Lisa Gardner - Hide

The mug cost $3.99, roughly two weeks' worth of chocolate/milk money. I never questioned the sacrifice.

I had to wait another agonizing week, until a Thursday when my mother announced she had errands to run and might be late picking me up. I spent the day jittery, barely able to focus, a warrior about to launch her first mission.

Two thirty-five the school bell rang. Kids who didn't ride the bus congregated at the front of the brick building, like clusters of flowers. I'd been at this school six months. I didn't belong to any of the groups, so no one cared when I slipped away. Those were the days before you had to sign kids in and out. Before parent volunteers stood guard after hours. Before Amber Alerts. In those days, only my father seemed obsessed with all the things that could happen to a little girl.

In the store, I picked out the mug carefully. Carried it all the way to the register using two hands. I counted out $3.99 in quarters, fingers fumbling the coins with my urgency

The clerk, an older woman, asked me if my name was Annabelle.

For a moment, I couldn't speak. I almost ran out of the store. I could not be Annabelle. It was very important I not be Annabelle. My father had told me this over and over again.

"For a friend," I finally managed to whisper.

The woman smiled at me kindly and wrapped my prize in layers of protective tissue.

Outside the store, I tucked the mug in my backpack next to my schoolbooks, then returned to school grounds. A minute later, my mother arrived in our new used station wagon, back loaded with groceries, fingers tapping absently on the steering wheel.

I felt an agonizing wave of guilt. I was sure her gaze saw right through the blue vinyl of my backpack. She was staring at my mug. She knew exactly what I had done.

Instead, my mother asked about my day I said, "Fine," and climbed into the front bench seat beside her. She never looked in my bag. Never asked about the mug. She simply drove us home.

I kept the pink mug hidden behind a pile of outgrown clothing on the top shelf of my closet. I would bring it down at night, when my parents thought I was sleeping. I would take it into bed, hiding under the covers and admiring the pink, pearlescent sheen under the glow of a flashlight. I would run my fingertips over the raised brushstrokes of flowers, butterflies, kitten. But mostly I traced the name, over and over again.

Annabelle. My name is Annabelle.

About six weeks later, my mother found it. It was a Saturday. My father was working. I think I was watching cartoons in the family room. My mother decided to clean up a little, taking down the pile of clothes to trade in at the secondhand store where we purchased most of our things.

She didn't scream. Didn't yell. In fact, I think what finally alerted me was the silence, the total utter silence, compared to the usual white noise of my mother puttering around the tiny apartment, folding laundry, banging pans, opening and shutting cupboard doors.

I had just climbed up off the gold shag carpeting when she appeared in the doorway, holding my treasure in her hand. She looked stunned but composed.

"Did someone give this to you?" she asked me quietly

Wordlessly, heart thumping in my chest, I shook my head.

"Then how did you get it?"

I couldn't look her in the eye and tell my story Instead, I scuffed my toes against the carpet. "I saw it. I… I thought it was pretty"

"Did you steal it?"

Another quick head shake. "I saved my milk money"

"Oh, Annabelle…" Her hand flew to her mouth. To show me she was appalled, even horrified? Or to cover the unforgivable sin of saying my name?

I wasn't sure. But then she held out her arms, and I ran to her and held on to her waist very hard, and started crying myself because it felt so nice to hear my mother say my real name. I had missed hearing it from her lips.

My father came home. Caught us huddled like coconspirators in the family room, mug still clutched in my mother's hand. His response was immediate and thunderous.

He grabbed the pink ceramic cup from my mother and shook it in the air.

"What the hell is this?" he roared.

"I didn't mean-"

"Did a stranger give this to you?"

"N-n-no-"

"Did she give this to you?" Finger pointed at my mother, as if somehow she was even worse than a stranger.

"No-"

"What the hell are you doing? Do you think this is a game? Do you think I gave up my post at MIT, that we are living in this shitty little dump of an apartment because of some game? What were you thinking?"

I couldn't speak anymore. I just stared at him, cheeks flushed, eyes wild, knowing I was trapped, wishing desperately for some means of escape.

He turned on my mother. "You knew about this?"

"I just found out myself," she said calmly. She put a hand on his arm as if to soothe him. "Russ-"

"Hal, the name is Hal !" He shook her hand away. "Christ, you're nearly as bad as she is. Well, I know how to put a stop to this."

He pounded into the kitchen, yanked open the drawer under the phone, pulled out a hammer.

"Sophia," he said pointedly, staring at me. "Come here."

He sat me at the kitchen table. He placed the mug in front of me. He handed me the hammer.

"Do it."

I shook my head.

"Do it!"

I shook my head again.

"Russ…" My mother, sounding plaintive.

"Goddammit, Sophia, you will break that mug or you are not getting up from that table. I don't care if it takes all night. You will pick up that hammer!"

It didn't take all night. Just until three a.m. When I finally did the deed, I didn't cry. I picked up the hammer with both hands. I studied my target. Then I delivered the killing blow with such force, I broke off a chunk of the table.

My father's and my problem was never that we were so different, but that, even back then, we were too much alike.

WHEN YOU ARE a child, you need your parent to be omnipotent, the mighty figurehead who will always keep you safe. Then, when you are a teenager, you need your parent to be flawed, because it seems the only way to build yourself up, to break away. I am thirty-two years old now, and mostly I need my father to be insane.

The thought started with my father's untimely death. After his constant vigilance against would-be pedophiles, rapists, serial killers, it seemed notable that no monster got him in the end. Instead, it was an overworked, English-challenged taxi driver who never stood trial after threatening to countersue the city for improperly marking the construction detour for the Big Dig, thus setting the stage for the shocking accident and, of course, causing the driver debilitating back pain that meant he'd never work again.

I began to wonder if, all his life, my father had feared the wrong things. And then it was only a hop, skip, and jump to wonder if he had had anything to fear at all.

What if there had never been any monster hiding in the closet? No homicidal sexual deviant waiting to snatch little Annabelle Granger off the streets?

Academics are notorious for their brilliant, brittle minds. And mathematicians in particular. What if it had all been in my father's head?

Truth is, looking back on all of our days on the road, I never noticed anything out of the ordinary. I never felt unknown eyes watching me. I never saw a car slow down so the driver could catch a second glance. I never, ever felt threatened, and I thought about it, believe me, I thought about it every time I came home and found our five suitcases packed and stacked next to the front door. What had gone wrong this time? What sin had I committed? I never got an answer.

My father had fought a war. Wholeheartedly, manically, obsessively.

My mother and I simply had gone along for the ride.