I walked to the back of the car. It had an Arkansas plate—red, white, and blue, The Natural State etched along the bottom. I coughed on the exhaust and moved back around to the side of the car.
“Caleb.” My teeth were chattering again. I put my mouth against the crack of the window. “Tell her to roll down her window, and I’ll talk to her right here. Meanwhile I want you to get out. Right now. Right this instant. Or I’m walking away. I mean it.”
“No,” he said. “You get in, Sarah-Mary. She’s not dangerous. I promise.”
“You don’t sit in a stranger’s car.”
“She’s nice. She gave me dry socks. I’m wearing them. She gave me peanuts, too.” He held up a bulk bag of shelled peanuts for me to see.
I shook my head. I knew Caleb well enough to know it wasn’t the promise of peanuts that had lured him into the backseat of this woman’s car. He could be naïve, but he wasn’t a complete idiot, and anyway, he wasn’t starving—he’d just eaten at McDonald’s. He was just dead set on helping her.
I moved to the front of the car, wiping rain from my forehead. The windshield wasn’t dark like the other windows, and now I could see her clearly, staring back at me through eyeglasses with thin frames and square lenses. She didn’t look young, but she didn’t look old. She might have been thirty-five, or forty-five, or anywhere in between. She had both hands on the steering wheel, but whatever she tried next, I was ready: I had my backpack slung on just one shoulder, and I’d already unzipped the little compartment where I’d packed my pepper spray.
“Tell my brother to get out of the car,” I yelled, loud enough, plenty loud enough, for her to hear me through the glass. But she kept staring at me. She wore a white puffy coat, and just like the car, it looked too nice, and too clean, for someone who didn’t have a place to live. It seemed like she must be hiding, probably from the police.
“I’ll help you,” I said. “Okay? Whatever it is, I’ll help you. But I need you to make my brother get out of the car. I’m not comfortable with him being in there with someone we don’t know. I’m sure you understand.”
Caleb opened the back window again, sticking his head out just a little. “I’m not getting out, Sarah-Mary! I’m not getting out until I know you’ll help. Just get in. Get in the front.”
He said it as if I were the one being unreasonable, standing out there in the rain. Before I could make it back to his side of the car, he’d put his window back up. I glared down at my reflection. Aside from the part about getting in a stranger’s car, he really was being smart. He knew better than to even let me in the backseat with him—he knew I’d drag or push him out.
“I’m going to leave,” I said. “I’m going to leave you here, and I’m going back to the McDonald’s. I’m going to have someone call the police. And she’ll be in a whole lot more trouble than she is now. She’ll be ARRESTED. For KIDNAPPING.” I pounded on the glass of her window, hard enough that I hurt my hand. I turned away. “Seriously, Caleb. Here I go.”
I only walked a few steps back up the road. We both knew I couldn’t go anywhere. What if she drove away with him inside? What if I came back with the police and the car was gone, and he was gone with it? Right now, I was at least here, and if the car so much as rolled forward one inch, I’d jump up on the hood. I’d get my fingers into the edges by the windshield, and she couldn’t make me let go. I didn’t know how hard it would be to kick in the glass of a windshield. But I was ready to try.
The car didn’t roll forward, though. It stayed where it was, the engine still running, so there was nothing for me to do but stay there as well. I pulled my hood back up over my head and crossed my arms, staring at the passenger side’s front window. Finally, it rolled down.
I crouched down enough to see in, staying a few feet away.
She leaned across the parking brake and looked up at me, her eyebrows raised as if she’d asked me a question. She waved me in with her hand, smiling a little. She didn’t say anything.
Caleb moved his head up into my view. “She’s not a killer, Sarah-Mary. Geez. If she was a killer she would have killed me by now.”
I ignored him, my eyes on her. I was shivering, and my teeth were still clacking together. I knew I wasn’t thinking straight. I had to be careful. I couldn’t use the pepper spray. Not with Caleb inside.
I bent my knees to get a better look at her. She’d ducked her head to get a better look up at me. Her eyes were sort of greenish behind her glasses, but she looked like she might be Mexican. I guessed that was it, the reason she was hiding. She maybe didn’t have papers.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
She didn’t answer. Caleb was still pressed up behind her headrest, giving me a scolding look, like I was being rude.
I tried again. “Cómo se llama?” I’d been taking Spanish since ninth grade, and I could write it okay, though both teachers had told me my pronunciation was terrible.
Still she didn’t answer. She held up a little plastic orange packet. When I squinted, I could make out HOT and 6 HOURS on the side, and I realized it was those little toe warmers they sold in bins at Appliance Depot. People put them in their boots when they had to be out in the cold. She was offering them to me, but only as a condition. I had to get in the car.
Caleb was still pressed up against the back of her seat. I glared at him as he brought a peanut up to his mouth. He slipped it through his lips, still looking at me. I heard the crunch of it in his teeth.
I shook my head at him, my fury plain for him to see. I didn’t give a damn about the toe warmers. I wasn’t stupid. At least not usually. I would have stood out there all night, getting frostbite or whatever, if it had been just me.
4
THE INSIDE OF the car smelled musty, like wool that had gotten wet, with an undersmell of Caleb’s peanut breath wafting up from the back. But it was clean enough—there wasn’t any junk I could see on the floor or around the gearshift—just her keys, with a little silver S attached to the ring.
“She’s nice,” Caleb said. I whipped my head around to tell him that if he told me the woman we didn’t know was nice one more time, I was going to lose my mind. But then I saw he wasn’t talking to me. He was talking to the woman. About me.
“She doesn’t always seem nice.” He cupped more peanuts beneath his chin, ready for delivery. “Especially at first. But she is. She’ll help you out.”
The woman nodded, though she’d scooted close to her door. I gave her a look to let her know that was probably a good idea. I’d taken off my mittens, and I had my backpack in my lap, my right hand inside the pocket with the pepper spray. She glanced down at my hidden hand, looking anxious. That was fine. Let her be anxious.
“You understood what he said?” I asked. “You understand English?”
She nodded again, pushing up her glasses. She’d put the Toasty Toes packet away, back in her coat pocket. I’d already refused it. I curled my toes inside my damp socks.
“Then you better start talking,” I said. I was acting tough, like I had a card to play. Which, of course, I did not. Caleb started to say something, but I held up my hand. “I want to hear it from her.”
She shifted in her seat. The nylon of her white coat made a sh-sh sound, but she didn’t say anything. She kept staring at me through her glasses. Even with her coat, I could see the rise and fall of her shoulders, and I knew she was breathing hard.
“Rápido,” I said. I couldn’t roll the r, but I snapped my fingers. She knew what I meant. “Come on. Start talking.”
“I just want to leave,” she whispered.
Or maybe she said, “I just want to live.” I couldn’t tell. What was clear was that she had some kind of accent, and it didn’t sound Mexican at all. Want had come out like vant, like the way a German in a movie would say it. But I didn’t think she was German. I looked at the bones of her face, the hollows of her cheeks, her scared eyes. My heart started to pound. I knew where I’d seen her. She looked different with the knit hat and mor
e of her hair showing, and no lipstick now. But I knew.
I leaned away from her, a siren going off in my head. Caleb was right behind her seat. I pulled the pepper spray out and aimed it at her. She held up her gloved hands in surrender. I didn’t care.
“Caleb!” I kept my eyes on her hands. “Get out of the car! Get out now! She’s a criminal. They’re looking for her. I just saw her on TV.”
My whole arm was shaking. I grabbed my elbow with my left hand to try to keep it steady. But I was going to do it. I’d already popped the release. As soon as he got out, I would jump out too, and I’d give her a good spray, right in the face, before I slammed my door.
“Caleb?”
He didn’t answer. When I let myself glance into the backseat, he was just sitting there with his arms crossed.
The woman turned away and covered her face with her hands, leaning down against the steering wheel.
“Caleb. You listen to me.” I tried to keep my voice calm, but my finger stayed on the trigger. “This is serious. Even if you think she’s nice, understand she’s done something wrong. They were showing her on TV. I don’t know just what she did, but they’re telling people to watch for her. She’s maybe hurt people. And even if you don’t believe that, it’s for sure true that we would be in trouble with the police for sitting here with her like this.” I clenched my teeth. “Now get yourself out of this car right now.”
He shook his head. The sun had started to set, and the silvery light coming in through his window cast half his face in shadow. It was still him. Still Caleb, my little brother. But all at once—maybe it was the serious way he was looking at me—I could picture how he would look when he was grown, older than I was now.
“No way,” he said. “She didn’t do anything wrong. She didn’t hurt anyone. She just didn’t want to go to Nevada. That’s the only reason they’re looking for her.”
“You don’t know that,” I snapped. “You think that’s true because that’s what she told you?” I didn’t want to call him stupid again, but my God. I was trying not to breathe so hard. I didn’t want her to know I was scared.
“It is true,” the woman said. She sat up straight again, resting both hands on the wheel.
“You stay quiet,” I said. But I lowered the pepper spray to my lap. I couldn’t spray it with us both in the car with her. “Caleb. You don’t know if she’s telling the truth. But she probably isn’t. It’s only the bad ones that didn’t go when they were supposed to.” I eyed her from the side. “The ones who are still killing people.”
“I have killed no one.” She acted all offended, rolling her eyes, which, it seemed to me, is what any good actress would do. “And I won’t ever kill anyone. I just didn’t want to go to a”—she paused to make quote marks with her fingers—“detention center. I’m not going to participate in my own persecution.”
Now I rolled my eyes. That was a little much. First of all, they weren’t called detention centers. They were security zones. It was true that a lot of Muslims were living in those little trailers, and that they had to use public bathrooms that they all shared, but that’s only because the government was still trying to build housing, and hello, they were in the middle of a desert, so everything needed to be brought in by truck or train. But the trailers seemed fine for now. I mean, I’d been going to school in a glorified trailer every day.
And second of all, the government was sending them off to Nevada for their own good. We’d talked about it in social studies when I was at Hannibal High. Mr. Gordon said the security zones had fences and barbed wire and tower guards holding machine guns, but that was just as much to keep out people who wanted to kill Muslims as it was to keep the Muslims in. That’s how mad everybody was. It was all costing taxpayers a whole lot of money, and Mr. Gordon didn’t see how it could go on forever.
“Well. You should have gone,” I said. “Cause now you’re probably going to end up in a real detention center, and it won’t be the kind with quote marks around it.”
“No, she isn’t!” Caleb slapped the back of my seat hard enough so I felt it on the other side. “We’re going to help her, Sarah-Mary. You promised!”
I swallowed. It was true. I’d promised him. He knew what that meant for me, and that I wasn’t like our mom. But this was crazy, too much. He didn’t understand how serious this was. He was trying to be like Jesus, and judge not. He was going to welcome the stranger and love everyone the same. That was all very nice, usually, but not for this. Sometimes you had to judge, or you were going to get killed. Or arrested.
She looked at Caleb in the rearview. “Your sister is right. You should go with her. You would get in trouble, and it’s very serious.” She glanced at me. “I am sorry. I should not have told him to get in the car. But he looked cold and wet. I thought he was lost.” She pressed her hand to her ear and lowered her voice. “He was crying. I thought he was hurt.”
“She gave me dry socks,” Caleb said. “And now we’re going to help her back.”
The woman gestured at her face. “And he guessed right away. He knew.”
I nodded. I’d already figured out what to do. There was only one way I could think to keep my promise to him without doing something illegal.
“We’ll help her, Caleb.” I looked back at the woman. “We’ll help you turn yourself in. They won’t be as hard on you if you turn yourself in.” I didn’t know if that was true, but it seemed likely. It seemed fair. “And however bad you think it’s going to be in Nevada, it can’t be half as bad as sitting out here in your car.” I shook my head. “And they’re going to get you eventually.”
She looked at me, tilting her head. “How old are you?”
I raised my chin so I was looking down at her. I didn’t want her to think I was some kid she could talk down to. And I knew for a fact that when I put my mind to it, and with a certain fake driver’s license, I could pass for twenty-one, though I was more convincing when I had the chance to pile on the mascara. I would have lied and said I was older, but Caleb probably would tell her I was lying.
“I’ll be sixteen in March.”
She sighed, closing her eyes. “He told me you were nineteen.”
I turned around and gave Caleb a look. He stared back at me and shrugged.
“Where are your parents?” she asked. The look on her face made it seem like we were the ones with the weird situation.
“Don’t worry about that,” I said.
She still looked confused. “You live close to here? It is dark now. They must be expecting you home for dinner soon.”
Caleb started to say something, and I turned around to shush him. We didn’t need to start telling some Muslim woman anything about our parents. Or even Aunt Jenny. I looked back at her to let her know we weren’t giving out more information.
“Well,” she said. “Even at fifteen, you have studied history. You know why any group of people that is first registered, and then rounded up, should be very nervous.”
She was talking about the Holocaust. But that was totally different. The Nazis registered people and then killed them, even the little kids. America was just making Muslims go to the safety zones for their own protection, and for ours.
She sighed. “Not to mention the internment of Japanese Americans and German Americans during the same time period.”
She talked funny. It wasn’t just her accent, whatever it was. It was the words she chose, most of them bigger than they needed to be, and also the way she said them, like you were maybe a little bit stupid if you didn’t automatically agree with every single one.
“Where you from?” I asked.
“Originally?”
I nodded. Duh.
“Iran.”
I shrank back. That just pretty much sounded scary, especially the weird way she said it, like EE-dan, not Eye-ran. I knew the capital of Iran was Tehran, which sounded even worse, like terror. It’s from a different language, okay, but if they ever wanted to make a better impression, they should probably chang
e it.
“It’s just a country. A place.” She looked annoyed. “And for the last seven years, I’ve lived in Jonesboro, Arkansas. I taught at the university.”
That made sense, that she was a teacher. She totally had that way about her, like she knew everything you didn’t.
“What did you teach?” Caleb asked. He’d moved to the middle of the backseat, one hand resting on each headrest. Still, I guessed if I tried to grab him and pull him out, he’d go all rigid. He’d hook his feet under one of the seats.
She rubbed her eyes. “Electrical engineering.”
“Wow,” Caleb said. “You must be smart.”
Or she was lying, I thought. But it was a pretty smart lie. I didn’t know anything about electrical engineering. It wasn’t like I could quiz her and trip her up. And even if it was the truth, it seemed kind of suspect. Somebody who knew about electrical engineering probably knew how to make a bomb.
“She’s got to get to Canada,” Caleb said. “You promised you’d help her, Sarah-Mary.”
I turned around and gave him a look to let him know how crazy he sounded. “Uh, how am I going to do that?”
“I don’t know. But you’ll think of something.” He turned to the woman. “She’s really sneaky,” he said. “She makes up the best lies.”
The woman did not look especially relieved. But I have to say, I knew Caleb had meant it as a compliment, and I took it as one. If I were a foreigner trying to sneak out of the country, I’d for sure come up with a better plan than sitting out here in my car.
“You should turn yourself in,” I said. I knew I’d already made that clear, but I wanted to say it again, and hear myself saying it, just for my conscience. My brain was already starting to think of what else she could do, what I would do if I were her. Even that, just thinking about it, seemed morally wrong.
American Heart Page 6
