Gretchen

by Shannon Kirk

  The man stands, hands on hips, as he watches Teen Boy fish out their Frisbee. This man has icy-blue eyes, blondish-brown hair, and a clean-trimmed beard. He looks to be a little older than Mom, so he’s forty something or other, and handsome. He’s fit, long, and lean, like a marathoner. And I’m so into how he wears pressed shorts with cool flip-flops and his toenails aren’t gross like on most men.

  He turns to my bench and smiles at me. I smile back but return quick to watching the lake. We do not hold strangers’ eye contact long. And, in a tragic mistake I’m just now realizing, my contacts are in their case, and my sunglasses are on my head.

  I stall in sliding my sunglasses back over my eyes. I’m not sure why. I’m not sure why. I turn back to hold a stare with the ice-blue-eyed man. His blues to my violets. I’m not sure why. I’ve never done this before. Why? Look away. Put on your sunglasses. If Mom is walking back from the bathroom, I’m sure she’s frozen on the street and afraid to move a muscle. I don’t look to see if she’s there, can’t add ammunition to this powder keg. I look away and to the water.

  “Hey,” he says. From the corner of my eye, I see his face is directed to me. He’s not talking ahead to Teen Boy. This Teen Boy doesn’t go to my school; I’d remember his face, which is very much like this man’s face, minus the beard. I wonder if these two are out-of-towners. We’re in a vacation town, and we like to stay in vacation towns because there’s a lot of people coming and going and new faces, so we’re not weird to townies. Easier to blend.

  “Um . . . wow . . . ,” the bearded, blue-eyed man says. I slightly turn my face, and he’s pointing at me. “Gosh, you resemble . . . so much like . . . where . . . who was . . . ?” He’s snapping his fingers and closing his eyes as a way to squeeze the name of whoever I remind him of from his brain. “Damn. What’s the name?” His eyes are open now, and he’s staring at me, scrunching his brow and thinking real hard. “So distinctive. Hey, Thomas, come here. Who was . . .”

  And thus the card clicks, and so shall begin our pattern. Our dreadful, predictable pattern. I knew it. I fucking knew it. Shit.

  “Babe,” Mom yells from way behind the bench and up nearer the street. When I turn, she’s gone and mixed herself with a crowd forming around the ice-cream shop. I know enough to know I need to pop and trot fast to meet her at the Volvo.

  I drop my face to my chest, stand, and hurry to the trash can to toss my cone. I reset my sunglasses. I’ll be blamed for this one.

  When we’re back in the car, it’s no Love you, Bug from Mom. It’s, “Dammit, Lucy. You know better. Now we have to leave tonight. You should have kept those sunglasses on. And why would you look at him? Why engage?”

  I have no answers.

  “I should never have stopped homeschooling you. Never stopped keeping up my guard. These trickles of us out in public together are too risky. No more.”

  “Mom, I’m sorry.”

  So here we go. Here we go to pack and run at night and leave messages full of lies for the people in our tenth state, as we head for our eleventh. Jenny will go back to her solitude in reading at recess, without me somewhere near on the lawns or a bench doing the same—a broken team of solitary and separate beings. I wonder if she’ll wonder later in life whatever happened to the new girl who disappeared one day from school. I wonder if she’ll even care to remember my name next week or ever.

  My heart feels heavy in thinking on how much I already miss Jenny and how she was strong enough to let being silent companions be enough for her. She never questioned me, never probed me. She accepted me for whatever I am, and she didn’t change one single thing about herself to make sure I accepted her. No competition, no challenges between us. We came together in an organic way. I’ll hold Allen, my only non-Mom friend in the world, on my lap in the back seat of the brown Volvo and hide my crying from Mom as we drive all night.

  I knew this morning. I knew the sun was too kind too early. The law is this: life is never bright for me and Mom for too long. It is never wise to trust the sun.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Early dawn. I wake up for a second to see we’re in the parking lot of some rest stop. I go back to sleep. A couple of hours later, I wake up for good and move to the front passenger seat.

  The Volvo’s analog clock reads ten in the morning. Bright-blue early June morning as we cross the border out of Massachusetts to be welcomed by a big green sign with the word BIENVENUE and the state’s motto, LIVE FREE OR DIE. Our eleventh state is New Hampshire.

  Live free or die. Are we free? Am I free? Running like this all the time. Worrying always about when the pattern will begin again.

  “Welcome,” Mom says, catching me mouthing the words. “Bienvenue is French for ‘welcome.’”

  “Kind of figured from the context, Mom,” I say, and shoot her a corner-of-my-lip smile. I’m not being smug. I’m trying to show I accept, and am willing to agree, that all is normal and regular as usual—so much so, we can do a happy-times teasing banter. I turn to check on Allen in his cat cage, where he’s chilling on the catnip I overfed him to calm his car nerves.

  Mom rolls her eyes. “Whatever, smarty-pants.” She shoots me a thoughtful smile, taking quick glances ahead as she steers straight on this endless highway. The fact she’s smiling and going along with the teasing banter means she’s not going to raise, this morning, how I’m to blame for this latest run. Relieved we’re not fighting this minute, I loosen the tension in my shoulders. But I must be cautious, can’t be the one to raise the topic, even if I want to apologize. My apologizing would only lead to a fight. Mom’s lesson: never return to the scene of a crime.

  The sides of the road are in high green, all sorts of thick shades, from lime to deep forest green, in the birch saplings, tall pines, leafy oaks, and fat maples. The world outside this brown Volvo is green and happy and blue and full.

  “Baby, this life . . . just till you’re eighteen, okay? When I know for sure they can’t take you again. Another country away from me. God, no. Your father’s family, they’d never let you leave, and the way they treat women, they have no rights. None. Women are trash. I can’t . . .”

  “Mom, I know. I know. We’ve been over it a literal million times.” I decide to take a chance. “Sorry for not wearing my sunglasses. Sorry for engaging that man.”

  She stares at the road ahead, brings a hand to her lips, which she sucks in, I’m guessing as a way to stem her own words—caustic or loving, I’m not sure. Her forehead accordions in a crinkle as she side-sweeps another look at me, checking that I am looking back, and I am. She’s got her serious face on. “Lucy, I’m sorry about this life.” She winces and soon looks to the road again. I’ve noticed how ever since I started my period a few months ago, and since my body and face have been changing more and more, she winces more and more. Sometimes, and maybe this is all in my mind, but lately it feels like the sight of me hurts her, so she looks at me less and less. Or so it seems.

  “Mom, really. I get it.” Because it’s true, I get it. My father is a powerful man with centuries-old connections to royalty in some other country (Mom won’t say which one because she doesn’t want me googling and freaking myself out). She won’t say his last name, because his last name, she says, would quickly identify his country, his very specific nationality. He’s from a place in which she says mothers have zero legal right to take back their own babies. He’d already tried to abscond with me once before, but Mom had a plan, and Mom had her own connections. I was two years old when she stole me back and we ran. And now this life with two new names and constantly new states. We always use the same IDs and variations of the formal names on those IDs, since I need to be able to cleanly transfer into new schools, and frankly, Mom says, the first fake IDs were hard enough to get.

  All this cash we live on. I’m not clear on where Mom got all the stacks of cash we keep in a series of places around the country, which we call the “base money,” to be used when our “steady stream money” is low. The “steady stream money” co
mes in various increments and in random bursts by way of direct payments to Mom’s business, Birds Flash & Snap, for the sale of her online digital photos of birds. She’s a birder. And also, her online editing services for client authors who never meet her.

  Mom bounces her head, indicating she’s still thinking on the topic of my father—or someone he hired—kidnapping me at age two. But I don’t want to rehash the terrors of international snatching of kids by parents and the difficulties with getting a snatched kid back to the States. Don’t want to talk about being on the run or the fact that New Hampshire will be our eleventh state. I follow the passing pines along the freeway and clutch the door handle. I’ll pull and jump if she goes there again.

  “So . . . ,” she sings, a lightening of mood in her tone. I wait for the punch line. “I know you’ve been wanting a place in biking distance to restaurants and cafés, so maybe you can get your first job. And I did some research, and I found a rental in a village called Milberg. About an hour and a half from Boston. Sounds like everything you want, baby.”

  She’s going to let me work? Only two years ago she allowed me to stop homeschooling and go to public. I need permission for everything.

  “What about the rental?” I ask, not wanting to expose my excitement over the prospect of getting a job. She works so hard to protect me; I need to play my part.

  “Here,” she says, digging in her open shoulder-sling tote in the space between our bucket seats. She fishes around for her iPad, which is pinned beneath her birding binoculars. When she yanks on the iPad with a jerk, out tumbles an avalanche: a few balled dollar bills, a tissue, the folded page from an old magazine listing the “Hidden Vacation Gems of America,” some random receipts—why she keeps them I have no clue, because she won’t be filing taxes. A tiny yellow hairbrush that clings to everything. All of her detritus falls upon the middle space around the nightstick parking brake.

  “You are such a disaster, oh my God,” I say, stuffing her things back in her bag.

  She playfully hits me as I pinch a used tissue and dangle it in her face. I drop it on her lap. “Nasty,” I say.

  “Please, Lucy, as if you keep your bedroom spick-and-span.”

  “A cyclone. A total dump purse,” I go on, teasing. “Gross. And this yellow hairbrush is, I mean . . . who uses something like this?”

  “Not everyone has thick, perfect hair. Need a rake to comb through your mane.”

  I’m scanning the open tabs on her iPad. “So, what town?”

  “Milberg, New Hampshire.”

  “One of the ‘gems’ from the magazine article?”

  “Sure is, baby.”

  “What’s the tab for the rental?”

  “Don’t close any. I left the tabs open after using Wi-Fi at the last rest stop. The one you want says, ‘Milberg Ranch, two bedroom, two bath.’ See it?”

  “I get my own bathroom?”

  “And you can clean all your hair clogs all on your own.” She scrunches her nose while rubbing a strand of my black hair. “God, silk. Thick, thick silk. You’re a goddess.” But when she takes her eyes off the road and sees her hand on my hair, she pulls back fast and winces again. The snap of her hand off my hair and her expression to one of horror are as if I’m a column of flames. When she returns to gripping the wheel, she smiles in profile to me—a closed-mouth smile.

  It’s all in my mind. I’m tired from driving all night. What’s wrong with me? Nothing’s wrong with me. I’m tired. Tired. Imagining things.

  I scroll down the page through the pictures of the furnished rental. This thing is furnished so completely, it even comes with new linens. Perfect. And the way it’s decorated, I place myself inside reading a book, in its cozy-colorful-artiness. I hope this works out.

  “Cool,” I say. And because I need a break from worrying I’ll anger or scare her or say something wrong or that something’s wrong with me, I snap my Beats over my ears and turn up “DNA” by Kendrick Lamar on my five-dollar, yard-sale iPod Nano, the kind without internet. We drive a full hour more.

  Here we are, pulling off a windy country road onto a dirt road, and I’m so scared the online pictures won’t live up to reality. So nervous the landlord won’t agree, as they often don’t agree, to take cash. So scared Mom will sense the landlord senses something off about us, and we won’t get to stay in this place. The setting is rural, or perhaps I should say, forested. I can’t wait to see the inside of the rental and match living colors to the pictures.

  I pull out my contact lens case and pop my blues on my violet pupils.

  We’re rolling on a narrow, packed-dirt road that weaves between patches of the tallest pines on both sides. The pines’ lower limbs appear to have been sheared off, making the trunks a forest of telephone poles with the darkest green tops, like bristles on a bottlebrush. I think of this patch at the entrance as Bottle Brush Forest. The gravel crunches and skitters as we continue a slow roll over a tiny bridge above a shallow creek.

  Rising up the dirt road, we move past Bottle Brush Forest, and as we do, the trees on my side, the right side, start to thin, but the trees on Mom’s side start to thicken, the limbs of the pines not sheared now. Other trees mix between the messy pines: oak, maple, birch. The floor of the forest on Mom’s side is a thick carpet of rust-red pine needles and brown leaves from what appears to be centuries of falling.

  “Milberg has always been a destination because of Great Katherine Lake on the outskirts. And I read that the downtown is, quote, ‘quaint, charming, up-and-coming, and becoming a magnet for foodies,’” Mom says. I’m not a foodie, but I am obsessed with good ingredients, and I like to use the best ingredients to make common meals awesome. I think this means I want to be a chef someday, and Mom thinks I must think that too. But I also really like reading true books about octopus intelligence and jellyfish and sea things, and I love tubes of paint and colors, and I saw a documentary on women who dress as mermaids and swim in pools for parties, so I don’t know. I hope it’s okay to not know what I’m supposed to be. Maybe I’ll be a librarian. Maybe a mermaid. Maybe a painter. Maybe an oceanographer. Maybe a chef. Maybe I’ll drive around the country forever with no roots. Alone and with no Jennys in my life.

  I place a palm on the wispy floaters of the jellyfish on my T-shirt’s belly as we drive up the packed dirt road. I still haven’t changed from yesterday, but at least I wet-napped my pits this morning at another highway rest stop and slapped on deodorant. Mom doesn’t smell—she did the same. And she seems jacked on caffeine and fired to set up our new life. She didn’t sleep at all last night. Mom can be relentless, tireless. Her endurance can be shocking. I’ll have to be extra special even and happy today to fulfill my part in this scheme.

  We drive through a patch of road that’s especially darkened by the trees’ shade, and that ever-sneaky anxiety over newness makes itself known in me again, making me queasy and fearful. I grasp the fabric of my T-shirt, squeeze the jellyfish in my hand, and do the same with my jelly pendant, as if I’m holding on for dear life. I’m making small movements in this, trying to hide this feeling from Mom. I’m only almost strong; a wedge of weakness slices into me, a wedge I can’t seem to close. Feels like I could be a solid wheel, but I’m missing a slice of myself, and I don’t know what the slice is or where it went off to or even how to define it. So I have no idea what to look for to make me whole—the missing item that would stop this sliver of sneaky panic that rises out of nowhere and chokes the stronger slices of me.

  “Mom,” I say, and this time I can’t hide the crackle in my voice, which makes me feel worse, because now I’ve failed her. “Can we go to the Boston aquarium? I read they have jelly, and they let you see the octopus up close.”

  “Of course, baby. Yes, of course,” she says, as she grabs my left biceps and squeezes, her way of telling me to toughen up. I hate the water in my eyes. This tremble in my lips. The crackle in my voice. This clouding in my mind. If I’m some simpering girl, then I’m a liability, and I can’t jeopardize t
he team.

  “It will be okay, Lucy.” She changes her tone to serious and offers her constant mantra: “We are safe. We are present. It will be well. Be strong. We must do this. We have no choice.”

  I breathe in deep and nod. The wave of panic recedes as I look to her being solid, which is her forgiving me for being weak. We drive up and up.

  We’re driving up, as in really up; this is a hill and somewhat of a steep climb. The pines are super tall, and I sort of feel like what it must have felt for Hansel and Gretel in their deep, dark forest. It’s midday, the start of June, and Mom somehow convinced (in a call during our drive) my most recent school to close out my grades for freshman year since all I’d missed was my biology and Spanish finals, and I’d maintained straight As anyway. So, it’s summer for me, a new state, and indeed, the day is sunny and hot. And yet the thickening forest on Mom’s side casts stagnant, unmovable shadows—not the dappling, lighter mood of light dancing through rippling leaves and mixing with moving shadows; the darkness on her side is a wall of cold dusk. I roll down the window and breathe in a crisp floral scent mixed with dirt on my side of the road.

  Mom slows the Volvo, squinting to find a number on the side of a one-story ranch on our right. The ranch is a light-beige stucco, and on the back, which faces the road coming up the hill, are forest-green shutters flanking one picture window, which is divided into twenty panes. The window overlooks snarly blueberry and holly bushes that fill the hill down and away from the ranch. Coming closer to the side of the ranch, a driveway veers off the dirt road we’re on, and the driveway leads to the front of the ranch. If we were to keep climbing the dirt road on the left side of the property, we’d hit a colossal brick house, maybe a mansion, which lords over another hillside of blueberry-holly snarls, a long shed opposite the ranch, the ranch itself, and the first blueberry-holly hill snarls below that.