I didn’t do anything wrong. A sin of omission, maybe. After all, I had never even teased Kalinda. Even before that TV show, where the character with the same name got so popular: a cute little bi-detective that everyone wanted and desired, and all the kids said “Look, look at her,” and then “Her, too,” meaning our Kalinda. Only they didn’t see her as an object of desire, just some sexual deviant, which isn’t a great thing to be in a small railroad town this side of the Blue Ridge.
Or even before that, when my friends made fun of her because she was dirt poor, the kind of poor nobody believes exists anymore. Dust in your mouth, wrong side of the tracks poor, for there’s always a side that’s the wrong side. She lived there, behind the 7-Eleven with the double dumpster, and walked to school in cotton dresses too big and too worn for anyone you’d see on TV, unless they’re homeless, that is, or on reruns of The Waltons.
But I didn’t make fun of her. I didn’t say a thing, not a word. I even turned away when others did, so as not to embarrass her anymore than she already was. But when Kalinda said she was abducted by aliens, you can imagine the uproar, as if she didn’t know better to say something like that, especially in a town like this.
The ribbing was horrible. I’m not surprised she looked afraid. Threats, mostly from boys, who had always thought Kalinda’s lithe body and generous breasts were reason enough to tease her or flip paper footballs into the gap of her open blouse. I often wondered why she didn’t just button herself up.
‘Course, Gran said she was asking for it – Gran’s older than God and cranky as hell – but Kalinda just seemed confused to me. Pretty, though, with her lank blonde hair and full mouth. But dirty, too, her fingernails, and especially her feet. When she wore sandals, you could see that her toes were the color of peat moss, like she’d been walking through cornfields or newly-dug graves. Dull-eyed. Quiet in class. I didn’t tease her about any of those things.
But after she disappeared, well, we couldn’t get enough of her. It was all – what did she say? What was she wearing? Who saw her last? How was she acting when she told Bickles and Shay, her two best friends – or so they say now – that she’d been abducted, abducted for years. Experiments galore, they said.
Of course, those two buffoons also said Kalinda didn’t mind being felt up for a fiver behind the gym, so they weren’t the most reliable witnesses.
But I’d heard stories, too, from plenty of girls who said she’d confided in them or their best friend’s friend. And supposedly she told Mrs. Whitcombe too, the health teacher, who later told the FBI she suspected abuse in the home, probably “sexual abuse”. I can hear her say it, with her eyebrows raised, like she was sharing something you already knew but were too embarrassed to admit.
But when all was said and done, or not said, or not done, no one believed Kalinda anyway. Even Bickles and Shay – you could tell by how they told their story with big hand gestures, over-enunciating every word: “A beam of moonlight, shooting from the sky, neon-green, atoms dancing in the light. You can see atoms, right?” Then the climax: Kalinda levitating in the air, pulled into some cigar-shaped vehicle with rotating reds, prodded and probed by those grey-green men of Spielberg fame. They had big heads and eyes the shape of aviator glasses with no pupils, and their long skinny fingers were crooked and slow-moving.
“That explains the bruises,” Bickles whispered knowingly – the ones we’d all chalked up to clumsiness. Or maybe heroin.
And we said, “Yeah, right,” like they couldn’t fool us. But we applauded when those goons got interviewed by Channel 5, even if they were only onscreen for thirty seconds. Mostly the TV story just gave a timeline of Kalinda’s disappearance, and ended with her parents’ insistence that their daughter was safe and sound with family in Tennessee.
Ah, but they didn’t say that at first, did they? Kalinda’s mother was frantic when her girl went missing, showing up at school, accosting students in the hall, till she was picked up by the cops herself. She insisted on an AMBER alert and a search of the woods. But after the alien story hit the papers, the whole family clammed up.
Three weeks counting. Other news takes front and center. Missy Obert’s pregnant but doesn’t know if the dad is Chad or Steve or some visiting rapper from DC. Father Wilson had a breakdown on the pulpit, and accused his congregation of stealing from the donation box, which is locked for goodness’ sake. And Boom-Boom Walker claims he kissed the substitute teacher and she kissed back – with tongue. So you see, Kalinda’s story’s dead, dead as stone, or a hank of rope to swing by. No one thinks of her at all.
Save me. I think of her every time I hear a plane overhead or see a helicopter beam sweep through the town, bats and summer flies caught in its light, or late at night, when I hear the tap on the window pane, and look out to see those black, tilting, oblong eyes looking back at me in the dark.
I know they can’t come inside. They’re not omnipotent. They can’t move through walls. That’s movie stuff. But they motion to me with their long skinny fingers, and they tell me in my mind, as they have for years, that they’re here and they’re waiting, and they’ll see me soon. And then they point to my body and smile in my mind, and I know no one will believe me either.
And even if they do, they’ll never say.
