When We Were Friends (18 page)

Glad? Glad was not the right word. I was overwhelmed, freaked out, and not quite sure I wasn’t dreaming. It was like nightmares I’d had of being lost, running through dark and unfamiliar streets, then suddenly finding the street that led toward home.

“I was worried about you, Leah. The state you were in when you left … I know you can take care of yourself, but anybody would fall apart in your situation. What kind of person would I be if I just shrugged and let you go through that alone?”

“You followed me,” I said.

“Yes, I think we’ve already established that.”

“I
thought
somebody was following me. I was sure of it, and I kept telling myself I was being paranoid. But it was you.”

“Look, we’re not getting anywhere with this line of conversation. Let’s go inside, I’ll buy you a burger and we’ll talk. Let me just grab Molly.” He opened her door, handed me the diaper bag and fumbled
with her car seat latches. “Have you experienced the wonder that is beef-fat–fried potatoes?” he asked her gently. “If not, you’re in for a treat.” He lifted her and started toward the entrance, and I followed behind him, my mind blank as we walked inside. “Here, you sit with Molly,” he said. “I’ll order for us, if you tell me what you want.”

I watched him silently, then turned to the nearest table and sat, resisting the urge to spread prostrate along the booth. He pulled up a high chair and set Molly inside it. “A salad,” I said softly, then a bit louder. “Thank you.” Me, who hadn’t seen a salad since 1992 during Star’s deluded attempt to follow the food pyramid. But my stomach was churning, and real food just seemed beside the point somehow.

In a semi-stupor I watched him approach the front counter. None of this seemed quite real. Seeing Alex threw doubt onto everything; it must all be a dream, because what were the chances of finding a man like Alex who’d care enough about us to follow me here? I gulped at my coffee and the heat on my tongue helped a bit, something corporeal to focus on.

I cracked open a jar of pureed liver for Molly, and the bitter scent surrounded us, embarrassingly similar to fecal matter. I spooned it into her mouth but she spit it out, making a motorcycle sound with her lips. Apparently she did not like mashed liver.

“Here.” Alex set down a tray with a burger, soda, fries and my salad, and a chocolate shake that he handed to me. “You need more than lettuce to get through this. I want you to make some decisions here, and that’s going to take sugar and fat and … calcium. I’m assuming shakes have calcium.”

I cradled the sweating cup in both hands, squeezed and released it rhythmically like I was testing its ripeness. “You didn’t need to check up on me.”
Squeeze, release
. “I mean, it’s awfully nice of you, ridiculously nice. And now I feel really guilty.”
Squeeze, release
. “Because I must’ve somehow given you the impression that we need to be taken care of. But really, you don’t need to save us.”

He watched me a minute before he said, “Do you actually have a plan, or were you just driving randomly?”

“I’d say somewhere in between.” I set down the cup and dried my hands on my jeans, then shuffled a plastic fork through the salad. “But I guess more the latter than the former. Which is okay, I mean I don’t need a destination. I just feel like I need to stay on the move, get far enough away from home before I stop.”

I had to check the news, buy another paper. And I needed to call Star, make sure she was okay, but I couldn’t use my cell phone because I was sure they must’ve started tracing my calls. I’d have to find a pay phone, but what if our home phone was tapped? Maybe I could just make sure Star answered, judge the tone of her voice and then hang up without speaking. I pulled out my wallet, my eyes filling. I wasn’t equipped for this. I should’ve watched more CSI. “This is for the salad, and do you have change for a dollar? I want to see if there’s a pay phone here.”

He fished in his pocket, pulled out a handful of coins and piled them on our food tray, waving away the bills I tried to hand him. “Who did you want to call?”

Molly started banging her palms on her high chair tray, so I wiped off her spoon and scooped up a bit of milk shake to feed her. “My mother,” I said. “I know she has to be freaking out about me, and I just want to hear her voice, make sure she’s okay. But if David’s told the police I’m missing, if they’re looking for me I’m scared they might be tracing the calls from my cell, and I don’t want them knowing I’m in Ohio.”

“You want to use my cell?”

“I don’t want to get you any more involved than you already are. What if they’re tracing everybody who calls her, and they track you down?”

“I could just say I dialed a wrong number. If your mom gets a call from a pay phone, that’ll look more suspicious than a private number.”

“They’ll know it wasn’t a wrong number, because I used your cell yesterday to call her. If they see you called two days in a row, you’d need some kind of explanation.”

“I don’t care. Worst comes to worst, I can say I lost my phone.”

I shook my head firmly. “I don’t want you lying for me. What if they polygraph you or something?”

“Polygraph me? Over a stolen phone? Here.” He dug into his pocket and handed me his phone. “Call.”

I hesitated, then flipped it open. “Thanks, Alex,” I said. “I just want to hear her voice but I won’t even talk, in case they’re tapping her line. There won’t be any way for them to tell it’s me.” And even if they did somehow find out, Alex had no idea who I was or what I’d done. They couldn’t arrest him for unwittingly assisting a kidnapper.

My eyes on him, I dialed my home number and let it ring at least fifteen times, but there was no answer. I hung up and stared down at it. “She’s not answering,” I said.

“You can try again before we leave, see if she’s back.”

“But she
has
to be home. Because she never goes out, she’s agoraphobic, so she doesn’t leave the house.” I set the phone down, spun it fitfully with one finger. “Maybe she’s sleeping or something. She keeps weird hours.”

“I’m sure she’s fine, try not to worry. We’ll try again later, okay?” He smiled at Molly, who’d apparently decided I wasn’t spooning the shake fast enough, and was now shoving fistfuls into her mouth. “Well, at least someone’s eating.” He nodded at my salad. “Come on, Leah, have you had anything since breakfast?”

I looked down at the salad, then speared a cherry tomato and brought it to my mouth, focusing on the chewing and swallowing, fighting back a coil of nausea.

“Look,” he said slowly, “I want you to let me help you.”

“Alex, no.” I dropped the fork and pushed my salad away, focused on wiping the milk shake from Molly’s fingers. “You’ve been amazing, more than I had any right to hope for. But I’m a big girl. I can figure this out for myself.”

“Well of course you can.” He plugged the top of his straw with his finger, lifted it and let Coke spill back into his glass. “But anybody in your situation would need some help.
I’d
need help if I was in your situation.”

“I know you think I should go to a shelter.” I licked a napkin, wiped at Molly’s face. What incredibly bad aim she had, chocolate all the way to her eyelashes. “But I won’t.” I lifted her from her high chair to set her on my lap, and she settled into the crook of my arm, making soft
da-da-da
sounds and playing with her foot. “It seems so, I don’t know, desperate. The energy in those places, filled with scared women, I don’t want to bring Molly into that.”

“Understood. I can totally understand that.” He looked into my eyes a moment as if considering something, then reached forward and took both my hands. Not caring about the milk shake stickiness, the dirty napkin I clutched, just holding tight. Mortifyingly, I squeaked.

“I have a big house,” he said, “two extra bedrooms, and it’s pretty much in the middle of nowhere, so I’m sure you’d be safe.”

He was asking me to stay with him in New Hampshire? I opened my mouth, tongue flapping. I’d never really understood how a tongue could flap but now I did, tongue flapping against the roof of my mouth like I was echoing Molly’s croon:
da-da-da
.

“You could stay just for a few days, it’d give you time to rest up and plan what to do next. You can even look up trip routes on my computer to wherever you want to go. And maybe it sounds weird of me, and sudden, and I realize we hardly even know each other. I swear I’m not usually this impulsive, but I just can’t stand the thought of leaving you here stranded in the middle of nowhere. Besides it’d be fun for me, having the baby around.”

I glanced down at our intertwined hands. All I wanted was to confess everything to him, let him tell me exactly what to do and where to go, and that we’d be safe. If I told him, what would he say?

He suddenly pulled away and raked a hand through his hair. “Sorry, you probably think I’m some kind of stalker, or a psychopath who lures women into his home and then … I don’t know, locks them in the basement.” He set a hand on Molly’s head, held it there a moment before he stood.

And it was only then that I realized I hadn’t answered him, hadn’t even looked at him since he’d offered his home. What was I supposed
to say? Was I really the kind of person who could take advantage of kindness, lie over and over to someone’s face and make him an accessory to my own crime? No, no, I knew I wasn’t, and I wasn’t the sort of person who’d let a stranger take care of me. But suddenly I wanted to be taken care of more than anything in the world.

I hesitated, then reached for his elbow. “See the thing is?” I said. “The thing is, nobody’s been good to me in a long time; I mean nobody’s gone out of their way. And I’m just not used to it, is all. I don’t know how to react exactly.”

He watched me a moment, unblinking, then set his hand over mine. “Just say yes. It’s easy. Just for a few days.”

“Okay,” I said, then smiled. “Thank you.” Not even allowing myself to think how crazy it was to travel hundreds of miles to stay with some man, when I didn’t even know his last name.

We drove through the night. Him navigating and me following behind fueled by $1.99 gallon-jugs of coffee, flashing my headlights when Molly needed a new diaper or a feeding, or when I just wanted to see Alex’s face, to remind myself this was real.

I’d set a newspaper I’d picked up in town on the front seat next to me. I paged through it each time we stopped at a light, scanning photos and headlines. And by the time we reached Pennsylvania I’d glanced through it all and found, to my great, great relief, no stories on the kidnapping. Of course it was only a local paper, and they had hardly any stories of national interest so I knew that meant next to nothing. Except that there must be lots of people in the country who hadn’t heard about Molly or seen photos of my face. There were places we could hide. And the town we were going to was supposedly even more remote than the Ohio town where I’d bought the paper, so there was a good chance we’d be safe.

I tried calling Star from Alex’s phone again during a rest stop, and again got no answer. But I forced myself not to worry yet. It was the middle of the night after all, and she didn’t have a phone in the bedroom. She’d probably just slept through the ringing from downstairs.

Yes, maybe I was being naïve. Maybe Star had turned herself in and was now sleeping in jail. Maybe the police had tapped her phone
and found the calls from Alex’s cell, and when we arrived at Alex’s home we’d find flashing headlights and Miranda rights. But I couldn’t think about that now, just wanted to focus on the drive, the feeling like I was both getting away from something and moving toward something. Reality, whatever that reality was, would hit soon enough, and at this point there wasn’t much I could do to change it.

As night bleached into a colorless day, I studied the back of Alex in the car ahead, his perfectly trimmed dark hair, the curve of ear to neck, his profile as he turned to the side window. I studied the parts of him like the instructions to a model airplane as if they could tell me something about his insides, how he was constructed.

So here’s what I learned. He was beautiful, he was
beautiful
, he smiled at the sun and sang along with the music from his radio, and he was beautiful. He slowed to look when we drove across a river and laughed out loud, glancing back at me, when a goose with her babies paraded across the road. And he was beautiful.

We made it into New Hampshire by morning, and as soon as we left the highway it was like making a detour to a different world. The forest rose around us, ash and pine and white birch muffling the rattle of my engine, a sudden muting like diving underwater at a public pool.

For miles we passed nothing but those trees and rock-strewn rivers, the only signs of human intervention an occasional dirt path leading to a log cabin, or a farm with cows and fields of hay. The mountains rose imposingly on all sides, in the rounded shape of breasts and knees, the road twisting in the notches between them. I opened my windows to inhale the cool breeze, the scent of pine, imagining I was the first to ever have traveled this road. What would I have thought if I’d seen it however-many-hundreds of years ago?
Yeah
, I would’ve thought,
I could settle here, dig in my homestead stakes, do some farming and meet some Native Americans, churn some butter
. It felt like a place one could hole up in, cradled by the hills, and compose a symphony or write a novel.