Guilt By Degrees

36

Hearing him say my sister’s name made my heart lurch painfully, and suddenly my throat tightened. For a panicked moment, I forgot how to breathe. When I finally drew air, I found myself light-headed and unable to hear over the rushing in my ears. Graden, his expression concerned, was saying something.

“What?” I said, momentarily confused and disoriented.

How could he know about Romy? I took some deep breaths and forced enough calm for the sounds to take the shape of cognizable words.

“…wanted to know more about you. I guess I should’ve just asked you directly.” He paused and stared out the window. “But then I thought, the case doesn’t have to stay unsolved. I know the local police up there did all they could, but we’ve got more resources. Hell, I know I could get some help from the FBI on this…”

I mentally curled inward, trying not to let his words conjure the pictures, but I knew it was hopeless. The wheels began to turn, pulling me under, and the day that perpetually lurked just beneath my consciousness replayed for the millionth time in heart-clutching detail.

It was my seventh birthday. Romy, an unusually sedate eleven, was cautious and patient from birth, a counterpoint to my more impulsive and reckless nature. And, unlike my friends’ older siblings, Romy almost never got annoyed by my constant bids for attention. I hadn’t needed my parents’ reminders that I was lucky to have Romy for an older sister.

Our little two-bedroom home in Sebastopol, north of San Francisco, stood on the outer perimeter of the relatively new development of unimaginative stucco ranch houses that repeated the same three styles throughout all ten square blocks. Young as I was, I nevertheless had a dim awareness that money was scarce. My mother’s job as a bank teller didn’t bring in much, and my father, who’d just finished a stint in the army, was in his first year in college, pursuing his dream of becoming an airline pilot. But ours was a neighborhood filled with young families struggling to get a leg up, so we never felt deprived.

And it was a kind of heaven for us. Young children poured out of every house at all hours of the day, shooed outside by overworked mothers who needed some peace and quiet. And in that place, there was plenty of “outside” to play in. Our neighborhood had been carved out of a broad expanse of woods and fields that still surrounded our development, so a child’s paradise of wilderness was just steps away.

For most of the kids, the biggest draw was the old abandoned house that stood in a clearing in the middle of the woods. The ramshackle hut burned a fire in the imaginations of all the neighborhood children, its hauntingly vacant windows staring out like sepulchral eyes. Rumor had it that the owners had been murdered and/or abducted by aliens…or was it that they’d been arrested for having killed, skinned, and eaten children…exactly our ages?

But that house hadn’t intrigued me. For me, the big thrill lay a half mile away in the decidedly unmysterious chicken ranch that filled the air with feathers, stench, and the squawks of roosters at all hours. It had horses, which I, being a typical young girl, loved, as well as pigs, cows, and one surly-looking bull. The owners would sometimes let me ride the older mare with the bushy forelock that looked like a teenage girl’s overgrown bangs. But I daydreamed about sneaking a ride on the bull-though even I knew enough to keep that particular goal to myself.

The day of my seventh birthday dawned bright and early, the August sun already intense by ten a.m. I’d woken up filled with joyous anticipation. Romy had declared that for my birthday present, she’d do whatever I wanted for the whole day. I’d given the matter a lot of thought and come up with a list of the things that were usually the hardest to get Romy to do: double-Dutch rope jumping (she’d grown tired of it), play Monopoly (Romy hated board games), play hide-and-seek (she thought it was “dumb”), and visit the chicken ranch.

I’d known that the ranch owners were on vacation, and that by the afternoon the caretakers who came to water and feed the animals would be gone. That’s when I’d planned to realize my dream of riding that bull. I told myself that I wanted to do it when Romy was there so I’d have a witness to my triumph. I didn’t admit that I might also have wanted Romy there to rescue me in case the bull wasn’t on board with my plan. Of course, I kept this part to myself, because I knew Romy would stop me if she knew in advance. So I devised a strategy to spring it on her. I was going to suggest we play hide-and-seek around the ranch in the afternoon, and when it was my turn to hide, I’d make sure Romy did her counting near the bull pen. Then I’d sneak over to the pen, climb up, and call out just in time for Romy to see me swing a leg over the bull’s back.

We’d begun the morning with double-Dutch rope jumping and moved on to Monopoly. By then, I was feeling more than slightly guilty for what I was secretly planning to do, so I called off the game halfway through and said we could end my birthday early with a game of hide-and-seek at the chicken ranch. Romy had gratefully leaped at the offer.

We made our way across the open field that separated our little suburban community from the ranch and the wilds that surrounded it. I let Romy be the first to hide, knowing that would give me the right to stake out where “home base” was, and I purposely positioned myself in front of a big oak tree right next to the bull pen. I’d only counted to seven when I heard the crunch of tires on the dirt road and looked around to see that a pickup truck was slowly approaching. Most of the ranch workers drove those trucks, so when the dusty red pickup rolled toward me, I shielded my eyes from the sun and prepared to wave. But as I lifted my hand, I saw that the driver was a stranger. A big black dog was on the seat next to him. The man wore the battered cowboy hat favored by a lot of the ranch hands, and as he drove by, he smiled and lifted it, showing closely cut dark hair and a round, open face. It was a pleasant smile, and I gave him one of my own before turning back to the tree to resume counting.

When I got to one hundred, I knew exactly where to look. Romy always chose the same spot, and I ran straight for it. Sure enough, there she was, in a large hole in the trunk of an oak tree.

“Come on, Romy!” I complained, forgetting that the game was just a ruse for my planned bull ride. “Pick a real hiding place!”

Romy made a face, but she conceded. “Okay, okay. Jeez, Rache, aren’t you ever going to get tired of these baby games?”

I shrugged, embarrassed but stubborn. Even though I had a bigger goal in mind today, I didn’t think it was such a baby game, and I wanted to play it right. Romy reluctantly trudged back to home base. I turned to face the trunk, closed my eyes, and began to count again. Behind me, I heard Romy run toward the woods.

“Twenty-one, twenty-two…,” I counted, and then stopped. Something felt wrong; there was a bad energy in the air. A wave of apprehension rippled through me. I didn’t want to cheat, but the feeling was so strong, I couldn’t ignore it. I opened my eyes and looked around.

The pickup truck had stopped just fifty feet down the road, and it was pointing into the woods. The driver’s door was standing open, and the truck looked empty. I stared, sensing danger, but unsure of why or what to do.

Suddenly I heard a sharp yelp from somewhere in the woods, then abruptly the sound was cut off and there was a distant rustling noise. Terrified but disbelieving, I whispered, “Romy.”

I began to walk toward the woods, stiff-legged, face frozen, unable even to name a reason for my fear. I walked faster and faster, an instinctive terror growing and solidifying with every step, forming a hard ball in my chest. Finally, too overwhelmed with dread to wait another second, I took the deepest breath I could and screamed, “Romy!”

Silence. Romy had to have heard me. Now the ball of fear rose up from my chest and into my throat. I tried to call out again but choked; nothing came out. I stopped and gathered all the breath in my body and was about to call out to her again, but at that moment the man in the cowboy hat appeared. He was jogging out of the woods, toward his truck. An object I couldn’t identify was draped over his shoulder. I stopped breathing and stood dead still, paralyzed with fear. Then, heart pounding and without conscious thought, I started to run toward him, screaming over and over again, “Romy! Romy!”

But though I was pushing my body as hard as I could, my legs felt leaden, as if I were running through quicksand. Some part of my brain realized I couldn’t make it in time. I watched, mute with terror, as he threw the object that’d been on his shoulder into the passenger side of the truck. I stopped, and with every ounce of strength in my body, arms and legs shaking, I screamed out, “Romyyy!” The man looked up and, for just a moment, our eyes met. Then he jogged around to the driver’s side, slammed the door, and drove off, his tires kicking up a cloud of dirt and rocks. “Romyyy!” I screamed again.

I ran after the truck. “Noooo!” I sobbed in a high, keening wail. “Romyyy! Romyyy!” I screamed in helpless desperation as the truck became a pin dot in the distance and the graveled turn of its wheels faded into silence.

I kept running and screaming long after the truck had disappeared, until a sharp, stabbing pain in my side made me crumple to the ground. I lay there, panting, trying to catch my breath as tears streamed down my face. Finally I pulled myself up, hiccuping and still breathless. It couldn’t be true-I refused to acknowledge what “it” was, stopping the thought before it could complete itself. I began talking to myself-my old baby habit-telling myself that maybe Romy was still in her favorite hiding place. Then I told myself she had to be there. I filled my heart with conviction and began to limp toward Romy’s tree. As I moved, clutching my side, I spoke out loud. One long stream of consciousness: “Romy, please be there, please, oh please, I promise I’ll never make you play it again, I promise, Romy, please, please oh please be there! Please be there, Romy!” My breath was ragged, my voice rasping and hoarse.

The tree was empty.

I have no memory of what happened next, but I was told that I’d been found by one of the ranch hands, stumbling around in the woods, sobbing, filthy, my clothing torn. I either couldn’t or wouldn’t speak, and when the man tried to lead me out of the woods, I’d kicked and bitten him until he’d backed off and gone for the sheriff. I couldn’t explain it at the time, but in my child’s mind, I believed that as long as I stayed in the woods, there was still a chance that Romy would be there, that somehow she’d appear and everything would be okay.

I never saw my sister again.

Eventually her disappearance-I still refused to accept the possibility of her death-claimed both my parents. When my father died, the small light that had continued burning in my mother’s eyes flickered and went out. She slipped into a clinical depression that left her virtually immobile for weeks at a time. When her health insurance ran out, she’d managed to rally and go back to work and put food on the table, but I knew she only did it for me. Up to that point, I hadn’t thought it possible to feel any guiltier than I did.

As for me, not only had I lost my family but I’d also lost my friends, for whom I’d become the object of pity and fascination. The story of Romy’s disappearance made the local news. There was no place I went where someone didn’t point and stare or outright ask me about the day Romy went missing.

As much as I came to hate my life, it didn’t occur to me that there was anything to be done about it until I was in my junior year in high school. And then one day, for no particular reason, it hit me: why not move? In a new city, my mother could get away from a town that held nothing but agonizing memories, and I could become someone else-someone who wasn’t the local freak. I’d never again have to see those hellish woods.

It took some time and effort to convince my mother, but I was relentless. I’d chosen Los Angeles. Big, anonymous, and not so far away as to be daunting. Slowly we learned together how to navigate an entirely new life. My mother found her smile again, and I found a fresh identity as a normal person. Those were sweet years, when my mother and I discovered a closeness we’d never known before. Then, three years ago, she was diagnosed with melanoma. Six months later, she was gone. I know, because she told me, that she’d never expected to have any happiness in her life after losing Romy and my father; the joy we’d found in these years was an unexpected gift.

My mother’s death was a crushing blow. I was truly alone. What got me through that terrible time was the support I had from Toni and Bailey. But even they never knew about Romy.

When I moved here, I’d very deliberately decided never to tell anyone. Carla the Crone, my lifelong shrink, says it’s an unhealthy sign that I still suffer guilt for my sister’s abduction. She also says that a true friend will neither judge nor pity me, nor treat me like a freak. I say, why take the chance? And besides, what’s the relevance? Romy’s been gone for more than twenty years. I don’t see why a relationship should require all parties to divulge their entire life histories.

I think adults get to decide what to share and when…and what to keep to themselves.