Trafficked by My Childhood Friend, I Found My Spring

The auditorium smelled like pine-scented floor wax and the cheap coffee the school secretary brewed in a chipped ceramic pot. I stood behind the curtain, smoothing the skirt of the navy dress I had bought at the thrift store three towns over, and listened to Principal Hargrove read my name into a microphone that buzzed with static. "Mrs. Clara Whitfield, forty years of service to the children of Cedar Hollow." My hands were shaking. Not from nerves. I had stopped being nervous around the time I turned twenty-two, the first year I taught a full class of six children in a one-room schoolhouse with a wood stove and a chalkboard the size of a dinner table. The shaking came from something deeper, a tremor that lived in my bones and woke up whenever too many people looked at me at once. "Honey, you're gonna wear a hole in that dress," said Ruth Ann, the school's librarian and the closest thing I had to a friend. She was seventy-three, wore a different shade of reading glasses every day of the week, and had never once asked me where I came from. "Go on up there. They're waiting." I walked onto the stage. The lights were brighter than I expected, and for a moment, I couldn't see the audience at all. Just a warm blur of faces and the shape of Principal Hargrove holding a plaque that said Teacher of the Year on it in gold letters. Then my eyes adjusted. And I saw him. Front row. Aisle seat. Silver hair, the same square jaw, the same easy smile that had made every adult in our neighborhood trust him. Dean Crawford, sixty-two years old and still wearing that leather jacket like he was twenty. He was looking right at me. The plaque was in my hands. The microphone was in front of my face. Sixty years of life, forty of them spent in this hollow, teaching other people's children to read and write and dream, and the man who had stolen everything from me was sitting in the front row like he had every right to watch me receive an award for surviving. "Mrs. Whitfield?" Principal Hargrove whispered. "Are you okay?" I didn't answer him. I looked at Dean, and Dean looked at me, and in that space between us was a rented room in a town I had never seen before, locked from the outside, a man three times my age who called me his wife without ever asking my name, and a six-month stretch where I learned that screaming only made things worse. Dean smiled and raised his hand in a small wave. I gripped the plaque until the gold edges cut into my palms. "Thank you," I said into the microphone. My voice was steady. Forty years of steady. "Thank you all. I have been at Cedar Hollow School for... a long time. Longer than most of you have been alive." The audience laughed. They thought I was being charming. I wasn't. After the ceremony, there was a reception in the cafeteria. Punch, cookies, the kind of plastic tablecloths that stuck to your forearms. I stood by the window and watched the sun set behind the ridges, the same ridges I had learned to see as fences in my first years here, the same ones I had eventually learned to walk through when I stopped running and started teaching. "Clara." I didn't turn around. "You haven't changed a bit." "You have," I said. "You got old." Dean laughed. It was the same laugh, the one that used to make me feel safe when we were kids and he walked me home from school through the empty lots behind the mill. "Sixty's not old. It's just... seasoned." I turned then. He was standing close, closer than he should have been, wearing a watch that looked expensive and shoes that weren't from any store I had ever seen in this county. "What are you doing here, Dean?" "Come on. My best girl gets Teacher of the Year, you think I'm gonna miss it?" He put his hand on my arm. I felt it through the fabric of my dress, the exact same grip he had used the last time I saw him, when I was nineteen and he was holding my wrist at the bus station in a town called Crescent Falls, telling me that we were just going to meet a friend, that everything was going to be okay. "Don't touch me." He pulled his hand back. "Still a firecracker. I always liked that about you." "What do you want?" "Nostalgia." He shrugged. "Old times. I'm back in the area, and I heard about the award, and I thought... maybe I'd come and see how you turned out." "How I turned out." I repeated the words slowly, tasting them. "You want to know how I turned out." "Yeah." He looked around the cafeteria, at the children running with paper cups of punch, at Ruth Ann adjusting her glasses, at Principal Hargrove shaking hands with parents. "Looks like you did okay for yourself." "Did I." "Hey, I know it wasn't easy. But look at this place. You're a hero around here. Teacher of the Year." He smiled at me, and for one terrible moment, I saw the boy I used to know, the boy who carried my books and climbed trees with me and promised that we would always be neighbors, always be friends, always be something. Then I remembered the door closing. The lock turning. The smell of that room. "Do you remember the last time you saw me?" I asked. Dean's smile flickered. "What?" "Before today. Do you remember the last time you saw me?" He looked at his shoes. The expensive ones. "Clara, that was a long time ago." "Was it?" "Water under the bridge, honey. We were kids. We made mistakes." I laughed. It came out sharp and hard and nothing like the quiet teacher laugh I had trained myself to use. "You made mistakes. I made a life." "Okay." He held up his hands. "Okay. I can see you're upset. That's fair. But I'm here now, and I've got something to talk to you about. Business." "Business." "Can we go somewhere? Not here." He nodded toward the crowd. "Somewhere private." I looked past him, through the window, at the dark shapes of the mountains against the last light. Forty years ago, I would have said yes. I would have followed him anywhere, because that's what you did when someone had known you your whole life, when they had been there when your mother died and your father drank himself into a quiet grave, when they were the only person in the world who had ever promised to stay. But that girl was gone. And the woman who replaced her had learned a few things. "There's a diner on Route 9," I said. "Ten miles east. Tomorrow, noon." Dean's face relaxed. "Perfect. I'll be there." "Bring whatever paperwork you have," I said. He paused. "Paperwork?" "For whatever business you're talking about." I smiled, the way I smiled at children when I was setting a trap I intended to be educational. "You know me. I like to be prepared." Dean laughed and shook his head. "Well, I'll be damned. You really did turn out interesting." He turned to go, then looked back over his shoulder. "Hey, Clara. I'm glad you're alive." I watched him walk out of the cafeteria, through the double doors, back into the life I had crawled out of his hands to build. "Me too," I said to no one. "More than you'll ever know." That night, I sat at my kitchen table with a cup of tea that went cold before I drank it, and I opened the shoebox I had kept under my bed for forty years. Inside were three things: a bus ticket from Crescent Falls to Cedar Hollow with a date on it, a hospital wristband with a name that was not mine, and a piece of notebook paper where a fourteen-year-old girl had written down everything she remembered about the man who had sold her. That girl had been me. She still was. I picked up the phone and dialed a number I had never called before, one I had looked up months ago and saved in the same drawer where I kept my car registration and my insurance card, the drawer of things that were not secrets but were not exactly for sharing either. "Attorney Wilson's office," a voice answered. "This is Clara Whitfield. I'd like to schedule an appointment." "Of course, Mrs. Whitfield. What is this regarding?" I looked at the bus ticket. At the hospital wristband. At the piece of paper. "It's regarding a crime," I said. "A very old one. And I think it's about to start happening again."