You Can't Catch Me

by Catherine McKenzie

  “Let’s give it a minute, shall we? Till the lesson sinks in?”

  “I think you’ve made enough of an impression.” Jessie emphasizes the last word, making it low and harsh. It gets through to JJ. She’s already called too much attention to us, even in this transitory place.

  She springs to her feet in an elegant move and slaps one of her relentlessly positive grins on her face. She extends her hand to the ground.

  “Little Timmy here is all right, isn’t he?”

  Timmy, or whatever his name is, is probably not all right. But JJ’s grin is infectious, so he reaches out his hand and she pulls him up.

  And maybe it’s only me that sees the menace in her smile.

  Chapter 25

  Game Day

  It’s game day.

  That’s what I’ve taken to calling it in my head.

  I’m seated at a high-top table in the Jackson Hole Airport in the only restaurant in the place. It sells big burgers and salty, thick-cut french fries and looks out over the tarmac, which is the second-best view of the Tetons I’ve seen since I’ve been here. There are several large-screen TVs mounted on the walls, which are all tuned into sports. My fellow patrons look longingly at the view they’ll soon be leaving. It’s a bluebird day. Only, I’m not looking at the TV or the view. Instead, I’ve positioned myself so I can see the departure lounge.

  I’ve been here for two hours already. JJ and Jessie are in position in the parking lot.

  The airport website says to get to the terminal three hours before your flight during tourist season. The town’s a gateway to Yellowstone, so a million tourists come through it in a good summer. I just hope that Five is one of those people who follows instructions and not one of those last-minute airport people who rush up to the gate right before it’s supposed to close. The kind of person Jessica Two turned me into.

  I needn’t have worried. I see her enter the lounge—one large room with plenty of comfy dark-leather chairs and a massive stone fireplace in the middle where the fire is roaring despite the weather—an hour and a half before her flight’s supposed to leave. She looks around for an empty spot. A woman about our age motions that there’s room for her on the couch she’s sitting on. Five walks toward her gratefully. Maybe they know one another? No. They’re not talking to each other like friends. Instead, Five pulls out an iPad and starts to read.

  I survey the woman. She’s in her late twenties or early thirties. A nondescript brunette dressed in a plaid shirt with her hair in a messy ponytail. She could be anyone, but in this moment, she looks like she’s searching for an opportunity to engage Five in conversation.

  I tap my foot nervously. It’s go time.

  I take out my phone and text Jessie and JJ in the group thread we created earlier.

  I think she might be here, I write.

  For sure? Jessie types back.

  Strong possibility. I’ll keep an eye out.

  I should come in.

  No. We agreed. Stay in the car so you can follow her when she leaves the terminal.

  I put my phone in my pocket and leave cash for my check and go up to the information desk. A pretty young blonde woman is working there.

  “Hi, um, I’ve lost my friend and this is ridiculous because, look at this place, it’s tiny, but I can’t find her. Do you mind paging her?”

  The blonde tilts her head to the side. “Sure. It happens all the time.”

  “Oh, thank you. I feel so silly.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Jessica Williams.”

  “Gotcha.”

  She picks up her microphone. I can tell she’s relishing using it in this TV-like way. “Jessica Williams to the information podium. Jessica Williams to the information podium.”

  “Thanks,” I say, then walk a few feet away to look out at the room full of crowded travelers. I watch Five. She stands, puts her backpack on the seat, and asks the woman next to her to watch it while she finds out what’s going on. This happens in hand gestures, but it’s easy enough to understand.

  Five walks toward me. I’m wearing a dark wig I brought with me, but I take out the cheap glasses I bought in the pharmacy in town a few days ago and put them on. My clothes are a size too big, and I’m barely recognizable even to myself. I turn around and arrive at the kiosk at the same time as Five.

  I wait for her to speak, then say with her, “I’m Jessica Williams.”

  Five turns toward me with what must be a duplicate of the look I gave Jessica Two a few months ago. “What?” She turns back to the girl behind the counter. “What’s going on?”

  The girl behind the counter gives me a funny look. “She was looking for you . . .”

  “Me?” I say. “Was it my sister? We look alike.”

  “Oh, maybe . . .”

  “Excuse me?” Five says. “Were you looking for me?”

  The girl’s confusion deepens. “Are you Jessica Williams?”

  “I am.”

  “Wait, whoa,” I say. “Me too.”

  “You are?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So, which one of us was paged?”

  I raise my shoulders. “Not sure. Maybe it was my sister looking for me? I’m not sure where she’s gotten to.”

  I feign looking over my shoulder to try to find my imaginary sister.

  “I could page her,” the girl says helpfully.

  “Oh, don’t bother. She’s probably in the bar. Speaking of which.” I loop my arm through Jessica’s.

  She pulls back. “What are you doing?”

  “Don’t you think we should have a drink?”

  “Um . . .”

  “Come on, it’s not every day that you meet another Jessica Williams, is it?”

  She hesitates, but my smile is so wide open, and this place is so trusting, that she caves.

  “I guess not.”

  “What time’s your flight?”

  “Not till two.”

  “Plenty of time, then.”

  “Yeah, I should get some lunch, I guess.”

  “Perfect. I even have a table.”

  I can tell that Five is still hesitant, but she’s surrounded by a familiar environment, and she’s still giddy from winning the trip. What can a drink with a stranger with the same name as her do? Nothing, she thinks.

  Ha.

  The table I left earlier is still empty but for the twenty I secured under the salt and pepper shakers.

  I catch the server’s eye, and he walks over looking resigned. He’s got a mustard stain on his black apron, which blots out the J in Jedediah’s.

  “Back?” he says.

  “Yep.”

  “What can I get for you?”

  I look at Jessica. “What do you like? They have that local IPA here, right?”

  “Pako’s. Sure, that sounds good.”

  “Two Pako’s.” The waiter writes it down.

  “Two Pako’s. Two Jessicas,” I say.

  Five looks nervous. “It’s weird.”

  “Yep.”

  She’s very pretty up close, this Jessica. Much prettier than the rest of us. Not that we’re unattractive, just that this girl could be a model. In fact, she was for a while, which is how she got into photography. Tall and willowy in a way that isn’t achieved through the gym but through genetics. Also, probably, not growing up in a cult doesn’t hurt.

  The waiter brings our pint glasses.

  I raise my glass to hers. “What should we toast to?”

  Before Five can answer, a voice says, “There you are!”

  It’s Jessie. She’s wearing a tight smile that’s meant to look friendly, but she’s clearly pissed. I’m off book, and she wants to know why.

  “Who’s this?” Five asks.

  “My sister,” I say before Jessie can speak. “The one who was looking for me. You paged me, right?”

  Jessie’s confusion disappears quickly. “How come you didn’t come to the counter?”

  “I did, but I met her and forgot a
ll about it.” I turn to Five to include her in the conversation. “Can you believe it, J . . . Julie? She’s another Jessica Williams!”

  “No way.”

  “Yeah, weird, right?”

  “Totally.” Jessie pulls a seat over from the table next door and sits down. I want to find a way to ask her what she’s doing in the airport, but I hold it. There’s no way to have that conversation right now.

  “So,” Jessie says to me, “have you done it?”

  “Done what?”

  “You know, played the game.”

  “The . . .” I stop and give Jessie a look.

  “What game?” Five asks.

  “It’s nothing,” I say quickly, trying to kick Jessie under the table.

  Five puts her hands on the table and pushes her chair back. “I think I’m going to go.”

  “No,” Jessie and I say in unison. “Stay.”

  “Then tell me what’s going on.” Her eyes wander around the restaurant and come to rest on the security guard standing near gate three. One yell from her and we’ll all be in some trouble.

  “I’m Jessica Williams,” I say.

  “Yeah, you said that already.”

  “And she’s Jessica Williams too.” I point to Jessie. Jessie’s face reddens. We are way, way, way off book now.

  Five frowns. “I thought you said her name was Julie? And that she was your sister.”

  “She’s not.”

  “And you’re both called Jessica Williams?”

  “Yes. And we were all born on the same day.”

  Five’s hands start to shake in fear. “How the fuck do you know that?”

  “That’s a long story.”

  She checks her watch. “I’ve got an hour. That long enough for you?”

  It only takes half an hour to tell her the condensed version of what’s happened up to now. All the “chance” meetings, the cons, how I’d hatched this plan to finally catch Jessica Two.

  “Why did you think this was going to work?” Five asks. She hasn’t touched the burger she ordered, though I’ve already finished mine, eating it greedily between snippets of explanation. Jessie didn’t say much as I talked, just steadily ate a plate of fries, dipping each one into a mound of ketchup with the precision of a surgeon.

  “Because this is how each of us got taken in.”

  “But no one approached me.”

  “There was that woman you were sitting next to earlier.”

  “What woman?”

  “The one over there.” I point to where she was sitting before.

  “Shit, my bag,” Five says. “I should go get it.”

  I stop her. “It’s still there. Which doesn’t say much for security, but I’ve been checking.”

  “Is she Jessica Two?”

  “Hard to be sure. She’s good at disguises.” I take the pictures I have of Jessica Two out of my bag. I lay them on the table in front of Five. “Have you ever seen this woman?”

  She picks each one up individually, then puts it back down. “This is the same person?”

  “Yes.”

  “She’s smart to cover her ears and forehead.”

  “That’s what Liam said.”

  Jessie rolls her eyes. “How did you know that? About the ears?”

  “I did portraits for a long time. You learn pretty quickly how to make someone look different, especially in photographs.”

  “So,” I say, “that woman could be her.”

  “Yeah, I guess. So why did you call for me on the intercom?”

  “I wanted to flush her out. If she was here, she would’ve reacted to me calling her name.”

  “Or, she saw what you were doing and beat it,” Jessie says, staring down into her endless glass of Coke.

  “I made a snap decision.”

  Jessie looks up. She’s furious. “It was a stupid decision. And now we’re left with nothing.”

  “We’ll think of something.”

  “You should go to the police,” Five says.

  “No,” Jessie says. “We’ve tried that. Useless. Besides, what’s the crime right now? We’re the ones who set up a fake event. We could be in trouble.”

  A voice speaks through the loudspeaker. The flight to New York will begin boarding in ten minutes.

  Five stands. “This is where I leave you.”

  “You’re still going?” I ask.

  “Damn straight. Free weekend in New York. Why not?”

  “Makes sense,” I say. “Only . . .”

  “What?”

  “Be careful, okay?”

  “Don’t speak to any other Jessicas?”

  “Definitely not.”

  She stands and picks up her cell phone. “Let me know how this all turns out. I’m curious.”

  “Sure, give me your number.”

  “What’s yours?” she says. I give it to her and she texts me. This is Five.

  I smile. “Sorry about all this.”

  “It’s fine. Maybe you even saved me from a world of trouble.”

  “Maybe.”

  “What are you guys going to do now?”

  Jessie hops off her chair. “First, we’re going to have to explain this all to JJ.”

  “Worried?” Five asks.

  “Nah, that’s going to be her job.” Jessie presses a finger into my chest too aggressively.

  “It’ll be fine.”

  Jessie doesn’t answer me. Instead, she reaches her hand out to Five. “Nice to meet you.”

  “You too. I think.” Five turns and walks toward where she left her bag.

  When she’s out of earshot, I say, “How did you get in here?”

  “Forget about that. We are in so much shit.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She was here.” Jessie pulls her phone from her pocket. There’s a text on the screen.

  Nice try, it says from a number I recognize.

  Shit.

  Chapter 26

  Incomplete Pass

  One of my biggest regrets in life is that when I took Kiki out of the Land of Todd, I didn’t bring her right to Liam. I don’t know why. Probably I wanted to prove something. That I could do it on my own. That I could succeed at life without Liam being there to steer me in the right direction. And because I’d never told Liam about her, I didn’t want to have to explain why I’d kept her from him for so long. Besides, I knew Kiki. I knew her like I knew myself, and myself had made it out of the Land of Todd and through to something better. It was better, whatever Kiki thought. I’d show her.

  I’d show her.

  So I followed Liam’s plan without involving Liam. I took Kiki to the same run-down hotel in the Catskills even though I was supposed to be starting my job at FeedNews. I told them there’d been a death in the family and that I needed a couple of weeks off to process it. That was close enough to true to pass, even though it felt gross using Todd’s death for anything. He wasn’t my family; he’d ruined my family. I guess that’s a kind of death.

  It was weird being back in that hotel. Not Land-of-Todd weird, but weird just the same. The place had continued to decay. The paint was chipping away. Leaves were left unraked. There was an abandoned look to the swimming pool. The random collection of guests made it feel as if we were on the set of a horror movie, or in a locked-room murder mystery. Was that man that little girl’s father, or was this some stopping place along a kidnapping route? I was suspicious of everyone, jumpy. Scared.

  Kiki didn’t say much on the drive there. She was too used to following directions. When we got to our room, she walked to the bed closest to the door, kicked off her shoes, and lay down as if she were waiting to be examined. That scared me more than the silence, but after a night where we both slept more than twelve hours, I forged ahead. I started her on the deprogramming/relearning right away—showing her all the classic movies I could find on the movie channel the hotel got, only stopping for food and sleep. We ate on our respective beds, watching the screen, and I’d provide additional narration
to explain what I knew she didn’t understand, something Liam never did for me.

  “So, like, in this scene we’re learning that they have to come to school on a Saturday for detention. That’s, like, extra punishment. Not Back Forest or anything, but—”

  “I got it,” Kiki said, pushing away her half-eaten pizza. “This is kind of gross.”

  “It is. That’s the whole point.”

  “Why?”

  We were wearing matching pajamas that I’d gotten at the nearest Walmart. “Because sometimes you need to eat something that’s bad for you.”

  “But Todd says—”

  “Yeah, I know, but he’s wrong. I mean, not totally wrong about this one thing, because, ultimately, it is better to eat healthy most of the time, but you know, in the grander scheme of things . . .”

  Kiki lowered her head onto her knees, stretching her back out. “I get it.”

  “How can you?”

  “We had books.”

  “Crappy romance novels from the seventies.”

  She turned her face toward me. “No, after you left, someone started smuggling in better stuff.”

  “Covington? I mean, Terrence?”

  His real name felt weird in my mouth. I thought about calling him, letting him know where we were. He’d let me take the car we’d rented to go to the funeral and told me he’d make his own way back, not to worry about it.

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “How?”

  She sat up and turned her head back to the screen. “He found this way out of the back of the property. There’s a town over there. I never knew its name. But they had this used bookstore, and they’d sell books to him for a quarter. So, we’d all scrounge around to find whatever change we could and give it to him.”

  “He didn’t tell me about that.”

  “Do you guys hang out a lot?”

  I watched Kiki’s bony shoulders rise and fall. She was so thin under her pajamas. She needed more pizza. “Not that much.”

  “Did he mention me?”

  He never had, but she didn’t need to hear that. Covington and I didn’t talk about those sorts of things.

  “A couple of times. Do you want . . . Would you like me to call him for you?”

  “No, that’s okay. Everything in its time.”

  Another Toddism, but I let it be. It felt so hopeful, you see. So normal. To be talking about a boy with Kiki like we should’ve been when we were growing up instead of learning how to prepare ourselves for the end of civilization.