She loaded Tommie’s lunch into his backpack, then walked with him out to the stump by the road. They took a seat, waiting.
“If you want to catch more tadpoles later, I’ll try to find an old jar we could use,” she offered. “You might not be able to bring them for show-and-tell, but you could bring them back to the house for a while if you want.”
Tommie studied the ground. “I don’t want to die, Mom,” he said.
Beverly blinked. “What did you say?”
He turned toward her, his forehead wrinkled. “I said I don’t want them to die, Mom.”
“Oh,” she said, suddenly thinking about cameras and nightmares and too little sleep and not enough food, and in the rising heat of the morning, it was hard to keep all her thoughts straight. She needed to do better. She needed to make sure that Tommie felt safe.
The yellow bus, squeaking and groaning, came to a stop; the door squealed as it opened. Tommie rose and climbed into the bus without looking back, without even saying goodbye.
Cameras.
The word kept ricocheting around her mind like a pachinko ball. She needed a distraction—anything to settle her nerves—but her hands weren’t steady enough to start painting just yet. Instead, she went upstairs to Tommie’s room. Though he’d had a nightmare, she’d told her son that she would check to make sure, and that’s what good mothers did. His window was set into an alcove, making it impossible to see if anyone could even reach the roof. She examined the ceiling and lay down in Tommie’s bed. Tried to imagine where the sounds might have been, if there were any sounds, but pretending to be Tommie didn’t help.
She went outside, backing away from the house to get adequate perspective. Tommie’s room was on the side, and a single glance confirmed that the steep pitch of the roof made it even more unlikely that anyone could have been walking around up there. But one of the oak trees had a branch that stretched over part of the roof, making it essentially a squirrel highway. If there was wind, the branch might even scrape the shingles, and she tried to remember whether there’d been any wind last night.
The only thing that was certain was that no one had been on the roof; no one had whispered Tommie’s name. She’d known that already; nonetheless, she was glad she’d made herself sure of it. Just as she was now sure that there’d been cameras in the bus stations. They’d probably been required since 9/11, now that she thought about it, and Gary, she knew, had the power to access all of them.
Though her mind felt even more swimmy than it had over the last couple of days, she forced herself to think. Back inside, she took a seat at the table and rubbed her temples, pressing hard with her fingers.
Gary would no doubt demand to see footage from the local bus station for Friday night, Saturday, Sunday, and maybe even Monday morning. He would sit with his face close to the computer screen, fast-forwarding at times, watching carefully, searching. Even if he didn’t recognize her right away, he would undoubtedly recognize his son. It might take him hours or days, but she knew with certainty that Gary would eventually figure out exactly which bus they’d taken on their escape from town.
And then? Unless there were cameras on the buses—which she doubted—he would have no idea where she’d gotten off. At that point he’d probably try to speak to the drivers, but would the second driver remember where they’d disembarked? Unlikely, which meant that Gary’s next step would be to check the cameras at other bus stations along the route. And again, in time he would probably recognize Tommie. Then he’d keep repeating the process, like a wolf with his nose to the ground while hunting prey, getting closer and closer, zeroing in. He might even find a video of her at the convenience store.
But after that?
The trail would come to an end, because she and Tommie had hitched a ride with a woman in a station wagon. The woman who knew enough not to ask questions.
Could he find the woman? And the carpet salesman who smelled of Old Spice?
Doubtful.
But could there have been other cameras on the highway? Like traffic cameras? Cameras that recorded license plates?
Possibly.
Even if she assumed the absolute worst, the impossible worst—that Gary, somehow, had tracked her to this town—what then? He might check the motel, might go to the diner, might even speak with the waitress, but the trail would grow even colder after that. The waitress hadn’t known she wanted to find a place to live, and aside from the owner of the house, no one knew they were in town at all. For all Gary knew, she had caught yet another ride with someone else, heading in an entirely different direction.
Gary might be dogged and intelligent and able to leverage the power of federal and state governments to a point that would scare even the bravest ordinary citizen, but he wasn’t God.
“I am safe,” she said in her most convincing voice. “There is no way he can find me.”
Still, the anxiety was slow to pass, even when she went over everything again, just to make sure. She was on edge, no doubt about it, or maybe it was more like a super-high tightrope with no safety net, but either way, she knew she wasn’t thinking right. She was dwelling too much on certain ideas and forgetting other things completely, and she had to think normally again, if not for her, then for Tommie. He needed her and they were starting over and the orange walls of the kitchen seemed to be pressing in, giving her the beginnings of a headache.
“I need to paint the kitchen,” she whispered. “That will make me feel better.”
Rising from the table, she retrieved one of the paintbrushes, along with a roller and pan. As she had the day before, she stripped off her shirt and jeans, unwilling to ruin them with paint spatters. She used a butter knife to pry open the can of primer. Paint stores had a machine that shook the cans, but since that wasn’t an option, she found a wooden spatula in one of the drawers and used that to stir. The primer was thicker at the bottom, like the goo in a swamp bed, but she stirred and stirred, trying to coax it back to life so she could make the orange on the walls of the kitchen disappear for good.
Who in their right mind would have chosen that god-awful color in the first place? How was it possible to examine all the paint samples the stores had to offer—all the pretty neutrals or pastels or spring colors—and think, I want my kitchen walls to look like a Halloween jack-o’-lantern?
The primer seemed as ready as it ever would be, so she poured some into the pan, then pushed the roller back and forth, absorbing the liquid. She rolled the primer onto the walls, striping the jack-o’-lantern and getting as close to the cupboards as she could. After that she used the brush, pleased to discover how easy it was to cut right to the cupboards without leaving so much as the tiniest of smudges.
“I should get a job painting ugly kitchens,” she said with a giggle.
Leaving the primer to dry, she rinsed the brush and roller and set them near the water heater on the back porch to dry. She poured the rest of the primer back into the can, rinsed the pan and dried it with a paper towel, then added glossy white paint to it. She retrieved another brush and roller and turned her attention to the cupboards, immersed in her task. When she was finished, she stood in the middle of the kitchen, taking it all in.
The cupboards looked great, almost like new. But the ugly orange color had seeped through the primer, making the walls gray and dirty. She felt the stirrings of a headache.
I should get Tommie some clothes, she reminded herself.
Not only because she didn’t want the other kids to tease him, but because she didn’t want the teacher to notice. That might lead to a meeting, and the last thing either she or Tommie needed right now was to be noticed by anyone.
Checking the clock, she calculated how much time she would need to get to town, find a place to shop, and get back. If she left soon, there was still time, so after quickly rinsing the paintbrush and roller, she went upstairs and put on the wig and baseball hat and wrapped her breasts in the Ace bandage. She retrieved some money from her stash and left the house, her feet kicking up dust on the gravel road as she walked. And walked. And walked. As she passed the store where she’d bought the groceries and neared the diner and motel, she wondered if those two businesses had cameras. And if they did, how long would the recordings generally be kept? A couple of days? A week? A month? They wouldn’t be kept forever, would they?