I sat back down at the computer and scanned the headlines for Oklahoma papers. No mention of me in Tulsa. Oklahoma City. Or in the Bassett Gazette, the town newspaper closest to the farm. I’d been checking that one religiously since I’d left.
I did a quick search of my name and all that showed up was my marriage announcement, my mother’s obituary, and the announcement of the land Hoyt sold to the electric company to put up windmills.
Nothing. Oh dear God. Nothing.
It had been twelve days since I’d run. And it didn’t seem like he’d even gone to the police.
I sat in the chair a little bit longer because my legs felt like jelly, my arms useless spaghetti noodles. There was no big search underway for me.
I had never made a will, but I imagine if he claimed abandonment or whatever, he could do what he wanted with the land. I had no idea how these things worked. But he was my husband after all. No one would argue with him.
This was the best possible outcome of my leaving. There would be no fuss. No scene of him in front of reporters with flashing cameras, pretending to cry, pretending to care.
But it meant that I’d vanished…everything I’d been. Twenty-four years of being alive, of being a daughter and a student and a member of a church. Of working, sweating, crying, laughing as Annie McKay. Gone.
No one missed me. Or worried. Or wondered. I’d vanished and the world just kept on spinning.
That no one seemed to be searching for me was a relief. Yet behind the relief…there was something else. Something I couldn’t look at yet.
Relieved was enough for now. Relieved was all I could handle.
“I know you said you’re not from around here, but we’re having a book sale this week,” the librarian said. “Paperbacks are a dollar, hardbacks are three.”
I got to my feet, bracing myself against the table for a moment when it felt like my knees were wobbling.
The librarian pointed to a little rack of books by the door, full of beat-up old bestsellers and hardback textbooks and literary novels.
I loved books. Loved reading. It not only gave me an escape from my own world, but opened a door into other worlds. It allowed me, at the beginning of my marriage, to suffer with some grace. As long as I had another world to go to, what did I care about how small and strange and terrifying my own life had gotten?
Then Hoyt took away my books. Put them right in the burn pile, and the smell had been worse than anything. Like every dream going up in smoke. I’d tried to get some at the library, telling him it wasn’t costing him anything. But he didn’t like it.
And then I snuck them when I could, hiding some garage sale books in the barn.
But he’d found them.
And that had not gone well for me.
“I’m fine,” I said to the woman, feeling unbelievably outside of my body. Like I was floating somewhere near the ceiling, watching my thin arms and legs all scraped up from the work I’d been doing. The stupid bad dye job.
The scarf.
Stop. Fucking. Saying. That.
Everyone can see you are not fine.
“Actually,” I said and stopped at the shelf, “let me see what you have.”
In the end I bought ten paperback books. One of them was Fifty Shades of Grey, so worn the cover was nearly falling off. Chunks of pages were threatening to fall away from the spine.
“We’ve had to replace that book three times,” the librarian said with a twinkly smile.
“I’ve never read it.” I could not imagine the shit storm that would have fallen on my head had I tried to bring that into my home. But news of it had even managed to make its way to the rock I lived under. It had caused something of a revolution.
And I was ready to be revolutionized.
I clutched the plastic bag of books to my chest and headed back to my car. My hands were shaking so bad I barely got the key in the lock, barely got my body inside the car, the door shut behind me.
It was hot, and it smelled like the peaches I’d bought off the clearance rack at the grocery store.
I rested my head against the steering wheel.
He wasn’t looking for me.
I bought chocolate chips.