He Started It

I don’t remember who got out first; I just remember Grandpa and Calvin facing each other between the cars. Eddie and Portia and I were pressed up against the back window. The van had those windows with a latch and they pushed out a few inches. Eddie opened one a little so we could hear.

‘Are you just going to keep following us?’ Grandpa said.

Calvin smiled. His teeth looked so white beneath that big moustache. ‘No. I’m going to call the police if you don’t tell me where Nikki is.’

Grandpa held out his hands, palms facing forward. ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about. I’m just on a road trip with my grandkids.’

‘Sure you are.’

‘It’s the truth,’ Grandpa said.

‘That’s not what their mother said.’

Mom. I wanted to talk to her so badly right then, and I wouldn’t have lied, either. I leaned forward to look in the driver’s seat, trying to find Grandpa’s cell phone.

‘No,’ Eddie said, pulling me back to my seat. ‘Don’t even think about it.’

Outside, the conversation continued. Grandpa laughed.

‘Okay, okay,’ he said. ‘You got me. Nikki ran off to meet up with a friend of hers. That’s the truth. She runs off a lot and you’re welcome to ask my daughter about it. Ask her how many times Nikki has run away.’

Calvin says nothing.

‘We’re going to pick Nikki up right now. That’s why we’re in this godforsaken place.’ Grandpa looked around, his nose scrunched up like it smelled bad. ‘Go ahead and follow us. You’ll see Nikki is just fine.’

I should’ve jumped out of the car right that second and told Calvin that Grandpa was lying. Nikki hadn’t run off to meet a friend; she had run off because Grandpa and Eddie had tied her up.

I was about to do it – I swear I was – when Portia yelled, ‘Nikki! We’re going to see Nikki!’

Grandpa heard her and smiled. ‘That’s right. We’re going to see Nikki.’

Calvin got back into his car, ready to follow us.

The road to Alamo looks the same, which means there’s still a whole lot of nothing. Side note about driving across the country; it’s impossible to understand how big it is unless you see how much nothing there is.

Halfway into the drive, Portia texts me from the front seat.

I’m a little nervous.

Is she really nervous or is she just pretending? At this point, anything is possible. The endgame is when all the secrets come out.

Not a question, I say:

You think something bad is going to happen.

Bad? Given. Tragic and horrifying is what I’m afraid of.

I say:

Like last time.

Yeah, I’d say that was pretty tragic and horrifying.

‘Hey,’ Eddie says. ‘Are you guys seriously texting each other while I’m sitting right here?’

‘Yes,’ I say.

‘I was talking about last time we were out here,’ Portia says.

Eddie’s jaw tightens. ‘What about it?’

‘Ummm …’ Portia says. ‘It sucked? A lot?’

Yes. Yes, it did.

‘Oh,’ Eddie says. ‘That.’

It’s hard to know how much Portia understood during the trip, or if she knew why she was the center of everything in the desert. Later, she did get it.

When we finally got back home, Grandpa went into seclusion, and he stayed that way for the rest of his life. Our parents went into overdrive looking for Nikki, and we all told them the truth. Mostly. Nikki ran away in the middle of the night and no one had seen her since.

True.

Next came the lie.

We said we had never seen Calvin Bingham, never spoke to him. Didn’t even know there was a private investigator following us. Grandpa said it, Eddie said it, and so did I. Even Portia lied. Grandpa said we had to or we’d all go to jail. Forever and ever, he said.

For all our parents knew, Calvin walked off the job and went to Vegas instead. The last report they received had come from somewhere in the desert, when he was still following us in the van. The only person who asked questions about him was his secretary.

She could still be looking for him, even now, twenty years later. Oh, along with his ex-wife. Calvin Bingham had an ex-wife who called the police about six months after the trip ended. She hadn’t received her alimony.

None of that mattered to our parents. They didn’t care about Calvin Bingham. The only one they cared about was Nikki, and they looked for her until my father suggested they stop. You already know how much my mother hated that idea.

For years, the family closed in on itself, grieving over the still-missing Nikki – not to mention dealing with everything our parents didn’t know. No one told our parents how Nikki took control, how she gave Grandpa the pills, or how she blackmailed him with that camera. Not even Eddie.

We also didn’t tell them that Nikki had been tied up right before she ran.

And you know I didn’t say a word about her condition.

I could tell you how upset my parents were, how many times they called the police, how their lives revolved around finding her, how often I heard my mom screaming and yelling at someone for nothing. That period of time was horrible, and I don’t have a single good memory of it. Not one.

You get the idea.

But no one can stay like that forever. Either you die or you move on, because life does. Eddie finished high school and went off to Duke, while I went to the University of Miami to be close to Cooper. Portia was still at home and starting her teenage years. When I came home for the summer after my freshman year, she looked like a different person.

Portia had gone full goth, from the steel-toed boots to the black lipstick. The first time I saw her, I didn’t know what to say. She looked awful.

‘That’s dramatic,’ I finally said.

She walked away.

Her music was horrible: rock bands with drawn-out voices and guitar riffs, the kind made for wallowing teenagers. She carried a notebook everywhere. It had a black cover and she drew on the cover with a silver pen. Anarchy signs, skulls and crossbones, that sort of thing.

Still, I didn’t worry too much about her. Everyone has phases. I was in my own first-year college phase and didn’t even recognize it. I thought I was the smartest person on the planet and everyone was too stupid to see it.

That summer, when I was living back home, I heard Portia on the phone with one of her friends. We still talked on landlines back then. Texting was starting to become popular, but Portia didn’t have her own cell phone. Not in 2006.

She was in her room and I was in the bathroom. We shared one, it was between our bedrooms and not accessible from the hall.

‘I swear,’ Portia said. ‘If my grandpa hadn’t done that, my life would be totally different. Totally.’

Pause.

‘That’s what I’m saying. It’s, like, a huge thing, right? It changes everything.’

Yes, I stayed to listen. You bet I did, because I thought she was talking about the road trip and Grandpa tying Nikki up. A few sentences later, I realized she wasn’t.

‘You understand,’ she said. ‘Because you’ve been molested, too.’

Too.

Portia had not been molested by her grandfather. She knew that. She understood what it meant to be touched in her private places, and no, Grandpa had never done that.