Kidnap Is Sorta Like Babysit

Lonna didn’t kidnap me. She broke into my parents' liquor cabinet and shared it with me. We played quarters with Kool-Aid, and when I was in the bathroom, she poured gin in my cup. Her younger sister, a year younger than I was (her fourth grade to my fifth), got drunk and stood on the furniture, shouting.

I tried my first (and last) cigarette at Lonna’s parents’ house. I wondered how anyone could bear the burning cough. But she didn’t kidnap me. She picked me up from my friend Lori’s house one night; her boyfriend was driving. I sat in the back with another couple, and they all smoked pot, windows rolled up, hotboxing us all. I pulled my jacket sleeve over my face and breathed as shallowly as possible.

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Lorraine didn't kidnap me, either. She was 19, and we’d just moved to Punta Gorda. I was eight and missed a whole week of school after I got sick with the flu and started sleepwalking. We watched a lot of television, and when the Rolaids commercial asked how we spell relief, Lorraine said, “F-A-R-T.” She made spaghetti for herself in my parents' kitchen, and when I asked her how much of it was mine, she said, “None.” But she didn't kidnap me. She took me trick-or-treating in her neighborhood because my parents were gone. No idea where.

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Sabrina didn't kidnap me. She watched soap operas on the living room TV when I wanted to watch cartoons after school. She told me to use my parents' black-and-white television in their room. What was the point of that? Her family had a German Shepherd named Strong who roamed the neighborhood. Sabrina and her best friend made up their own language, called Humpshkenese, which she taught to me and which I still remember.

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Kim didn't kidnap me. She also smoked pot with her friends, in front of me, but it was in her parents' living room. Her brother drove a red Trans Am, and their townhouse felt fancy, even though it must have been close to the same size as ours. When I told her the smoking bothered me, she put Scotch tape on her mouth and stopped talking.

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Jimmy Hitzman didn't kidnap me. He told me not to take my night shirt off as I walked upstairs to change. His younger sister, Ursula, watched me sometimes, too. But she was only three years older than I was, so she didn't really count as a babysitter. Her boyfriend called her a “double fucking bitch” on the phone. I was listening on the extension downstairs. I repeated his words one day, riding my bike through the neighborhood, aimed at some boy who made me mad. Ursula told on me, but she didn't kidnap me.

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Ruth didn't kidnap me, either. She lived in one of the apartments at Snell Isle, and she loved plants. She lined her tiny windowsills with tiny metal mustard boxes that she'd emptied and washed and filled with soil and tiny little plants. She took me on a walk one evening, “window shopping,” she called it. We passed a puddle with a rainbow sheen on it, and I was captivated. When she explained it was from spilled gas, my four-year-old brain didn't process it or care. I just watched the light turn colors as the sun went down. I fell asleep in her lap that night, her long nails tickling my scalp as she played with my hair.

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I don't remember my kidnapper at all. If my parents recalled her name, they never shared it with me. They had called a service in Wheaton, Illinois, both of them working full-time at the VA hospital in Chicago. Mom got a phone call at work from the Wheaton police: “We have your daughter here.” The sitter had turned herself in, told the police she woke up in a field with me crying beside her. On the typewriter at home, a typed page: “We know you have money.” That's the part of the story where Dad would always laugh: “Shows what they knew!” As though it were a joke. As though the near-loss of his two-year-old daughter were an entertaining tale for cocktail parties. As though the worst were over.