Vanished
Page 25
He was gone only a minute. My ankles and my hands were tied and I was squirming on the seat trying to get free when out he comes. Running, with this jar of dimes and the sweetest little baby girl in his arms. “Who’s she?” I said. But he just set her on my lap and took off, and a few miles later, I asked him again and he said, “I dunno. She was making so much noise I had to pick her up.”
“Leave her someplace,” I said. “You can pin a note on her shirt and leave her off someplace.”
“We will,” he said, with that scared little voice he had. “We will,” he’d say every time I said it. And I said it for miles and miles and days and months and then years. But he never did. We just kept on going and going. We lived everywhere, mostly down south, in different places, the kind of places people keep going to when the last place didn’t work out. We lived in trailers and shacks and, once, even a tent; and that first summer, we lived mostly out of the car he’d sold the truck for.
He’d work a while one place and then the craziest little thing would scare him, like seeing the same little old lady on the sidewalk two days in a row, and then that’d be it—we’d have to take off to some new place.
People always ask me how come he never got caught. I tell them it wasn’t because of any plan he had. In fact, I think it was just the opposite, that because he didn’t have a plan somehow it all kept working out for him, like it was fate or something. Of course, in the Bird thing, at first they thought it was all planned by some kidnapper that wanted the ransom. So why would they ever be looking for poor Aubrey Wallace? His own family wasn’t even looking for him.
I used to think he didn’t talk to people because he was so shy. But then I began to see that nobody ever talked to him, that they’d pass him on the street and never even see him. It was almost like he was invisible in this weird way, almost like he even thought he was, or he wanted to be. That way nobody could hurt him. Nobody, I guess, but me.
People always ask how come I went along and never did anything. And all I can say is how half the time I was crazy with homesickness and the other half I guess I was just crazy. Scared all the time and crazy.
But I’m okay now. I feel like it’s all been a dream, some good and some bad, and now it’s all over, and I’m alive, and I’m going to live happily ever after. Finally.
About the Author
Mary McGarry Morris grew up in Vermont and now lives on the North Shore in Massachusetts. Her first novel, Vanished, was published in 1988 and was nominated for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award. A Dangerous Woman (1991) was chosen by Time magazine as one of the “Five Best Novels of the Year” and was made into a motion picture starring Debra Winger, Barbara Hershey, and Gabriel Byrne. Songs in Ordinary Time (1995) was an Oprah’s Book Club selection, which propelled it to the top of the New York Times bestseller list for many weeks, and it was adapted for a TV movie starring Sissy Spacek and Beau Bridges. Morris’s other highly acclaimed works include the novels Fiona Range (2000), A Hole in the Universe (2004), The Lost Mother (2005), The Last Secret (2009), and Light from a Distant Star (2011), as well as the play MTL: The Insanity File.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1988 by Mary McGarry Morris
Cover design by Jason Gabbert
ISBN: 978-1-5040-4810-1
This edition published in 2017 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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