, and hurried out the door. It felt so good to be outside that for once I didn’t stop at the high iron fence surrounding Thornfield Park. The guard on duty was a young, open-faced man with long blond hair. He waved me through the gate, smiling, and looked for a moment as though he wanted to speak to me. I considered stopping to introduce myself, but the very thought brought a flush to my cheeks. I looked
down at my feet, letting my hair fall forward to curtain my face, and kept hurrying along.
“Smile at the other children,” I remember my mother telling me at the little playground near our house. “Don’t cling to me. Go over to the monkey bars and say hello.”
I followed her instructions and walked over to the monkey bars. I even tried to say hello to the laughing girls hanging upside down from the topmost bars, but they were so happy and familiar with each other, their long hair sweeping from side to side like banners, that I felt the words die in my mouth. I stood frozen a long time until, still laughing and chattering, the girls unfurled down to the ground and ran off to the swings.
My mother’s anxiety about my social skills grew more acute the older I got. “By the time she was your age, Jenna had three boys fighting over her,” she would say. “Why don’t you ever go on dates?” Usually I would brush the question off and retreat to my room, but once I made the mistake of answering.
“I’m not as pretty as Jenna,” I said, as though it needed saying.
“If you smiled you’d be more approachable.” She put a hand on my arm. “Isn’t there a boy you like?”
There was: Michael, a popular boy with creamy skin, roses in his cheeks, and dark brown eyes, a basketball player. I’d liked him since fourth grade. Unlike the other popular boys, he wasn’t unkind to girls like me. Once in junior high when the bell rang, I left my pencil case on my desk, and he ran after me, shouting my name.
“You forgot this.” He pressed the case into my hands. “It’s nice. You wouldn’t want to lose it.” He was gone before I could thank him. But he knew my name. And he had cared enough to run after
me. The next time I saw him, I wanted to speak to him but hadn’t dared to.
“Well?” asked my mother. “There’s no boy you like?”
I couldn’t bring myself to utter his name, to break the magic spell of secrecy and expose my crush to the ordinary light of day. “Not really.”
My mother withdrew her hand. “You’re a cold fish,” she said.
Tears rose to my eyes. I knew there was no use pleading my case, and before I could think of anything more to say, she turned and walked away. “I’m not,” I whispered to the empty room.
I knew, even if the world did not, that I wasn’t cold. But maybe my mother had been right about one thing: maybe I should have smiled at the cute gatekeeper; maybe I would on the way back in. For now, though, it was too late. I kept walking.
The driveway fed into a two-lane road at the bottom of the hill. Lucia had mentioned horse farms a mile or so east, so I headed in that direction. The shoulder was narrow, the road winding. I picked my way along the marshy grass, trying to stay out of the street. Traffic on this road was infrequent, but the cars that did drive by tended to be going above the speed limit, or at least that’s how it felt as they whooshed past close enough to rustle my hair.
The road was slick. Petals from a stand of dogwood trees had been driven down by the torrential rain and made a pretty pattern on the black asphalt. I had been walking for about ten minutes and had just reached a sharp turn in the road when a sleek black sports coupe — quieter than the other cars had been — approached me from around the bend. I jumped back in surprise and before I had time to think heard the squeal of tires behind me and the wrenching
sound of metal on metal. The car had slid on the wet pavement and skidded into the guardrail on the opposite side of the road. It screeched to a stop, its front compartment filling with pillowy white air bags.
I gasped and found myself running up to the car, where a man in a navy blue jacket and mirrored sunglasses was picking his way out from under a deflated air bag.
“Are you okay?” I asked him. “Are you okay?”
“What the fuck were you doing in the road?” he yelled at me, his voice thunderous as he removed his sunglasses. “It’s dangerous… the road is wet. I could have hit you, for chrissake. I could have
killed
you.”
This struck me as unjust. “I wasn’t in the road,” I told him, working to keep my voice calm. “I was on the shoulder. And
you
were speeding.” I hated being sworn at and being wrongfully accused; one reminded me of Mark, the other of my parents.
The man looked at me strangely. He rubbed his chin, then ran a hand through his dark hair. “My car’s going to be in the shop for a week,” he said sullenly, as if conceding a point he’d rather not have admitted to.
“Are you all right?” I asked him again. “Should you go to the hospital?”
“The hospital?” He looked at me blankly. “What for?”
“If you bumped your head. Or strained your neck. You seem disoriented.”
Then he startled me by throwing back his head and laughing. “Disoriented? I’m oriented all right. The air bag knocked the wind
out of me, that’s all. But my dog could have gone through the windshield.”
An enormous, panting black Labrador retriever stood on the backseat, his nose poking over the partially rolled-down window. “Is he hurt?” I asked.
“He’s shaken up. You’re lucky he’s indestructible.” Then his voice grew gruff again. “Where could you be walking to all the way out here in the middle of nowhere? I suppose you’re one of those
fitness walkers
.” He emphasized the last two words with something like scorn.
“I am
not,
” I said, as if he’d accused me of being a criminal or a con artist. What business was it of his why I was out walking? “Maybe you should check your car and see if it will start.”
He stared at me a moment, then stalked back to his car. I watched as he expertly pushed aside the deflated driver’s side air bag and turned the key; I guessed this wasn’t the first time he’d performed that maneuver. The ignition caught. He rolled down the window and called to me. “It’s apparently indestructible too.”
“And you’re really going to be okay? You shouldn’t drive if you feel light-headed.”
He smiled condescendingly. “Thanks, nurse. I’ll be fine. I don’t have far to go.”
“Okay then.” I wasn’t about to let him spoil my walk. “Good-bye.”
I’d only taken a few steps when I heard him calling after me. “Wait!”
I turned back.
“I can’t let you keep wandering on this road that way. I didn’t kill you, but somebody else might.” He squinted and shielded his eyes. “Look, the sun’s getting lower. Do you know how hard it is to drive with the sun in your eyes? A driver can barely see the road this time of day, much less pedestrians lurking around corners.”
I stood there, not knowing what to say.
“I’ll take you wherever you’re going.”
“Thank you but no.” I took a step away from him. There was no way I was going to get into a strange man’s car. “I’m only going to walk a bit farther, then I’ll go home. I live less than a mile from here.”
“You do? There aren’t any houses around here.”
I spoke without thinking. “Yes, there are. Well, one — at Thornfield Park.” I immediately regretted my words; if I didn’t trust him enough to ride in his car, why on earth had I told him where I lived? But then I remembered the high fence and the guardhouse and felt a wave of relief wash over me.