“We know that for a fact,” Mrs. Pratt said.
“Yes, we’ve had some interesting examples of it during our journey. For example, there are parents who disown their children because they show homosexual tendencies and those who disinherit children because they marry the wrong people, people from other races, cultures. There is no shortage of reasons or examples of blood losing its adhesive qualities. Ruth—Mrs. Pratt—was disowned when she refused to marry someone her father had chosen.”
I looked at Mrs. Pratt. During all the time I had been there, my interest in her was so small I never asked any questions about her. In my mind, she was almost a piece of the furniture, something that came with the whole picture. I never thought of her as someone with a past, with pleasures and disappointments separate from Mrs. Brittany’s. I saw now that I had underestimated her importance.
“Anyway,” Mrs. Brittany continued, “we were cautious about you. Mr. Bob and I anticipated the possibility of starting you out and having to abort because of your age and your family or your father regretting his actions. We didn’t want to get in the middle of that, and we were prepared to send you on your way every day until your eighteenth birthday. When that came and went, we were more confident and willing to invest more in you.”
“What’s happened to change that?” I asked, unable to balance myself much longer on my roly-poly anxieties and fear.
Mrs. Brittany’s response was to lift a page from a newspaper out of my folder and pass it to me.
There was my picture just under the headline on the page describing my disappearance. My mother had apparently finally gotten her way and initiated a search by the authorities. Some ambitious young reporter had tracked down some of my history of bad behavior, Papa’s work and firm, and went on to describe the halfhearted effort to find “a girl neither her school nor her father is that keen on seeing return.” That take on it had obviously initiated a bigger discussion about lost children, especially teenagers. There were references to upcoming radio and television talk shows that would have it as the main topic.
Mrs. Brittany passed me another article from another city newspaper that had picked up on the story and revisited the Pulitzer Prize–winning narration about “America’s Forgotten Children” living on the fringes, young people who were ripe fruit for drugs, crime, and prostitution. My picture was reprinted there, too. And in another article, there were two different but relatively recent pictures of me.
“We understand,” Mrs. Brittany continued, “that the New York Crier magazine is going to do a five-page article on all this, highlighting your disappearance. These pictures and a few others will appear. Your mother is turning over whatever she has to build it up. Your picture won’t be on milk cartons, but it could turn up on the sides of city buses and taxis advertising the magazine article.”
“I never thought . . . I mean, I never expected . . .”
She reached for the articles, and I handed them back to her. She placed them in the folder and closed it. I glanced at Mrs. Pratt. She mirrored Mrs. Brittany’s look of deep concern. My heart began to thump. What was coming next?
“We’re not blaming you for anything. Our taking you in is totally our responsibility,” Mrs. Brittany said. “Obviously, however, if anyone managed to connect the dots, it would bring some serious negative attention to us.”
“No one knows I’m here. I haven’t violated your rule about contacting anyone. I had no one to contact. I’ve never even tried to speak with my mother since I’ve been here, and you know I wouldn’t try to speak with my father.”
“Yes. And I’m not concerned about anyone who has come here and met you,” she began, sounding more like someone thinking aloud. “The places I’ve taken you, shops and so on, should be fine. However, no one can predict if someone who saw you and read these articles would make the connections. We can only hope not. And we would hope, or assume, that anyone working here who saw you, even if he or she could make any connection, would simply not do so.
“But,” she continued, “I do not like being dependent on the discretion of too many . . . underlings. We’re risking too much by parading you around on the outside.”
“I don’t need anything else, and I can wait to see shows or go to more museums.”
Again, I looked to Mrs. Pratt, hoping to see her nod, but she was stone-faced.
“That’s not going to solve our problem,” Mrs. Brittany said.
“So you want me to leave?” I asked, dreading the answer. I held my breath.
“Yes,” she said.
I felt a cold chill come over me. It was like being thrown out of my home and driven from my family again. I didn’t know whom to blame more, myself, my father, or Mrs. Brittany. I think what hurt me most was the feeling that my father was going to win after all. All this training, this education I had been enjoying, the hope and the new self-confidence I had developed, would be snatched away. The vision of myself on the streets again actually turned my stomach.
“I would never say you kidnapped me or anything stupid,” I told her. I looked at Mrs. Pratt, too, so she could see how sincere and determined I was. “And no matter what, I wouldn’t reveal anything about your company or the other girls or . . . anything.”
“We know that, but more often than not, things happen, good intentions are lost.”
I could feel the tears come quickly into my eyes. They came more quickly than I could remember happening before. When Mr. Bob first brought me here, I was a much harder, more tightly wrapped person, I thought. Rarely was my father or even my mother able to bring me to tears. I hated the idea of revealing what I really felt inside. Besides making me feel weaker and more vulnerable, something I detested, it gave whoever was criticizing me or chastising me a sense of superiority. It got so I could keep from changing expression when a teacher or the dean at school bawled me out. My expressionless face invariably drove them back and forced them to get me out of their sight. I always left a confrontation feeling victorious even if the results were bad grades, behavior demerits, suspensions, detentions, or being sent to my room.
Once, my father was so frustrated with my indifference he screamed, “She’s like the devil. You can defeat him in a battle but never destroy him.”
Then stop battling me, I thought. Leave me alone.
He couldn’t. I couldn’t be his perfect daughter. Or even his daughter, for that matter, and so I was here, sitting in front of Mrs. Brittany’s desk, feeling as if I were back in school, where I had been called to face the dean so he could discipline me for some rule I had broken, some fight I had been in, or some nasty remark I had made to a teacher.
“What do you want to do with me?” I asked.
“I’m sending you out of the country. You’ll be flown to Nice in my private jet today, and you will stay at my home in Beaulieu-sur-Mer. It’s a beautiful villa overlooking the sea. There are servants to care for everything, and since you speak French so well, you won’t be uncomfortable.”
“For how long?” I asked, now feeling some hope. This wasn’t a dishonorable discharge. She was planning something strategically.