Surviving Valencia (12 page)

Starting seventh grade was completely different from starting sixth grade. I could not tell you what I wore because I no longer cared about clothes or being popular. I mainly stopped caring about clothes from necessity. When Valencia and Van died, my parents relinquished most of their duties as my caretaker. The brief nightmare of them asking about my grades and chaperoning dances fizzled. They just decided they were done being parents. My back-to-school clothes from the summer before were my newest clothes, and they were all getting too short. Valencia’s clothes and even my Christmas jeans were gone, donated to St. Vincent’s. But now I could do as I pleased, since they barely noticed me.

I stayed in my room a lot watching my little TV, alone in the flickering blue haze. I made elaborate stir fries in the kitchen, once nearly starting the house on fire, while my dad dozed on the porch and my mom strapped on her ankle weights for one of her three hour power walks. I joined every club our junior high school had to offer so I could avoid being at home.

My neighbor Rhonda Newcomber was in every club too, and her parents drove me home. I could tell Rhonda didn’t like it. She was an only child and was used to it just being the three of them. Her parents were nice but asked me too many questions about my family. Do you miss your sister and brother? How are your parents holding up? Do you have any other brothers or sisters? Now, Valencia and Van were twins, right? Rhonda just looked out the window.

People still treated me like an outcast, but the deaths of Van and Valencia elevated my status from outcast-you-spit-on to outcast-you-just-whisper-about. Sometimes I liked my new position of being just a little bit removed from the other kids in my grade. Then I would remember what it had taken to put me there and I would hate myself for being evil. I guess that is why I began making the offerings.

It wasn’t something I planned ahead of time; like a lot of things in life, it just kind of happened. I was staying in from recess one day, working on a book report, and I saw an open backpack over by the pencil sharpener. So I went over and took a look inside while I sharpened my pencil, and there was a baggie with a gold bracelet inside. The funny thing is, I knew there was going to be something important in that backpack. Fate led me to it. I don’t know if it was real gold. It looked like something Valencia would like. I took it for her and buried it behind the lilacs in my parents’ yard. There seemed to be a truth and purpose in what I was doing, not unlike how I imagined religion would feel.

In September of 1987 I was sitting in the kitchen, working on my homework. Geraldine McCray, the mother of Valencia’s high school boyfriend, had just died a few weeks earlier. Her obituary was attached to our refrigerator with a magnet shaped like the state of Nebraska.

“Why did you put her obituary on our fridge?” I asked my mother.

“To remember her by,” she said.

“But you couldn’t stand her.”

“That’s not true. Where would you come up with an idea like that?”

“Well, you wouldn’t let Valencia date Rob.”

“How do you even remember these things?”

“What do you mean? It was just a year ago.”

“It was several years ago,” she said.

“Anyway, I didn’t think we liked remembering stuff like that here.”

“Fine. Enough.” She went over to the refrigerator, removed the obituary and dropped it in the garbage. Then she opened her mouth as if to say something, then snapped it back closed.

“What?” I asked her.

She shook her head.

“What were you going to say, Mom?”

She drew in a deep breath. “You are obviously too young to understand about any of this.” This was her go-to insult for me because she knew how desperately I wanted to grow up and be taken seriously.

“Death? Is that what you mean? I understand plenty.”

She didn’t answer. Instead she went to the laundry room and reappeared with her big headphones over her ears. Their cord dangled, shoved into her pocket. As if I didn’t understand how they worked. Then I watched as she strapped on her ankle weights, leaning down, her fat butt like a blue jean billboard in my face. She grunted a little. I guess the waistband was cutting into her stomach. Next she touched up her lipstick in the blurry-mirrored side of the toaster, discreetly sniffing her pits as she did so. I had been growing suspicious of her. How could someone power walk this much and just keep getting fatter? Who wore jeans and loafers on a walk? Weren’t you supposed to wear sweatpants and sneakers? The lipstick was the final straw. I slammed my math book shut.

“I’m coming with you.”

“No. My walks clear my head. Keep doing your homework.”

I ran over to the door and stuffed my feet into my shoes. “I said, I’m coming with you.”

“And I said no.”

“Yes.”

“No.”

“Yes!”

She opened the backdoor, prepared to just walk away from me. I wasn’t having it.

“What’s the matter Miss Lipstick Face? Nice jeans for your
walk
, Mom. Walking three hours a day doesn’t give you a butt like that! That’s a sitting-around-eating-Twinkies butt! Don’t you think I
hear
things? Don’t you think I
know
about you? Tell me where you’re
really
going!”

She gasped and spun back around. Then, with the finesse of a cheetah, she lunged at me and grabbed the back of my neck. She slapped her other hand over my mouth. I was too shocked to bite her.

“Shut up. Shut up right now,” she said. It was more of a terrible little hiss than actual spoken words. She looked at me with such seething venomous fury that I was frozen. She quickly scanned the room for my father. “So you think you want to go for a
walk?
” she asked, murderously. Her hand was a cold, waxy paw against my lips.

I shook my head
No
, which wasn’t easy with her hand glued to my mouth. She yanked me outside and dragged me behind the garage.

“How dare you talk to me that way?” She slapped me hard across the face and just like that, I was crying. “Didn’t I raise you better than this?”

Raise
me? That almost made me laugh. People raised chickens or beef. I’d heard of barn raisings. Had someone been
raising
me? I just kept crying though.

She pulled a folded sheet of paper from her pocket. “
This
is where I’m going, you goddamned little know-it-all. You think you’re so smart. You’re going to be sorry tonight ever happened.”

It was a pamphlet for a support group of parents who had lost their children. It was from the church three blocks away. My mouth opened but nothing came out and I closed it again.

I watched her brushing at her eyes as she clomped down the street.

Three days had passed since the latest mystery letter had arrived. Three days of going crazy, crying in the bathroom, sneaking cigarettes. I carried my phone with me at all times, 911 just a few clicks away, my fingers on it like it was the trigger of a gun.

Adrian was back.

“Honey, what’s going on? What’s the matter?” he kept asking.

I didn’t want him to touch me. What I needed to do was go to the police. Instead, every time he left me for any length of time, I went back to the bookshelf and pulled down the decorating book. I had to be discreet. I would watch his car going down the street and when it turned the corner I would race to the bookshelf.

The long, white envelope hiding within the book bore a Minneapolis postmark and three ordinary stamps in a neat row. Inside were two old Polaroid photos, both unmistakably my sister. She was wearing her green sweater I’d seen her wear dozens of times. In one I could see her gold watch, a graduation gift from our grandparents. Duct tape was over her mouth but her eyes were open and focused on the camera. She was very scared and very much alive.

Her hands were bound with duct tape also, positioned peculiarly as if she had been told to pray while the tape was wrapped around them. In both she was curled up like they had been taken when she was somewhere small and uncomfortable. Then it became obvious to me that she was stuffed into the place where a passenger’s feet go in a vehicle. A big vehicle, like a truck. I could make out part of the dashboard and glove box above her head.

At the bottom of each Polaroid, scrawled in black ink, was her name:
Valencia Loden
. As someone might name a recipe card or a folder in a file cabinet. This made me think that whoever did this had a need to keep organized, that Valencia was one of many.

Typed on the notebook paper was the message
ADRIAN CORBIS, The past ALWAYS catches up with you. It’s only fair…
 

It was impossible for me to believe that Adrian could seriously have anything to do with this. I needed to talk to him and show these to him. We needed to go to the police. My brother and sister weren’t accident victims; they were
murder
victims. And these letters were a direct connection from the killer straight to our door, which obviously led me to believe we could be next.

But why were they addressed to Adrian instead of to me? Wasn’t I more of a missing link than he was? I began to think perhaps he really
was
involved, and the implications of this, of our entire life together, gave me chills.

I decided I had to talk to him.

But I was afraid of what he would say, and I could not bring myself to do so.

And then I decided that I must,
must
, talk to my parents about this. But every scenario I played out in my head was a hysterical, out of control mess.

So I decided then I would go to the police, alone. I’d talk to them, let them sort this out. But I was skeptical of how they would handle this, of whether they would be honest, or smart, or thorough enough to really help me. And to go to them, before speaking with Adrian was a betrayal. It was resigning myself to his guilt. I imagined his eyes, pained. I imagined him being taken away from me and I felt as though my heart would break.

So in my usual fashion in times of crisis, I did nothing.

I stayed in my bathrobe and I drank coffee in place of food. And over and over and over again I went to the book and touched, smelled, devoured the pictures of my sister. Long forgotten details of her. Purple embroidered flowers along the cuff of her sweater, right where the duct tape ended. Despite the Savannah heat, I got goose bumps of cold and fear, feeling I was with her, feeling I
was
her. My memories, scenes frozen in amber, thawed and seeped from the forgotten depths of my mind, catching my present self in their rich sap, immobilizing me further. I was in quicksand. Like an Alzheimer’s case, the past was real and the present was only a bad, fuzzy dream.

Long forgotten glimpses of 1986 were coming back to me. I remembered our house filling with relatives in days following the twins’ deaths, and a woman I had never met before trying to force feed me pumpkin pie. I could smell the pie, the memory was so vivid. One of my little cousins was there and he broke a coffee cup. The pieces got swept into a corner and stayed there for days, weeks. The most absurd thing was one of my aunts somberly handing me a booklet about getting my period. I already knew all about periods. I had read
Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret
at least four times. Who would think to bring that for me? I guess to those who knew my mother best, it was obvious she would be taking early retirement.

My thoughts were interrupted by the sound of the garage door opening. I shoved the pictures back in the book and replaced the book on the shelf, my heart beating so hard that the sound of it seemed to echo off the walls. I ran and sat down in the living room. If I was going to talk to Adrian about this, we needed to be somewhere safe. A public place with lots of people around. Just in case.

Just in case.

I hated myself for thinking that, but I did think it.

Wherever we went, it could not be too small or quiet. I couldn’t risk us being overheard. We needed to go somewhere busy. Bustling. Like a diner. Or a pancake house.

I heard him come in, go into the kitchen, set down something on the table. I heard the jangle of keys and the rustle of paper.

“Hi, Honey.” He appeared before me with one hand behind his back. I stiffened against the back of the couch. “For you,” he said, presenting me with a small bouquet of flowers.

“Thanks,” I said. “What’s the occasion?”

“Well…” He sat down beside me and put his arm around me, “You’ve been acting a little funny since we’ve been trying to get pregnant, and I just want you to know that if this isn’t the right time for you, then it’s not the right time for me either. I just wanted you to know… it’s okay.”

He gave me a little hug and we both sat there in silence until I got up to put the flowers in water.

“Are you in the mood for pancakes?” I called from the kitchen.

He rushed into the kitchen. “Pancakes? Are
you
in the mood for pancakes?”

“Yes. Let’s go get some.”

“Really? Now?”

“Yes. Now.”

“Are you trying to tell me something?”

“What do you mean?” I asked, pausing from arranging the flowers.

“Does the baby want pancakes?” He came over and slid his hand inside my robe. I hated how I was instantly turned on. He started rubbing my belly. “Whoa, honey, you feel like you’ve lost ten pounds! I can feel your back through your stomach! Are you alright?”

“There is no baby. I’m just hungry for pancakes.”

“I have known you for years and I have never seen you eat a pancake.”

“Adrian, just forget it. I will make myself a sandwich instead.” I pulled my robe together.

“No, we should get pancakes. Let’s go.”

A half hour later a stack of blueberry pancakes were placed before me. Adrian dug right into his buttermilk tower, while I picked at mine and washed down each bite with sips of orange juice. After not eating for days, the sweetness of the syrup was giving me an intense headache. I set down my fork, trying to speak.

“Look at you, wearing clothes,” said Adrian, smiling at me. “The robe look is nice, and it says ‘low maintenance’ which I can respect. But this is attractive too.”

I nodded, looking down at myself. I cleared my throat. “Adrian?”

“Hmm?” He asked me, simultaneously flagging down the waitress and holding up his empty juice glass. He shrugged, smiling a sheepish grin. Like
Oops, I drank it all.

The waitress giggled and took it from him, rushing off to refill it.

Hello? Can anyone see me here? I am his wife. Just give him a refill. You don’t have to giggle.

This was the problem with Adrian. He could charm anyone. Including me. I still
liked
him, still had a crush on him. Even when I hated him, I still became a sixteen year old girl if he looked at me right. He had the power in our relationship.

The waitress was back and the glass had a big slice of orange stuck on the side of it. She had clearly just reapplied her lipstick.

“For
you
,” she said. Fucking bitch.

“What made you start working at Border’s?” I asked him.

“I needed the money.”

“But why Border’s? Why not some other bookstore? Or, say, a CD store? You love music.”

“I probably applied at other places but they were the first ones to hire me. I don’t know; it was a long time ago. Why do you ask?”

I pushed a slice of mushy pancake through a river of buttery syrup. “It’s just, if you hadn’t, we never would have met.”

“We might have met anyway,” he said.

“Wouldn’t the Border’s on the east side have been closer for you?”

“Maybe a little bit. I think I wanted to work at the one on the west side because it was closer to my other job and I could just shoot over there straight from work. Not have to go home and see Belinda. We weren’t getting along much by that point, you know.”

“Sure,” I said.

“Have you ever thought how much better pancake houses would be if they served beer?”

“No. That’s gross. Do you remember the first time you met me?”

“I think so. We were in the break room, right?”

“What drew you to me?”
You could have had anyone,
I didn’t add.

“You were funny…”

“Funny?” I interrupted. “Are men really drawn to
funny
women?”

“
I
am. As I was saying, you were funny, and beautiful. You
are
funny and beautiful.”

This made me positively sure he was lying. Because I’m not beautiful. Cute, perhaps. Better than I used to be. But even if somehow, after years with me, someone could come to see me as beautiful, it would never be anyone’s first impression of me. And back then, prior to the yoga classes and high end skin care routines I now religiously followed, I was even less so. It was clear he came to Border’s because I worked there, and after killing Valencia, he needed to make it up to her the only way he knew how, by marrying her pathetic, miserable little sister.

“No, Adrian, seriously. There was that Natalie girl with the long brown hair. She was beautiful. Or what about Lauren? Remember her? That girl with the really blue eyes, way bluer than mine, and short black hair? They were both beautiful. Why didn’t you like either of them?”

“Honey, I don’t even remember them. I liked you because I liked you.”

“We had nothing in common. Right?”

“Honey, stop it. We just sort of clicked. Didn’t we?”

“Yes, too easily, come to think of it.”

“So we liked each other and we got along well and then we got married and everything was great. Is that what you’re complaining about?”

“I’m not complaining, Adrian. I am
asking
you what
drew
you to me.”

“I liked you. Until you recently went crazy.”

“Thanks.”

“Why can’t you just say what you mean?”

“I’m trying to.”

“I’m getting tired of this. If you have something to say to me, then say it. But enough of these head games.”

I finished my coffee and looked around the restaurant. It was a sad place to be. The waitresses looked tired and annoyed. The floor, table, and cracked, padded bench were all slightly sticky.

“I don’t think the accident that killed my brother and sister was really an accident,” I said.

“Why would you think that?” he asked.

“Well, for one thing, where’s my sister? How is it possible that she was never found?”

“It’s possible, Baby. If she landed in the river, which she must have, she could have washed all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico.”

“So you never think there might be more to the story?”

“No.”

I looked through the sugar and artificial sweeteners dish while Adrian continued eating. Half the packets were already opened. I pulled them out and set them aside, making a little pile. “These look like a model of a stack of nearly empty flour or rice bags, don’t they Adrian?”

“I guess so,” he said, focusing on his hashbrowns.

“More like rice sacks than bags of flour, I guess.”

“I guess.”

“Like something a person might see in… Where do you think, Adrian? Thailand, perhaps? Miniature Thailand. Or Miniature India. Or… Gosh, I don’t know.”

“They just look like sugar packets to me.”

“Well, as I was saying, I think there’s more to what happened to the twins than everyone thinks.”

“I think you’re wrong.”