There is no pain, you are receding . . .
Jane walked into the room. The smell of lavender enveloped her. A glass vase held fresh cut flowers. Incense burned on a metal tray. Jane realized these were not meant to ward off bad spirits, but to cover the odor of shit and piss in the bucket by the window.
When I was a child, I had a fever . . .
There were only two windows in the small space, one facing the Victorian in the front, the other facing the house that was on the street behind them. Jane opened both, hoping the cross-breeze would alleviate some of the odor.
She stood in the middle of the room holding the peeled apple. She let the song play through to the guitar solo. She followed the notes in her head. Visualized her fingers on the strings. She had played guitar for a while, then the violin, cello, mandolin and, just for the sheer joy of it, a steel-stringed fiddle.
Then Martin had told her that she had to choose between being good at many things or perfect at one.
Jane lifted the needle from the record.
She heard them downstairs. First, Andrew’s coughing with its worrisome rattle. Nick’s pithy little asides. Quarter told them all to keep their voices down, but then Paula started another fucking pigs will pay diatribe that drowned them all out.
“Come now,” Nick spoke in a teasing tone. “We’re so close. Do you know how important we’re going to be when this is all over?”
When this is all over . . .
Jane put her hand to her stomach as she walked across the room.
Would this ever be over?
Could they go on after this? Could they bring a child into this world that they were trying to create? Was there really a flat waiting for them in Switzerland?
Jane reminded herself again: Nick had sold his furniture. Stripped away the fixtures in his apartment. He was sleeping on the floor. Was that a man who thought there was a future?
Was that a man who could be a father to their child?
Jane kneeled beside the bed.
She lowered her voice a few octaves, warning, “Don’t say a word.”
She pulled down the gag from the woman’s mouth.
Alexandra Maplecroft started screaming.
August 23, 2018
11
Andy hefted a heavy box of old sneakers out of the back of the Reliant. Fat drops of rain smacked the cardboard. Steam came off the asphalt. The sky had opened after days of punishing heat, so now in addition to the punishing heat she had to deal with getting wet. She sprinted back and forth between the hatch and the open storage unit, head cowed every time a bolt of lightning slipped between the afternoon clouds.
She had taken a page from her mother and rented two different storage units in two different facilities in two different states to hide the gazillion dollars of cash inside the Reliant. Actually, Andy had done Laura one better. Instead of just piling the money on the floor of the unit like she was Skyler in Breaking Bad, she had cleaned out the back room of a Salvation Army store in Little Rock, then hidden the stacks of cash underneath old clothes, camping gear and a bunch of broken toys.
That way, anyone watching would think Andy was doing what most Americans did and paying to store a bunch of crap they didn’t want instead of donating it to people who could actually use it.
Andy ran back to the Reliant and grabbed another box. Rain splashed inside her brand-new sneakers. Her new socks took on the consistency of quicksand. Andy had stopped at another Walmart after leaving the first storage facility on the Arkansas side of Texarkana. She was finally wearing clothes that were not from the 1980s. She’d bought a messenger bag and a $350 laptop. She had sunglasses, underwear that didn’t sag around her ass, and, weirdly, a sense of purpose.
I want you to live your life, Laura had said back at the diner. As much as I want to make it easier for you, I know that it’ll never take unless you do it all on your own. Andy was certainly on her own now. But what had changed? She couldn’t quite articulate even to herself why she felt so different. She just knew that she was sick of floating between disaster points like an amoeba inside a petri dish. Was it the realization that her mother was a spectacular liar? Was it the feeling of shame for being such a gullible believer? Was it the fact that a hired gun had followed Andy all the way to Alabama, and instead of listening to her gut and taking off, she had tried to hook up with him?
Her face burned with shame as she slid another box out of the back of the Reliant.
Andy had stayed in Muscle Shoals long enough to watch Mike Knepper’s truck drive past the motel twice in the space of two hours. She had waited through the third hour and into the fourth to make certain that he wasn’t coming back, then she’d packed up the Reliant and hit the road again.
She had been shaky from the outset, loaded with caffeine from McDonald’s coffee, still terrified to pull over to go to the restroom because, at that point, she still had the cash hidden inside of the car. The drive to Little Rock, Arkansas, had taken five hours, but every single one of them had weighed on her soul.
Why had Laura lied to her? Who was she so afraid of? Why had she told Andy to go to Idaho?
More importantly, why was Andy still blindly following her mother’s orders?
Andy’s inability to answer any of these questions had not been helped by lack of sleep. She had stopped in Little Rock because it was a town she had heard of, then she had stopped at the first hotel with an underground parking deck because she figured she should hide the Reliant in case Mike was somehow following her.
Andy had backed the station wagon into a space so that any would-be thieves would have trouble accessing the hatch. Then she had gotten back into the car and pulled forward so that she could take the sleeping bag and the beach tote out of the trunk. Then she had backed into the space again, then she had checked into the hotel, where she had slept for almost eighteen hours straight.
The last time she had slept that long, Gordon had taken her to the doctor because he was afraid she had narcolepsy. Andy thought of the Arkansas sleep as therapeutic. She was not gripping a steering wheel. She was not screaming or sobbing into the empty car. She was not checking Laura’s cell phone every five minutes. She was not fretting about all the money that tethered her to the Reliant. She was not worrying that Mike had followed her because she had actually crawled under the car and checked for any GPS tracking devices.
Mike.
With his stupid K in his last name and his stupid grasshopper on his truck and his stupid kissing her in the parking lot like some kind of psychopath because he was clearly there to follow Andy, or torture her, or do something horrible, and instead he had seduced her.
Worse, she had let him.
Andy grabbed the last box from the back of the car and approximated a walk of shame into the unit. She dropped the box onto the floor. She sat down on a wooden stool with a wobbly third leg. She rubbed her face. Her cheeks were on fire.
Idiot, she silently admonished herself. He saw right through you.
The painful truth was, there was not much of a story to tell about Andy’s sex life. She would always trot out the affair with her college professor as a way to sound sophisticated, but she left out the part where they’d had sex only three and a half times. And that the guy was a pothead. And mostly impotent. And that they usually ended up sitting on his couch while he got high and Andy watched Golden Girls reruns.
Still, he was better than her high school boyfriend. They had met in drama club, which should have been a giant freaking clue. But they were best friends. And they had both decided that their first times should be with each other.