Hunting Annabelle, page 4
The roof is minimally slanted and I take her to my favorite spot, tucked next to vents on the southwest side. From up here, people are nothing but little crawling creatures, creeping along the paths in pairs and groups. Far ahead, where the blinding sun is beginning to sink into the hazy, indistinct horizon, the theme park ends and the city begins. The freeway curves along the south toward downtown and the skyscrapers poke up in a cluster.
We settle down on the gently sloping roof to watch the sunset, tired and arguing playfully. She wants me to take her to the basement of the wax museum where they store all their Halloween stuff. I’ve been down there a couple of times during chaotic shift changes when so many people are coming and going that they never noticed me, but I’m not about to go now on a slow weekday. I can’t get kicked out of Four Corners; where would I go instead?
She kisses me and I forget all about our little spat. For such a sweet girl, she kisses like a goddess. Her lips and skin are so soft; my fingertips and lips aren’t gentle enough to kiss and touch her properly. I trail kisses down her neck and she shivers, one hand clutching the back of my hair. I think she likes my hair; she keeps running her hands through it. I want to tear her shirt off and rip the buttons off her shorts but I restrain myself. She doesn’t seem like the getting-naked-on-dirty-rooftops type of girl. Besides, I don’t even know if I could have sex. How long has it been since I tried to masturbate? I try to remember and fail. Despair and grief flood me like another wave of drugs, always drugs.
I kiss her once more and pull back. Her eyes are half-closed and the setting sun is turning her into a copper glitter fairy. I brush the hair back from her forehead and try to memorize every inch of her face. “Let me draw you right now.”
“Draw me doing what?”
“Nothing. Just laying there.” I sit up to get my sketchbook from my backpack. She shifts on the rough tarpaper, trying to find a comfortable position, so I take my shirt off and wad it up for a pillow for her.
She wiggles her eyebrows at my torso. “Not bad. Except for the farmer’s tan.” The compliment embarrasses and pleases me so much that I feel the unfamiliar blush creeping up my neck again. I hadn’t even thought to feel shy about taking my shirt off. My body has been a strictly clinical thing for as long as I can remember.
I sit cross-legged with my sketchbook on my lap. The light is perfect. Her expression is open and her waves of copper and shadows are sweeping through me. I’ll get this one right, I know it.
“Why are you doing that?” she asks after a few minutes.
“Drawing?”
“Mmm-hmm.”
I’m working on the line of her jaw; I’ve made it too angular and I’m pissed off at myself. I erase, draw, erase, draw, squint, draw.
“Sean?”
“Oh.” I blink at her. Despite my efforts, I’ve lost a minute. “Because... I guess because I want to remember this. Capture it.”
“For yourself for later?”
I nod.
“We could do this again. Then you wouldn’t have to draw it.”
“I have the feeling we won’t be doing this again.”
“Why not? We could.”
I set my book aside. I lie on my bare stomach and take her hand, press my lips to it. The beast and my conscience and my mom and Dr. Shandra and the institution and even my own self seem far away from this moment. The only thing I feel and see and smell is her, and I want to immerse myself in her and forget all those other things. I can almost believe it’s possible.
One day. That was the deal.
My lips against her hand, gravel grinding into my elbow, I say, “You’re going to be a doctor, Annabelle. I’m, like, Korean Quasimodo. We both know nothing’s going to come of this.”
That last sentence lingers precariously, pinned to the air between us.
She takes the hand I’ve been kissing and runs it through my hair. “I think you’ll change your mind. I think you’ll be calling me by...Saturday.” Her tone is playful.
I lift myself onto a forearm and kiss her lips. I don’t know what to say, and the second I kiss her, I forget I was planning to say anything at all. Am I falling in love with her? Is that what this is? Can I know her well enough for that? Maybe I can. I’ve been in love once before. It felt like this, or at least I think it did. It’s been a long time. If anything, this feels stronger, more intense, more visceral. Is it because my memories of Elise are dulled by the drugs I’ve been taking ever since?
The name twists through me.
Elise. It’s been so long since I let myself think about her. I remember tangling my fingers in her shiny black ponytail and pulling her face sideways to kiss her on the cheek. She’d giggled, something that had annoyed me at the time but feels precious and poignant now.
Guilt and horror pour down on me like rain, and the images attack me without warning. I see myself picking Annabelle up and hurling her over the roof. It’s so sudden and vivid that I jump away from her, pressing my back to the roof, hands sweaty against the rough tar paper.
She sits up. “Sean? What’s wrong?”
“We need to get down,” I stammer.
“Are you okay?”
“Get down. Start climbing down!” My heart is pounding.
She looks me over for a minute and says, “Okay. Sure.”
“You first. I’ll see you down there.”
I cling to the gritty tar paper and close my eyes. It’s better if I don’t know where she is. Safer.
I feel my shirt land softly on my chest. “Are you okay?” she asks.
“I’m fine. I just need a minute. I’ll see you down there.”
“I’ll be right at the bottom.”
I wait a minute, two minutes, three minutes, counting the seconds by my pounding heart. When I open my eyes she’s gone and I breathe relief out through my nose.
That was close.
This is what I was afraid of.
I’m so stupid. I’d thought of the pencils but hadn’t thought it might be dangerous up on this roof? I’m distracted. I’m not being vigilant enough. This was sloppy, careless, irresponsible.
Enough. The day is over. I had my fun. If I care about Annabelle, I’ll walk away now.
Back on land, humiliation setting fire to my every extremity, I walk beside Annabelle through the forest behind Marine Land that borders the whole back end of the park and the two-lane highway beyond. It’s dusk and the forest is alive with the buzzing of cicadas. Somewhere not too far away a family is laughing. Their proximity makes me feel safer. We’re not really alone in the woods. It just seems that way.
“I’m sorry about that,” I say at last.
She laces her fingers through mine. “You’re scared of heights?”
“I guess so.”
“My roommate’s afraid of heights.” She tells me about a time they got stuck at the top of a skyscraper downtown because her roommate wouldn’t get on the windowed elevator. I try to laugh but it comes out wrong. I’m full of misery. Right now all I want is to be like her, a normal, healthy twentysomething with friends, roommates, a job... All at once, I am acutely aware of how far from the world I am, how outside of and irrelevant to it, and it spears me through the stomach with loneliness and rage.
We’re walking through the forest about fifty feet from the chain-link fence that separates Four Corners from the road when she tosses me a sad smile. “It’s funny that you brought me to this place. This was my grandma’s favorite part of the park. She took me here a million times.”
“Here?” I glance around in surprise.
“She liked to escape the crowds. Every time I come back, I walk through these trees and think about her.”
“I didn’t realize you came here that much.”
“Every year on her birthday.”
“We should have scattered her ashes here, then.”
She shrugs. “It seemed too obvious. I figured you’d have some more interesting ideas. And you did.” She stops walking and looks up at me. “What happens now, Sean?”
“Now?”
“Will you call me?”
“I don’t have your phone number. I don’t actually know your last name.”
She holds a hand out. “Pen?”
I get out my sketchbook and turn to the most recent drawing, then flip to the next page and hand it to her with a colored pencil. She pages back and looks at her own face for a long moment. “Do I really look like that?”
“You do.”
She tilts the book. “I look different in my mind.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. I guess older. And not as...not as all-American, I guess. Not as goody-goody.”
I flip the page for her. “Write down your phone number and stop being silly.”
She writes “Annabelle Callaghan” with an Austin phone number.
“Irish?”
She points to her hair.
“It’s not really red.”
“Close enough.” She closes the book and hands it to me. “Don’t give me yours. I won’t call you. You can call me if you want to see me.”
I put the book into my bag and decide I’m going to have to burn that page. I’m not going to be able to stay away from her otherwise.
She glances toward the road as though startled.
“What?” I ask. I look in that direction but don’t see anything.
“I guess it’s nothing.” She shakes her head. “Okay, then. Well, Sean, thanks for showing me your secret passageways.”
She’s going to leave. She’s going to walk away. All of the reasons not to stop her seem very small and stupid.
I can’t resist kissing her one last time, my hands tight on her little waist and then soft in her hair. As they pass her neck, I get a wave of fear and an urge to squeeze, and I have to snap them open and take a step back, my heart pounding. I want to cry. I want to do violent things. I take another step back and confine my hands to my pockets.
She takes that as her cue and turns to walk away. I watch her go until I can’t bear it anymore, and then I hurry off in the opposite direction. The cicadas, having seemed to quiet for a few minutes, start up their eerie buzzing. The noise grates on my nerves. I cram my hands to my ears, but the sound is echoing inside my head.
I have to stop and lean against a tree. The forest blurs around me, wavering like I’ve gone underwater. Somewhere closer to the park a child screams, probably having fun with a warm and happy family. What does it really matter if Annabelle has just walked away, vanished as though she had never been? Maybe she’s been a dream. That’s how it is going to be. I’m going to go back to my routine and it will be as though she never existed. She’ll tell her roommate about this strange and creepy guy she made out with at the amusement park one time and how glad she is never to see me again.
The child screams again and I pull my hands off my face. I’m not sure that was a playful scream. I don’t hear any responding cries from adults, or anything else, for that matter.
I turn and walk back the way I came, going on instinct, not really worried, just wanting to hear more and make sure all is well. The scream rises up again, and I realize it’s not far from me; it’s actually back the way Annabelle walked. Another scream slices through the trees, and the scream comes in the form of a name:
“SEAN!” the scream roars, and I tear forward through the forest because it is Annabelle.
Branches hit my face. My backpack is back on the ground somewhere behind me. The scream comes again, closer now, but it’s choked and it cuts off. My heart pounds, stops, pounds again. To my right, red lights flicker through the semidark. I rush toward them. A person-sized hole has been cut in the six-foot chain-link fence that borders the highway. Against the hole, on the shoulder of the road, a white truck’s rear tires churn up a plume of gravel. A blur of motion—a human body, legs flailing—someone being shoved across the front seat.
The passenger door bucks, kicked out—Annabelle’s white sneakers, recognizable for an instant before they disappear with another terrified scream. “Sean—” Annabelle’s voice chokes as the driver’s door slams shut. A last scream makes its muffled way through the glass. Taillights flash and the tires make contact with the asphalt. It bumps onto the road and is gone around the corner. I’m right behind the truck, climbing through the hole in the fence, but I’m too late.
“Annabelle!” I scream.
I wait. Blood roars in my ears.
“ANNABE—” My voice cuts out; my throat’s too dry. I dart into the street and almost get hit by a passing car. I run along the shoulder in the direction the white truck had gone, thoughts popping through the panicked fuzz inside my brain.
Where’s the nearest pay phone? I have no idea. I can’t think of a single time I’ve had to use the phone here. What is wrong with me that I’ve never had anyone to call?
I keep running. The woods are fuzzy through a psychotropic haze. My breath is hot, the cedar trees blurry around me, the dry forest floor puffing tumbleweeds of dust up around my ankles. I stumble, slam my shoulder into a tree trunk and fall backward on my ass. I realize my backpack is gone. I dropped it somewhere in the woods. I push myself up, keep running, brain spun with panic and throbbing with drugs.
The road takes me to a countrified intersection with horse fencing along one side of the highway and a ramshackle gas station on the other. I falter, hands on knees, hair falling over my face, sweat plastering my T-shirt to my back.
She’s gone.
Chapter Four
Four cops surround me in a semicircle, their flashlights lighting up the trees. It’s night, the buzz of cicadas having given way to the chirping crickets, humidity rising from the heat-packed earth like steam. Two cop cars are cruising the streets, their lights blinding passersby as they search driveways and alleyways.
I show them the hole in the fence. I tell them the same things over and over again. “Annabelle Callaghan. This was our first date. She goes to UT. We met here at Four Corners. She’s gone. Can’t you guys do something?”
The cops find my backpack among the trees, and I carefully rip the drawing of Annabelle from my sketchbook, the first one I’d drawn to capture her auburn eyes. They take turns staring at it with their flashlights trained on her face, passing it around and communicating silently with their eyebrows.
“I need that back when you’re done with it,” I say, nervous about them having it.
I know I look weird to them. I know they don’t trust me. Am I wearing the feather earring today? I reach up to check. Yeah. The feather. That’s not good. This captures one officer’s attention. He squints at the earring and gives me a look that is part disgust, part humor. Stinging shame burns through me. I yank the earring out and toss it aside when no one’s looking.
They have a lot of questions. Why had we been wandering around all the way out here away from the park so close to the road? What’s my name, they want to know, and when they hear my last name is Suh, which is how they pronounce sir in the sacred US Army or Marines or whatever, they raise their eyebrows at each other again as though I’ve blasphemed their great military culture with my offensively homophonic Korean surname.
Time does its fuzzy thing again and I’m at the police station, sitting in a waiting room on a goldenrod plastic chair against a puke-orange wall that probably hasn’t been cleaned since the sixties. My heart is beating fast but regular: pound-pound-pound-pound-pound like I’m still running along the highway with my throat in my mouth. It syncs up with the click-clack of typewriters that echoes around the linoleum, creating an asynchronous rhythm like an indoor thunderstorm. My hair tickles my nose and I reach up with a shaking hand to push it back. It’s wet with sweat. My whole body is damp and I bet I smell.
For a muddled minute, I watch a weathered-looking man in a chair nearby smoke a cigarette and contemplate the whorls of smoke that haze mysteriously through his navy-blue aura, and then I jump, remembering where I am and what I’m doing here. I put a hand out to search the floor around me for my backpack. It’s not there.
I don’t know who to ask. I’m in a big room with desks and there are cops behind the desks. Some other people in street clothes are sitting in chairs here and there, waiting like me.
I close my eyes and concentrate. I haven’t taken my meds. I feel weird. You’d think it would make me feel clearer, but withdrawal from psych meds is no joke. “Come on, come on,” I whisper. I hate it when I go blank like this. I need to remember where I put my backpack. My sketchbook is in there. Annabelle’s sketches. I need them.
Where are the cops? Are they looking for Annabelle? Why am I here? I’ve told them everything already.
A flurry of motion makes me open my eyes and there’s my mom, hurrying toward me with an officer at her side. “Oh no,” I whisper. She makes a beeline for me, all efficiency and polished, suited authority. Her face is masked as always, skin stretched tight across her cheekbones, eyes sharp and darting. Her jaw is prominent, a feature that is more flattering on me than her. It makes her mouth look even smaller, her cheekbones wider. She is pretty in a geometric way, her face wrought with diamonds and hard edges, the point of her nose perfectly symmetrical.
She’s berating the police officer when she gets to me, and he’s actually apologizing. “Ma’am, I’m sorry, but he’s an adult and we didn’t know—”
“A mentally ill young adult, being questioned in the dark with no legal counsel, under what conditions do you suppose—”
“Ma’am, please, you can direct your questions to me,” says a plainclothes detective who has appeared out of nowhere to rescue the young cop from my commanding mother. He’s tall and athletic with bronzed skin and a thick golden mustache. His cheeks are pocked with acne scars.
