by A. L. Tyler
Lena flinched. It suddenly occurred to her that Tom must have thought he was sending his son off to a family—a real family, with parents and siblings and aunts and uncles. And Lena couldn’t offer up any of it. All of their conversations at the Iris Inn had been positive; Lena had purposefully avoided bringing her ugly past into the sanctity of the valley. “He’s dead too. He died when I was fifteen. Also murdered.” The quiver in her voice was growing. “Your mom’s my only living grandparent. My two on the other side were both murdered. My mom was murdered.”
Again, Tom didn’t speak for a long time. Lena was about to reach over and switch off her bedside lamp.
“My dad died of a heart attack when I was twelve.” He took a deep breath and then exhaled slowly. “He had the look. We woke up one morning and we both saw it. He didn’t, of course. Just popped into the kitchen like always, and I was sitting there at the table doing the homework I was supposed to do the night before, and my mom was there cooking eggs and coffee…she was wearing this thing, like one of those old aprons from the fifties. It was red—I think it’s the only time I’ve seen her wear something red. But he just came into the kitchen with the newspaper under his arm, kissed my mom on the cheek, and sat down next to me like always. He had the newspaper up in front of his face when my mom brought over the eggs, and when he took it down to eat I heard him say, ‘What?’ My mom was sitting there with her jaw dropped, staring at him, and I looked over, and I knew, and I looked back over at my mom, and she said, ‘Nothing.’ She gave me a look, like…we didn’t say anything. It’s deceiving when you see it coming and you want so bad to fix it, but the truth is that it’s already broken and you can’t. You just can’t. And we ate breakfast, just like that. Christ. He was gone that afternoon—I got the chance to tell him I loved him before I went off to school that day. Heart attack while he was changing out a blown fuse in someone’s car…he was a mechanic. I’ve always wondered if she would have told him…you know, eventually, if he would have lasted longer. I’ve always wondered if he knew, you know, in those last moments, if he was thinking about her looking at him like that…he if ever knew that she knew in those seconds. Christ. He’s been in the teapot ever since.”
She heard Tom shuffle on his bed. When she glanced over, she saw that he was looking at her. Normally she wouldn’t have said anything—grieving was personal. There wasn’t anything for anyone else to say about it.
But Tom seemed to be expecting it.
“I’m sorry, Tom. At least you had the chance.” She whispered, but her mind had grabbed onto those final turbulent memories of her father, and it wasn’t about to let go any time soon.
“So…you’re alone then? Like me?” He asked.
Lena turned over on her side. Her stomach was starting to ache. “I have an uncle that I live with. My dad’s brother—if he’s still alive, I mean.”
“What’s he like?” Tom asked. He tried to smile, but it vanished almost instantly.
“He’s…” Lena thought back to Howard. Always so busy, always in meetings. Always trying to fix things that were irreparably damaged; things that just couldn’t be fixed, but he somehow had a way of making them work. “Lonely. We only have each other, and some of the time we don’t. I think he wanted a family a long time ago, but it just never happened. He just got too busy to have a family. But he’s nice. Really nice. It really screwed up his life when my dad died and I had to come live with him, but he never said anything about it. He just made it work…”
Lena trailed off. She turned her head and looked over the edge of her bed at Brandon, sleeping quietly, his little cheeks working like he was dreaming of a bottle. Was that how it was supposed to happen? Was she supposed to be Brandon’s Howard?
She glanced up. In the slightly yellowed light cast by the lamps, Tom had met her gaze, the eerie look in his eyes magnified in the surrounding dark. “You don’t have to tell him about all of this. I don’t want him to have to grow up with this tragedy. I want him to have a family, and happiness. But someday will you tell him about us? Me, and Janet, and my mom? When he’s old enough to understand?”
“Of course I will.” Lena whispered back.
They slept with the lights on that night. The next day they drove to Raleigh, where Lena tried to get tickets to take them to Greenland, only to discover that Tom didn’t have a passport. He offered to stay behind, letting Lena fly away with Brandon, but they had no way to get a copy of his birth certificate to apply for a child’s passport without going back to South Carolina. They were stuck with no way to leave the country, and the Silenti probably knew it.
From that day on they started driving West, zigzagging back and forth through the mountains and staying at any small hotel they came across. Lena was spending copious amounts of time trying to figure out how she could adequately fake a birth certificate for Brandon that listed her as his mother; there was no way they were going to let him go with her without explanation otherwise. Even then, she had no intention of traveling under her own name if people were looking for her, and that meant forging her own identifications as well. She wasn’t even sure what she needed to forge for what purpose; Griffin would have known. Aaron had known. Lena wished she would have paid more attention to illegal activities she had previously considered beneath her.
She had Tom max out his credit card and cash out his personal checking account—a substantial amount of money, given the limit on his card was designed for the small business he had been running with his mother. He assured her it wouldn’t be a problem, because Olesia had amassed a small fortune years earlier to send him to college; he had never used it, instead staying home to help run the Iris Inn because he couldn’t bear to be away from other Silenti contact for so long. Lena still felt bad, however, and promised Tom that she would pay his mother back.
Almost a week after the incident in Raleigh, they passed through Ashville. They sat in the car outside of the airport, while Lena stared at the entrance, dejectedly watching people come and go with their bags. She had to find a way to get Brandon out of the country. It was very difficult to get a child passport quietly, and they were probably counting on that fact—she couldn’t leave the country with a baby without someone finding out. They knew she was here, and that was where they were going to be looking, which made it even more important for her to find a way to get them out.
“Couldn’t you hide him or something?” Tom asked.
Lena glanced over, then set her eyes on the door again. “Where? In my purse? With flight restrictions the way they are now, I’ll be surprised if I can get him on the plane without having security frisk him first. Anyways, this is a regional airport. We need international.”
She sat back in her seat. They might be counting on the fact that Brandon didn’t have a birth certificate, and hence couldn’t even apply for a passport—someone had inevitably checked into whether or not she had checked into a hospital to deliver a baby under her own name. But Brandon wasn’t her baby; his last name was Spinkle. That fact might allow her to sneak him under the radar.
She needed a birth certificate to apply for Brandon’s passport. It was possible they could write to have one sent to them, but then Lena was going to have to fake her own passport to show her name as Janet Spinkle, the name on the birth certificate. This led to its own set of problems, as someone was sure to notice that Janet Spinkle had a death certificate issued in her name at some point during the approval of her passport, the issuing of the international tickets, or one of the security checks as she boarded the plane. And she was losing precious time before someone finally tracked her down.
She had to make a decision.
Lena sighed. “Okay. Okay…let’s find some off the road place to stay at for a few days. I’ve got to get stuff to fake passports for both of us. Then we’re crossing the border into Mexico, because I don’t think they check all that well. I’ll do whatever I have to in order to get us citizenship papers there so we have valid papers. Incomes are pretty low there—if nothing
else works we’ll grease a few palms.” She sat back to think again. “Then I’ll get a vacation visa so we can get off the continent, and then we’re gone until things settle down back home.”
As a matter of fact, she had no idea when or if things were going to settle back to normal in the Silenti world; they had proven many times over that they could hold a grudge. It could take years. It could take a lifetime or longer, but she wasn’t about to share this information with Tom.
They drove a few hours out of the city and settled in a hotel off the one main road in Maggie Valley. It was a mid-size hotel with indoor hall access to the rooms, two floors, indoor pool, a continental breakfast, and rooms with windows that overlooked the parking lot. She spent several hours on the internet that afternoon trying to figure out how to get the right quality paper and supplies to fake a U.S. passport. She had settled Brandon on the bed next to her. He was such a serious child; he only stared at her as she poured over page after page of how difficult it was to use a fake passport to try and travel internationally. Her chances were better at faking the documents to apply for a passport, but the application process was going to cost her time that she didn’t have. As dusk began to fall, and the light in Maggie Valley stretched and faltered, Tom broke the stony silence that had enveloped them.
“You wanna go out to dinner?” He asked, switching off the television.
“I don’t know if that’s a good idea, Tom…” But she was already shutting the open windows on her computer. She checked into her email one last time; she wished she could have written to Hesper. Serena and Hesper knew about babies and taking care of them, and soon she was going to need all the advice she could get. Subconsciously, she was already planning to swing through Australia to see her one more time before she made her great escape around the world with Brandon.
Anyway, it was probably good that she hadn’t heard anything about any of the Masons; hopefully they were just keeping to themselves and out of the crosshairs. Maren would be going on two now, talking, learning to walk, and making trouble. Daisy and Rose were probably enjoying her immensely. They probably liked playing dress-up with her, taking her to the beach, making her laugh…
Tom cleared his throat. “Dinner?”
“Sure.” Lena said, closing her laptop and getting up from the bed. She picked up Brandon, bundled him, buckled him into his carrier, and then they walked out to the car. Even though it was only early evening, it was already dark outside. The streetlights cast a blue sheen across the snow-packed lot and road, making every flurried tree, bush, and roof glitter like Hollywood fakes. It was late January now, and the country was suffering an unusually chill winter, making Lena long even more to escape to a warmer climate.
They drove down the road to a local steakhouse. It was a large cabin type environment with vaulted ceilings and pinewood fashioned tables and chairs; the sound of chatter from the surrounding tables and the clanking of flatware on ceramic plates filled the grilled-meat scented air. They boasted to have some great salads, but Tom got a steak while Lena ordered an appetizer of fried cheese sticks as her dinner. Tom was as bright and chipper as ever—conversing, and refusing to let his last moments be sad. They joked, they took turns feeding Brandon, and Tom told every story of Olesia he could remember so that Lena could tell Brandon someday. Everything was going great, and Lena was even edging on optimism, until halfway through the meal.
“I don’t think I have much longer.” Tom said, lifting his glass of iced tea and taking a deep gulp.
“What?” Lena said, her smile falling slightly. “Tom, there’s no reason to think—“
“Those two guys over there—they followed us in. They keep looking at us.” He nodded in the direction of a table behind Lena.
She turned around just in time to see the two men at the table avert their eyes. They were both dressed extremely casual, and there wasn’t anything particularly striking about them, but the longer Lena stared the more she realized that they were indeed casting regular glances in her direction as they ate.
She turned back to Tom. “Don’t be paranoid. They’re probably just two guys who think I’m a little young to have a baby.”
Tom raised his eyebrows. He looked off into a corner as he murmured, “This is the backcountry of the Carolinas. They’ve seen younger.”
Lena turned to look again. Two guys eating dinner, maybe in their late twenties, wearing jeans and heavier snow jackets. Jackets on—that wasn’t too weird, was it? It was a little warm in the restaurant; no one else was wearing a jacket. They were planning to leave quickly. Jeans—probably human-borns. What were the human-borns doing following her?
Lena spun back around to face Tom again. She was being crazy; there was no reason for human-borns to be following her…unless it was Rollin. Or, they might have been hired to find her by the New Faith. How would they have found her anyways? She was overreacting.
She reached out to touch one of Brandon’s flailing hands and held it between her thumb and finger, gently stroking his soft, smooth skin. She smiled at Tom. “Don’t worry so much.”
Tom glanced back over at the other table, and then smiled at Lena. They finished eating without interruption, enjoyed an extra side of fries, and generally had a good time, until it was time to go.
When they left, Lena managed to convince herself that it was a coincidence that the two men also left, leaving a wad of bills on the table and not bothering to get change. But when they followed them back to the hotel, and didn’t get out of their car, Lena knew something was wrong. They went back to their room without discussion, Tom carrying Brandon in his arms, and Lena hauling the empty carrier as they half ran into the room.
As Lena turned the lock on the door, threw the carrier onto a bed, and ran over to the window, Tom spoke very quietly. “I told you. I told you. This is it, Lena, this is it. You have to take him and leave. Now.”
“Stop…just stop!” Lena peeped through the curtains. They were still there, sitting in the car. One of them was looking at a map and talking on a cell phone. The other seemed to be picking at his nails.
Lena took a deep breath and tried to swallow her anxiety. We need to put Brandon down for bed.
The guy on the cell phone immediately stopped talking. Both of them were looking in the direction of the window. Lena spun around and sat down next to the wall. “Shit.”
“It’s them, isn’t it?” Tom asked.
Lena could hardly bring herself to look him in the eye. It must have been at the airport; they knew she would need an airport eventually, and it saved time to station the guards there. They had sat out in front of the airport for too long, just sitting and watching—it wasn’t typical behavior. It was easy to spot as odd. They had followed her until they were sure it was her, even underneath winter clothes and with a different haircut, and now that she had settled, they were making the call. She had brought them back to the hotel, and now they were cornered; they probably had an hour before the two guys in the car had enough people there to somehow extract them from the hotel without causing a scene.
Tom was moving around the room very quickly, throwing things into a backpack. He took several blankets and laid them out on a bed, then set Brandon down and started bundling him in layer after layer.
“Tom, stop. I have to think. There has to be a way.”
“There’s no time to think.” He said simply. He finished bundling his son and then walked off to the bathroom and returned with a towel set, which he wrapped up in a receiving blanket and put into Brandon’s baby carrier. “I’ll lead them off. You have to get Brandon out of here.”
Lena stared at him from the floor like a doe in the headlights. “No. No…no! Tom, no! It doesn’t have to be like that!” She got up from the floor and started walking towards him. “We can…we can sneak out together, or we can call the cops right now and—and—“
But it was ridiculous to think it would work. The Silenti had been evading and going over the heads of law and government for ages; if they sep
arated Lena from Brandon, she doubted she would ever see him again. The Silenti had their fingers in the social welfare system—placing orphans was one of their strong points.
Tom was pale. He smiled weakly. “All I have to do is look in your eyes to know that you’re walking out of this hotel with my son. Lena, I’m not. I was never going to get out of this alive.”
Lena stared at him, aghast. He was right, and she knew it, but it didn’t make it any easier. Her mind was still racing, trying to find a way to get him out with them, but the look was as fixed in his eyes as ever. She leaned in and hugged him, just wanting to feel that he was real one last time, until he finally pushed her away. He grabbed one of the small carry-on size shoulder bags he had bought when they had first set out from South Carolina and very carefully eased his tiny bundled son into it, leaving the zipper that ran along the top of the bag open halfway. Having had a bottle over dinner, Brandon was full and sleepy; he was probably going to sleep through the whole ordeal.
Tom handed Lena the backpack he had loaded up. “This has everything you’ll need until you can buy the things you need to replace for him.”
Their eyes met for one fleeting moment, and Tom pulled her back into a hug. You’re going to be okay. Remember that.
Then he picked up the baby carrier with the bundled up bathroom towels in it and was out the door before Lena could find herself and stop him. She walked silently back over to the window.
Tom walked out into the parking lot and buckled the carrier in like he always did. He slid into the driver’s seat, the lights came on, a plume of hot exhaust came out the back as the car started, and then he was pulling out of the lot. Lena turned her gaze to the other car—one of the guys had gotten out and was walking through the snow toward the hotel lobby entrance as his companion took the vehicle and made to follow Tom.
Lena turned back to the hotel room. It was now or never.
