Reagan's Ashes

by Jim Heskett

  In less than a minute came the reply:

  Txt me when u know where. DO NOT approach.

  The light turned green and Dalton let his phone guide him to the first hotel in the area. Big place, big parking lot. No matching Honda Accords.

  He left the parking lot and headed for the next nearby joint. A brief moment of anxiety unsettled him when he wondered if his brilliant idea could be totally wrong. They may have turned off the main road to mess with anyone following them.

  He couldn’t be wrong. Couldn’t mess up again. Not an option.

  The second hotel was much smaller, only three stories tall. Shabby and run-down. But he didn’t need to search the parking lot because the Honda Accord sat at a gas station across the street. In the rear of the building, but the nose was poking out from behind a dumpster. Not exactly super-spy-quality hiding.

  He copied and pasted the address from his Maps app into a text to Tyson and started mentally mapping the layout of the hotel. Three stories, all the rooms facing the street. Couldn’t be more than forty units. He could walk by each door, listen, and pinpoint for Tyson exactly which was the one the little lovebirds were in. Probably fucking their brains out.

  But Tyson had told him to wait.

  He drummed his thumbs against the steering wheel, looking at each of the motel room doors facing him. The cut on his hand throbbed. The whole building remained motionless; the concrete hallways out front empty and quiet.

  Fuck it.

  He got out of the car and crept toward the motel. Then he realized all this cloak and dagger shit was retarded, straightened up, and walked normally. He wasn’t doing anything illegal. Not yet, at least.

  He climbed the stairs to the third floor to begin at the far-right end. He worked his way back left, leaning toward each door. Mostly, he heard televisions, muffled conversations, a couple rooms with little kids running around playing, but nothing that sounded like Reagan or an Australian guy. He had to resist the urge to walk with light feet, because looking like a creeper would be much more suspicious than the sound of footsteps on the walkway.

  At the last room on the third floor, as he leaned close, the door opened and he nearly fell over the balcony railing. He stopped himself as a woman with a big fat pregnant belly and her hair up in curlers threw the stink-eye at him.

  “Excuse me. What are you doing lurking outside my room?”

  He averted his eyes and said nothing, then hustled down the stairs to floor two. No luck there, either. He started to descend the stairs when his phone vibrated.

  The fuck r u doing up there?

  Dalton surveyed the parking lot and saw Tyson’s blue truck backed into a parking space. He raced down the stairs, trying to think of what he would say to his father. Four days of backpacking had left him with sore knees and hips, another reminder of his failure.

  The tinted window lowered as he approached the car. “I told you to wait.”

  “They’re here, somewhere. I know it.”

  “I don’t see Mitch’s car,” Tyson said.

  “It’s across the street at that gas station. They’ve got to be here, for sure. I just don’t know which room.”

  Tyson rolled up the window but unlocked the car doors. Dalton rushed around to the passenger side and jumped in the car.

  “We wouldn’t have to be here if you’d taken the key from her in the park, like you should have.”

  Dalton ducked his head. “I know. I’m sorry, Dad.”

  “You’re sure it’s this one, though? Are you A-1 positively sure?”

  Dalton nodded, still looking at the dashboard. “Do you know which bank has the safe deposit box yet?”

  Tyson tugged at the scruff jutting from his chin. “Not exactly. Mitch had an account at FirstBank, but I called them and he doesn’t have a box there. Your grandad doesn’t know.”

  “You think Reagan knows?”

  “Maybe. But even if she does, that doesn’t mean we can get in it. I did some research. The bank or the state might seal it for weeks or months until they see death certificates and all that horseshit. But we don’t got to worry about that yet. Step one is finding the god damn thing.”

  “As soon as she tells us where it is,” Dalton said, taking his knife out of his pocket and then waving it in the air, “I’m going to gut that bitch.”

  Tyson whipped his head around, the whites of his eyeballs flaring. “You’re going to what?”

  Dalton put away the knife. “I just… I don’t know. What do you mean?”

  “That’s your cousin, and you’re going to slice her open like some crackhead?”

  “I thought that was the point. Get the money and get her out of the way. You asked me what I was willing to do to make it right, and all that.”

  Tyson sat back and rubbed his temples. “You stupid little asshole. That’s why she got away in Rocky Mountain, isn’t it? You pulled some shit, freaked her out, and she ran.”

  Dalton didn’t know if he should answer the question. He was confused, since Tyson had never told him one way or the other what he was or wasn’t supposed to do in the park. Just get the money.

  “You ever know anyone with a cat?” Tyson said.

  “Sure.”

  “If you want a cat to pay attention to you, you can’t go chasing it around the house. You sit back in a chair, then scratch on the side of the chair for a few seconds. Then you stop. In a minute, the cat’s going to get curious, then bam… it’s in your lap.”

  Dalton searched the roof of the truck, rehearsing the words of Tyson’s story. “So… we’re supposed to ignore her?”

  “No, goddamn it. I’m trying to tell you to be subtle.” Tyson took a toothpick from his pocket and picked something from between his front teeth. “Listen to me very carefully. We may have to get physical, but you are not going to take out that knife or do anything like that unless I tell you to, got it?”

  Dalton nodded but wasn’t sure if he meant it. That bitch had cut him. There had to be payback.

  “Tell me you got it,” Tyson said. “I need to hear you say it out loud.”

  “Okay, okay, I get it. So what do we do now?”

  Tyson popped the glove box and removed a piece of cloth. He unfolded the cloth and showed Dalton a device, about two inches by two inches, with a set of LEDs lining the front. He opened the truck’s center console and snatched a package of AA batteries, then held them both out to Dalton. “Do you know what to do with these?”

  Dalton puzzled over it for a second. Then he nodded.

  “You go take care of that, and then come back and we wait. They can’t stay in there forever.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  8:00 pm

  Reagan steps backward until she bumps into the combination mini-fridge/microwave bolted to the motel room wall. Spoon’s revelation has filled her veins with ice water. “My mother?”

  Spoon casts his eyes to the floor. “Her name is Jules, right? She followed me to an AA meeting yesterday.”

  Six years. Six years since Jules Darby left, and not a single word since then. Not a word at her first day of college, not a word when Reagan attempted suicide, not a single letter or phone call the whole time she was drugged up in the hospital or recovering afterward. Not even for the funeral of her husband of more than twenty years.

  “What happened?” Reagan says.

  “Not much. I didn’t know who she was until after the meeting. We chatted in the parking lot, she said she was here to see you.”

  The possibilities spin Reagan’s brain. The money, Spoon losing his job, Mom returning. “This is all part of the plan. I’m sure of it now. She’s here and now she can help us find our way and open our educational center that’s going to heal the world. But not in the usual, come-here-and-find-Jesus kind of way that always turns out to be some scam where the priests molest little boys and the guys at the top skim all the donation money. No, this is going to be true, and full of enlightenment and people who pay things forward because it’s the right thing
to do. Mom will help us. She has to. Why else would she be here?”

  “Reagan…” he says, slipping his hand into his pocket.

  Something about his hand in his pocket feels wrong. “What are you doing?”

  “I looked in your nightstand on Wednesday and found some pill bottles. I’d hoped they were extras that you didn’t need, but I can now tell by your voice and how you never stop fidgeting that you haven’t had any meds. You’ve gone round the bend.”

  “I don’t need them,” she says. “There’s no point in diluting the world now because I can see everything clearly. I’ve never been this clear before.”

  He inches his hand out of his pocket, and he’s clenching a plastic baggie with a dozen pills of different sizes and colors. “I took these from the bottles this morning, since I knew I’d see you. Didn’t know if you’d need them, but I reckoned if you did, you’d need them right away.”

  In his hand, Spoon holds death to creativity. Death to imagination. Lithium, Risperdal, Seroquel. A recipe for flattening Reagan into a conformist pancake, ready to be pressed into a box and shipped out to the world. Stomp her down into a Good Little Girl ready to accept more steaming spoonfuls of the world’s garbage.

  “I don’t want them. I want to live and breathe and understand the universe. I want to have sex. Do you understand? That stuff takes my sex drive and squeezes it into a tiny glass bottle; makes it something impossible to think about. You’ve said you wish we had sex more often. We can now, baby. I want to show you how much I love you.”

  He fidgets on the bed. He holds the pills at arm’s-length, refusing to look at her. “I know what I said, but I think you should take your meds. You’re scaring me.”

  “If you loved me, you wouldn’t do this.”

  “I’m doing this because I love you.”

  She reaches behind her and grabs a stack of Styrofoam cups next to the coffee maker. The day’s color bleeds into red, and her face reflects the change. Heat dots her skin, making her feel lightheaded. She crinkles the cups in her hand, and then starts to shred them into little pieces, letting the bits fall to the floor one at a time. “You don’t understand me at all.”

  He won’t withdraw the pills, and she can’t stand here and watch this anymore. She storms away from him, into the beige bathroom with its mildewed shower curtain and poorly-sanitized toilet. She shuts and locks the door, and within ten seconds, he’s knocking softly and calling her name but she doesn’t want to hear it.

  Can’t lose this peak of understanding. She knows that she’s manic and the last time she felt this way, a ton of bad things happened, but this time will be different. Maybe all this new self-awareness will change things. Maybe she can control it.

  She sheds her clothes and faces the mirror to examine the bruise the moose left as a parting gift. It’s round, the size of a small dinner plate, black in the center and blue around the edges. Horrifically ugly. Now that she’s focusing on it, the pain grows. She sucks in her stomach then pushes it out, trying to feel for any broken rib bones, but she’s still not sure how it should feel. Only that her stomach aches as if someone is continuously punching her.

  Images of the gifts Dad used to bring her after business trips float through her mind. Usually, stupid little airport trinkets like bumper stickers that read, “It’s a beautiful day in Reno, NV!” When she was a pre-teen, the gifts always made her giggle. When she got older, she took them for granted. She never knew exactly where he was going on those business trips, and he never said.

  She steps into the shower for the first time since Tuesday morning. Despite the meek water pressure, the feeling of warm water rushing over her sends her into ecstasy. She watches the grime slip from her body and run into the drain, lines of gritty brown circling with the clear water.

  When she exits the shower, it’s as if she’s molted away an extraneous layer of her body. Clean, warm, and her skin has become lighter and more alive.

  Still red, but also better. A little calmer, approaching orange.

  As she wraps a towel around her body and then another around her hair, she looks at the dirty hiking clothes on the bathroom floor. She sighs because she has no clean clothes to wear. But a fresh body in dirty clothes is still better off than a few minutes ago.

  Lip balm. She wishes she had her lip balm, but it’s probably in her purse, which is on the bed next to Spoon. Or it may be in the backpack with her phone, which is who-knows-where.

  She reaches into her pocket, hoping that maybe she put the lip balm in there without remembering. Instead, she finds Dad’s letter. She hasn’t thought about the letter in hours.

  Her eyes scan the water-ruined letter a few times. A line sticks out to her:

  what the key in … farmer’s market. You’ll understand when you get there.

  Farmer’s market. The realization comes over her suddenly, like a wave that seems small and barely over knee-level yet hides a massive force that topples you onto your butt.

  Naked, she runs out of the bathroom and yells, “I know where the money is. It’s not in a safe deposit box.”

  She stops moving and closes her mouth when she sees Spoon. He’s on one knee–or some approximation of it–with his bad leg pushed out in front of him, and he’s holding something in his hand. It’s a small, velvet box, opened, with a glistening diamond ring inside it.

  “Oh my god,” she says as the diamond sparkles under the lights of the motel room.

  “Reagan Darby, I love you and I intend the spend the rest of my life with you. I know this is a terrible time and place to ask.”

  She’s about to scream yes when she looks and sees what he’s holding in his other hand. It’s the baggie of medication, extended toward her.

  Saturday

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  7:00 am

  Dalton awoke with a start when a bird chirped outside his window. For a second, he thought he was still in the woods, hearing those never-ending alarm clocks trying to force him out of his sleep.

  He’d dozed off in the passenger seat of Tyson’s car. His father was leaning back in the driver’s seat, head lolling back, mouth open and snoring like a chainsaw burning gasoline.

  Dalton nudged the old man. “Dad, wake up.”

  Tyson snorted, blinked a few times, then pushed himself upright. “What?”

  “We fell asleep.”

  Tyson sighed and pressed a button on the dashboard to make a digital clock light up. “Goddamn it. Go check if the car is still there across the street.”

  A flash of an idea walloped Dalton upside his head. “I got this.”

  He exited the car and peered over the fence at the gas station. The nose of the Honda was still poking out from behind the dumpster, quiet and untouched. The lovebirds were probably still sleeping off a good night of fucking.

  He strolled across the parking lot toward the motel office and opened the door as an attached bell jingled. In front of him was a chest-high counter, with slits in the ceiling and walls where some kind of protection like safety glass would slide in. Didn’t seem like a rough neighborhood, but with shady motels like this, who knew what kind of shit went down.

  He whistled and started tapping a bell on the counter once every few seconds. After a minute, a young woman appeared from the back room. She was about his same age, but chubby and doe-eyed. Perfect. Fat girls loved him.

  “Hi,” he said.

  She offered him a reserved smile. “How can I help you, sir?”

  He struggled to get his elbow up over the counter. “I’m in a tight situation here. My cousin checked in last night, maybe with her boyfriend. Thing is, he’s a not-nice kind of guy—if you know what I mean—and I’m worried about her.”

  The chubby girl stuck a finger in her mouth and chewed on the nail. “I’m not supposed to give out names or room numbers and things of that nature. I could get into trouble.”

  “I totally get that, sister. But you’d be doing me a huge favor and I would owe you until the end of time. I r
eally need to find her.”

  “Can’t you call her?”

  Dalton almost laughed, because he had Reagan’s cell phone in his pocket. “No, she didn’t take her phone. We were hanging out last night, at my apartment, and her boyfriend came over, acting all like a big jerk. He started shouting about this and that, ordering her to leave.”

  The doe-eyes grew wide. “What did you do?”

  “I told him to leave her alone, of course, but he’s about ten times bigger than me, so there wasn’t much I could do.”

  The chubby girl actually looked scared for Dalton’s safety. He bit the inside of his cheek to keep himself from bursting out laughing at her.

  “Anyway, he made her leave, and she didn’t have time to grab her cell phone, but she’d told me before all this shit got crazy that if something bad happened—like he was going to hurt her—that she’d come here and I should meet up with her.”

  The girl studied him, her face twisted. Dalton held her gaze, and it seemed to go on forever.

  Finally, she took in a deep breath. “I’m sorry, but I’m not supposed to. I could get into trouble.”

  Motherfucking bitch. Without meaning to, he pounded his fist on the counter, which echoed through the little office. The chubby girl jumped as if he’d stepped on her toes.

  “Please. This is like an emergency situation here. I’m begging you.”

  She looked behind her shoulder, then huffed a few deep breaths in and out of her nose. “I understand. I’ll get the book, but you can’t tell anyone I did this, okay?”

  “No problem.”

  She ducked down, shuffled through something for a few seconds, then came up with a ledger, which she flipped open halfway. “Name?”

  “Reagan Darby.”

  She trailed a finger up and down, mouthing the words to herself as she did so. After several seconds of this, she shrugged and said, “I don’t see it.”