Nobody but Us (6 page)

I kiss her across her forehead. I’ll wipe away the memories of her bastard dad from her mind. Help her be strong. I promise her silently. Rest my lips at her temple. That promise is the last thing I remember before I fall asleep.

My muscles groan at me when I wake. I’m too stiff to move, and Zoe’s gone from me. But there she is, just in the front seat. She turns to look at me when I grunt in her direction.

“Hi there.”

“Why’d you go up there?”

“You were trying to move. Trying to get more comfortable, I think. I was in the way, so I came up here.”

I sit up and my back’s pissed at me. “Ugh. We need a real bed.” She looks away for a sec, and I see the color and can’t hold back a smile. I reach forward for her hair and twirl a piece around my finger. “You can pick out the furniture, ’kay?”

“Okay.”

Outside the car I stretch and pop joints and moan a little. Blood begins rushing back into places I didn’t realize before were missing it. Little pins stab up my ankles and calves. I try to shake them out, but I can’t tell if it’s helping or making it worse.

“Did you sleep up here?” I ask as I adjust the seat back to where I like it.

“No. I wasn’t too tired.”

“You just sat here?”

“I took a walk. I thought about stuff. Made plans and went over things.”

I look at the ignition as I insert the key ’cause all three of those things sound dangerous and freak me out. But I don’t want her to see that. She’s a big girl. She can take care of herself, even on walks in the middle of nowhere where ax murderers could be lying in wait for unsuspecting girls to go out alone. And thinking’s good. But making plans kinda messes with me. She’s smart enough to make plans without me, but I don’t want her to. I want to be a part of everything she does.

“What kinds of plans were you making?” I make my voice steady and cool. I’m not trying to smother her. That ain’t right.

“I was thinking about school. How I need to finish. Can I do that with a fake ID? How do I fill out forms? I guess I get my GED somehow … and then college?” She plays with a dolphin on her mom’s chimes while she talks. “What kinds of classes do I have to take? And about how I’m going to have to study a lot.” She’s holding the chimes up, making the dolphins swim. The sound’s annoying as shit. “And how I want to sit next to you on our couch and study while you watch baseball. I want you to learn how to play baseball, Will.” She drops the chimes and faces me. “I bet there’s some league you could play in or a college PE class or something. I’ll learn with you, if you want.”

“Yeah, that would be cool.” I can’t tell her that there ain’t no way I’m gonna get in front of people and not be able to hit a ball. I can throw, I guess. Even catch. But swinging at a white blur flying by my stomach seems impossible. Connecting with anything that comes at me fast ain’t easy.

It’s somewhere between lunch and dinnertime when we hit the road again. She surprises me by grabbing a bag down by her feet and pulling out a couple of apples, some crackers and cheese spread—the kind in crinkly plastic packages with the little red sticks—and a bag of frosted animal cookies with sprinkles.

“Where’d that come from?”

“I got it out of the trunk when you were sleeping. It was in my makeup case.” She lifts her chin a tad. “I didn’t pack my makeup.”

Well, shit. Awe soaks me from head to toe like I got caught in the rain, and I’m reminded what a fuckup I am. I shouldn’t have doubted for a second that she could walk around the rest stop on her own. I gotta remember that, let her be strong on her own, ’cause a guy like me ain’t gonna fix her.

She cheeses up some of the crackers and hands them my way as I drive. We share an apple, passing it back and forth after each bite. We’re both trying to take small bites, making sure there’s enough for the other person.

I toss the core out the window. She pops a cookie in my mouth, but I ain’t paying attention. There’s a glint in the rearview mirror.

I gotta take another look ’cause I ain’t sure what I saw. She gives me another cookie, but I can’t remember finishing the first one. I bite. The sprinkles pop under my teeth. I look again.

There’s something glinting on the roof of that SUV behind us. I can’t tell what. Not yet. It might be rectangular. Too far, but I ain’t slowing down to let them catch up. I ease the accelerator down, pick up speed, build space between us. I check the side mirror and hope that car ain’t really closer than it appears.

“Slow down, Will. You’re going to get pulled over.”

“Everyone drives fast out here,” I tell her. Like the SUV. Where the hell are they going so fast?

I get a good look. The car’s white. White and something across the top. Shit. I floor it. The engine revs. We’re flying and Zoe’s scared. She’s got one hand clutching her door and the other one on the dash.

“Will!”

But we gotta move or we’re screwed. I check the stretch of highway. Check the mirror. Why ain’t he got his lights on? The gap’s opening. I’m pulling away. I hold the wheel so tight sweat forms on my palms. Fields rush by, and if I lose control we ain’t stopping for a long time.

There’s a town coming up, the kind of place where I gotta slow down, go twenty-five. I push one last time, gain more road in between us. Another look back. The SUV’s a square, hard to even see the lights. It slows, turns off on some back road. I take my foot off the gas.

Hunting lights. That’s all it is across the top.

I relax my muscles. Push my head back. Zoe gives me a look.

“Just testing her out. See how fast this baby can run.”

Zoe lets her hand fall off the dash. “Boys.” She laughs.

I ain’t sure she believes me. I should tell her about the money. No, not yet. Not till we get to Vegas and she realizes we need it. Any sooner and she’s just gonna think I’m a thief.

My heart slows down as the car slows down, and I figure we’re okay, I figure I shouldn’t overreact like that. But reacting quick’s just the way life made me be. Ain’t never felt safe much.

Zoe leans on my shoulder. She watches the fields and nothingness pass us by.

I check the mirrors.

THERE’S NOTHING, REALLY NOTHING, OUT HERE. Acres and acres of graze land and wheat land and who-knows-what-else land. At this time of year, though, the land isn’t being used for much. Just sitting, waiting, resting. Brown and going on forever.

We slow when we pass through towns. I brush my finger distractedly across the bottom of my chimes when we’re tired of the radio but need more noise than the ever-present rush of tires on road. Sometimes the glittery sound makes me think she’s here, escaping with me.

We look curiously around those small towns, as though trying to see if this was the kind of place we could see ourselves living someday. But the towns are all small and we’re sick of small towns. We can’t ever go back to places where everything is everyone else’s business. Everybody’s business, unless it’s something really important. Then everyone has the right to ignore it.

In first grade, Mrs. Hilliard spent two days a week running the school library. She saw things, asked a lot of questions, until the day my dad walked into the principal’s office wearing an American flag T-shirt and his “I’m a vet” face, shouting at the principal to mind his own business. Mrs. Hilliard kept her lips zipped from then on, but she never stopped watching me, an ever-present shadow hanging over me as I browsed the shelves or curled up in a corner with
Little Women
.

She retired at the end of the year and volunteered at the public library. Whenever I went there, she’d ask how things were at home, would sit with me for a few minutes, telling me about my mom, about how she was a student when Mrs. Hilliard first started at the school library. She said I looked like my mom. The same eyes, the same mannerisms. I was just like her, she’d say. She always made it sound like it was a good thing.

“What do you remember about Nevada?” I ask Will. He extends his arm over the back of my seat and shrugs.

“Not much. It’s hard to remember much about where I’ve lived. I don’t know. Bushes? And the mountains. It was northern Nevada, so not in the flat desert or nothing. There was snow in the winter.”

“I think I could be happy never seeing snow ever again.” There’s a long season of snow in North Dakota. It’s not so bad when you’re let out to skate and play hockey. But it makes for a crappy six months of the year when you’re stuck inside all the time.

“Yeah. Vegas probably don’t get snow.”

“Probably not.”

I kiss the inside of his elbow. And blush. It’s funny how some big moments, full of kissing and touching and everything, don’t make me embarrassed, but the little ones do.

I’ve asked Will about all the places he’s lived before. He lists them off, one by one, as though he’s recounting someone else’s history. Nevada, then some time in California. At one point his grandma, his mom’s mom, tracked him down and took him to live with her in Colorado. That was one of his worst times. She liked to put her cigarettes out on anything that moved. The cat, the TV screen, Will. When she died, an uncle took Will to Nebraska and tried to make a man out of him by locking him out of the house at night, just because.

Because you’re a man if you can fight off a coyote at the age of ten.

His uncle’s wife, a decent woman, Will says, took him with her when she fled to North Dakota. They lived in a one-bedroom apartment for a few months. Will was by himself most of the time, since his aunt worked day and night, but after everything else, it was a blessing to be left alone.

Then she met a guy who didn’t want kids around, and Will went to the state.

I told Will once that I was grateful for the way my life was. At least I didn’t have to move all the time. At least I knew a couple of people, people who talked with me and ate lunch with me most days. I had Lindsay. Even Mrs. Hilliard, who remembered things about my mother I never knew and set aside books she thought I would like. The teller at the bank who didn’t care that I signed my dad’s name on his checks for him when I went to cash them. Will gave me a weird look when I said those things, like he couldn’t believe my experience had been better than his.

But I never went hungry for days, waiting for my aunt to get home, and I don’t have a parade of little round scars on my forearms like he does.

“Hey, how far is Vegas from California?”

“I don’t know. Pretty close. Here, check the map.” He pulls the map book from under his seat and I set it across my lap, flipping pages till I get to Nevada. I press my finger against the dot that is Vegas and another against the border and bring them together. I check the scale and make an estimate.

“Yeah, it’s really close. A couple of hours, maybe? Let’s go there sometime, okay?”

“Definitely.”

“I want to see the ocean. And the stars.”

“They’re probably the same stars like everywhere else.”

I laugh. “Not those stars. The ones on the sidewalk in Hollywood. And the place where actors have their handprints in the ground.”

“I didn’t think you were into all that stuff.”

“I’m not. But it’s Americana, right? I mean, we’re supposed to do things like that and take pictures and say we’ve been there. I want to say I’ve been there. I want to do it all. See the Statue of Liberty someday. Disneyland. Other countries. All of it.”

“Okay, we’ll go. Some weekend after we get settled in. We’ll go to Hollywood. And the ocean, too. Promise.”

“I’d like that.”

I’ve never actually owned a swimsuit. I’ve never set foot in a pool, and I don’t know how to swim. I’d probably run screaming if I actually saw an ocean wave, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to go and see what happens. It might be nice to discover something scary in a way I’d never known before. The heart-racing, in-love-with-the-risk kind of scary. Not the hide-away kind.

“Can you swim?” I ask him.

“Yeah. I lived in an apartment that had a pool. The complex, I mean. I learned one day.”

“In one day? Wow.”

“It was either that or drown. I got pushed in by this neighbor guy one time. I was playing on the concrete with a Tonka truck and he just ran up and shoved. Jeans and shoes and all. Thought it was funny to dunk the kid.”

“It doesn’t sound funny.” I see a little Will, falling into the water, splashing, clamoring for help. He cries out, he chokes. I close my eyes against the image.

“Nah, but at least I learned to swim.”

ONE OF THE PROBLEMS WITH DRIVING A FORTY-YEAR-old muscle car is that gas ain’t cheap no more. We’re a couple hours into Wyoming when I pull off to fill the tank. It’s late and I figure twenty-four-hour gas stations will disappear in this part of the woods. Or plains. There’s a sandwich shop in the convenience store, so I pass Zoe a twenty and she runs in to buy dinner while I pump.

The sky is cloudless. The air sharp and cool. The wind is picking up, blowing dust and gas fumes my way. I squint against it, try not to breathe too much, and look toward the store. Zoe’s second in line and there are two guys behind her. I watch them carefully ’cause one of them’s wearing a denim jacket over his flannel and, I don’t know, denim jackets rub me the wrong way.