“I’m adding contacts. Mom and Dad and Lia.” She glanced up at me. “I don’t know. We got this as backup, right? Just in case. Anyway, if they get your number somehow, don’t you want to know it’s them so you don’t accidentally answer?”
“They’re never going to get my number.” If that happened, I’d do what the girl at the phone store said and get rid of it.
Dixie finished with it and handed it back. An announcement came over the ferry’s loudspeaker that we’d be docking in five minutes; drivers should get back to their cars. My next decision was here and I had no idea what to do. “We need to listen to the voice mails,” I said. I didn’t like not knowing.
She nodded. “After we get off the ferry.”
The other passengers collected their stuff and threw out their trash from the café and either went back to their cars or gathered at the pedestrian ramp. We sat still, charging her phone as much as we could until the last possible moment. Through the windows all around us the island drifted closer. Dixie fixed her gaze on the trees, the smaller boats that filled the harbor. It started to rain, fine drops hitting the Sound.
Dixie shook her head, then asked, “How come nothing good ever happens to us?”
I knew she didn’t mean the rain.
19.
WE CAME off the ferry and Dixie went into the small terminal to use the bathroom.
I stayed outside. I flipped the hood of my sweater up to keep the drizzle off while I walked a little bit away from the terminal area for a better view, and to get farther from the exhaust of the ferry. I gazed up at the hills; they were covered in evergreens. Even in the rain—especially in the rain—it was beautiful. I thought of Dixie’s joke about me living in the woods.
Why not? I mean, not camping, but maybe someday having a little cabin or cottage. It could be tiny—one room and a bathroom. I wouldn’t be picky and I don’t need a lot. And if I had the money, not just some but all of it . . .
I couldn’t do this one day at a time forever, waiting for Dixie to figure out what she wanted to do. As if she had a choice. She wasn’t even fifteen yet. Despite what Dixie said, I had a feeling my mom would let me go my own way; I’d be eighteen in a little less than a year anyway. She’d never let Dixie go that easily. If Dixie came with me, we wouldn’t be starting a new life, we’d just be running and it wouldn’t be a game, and I’d be responsible for her.
I couldn’t do it. Everything I had to give, I needed to give to myself.
Dixie had to go home. And I had to make a real plan.
With the money on my back and Dixie in the bathroom and the ferry boarding for the return trip to Seattle, I thought: What better way to make sure Dixie didn’t limit my options, didn’t get scared into telling Dad where we were or give him the money, than for me to just . . . take it, and leave? That was my plan A to begin with, and here I was back in the same place, trying to decide if I was capable of going without saying good-bye to her, if I was capable of abandoning her.
She’ll be okay, I told myself. She’d understand now. She had enough to get back, with the cash in her pocket left from all our shopping. I could get on the return ferry, that minute. When she figured out I’d left, she could get a ticket for the next one and go home and tell Dad whatever she wanted to tell him. I could lose myself somewhere on the Seattle side for a few hours or a day. Then ferry back over and, I don’t know, hitchhike deeper into the island? Or go far away, to another state. By myself, responsible for only me.
Then I imagined her coming out of the bathroom, looking all over for me. I thought of her face when she asked why nothing good ever happens to us, and what she’d said about how she couldn’t go home without the money. How betrayed she’d feel. How betrayed I’d feel, if I were her.
So I’d give her the backpack and send her home. I’d still have what I needed. I put my hands in my coat pockets, feeling for the phone, the Haciendas, the hotel washcloth—
My heart stopped.
No.
No!
I went over it in my mind again, and again, as if I would come to some other conclusion than that I’d thrown seven thousand dollars into the trash can in the mall bathroom, in the pocket of my old jacket. My head filled with a low buzzing as Dixie came back into view. I couldn’t go back for it, not now, not without confessing to Dixie about secretly stashing money, lying to her. If it was even there anymore.
Dixie couldn’t go home without the money; I couldn’t leave without it. My backup plan, my safety net, was gone.
When she reached me, I could tell something was wrong.
“What happened?” I asked, trying to hide the horror I felt over my own carelessness.
“She’s a fucking—” She mashed her lips together and turned away from me, striding fast back toward the water. She had her phone in her hand.
I jogged after her. “Who?”
“Fucking Mom is who,” she said over her shoulder.
“Dixie, wait.” She only walked faster. The voice mails. She must have listened to the voice mails when she was in the bathroom. “What did she say?”
She broke into a run straight toward the water and for a second I worried she’d climb the rail and jump in. But when she got right up to it, I knew exactly what she was doing.
She pulled her arm back, and the phone flew out of her hand in a huge arc in the gray sky before dropping into the Sound.
I got to her and touched her shoulder; she batted my hand away.
“Tell me what she said.”
“Now she wants the money. Dad told her about it and now she wants me to come home with it.”
“He told her?” I asked, confused. It was easy to imagine him using the idea of all this money to manipulate Mom, but harder to believe she’d fall for it, especially after the way she’d dumped all of the food.
“She only ever wants something from me,” Dixie said through her tears. “She wants me to listen to her when she thinks she’s in love or some guy breaks up with her. She wants me to get her pills from kids at school. She wants me to act like her fucking best friend but she doesn’t ever do anything for me.”
“What happened, though?” I was still fixated on the image of my jacket in the bathroom trash can, and Dixie was barely making sense. “All this was on a voice mail?”
“She called.” She calmed down a little bit, taking deeper breaths. “I wasn’t going to answer, but then I did, in case school called or something to say I’m not there. I wanted to give her some reason I—”
“You shouldn’t have talked to her.” It was too risky, what could come out in an emotional conversation.
Dixie dropped her arms. “Well, I did. And she was all, ‘Do you have the money? I just talked to Dad and he says you have this money and oh Dixie you should bring it home, what do you think you’re doing, we need it blah blah.’”
“Maybe she’s just worried about you?”