After dinner, I laid out my plan to Arlene. She nodded and didn't say much. Apoc laid on the floor by the door apparently sleeping. I wish I understood how much he understood of my plans. All in all they seemed to have no interest for him whatsoever.
Finally, she sighed and put down her notepad.
"Alright, I'll do what I can."
We pulled out of our campsite early the next morning and back onto the road. Two days later we were back in Oso Creek, Idaho, where I'd been kidnapped. It was the same idyllic small town I'd left. I remembered it as if I'd been here a decade ago, and somehow it rankled that nothing I could see had changed. A young woman disappears and a young man run over and no one even bothers to look into it? Nothing happened? Half the businesses on the tiny main street were shuttered, the mills having shut down ten years ago and work that made this town had moved on.
I wasn't sure what I was expecting exactly. Maybe to see my picture on the back of a milk carton, or a poster on main street?
I saw just a glimpse of the vet's office and it looked so average, which made the feeling like I'd been shot full of needles such a strange sensation. A two-tone single story brown clapboard that concealed the secrets of how this all started for me. I could swear for just a moment that my car was parked out front and a girl who looked just like me was going inside. But I knew that my memory was playing tricks on me. I'd been back there so many times during those months recovering it played back like a sad little movie in my head. I could see myself in my minds eye, what I was wearing the day that I carried Blossom through those doors.
I hadn't wanted to talk to anyone in town.
I hadn't connected with anyone except at the vets office. I'd talked to Chris, but I didn't know what had happened to him.
I don't even think I'd spoken to the waiter at the bar that night.
Everyone I had met either was my kidnapper or a fellow victim that night.
I'd tried to rationalize that the police had nothing to go on and that was why I was never found. I had just ceased to exist. But I knew that wasn't true. Someone had driven my car away. It wasn't parked where I'd left it.
The first time I met Dr. Shen, I couldn't remember what his face looked like that first day. I hadn't paid any attention to him. All of my memories of that day were of Blossom and then Chris. Chris who had been so kind to me, a hug to steel me against the loss of my best friend. A listening ear, a warm embrace, and a shoulder to cry on after she left me here.
Again I could see his warm brown eyes in my memory. I could see me looking back at him in the reflection in his eyes, the oncoming headlights, the moment his eyes flicked behind me. Then again as we both lay on the ground, I remembered how he looked before I was pulled away, eyes wide open, his pupils got so big and black. I felt the chill of fear, he had looked so frightened that night, at the end.
Arlene agreed to scout the vet's office and to hit up the local paper to see if Chris had reported me missing. And to find out if he still worked in the vets office and what had happened to him.
