“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I love you!” She cried. “I trusted you! We’re a team—you said you’d never leave me, that we were partners, that you’d walk into hell to get me back!”
“You’ve already—”
“How could you!” She punched me in the shoulder with her free hand, only once at first, then over and over, pounding her fist into my arm and chest, digging her knuckles into my flesh. I grabbed her hand in mine, wrestling her to a halt.
“You’ve already been to hell,” I said. “I’m the one who took you there. This life we’ve been trying to live, sleeping in alleys and living on stolen corn nuts from highway truck stops: this is hell. Dragging you from one murder to the next, forcing you to remember tragedies that aren’t even yours, dancing along the edge of a suicide cliff and trying to catch you every time you start to go over: that’s hell. If I love you, I can’t put you through that.”
“That’s not your choice to make.”
“I know.”
“This is my life,” she growled. “And if this is how I want to live it, I’m damn well going to live it how I want.”
“You’re ill,” I said. “You need medicine, you need therapy, you need twenty-four-hour care of a kind that I can’t give you—”
“I don’t want care,” she screamed, “I want you!”
“And I want you to be alive,” I said. “And happy. Even if I’m not there to see it.”
The truck stopped in front of the hospital, and Brooke wrenched away from me, leaping out and running.
“There she is!”
“It’s Brooke! Thank God, it’s Brooke!”
Brooke’s parents had been waiting, probably for hours. It’s hard to predict travel times when you’re hitchhiking. I’d spent a dollar on a phone call, telling them the day and the place and hanging up. They streaked across the parking lot now, catching her in their arms, sobbing and lifting her up and holding on to something they thought they’d lost forever.
Brooke looked back at me, pleading, trying to break away. “You can’t leave me!”
“She’s a severe suicide risk,” I called out, standing in the back of the truck. “Clinical depression and dissociative identity disorder. At least one of her personalities is bipolar. She needs a long-term, live-in care facility and intensive therapy, but she can come through.”
“I’m not weak!” Brooke shouted.
“No you’re not,” I said. “You’re the strongest person I’ve ever known. I could never have done what you did.”
“Is that John?” asked Brooke’s mother.
“He’s saving her,” said Brooke’s father.
“He’s hurting me,” sobbed Brooke.
“Sometimes the right choice is the one that hurts the most,” I said. “Good-bye Brooke.” I sat down and knocked on the side of the truck. Time to go. I said the next one softly: “Good-bye, Marci.” I started to cry, and the truck rolled.
“You’re not staying?” shouted Brooke’s mom. “What should we tell your aunt? Your sister?”
I didn’t answer, and the truck pulled out of the parking lot, back onto the road.
I sat in silence for a mile or more before banging on the side of the truck again. The driver stopped.
“You want to go back?”
“Just let me out here,” I said. I hopped down.
“What was all that back there?” he asked.
“You’ll see it on the news,” I said. “Look for the name Brooke Watson.” I started walking away.
“What about you?”
I turned around, walking backward away from him. “The police are going to ask where you left me,” I said. “Probably the FBI, too. Tell them I said hi.”
I turned back around and walked away. I passed through the town I grew up in, wondering who might recognize me, what they might do. No one even looked. I was a drifter, here one minute and gone the next. I passed the school, empty in the summer; I passed the old apartments where my sister used to live. I passed Marci’s house, still overgrown with trees and plants, and saw her little sister playing on the sidewalk, drawing pictures with thick sticks of colored chalk. I stopped half a block away and watched her. I couldn’t see what she was drawing. I turned the corner and moved on. I passed the wood plant, and jumped a fence to the rail yard, and climbed aboard an empty flatbed as the train headed out for another load of logs.
The city disappeared behind me, and the wind whistled secrets in my ears.