ABOUT THE AUTHOR

AMY SHEARN’s first book, a novel entitled How Far is the Ocean From Here, came out in July 2008 from Shaye Areheart/Crown Books. Her work has appeared in Jane, Modern Painters, West Branch, Salt Hill, the small-press anthology Hysteria, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn and teaches writing for NYU and Gotham’s Writers.

The Kidnapped

By Amy Shearn


Out on the train platform the silence of the day closed around them like a room. It was only ten or ten-thirty in the morning, though Bob had lost his watch somewhere. No one visited the Dells in winter anyway. He leaned down to tug at the zipper of Geneva’s suitcase, found a can of cheap beer lodged in her panties. Then he loosened his string tie and smoothed back his thinning, greased hair. “Don’t look so glum, you sourpusses,” Geneva was saying, shrugging on her matted fur coat. “It’s called an adventure!”

It had all been Geneva’s idea. It was her kid, after all. And now here they were, like a family, emerged from the train called “The Empire Builder.” Geneva tugged along the wheeled suitcase they’d filled with beer cans and wads of clothing. The kid, Martine, had her own little wheeled suitcase, shocking pink, decorated with mean-looking cartoon girls topped in alien-sized heads. The suitcase girls seemed sort of slutty to Bob, with their tube tops and platform shoes, hardly right for a silent eight-year-old. He had paid for the thing—nineteen dollars, for a bunch of cheap nylon slapped together with visible glue—when had Geneva picked it out at Wal-Mart the night before.

The kid sat on the pink suitcase, resting her chin in her hands. The town seemed entirely deserted. Large heaps of fire—bonfires? of, what, wild grasses? or what?—crackled on one side of the tracks—alarmingly close. Space-suited men milled around the flames. On the road nearby idled a truck that reminded Bob of nothing so much as a hippopotamus, with long tails—no, hoses—that the men directed towards the inferno, just in case, he guessed. Beyond the fires were the gnarled river with the green-brown bluffs and the caves and a few boats of off-season tourists navigating around the ice chunks, puttering towards the horizon. On the other side of the tracks the town arranged itself across the slight hills—the main road, the arcades and fudge shops and wax museums, the cheap motels, the brick churches left over from when the town had had different ideas about itself. Bob hadn’t been to the Dells in years and remembered the town only as being horrible, without recalling any of the specifics. He felt that he could still hear the soothing hum of the train though he knew that he couldn’t. It was too cold to want to stand around discussing things. “But,” he heard himself saying anyway, as he pulled the front of his soggy pants away from his skin—Geneva had spilled his beer on the train—“we paid through St. Paul. Our tickets go to St. Paul.” He watched his breath gather in cottony puffs.

“Oh please, we’ll still go to St. Paul and on to Portland and do all that, silly billy. We’re just taking a wittle detour!” and she stuck out her glossy bottom lip, either to pout or to make fun of Bob pouting. She started up with the baby talk whenever she was nervous. Bob couldn’t decide if he thought it was cute or annoying, but he knew that when they had first gotten together and things were all rosy and they were having sex constantly he had not thought it annoying at all, and that now, if any of this was going to work, he had to remember how to find it cute again.

“Yeah but—”

Geneva leaned down and cupped the kid’s chin in her hand. The kid crinkled her nose but didn’t say anything. “Look at this little cupcake, she’s eight years old and never has been to the Wisconsin Dells and it’s fun for kids, Bobby-sox, kids like to have fun!”

“I’ve been here before,” the kid said.

Geneva frowned. “No you haven’t. And besides, Mister Serious, we’ll just hop on the next one!”

“There isn’t a next one.” Bob felt tired already. He drained the rest of the beer and threw the can onto the tracks. The kid glared at him. She was moving her mouth in a funny way, with her lips pressed shut, as if she were silently talking, or maybe chewing on something. “The Empire Builder”—he tried to say it in a funny, presidential voice, but he guessed maybe he didn’t have a funny, presidential voice—“This train only runs once a day. Sweetheart.” He blew on his fingers but it didn’t make them any warmer so he just jammed his hands into the pockets of his tight black jeans.

“Well we used to hop on and off trains all the time when we were Europe, Bunny.”

“You never were in Europe,” Bob said. “Lovey,” he said.

“You don’t know everything about me, Darling,” Geneva said. “You don’t know anything about me. I am a mystery to you. All women are a mystery to you.”

“All right,” said Bob. “Let’s just go. Let’s just do whatever frigging great fun stuff we’re here to do.”

It had started a week or so earlier. Before that he hadn’t even known she had a kid. She was living in his apartment, had moved a few lumpy boxes over from who knew where, and now that he thought of it, he was sure the fleas had come from that damn coat. Then one night, when they were lying naked in this bed, she’d started crying. How she missed her daughter! He’d closed his eyes, trying not to say “Oh, shit,” out loud, and then when he felt ready, blinked and said into her hair, “Daughter?” Somehow Geneva was always able to talk him into anything—she had a certain charisma—and anyway he was too much of a coward to say no to her, the first girlfriend he’d had in awhile. That was how they’d come to be driving around for much of the night in a borrowed car, finding the address in some poorly-lit, woodsy suburb, and sneaking into the house to get the kid. She was scrawny but strong. Bob had scooped her up like a long-limbed baby, holding her warm little body tenderly but firmly, while Geneva had whispered, “Mommy’s here! Mommy’s here!” The way the kid looked at Geneva shot panic into Bob’s groin. She looked at Geneva as though she’d never seen her before in her life. Though they’d managed not to wake Geneva’s ex or the rest of the family, Bob found in the morning a bloom of bruises on his side, a crescent of blood rising beneath the skin of his thumb.

Geneva flounced off down the street, the suitcase scooting after her like an obedient dog. The kid trailed behind. They walked in single file down the middle of the road, Geneva pointing now and then. “Oooh! Martine honey look, look at those beautiful teddy bears, dressed up like princesses!” or, “What funny t-shirts!” or, “Wouldn’t you like a big huge hunk of taffy like that, we’ll get you one when the shop opens up.” She said, “We’ll go to the stunt show, and see the water-skiers and the fancy airplanes and the robots, and we’ll go to the indoor water-park and on a boat ride, and to Ripley’s Believe It or Not and the Haunted Mansion!” Then every once in a while she stopped suddenly, wobbling a little, whirled around, grabbed the kid’s chin and said fiercely, “Honey, aren’t you glad to see your Mummy? Aren’t we going to have fun?”

Bob calculated whether or not he could take another beer from her suitcase without her noticing. Geneva caught him looking and grinned, that coy, Jayne Mansfield grin that drove him crazy, and flipped her white-blond hair over her shoulder. Once they were in Portland, he figured, she’d calm down a bit; he’d find a job, the kid would start school again, they’d have a nice house with ruffled curtains and everything, maybe they’d get a pet. Maybe they’d get an iguana. He wondered if the kid would start calling him “Dad” or if she would call him “Bob” or “Mr. Laten” or what. So far she hadn’t called him anything.

“Hey, Kimmy,” he said.

The kid looked over her shoulder and scowled. “My name,” she said, “is Martine.” Martine! It was the name of a woman in a movie set in France, the name of a sophisticated lady you’d meet in a hotel bar. It was a come-hither name, a va-va-voom name, of course only Geneva could choose such a name for a kid, a name that was not any sort of name at all for a scrawny eight-year-old in overalls and pigtails and one of those knit hats with a pom-pom on top, a kid who was, he realized, wiggling a loose tooth with her tongue, that was the thing she was doing with her mouth. She had a loose tooth. “Right,” he mumbled, “Sorry.” But—had he really said ‘Kimmy’? He hadn’t even said the name in ages, and never in front of Geneva, and he was embarrassed, flustered, forgot entirely what he even wanted to say to the kid in the first place. Anyway, happily, they had doubled back towards the train station and Geneva had found a bar—“The Sand Bar”—that was just opening up for the day. They followed her, like baby ducks, and blindly, into the cavernous dark.

The train and their sudden descent—detraining, it was called—their sudden detraining had left him shaky and confused, and he hadn’t eaten since the jelly donut at the gas station, sometime around nine the previous night, sometime after the trip to Wal-Mart and before getting the kid, and the high, light feel of all the beer he’d drunk rested in a quivery way somewhere just below his skin. He always drank too much around Geneva. He was always trying to keep up with her, with whatever it was about her that buzzed and glowed and made everyone pay attention. Now she sat the kid down in front of one of those lit-up monitors flashing trivia quizzes and dug a handful of quarters from her pocket. “Here honey, it’s a game,” she cooed. She talked to the kid like it was a kitten. “Skip the one with the wadies in thwimthuits,” she said. She winked at Bob.

Bob took the kid’s pink suitcase over to the bar. He drummed his fingers on the sides of his stool, waiting for the bartender to say something to him so that that he could make a joke about something (Women, he’d say, gesturing towards Geneva and her kid with a comical sigh), anything to lift some of the pressure from his head. Geneva threw herself onto the barstool next to him. “Oh fri-end!” she sang to the bartender, “The lady here absolutely NEEDS a—a what, Bob?—a gin and tonic do you think? Or—oh! a bloody mary, that’s a good morning drink—” and she fluttered her eyelashes. She threw her ratty coat over an empty barstool, revealing a dress—he’d bought that too, he could never say no to Geneva—that clung to her pillowy curves.

The bartender, who looked vaguely familiar, started making her drink. Bob asked for a package of barbeque potato chips which was unceremoniously tossed in his direction. Geneva lit a cigarette. His pants were still wet and he was aware that, even in the bar, most of the beer smell was coming from him. He looked around. It did seem to be trying to be a family place, despite being a bar. He saw beside the trivia game (the kid just stared at it, her face in her hands) one of those toy-grab things with a mechanical arm, a Star Wars pinball machine, and the place had faux-rustic wood panel wallpaper and countrified decorations all around, and a sign bragging about the best burgers in the Dells and fresh cherry cider from Door County. The bartender clunked Geneva’s drink down in front of her, sending the too-tall celery stalk into a see-saw motion, the ice clinking against the glass. Santa Claus, that’s who he looked like. He looked just like Santa Claus. A bit expressionless for a Santa Claus, but he had the right appley cheeks, and even a somewhat appley nose, and a fluffy white beard, and a bulbous stomach accentuated by his red flannel shirt. Just the right bartender for a wholesome family kind of a bar.



Published July 2008