Chapter 5
Charlotte and I rushed out of the airport, eager to find Ms. Odette. As soon as we took a step out the door, we froze.
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” I asked.
“I believe so.” Charlotte said. Then, we sat down at a table and brainstormed ideas. We sat there in silence for a long while. Suddenly, my thoughts skyrocketed.
“I know! We could look in the yellow pages!!!” I screamed, grabbing a thick phonebook from the phone booth.
“Hello! Kidnappers don’t advertise themselves!!!” she responded, also in shouting. She grabbed the Yellow pages and pitched it back into the booth, where it hit a man square on the back. He was clueless about where it came from, as he turned his head from side to side, trying to find the culprit.
“Oh,” I said shamefully. “Well, we could at least ask to find out about a rumor of Ms. Odette… if there is one.”
“That’s likely…” she replied.
“Alright then, let’s start!” I said. I jumped up from the table and scrambled to my feet. I ran over to a random person and looked up. Wow, he is sooooo tall. And he is sooooo dashing. What was I going to say
to him again? Suddenly, a voice interrupted me --again.
“NOOOO!!!” Charlotte screamed. She said, “Sorry,” in a quiet voice to the man, grabbing onto the ribbon of my dress while she slowly backed away. As soon as we got out of earshot, she started scolding me. “Do you know what you’re dealing with? What if that person was the kidnapper? And what if he kidnapped you? Then what would I do??”
I looked at her in a curious way. “Then you would call the police. But why do you care so much? I’m not trying to be mean or anything, but…” my voice trailed off at the end.
She started crying big, wet tears. They looked like raindrops coming out of a cumulus cloud. Wait. Cirrus clouds. Hold on. Stratus clouds. Whatever. Now, back to the point. Her face looked like a puddle of water that had been trudged in by…me? I suddenly thought it was my entire fault.
“Well… when… you first *sniffle, sniffle* came… to the …orphanage… Ms. Odette told … me to …keep you safe … from harm…” her voice trailed off at the end, too.
All of a sudden, Charlotte’s sobbing voice turned into muffled cries. I tried to look at her, but all I could see was that a man was carrying her away. I could only see her leg, waving frantically for me. Acorn tried to chase him, but a hotel doorman picked him up and literally threw him
across the street. It was then that I realized what had to be done. I had run from adults many times, so I thought that this one wouldn’t be too hard to catch.
I started to chase him. He was about two feet away from me, and he tried to stick an obstacle between us, a shopping cart. But this wasn’t that much of an obstacle, because I had jumped out of so many foster parents’ carts whenever I wanted to get away from them. Anyway, I kind of pole-vaulted over it with a martial arts stick I had grabbed from someone doing a demonstration. After that, I saw him speed up. Charlotte’s foot was hanging limp.
I tried to peg him with a tomato from the nearby fruit stand, but all it did was splatter his coat. In despair, I cried big, wet, tears like Charlotte had. Then, I felt a warm hand cover my mouth. I knew some self-defense, so I tried to kick him in the most vulnerable spot. I failed doing that so I grabbed onto the doorman’s coat. He immediately said, “Drop her, DROP HER!!!”
“As you wish, sir.” The kidnapper dropped me on the hard pavement. I tried to break my fall with my forearms, but that was quite unsuccessful. The last thing I remembered was that I saw the kidnapper’s feet thump away into the distance.
Don’t ask how I knew this, but I figured I was in an American
ambulance. I opened my heavy eyelids. They were so hard to open; I
would have sworn they felt like glass doors on my eyes. “Are you okay?” this complete stranger asked. “What happened?” asked another. “Don’t rush that many questions onto her. It gives her pressure.” Someone else said harshly.
“No, I’m fine,” I lied. Then I felt dizzy and I blacked out again. The second time I woke up, I was being pushed into the hospital on a stretcher. I saw the words “Emergency Room” in huge letters on the wall.
In the twenty-first room down the hallway, the doctor asked me what had happened. I told him the few simple words I knew how to say in English: “I speak French.” I knew how to read and write and understand English, but I didn’t know how to say most of the words. So then he used this cool phone that was attached to the wall to call the translator. I reached my hand over onto the table and grabbed the doctor’s pad of paper and pen. I wrote the whole story down, from when Ms. Odette was kidnapped until now. The doctor hung up on the translator to watch what I was doing, openmouthed.
A few moments later, the translator rushed into the room. She looked very pretty, with brunette hair and a peachy skin. She dropped her things on the counter and watched me. She read the first part, which said: “I can read, understand, and write English, but I’m not so good at
speaking it.” She nodded her head and started to speak to me in French.
“How do you feel?” she said in French.
“Dizzy and sad,” I said.
“She says she feels dizzy and sad,” I heard her say to the doctor.
“Well then, ask her why she feels sad.” He said.
I pointed to the paper. They nodded their heads in an understanding way.
“Now ask her what her name is.” He said.
“What’s your name?” she said.
“Marie.”
“How about your last name?” she said.
“I don’t know.”
Now, she asked her own questions.
“How did you end up in America?” she asked.
I moaned in reply. Then I felt myself black out for the third time.
The next thing I knew, playing kids and small children in wheelchairs with fractured legs surrounded me.
A nurse was standing by my bed, waiting for me to wake up, I guessed. “Hi, my name is Emily, and I will help you try to heal. You see, when you fell, there was a displaced part of your brain. We used surgery to put it back into place.”
I buried my head in my pillow like an ostrich. “NOOOOOOO!!!” I screamed. I had learned from books in the library that surgery was very painful in the old days.
“Don’t worry, it’s already over.”
I sighed a sigh of relief, although I was still confused. It was over? How come I didn’t get to know about it? “Why didn’t I know about it?” I said in French to Emily, forgetting that she wasn’t Ms. Odette.
She must have overheard me, because she answered, “Well, we put anesthetics on you,” also in French.