didn’t like to drive me places. But sometimes, when something bad enough had happened in our house, she’d get very drunk and then she would take me in her car and she would make me drive, even though I was not old enough. We would go down North Ave because it was straight and we could go very fast. She would roll down the window, stick her head out just enough for the wind to catch her hair. And she would sing so loud and so hard, she would start to cry. Sometimes she would smoke a cigarette. But mostly she would sing until she cried and I would just drive and watch her from the corner of my eye and be frozen by the sight of her. It was like watching a tornado. Beautiful. Terrifying. Sometimes I wished I could be like that, and feel things like that. But Emma felt enough for two people, and I was mostly grateful that she had her role and I had mine.
I think there are two types of people. Ones who have a scream inside them and ones who don’t. People who have a scream are too angry or too sad or laugh too hard, swear too much, use drugs or never sit still. Sometimes they sing at the top of their lungs with the windows rolled down. I don’t think people are born with it. I think other people put it inside you with the things they do to you, and say to you, or the things you see them do or say to other people. And I don’t think you can get rid of it. If you don’t have a scream, you can’t understand.
As I watched Dr. Winter that first day, I got the sense that she had a scream. She was not a normal person. It takes one to know one, I guess, and I could just tell. She was beautiful—blond hair, very fit, big pouty lips and high cheekbones. Her eyes were pale blue but suspended in a perpetual state of anxiety, and she walked and talked and moved with strength, more like a man than a woman. Her eyes, and the way she moved, stood in such stark contrast to her otherwise feminine traits that it made her intriguing. Mysterious. I imagine men found her irresistible. And yet she did not wear a wedding ring. People like Dr. Winter, intriguing, mysterious people, always have a scream inside them.
I didn’t know I had one until the night I finally escaped from the island.
No one answered my question about Emma liking that music, so I continued my story. “I can still remember exactly how I felt when we got to the dock and Bill opened the car door and the cool air came in with that smell, the Christmas tree smell, and also the smell of the water. It was nothing like the water here, or even when we went to Nantucket that summer when I was ten I think, or maybe nine. There was no fish smell, or seaweed, or you know that rotting smell that comes when it’s really hot and there are all those open shells? There was none of that. Just water and Christmas, cool against my face while my body was warm under the blanket. And then, also, there was a sense of adventure and something else that I’ve thought about all the time since that night because it was part of what made me get out of the car and get on Rick’s boat instead of running away into the woods.”
Agent Strauss interrupted me to ask about the woods. “What kind of woods? Were there streets and houses, like a neighborhood or just trees and the shoreline? And what about the boat?”
I told him what I remembered—that when I woke up, I felt that cool air and then saw water on one side, with the dock and a small motorboat. And the boatman. Behind us and all around was a forest of pine trees and brush. The road was not paved. There was no parking lot or building. Just a small wooden dock and one boat and the boatman.
“So this boatman, Rick, he must have taken the boat to the dock from somewhere else? Sounds like he didn’t keep the boat there, or you would have seen his car. . . .”
It went on like this for several minutes. I had already described the boatman to them, and not just his accent but that he seemed as old as Dr. Winter, and he was always tan and had a scruffy layer of light facial hair all the time—never cleanly shaven and never a full beard. He was not much taller than I was, maybe five nine with a thick, muscular build. His neck seemed larger than it needed to be, or maybe his head was small by comparison. And he had very short hair, dark brown. His eyes were brown as well. He wasn’t ugly but he wasn’t someone Emma would have even looked at twice. He was the kind of guy who passes in a hallway without being noticed.
I knew that the Pratts paid him to come back and forth to the island and that I thought he relied on them a lot for money because he was very loyal to them. I did not know how loyal until much later. Until the first time I tried to escape.
Dr. Winter was not a patient person. I could tell by the way she shifted her body in the chair, crossing and recrossing her legs. Fidgeting with her pen. But she let Agent Strauss go on until he was done even though she didn’t seem to care much about the woods and trees and cars, or even about the boatman. When she asked me the next question, I started to believe that we would actually find my sister.
“Cass, go back to that night. Go back to that feeling you had—the one that made you get on that boat.”
I took a long, deep breath and closed my eyes. This part was important and I wanted to make sure everyone knew it.
“I told you that I had a plan to go home in the morning, but that I wanted to find out what was going on and where we were and why Emma knew this man and why she had run away. When I knew all of that and I knew she was safe, I would go home. And because I had this plan that would make it impossible for anyone to blame me for anything, and then the smell of the trees and water—it just felt so clean. I felt so clean. And because I was clean, I could let myself enjoy this one night when everything was being turned upside down, when everyone would have to stop and open their eyes to see that things were not perfect for Emma because she had left this way and taken me with her. I felt alive. I felt hopeful. It’s hard to describe. Something had lifted off me. Something heavy.”
Dr. Winter looked at me with narrow eyes, like she was concentrating very hard. “What wasn’t perfect, Cass? What did you want people to see when you left?”
The room got quiet and I realized I had said too much. Agent Strauss didn’t let me answer, and I was relieved.
“It sounds like you felt powerful,” he said.
“Yes! Like by going on that boat, I was going to change everything.”
“So you got on the boat. Emma got on the boat. Then Bill . . .” Agent Strauss said, moving the story forward even more. Dr. Winter let him do it, but I could sense that she wanted to go back to her question, the one Agent Strauss had not made me answer.
“And then Rick untied the lines and pushed us off. I thought for a second that he was going to stay on the dock because we started to move away and he was still pushing. But then he grabbed hold of the rail and got on with us. I remembered the boats in Nantucket and how we were told not to try to do that, try to get on a boat that was moving away from the dock, because if we fell in and the water pushed the boat back toward the dock, it could crush us. Is that right, Dad? Did that happen in Nantucket?”
My father was staring at me but he didn’t answer. I think he was in a state of shock, or maybe swept away by the storm inside his head. Mrs. Martin said his name sternly. She said it twice, like this. “Owen Tanner! Owen!”
I realized then that he had been listening and that he had heard my question because he answered it. “Yes. I did say that. That did happen in Nantucket.”
But my father did not want to hear about the boat and the dock and how I felt powerful the night I went to the island.
“Cass,” he said, “was this Bill person the father? Did this man get your sister pregnant?”
I tried to explain the best I could.
“I couldn’t talk to Emma that night. We were never alone, not for a minute. We were given separate rooms. Bill
