The American Girl (2 page)

AUGUST 5, 2015

Video Diary: Session 6

[Quinn, a girl of seventeen, sit
s on the edge of a hospital bed wearing a white gown. As she talks, her bare legs kick the frame of the bed and monitors beep softly in the background]

You ever have one of those Magic 8 Balls as a kid? Yeah, pretty retro, I know. I remember asking mine if Adam Epstein was planning on taking me to senior prom. It said,
Don't count on it
, so I sat on my little pink bed with the daisy-pattern comforter and shook it again and again until I got the answer I wanted.

Um, my mind keeps circling. Back to that Magic 8 Ball. See, if I can remember those details—my room, the pattern on my comforter—then why can't I remember all the other things that are so much more important? The therapist who gave me this camera told me to keep a diary. He gave me some exercises and helpful advice, too: “the mind is a mysterious place” kind
of thing. But in the end, I guess, he found it just as frustrating trying to get inside my head as I do. Everyone seems to.

[Quinn moves closer to the camera and stares into it]

I'm that 8 Ball, y'know. Shake me once—one answer bubbles to the surface. Shake me twice—I say something different. Might not be the thing you want to hear, though. I can't help it. All those sharp little shards inside me could be answers, but they've come loose. Now I see them in fragments that don't make any more sense than my nightmares do.

Those puzzle pieces are all in there somewhere. I know it. They're waiting for the right person to fit them together. That must be why they keep shaking me over and over and over, asking the same question:

“Where is the family?”

[A nu
rse walks into the frame and adjusts the sheets on the bed. She glances at the monitors, notes something on a chart hanging from the bed, and leaves without speaking]

I'm back. Anyhow, sorry. Didn't mean to sound crazy there. Dunno what's come over me since . . . well, since whatever happened. But I want to help find them. So here goes. I'm telling all of you—the therapist and the police and everyone—what I remember about that night.

I woke in the woods. I don't know how I got there. I could see my hands in front of me in the dark and that was all. I was only sure of one thing—I had to get away from that place.

I got up and I didn't know which way to go. I kept spinning around in circles, but the trees looked the same every way I turned. There was a full moon, I think, and I had the idea that if I
kept it on my right, I'd get to where I needed to be, so . . . I started to walk. Then I realized I was barefoot. These sharp little bits of stuff dug into my feet and I had to pick my way along on tiptoes. I walked a few steps. Then I heard the sound of twigs cracking. Yeah, uh . . .

[Pause]

It sounded like someone was behind me. God. This horrible thought came into my head like there'd been something back there in the dark I was scared of—really scared of. That something terrible had happened to me. I had this thought,
They'll start hunt
ing for me soon
. That thought was like . . . well, it was like wooden letters spelled out in my head. Yeah—just a sentence with no explanation.

The footsteps came closer. I hid behind a tree. I tried to think what to do. Then I just started to run. It felt as if I was moving in slow motion, like my mind wasn't really moving my legs. I fell, hard. I can still . . . well, it throbs . . . The ground punched me in the face, I think.

[Laughs]

Which is how I got these cuts around my lips, I guess. I remember blood in my mouth, getting up, winded. My knees and my tongue stung 'cause I bit them. I was getting more and more stressed. I wanted to stop somewhere. Prayed someone would come and help me. All I could do was keep going and not look at anything like the dark or the trees. They were pretty scary.

I just knew I
had
to keep running. I ran and ran. I didn't know if anyone was behind me or not. Maybe I should have looked around or something, but I couldn't stop long enough to listen.
Then the sun started to rise. I remember thinking it looked like melted metal running down between the trees. Would've been pretty if I hadn't been so terrified. By that time, I couldn't feel my feet anymore. All of a sudden, I heard, um, a river rushing by, I thought.

So I ran towards the sound, but there was a slope I didn't see and I stumbled down it. Then I saw where the noise was from—not a river, but the road. Well, more of a track. I followed it for a while. I don't know how long. My feet really hurt. I was cold, shivering. I kept looking over my shoulder all the time, hoping someone would come.

Then I heard this sound . . . tires on the road and I saw a red car coming, so I ran to it, waving my arms and shouting and stuff, but the driver just kept on going and the headlights blinded me. I kind of knew it would hit, but I couldn't move. I just . . . froze.

[Quinn laughs softly]

Do you find all of that as hard to make sense of as I do?

Well, you can “ask again later” if you want to.

JULY 30, 2015

I
t's two days since they found her. The papers say she was wandering on the road, barefoot and bloodied, her mouth open in a scream the driver couldn't hear. He slammed the brakes but didn't stop in time; he hit her and took off.

As fate would have it, a German tourist couple was parked on the top of a hill along the road, filming a panorama of the sunrise over the lavender fields. In the midst of their early-morning filmmaking, the camera panned towards the road—and caught the whole accident, from the moment she walked out of the woods. She was lucky, I guess. If they hadn't spotted her, who knows how long she would have lain there bleeding.

According to
Le Monde
, the tourists ran to help and rushed the unconscious girl to the hospital here in St. Roch; but by the time the doctors wheeled her into intensive care, she was in a coma. Shaken, the pair returned to their holiday flat and
watched their French sunrise video. They were shocked afresh by the sight of the girl lying crumpled in the road, the way the red car sped away, the scene captured as they ran downhill to help her—filming as they went.

That's how the video went viral. The Good Samaritans saw that glimpse of red car, the hint of a plate (a nine? an
E
?), the merest blur of a man's face, hair dark, sunglasses on. They decided the best thing to do was upload the clip to YouTube. It spread to Facebook as one of those long status updates calling on the public: “find this monster,” “help the #AmericanGirl.”

She wouldn't have made the headlines except it was a slow news week and the story of an American girl abroad for the first time, alone—a mystery girl who walked out of the woods—spread in the way stories do nowadays. In the video, there was that hint of foul play: not just a hit-and-run, after all, but something darker. Otherwise, why would the girl be half naked and screaming before the car ran her down? Soon the clip was trending on Twitter and dominating the insistent worm of text that slithers across the bottom of your TV during the news. It became one of those stories everyone's curious about, one of those mysteries everyone wants to solve.

That's why I'm here, me and the handful of other hacks camped outside the Hôpital Sainte-Thérèse in St. Roch, where the nuns come and go at inhospitable hours, murmuring prayer and giving no sound bites. I'm the most recent arrival, late to the party, crashing in uninvited as usual. Well, not quite uninvited. I was in Paris when I heard the news. First holiday in years, and then this story broke.

I was intrigued. I called Bill to tell him about it and he said, “Why don't you go? Cover it for the program. We'll do an episode on it.” Dangling the thought, a whole episode with me at the wheel.

I said, “Go away, Bill, I'm on holiday,” but I found myself thinking about that American girl, all the more so because the video was impossible to get away from.

Of course, the other journalists will state the obvious: the facts, the theories, the local gossip. But this is
American Confessional
—“the truths no one wants you to hear”—podcast once a week on iTunes in a series of audio episodes topped and tailed with our melancholy signature music. We're interested in the big themes: police brutality, political corruption, contemporary loneliness in the toxic age of the internet. We've gathered quite a following for unpicking the kind of unsolved mysteries that fascinate the American listener (well, the HBO-loving,
New Yorker
–
reading kind). I like to think the show's motif of moral inquiry emerges through the interviews I do. I don't judge or comment. Bill and I let our audience decide the guilt of those involved as if they were investigating each case from the comfort of their armchairs.

So we're going for more of a think piece on this one: a young American girl coming of age, going into the world on her own only to encounter the unkindness of a stranger. Then cue the ominous music, delving into her life via her social media profile and those that encountered her here. I could see how it would work with our show, too: ragging on law enforcement always draws listeners, so we could condemn the local police, too cor
rupt or incompetent to find the guy in the car or examine the video before it spawned a legion of online vigilantes.

I was also the only journalist with enough guts to sneak into that hospital and make my way past the nuns. As a former Catholic-school girl, I'm not scared of nuns, which served me well when I encountered the severe-looking nun manning the hospital's reception desk. When I asked what room Quinn Perkins was in, she muttered something dismissive in French. I could see she was tough, probably prides herself on getting rid of people; but then, I pride myself on being a professional liar.

“Could you please repeat that in English?” I said with a smile, holding my ground.

“Family only allowed here,” she barked, “no person else.” Then she paused, glaring at me over her half-moon specs. “You are a family member of Quinn Perkins?”

What, because we're both blond and American?
I thought. It was lucky for me that she made that assumption. A little too lucky perhaps. I fought off the impulse to look over my shoulder when I smiled back at her and answered, “Yes.”

JULY 30, 2015

I
felt bold in my lie, but I expected to be found out any moment. I followed the receptionist's directions to the girl's room as quickly as I could without looking as if I was hurrying. I came to the room, and stopped at the threshold.

From the newspaper stories, I'd imagined she would be in a tent of plastic, tangled in tubes and wires, barely visible; but she lay unfettered by machinery, neatly tucked under starched white sheets. Her face was bruised from the accident, her head shaved on one side. A run of stitches tattooed her scalp like railroad tracks: the place the car hit, the blow that knocked her clean from this world into dreamland, some gray space where she couldn't be reached.

It always happens when I'm working on a new story: that moment when the person I've been researching transforms from a news item into a human being. I'm used to it, so I'm not sure why it hit me harder this time. Maybe because I was far from
home and she was, too: the girl in the bed, the girl called Quinn Perkins, was all too real to me now. Bill had told me to take some footage with the little hidden camera he bought me years ago for my undercover work. It was pinned to my lapel, switched on and filming. He'd asked me to find a chart if I could and photograph that—to document the room, the nuns, the state the girl was in.

Instead, I found myself turning off the camera and, almost as if in a dream myself, falling into the plastic bucket seat next to her bed. I sat watching the rise and fall of her chest, even and slow, and felt a strange peace descend, like watching a child sleep. With her bruised face, her half-shaven head, and black scabs crusting the stitches, she looked worlds away from the fresh-faced teen in the photographs.

I found myself pondering all over again how she came to be walking out of the woods that gray July morning. I imagined how her legs would have been bare and dirty, her feet cut to shreds when she wandered down the middle of the dirt road, her blond hair stringy with blood. Why? This question intrigued me far more than the driver of the car.

The video footage the German tourists took of her was so shocking it looked like something from a handheld horror movie. That, and the mystery of her identity, seemed to be why the video spread so far so fast. Stills taken from clips ended up on the front pages of French papers. Soon “
La fille Am
é
ricaine inconnue
” bled through Reuters and Google Translate, becoming “Mysterious American Girl Found.”

Eventually her father, on holiday in Tahiti with his very pregnant fiancée, recognized the face of his daughter and called
up to claim her. She was given a name: Quinn Perkins of Boston. She had come to St. Roch as part of a study abroad program that placed her with a local family called the Blavettes—a schoolteacher mom, her son and daughter—presumed to be away visiting an ailing relative in some mountain area with no phone reception. Their name came out when the police released details of the case.

The news feed on my phone said Quinn was running out of time, that after the first twenty-four hours of a coma the chances of waking plummet. From the chart at the end of her bed, I could see that this particular coma had been rated a “7.” Google told me that made her chances of recovery about fifty-fifty. She should have had relatives there, talking to her, playing her music, stroking her hand. But the visitor list near the door told me she had no one—Professor Perkins hadn't yet rushed to her side, which was odd. Not just odd, heartbreaking. A plane would get him here quickly from anywhere in the world.

They say that sometimes the feeling of touch, the sound of speech, can jolt a person from this dream state, wake them like a kiss in a fairy tale. And so I found myself reaching for her hand, taking it in mine. I touched her hand almost reverently. Time unspooled until I didn't know how long I'd been in that room with the softly bleeping machines, the sleeping girl, her mystery sealed inside, pristine. All of a sudden, her hand twitched, the fingers wriggling inside mine. I squeezed it again, but this time nothing happened. Still, I couldn't help thinking,
She moved.

“Only you know how you got here,” I said softly.

A hand touched my shoulder. As startled as if I'd been sleep
ing myself, I looked up to see the habit of a nun, crisp white folds around a surprisingly young face.

The nun's brow was creased. Her pale eyes looked nervously down at me through frameless specs. “Poor thing, she has been alone. We are so glad her family is here finally.”

“Yeah.” I smiled, hoping she didn't want to know exactly what family I was.

She checked the charts, the machines, making little ticks on a chart as she did. Faintly, I heard her singing a French song under her breath. I sat tensed, wondering if I should make my excuses now and leave before she started asking me questions I couldn't answer.

She was in the middle of adjusting Quinn's sheets when she turned to me and said in very precise English, “Have you heard? It is so terrible. Now they think the family of Blavette is missing.”

“The family she was staying with?” I asked, managing to sound genuinely shocked because I was. “I thought they were visiting some relative.”

“No indeed. The grandmother has been in touch and has not seen any of them since Christmastime. The police have just searched their house again and found something perhaps, because they are putting out a news bulletin to say this family is missing. It is on the television now.”

In the reception area, a crowd had formed around the television. I couldn't see the images except for a flicker of color between their heads, but I understood enough of the rapid French reportage to confirm the nun's story: the Blavettes had been de
clared missing. The search was on for them as well as the hit-and-run driver. Two mysteries to solve for the price of one. When I walked into the hospital parking lot, I noticed that most of the other hacks had gone, perhaps to the gendarmerie to hear the press release. I had other plans.