American Heart

by Laura Moriarty

  Chloe nodded, even smiling a little. I actually thought she really might be feeling better, but after the woman went back to the counter, and the manager got far enough away with his mop, she put her palm to her forehead and turned away, and she made a little crying sound. Clearly, the pencil was still digging in.

  I leaned across the table. “Can you take any more of the medicine you bought?”

  She shook her head, just barely. “I’ve already taken the limit. And it’s not touching it. I have never felt pain like this in my life.” Her voice wavered. “Even giving birth. That was nothing to this.”

  She turned her face to the window, looking out at the snow. She was deciding. I knew she was.

  I leaned my head back as far as I could, trying to see around the partition to the counter. I was thinking about getting up to see if the blond woman was there, scooping up fries or taking an order, or doing anything besides calling the police because she recognized Chloe, or thought she did, and hadn’t believed me for a second.

  “Just hang on a little longer,” I whispered. I turned back to look out the window. People were driving slowly because of the snow, and though it was just a little after four o’clock, most everybody had their lights on. So it made sense that the brothers were taking so long. It didn’t mean they weren’t coming back. They could come back any minute.

  A woman carrying a child on her hip shuffled through the snow in the parking lot. The child looked maybe five years old, too big to be carried, but she was wearing tights and ballet slippers, and she cuddled in close to the woman’s neck like she was afraid of the snow. The woman held out her tongue to catch a snowflake, and after she chomped down on one, or pretended to, she smiled and said something. The girl tilted back her head and laughed.

  Chloe’s hand was still pressed against her ear, but her eyes were on the girl, and all at once, she looked miserable in a whole new way.

  “You thinking about your son?”

  She closed her eyes and nodded.

  My own mom was probably in Virginia, maybe spending time with that guy she’d met online, working on her own plan. Maybe she sometimes worried that she was a bad mother, or missed us, like Chloe missed her son now. But probably not for long.

  If you asked Aunt Jenny what was wrong with my mother, she would say it was that she didn’t have God. If Aunt Jenny ever talked to Chloe enough to not be scared of her, she might even say that’s exactly what was right with her—that believing in Allah was enough like believing in God to make her a decent person, and the kind of mom that would feel guilty about leaving her kids, or letting them leave you. But that’s not right. I mean, obviously I don’t have kids. But clearly, I don’t leave people in fast-food restaurants, either. I think the thing that’s missing in my mom, and maybe a lot of people who do things that are way worse, is that they don’t care so much when other people hurt. Or if they do care, they work around it in their head so they don’t have to feel bad about it. Given some things I’ve seen in the news, I knew there were plenty of religious people, from here and all over, who could pull that trick at least as well as my mom.

  But Chloe wasn’t one of them.

  “How’d you get water in your ear?” I asked. I wasn’t sure if she would answer or not. She was rocking back and forth again, her eyes closed. I was mostly trying to distract her.

  “The bathtub.” She kept rocking, but she opened her eyes. “The friends who hid me, they had a tub in the basement. I couldn’t take showers upstairs because someone might come by. I was in the tub when someone did come by, the neighbor we were worried about. She stayed, and she stayed. The water was getting cold, and I wanted to rinse my hair and get out, but I was afraid to turn on the faucet, in case the neighbor could hear.” She shrugged. “So I dipped my hair back into the water, and some got in my ear.”

  That was so unfair. Even with how hard she’d tried, and even with all the good luck we’d had, just a few drops of bathtub water was what was going to do her in. Maybe not. But now it had been almost an hour since the brothers left us. They could be back on I-35 North, headed up to Saint Paul. The medicine, and maybe the police, would be still waiting at the pharmacy, if Audrey Chang had even called the prescription in. Both brothers would probably feel bad about not coming back. They’d wanted to help, at least before they’d gotten scared.

  “Still waiting for your dad, huh?” It was the blond woman again. She’d sneaked up to our table. She had a squirt bottle in one hand and a rag in the other, but she wasn’t using them yet. And the empty tables around us all looked pretty clean.

  I nodded.

  She turned to Chloe, her small eyes steady. “Seems like you should call a cab or something, since you’re hurting so much. Do you live around here? Are you from here?”

  Chloe nodded. She looked like the saddest person I’d ever seen.

  “Whereabout?”

  I leaned forward. “Why do you ask?” I smiled. But we both understood the conversation had just gotten less friendly.

  The woman shrugged, keeping her gaze on Chloe. “You look familiar to me.”

  I held my breath. She knew. Or she was close to knowing. She knew she was on to something.

  “Everybody says that to her.” I forced a laugh. “Aunt Chloe, you must look like a lot of people.”

  Chloe didn’t look at me. She probably couldn’t. She was either too scared, or she was hurting too much.

  “She doesn’t look like you,” the blond woman said. She smiled, and I thought, my God, how much longer can we keep this up? And why should we even bother? Chloe needed a doctor. The brothers weren’t coming back. If this woman wanted to make ten thousand dollars out of it, well then okay. I guess at least somebody could come out a winner.

  And then I saw someone moving toward us: Adam, still just wearing his flannel shirt, and out of breath, his boots tracking in snow. He was holding a white paper bag, the kind you get from a pharmacy.

  The blond woman was still looking at me. “I mean being your aunt,” she was saying. “Must be by marriage?”

  “Yeah,” I said, looking around her to give him a wave. “Well, hey. What do you know—here’s my dad now.”

  We were lucky in that almost as soon as Adam slid into the booth next to Chloe, the manager came out and told the blond woman that a charter bus was coming in fifteen minutes, and that he needed all hands on deck. Adam waited until she was out of earshot before he said anything.

  “Sorry for the wait.” He put the pharmacy bag on the table. “There was a line.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. Chloe stared at the bag. She had her hand over her ear again.

  “I can’t stay long. David’s in the car.” He nodded out the window to where the SUV was parked. The wipers had cleared enough snow off the windshield that I could see David in the driver’s seat. He lifted his hand off the steering wheel to give a quick salute.

  Adam opened the bag and took out a small bottle. “These drops, they’re for the pain, okay? The pharmacist said it would numb it instantly, way different than what’s over the counter.” He turned to Chloe. “So let’s get this one in before I explain the rest. If you lay your head down, I’ll put some in right now.”

  I looked around. I was surprised he wanted to put the drops in himself, and that he wanted to do it right there in the Hardee’s. But I figured he might as well. Maybe a charter bus was on its way, but for now, the lobby was dead. I wasn’t sure how Chloe would feel about letting him put drops in her ear, since her ear was so close to the hair she wasn’t even supposed to show. That was no problem, though. By the time I’d turned back to Chloe, she already had her head on the table, bad ear up. She left her hat on and closed her eyes.

  The drops took about five seconds to work. I’m serious. You could see it in her face, the relief, almost as soon as they went in. I was thinking, thank you, thank you, all the people in the world who spent their lives coming up with medicine. They never even got to meet all the people they helped.

  Chloe s
at up and looked at Adam, blinking fast. “Thank you,” she whispered. “Oh. Thank you so much.”

  “Okay.” He turned to me. “This one’s the antibiotic. It says that you’re supposed to just take one every twelve hours, but the pharmacist said I could double up tonight and tomorrow morning, and that would help it get better faster. But she can keep using the drops until then. Got it?”

  I nodded. It occurred to me that Adam must have had to act like his ear was hurting in the pharmacy. He’d had to hold it and wince, just like Chloe had been doing, so the pharmacist would believe he was in pain.

  “How much was it?” I asked. I was just asking for Chloe. I knew she’d want to pay him. But he made a face like I’d said something crazy.

  “Thank you so much,” Chloe said again. She was sitting up straight, blinking at the ceiling like someone had just turned on bright lights.

  “Thank Audrey,” Adam said.

  “Yes,” Chloe said. “But I thank you, too.” She smiled at him, pulling her hat back down. “You’ve saved me. One person. You know what that means.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” He was already standing up. “I’ve saved the world. You’ve read the Talmud, I guess.” He shrugged. “Weird. But impressive.”

  “It is the same for us.” She looked over his shoulder, and then hers. “It is in our book too.”

  “Huh.” He tilted his head. They smiled at each other, their eyes talking like they had an inside joke. “That’s good to know.”

  “It is,” she said, still friendly, but serious now, like whatever it was they both knew wasn’t a joke at all.

  We waited until the bus came and things got busy enough in the lobby that we felt safe to slip out the doors. Adam walked out with us. No one was paying attention, but we still acted like a little family, though none of us looked alike.

  15

  THE NEXT MORNING, she was still asleep when I woke up. I was starving, so I left a note on our room’s coffee maker.

  Gone down to breakfast.

  I’ll bring you back some bacon.

  Ha ha just kidding! I’ll get you

  a bagel or something. C U SOON.

  I tried to be quiet on my way out. Her bag was in a different spot than it had been in the night before, and I guessed she’d gotten up early to pray and take her medicine before going back to bed. But now she was sleeping hard with her mouth open, like she’d lost consciousness and gone peaceful in the middle of saying something.

  I’d slept well too. After we walked over from the Hardee’s, we were so tired that we were both in bed, lights out, by seven. We hadn’t had any dinner. Now I felt almost dizzy as I walked down the hallway to the elevator, my boots quiet on the maroon carpet. But I also felt optimistic. We’d gotten Chloe’s ear fixed, or at least on its way to being fixed. And we were already in Minnesota. Two states down, one to go. A dad and two little kids got in the elevator with me, and when the dad said “good morning” in a cheerful way, I said it right back, and meant it.

  But as soon as the elevator’s doors hummed open and I looked out the lobby’s front windows, my high hopes fell considerably. It was hard to believe that so much snow could have fallen in little flakes—cars in the parking lot were buried up to their door handles. A plow rumbled down the road between the hotel and the Hardee’s, spitting out a wall of white. And more snow was still coming down, though it was hard to tell what was falling and what was getting blown around by the wind.

  “Oh, come on,” I said, like I could argue with it.

  A man walking through the lobby nudged my arm. “It’s January in Minnesota, dear. What’d you expect? A heat wave?” He got into the elevator laughing like he’d just said the funniest thing in the world.

  Over in the breakfast room, some of the people sitting at tables had their coats on and their bags next to them, like as soon as they finished their instant oatmeal and coffee, they were going to rush out and drive, blizzard or not. But other people looked like they had no immediate plans aside from getting their money’s worth from the buffet. A woman in line for the waffle maker was telling somebody “Well, we already missed the rehearsal dinner, so we’re just going to give it another couple hours to settle down before we even try to head out.”

  That sounded smart to me. The breakfast room was warm and bright, and the buffet would have been Caleb’s dream, with little boxes of different kinds of sugary cereal set out, and bagels with cream cheese packets, as many as you wanted, free for the taking—not to mention the waffle maker and the tub of batter at the ready. Most people were talking to each other or looking down at their phones, but there was a television, which, at the moment, showed a weatherman pointing to different-size snowflakes on a map of Minnesota.

  I frowned, taking it in. Minnesota was a tall state, and if we hadn’t even made it to Minneapolis yet, we were at the very bottom of it. We still had a long way to go.

  I started thinking about how nice it would be to just take a little break, instead of going out in the cold with Chloe and trying to find some shoveled-out space to stand with our sign. I wanted to sit at a table all morning, warm and dry and eating bagels and drinking all the free coffee I wanted, and not even doing anything visibly illegal, with Chloe safe up in the room. I knew we couldn’t waste the time, but still, it was a nice fantasy.

  That’s when I had the idea. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of it before. Live and learn, as they say.

  I got a napkin, an orange, a toasted bagel, and a packet of cream cheese for Chloe, as I had to run back up to the room for supplies anyway. She was still asleep, so I set it all on the nightstand. Ten minutes later, I was back downstairs in the breakfast room. I made myself a waffle, perfectly crisp at the edges, and I also got a coffee with extra cream, a glass of orange juice, and a bowl of Cheerios with milk. I even got a newspaper from the stack at the front desk. Just before I sat down, I taped the sign I’d just made to the edge of my table:

  HEADED NORTH?

  MY AUNT AND I WOULD

  LOVE A RIDE!

  WE HAVE $$$ FOR GAS

  I knew the breakfast attendant saw the sign when she came out. But she looked too busy to bother with me, or maybe she didn’t care.

  The paper’s front page was almost all about the bus in Detroit. They’d caught the men who’d done it: two men from Egypt who’d skipped out on the registry. In their photos, they both looked as cold and mean as you would expect a person would have to be to blow up people, including a kid, that they didn’t even know. The inside of the paper had two pages dedicated to pictures of fugitives—ten rows of ten on each page. It took me a while to spot Chloe on the second page, fourth row down. Her real name, Sadaf Behzadi, was printed underneath.

  Some of the other fugitives had Mexican names—there was a Maria Rosario Villalobos, and right next to her, an Ana Villalobos. Neither of them looked anything like Tess. But most of the fugitives had Arabic-sounding names, or names that just sounded generally foreign, though there was one bulgy-eyed blond guy name Brian T. Goodrich who looked like someone had snapped his picture right after sneaking up and saying “Boo!”

  “How far north are you headed?”

  I looked up. The speaker looked about twenty-five, and he wore a black hoodie that said WISCONSIN across the front. His hair was slicked back, still wet from the shower, and he looked like he’d nicked his chin shaving that morning. The cut was still bleeding a little.

  I wiped my mouth with my napkin. “How far north are you going?”

  “Winnipeg.”

  I nodded like that was just regular good news. But I knew Winnipeg was in Canada. And nothing about him seemed worrisome. His eyes were large and sort of amber looking, and though his skin looked especially pale against the black of his hoodie, he had an open, friendly face.

  “Wow,” I said. “That’s exactly where we’re headed. Me and my aunt.”

  He could be a killer, I thought. He could be a killer dressed like a college student from Wisconsin. Or he could be a killer who reall
y was a college student from Wisconsin. Either way, he wouldn’t necessarily be put off by the fact I’d have my aunt with me. He could just kill us both.

  “Well”—he shrugged—“you can ride up with me if you like.”

  “Thank you!” I said. I was being polite. I hadn’t made up my mind. I could say no, and try to hold out for a woman, or at least a family. But this was a bird in the hand, and he was going right up past the border. We’d done the right thing the day before, getting a ride with the brothers.

  “When are you leaving?”

  He took out his phone. His nails were clean and trimmed. “In the next half hour. Would that work for you?”

  Like I was a paying customer. Maybe he wanted the gas money. “You’re not worried about the weather?” I asked. I thought, Or that one of us is actually a fugitive trying to get out of the country?

  He shook his head. “The plows have been out all night, and I’ve got studded tires. My girlfriend lives in Winnipeg, so I make the drive in weather all the time. I usually head up to Fargo, and then make a straight shot up I-29. I plan to get there in time for dinner.”

  I nodded, my hands squeezing my knees under the table. It was too good to be true. Really. But maybe not.

  “Is it okay if I text a picture of your license plate to my dad?” I smiled like I was embarrassed. “He worries. He’s a cop.”

  I watched his eyes. They didn’t change.

  “That’s no problem.” He glanced at his phone again. “I’m Tyler, by the way. So you want to meet me down here at a quarter till nine? You and your aunt will be ready?”

  When I got back upstairs, Chloe was sitting at the little desk by the window, reading her book and finishing the last of her bagel.

  “How’s the ear?” I asked.