“Yes, that’s right. I’m surprised you knew that.”
“They’ve been talking about it on the news for a long time. Some towns are being quarantined if too many people have the disease.”
“That’s right,” he said. “Well, that’s what’s going on at home right now. Our neighborhood has been quarantined.”
“That means we shouldn’t have left,” she said.
“But then we wouldn’t be able to see Mom.”
Her eyes narrowed the slightest bit, and David could read her thoughts: We aren’t able to see Mom now, so what’s the difference?
“It’s like you said,” he went on. “It’s like being in jail. But I didn’t want that for us. So I took you away before they locked everybody down.”
Ellie said nothing.
“Because of that,” he said, “there’s a good chance people will start looking for us, Ellie. These are people who think they’re doing the right thing and will want to make us go back.”
“Back home?”
“Yes. But you don’t want to be locked in your house without being able to leave, do you?”
“And we wouldn’t be able to see Mom?”
“No,” he said. “We wouldn’t.”
“Okay.”
“It’s important we don’t let these people find us,” he said.
“What will they do if they find us?”
He chewed at his lower lip. When he spoke, his voice sounded paper-thin and intangible to his own ears. “We don’t need to worry about that, sweetheart, because they won’t find us.”
“But what about Mom?”
“Mom is safe. You know that.”
“Do you promise?”
He felt something toward the back of his throat click. “Yes,” he said, the word tasting funny. Poisonous. “Yes, hon. She’s safe. You know she is.”
“Okay.”
“Because I want us to be as safe as possible, too, there are a few things we need to do today before we get back on the road.”
For the first time, he saw Ellie’s gaze shift to just over his shoulder, to the items he had placed on the table behind him. The T-shirt, the baseball hat. The scissors, comb, hair dye . . .
“They’ll be looking for a father and daughter,” he said, his voice level, unemotional. When he realized that his hands were fidgeting between his knees, he forced them apart. “We need to change that.”
Ellie had always been a perceptive child. Even as a toddler—heck, as an infant—it seemed her demeanor reflected the emotions of her parents. On more than one occasion, Kathy had commented that Ellie was special, and not just in the way all parents thought their children were special. Kathy was convinced that sometimes their baby daughter was able to know things. Emotions. Feelings. David had always presumed this was a trait all young children shared—that they were mirrors of their parents’ emotions and fundamentally more perceptive than their adult counterparts—but now, looking at his daughter and seeing the wheels working behind her eyes, he wondered if Kathy might not have been on to something.
The corners of Ellie’s mouth turned downward. Her chin wrinkled.
“Hey. It’ll be okay,” he promised her.
“I don’t understand. If we can’t go back home, where will we live?”
“It’s just temporary,” he said. “Things will work themselves out soon enough. This isn’t permanent.”
She had grabbed a lock of her auburn hair and tugged it down over her shoulder. She wound a finger in it now, as if feeling it for the last time. She was perceptive, all right.
“Things are going to be okay,” he said again.
But her expression told him that she knew he was lying.
8
David cut off Ellie’s auburn locks in the motel bathroom. They went through it together, without ceremony, the whole thing as somber as an execution. Ellie sat there with a look of horror on her face the entire time, but never once did she complain or cry or put up a fuss. He could be grateful for that, at least.
David was no barber, but he did the best he could, and in the end his daughter wore the approximation of a young boy’s modest if clumsy haircut. When he finished, he came up behind her and they both looked at the mirror together to examine his work. Tears threatened to spill down her face, but she still did not make a sound. She no longer looked like his daughter. David kissed the side of her face. Her skin felt hot against his lips.
“Put on the T-shirt and hat I bought,” he told her as he cleaned up the curls of auburn hair from the bathroom floor. He was careful to get every strand, every scrap, which he tucked away inside the plastic shopping bag. He’d take the hair with them and dump the bag somewhere along the way.
“Boy clothes,” she intoned, leaving the bathroom.