“You’re a boy now,” he called after her.
Once he was done cleaning up the hair, he trimmed some of his own, then opened up the box of hair dye. His was a natural tawny brown, the sorrel hue of a deer’s hide. The hair dye would turn him Superman black. He hoped it would be enough to suitably alter his appearance. He wondered, Should I dye my eyebrows, too? Best to do the hair first and see how things looked.
Ellie appeared in the bathroom doorway as he was midway through the coloring process, his dripping head hanging over the bathroom sink, muddy tracks of dye sliding down his forehead.
“Are we in trouble?” she asked him. She had obliged, and was wearing the T-shirt with the trucks on it, the blue baseball cap. She looked alien to him. Some stranger’s little boy.
“No,” he said.
“Are you?” she said.
He looked at her sideways. “I said no, didn’t I?”
Ellie shrugged. “What’s my boy name?”
“Huh?”
“If I’m a boy now, you can’t call me Ellie. Or Eleanor.”
“I’ll just call you Little Spoon.” He grinned at her while he combed the dye through his damp hair.
“I don’t like that,” she said. “Not anymore.”
“I’ve called you that since you were a little kid.”
“Not anymore.” She looked at the bag of hair clippings that sat on the sink counter. “I don’t like it anymore.”
“Since when?”
She rolled her slight shoulders. The T-shirt was a tad too big. “For a while now, I guess.”
“How come?”
“I just don’t. Stop calling me that. I’m not a baby anymore.”
He straightened up, wiping the inky droplets off his forehead with a hand towel. He’d have to take the towel with them, too. No evidence left behind. “Okay. Okay. I won’t call you that anymore. Sorry.”
“Where are we going when we leave here?”
“To get something to eat. Aren’t you hungry?”
“I mean, we can’t just keep staying in hotels. Where are we going to go if we can’t go home?”
“I’ll figure that out after we eat. I’m starving. Aren’t you starving?” He was desperate to change the subject.
“Are you telling me the truth?” she asked him. “About why we can’t go home, I mean.”
The question jarred him. And it wasn’t just the question itself, but the confident and suspicious tone Ellie used when asking it. As if she knew the truth and was testing his honesty. It caused him to pause before answering, and she seemed to pick up on that, too.
“Of course,” he said.
“And about Mom, too?”
“Yes,” he said.
Her gaze hung on him.
She’s special, Kathy’s ghost-voice spoke up in his head then. A special child.
“I’ll only be a few more minutes,” he said, and eased the bathroom door closed with his toe.
9
Nineteen months earlier
It was one of the rare evenings he stayed late at the university grading papers. Walking across the quad, the night was a cold, wet soup. Late-winter snow swirled around the lampposts, weightless as dandelion fluff, and never touched the ground. He took the footpath to the parking lot, slowing in his progress when he noticed something small and dark flapping about on the path. He came within two feet of it and saw that it was a small brown bird. It was still alive, its twig-like feet scrambling for purchase on the stamped concrete. As David watched, one of its wings flared open and fluttered maniacally to no avail.
David crouched down and watched the bird die. It took less than a minute. By the time he stood, a chevron of geese was honking across the sky just above the treetops. He thought it odd that they were there in February. Didn’t geese fly south in the winter?
He coughed into a fist as he continued along the footpath toward the parking lot. There were still a number of cars in the lot, even at this hour. His Bronco was parked at the far end of the lot, since he’d misplaced his faculty pass earlier that month and didn’t want to risk being towed by parking in any of the faculty spots without it. The tow-truck drivers fished the campus parking lots day and night and were ruthless.