Picture Me Gone (14 page)

W
hen Catlin and I were eleven, we finally did run away from home.

It was Cat’s idea but I was happy to go along with it and, as usual, Cat seemed to have figured out all the technical details. How she knew what to do, I had no idea. It was part of her wisdom about the world, like knowing all about sex before anyone else.

The plan was to pretend to head off to school with our rucksacks so as not to draw attention to ourselves, only we’d dump our sports kit and fill our bags with running-away stuff instead.

According to Cat, the biggest danger in running away was starving to death, so we loaded up all the food we could find—biscuits, bread, jam, Cokes, an entire box of After Eights—and set off for the Eurostar terminal. Bring your passport, Cat said, so I did.

When we got to St. Pancras we piled our stuff against the wall outside a shop selling watches and jewelry. There were so many students sitting around waiting for trains that no one took any notice of us despite our age. The plan was to say our parents had just gone to buy lunch if anyone challenged us, but nobody did.

Cat told me to guard our things and went off to take a picture of the departures board. Returning, she carefully copied down the train times from her phone into a notebook. Our plan today, she announced, is to get to Brussels, infiltrate the European Parliament, contact our agent there and pass on the computer codes.

Ambitious plan. I wondered who our agent was in Brussels, but knew better than to ask.

Couldn’t we just e-mail them? I said, a bit nervously. Or send a text?

Cat looked at me like I was insane. Security, she hissed. Everything we do is surveilled to the nth.

I sighed. I didn’t think she’d manage to get two unaccompanied eleven-year-olds on a train to Brussels, but you never knew with her. I was fine skiving off school for a day, but unsupervised international travel made me a little nervous.

She stared at her phone and I stared at her, and eventually she looked up and explained that she was waiting for our contact to make himself known. I thought we might have quite a wait ahead of us.

We passed the time practicing encryption, which consisted of texting mildly obscene codes to each other. When things got really slow, Cat would send me out to check for enemy agents, or she’d go out to steal chocolates.

By late morning I’d had enough. Can we go home now? I asked Cat.

Soon, she told me. And we went back to code practice, painstakingly translating texts in a bubble of silence surrounded by the boiling chaos of the huge station.

At lunchtime we haunted the cafés set around the long station corridor and got lucky when a pale young foreign couple ordered a lot of food and left most of it behind. We ate the remains of their posh sandwiches and Cat pocketed the tip, slinking off to check for spies while I faced the waiter’s glare.

When it got right down to the actual stowing away to Brussels, we pretty much fell at the first hurdle.

Damn them, Catlin growled, patting her pockets furiously, and when I said, Damn who? she said they’d stolen her passport.

It wouldn’t have done us any good anyway as we had no tickets and not nearly enough money to buy any, and besides, I happened to know she didn’t own a passport so they didn’t have to bother stealing it. I know someone who’ll forge me a clean one, she said. For a price. And off she shot once more, disappearing into her fantasy.

I sat and watched the crowd, then wandered over and browsed the bookshop across the way, and eventually returned to our spot and texted
I’m tired
and a few minutes later Cat wandered back and flopped down beside me. About ten minutes after that (which was how long it took to write the average three-word code due to the unnecessary complexity of our cipher) my phone bleeped again and she looked away, as if distracted.

“I love you,” said the text. I translated it twice to make sure I’d read it properly and then just sat, not knowing what it meant or how to answer or what to do next.

We stayed like that, a silent island of two, while the crowds flowed over and around us in a steady torrent.

Let’s go, Catlin said at last. And without looking at me, she fastened the flap of her rucksack, stood up, and trudged off toward the Underground station, towing me behind in her wake like an Arctic sledge.

At her house, Cat shot off up the path and I didn’t bother to wave. I arrived home at pretty much the exact time I should have been back from school and went off to my room, where I sat on the bed and thought.

We never were found out. Cat forged sick notes for both of us, knowing I’d forget to forge one for myself, and our teacher accepted them without a murmur. The lack of suspicion was disappointing; Catlin was ready to withstand torture.

I never had the courage to talk to her about the day we almost went to Brussels or to ask about the text. As time passed, I began to think I’d imagined it.

I
have learned today that my father can lie to me and that I will put all my instincts on hold and believe him because I want to believe that he wouldn’t. I didn’t discover that he was a murderer or had a secret son, like Matthew. But nonetheless. So much relies on one person assuming the other is telling the truth. If a person can lie to you about one thing, he can lie about something else.

Of course I lied to him too, in a way, but it wasn’t the same. Matthew’s text was, after all, for me. I was merely protecting Gil from feeling sad. Or was I? Perhaps it was just me thinking I could handle something Gil couldn’t.

Another lie.

It makes me think about the nature of truth. I don’t lie as a general rule because I’ve never thought there was much to be gained by it. My parents don’t bully me or impose expectations in ways that inspire me to make things up.

I blame the quietness of this arrangement for my innocence. Though it’s not as if I’ve never experienced dishonesty. It starts early in life with girls at school, saying they’re only allowed eight friends at a sleepover and you would be the ninth. Or talking about what they’ve done with some boy when you’re pretty sure they haven’t. Some lies barely deserve the effort that goes into telling them.

In theory, I would like to lead a transparent life. I would like my life to be as clear as a new pane of glass, without anything shameful and no dark shadows. I would like that. But if I am completely honest, I have to acknowledge secrets too painful even to tell myself. There are things I consider in the deep dark of night, secret terrors. Why are they secrets? I could easily tell either of my parents how I feel, but what would they say? Don’t worry, darling, we will do our best never to die? We will never ever leave you, never contract cancer or walk in front of a bus or collapse of old age? We will not leave you alone, not ever, to navigate the world and all of its complexities without us?

They will leave me. It is the first thing you learn that makes you no longer a child. Someday I will die too, but I’m not nearly as frightened of that as I am of being left alone. This is my darkness. Nothing anyone says can console me.

Is Matthew coming here? I ask.

Gil shakes his head. No, we’ll go to him. He’s staying nearby.

I would hate to have parents who were always looking over my shoulder, reading my diary, checking my thoughts. I would hate to be exposed. And so, perhaps, when I say I long to be a pane of glass, I am lying. I long for partial obscurity at the same time that I long for someone to know me.

It is confusing and difficult being me.

Sometimes I need to cry in order to release the great welling sadness I feel in my head.

For this I need privacy. I do not want anyone to see me and ask why, almost as much as I would like to be comforted.

Somehow, without ever being present, Matthew has exposed all of this, brought it wriggling to the surface like worms. They gather there now, vaguely nostalgic for the dark.

M
atthew is staying thirteen miles from here. His disappearance, when you come right down to it, was modest in scale. For all the driving we’ve done up and down the state, his big break for freedom took him less than ninety minutes from home.

I am recalculating all the coordinates I’ve known so far, but am still lost. I take out my phone and text Jake.

We’re seeing Matthew today.

I want to tell him more but don’t know how. The phone bleeps back almost immediately.

What???

I text back.
Long story.

There’s a pause. I wonder if he’s gone and then the phone bleeps again.

Ok.
And then a second later:
Report back.

I will. Wish us luck.

Luck

The landscape we drive through is dazzlingly white, every angle and corner softened by great drifts of snow. Icicles have appeared like magic, giant dripping stalactites anchored to the edges of roofs and gutters. I have never held an icicle before and feel an almost unbearable desire to do so. They look precious as fairy jewels and if I broke one off I could wave it about like a scepter.

I sit in the back with Honey. Gil glances round at us occasionally but says nothing. He holds a map between his knees. I could be helping, but I don’t.

We’ve left the town and are driving through a hilly landscape that’s white as far as the eye can see. Fences and stone walls have become soft slopes, and farmhouses wear high slouchy hats. Everything looks clean and new and I like this world of perfection despite knowing that all sorts of barbed wire and dead things lie beneath. The road is clear and black, which makes a change from England, where they’d just wait for it to turn to ice and then melt eventually, while not going to work and complaining that the services can’t cope.

I like the way snow piles itself at the top of telephone poles and even collects on the wires in long thin white lines. There are gaps where birds have landed, spelling out Morse-code messages. Dot dot dot. Dash dash dash. Dot dot dot.

We pull off the road into what looks like a low-rent shopping mall and see the
MOTEL
sign. We’re moving slowly now and I’m glad for Suzanne’s big car, which feels solid even when we skid.

Gil leaves Honey and me in the car while he goes in. The path is drifted with snow that no one’s bothered to re-shovel in the past hour. Gutters all along the front glitter and sag with ice. He comes slithering back out and moves the car nearer to Matthew’s part of the motel.

We’ll see what happens, he says. As I get out of the car, I step through ice into a deep pool of freezing water. It fills my boot and feels horrible. Honey neatly avoids the puddle. She seems unnaturally alert, head high.

I blame Gil for my frozen leg and follow him up the path, dragging my foot and limping conspicuously. He ignores me, which is just as well. I’m behaving badly and don’t feel like being cajoled.

The girl at the front desk buzzes us in. We follow the corridor round and knock on Matthew’s door. I can hear footsteps. Gil looks down at me suddenly and reaches out his hand. I am not so horrible that I refuse to take it. His face is full of anxiety.

I don’t recognize the man who opens the door but Honey does. She bounds at him, launching herself through the air like a missile. Darling Honey, I hear him say, laughing, his voice cracked with emotion. Darling dog. Honey is incandescent with joy, ecstatic, and it’s contagious. If I had a tail I’d wag it too.

At last.

Matthew buries his head in her thick white ruff. He holds her face in his hands and his tired features fill with light. At last he stands up and embraces my father. Their faces disappear and the two men seem to merge. They could be twins, so similar are they in height and stature. I can imagine them as children, or on the side of a mountain, the closest either had to a brother.

Honey stands looking up at her master, alert to every expression, every inch of her electric with love. She has lost the melancholic expression of the last few days. Matthew cannot resist kneeling again, and she licks his face and neck till he grasps her head in his two hands and pushes her gently away. Not content to step back, she turns sideways and rubs the length of her body across his chest, first one way, then the other. If she could eat him, she would.

Matthew has strong features and unnaturally intense eyes; his hair is thick and gray. Even I can see that despite his age he is handsome. He doesn’t attempt hugging or kissing, just looks at me, his head tilted slightly, watching.

It is hard to get over the habit of dislike that has grown in my head, but Matthew is not what I expected. His expression is complex; he looks athletic, but holds his shoulders stiffly, as if in pain. I wish now that I hadn’t sent those texts.

While he speaks to Gil I examine his face. There are purple shadows under his eyes. He smells clean and has recently shaved; he wears a faded green flannel shirt. I expected desperation, but instead he is quiet and reserved. It is impossible to ignore the fact that he looks unspeakably sad.

We sit down, me on the bed, Gil and Matthew in chairs. Matthew asks Gil if he wants a drink, doesn’t wait for an answer and pours wine into two glasses. I don’t need to check my watch. It is not yet ten in the morning. Gil looks ill at ease. When I tune in to my father, the signals all line up. Is this because I know him so well or because he has nothing left to hide?

I get no clear signal from Matthew. What little comes through is scribbly and erratic. Something scrambled is not the same as a lack of information; it suggests interference. Matthew’s signals are blocked, as if he has a glass wall buried a few inches beneath his skin. He is accustomed to hiding.

It is fairly obvious that they would like to talk without me present, but I am not in a mood to cooperate. I sit absolutely still, waiting for resolution. Matthew drinks with steady deliberation and pours another. They make small talk about our trip. Gil tells him about Lynda and Jake. Matthew listens quietly, asking questions that may or may not mask a depth of emotional involvement. The mood in the room becomes increasingly odd. Honey searches Matthew’s face. I do too, and am abashed, suddenly, to feel that I may be contributing to his unhappiness.

Just as I’m trying to figure out how to excuse myself, Matthew asks if I would mind sitting in the lobby for a bit while they talk. He asks politely, as to a social and intellectual equal. I appreciate this. It is not commonly the way people speak to children. Gil takes me out to the lobby, which has been designed as a pretend study, with a desk, an ugly red leather sofa, a lamp, a small bookshelf filled with paperback books, two chairs and a television. Strange snow light pours in through the window. No one sits in the reception area, which connects to a small office. Perhaps whoever is on duty hides back there when not required.

Gil kisses the top of my head and apologizes for . . . well, he says, for everything. Then he goes. I look around for Honey and realize that she has stayed with Matthew.

Horrible music is playing through tinny speakers in the reception area. I get up from the chair and go exploring. All the public areas are empty.

I miss Honey, and despite the fact that she has been Matthew’s dog her entire life, I resent her absence. Gil and I brought her here. She should be grateful. Matthew’s the one who left her behind with Suzanne. He left Gabriel behind as well. And Jake. But dogs don’t hold grudges. At least this one doesn’t.

There’s nothing else to do but return to the fake study.

I text Jake again.
We found him.

What do you think?

Not what I expected.

There’s a longish pause and I can almost hear Jake thinking on the other end. I wait and wait but no answer comes. Maybe he doesn’t know what to say.

I look up and Gil is there, talking in a low voice to the receptionist. She hands him a key.

I’ve taken a room, Gil says, just for the night. So I can talk to Matt some more.

Matt is nowhere to be seen. We walk out to the car to fetch our bags. I’m waiting to hear what Gil tells me next.

Perguntador.

I’m busy collecting my things and only turn to him after a minute. Yes?

Forgive me, he says. I’m trying to do what’s best for everyone.

I stare at him, studying his face. You didn’t have to lie to me.

I know, he says.

I’m not an idiot.

Far from it. But everyone alive has secrets, he says. It’s terrible being a keeper of them. Worse, maybe, than being kept in the dark.

I say nothing.

Mila, I need your help.

Like he needs to point that out. Our eyes meet again and suddenly I feel grubby and false. I am withholding help because it is the only power I have, except the power to be kind.

I reach over and take his hand, the one that is not gripping his suitcase, and so the drama between us melts away.

Who knows? Someday I may need him to lie for me.