by S. B. Caves
No you didn’t, Francine wanted to say. I’m not listed. She decided not to focus on the lie just then, but stuck a little red flag in it for later. If not the phone book, then how?
‘I wanted to write everything down for you, but I don’t know how to do that sometimes.’
‘When did you escape?’
‘Must have been …’ She held out her hands and began counting off fingers, staring at the spotlights on the ceiling. ‘I think two weeks now.’
‘And you haven’t gone to the police?’
‘No.’
‘Why?’
‘They’ll send me back. They know about everything. They’re in on it too.’
Francine took a break to let Lena continue eating. She stared at her own food and saw a rubbery orange triangle of cheese hanging down from inside her burger. The girl had lied to her about how she had found her address – that was strike one. But Francine couldn’t help but feel there was more that Lena wasn’t saying. She sipped cola and thought about it some more.
*If you’re tired, little girl, close your eyes and go to sleep … *
‘Can you tell me about the house where you and Autumn were?’ She refused to call her daughter Mel. The very notion was obscenely offensive to her.
‘It’s deep inside the woods. That’s where he kept us. There’s nobody around, nothing but trees and hills. There’s a river that goes nearby.’
‘Do you think you can talk me through how you escaped?’
Lena tilted her head to one side and then the other. ‘Leslie was saying he felt like he had a stomach ache. I could see he was sick because he kept screwing his face up like this …’ She pulled a face, her features changing so rapidly that it startled Francine. In a flicker, it was back to normal. ‘I said he should sit up if his stomach was hurting him, because maybe that would help. But he said he couldn’t sit up. Then he was like this, doing this.’ She gripped her own arm. ‘He said he couldn’t breathe. Then he just went quiet and I heard him make a mess in his trousers. That’s what always happens when people die. Did you know that? They mess themselves. So I guess he was dead.’
‘What did you do?’
‘I left him there. It was early in the morning so I still had a lot of daytime. I followed the river and it got me through to a clearing. Later that day I came out of the forest and I was on the road. So I hitched a lift.’
‘Why didn’t you take Autumn with you?’
‘She wasn’t at the house just then. They took her away for a party a few days before. I didn’t get to go because Leslie always has to be at the house and he has to have somebody to keep him company.’
One of the McDonald’s employees was going around collecting abandoned trays, spraying antibacterial cleaner on the tables and wiping them down with a roll of blue kitchen towel. He neared Francine and Lena’s table, and the girl stopped talking and bowed her head, looking at the employee out of the corner of one eye.
‘It isn’t safe to be here.’ She shook her head. ‘They could check here like that,’ she clicked her fingers, ‘like it’s nothing. They could walk in here and sit down and that’s it. They won’t like that I’ve gone.’
‘It’s all right,’ Francine said, as soothingly as she could. ‘Nobody is going to touch you while I’m here.’
‘It’s not all right!’ Lena slid out of the booth and the tray clattered to the floor, the pink milkshake slopping out of the cup. ‘You don’t know! They could be waiting for me right now!’
An old man in thick glasses looked round from a booth a few feet away. Francine stood up and put her hands out in front of her in a don’t shoot gesture. ‘Easy, Lena. It’s okay.’ She heard one of the workers grumbling from behind the counter before appearing with a mop. It sounded like he said, ‘What the fuck is this?’ but Francine wasn’t sure. She turned to the young man and said, ‘Please don’t do that now. We’ll be leaving in a second.’ When she turned back to Lena, she saw that the girl was breathing heavily through her slack mouth. Her forehead, now greasy with sweat and lumpy with acne, shone brightly beneath the spotlights. ‘Lena? Are you okay?’
‘I don’t want to be in here.’ The girl raised a shaky hand and combed it through her hair. ‘I need to get away to a place where they can’t find me.’ She pointed at Francine accusingly. ‘You need to get me away from here.’
‘I can do that. But we need to talk some more.’
‘I don’t want to fucking talk any more!’ she roared, her pupils aligning straight again, her throat inflating to accommodate her rage. Francine flinched back, feeling her heart gallop.
Without warning, Lena spun and ran gracelessly out of the restaurant. Francine hesitated for a second and then took up the chase, bursting through the door after her. She was blocked by a wall of flesh – an overweight woman and her brood, paused mid-waddle on their way into McDonald’s to watch the drama. Francine huffed irritably and manoeuvred around them, she heard the woman say, ‘The word is excuse me!’ If she’d had more time, she would’ve liked to point out that those were in fact two words.
Lena zigzagged into the busy road, narrowly escaping a collision with a car, which screeched and fishtailed to an abrupt halt. ‘Lena!’ Francine screamed, but the girl didn’t hear her over the angry car horns.
Francine waited for a break in the traffic before hurrying across the road. She tracked Lena’s movements through a residential lane that bisected the backyards of two rows of houses. The girl ran drunkenly, frantic and flailing. Francine could hear her yelping breathlessly, her reedy voice appealing to God.
‘I can help you!’ Francine yelled, her own voice pinballing off the brick walls. She didn’t have anything to use as leverage to halt the girl. When Lena refused to stop, Francine went into a higher gear. Thankfully she was wearing her Skechers, which she always changed into once she was at the office. Arms and legs pumping in unison, she sprinted until she had closed the gap to a stone’s throw. Lena wheeled round, saw her and screamed as though she were some axe-wielding maniac instead of the woman she’d been speaking to minutes ago. ‘I’m not going to hurt you!’ Francine called as Lena’s legs buckled beneath her. The girl fell into a heap on the floor, limbs spreading out like a starfish. Francine stopped running, ghostly puffs of vapour escaping her mouth as she panted.
It was only as she bent down to help Lena up that she noticed the girl was giggling.
3
They were locked in the rush-hour traffic, the steady downpour ensuring that the vehicles moved at a crawl.
‘We’ll need to stop for my bag,’ Lena said emotionlessly. It was the first thing she’d said since getting into the car. It’d taken Francine almost an hour to calm her down after she’d caught up with her; then, without any real indication, Lena’s mood had changed. There were no more hysterics or random outbursts. She became a mannequin, completely compliant.
‘What?’ Francine asked. She hadn’t been listening, her mind a million miles away. *The house. In the woods. *
‘My bag. It has my stuff in it. I hid it by the dumpsters.’
‘What dumpsters?’
‘Near your apartment. I’ve got clothes in there; woman at a thrift store let me go through a whole bin of stuff, told me to take what I wanted. She gave me some cake, too.’
Francine listened as Lena began to hum under her breath. She hadn’t thought about that lullaby in a very long time, and hearing the melody float from the girl’s lips was like a kick in the stomach. Thinking back, she couldn’t recall how she’d come up with it; whether it was some variation of an existing song or something she’d concocted herself. But she knew the tune didn’t belong in Lena’s mouth.
‘Lena, I think it might be a good idea for you to see a doctor.’
A long, exasperated sigh escaped the girl. ‘No,’ she said drearily. ‘No, no, no.’ She lifted a foot and pressed it against the dashboard. Her knees were studded with tiny pebbles, crimson runners of blood oozing their way down mucky, scarred legs.
She had
n’t really noticed it at first, but in the confines of the car, Francine could smell the odour rolling off Lena. The scent of musky sweat, a pungent dampness soaked deep into her clothes, and her sour, undernourished breath. There was something else in the complex mingling of aromas that she couldn’t quite define. Her nostrils flared as she tried to separate the smells. Then she realised it was urine.
‘You could have injuries. You might be sick from all this running around in the rain.’
‘You mean like pneumonia?’
‘I don’t know. I’m just saying that you should get checked out.’
‘Can’t go to doctors and can’t go to the police. Maybe you don’t understand that, but I do, and I’m telling you now I’m not going. I’ll jump out of this car while it’s moving if you try and force me.’ She turned and locked onto Francine. Francine kept staring straight ahead, watching the windscreen wipers arc slowly back and forth.
‘I’m not going to force you. I’m just thinking about your health.’
‘If you’re so concerned about my health, then you should take me away someplace where they won’t ever find me.’ She barked with laughter; her throat sounded rusty and coated in phlegm. Francine thought that maybe she really was sick. ‘Listen to me. They’re everywhere. Like him.’ Lena pointed at a car inching along in the left-hand lane. ‘He could be one. Or him.’ She waved at an actor spread across a billboard in the distance. ‘He could definitely be one too. Probably most likely is. Fuck’s sake, you don’t get it at all, do you?’ Her hand reached up to her head and pinched out a few strands of hair. She stretched them taut in her fingers and marvelled at them. ‘All over the place. Like rats.’
Francine thought very carefully before speaking again. By now she was beginning to understand the verbal dexterity needed to extract information from Lena. Just when she thought a particular line of dialogue was going smoothly, the girl would change pace, altering the trajectory of the conversation. Francine could feel herself losing patience, the anger threatening to bob up to the surface. If there was ever a time she needed to keep her temper, it was now, she thought.
‘If you have any ideas about where you would like to go, I’ll gladly take you th—’
Before she could finish the sentence, Lena broke in, ‘You got a space rocket, huh? You can fly me to Mars?’ She chuckled, but her lips weren’t smiling.
‘No, afraid not.’
‘Then I want to go to the big island. Hawaii.’
Without discussing the finer details of the girl’s request, such as why she wanted to go there or how she planned to achieve this without a passport, Francine said, ‘Hawaii sounds good. I’ve been meaning to take a vacation. But before I take you anywhere, you have to help me.’
‘Help you?’ Lena snorted. ‘I did help you. I’ve told you about Mel.’
‘You didn’t tell me where she is.’ Francine could taste the urine stink now, touching the back of her throat. Somehow identifying the smell increased its potency, until the girl’s piss saturated the whole car.
‘That’s because I don’t know! A house in the woods, fucking miles away in the middle of fucking nowhere.’
Francine turned the engine off. The traffic wasn’t going anywhere. As calmly as she could manage, she said, ‘You’re lying.’
‘Yeah, right, I’m lying. If I’m lying, how come I know so much about Mel?’
‘Her name is Autumn,’ Francine growled. ‘Autumn. My daughter’s name is Autumn.’ Her fingers tightened around the wheel until she was strangling the rubber and could feel the friction burn on her palms.
‘We call her—’
‘Get out.’
‘What?’
‘I said get out of my car. And if I see you again, I’m going to call the cops quicker than a heartbeat, do you understand me?’ Francine swivelled in her seat, meeting Lena face on. The girl’s breath curdled the air between them. ‘You think you’re going to torture me about my daughter? You think I haven’t dealt with a thousand lunatics just like you?’
A collage of expressions contorted Lena’s face. Confusion gave way to venom, and then all at once she wore a blank mask. ‘I know her real name is Autumn,’ she said, docile as a doped-up dental patient. ‘But we have to call her Melody. That’s all I’ve ever called her. They gave us all new names. My real name is Cherry,’ she added quietly.
‘I don’t think you’re telling the truth, Lena. I really don’t.’
‘That’s fine, I guess,’ she shrugged. ‘You don’t have to believe me. I didn’t think you would. All I had to do was tell you, and I’ve kept up my end of the bargain.’
Francine felt the rims of her eyes sting with the threat of tears. She licked her lips and looked away, blinking until the situation was under control. ‘If what you’re saying is true, wouldn’t you want to help me find her? Wouldn’t you want her to be free?’
‘Sure. Course I would. I just know it isn’t possible.’
‘But why? Why wouldn’t it be possible? You could show me where she is and I’ll collect her. I don’t need to go with the cops; I could … her daddy and I could go. We could take guns.’ Take guns? What was she saying? Sure, Francine, you’ve done a few hours at the shooting range and now you think you’re the Terminator.
‘She’s in a house in the woods. But sometimes she goes to other houses, too. They take us out sometimes for a few days, but mostly we stay in the woods. That way we don’t bother nobody and nobody has to know about our business.’
‘So what’s stopping me from getting to her?’ Francine reached across and without thinking took one of Lena’s hands. ‘Please, Lena. If you know how I can help her, then tell me. Tell me straight. I know you can. Cut out the riddles and the crazy talk and just tell me.’
‘You bring guns, but they’ve got plenty of guns,’ Lena said after a long pause. She sat there watching the rain speckle the windows, her hand limp and cold inside Francine’s. ‘You wouldn’t even make it near the house.’
A car honked behind them, momentarily bamboozling them both. The horn blared again, holding the note of anger, until Francine saw that there was a gap in the traffic.
‘So what are we going to do, Lena? You need to make a decision, here and now.’
‘I can’t go back there. You can’t ask me to.’
‘Then what exactly do you expect me to do for you?’
‘Take me somewhere far away.’
‘Hawaii.’
‘Yeah. Or somewhere further.’
Francine exhaled slowly, a screwdriver grinding in her heart. ‘It’s not going to happen, Lena. You have to understand that. I think you’ve been through a lot and I want to be as straight as I possibly can with you. But I’m not going to help you unless you can prove to me that you’re telling the truth.’
Lena groaned petulantly. ‘But I can’t prove it unless I go back, and there’s no way I’m doing that. Isn’t there any way for me to help you without going there?’
‘There might be,’ Francine considered. A drum began beating in her skull; the onset of a migraine causing sparks of pain to shoot down her neck. ‘But you have to tell me everything. And I don’t want any more antics. Got it? Lena, look at me. Got it?’
‘Yeah. Sure.’
‘That tune you keep humming. Autumn sang that to you, didn’t she?’
‘Not to me,’ Lena said sadly, fiddling with her hands. ‘When the new girls get there, they’re all scared. They cry a lot, especially at night. And when they make a fuss, it turns into trouble for all of us. So with some of the younger ones, Mel would … Autumn would sing to them. She was good with the new ones.’
‘Jesus Christ,’ Francine whispered. Her throat closed to a pinhead, denying her air. She rolled the window all the way down, gasping. ‘Lena, I need to know more. Please … I believe you, all right? I’m sorry I yelled earlier. But this is why you need to tell me everything. Why don’t you come back to mine? We’ll be safe at my apartment. You’ll be able to talk freely. I can give you some food and
…’ she hesitated, knowing it was a huge risk, ‘you can stay on the sofa tonight. Does that sound fair to you?’
Lena shrugged.
‘And you can take a nice long shower. I bet you’re dying for a shower.’ Lena continued to stare down at her hands. Francine wanted to hammer that last point home, to insist that the girl bathe, but she didn’t. ‘If you tell me what I need to know, and you’re completely truthful with me, I’ll make sure that you reach Hawaii safely. Do you know my ex-husband? No, you probably don’t …’
‘Will something.’
Feathers brushed Francine’s nape. She rolled her shoulders and shuddered gently. ‘Will Wright. How did you know?’
Lena shrugged again, and Francine felt the tension bunch in her shoulders.
* * *
When at last Francine pulled into the parking space of her apartment complex, Lena opened the door and tumbled out while the car was still in motion. Francine pulled the handbrake up and watched as the girl skittered over to the dumpsters and knelt in a puddle, sifting through the mounds of garbage bags. It was collection day tomorrow and the rats would be squeaking, biting through the plastic bags and dragging banana peel down the street.
The girl’s jittery, random behaviour had set Francine’s nerves on edge. She felt as though she’d just been on a long-haul flight and had stopped off at an unfamiliar airport. This stranger had breezed into her life and drunk the energy right out of her. Now Francine was running on fumes, the hinges of her jaw achy from yawning, every blink chafing her eyeballs. Coffee, that was what she needed, and lots of it.
Eventually, after clambering over trash and rifling through the bags, Lena lifted out a backpack and held it aloft like a trophy. Francine got out of the car, locked the doors and approached her. The sky flashed white and the rain started drilling on the cars so hard it sounded as though pennies were falling from the clouds.
They jogged into the lobby and shook themselves off. Francine looked at Lena’s bag. It was something a first-grader might take to school with them: bubblegum pink with a laminated Disney character emblazoned across the zip pocket. It was scuffed, battered and bulging.
