Hit the Ground Running

by Alison Hughes

  What her father had loved about Santacino was that, initially, it really did feel like a place removed from the rest of the world. A small town on the edge of nowhere. She and Eddie just went to school—they never got asked who they were, where they came from. People paid cash for work done; many still did. But look around, Dad. Santacino’s changed—it’s grown. Everyone at school knows the Mexican kids who are illegal. We must be illegal like them. We haven’t had problems yet, but clearly, after five years you haven’t got things figured out. We might right now be on some immigration official’s radar.

  The memories took only seconds to flit through Dee’s mind as she carefully backed the car along the house, right up to the back door. But they made the urgency to leave feel like a live thing, growing and swelling in her until she had trouble breathing.

  Water, food, money, passports. Thank God we at least have the passports. One thing Dad did right. One less hassle as we scramble to get the hell out of here.

  Eddie rocketed out of the car into the field to “check something important.” One of his pointless experiments or some stupid bug that doesn’t have the sense to fly away somewhere better. I’ll tell you what’s important, Eddie: getting us on that highway out of town NOW…

  “Okay, but quick, all right? Really quick. Got to hit the road!” Her voice was higher than usual with the strain of flogging this fun road-trip lie. But she didn’t want Eddie spooked.

  She surveyed the hot, cluttered little house. So much stuff, so much useless junk.

  Eddie banged the door, carrying a jar. She turned to him.

  “Hey, so we’re only going to pack essentials, Eddie, things you really need, right? Toothbrush, pajamas, stuff like that. Nothing alive…” She eyed the dusty jar.

  Dee grabbed Eddie’s school backpack from where he’d thrown it in the hall on the last day of school. She dumped it out behind the fan “art,” shaking out loose paper, stubby pencil crayons, rocks, sand and some reeking lunch remains in a crumpled paper bag.

  “God, that’s disgusting. I wondered what smelled. Whatever. Here—use this.” She turned to hand it to him. He was crawling into his fort, reaching for a book.

  “Eddie! We have to get going!” She saw him register her tension, took a deep breath and explained. “Look, it’s supposed to be a really hot day. We don’t want to be driving in the blazing sun. We’ve got to leave before it gets stinking hot. Before we’re frying on the seats.”

  Eddie’s face cleared. This was normal. Planning around the heat was what you did in Santacino.

  “Oh. Okay,” he said, grabbing the bag and trotting down the hallway to his side of their room. Dee turned back to the kitchen, relieved. She’d stooped to pick up a box from the floor when a slight rumbling sound made her freeze. A car. She strained to hear it, to locate which way it was going. It was coming from town, down their street, toward the house.

  Oh, shit, we should have left, we should have gone…

  Heart hammering, Dee straightened, listening. Yes, it was definitely a car coming this way. She reached out and locked the kitchen door, pulled down the blind on the window and slipped into the living room. Using the piled-up furniture as cover, she inched forward, peering out the window. A car slid to a stop in front of the house. She held her breath as the driver, a woman who was not Susan, looked over at the house, checking the number.

  Who the hell are you? She’d never seen this person before. She was younger than Susan, slimmer, dark hair pulled back in a ponytail.

  I don’t even know you, Dee said silently to the woman in the car, but right now you get the prize for scariest frigging person in the whole world.

  The woman shifted and looked down at some papers in her hand. Dee took advantage of her momentary distraction and leaped to the front door. She locked it, then ran quickly down the hall to their room.

  “I’m almost done, Dee, but—” Eddie began before she could shush him.

  “There’s another lady outside, Eddie, and I don’t want to talk to her, okay?” Dee whispered. “Probably just about another boring bill. We need to be quiet until she goes away, then we’re pffft”—she jabbed her thumb over her shoulder—“out of here.”

  He nodded, smiling. It wasn’t the first time they had played this game with people at the door. He mimed locking his mouth and throwing an imaginary key over his shoulder.

  Footsteps. Heels clicking up the front walk. Click, click, click. Stop.

  The doorbell rang. She was expecting it, but in the quiet of the house it was so loud that they both jumped.

  Dee sat on Eddie’s bed with an arm around his shoulders. They waited, completely silent. Eddie kept catching her eye and covering his mouth with his hand, shaking with suppressed giggles. Dee could hear the clock in the hall ticking. She strained to hear what the woman on the other side of the wall would do.

  The clock ticked. Another shrill ring from the doorbell. More waiting, then some movement outside on the front step. Footsteps. Clicking footsteps, ordinary footsteps, not stealthy ones, coming past their curtained bedroom window, pausing at the corner of the house. Dee imagined the woman looking down the side of the house into the backyard.

  She picked the wrong side, Dee realized, sitting very still. If she goes the other way, she’ll see the car—she’ll know somebody’s here.

  The woman walked back to the front door and hesitated, as if making up her mind.

  “Dee—” Eddie whispered.

  “Shh.”

  Yes, the woman was leaving, going back down the front walk to her car. The door opened, then slammed shut. Start the car, start the car. Go away, go away…

  “I just wanted to know if I could bring my collections on the road trip,” mouthed Eddie, close to her ear.

  The car’s engine started.

  “Mmm. Whatever,” said Dee, listening to the sound of the car U-turning, then driving away. She counted off thirty one-thousands, then sprang into action.

  “Let’s go. Quick.”

  Dee checked the front window to make sure the woman had really gone. Then she started loading up the car with the boxes she’d packed the night before. She filled old soda bottles and jam jars with water. She ran down the hallway to the closet. Two pillows, two blankets. The trunk filled up quickly.

  Dee was ruthless with her stuff. One small bag. That’s it, that’s all I’m taking. Most of her clothes fit anyway, the small stuffed elephant she’d had since she was two, the photo albums, the yearbooks. All her other books would have to stay. She scooped up a bottle of shampoo, a hairbrush and her makeup (a crumbly blush, a gunky mascara and a tube of lip gloss) and shoved them into a side pocket with her toothbrush.

  Then Dee reached under her mattress, lifting the corner up as high as she could, bracing it with her shoulder. She grabbed the passports and gathered up the money, pressed flat from the hiding spot.

  Her stash. Her hoard. Since they had gotten here that January five years ago, after her mom died, Dee had been saving. She remembered her mom once winking at her and saying, “It’s always good to have some cash on hand, Dee” when Dee saw her slipping a twenty out of a coffee tin, then pushing the tin to the back of the cupboard. “You never know what’s going to happen.” That had been the mantra of her life with Dad, an unpredictable life, but a life she’d loved because she loved him.

  True, you don’t know what’s going to happen. I personally couldn’t have predicted that I’d be kidnapping my little brother and fleeing the authorities across the country to a border where we might be arrested. Life’s kind of funny like that.

  Dee’s saving had grown into an obsession. She began thinking of the stash as “emergency funds”—a phrase she’d seen in a paper at the gas station. Not money to be frittered away on clothes or outstanding bills, but a safety net for a someday emergency. She collected the spare change rattling around the inside of the washing machine at the Laundromat, and in couches and pay phones. Birthday money from Auntie Pat and Uncle Norm went straight to the stash, as di
d the landscape money, the gas-station money. The stash grew.

  She counted. There was $408—$468 with the $60 from Mr. S. How much gas does 468 bucks buy you? Enough to get to Canada? It’s got to be enough to get to Canada…She wished she had had a little time, time to plan, time to map it all out.

  Dee went into her father’s room, veering around the floor-to-ceiling junk, straight to the dresser. There might possibly be some money lying around. She remembered Mr. S.’s tidy money roll with the silver clip, so different from Dad’s crumpled bills, jammed into pockets, going through the wash. She rifled through the drawers, then the closet, and found a ten-dollar bill scrunched up in the pocket of his one suit jacket, which he never wore.

  She didn’t hesitate for a second. That made $478.

  As she turned to leave, she saw the wedding picture on the bedside table. Mom and Dad, smiling, young and happy. It wasn’t a formal picture, just a snapshot taken by someone at the wedding who had probably called out, “Hey, Sandy, Jamie!” and taken the picture as they glanced over. They were holding hands, not for the cameras, but quietly, privately, because they wanted to. Their faces were lit with a shared laugh. Two people in love, two people who, in a perfect world, should have grown old together.

  They were almost the same height, Dee thought suddenly, fighting back tears. I never noticed that. Five eight, five nine. Mom was tallish like me, Dad shortish. Somehow, that small fact seemed significant.

  She grabbed the picture and wrapped it in one of her dad’s old T-shirts. As she walked by the bed, she rumpled the blankets, punching an indent into the pillow. A pretend body, a pretend head.

  Dee wrote a note to her father on the back of a blue flyer. She had to stop, take a deep breath and think before she did it. It had to be in a sort of code, in case people like Susan or the other woman read it.

  But if Dad reads it— She stopped herself. Not if. When. When Dad reads it, he has to know where we are, how to find us.

  She finally wrote the date, then:

  Hey, Dad.

  We’ve just gone to visit Auntie Pat like we planned. Looking forward to it! We’ll see you there soon!

  Love,

  Dee and Eddie

  PS. There are veggie burgers in the freezer.

  Reading it over, it didn’t sound at all like her. Too many perky exclamation marks. But she thought the PS was a nice touch. It was the sort of thing people put in notes. Normal people who see each other regularly every day and leave casual notes.

  Nobody would ever guess that it might be a goodbye.

  “Dee? You got a box?” Eddie wandered down the hallway.

  Dee straightened from the kitchen table.

  “Just leaving a note for Dad,” she said.

  “Oh, good. Yeah, good idea. So he knows how to find us.” He made it all sound so simple and logical. That’s the trouble with weird families, Dee thought. You get used to the weirdness.

  She walked toward the living-room mess. “There’s got to be a box in here somewhere…”

  “There’s lots of stuff in here,” said Eddie. The mess was his private playground. His latest fort was inside the space formed by two couches stacked on top of each other, arms to arms. He would lie in there, stretched flat, thinking and reading books with a flashlight. Dee called it his “couch coffin.”

  “Found twenty bucks in that chair.” Eddie pointed at an overstuffed brocade chair that smelled of mold and generations of old people.

  Dee looked up.

  “Hey, better bring it on the trip.” All right, $498. Almost five hundred bucks. The longer they stayed, the more money they made.

  She suddenly felt so tired.

  “Yeah, maybe we’ll stop for some burgers or something,” Eddie said happily, “and I’ll pay!”

  “Deal.” Dee emptied a box, and they went to their room.

  Unbelievable. Just unbelievable. I hand him a backpack, one backpack, and he thinks he’s taking his entire room.

  Eddie had packed everything. Shoved a few clothes into the backpack, stacked books into boxes and used green garbage bags for stuffed animals. There was, apparently, almost nothing he could leave. He agonized about his specimens in the kitchen, rows and rows of baby-food jars full of dead insects, small bones and cactus bristles. A dead scorpion. Some snake skin that even the frigging snake didn’t want. Pebbles.

  “Rocks, Eddie? Really? Rocks?” Dee said.

  “They’re significant,” Eddie pleaded. “Some of them, actually, might have fossil—”

  “Okay, okay,” she interrupted. “Fine. The rocks, the significant rocks, can come,” she said, desperate to get them out the door. “Let’s just get all this”—all this shit—“all this stuff out to the car.”

  Not an inch to spare in the trunk, so they shoved bags and boxes in the footwells of the backseat and the front passenger seat. Eddie climbed into the backseat, onto the towel she’d spread out.

  Dee ran back for one last scan of the house, wiping her sweaty face on a tea towel. If I never come back here again, is there anything I’ll wish I’d taken? She hesitated at Eddie’s drawings, the strange, brightly colored ones tacked to the kitchen wall. Kindergarten and first-grade drawings. A little kid’s dreams, his imaginings. It seemed awful to leave them there to be stared at or junked by strangers.

  But I can’t take them. Susan saw them. People don’t take pictures off the walls when they go on a vacation. I’m very, very certain people don’t generally strip the walls when they go to visit relatives.

  She closed her eyes, rubbing them with the palms of both hands, like a tired child. Oh, God, please let me be doing the right thing. Not just about the pictures, but about this whole thing…

  Dee paused at Vera, the ratty aloe vera plant she had won in an essay competition in fifth grade (“Spectacular Succulents and Their Many Uses!”). Vera was a less-than-spectacular succulent whose dusty, straggly limbs occupied a faded clay pot on the shelf. Dee had managed to keep the plant alive for six years, occasionally cupping water in her hand and letting it drip down her fingers into the heat-hardened soil, or snapping off small pieces of fleshy arm to soothe burns and bug bites.

  Could she trust the good folks at children’s services to take care of Vera? To not kill her? No, she decided, she could not. You can never know what’s important to other people. She grabbed a shoe box and stuffed a tea towel around the pot. One more passenger. Let’s see—a plant, lots of dead bugs, rocks, snake skin…yeah, I think we’ve got it all. We’re all good for this psycho-family road trip.

  She felt a sudden, crushing wave of panic. Eddie was in the car alone. The scary woman, the children’s services follow-up, might still be prowling the neighborhood.

  She bolted out the back door.

  Eddie had already seat-belted himself into the laden backseat. He was sorting through a mound of stuffed animals, his feet resting on an enormous pile of books. Mrs. S.’s goodie bag was open beside him.

  He caught her eye.

  “Looks fun back here, hey?” he said, excitement lighting up his face.

  Dee looked at the lively little face, the tangled hair, the happy blue eyes. Her face softened, and she leaned in through the open window for his tight, quick hug, his skinny arm snaking briefly around her neck.

  “Sure does, Eddie.”

  Her fog of panic and fear cleared. She had to get him out of this, had to get him safely up to Auntie Pat’s. It was the only thing to do. There were no other options.

  They had to go.

  They were going.

  Together.

  Dee started the car, and they crept to the front of the house. At the corner she looked left, right. All clear.

  They slid off the gravel driveway and onto the road, turning away from town. It was longer to the highway this way, but at least it circled the town. The other way, they’d have to drive straight down Main Street.

  She didn’t have a driver’s license. Not technically. She’d studied the materials and gone out driving with
her dad and assumed she’d eventually get one. But she didn’t have the proper ID. The woman had looked blankly at her Canadian birth certificate, turned it over and said, “You got anything American, honey?” Dad, waiting in the car, had said he’d fix it, make some calls, straighten it all out. But the bureaucracy had defeated him, and finally he had slammed the phone down and tossed her the keys.

  “I know you can drive. You know you can drive. Why in hell the government needs all this crap for you to drive to the frigging gas station and back in a small town is beyond me.”

  “But we’ll still figure out how I can get an official license soon, right?” Dee asked anxiously. I’m not like you. I can’t just float, wander, make my own rules.

  She’d started driving anyway—she had to get to and from her job. And she felt better when she found out Mrs. S. didn’t have a license either.

  “No, I don’t got no license,” she had said, waving that technicality away with a contemptuous flick of her hand. “But sure I drive, no problem. A-okay. Some cop gonna pull me over? No way. Not one time these seven years! They do, I tell you, Dee, I got plan. I make beeeg deal of huntink in my bag. I drop things, take out everythink, songlasses, makeup, okay? I get more and more upsets. Then I say, ‘So sorry, Mr. Poleese, I change the purses! The license at home!’ He shrug, tell me not do again, and away I go.” She’d cackled and squeezed Dee’s arm, like they were both in on the joke, both pulling one over on the cops.