David Bell - The Hiding Place

“So you decided to become my brother.”

“I wanted a new start. This was about ten years ago. I’d had some trouble with the police, mostly when I was a teenager but a little when I was over eighteen. I committed some petty crimes, some robberies. Nothing that serious, but I just woke up one day and was sick of myself, you know? I looked in the mirror, and I thought, ‘Who the hell are you and why are you such a piece of shit?’ It’s pretty easy to assume a new identity if a person wants to. You can look up the tips for doing it on the Internet or from the library. And the way people always do it is they find someone who died, preferably a little kid because then there are no real records about them. All you have to do is find the social security number and request a birth certificate. I figured, why not accomplish two goals at once? I could get a new identity and be the person I kind of always wanted to be. Your brother. I knew the story from when I was a kid. I knew this tragedy had befallen your family. People still talked about it in school sometimes-the other kids. I think everyone thought of you as the girl whose brother had died.”

“I don’t think of myself that way,” Janet said.

“I get it,” he said. “You’re more than that. You have your own kid. You have a life. I get it. I didn’t want people to look at me and just see Hope House. Or foster child. I did what you did-I created a new life.”

“I didn’t steal someone’s identity,” Janet said. “I didn’t steal an identity and then torment a family. Why did you let me believe, even for a second, that you might be Justin?”

“Because I liked thinking that I might be him. I wanted to be someone else, someone from a decent family. Someone with a home like yours-”

Janet had listened long enough. She got it. Steven Kollman was a messed-up adult who grew out of a messed-up kid. She remembered that day on the playground, her act of what Steven considered heroism and what she considered simple decency, and she understood the impact such a gesture could make on a young life.

But that was as far as she went with Steven Kollman. She couldn’t forget the cruel trick he’d played on her, encouraging false hopes about Justin, leading her to believe there were possibilities where none existed. So rather than listen to any more of Steven Kollman’s sob story, Janet stood and went for the buzzer near the door, which would summon Detective Stynes and let her out. But before she reached it, Steven spoke, his voice stopping her.

“I ran into Michael about six months ago,” he said.

Janet froze in place. She didn’t hit the buzzer.

“I came to Dove Point almost a year ago. I got arrested in Columbus for an assault. I blew the court date, so there was a warrant.”

“You got arrested?”

“I assaulted a guy who worked for the child welfare office. My records are sealed, the ones from when I was a kid. I wanted to see what they said about my parents and if maybe I had any other family members I could look up. Cousins or something. Since they’re sealed, I couldn’t even see them. They’re my records, but I couldn’t see them. And this asshole in the welfare office offered to let me see them for a price. You know, some kind of side deal. We met at some dive bar in Columbus, and when I got there he wanted more money. I punched him. It was stupid, I know, but when the cops came and found me I was only carrying the Justin Manning ID. Some days, that’s all I carried, like I really was him. I went into the system that way.”

“They found the summons in your apartment,” Janet said. “Actually, my daughter found it.”

Steven looked a little surprised, but then he shrugged and kept talking. “I figured I needed to get out of Columbus, so I decided to come back here. At least it was a little familiar, and I figured you might still be here. I thought you’d be married and all that, but who knows? We could reconnect maybe. We could be…I don’t know. Something. Friends? Maybe like family even.”

“What does Michael have to do with this?” Janet asked.

“It’s interesting the way you snap to attention when his name comes up. I don’t even know if Justin’s name gets the same rise out of you that Michael’s does.”

Janet looked into Steven’s eyes, saw the little glint of glee he seemed to be feeling. “Good-bye.” Janet reached for the buzzer.

“You love him, don’t you?”

“He’s my best friend.”

“But you love him, right? You sat around here in Dove Point all those years, like I said, raising your kid and making a life. And it was all good, wasn’t it? Except you always wondered what Michael was doing. Was he having a good time? Was he having an adventure? Was he having it with someone else?”

Janet looked at the floor, the scuffed, filthy linoleum tile, the harsh glare of the overhead lights showing every speck of dirt. He was right. She carried that image of Michael around with her all those years, using it as more than just a distraction. She used it as a spur, something to urge her forward. She didn’t want Michael to come back and find out she’d completely fallen to pieces after high school, that she’d married the first loser who came along and continued to pump out kids. No, she wanted to show him something-anything-if he ever came back. Some might say she lived for him, and would consider this pathetic, but she didn’t see it that way. She wanted a better life for Ashleigh and for herself, and if thoughts of Michael helped her get there, so be it.

“Let me tell you about meeting the golden boy when I came back to Dove Point,” Steven said.

But he didn’t start talking. He waited for something. Janet understood what he wanted, so she went back to the table and took her seat again. He had something important to say, and he needed his audience in place.

“I ran into Michael about six months ago here in Dove Point. Do you know Rodney’s? That bar out on Old Dayton Road?”

“I’ve heard of it.”

“I guess it’s not the kind of place you would frequent. I’m not even sure why Michael was there, except maybe he was feeling sorry for himself. He was drinking a lot, you know?” Steven pantomimed throwing a drink into his mouth. “I studied him for a while from across the room because I thought I knew who he was, but I wasn’t sure. I hadn’t seen him in, what, twenty-some years? I wanted to be sure, but after I checked him out for a while, I knew I recognized him. I had all those faces from that day on the playground memorized. He didn’t look that different. Just grown-up is all.”

“Did he recognize you?”

“Recognize me?” Steven laughed. “Janet, people like Michael don’t recognize or remember people like me. Hell, did you recognize me when I came to your door in the middle of the night? Or when you saw me in broad daylight on campus? Did you recognize me?”

“I thought you were familiar.”

“You hoped I was your brother,” he said. “Hoped. But you didn’t recognize me. You didn’t even recognize me when the cops told you my name, did you?”

By not saying anything, Janet knew she was answering his question.

“I told him we went to school together,” Steven said. “I bought him a drink, told him my name. I told him I moved away after the third grade, which is true. I didn’t mention Hope House and all that shit. We started talking. We just shared stories of our lives. And here’s what got me, man-here’s what really got me. As he talked about his life and I talked about mine, I realized that the paths we’d been on, the way we’d been moving through our lives in the years since high school, really weren’t that different. Sure, he had a great time up to a point. The exact opposite of me. But after graduating, the wheels came off for him. He didn’t finish college. He tried a few different careers-salesman, store manager, substitute teacher-but none of them panned out. Nothing ever stuck with him. Or he never stuck with anything. Whatever it was, his life just wasn’t that golden. Do you understand what I’m saying here? Do you understand what a revelation it was to hear all that?”