Walk Me Home (30 page)

“You could call and pretend to be older.”

“But on the phone, everybody thinks I’m even younger than I am.”

“Oh,” Jen said. “That’s true.”

“I think we should just wait.”

“How long?”

“I’m not sure yet,” Carly said. “But longer.”

“Oh, my God, here comes Wade!” Jen shrieked.

She’d been sitting by the window for hours. Many hours. It was after seven in the evening. The sun was nearly down. Carly was in the bathroom and couldn’t get out there as fast as she’d have liked.

“But I don’t see Mom. What’s he doing back without Mom? Oh, wait. That’s not Wade. That’s Wade Two. His hair is much longer.”

“Wade Two?”

Carly zipped up fast and ran to the window without washing her hands.

Together they watched Wade Two walk down the path to the guesthouse door. Neither said a word. Both girls knew something that did not need to be spoken out loud. In the four months they’d lived in this guesthouse, Wade Two had never come to the door. Not once. Not for any reason.

They watched him raise a hand to knock.

“I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” Carly said.

He knocked.

“I bet they just got hurt.”

“I hope so.”

“Well, let him in, Carly.”

Carly opened the door and stared into the face of Wade’s twin brother, who stared back. He did not look like a happy man. Then again, he never had, all three of the times Carly had seen him from a distance. But in that moment he seemed less happy than ever before.

“You girls sit down,” he said. With close to no emotion at all.

They did. In unison. They sank onto the couch, facing the door. Bizarrely, Wade Two did not come in. Just stood in the open doorway.

“I have to tell you bad news. I hate to do it. But somebody has to. I’ll cut right to it. There’s been an accident.”

“What kind of accident?” Carly asked, a tingly electric heat spreading in her chest.

“Wade’s truck. Went off the road up in the high mountains.”

“Are they OK?”

“No.”

Just for a second, Carly thought she was a statue. That she had turned to stone. A voice in her head said, You knew. You already knew. But there’s knowing, and then there’s
knowing
. This was the worse of the two.

“It was on the edge of a big drop-off,” Wade Two said. “Or anyway, that’s what they told me on the phone. The police, or whoever just called me. Hard to pay good attention at a time like that. You just hear the bad news and not much else.”

Something rose up in Carly. Some kind of voice to speak.

“So what you’re saying is, Wade took our mom up high in the mountains and drove them both off a cliff.”

Wade Two’s face tightened down. The look of loss suddenly armored over with a pestered expression. As though Carly were a gnat or a mosquito, hovering too close to his face.

“He didn’t do it on purpose.”

“How do
you
know?”

The only reaction was a deeper solidification of his features. It rattled Carly to look into the face of a man who looked exactly like Wade.

“I’ve done my part here. I told you.” He turned away. Marched two steps toward his house. Then he stopped and looked at Carly over his shoulder. “I’ll make the phone call to get you girls taken care of.”

Carly ran to the open door. “Wait. What do you mean? Taken care of how?”

“Well, I don’t know. The authorities will know. There has to be a procedure. You girls have a father you can go live with? Well, never mind. Don’t bother telling me. I’ll call whatever agency takes care of children. You tell them.”

“It’s too late,” Carly said. Blurted out, really.

“Too late?”

“Their office’ll be closed.”

“Well…I don’t think it matters,” he said. “If a child is in danger, and it’s an emergency, somebody will come sort it out.”

“But we’re not in danger, and it’s not an emergency. I mean, not tonight. We’re old enough to stay alone. We stay alone all the
time. I’m old enough to babysit. Why drag them out here at night when we can just go to sleep in our own bed? Like we always do?”

Carly could see him chew on the inside of his cheek for a moment. She had a sudden dizzying sensation, like a tightrope walker. A sense that one mistake in balance would lead to the final fall.

“I’ll call in the morning, then. You girls try to get some sleep.”

He walked away. Carly watched him go, knowing she had to turn and face Jen. And not wanting to. She put it off as long as she reasonably could.

Jen was still sitting on the couch. Doing nothing. Jen, it seemed, really had turned to stone.

“Jen?”

“What are we supposed to do, Carly?”

“We’re going to go live with Teddy. Now come on. Get your backpack, and go through your stuff and put together only what fits in the backpack. Like just the stuff you’d take camping. We’re leaving tonight.”

Carly was halfway across the room to her backpack when she heard a small, muffled thump. She turned to see Jen sitting on her own crumpled legs in the middle of the floor.

“Come on, Jen. Get up.”

But she didn’t.

“Here, I’ll help you.”

But Jen’s bones seemed to have turned to jelly.

So Carly sat in the middle of the floor, shoulder to shoulder with her sister. For about an hour. Thinking how nice it would be to collapse. But she couldn’t afford to. Somebody had to stay upright. And the job had fallen to Carly.

There wasn’t much Carly could do, under the circumstances, but she figured at least she could do a decent job of being the one who didn’t collapse.

Now Again

ARIZONA

May 18

It’s undoubtedly the small hours of the morning, though Carly has no way of knowing which ones. She only knows it’s getting harder to stay awake.

She’s been holding on to this metal ladder for what seems like two or three hours now, one arm hooked through so she doesn’t have to trust her hands. So her hands can’t slip.

Funny how something can start out heaven, then so quickly turn to hell. The dark scenery has grown tedious. Over and over she’s startled by a sudden rock face springing up just a few feet from her right or left shoulder. Or a tunnel. It’s hard to know what’s happening when the train suddenly plunges into a tunnel.

But that’s not what makes it hell. It’s the fact that there’s no way to rest. And it’s getting harder to stay awake.

Actually, it’s getting almost impossible to stay awake.

She tries climbing up higher on the ladder, thinking maybe she can pull herself up onto the top of the railroad car. But she can’t see what she’d be stepping onto, and she can’t stop thinking about how
much clearance there might be between the top of the train and the roof of the tunnels.

She thinks about letting go and giving up on the ride, but she can’t see what she’d be falling onto, or into. The train might be a couple of feet from the edge of a cliff for all she knows. Besides, where would she go then? She doesn’t know her way to Highway 40 from here, wherever here is, the way she would if she’d just kept walking down that paved road. She could get lost in the middle of nowhere. Forever. Well. The point being that forever, for her, would only be a couple of days in that case.

So she’s stuck. No going up, no going down. Too late to turn back. But she’s not quite sure what’s in front of her if she just hangs on. Do westbound trains just keep going west? Or do they bear north or south at some point? She has no way to know. It’s never affected her life before. So she never cared.

She tries to sit on a rung, but it leaves her feet dangling. But she’s desperate enough to give that a try.

A few moments later she snaps awake, hanging by nothing but the bruised crook of her right arm. She has to use her left to grab hold again, and while she does, nothing but her rigid refusal to relax her bent right arm is keeping her from falling. She takes a good hold with her left, but her whole body is still trailing free, swinging. She eases her right arm straight, then grabs the side of the ladder with her right hand. Both of her arms shake with the strain, and her heart is pounding. She has to pull herself up to get her feet back on the ladder. Her arms are ready to fail her. To just let go. The backpack isn’t helping. It’s weighing on her, pulling her backward. She looks down. Just blackness. No way to know what will happen if she falls.

She gives it all she’s got. Pulls up, arms trembling, muscles screaming with overuse. Then her foot hits a rung. She steps in close
to the ladder again and wraps her arms around it, shaking. Calming her heart.

She has to stay awake.

It’s now officially a life-or-death situation.

She thinks about Jen saying, “I’m afraid you’re going to go out and get yourself killed.” Or words to that effect.

She was so sure Jen was wrong about that.

Now she has to prove it.

The train stops. It seems almost too good to be true, but Carly can hear the scream of the brakes, the metal on metal. And then they’re standing still.

She climbs down onto the tracks.

Her arms are shaking, not so much with fear—though she has plenty of that, too—but from overexertion. Like they couldn’t lift a leaf without five or six days to rest and regroup. But she doesn’t have time to think about that. There’s no way to know how long the train will remain stopped. They don’t seem to be anywhere. And she has to find a way to get into this train, rather than on it. So she can relax and sleep.

She picks her way in the dark up to the last boxcar. The one with the door that was open just a crack. She grasps the door with both hands and tries to slide it, but it’s heavy. Her arms are all but useless. She uses the weight of her body instead. Holds with her fingers and throws her body in the direction she wants the door to go. It gives a few inches. She uses the same maneuver five more times, getting another few inches on each pull.

The train starts to move again.

She slips off her backpack and throws it into the boxcar, then immediately regrets the decision. If she fails in her attempt to jump the train, it’s gone forever.

She has to get on.

She takes a three-step running start and throws her body through the opening, hitting one hip hard on the edge of the sliding door. It’s not enough. She barely has her whole upper body on the floor of the car. She’s falling back again.

“Oh, shit!” she says out loud.

Her waist is bending, the weight of her legs pulling down and inward, and rather than falling back and away from the train, she’s about to fall in a hook motion, right under the wheels. And there’s no way to stop it. She has nothing to grab on to.

Jen was right.

In that tiny fraction of a second, she processes the inevitability of her own death.

This is it.

From inside the boxcar, two hands grab her wrists.

A little noise something like a scream escapes her throat. She instinctively tries to pull away from their grasp.

“Don’t let go!” a voice says. It’s a male voice, but young. Teenage boy young. “I’m gonna pull. Let me pull you. Try to shimmy up on your belly.”

He pulls hard, and it hurts Carly’s midsection, which is scraping along the edge of the boxcar floor. She straightens as best she can, lifting her legs with great effort, then inchworms along the boards.

When her knees touch wood, she knows she’s not going to die. She collapses, trying to breathe again.

She has no idea who’s in this car with her, but since she was dead a minute ago, it doesn’t seem to matter.

“Thank you,” she says. “Whoever that is.”

“Yeah. You don’t wanta fall like that. That’s the worst. You could end up right under those wheels. People lose both legs. Or
if it goes right over the middle of you…well…why talk about that? You made it.”

She wants to say something else appreciative, but nothing comes out. She doesn’t have enough strength left to find and form words.

A deep male voice says, “What’s going on, Davis? What’s all the noise?”

“It’s nothing, Dad. Go back to sleep. It’s just a girl. A girl jumped the train is all.”

“A girl? All by herself? What’s a girl doing jumping the train all by herself?”

“I don’t know, Dad, but it’s OK. Just go back to sleep.”