Bones & All (26 page)

*   *   *

I pulled into Travis's driveway as the sun was coming up, and I quietly let myself back into the house. The lemonade glasses and plate of sugar cookies were still on the coffee table.

I peeled off my T-shirt and jeans and dropped them in the washer. Then I got into the shower, turned on the water as hot as I could stand it, and cried. Nowhere was safe now.

I couldn't even stay here much longer. Travis wouldn't be in to work, and someone would come looking for him. I rubbed his soap between my hands, used his Head & Shoulders shampoo and his white fluffy towel, and looked at myself in the mirror like I was somebody else, somebody with no names written on her heart. I was done pretending to be normal.

When I got out of the shower I rinsed with Travis's Listerine. I put my clothes in the dryer and walked through the house. The second floor was one big room with slanted ceilings and gabled windows, with pictures of his parents on the dresser and night table and a floral duvet on the bed. Maybe he'd inherited the room after his mother died.

I found a new backpack on a hook in the closet and then I opened all the dresser drawers. His clothes were much too big for me, but I needed money and Travis seemed like the kind of guy who would keep some spare cash at the back of his sock drawer.

I was wrong though. The money wasn't in the drawer; it was in the closet, rolled up in the toe of an old leather shoe. I sat on the bed, my hair dripping on the duvet, and counted out seven hundred dollars.

*   *   *

I had to wipe down the steering wheel before I started the car. I wanted to follow Lee to Tingley, but I didn't know what I would say to him. What if
You told me so
didn't make things better? What if he didn't want to be my friend anymore?

I knew I shouldn't go. But doing things I wasn't supposed to do was pretty much my specialty.

After the pickup truck, Travis's car was easy to drive. I figured out how to pump gas when I needed it, and I was careful to keep to the speed limit. I let out a sigh of relief each time a state police car passed me by. That night I did what Lee and I had been doing—found a park, but not too close to a campsite—and I climbed into the backseat and curled up under a scratchy wool blanket I'd found in the trunk.

When I fell asleep I dreamed about Sully. I was back in Mrs. Harmon's Spare Oom, stifled by the darkness, only this time I didn't throw off the bedclothes in time, and he had me trapped so I couldn't kick. With one hand he pinned my wrists together against the pillow, and with the other hand he reached for the sphinx trophy. He held it above his head and I could see the moonlight glinting off the bronze wings.
Ain't no such thing as a clean getaway, Missy,
he said, and I woke up just before the trophy hit my face.

*   *   *

It only occurred to me when I got to Tingley that I didn't know Lee's last name, so I went to the high school. It was summer recess now, but the front office was still open. A nice secretary dialed Kayla's number and handed me the phone.

“Hi,” I said. “This is Maren—Lee's friend? At your aunt's house that time?”

“Oh yeah,” she said slowly. “I remember.”

“I wanted to say hello to you that day, but…”

“Yeah,” she said. “It's okay. Is my brother with you?”

“You mean he's not there?”

“He hasn't been back since that time you were here.” She paused. “Is he all right?”

“I'm sure he is. We … sort of had an argument. I guess I just wanted to come back here and make it up to him.”

“Did he tell you he was coming home?”

“Yeah. But he probably got tied up somewhere. Maybe he found some work.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Maybe.”

There was something else I wanted to tell her, but I didn't know how to begin. Fortunately she saved me the trouble. “I have to leave for work now, but do you think you could meet me there later and we could talk? I'm done at eight.” She paused. “If you want, I can probably get you a free ice cream cone.”

I smiled at the receiver. “Thanks,” I said. “That would be great.”

*   *   *

True to her word, Kayla met me in the parking lot at Halliday's Ice Cream Parlor with a double scoop of peanut butter fudge. She got in the passenger's seat. Between licks I asked, “Did you pass your driver's test?”

She nodded. “I had to borrow my friend's truck, so I was a little nervous, but I did all right. Remembered to stop at the stop sign and all that. Lee said if I could learn to parallel park with a pickup truck then I'd be good to go, and he was right.”

I smiled. “That's great.”

She pulled down the sun visor and looked at herself in the mirror. “I see you passed yours too.” I shook my head, and her eyes went wide. “You mean you drove all the way here without a license?”

“Never got pulled over or anything. Your brother's a good teacher.”

She flashed me a sad smile and watched me slurp down the ice cream. Once I'd swallowed the last bite of waffle cone I was ready to tell her the other reason I'd come back to Tingley.

“Lee said he wanted you to have a car,” I said. “So I want you to have this one. Just get Lee to replace the plates for you the next time he's home.”

Kayla stared at me, her mouth wide open.

“Just please don't ask me whose car it was. I didn't steal it, and that's all you need to know.”

*   *   *

In the morning she poured two bowls of Count Chocula, and we ate on the front steps. “You could stay here awhile,” Kayla said. “Wait 'til Lee gets back. My mom wouldn't mind.” Their mother hadn't been home since I arrived.

“Thanks,” I said. “That's really nice of you. But I don't think Lee would want me to.”

She made a face. “I don't think he would either. I just can't figure out why.”

“He loves you more than anybody. He wants to protect you.”

“Protect me from what?”

I sighed.

“It has to do with Rachel, doesn't it? Did he tell you about Rachel?”

I nodded.

“I liked Rachel,” she said sadly.

“Lee said she's still in the hospital.”

“I tried to go see her once, after it first happened,” Kayla said. “They wouldn't let me in.”

“My dad is in one of those places.” I stirred the chocolaty milk at the bottom of the cereal bowl. “A place called Bridewell, in Wisconsin.”

Kayla set down her bowl and patted me on the shoulder. “I'm sorry.”

I showered and changed into a spare set of her clothes. I wanted to ask for a black T-shirt, but I thought better of it.

She drove me back to the interstate, and I got out carrying Travis's backpack filled with food, another change of clothing, and two Madeleine L'Engle novels Kayla had scrounged up for me.

Kayla turned off the engine. “Are you absolutely sure you want to give me your car?”

“I'm sure.”

“Where are you going?”

“I guess I'll make my way back to Bridewell.”

“To visit your dad? And then what?”

I shrugged. Going back to Wisconsin felt like climbing into Sully's open jaw, but I didn't know where else to go.

“When Lee comes home, I'll tell him to meet you there.”

I smiled as she got out and came around the front bumper to embrace me. It was kind of her, but I knew there was no point hoping he'd follow through.

*   *   *

This time, miraculously enough, I had no trouble hitchhiking. The second day I made it as far as Oberon, Kentucky, where the middle-aged couple I'd been traveling with treated me to a meatloaf special and a hot fudge sundae at an all-night diner. Thanks to Travis, I stayed at a motor inn, took a long hot bath, and fell asleep with the television on.

The next morning I went for a walk in the hills. I crossed a covered wooden bridge over a trickling river, passed laundry on the line outside a ramshackle farmhouse here and there. I didn't know where I was going, but for the first time in weeks I felt no anxiety. Being with Kayla had made me feel better about a lot of things. If I never saw Lee again, it was all the better for him. Travis had gotten what he'd asked for, and if Sully wanted to finish me off, then let him come. I would be ready.

I came to a bend in the road and paused to admire the view. An ancient red barn stood at the edge of a meadow—a field, really, but it hadn't been tilled for years—and beyond it, all around, was a dense tract of pine trees rising to a crest in the near distance.

The barn belonged to a farmhouse across the road. The house and yard were enclosed by a white picket fence in a shoddy state of repair, and the house itself was no better off. Some of the windows were broken, and there was a water-stained condemned notice stapled to the front door. No one had lived here for years.

I lifted the latch on the little wooden gate and walked around the building. There was a covered well in the backyard and a small lean-to stocked with rusting tools. I drew out a hatchet and hefted it in my hand. A modest garden plot, encircled by chicken wire, still yielded a spray of basil or rosemary between the weeds and wildflowers.

I went across the road to check out the barn. The latch on the door was still secure, and when I opened it a few nesting birds made their protests from the rafters. Though the stalls were empty, the room still smelled sweetly of hay and cow manure, and the ladder to the loft seemed sturdy enough to support my weight. I climbed up and looked out the window into the trees. I couldn't have asked for a better hiding spot.

I walked back down to the highway and picked up a tent, a sleeping bag, a gallon of water, and a few other necessaries from an army and navy store near the motor inn. This time I remembered the can opener.

*   *   *

For weeks I lived on canned beans and the remnants of the kitchen garden, sleeping in my new tent in the loft with the hatchet at my side. In my dreams my father came to me and smiled as he held out his hand. I opened my mouth and he put his hand inside. I ran down the winding corridors, the walls stained with words, and one by one I found them, each of them, waiting for me in the dark. Even Sully, slumped on the ground with his back against the wall, taking me in with a weary glance before offering his neck.

I walked down the highway to a drugstore and bought two big bottles of Listerine, and that night I drowned in an ocean of cinnamon-flavored mouthwash. When I woke up I could even feel the burn in my nose.

Some afternoons, as I sat on the barn roof looking out over the road with
Troubling a Star
splayed on my knee, I would spot a rusted red pickup turning the bend in the road, and I'd forget what I'd dreamed and feel my heart suddenly stuck in my throat. Other times I imagined going on living like that forever, doing no harm to anyone or anything as I said hello and goodbye to the sun each day, and made up my own patterns between the stars.

Then, of course, it would rain all day, or I'd find a dead frog in the well, or some neighbors would draw uncomfortably near, and I'd think better of living there indefinitely. There were no secondhand bookshops along that little stretch of highway, and the farmhouse yielded nothing beyond a candle, a stack of decade-old newspapers, and a box of matches.

So the last week of July I packed up my things and climbed down the ladder for the last time, leaving the hatchet on the floor of the hayloft. It had made me feel safe, but I couldn't hitchhike with an ax in my hand.

*   *   *

A woman trucker—a Beatles fan who pretty much lived on Red Bull and those little packages of orange peanut butter crackers—dropped me off in Tarbridge three days later. I walked up the road to Bridewell, hoping the black truck would be there but feeling sick with certainty that it wouldn't be.

It wasn't there.

It wasn't there.

And then it was.

I found him dangling his legs off the edge of the flatbed, Barry Cook's Stetson shading his eyes from the afternoon sun. He held a can of Pepsi in one hand and a magazine in the other. I came around the back of the truck, dropped my backpack on the gravel, took one look at him, and hid my face in my hands.

“Hey.” I felt his hands resting gently on my shoulders. “Hey. It's all right. I knew we would find each other again.” I wanted him to put his arms around me, but I had to settle for his fingers on my hair, stroking and smoothing as if I were a downhearted child.

I didn't know what to say, so I said, “What were you doing?”

“Oh, you know. Making myself useful.” He flashed that wry smile of his. “Found a mechanic who needed a bit of extra help, so I stayed with him for a couple weeks.” Lee looked down at my new bag and frowned. “What happened to your rucksack?”

“Lost it.”

“And everything in it?”

I nodded.

“Even ET?”

“Even ET.”

He shrugged. “Oh well.”

I wiped my eyes with the heels of my hands. “So was this perfect timing, or what?”

“That's what
you
think,” he said, but he was smiling. “I've been sitting here every day for a week. Didn't even have my knitting to keep me company.”

He sat on the flatbed, and I hopped up beside him. He opened another can of soda and handed it to me. “I'm not knitting anymore,” I said.

“Why not?”

I thought of the woman in the wheelchair at Bridewell, and of Mrs. Harmon's yarn and needles stuffed in Sully's cabinet of other people's things. “Long story.”

“Thank you for giving that car to Kayla. That really meant a lot to me.”

Of course it did. That's why I'd done it. “Sure,” I said. “Did you get new plates for it?”

He nodded. “Where'd you get it, anyway?” He looked at me pointedly. “Or maybe you'd rather not say?”

“I didn't eat him,” I said.