by Kit Reed
She pushed him up against the wall. “What other thing?” The woman he was seeing. Emphasis on the was. That was over.
How many other woman were there, Ralph? How many were there anyway? She doesn’t know. She couldn’t ask. He had freed himself and was holding Annie by the scrawny shoulders, thundering.
“You know there are places for girls like you.”
“Not that!”
“Margaret, get me the phone.”
“Anything but that!” Sobbing, Annie promised to do better, gain back the weight, eat like a contender, anything if they’d only let her stay home; Ralph promised to do better too and Marg, what could she do but believe? Weren’t they saying exactly what she wanted to hear?
After the promises came the betrayals, the questions and the lies. Annie lied. She promised she would eat better when she was intent on starving, and Ralph? Was Ralph lying too?
There were moments of discovery. They had the pleading and the ultimatums and more promises and then they had the breaking of same, Annie’s in particular. And Ralph’s? Marg still doesn’t know. She wept. “Ralph, this can’t go on.”
Smooth as the curtain raiser in a sleight-of-hand act, Ralph pointed at Annie, roaring, “This can’t go on!”
Next came Ralph’s humiliating conference call with the Dedicated Sisters—Mrs. Abercrombie, this isn’t the child’s fault, it’s your fault. How did you go wrong? Then there was grief and trauma when they took Annie away. When the women came for Annie she left the house sobbing to be turned loose; she reached for Marg’s hands, “Mom, save me!”
Marg held tight to her daughter’s curled fingers and promised, “I’ll try.”
Ralph shook his head.
Clinging to Annie, Marg pleaded, “Ralph, I’m begging you!” and when their locked fingers tore apart and the Dedicated Sisters dragged her into the van, both mother and daughter ripped the air with their sad, guttural “Nooooo.”
Marg sobbed for hours after they took poor Annie away, and Ralph, who had apologized so many times and made so many promises? Ralph went out. He came back late and wouldn’t tell her where he’d been.
The rules at the convents the Dedicated Sisters run, are the same as the rules in the best detox centers. After all, what is this but detox of a more sophisticated kind? There is nothing headier or more intimate than the food we choose to put or not put into our mouths. The rules are: No parental contact for the first six months. The facility chosen for your daughter (it’s always daughters) will be at an undisclosed location, for her safety and yours. Those women have a hundred percent success rate. Those women are so stern!
Do not contact us. We’ll contract you.
Is this a threat? Marg misses Annie to death. She is ashamed of Annie but she misses her so much. At least, Marg told herself when they shut Annie in the van and drove away, at least I have my twins.
Now this.
“What?”
°Marg is distracted by an unexpected sound. She’d forgotten to turn off her cell phone.
His voice overflows, crackling. “Where are you?”
“Ralph?” She knows damn well it is Ralph. “It’s not important, Ralph. Where the hell were you?”
“Who, me? Where else would I be? I’m home.”
“That’s not what I mean. Where were you tonight? The twins are gone.”
“Marg, I got held up, it’s … The twins are gone?”
“Where have you been, Ralph.”
“Don’t worry, they’re probably just …”
Over time it has piled up—the bitterness of his betrayal, his scorn. Angry, she runs over his stupid evasions, yelling, “Where have you been all this fucking time?”
“What’s it to you, Marg? I’m home now. Come on home and get some sleep.”
“Sleep! Ralph, the twins!”
“You want to sleep well and wake up rested for your big day.”
“What?”
“You know.” He makes it sound like a question, like a kid. “Tomorrow?”
The Time Has Come clinic. It’s nothing she wanted, it was Ralph’s idea. When she can bring herself to answer, her voice is shaking with rage. “You mean for letting them cut up my face?”
“Don’t be dramatic, it’s only a little …”
She cuts him off. “How can you, when our …”
“Face it, honey, you’d be doing us all a favor.”
Mistake, Ralph. “Do you know how that makes me feel?”
“Honey, nobody wants to go around all doggy looking.”
“Doggy looking.” Enraged, she shouts, “Like if I wasn’t ugly, you’d stay home instead of being a big slut.”
“Wrong word,” he says angrily. “Men aren’t …”
“This is all your fault!”
“Wait a minute, Margaret.”
“You. ruined Annie with your nagging.” Her voice echoes in the deserted mall. It’s just too much. Her husband at the other end of the line, warm from some bimbo’s bed, the nerve! Pushing a face-lift when he … To her astonishment the truth pops out, and when it does, it’s huge. “But you’re not about to ruin me!”
She can almost see Ralph’s eyes zigzagging, looking for the exits. “So, Margaret. You lost the twins?”
“I didn’t lose them, Ralph, they ran away to find Annie, and I …”
She tosses the cell phone, laughing as it skates across the marble.
She can hear it peeping at her in Ralph’s voice, “Wait just a damn minute.”
She hates Ralph Abercrombie for what he’d done but she loves him for pushing her to this moment of decision. No point waiting for the midnight show to end, the twins aren’t inside and they aren’t at the skateboard park or in-line skating, either, they wouldn’t waste precious time like that. Her twins are out there in the wild blue, doing what she ought to be doing, she, Marg Abercrombie, who somewhere between the vanity of girlhood and here lost track of what’s really important. The integrity of her children. Herself. “Fuck waiting, Ralph.” She shouts, so the sound will reach the phone which, for all she knows, has lost the connection. She yells loud enough for Ralph and the night ushers and the last patrons in the midnight show at the mall movie house to hear: “I’m going too.”
9
It’s a long road between the shot you just called and the target you’re so sure you can hit. The trip is hard and the road is seldom straight. You keep going, but the rush that came when you first decided—gotta do this, let’s do this, we’re doing it!—has worn off.
Betz is tired and hungry. Everybody is. They’re sick of riding all day and getting up the next morning and crawling into the same crusty clothes. The air in the car is beginning to smell. Crumbs come up out of the upholstery and even though Dave tries to police his precious car, the fast-food containers and paper cups and greasy paper napkins are getting ahead of him. The Saturn has developed a new rattle in the undercarriage and the rusting fenders are dinged in some spots and crumpled in others because Dave has started letting the twins spell him at the wheel. Never mind that Danny is a harum-scarum driver and Betz just got her learner’s permit, they have to keep going. They will keep going at any cost.
Movement may not be action, but if you don’t keep moving you’ll never get anywhere.
Forget what they say in the ads. Getting there isn’t half the fun. It’s no fun.
They’ve been on the road for days.
Betz is still kind of in love with Dave even though at this point she knows more about him than a girl in love needs to know. That he uses spit to slick his hair. That thing he does when he’s asleep. She still loves him but would he just not whistle through his teeth all the time, and does he have to keep playing his Next CD, doesn’t he know it’s getting on her nerves? And Danny! They are, OK, flesh of each other’s flesh from birth and totally bonded, but frankly she is sick to death of him finishing her sentences and obsessing over how many ounces he just ate in what kind of time.
They have been together for too long. There have be
en reproaches and second thoughts. There is fighting in the car.
When it gets too bad, Dave, who still does most of the driving, threatens to stop the car and put the twins out like warring toddlers instead of treating them like the grownups that they practically are. He won’t follow through, of course, because if the twins are getting snarky and behaving badly, so is he. When Betz accidentally nicked the cement marker outside Wendy’s—listen, she just got her learner’s permit! —you could have heard him screeching in three states.
OK, they’re all stretched thinner than the shrink-wrap on a DVD.
Last week—week before—whenever it was that they decided to do this, they were all excited and happy. That was Day One and the top of Day Two. When they woke up in the car that Saturday morning Betz thought they’d find Annie by lunchtime for sure. They could rescue her and make it home in time for Betz to buy something hot to wear when Dave asks her to the prom. Danny probably thought by the time he digested all three fifty-ouncers he’d be kicked back in the family room with his maintenance drum of pretzel nuggets and his gallon water bottles, watching the Palm Beach clam roll semifinals on TV, and Dave? She doesn’t know what Dave thought. They’ve been together for days now, and she still doesn’t know.
Nobody thought they’d be on the road for so long.
On Day Two they crossed the state line into Kentucky singing, because the Dedicated Sisters convent Dave knew about was not far ahead—it said so right there on the MapQuest printout Dave had ordered at Easy Everything.
They were still feeling the rush at twilight when they rolled in to the overgrown courtyard of the Dedicated Sisters compound high on a mountain in Nebulon, Kentucky. It was not the first Kentucky mountain they’d tried. They’d been going up and down mountains all day. They should have known the right one would be craggy and forbidding. The Dedicated Sisters’ convent turned out to be in a Norman castle moved in stone by stone by some mining baron who had it put together, spent one night there and abandoned it. The door loomed like a slab put together by an ogre—all railroad ties and scrap metal, with the Dedicated Sisters trademark calipers nailed to it like a victim’s scalp. You’d expect to find your sister trapped like Rapunzel at the top of a tower in a place just exactly like this.
Danny’s voice dropped to a gritty whisper. “Awesome.”
“This is it.” Dave’s was too loud. He pulled the bell rope, which hung like a special effect from a strip-mall ghost house.
“This has gotta be it.” Betz shivered. It was just like the end of a movie. You don’t want it to be over because of what you’re feeling, but you do because you know the next part is going to be scary and you can’t be sure it has a happy ending.
“The Dedicated Sisters,” Danny murmured. “We’re almost done.”
They weren’t. Instead a desiccated woman hobbled out on a blackthorn stick to tell them that the place was permanently closed.
Dave took the lead. “What do you mean, closed?”
“Empty. Kaput. Shut down.”
“I don’t believe you. Now let us in.”
“Can’t do that. Forget it. Face it, they’re all gone.” The old woman was eyeing them like the witch checking Hansel and Gretel for the sell-by date. “You don’t look like you need fattening up. Or thinning down. Why don’t you fuck off and consider your case closed?”
“Lady, they took my girlfriend.”
My girlfriend. This hit Betz like a dart. She hissed, “Our sister.”
Dave corrected. “Their sister.”
The nun or whatever she was blinked like an old person who doesn’t exactly hear. “It’s Sister. Call me Sister.”
“Sister, do you have our—”
She swiveled her head like a flashlight, sweeping their faces with mad, occluded eyes. “I did but I don’t any more.”
Danny muttered, “She’s lying.”
“You’re lying.”
Betz said, “Either that or she’s crazy.”
“I heard that! I am not. Besides, this place is over.”
Dave said, “Not crazy or not lying?”
Danny said, “Over! Why?”
The Dedicated Sister waved at the broken windows, the huge door half off its hinges and gaping like a rotting mouth. “We weren’t up to standards.”
“What?”
She shrugged. “Don’t ask me. Thank the Reverend Earl. He shut us down.”
“Then what are you doing here?”
“Don’t ask me that, either, ’cause I sure as hell don’t know.”
Betz probed gently, “And the other Dedicated Sisters went … where?”
“Because they had to go.”
“I said, where?”
“Oh, somewhere else.” The old lady faltered. It was hard to tell whether they saw tears in her eyes or the film of extreme old age rising like an unstoppable tide. “They didn’t tell me. I woke up one day and they were all gone!”
“I’m sorry,” Betz said.
“Fuck sorry!” Danny moved in until he and the Dedicated Sister were standing nose to nose. “Tell us where they went.”
She backed away. “They didn’t even leave a note.”
He closed in. “I said, where did they go?”
“One of the other places.” She waved a hand like a captive mantis. “I guess.” Then the ancient Dedicated Sister planted her blackthorn stick in the soft part of Danny’s Converse high-top at the exact point where his metatarsals spread, and pushed off for the convent door.
“Yow!”
Dave barked, “Shut up, they’ll hear you.”
Right there in the courtyard, the twins turned on Dave. Danny snapped back. “Who’s going to hear us? Nobody’s here.”
Forgive her, Betz lost it. She couldn’t help it. She was strung so tight that she let go at him before the old lady shut the door. “You said this was it.”
Danny yelled, “You told us she’d be here.”
Dave was upset too. He yelled back. “Did not. Now, back off!” Danny punched him in the arm. “Did too!” ,
“I said it was a place to start!”
“Well it isn’t.”
“It sure as hell isn’t.”
“I’m sorry!”
“Fuck sorry. Now what the fuck are we going to do?”
“Yeah Dave, what?”
It was a tense moment. Dave’s big lead had fizzled. The Dedicated Sisters were as secretive as they were famous, the rumors you heard in school were tales brought back by survivors, fuzzy and inflated out of sight. Details were hard to find. Sure there were other installations cached here and there in the American landscape, there had to be—but where? Night Two was falling fast and he and the twins were adrift in nether Kentucky without a clue. They were angry and exhausted and pushed closer to the edge than they had ever been in their short lives.
Dave’s answer was not what they expected. “We’re not spending another night in this stupid car!”
“That’s not what he means!” Betz ran her fist into Dave’s arm. She loved him but right now she hated him. “You got us here. Now what are we going to do?”
You’ve got to say this for Dave, he handled it. “Talk in the morning. First, a motel.”
They covered the room on Dave’s father’s plastic. They ran Mr. Berman’s card through the food machines and showered and fell down among the crackling wrappers on the emperor-sized bed and slept like stones. By the next morning, when they tried to charge a road atlas and a fresh tank of gas, the line of credit had been stopped. Bad news. They were close to broke. Worse news: the ’rents could track them through the credit cards. It’s not the kind of thing you think about when you’re excited about running away but there were computers recording every transaction: location, the time and date. While Danny forked over cash from his Bonanzarama prize, a bright new fifty-dollar bill, Betz and Dave shredded their cards. Betz murmured, “Your dad must be pissed. We’d better get out of here before he catches up with us.”
Dave turned on her. “Why would
he want to do that?”
“He’s doesn’t want you back?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
Dave turned to her in the first and last intimate moment they’ve had together so far and said through his teeth, “Believe me, you don’t want to know.”
They have covered several states and dozens of states of mind since then, zigzagging across the country in a feverish attempt to hit on the next likely spot. There are convents rumored in every state they have passed through but none that they can find. Even when you come up empty, it takes time to follow up on these leads.
On quests like this one every disappointment is a little bit harsher than the last. Agreeing where to go next is a little bit tougher. It is a tribute to their strength that they are still going at this stage, and an even bigger tribute to their ingenuity—or the indifference of Dave’s parents and Ralph Abercrombie, who have not yet reported the twins missing—that they haven’t been caught.
It is Day Whatever now. They’ve been traveling for so long that Betz has lost track.
It’s late in the day and Dave is crashed in the back, asleep and drooling, and Danny is behind the wheel, which means Betz and her twin are pretty much alone. She puts the question to her brother. “Do you think the ’rents will catch us before we find her?”
His face clouds. “Do they want to?”
“Danny! Why wouldn’t they?”
Disturbed, he answers in the exact words Dave used on Day Three. “You don’t want to know.”
“Wait a minute.”
Danny swerves into the Grand Freezings section of a food plaza and yanks the emergency brake. “No time for questions. This is it.”
Betz groans. They are in front of a Gazillion Flavors store. The sign in the window reads: CONTEST TONIGHT. “Danny, I wish you wouldn’t.”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“You know it’s dangerous.”
He got out of the car and leaned back in to give her a broad, sweet, practiced hustler’s smile. “So hey, we’ve gotta eat.”
The real question, of course, is how they’ve managed to keep going since they hit their first dead end and all their plastic went sour. Partly it’s intelligence and partly it’s luck. Although the Dedicated Sisters keep their locations secret, a clever researcher like Dave Berman can go online and look at the few news stories that have leaked out and with a lucky guess, he can triangulate. So they have Dave to thank for the fresh route marked out in red on their new map. They have Danny to thank for the map.
