His father shook him now and again so that he came awake, choking back a scream. “Shh, son, it’s okay,” his father said. “You’re safe.”
He slept through most of the drive to the border and then across it. He realized that his father had Evan’s passport, but how would they get Noelle across the border? He bolted upright in a panic and turned to look out the back window, breathing out a sigh of relief when he saw the three SUVs still trailing them.
However they’d worked it out, she was still with him, just a car away. He slept again.
It was almost morning when Evan opened his eyes, wiping the sleep from his face and sitting up. They were in the parking lot of a police station, the SUV still idling. He was alone. How long had he sat here sleeping?
His head swiveled, taking stock, looking for Noelle. The other cars were parked nearby, a bevy of news vans all around, the logos telling him they were in San Diego. What the hell was happening? His father was just outside the car, talking to a man in a suit. Evan opened the door. “Evan,” his father said, moving forward and wrapping his arm around him as he got out. Cameras flashed, news anchors yelling questions at him, only disconnected words that didn’t form full sentences making it to his ears.
“I’m sorry,” his father gritted. “Someone from the police department leaked it to the media that we were on our way. Fucking vultures.”
He rushed with his father and the other man into a side door of the building, the calls and clicks muting as the doors fell shut. “Noelle?” he asked. “Where’s Noelle?”
“She’s with a detective,” his father said. “Don’t worry about her right now.”
Don’t worry about her right now.
But Evan didn’t know how to do that. Her well-being had been connected to his for so long. He didn’t know how to separate himself.
He whipped his head around, looking for her, but a tall man in a blue suit stepped in front of him, extending his hand. “Evan, I’m Agent Crokin. If you’ll come with me, we need to get a statement. Time is of the essence.”
“Noelle!” he called, pushing past the man and turning his head one way and then the other.
“Evan!” his father said sternly. “Stop it. She’s poison. Her family is poison. Whatever you experienced together, it’s over. And thank God for that. Thank God.”
His father didn’t understand. All that old stuff, it’d ceased to matter. It wasn’t even real.
Everything buzzed. The lights. The people walking by. His head. He couldn’t get his bearings. And so he let the agent lead him down a hall and out into a wide area filled with desks. He saw Noelle sitting on a bench, her head in her hands, as a woman knelt beside her.
Evan broke free of the man guiding him and ran to Noelle, going down on his knees next to the woman. “Noelle, what’s wrong? What happened?”
She raised her head, her eyes bloodshot, face wet with tears. Her expression crumbled as she leaned toward him, and he wrapped his arms around her. “My dad . . . he’s dead,” she said. “He died while I was missing.”
“Died?” He didn’t understand.
The woman who had been comforting Noelle had taken a seat next to her on the bench. “It was a heart attack,” the woman told him, and Noelle sucked back a sob. “Right after Noelle went missing.”
He felt a hand on his arm, and his father pulled him up, his arms falling as Noelle sat back. “They need your statement now, son. If we have any chance of catching the people who did this, you need to tell the agents everything you can remember. Then we’ll get you to the hospital. Your mother is flying in. She’ll be here in the morning. And then we’ll fly home.”
“All that can wait,” he said, yanking his arm away and stepping back toward Noelle.
But she shook her head. “No, Evan, go. Tell them what you can. I will too.” The sound of footsteps moving quickly made him turn, and there was Noelle’s friend Paula, red ponytail bouncing as she rushed toward Noelle, two older people hurrying behind her. Paula’s parents. Someone obviously called them to jump on a flight. Maybe his father. More likely the police. He’d slept through a lot.
Noelle stood and let out another sob as Paula took her in an embrace, both crying and shaking. Paula’s parents were crying, too, as they wrapped their arms around the girls.
Evan stepped back. He felt lost without her hand in his. Stripped of his identity, the only one he knew now. Alone in a way too painful to describe. And Noelle was alone too. Fatherless now. No family. She was in the arms of her friend and her parents, though, wrapped in safety, at least for now. He allowed his father to guide him away, his arm, still reaching toward Noelle, finally dropping. He turned, then walked down the hall and into a room with a table in the middle surrounded by chairs.
The agent offered them drinks, and his father requested a coffee and Evan asked for a bottle of water. He was thirsty. He’d been thirsty for so long. But he didn’t have to be thirsty anymore. Or hungry. Or petrified. He was no longer caged. But he didn’t know how to stop feeling like he was. He started shaking. He sank down into a chair, and his father sat next to him. “Who did this, Dad?” he asked, his voice a mere croak.
His father stared at him for a moment, his eyes murderous. He looked like he was barely containing his rage. “I don’t know,” he gritted. “But let me work on figuring that out. You need to try to forget.”
Forget? He was tempted to laugh. But if he did that, he knew he would cry. And he would not cry in front of his father because, even now, Evan knew his father would consider him weak.
Three days. Three days had passed. In some ways it felt like three years since he’d seen her, and in some ways, mere minutes. He’d never known before how tangled his emotions were with the passage of time. He stood for a moment, staring up at her house, the place where she was, somewhere just beyond those walls. The yearning spurred him forward.
The home was older, the white shingles clearly in need of a coat of paint. Evan let the short white picket gate swing closed behind him and then walked up the path to the hunter-green front door. The lawn had been recently cut, but the flowers in the beds under the front window had died, as had the ones in the pots on the front porch.
A fly bumped into the bulb of the porch light, giving off a tiny buzz. Evan raised his fist and knocked.
Footsteps approached, and then the door swung open. “Hi, Paula,” Evan said, putting his good hand in the pocket of his jeans, his left hand across his chest in a sling. He felt strangely like he was doing something wrong to be there, at this house he’d never visited before and never thought in a million years he’d have reason to.
The house where his so-called enemy lived. At least on paper.
What a joke. It was laughable now. That had been a different life.
Paula hesitated, clearly torn about how to respond to his presence. “She’s resting upstairs,” she finally said, obviously knowing full well why he was there. As if to illustrate the point that he wasn’t welcome in the house, Paula stepped to the side, her body blocking the entrance. Jesus. She was looking at him the way she always had in school. With distrust. Contempt. Did she still hold a grudge against him for what his father had done to her friend’s family? Hadn’t Noelle explained to her how they’d worked together? How they’d bonded? Or was it that, like him, she’d been unable to put their experience into more than a handful of words?