22. My weakness is that I care too much…
22
My weakness is that I care too much…
Moth
I had to pull over twice on the way home.
Once, to vomit on the side of the road, shaking and sweating, and the second time, to find my phone and stab in a text. I sent it to my little black heart, and even if I tried to add as much anger as I could manage, I only came out as begging.
Why would you do this? Why would you hurt him?
The phone stayed dark and silent for way too long, and dropped it into the passenger’s seat and continued my drive. The darkness pressed in on me from all sides, suffocating me with its weight. I refused to focus on it. Instead, I kept my eyes on the road and my foot on the pedal, forcing myself back home. When I pulled back into Cottonwood Falls, the town was quiet. The storefronts shut tight, silent, and black against the eerie yellow glow of the streetlights. I turned onto Lake Street and continued until I found the turnoff for the gravel road .
When I made it to the driveway, I saw the large, boxy shadow of Amelia’s Escalade. Somehow, she’d made it here before me. Not surprised. The way she sped when she was in a good mood was probably nothing compared to the breakneck speeds she must reach when she’s worried.
Was she worried? Maybe it was just me that was worried?
I parked my car behind Amelia’s Escalade and sat there for a moment, trying to collect my thoughts. The air felt heavy, charged with electricity, and a sense of foreboding crept up my spine.
Her driver’s side door popped open, and a few seconds later, I could see her shock of blonde hair bobbing in the shadows as she moved towards my car.
“Hey,” she said, coming to lean against my door, her arms folded and her chin resting on her wrists. “You okay?”
I swallowed hard, trying to push down the lump in my throat, but it stuck there, choking me.
“Not really,” I admitted, my voice barely above a whisper.
Amelia’s blue eyes searched mine for a moment before she sighed heavily.
“I know,” she said, sighing. “But it’s gonna be okay. Promise.”
I nodded, reaching over to thread the keys out of the engine and stuffing them into my bra. Everything was going in the bra today.
“Did you get my dress?”
“Sure did,” she said, nodding towards her truck. “And mine, and the shoes for both.”
“Good.” I moved to open the door, and she stepped back to give me room. My legs shook as I stood on the gravel, my thighs jumping and twitching. “You didn’t have to wait out here, though. I haven’t been locking the door or anything. No point.”
I shrugged.
Amelia cleared her throat nervously, and instantly, I was on edge.
“Well,” she said. “There’s something you need to see.”
I let her lead me around her Escalade, and she motioned to the front porch. A neat stack of papers had been placed in front of the door and secured with something heavy. The closer I got, the easier it was for me to see it was a clear glass paperweight with a lunar moth inside, frozen forever.
The moonlight cast an eerie glow over the glass, illuminating the intricate details of the moth’s delicate wings. Amelia watched me closely, her expression a mix of concern and anticipation. I reached out a trembling hand to pick up the paperweight, turning it over to see if there was any clue, any message left behind. But there was nothing, just the ethereal beauty of the moth suspended in time.
Carefully, I picked up the stack of papers and flipped through them. It was newspaper articles, file folders, and binders. Holding them carefully against my chest, I let us in the house.
The wooden floors creaked under our weight as we stepped into the dark living room. The air was heavy, and a shiver ran down my spine despite the warmth of the night. The scent of shame and dust swirled around me as I reached over and flicked on my dad’s trusty light. I placed the papers on the coffee table, and Amelia hovered beside me, her presence a comforting anchor amid my growing sea of unease .
What better place to start than at the top?
Right there on top, in plain black and white, was a newspaper article, torn from an old, yellowed newspaper. The blaring black text was still bold and easy to read.
Local girl missing
Cottonwood Falls police are seeking information about a girl who went missing on Tuesday afternoon. 13-year-old Vanessa Harper was last seen walking home from school along Lake Street, around 4 PM. Police are investigating, but at this point, have no suspects or leads.
Beside the text, a blown out, blurry, black-and-white picture of me smiled up from the paper. It was a copy of one of the photos I’d taken down from the hallway just a week or so ago. It was a school photo taken in my first year of middle school, when I’d finally started parting my hair on the side and decided that the straight, blunt bangs my mom insisted on were ‘too babyish’.
I passed the clipping over to Amelia. She awe’d at the picture before she settled in to read, but I had already moved on. It was another article, dated a week after the first one.
Cottonwood Falls teen still missing after a week
More than a week after Cottonwood Falls police released an Amber Alert for Vanessa Harper, also known as “Ness” or “Nessa”, the 13-year-old is still missing. She was last seen on April 12th, on her way home from school. She was last seen on the corner of Lake Street and Main. She stands at 5’3 and weighs 110 pounds. She was last seen wearing a pair of distressed jean shorts, high-top sneakers, and a blue and black striped camisole with lace trim. Speaking to the Chase County Gazette, her father, Police Chief Don Harper said:
“I just want my baby girl home. She’s all I’ve got.”
Two years ago in August, Chief Harper lost his wife, Olivia, to uterine cancer. Vanessa is their only child.
The words brought tears flooding my eyes, and I had to force myself to look away. I couldn’t cry anymore. I didn’t have the strength. I passed the clipping to Amelia and picked up the first file folder, shaking my head to force the emotions away.
Inside the folder were printed emails, handwritten notes, and police reports. I flipped through the documents, feeling a chill course through me as I read about the investigation into my disappearance. The details were jarring—sightings of a girl matching my description in neighboring towns, dead ends in the search, and interviews with friends and teachers who all expressed shock and concern over my sudden vanishing act.
Amelia must have seen the color drain from my face because she reached out a hand to squeeze mine in silent support. I appreciated her wordless comfort as I delved deeper into the file. There were copies of flyers that had been distributed, asking for any information on my whereabouts. The thought of people searching for me, worrying about me, tore at my heart.
This town cared about me, and I had abandoned it at the first chance I got.
Flipping the folder closed, I handed it to her .
“My dad was never the same after that,” I said, picking up the next newspaper clipping. “He drank so much, I hardly saw him except when he was leaving for work. He kept me home and checked in on me constantly. I remember for a while he had a cruiser parked outside 24/7.”
Amelia gave me a sad smile as she opened the folder, reading through it. I focused on the next newspaper article.
Fire leads to the discovery of missing girl
A fire broke out on Maple Street in Cottonwood Falls early Sunday morning. An off-duty firefighter, 24-year-old Thomas Eades, who lived close by, saw the flames and sprang into action. Hearing screams from inside, he risked his own life to save 13-year-old Vanessa Harper, who had been missing for nearly two weeks, kept locked inside a dog kennel in the basement.
Police believe the source of the fire was arson, set by the suspected kidnapper, in an attempt to get rid of evidence.
38-year-old Michael Jacobson has been charged with felony child abduction, attempted murder, unlawful imprisonment, and arson.
Thankfully, the accompanying picture of my kidnapper had been torn off. I was grateful for that small courtesy. I don’t know if I could sit here and look at his face now, even on a good day. Oddly, his name and age had been highlighted in thick yellow ink that stood out like a waving flag.
What did that mean?
Sighing, I passed the article to Amelia and picked up the next folder. This one was considerably thicker. Flipping it open, a stack of police reports greeted me. It began with my missing persons report, filed by my dad when he returned home after a shift and found the house empty. Next was a stack of papers, all with sightings and unsubstantiated reports, suspect interviews, and subpoenas for camera footage. Unfortunately, there hadn’t been any cameras on that part of the road. Now, just like many times before, I wondered if that was why he took me where he had.
Then, there was a stack of reports about the day they found me. I’d been found in the same clothes he took me in, stained in blood and grime. My hair was knotted, and the handcuffs around my wrists had dug so far into my flesh that they’d left permanent scars that I still had to this day.
An ache flashed through my wrist and I forced myself to snap the folder shut, shaking my head. I couldn’t look through that right now.
I passed the folder to Amelia and picked up the next one. Flipping it open, it was the interview transcript from the suspect’s interrogation. Along the edge of the stack, a bright red flag waved at me like a beacon, and I flipped to it. It was an annotation tab, and it pointed directly at a line highlighted directly in the middle of the page.
AW: So you took her
MJ: Yes. I had to.
AW: Because you thought it would be fun?
MJ: Suspect laughs. No, nothing like that.
AW: Can you tell me why?
MJ: I had to. I had to make him happy. He was confused, and he —
AW: Confused? Who was confused?
MJ: My son, Billy.
AW: And how was he confused?
Long pause
MJ: He said he was gay, see? He said he liked men, and see, we just— we can’t be havin’ that.
AW: He said he was gay, and so you took this girl. Why?
MJ: To snap him out of it! He was c-confused! He didn’t know what he was saying.
My stomach did painful flips, and I had to force myself to close the folder, shoving it away. It skidded across the coffee table, knocking into long empty beer bottles with a musical clink and sending forgotten bottle caps sliding across the wood and clattering to the ground.
The room fell into a heavy silence. My mind raced as I tried to grasp onto everything I’d just read and the twisted reasoning behind them. How could someone be driven to commit such atrocities? Out of fear and ignorance? The image of a young boy struggling with his identity, only to have his confusion exploited in the most horrifying way, filled me with a mix of anger and sorrow that I didn’t know what to do with.
“That bad, huh?”
“Yeah,” I said, swallowing hard to free the back of my throat from the taste of bile that rose up my esophagus.
“If you don’t wanna talk about it, we can—”
“He took me as s-some kind of… experiment?” I said, turning to look at her. “A-all this time I thought he was just a sick, demented pervert, but now? It’s worse. It’s so much worse , and I just want to peel my skin off.”
“Ness, h-hold on,” she held her hands up to stop me. “What do you mean?”
Swiping the file folder off the table, I handed it to her, and her fingers shook as she flipped to the annotated page.
Her breath hitched as she read the words on the page, her eyes wide with shock. Then, with a trembling hand, she reached out and touched the red flag, as if it would somehow provide an explanation or even absolution.
But it didn’t. It just served as a cruel reminder of the horrors that had been inflicted on me, all in the name of misguided morality.
“Your kidnapper thought he was doing it to help his family? He was trying to make his confused son straight? Oh my god, Ness.” I put a comforting hand on her shoulder as she took it all in. I was comforting her. It felt strange, and alien, but I didn’t know what else to do with my hands. “I’m so sorry you had to go through that.”
I took a deep breath, trying to calm the panic rising in my chest.
“It’s not even just about me. It’s about that boy. Billy? And all those other kids out there who are just trying to figure themselves out. How many others are there? How many others are going through this kind of cruelty because of fear and ignorance?”
Amelia wiped a tear from her eye and nodded.
“So what’s that?” she asked, nodding towards the last folder in the file. This one was much thinner than the rest, and then my shaking fingers opened it, and two pieces of paper stared up at me.
I picked up the first, and it was glaringly obvious. It was the black and white copy of an old, worn birth certificate .
Certificate of live birth
Name: William Benjamin Jacobson
Date of birth: 11/06/1995
Place of birth: Wyandotte County
Mother: Loretta Marjorie Foster
Father: Michael McClean Jacobson
I took the information in, reading it over and over to try to connect the dots, but none of it was making sense. This was Billy, the boy I’d been stolen for? I wondered where he was now, and if he was okay. I wondered if he knew of his father’s evil deeds and the things he had done to me in an attempt to force him to be someone he wasn’t.
I just wished I could remember any of the things that had happened while I was with them. The doctors had called it Sedative-Induced Amnesia, brought on by the drugs he’d used to keep me asleep. What had happened to me while I was asleep? Did I even want to know?
I had a horrible, gut-churning feeling I didn’t.
My only memories were of the day I was rescued, waking up to the heavy scent of smoke and the sound of angry screaming. Later, I’d come to learn those screams belonged to Tommy, fighting to break down the basement door to get to me. The next thing I knew, he’d pulled the door off the cage and ripped me out, covering my head in his wet t-shirt to protect me from the smoke as he carried me up the stairs and out the backdoor .
Sighing, I dropped the birth certificate and picked up the final paper.
Petition for change of name
IN THE MATTER OF THE PETITION OF: William Benjamin Jacobson
TO CHANGE HIS/HER NAME TO: Barrett William Foster
I didn’t read the rest. I didn’t need to. The paper fell from my fingers, fluttering to the ground as I jumped up from the couch, rushing into the kitchen, tripping and nearly falling as I hurried to the trash can and knocked off the lid. My eyes watered, my stomach cramping painfully as I leaned over it and spilled the bile in my throat into the black trash bag. Shaking hands came up to grab fistfuls of my hair, holding it back and away from my face as the watery contents of my stomach slipped from between my lips.
I gagged twice, my throat aching and my shoulders heaving as my terrified gut tried to spill into the bag. But after earlier, there was nothing left to give. I had nothing but my betrayal and my tears, my heart ripping itself apart as a thousand questions raced through my mind.
I dropped to my shaking knees, the sound of bone striking linoleum ringing through the empty kitchen. I leaned back against the cold kitchen floor, my back pressed against the cabinets. Through blurry teardrops, I stared at the ceiling, feeling the weight of everything crash down on me.
Amelia’s footsteps brought me back to reality as she kneeled next to me, her hand rubbing comforting circles on my back. Reaching up, she flipped on the kitchen tap until the water ran cold, wetting her fingers beneath the stream and using the pad of her digits to wipe the remnants of my disgust off the corners of my lips. She wet her hand again and ran her palm across my forehead and under my eyes, wiping away my sweat and my tears.
The cool water was comforting, and I leaned into it, desperate for the touch of another human being—for a connection to keep me grounded.
In my bra, my phone vibrated, and without a second thought, I reached into the bodice of my dress and fished it out, squinting against the bright light as I held it up to my eyes.
I’m so sorry, Little Moth.