The Borrower (30 page)

I couldn’t think of any reply that wouldn’t sound ignorant or make things worse. So I said, “There is one thing you can do. If anyone calls there looking for me, can you forget that I ever came through Chicago? I just need some time away right now, in peace, and I don’t want anyone tracking me down. From work, or anything.”

“I already did this!” He sounded proud of himself. “Some boyfriend, he called here and asked for you. He sounded no good.”

“Rocky Walters?”

“Yes, some ridiculous name like this.”

“Thank you.”

Ian came out of the bathroom, his wet hair sculpted into a Mohawk. He had put on his red T-shirt, the one from the police report, but I couldn’t ask him to change without explaining why. And I was still too busy seething at my father, at his puncturing my little balloon. But he had to be wrong. Or maybe he’d just forgotten what it felt like. There’s a reason revolutionaries are young. Three
young
Russians are a revolution. Three
old
Russians are just a bunch of people sitting around the kitchen, arguing how much cabbage to put in the soup.

Ian lay back on the bed and began reading again, but after a few minutes he rested the book on his abdomen and stared at the ceiling, where water leaks had stained the paint.

“Miss Hull, can I have some coins?”

“It’s too late for candy.”

“No, it’s not for candy, it’s something else. I can’t tell you. It’s a secret.”

“How much?”

“A couple dollars, I think.”

I remembered the pay phone in the lobby, and my heart sank through the bed and onto the floor underneath. I tossed him my coin purse anyway, lay back and closed my eyes, heard him count change in a stack and leave the room.

So it was over.

He wasn’t calling the police, or he wouldn’t have asked for money. Unless he didn’t know that it was free. More likely it was his teacher, his parents, some kind aunt or uncle. The library, for all I knew. Pastor Bob. All I could really do was breathe, and so that’s what I did for the next five minutes. It was over. If he came back and said that we were through, that someone was on the way to pick him up, then that was it. I couldn’t cross the line to
actual
kidnapping.

When he came back with paper in his hand, I thought it was a small phone book. Even when he unfolded the whole thing on the bed, I couldn’t comprehend the lines, the tiny lakes, the words. It was a subpoena, a picture of jail, a mass of pink and green hell. Really, it was a map of Quebec.

“No,” I said. I sat up. “We are
not
going to Canada. We’ve been over that.”

He rolled his eyes. “Do you think I’m stupid? They’d arrest us at the border. I think I figured something out, though.”

“What?”

“No, just read your book. I’ll tell you in a second.”

I lay down and held the book above my head, the other hand fingering the spongy polyester of the comforter. Soaking it in: it wasn’t over. The book was
Anna Karenina
, from the Lynton library. I suppose I had wanted a book whose horrible ending I could see coming from page one, a book where I wouldn’t hold out hope for a happy resolution that never came.

“I got it,” he said. He started giggling, red-faced. He picked up a pillow and held it on top of his head with both arms. Glasses falling off, laughing.

I went over to look, and he pointed his pinky at a small dot by a big green patch, a few miles north of the Vermont border.
Havre
, it said.

It took me a second. “So you think this all happened up—you think your grandmother was Canadian.”

“
No
.” He was laughing the way no one would unless they’d just won something impossible—a kingship, a lottery. Or maybe the way they would laugh if their house burned down. “Don’t you get it? They
lost
.”

When he disappeared to brush his teeth, I felt like crying. It was hunger and fatigue and stress, and more than anything, it was the writing on the wall. I’d been looking for a sign, looking for the dead grandmother soldier to tell us something, and here it was. Not
Run for it
, not
Trust that he’ll be okay
, not
Keep fighting
, but
You’re going to lose
. And it was true, and my father seemed to agree, and it was the only thing I could see clearly right then. The wallpaper of the room was a blur, the numbers of the digital clock were a single red stripe, the mirror was a glaring yellow spot, but this was absolute: you can’t keep going, you can’t go back, and you can’t stay here. What did you think, with your bag full of potatoes? How did you think this was going to end?

Ian came out of the bathroom, his toothbrush still in his hand, and said, “What’s really so funny is that
no one
was right. Isn’t that weird? I thought it was the same town as Mankson, and you said it was New Haven, and that librarian said it probably stopped being a town at all. And the answer was something totally different! It’s like, I thought you might be right because you’re really smart, and I thought that librarian might be right because she lives here and stuff. But
no one
was!”

“Except for you,” I said.

He thought about it a second, then raised his toothbrush triumphantly in the air and bowed.

When he lay down again on the bed, he didn’t even pick up
The 21 Balloons
, which surprised me a little. Judging by the spot where he’d stuck the hotel channel guide as a bookmark, he must have been right at the most dramatic part, where the gull makes a hole in the hydrogen balloon and the professor crash-lands on the mysterious island. Instead, he lay there looking around the room as if he expected more mysteries to solve themselves, more revelatory maps to unfold.

I found myself at an utter loss—for words, for action, for decisions. I’d just come crashing down from the height of my revolutionary fervor, and here was Ian sitting across from me, apparently elated by his discovery. I decided to throw it all back on him, once again. Letting Ian call the shots had started as a way to assuage my guilt, both moral and legal. Now it was simply a way out of paralysis.

I said, “Since you’re the guy with all the answers, you need to decide what’s happening next. We’re pretty much out of money. I can get some more if we really, really need it, but right now we’re almost out. We barely have enough to get back. And we’re not going to beg in the streets anymore.” I wasn’t trying to lead the witness, but I did want to give him an excuse, if he was ready to go home. The whole day, except for my brief inspiration from the gravestone, had felt like the end of something. The end of our money, the end of the country. And hadn’t Ian been telling me we were done, by letting us find his grandmother? He could have kept us circling Vermont for several more days, if he’d tried. Or he could have said, “Oh, did I say Ver
mont
? I meant Vir
ginia
!”

He looked at the ceiling, as if he were deciding what he wanted for breakfast in the morning. “The thing is that the auditions for the spring play are next week, and I definitely want a part.”

“Okay.”

“Only the eighth graders get the leads, but I still want to do it, even if it’s just the chorus. So I think we should probably go back now.”

He kept looking at the ceiling. I assumed it was because he didn’t want to look at me.

“Miss Hull, I’m sorry if I’m changing the subject a little, but why do bagpipes only ever play that one song? You know the one song they always do, like at the parade?” And he began a fairly decent impression. He still wasn’t looking at me.

I said, “I have no idea. Most composers don’t really write for the bagpipe.”

“I’m going to put them in my symphony. They can have a whole section of the orchestra. Or the bagpipe players could be hiding all through the audience with their bagpipes under their seats, and then suddenly they all pull them out and start playing, and everyone’s totally startled. Only they couldn’t wear those kilts, because that would sort of give it away.”

“It would certainly look a little suspect.”

I went into the bathroom and put a cold washcloth on my face.

I was surprised—and surprised to be surprised—but I couldn’t figure out what it was that I’d expected. Was I really going to raise him myself and enroll him in school somewhere? Homeschool him? Sign us up for the circus? Somewhere in the back of my mind there had always been a fantastical and illogical ending to the story, as crazy as Ian’s story about his grandmother, and if only I had bothered to examine it first, we wouldn’t be here. I’d forgotten that all the runaway stories end like this. Everyone goes home. Dorothy clicks her way back to Kansas, Ulysses sails home to his wife, Holden Caulfield breaks into his own apartment. Huck didn’t go home, at least—but what happened to Jim? Probably something terrible. I couldn’t even remember.

What happy ending could I have been nursing, this whole time? It lurked there like a dream, half remembered. There was a picture from somewhere of a place I would take him, maybe a place from a book: a white-walled, sunny house where people took care of children, where they would explain everything and let him stay there forever or until he was strong enough to face his parents. Or we would all launch out together in our happy little boat and forge a new country on new land rising from the ocean foam: an ideal America finally or again.

I
was up once again at four in the morning, my pillows unbearably hard, my heart beating fast as a hamster’s. For better or worse, Ian was going home. That was settled. But where was
I
going? The room was pitch-black with the thick hotel curtain drawn, so I got up and opened it and let the parking lot lights illuminate the room. There, in the lot, side by side, were my car and its twin. I had stopped being surprised. I was really just impressed. I wondered if he’d follow us all the way back to Hannibal. And then what? Turn me in for a reward? And what if I didn’t go back to Hannibal at all? Would he follow me or follow Ian? Who was he really after?

Even if I did go home, and even if Mr. Shades went back to whatever dark rented basement he’d crawled out of, I knew eventually Ian would slip up. Or even more likely, Pastor Bob would drag the story out of him. And there I’d be in Hannibal, behind my little desk, ready to arrest.

Then there was this: I didn’t really
want
to go home. I wouldn’t see Ian anymore, I knew. His parents would keep him away from the library, even if they didn’t suspect me. I couldn’t quite picture what would happen if we ran into each other, if I saw him at the Fourth of July parade. It would be different and diminished and sad. In addition to which, Rocky wasn’t my friend anymore, or maybe never was. And minus Rocky and Ian, I didn’t even like my job.

I lay down again and waited for morning. Ian would have to go home alone. If I drove him back myself, we’d get pulled over twenty miles outside Hannibal for the brake light I still hadn’t fixed. The cops would recognize Ian, and not even my father could invent a story good enough to get us out of that one.

I counted the hundred and twenty dollars left in my purse, and then I turned on the TV with no sound. I watched the weather channel, watched the bands of color sweeping eastward across the nation again and again and again. When Ian woke up at seven, I turned it off. I said, “Have you ever been on a Greyhound bus?”

No, he had not, but he had seen them, and he was visibly excited by the prospect, even when I told him he’d have to do it alone, and overnight. He might have to get off in St. Louis and call home or the police from there. I told him I’d come back separately. My major concern, though, was his safety over the two days. I thought of giving him my cell phone and having him throw it out the window as soon as he crossed the Mississippi, but there were too many ways that could go wrong. I had to trust that Ian would find the most helpful adult on the bus, the grandmother on her way to St. Louis, and latch on to her. I remembered the way he’d swindled half of Church Street. He’d be fine.

As soon as I found the address of the Burlington Greyhound station in the phone book, we started packing up. I didn’t want to call Greyhound from the front desk—it would be like tying everything up in a nice little bow for the prosecuting attorney. And of course the hotel had no Internet. Lots of mold, but no Internet. We’d have to get to the station, see the schedule and wait it out.

On the drive back to Burlington, we tried to solidify the details of the plan. Ian was jumpy, and he kept rubbing his ears with his shoulders. He had dark circles under his eyes, and I wondered how much he’d really slept. He’d seemed pretty out of it from four to seven, but of course those might have been his only hours of sleep.

I said, “Are you sure you want to do this?”

I didn’t know what I’d do if he said no. He said, “I probably missed a lot of quizzes.” I took it as a yes. I didn’t have to, but I did.

So I changed the subject. “People might be looking for
me
,” I said. “Either right now or later. Even if you don’t say anything at all.”

Even as I said it, I saw Mr. Shades pass another car behind us and come up right on our tail. He was getting bolder in his espionage, if that’s what it was. Either he was planning his big move, or he figured I was onto him and had decided to drop any pretense of subtlety.

Ian was pulling a hole in the knee of his khakis wider and wider. “I
swear
I wouldn’t say anything. But they could have found a clue. Like, maybe I dropped something in the library, like a sock or something, and they did a
DNA
test.”

Oh my God.

My hands went numb on the wheel. “Ian, did you clean up your origami?” I didn’t mean to shout.

“What origami?”

“The origami in the plant! Remember, the plane crash and the people? When you were hiding?”

He sucked his lips straight into his mouth.

“Did you clean it up when we left?”

He shook his head no.

The truck in front of us slowed to turn, and I almost crashed into it. Mr. Shades almost crashed into me. When Ian and I both had our breath back and the seat belts had slackened again, I said, “Maybe they’ll think it was from a craft class. There wasn’t anything with your name, was there?”