“I’m going to give you a boost up to this window” I spoke in the flat, tongueless speech you learn in prison because it doesn’t carry far. “You slide through, you drop to the ground. You lie flat on your stomach and wait for me. Got it?”
I felt rather than saw him nod. I gave him a boost up to the sill and helped him wriggle his legs through. As he twisted, he dropped his book. He cried out.
I stuck up my hand and covered his mouth. “I’ll hand it to you. Get through and get down.”
When he seemed unwilling to leave without it, I pushed him. He clung briefly to the sill, and then fell. He didn’t cry out again, so I assumed he’d landed without breaking anything. I climbed up on the toilet seat, dropped his book through the opening and hoisted myself onto the sill. The stab of pain between my shoulders was so intense I had to hold back my own cry.
I sat for a few seconds, gathering my breath, then began the hard job of wriggling through the window-a grown woman’s hips are wider than a skinny adolescent’s. When a second shot reechoed, it startled me so that I landed in a heap almost on top of Benjamin. The fall knocked the wind out of me and I lay gagging for air, trying not to make any noise.
We were at the southeast corner of the mansion. We could hear excited shouts as the puppies and Schorr tried to figure out where their prey had fallen. They had shot at … a raccoon or a deer. They had not shot-notan ardent teenage girl running through the fields to protect her protege.
I wanted to dash to the back, what are you morons doing, you machodrunk fools, shooting at shadows and children? I grabbed the grass in front of me, tying myself to the ground here. If I joined the hunt, I’d leave the boy here where he would be found, arrested, if not shot. And Schorr was jumpy enough to arrest me or even shoot me if I showed my face.
“What they doing?” Benjamin cried in an undervoice.
“They shot at something. Probably a raccoon, an animal. As soon as they figure that out, they’ll be looking for me, so let’s move.”
“Animal? You think not-” he thought better of finishing the sentence. “Come on,” I said roughly. “We’re going. We are going to go straight across the lawn here. The house will keep the people in back from seeing us. When we get to that tall grass, we are going to go through it. You will stay right behind me, got it?”
He stumbled to his feet. We couldn’t go fast. He could barely walk, and certainly not run. Cold, hunger, confusion, far from home in a country
that wanted to put him in prison for being-what? If he was a terrorist, I’d deal with that down the road, but if he was just a kid in the wrong place at a time when fear was holding the horse’s reins in America, I needed to deal with that, too.
We were halfway across the lawn when two more squad cars squealed up the drive, lights flashing. I turned to Benjamin and pulled him smartly to the ground, lying flat next to him until the cars were at the house. Lifting my head, I watched the side of the house we were facing. They hadn’t found the open bathroom window yet: all the action was in the fields and gardens at the back.
“Let’s go. Hands and knees. You go forward, I’ll keep an eye out.”
The work gloves shielded my hands from the stickers growing in the untended lawn, but Benjamin didn’t have any protection. When I saw him unable to put his hands down, I stripped the gloves off and forced them onto his hands. “Move. It’s our only chance, while they’re doing what they’re doing.”
We crawled through the unmown grass to the untended field beyond. I was lightheaded with fatigue and hunger, my shoulders ached, I was scared. Only the snuffling from the boy in front of me, tears manfully suppressed, air sucked painfully in, kept me going.
The deputies had rigged up the searchlights while we were stumbling through shrubs. The sudden light arcing through the night sky behind us startled me. I tripped on a fallen branch and landed in rotting leaves. At least if they sent dogs after us they wouldn’t find us by our smell.
When we reached the ditch by the side of Coverdale Lane, I cautiously poked my head through the shrubbery to survey the road. A squad car blocked the intersection of Coverdale with Dirksen, where I had left my Mustang. I couldn’t see clearly at this distance, but they had probably found the car, might be waiting next to it for me.
I sank back down into the ditch, close to screaming with fatigue and frustration. We were trapped. I fought back panic. Benji whispered, “How we are going to do?”
The only possibility was to cross Coverdale and fight our way through the hedge to Anodyne Park on the far side, taking a chance that they
wouldn’t see us in the road. If I had the wings of a dove or the shovel snout of a mole. A mole. If that culvert I’d stumbled on yesterday came this far … Under cover of sirens and of a helicopter that had arrived on the scene, I explained to Benji as best I could what I was looking for. I would explore east, toward my car, he would crawl along the ditch to the west.