But finally a man’s voice from up front said we were far enough away that we could sit up and take off the blankets, as long as we kept them in our laps and stayed ready to duck.
When I sat up, taking deep breaths of fresh air, Tess was in the middle seat but turned all the way around, her eyes way more popped out than usual. She looked at Chloe, then at me.
“Oh my God,” she said. “Are you okay?”
I nodded. I was having trouble believing it, but yes, it seemed I really was okay, though the back of my skull still hurt where Dale had pounded on it, and my scalp burned where my hair had come out. My teeth had stopped clicking together, and I could feel my fingers again. Chloe seemed okay too, though she looked strange to me without her glasses, and her lower lip looked swollen around the cut. She squinted past Tess up to the front of the van, where the big man sat in the passenger seat, his bald head visible over the headrest. A black man wearing a beanie cap was driving. I didn’t know him, either.
Tess looked at Chloe. “Are you okay?”
Chloe nodded. She seemed scared to talk, or maybe she was thinking she still had to pretend she couldn’t speak English.
“Good. I’m Tess.” Her voice was soft. “Nice to meet you.”
“This is the friend I called from Sherburn,” I explained. I wanted Chloe to know she didn’t have to be afraid.
Tess reached over the back of the seat and slapped my shoulder hard.
“Sarah-Mary! Do you know how worried I’ve been? You leave a message like that and then don’t pick up when I call you back? I tried calling that number all night, and in the morning when we were going to the airport, and then on the layover in Miami, and as soon as we landed in St. Louis.” She tugged off her cat hat. Her hair was blonder than it had been. “But you never answered, and I didn’t know if you were dead or if you’d just run away or what, and I couldn’t even tell my mom what was going on because you said not to. I was going out of my mind.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, meaning it. But right away, I understood I should just stop there. The only excuse I had for stomping that disposable phone to death was that I hadn’t wanted to get Tess in trouble, or to bring her into my problems, and I could see by the way she was looking at me now, mad but mostly like she was about to cry she was so happy to see me, that if I told her I hadn’t wanted to give her my problems, she’d probably slap me again.
“Poor Caleb was the one who had to tell me.”
I blinked.
“Yeah. He sneaked out of your aunt’s house last night and ran all the way to my window. You want to talk about somebody who’s worried. I don’t think he’s slept since you left. He thinks you’re dead, Sarah-Mary, and that it’s his fault.”
Chloe and I looked at each other. At least he’d known he could go to Tess, and he’d remembered when she’d get back in town. He was smart. But he was only eleven. All this time, he’d been all alone.
“He was a mess.” Tess shook her head. “He was crying. He made me promise I’d go find you. I told him of course I would do everything I could, that he didn’t need to make me promise. But he made me promise.”
Chloe caught my eye again, and this time, we both smiled a little. “Yeah,” I said. “I know how that goes.”
“So I promised him, and gave him a ride home, and this morning I got up early and left a note for my parents saying I was going up to Omaha for the weekend, because, you know, better to ask forgiveness than permission.” She nodded in the direction of the bald man. “That’s my Uncle Tim. My aunt stayed home with my cousins.”
The bald man turned around and waved with one of his big arms. His eyes were bulgy like Tess’s, and also like her mother’s. Now I was following, at least a little. This was the uncle who lived in Omaha, the one who’d had Muslim friends.
Tess nodded at the driver. “And that’s Ray. He knows people who know how to get someone across.” She looked at Chloe. “He says you’ll be in Canada in just a few hours.”
Chloe bowed her head. I heard the breath rush out of her as she whispered something into her hands.
Ray turned around and said “Nice to meet you” to me, and then “As-salam alaykum” to Chloe. She smiled and said something back to him I didn’t understand. That was strange, going from being the only person Chloe could talk to, and the only person who could talk for her, to sitting and watching as she had a foreign-language conversation with someone we didn’t even know. Also, we were going against her rule of riding with a black driver who was more likely to be pulled over. But I guess it was dark out, and if he was willing to take the risk, she was in the homestretch now.
Tess stayed turned around, resting her chin on the back of her seat. “Aren’t you curious how I found you?”
I nodded.
“Guess!”
“I can’t,” I said. I wasn’t in the mood to guess. My scalp hurt where my hair had come out.
“All right.” She clicked her tongue like I was ruining her fun. “Don’t think I’m a stalker, okay? I seriously forgot.” She reached over the seat and pointed at my wrist. “It’s the watch. I was almost in Omaha before I remembered I had a tracker for it on my phone. My mom had it on auto-pay, and I was hoping she forgot to cancel. I guess she did, cause we’ve had a global position on you for about the last ten hours.”
I looked down at the watch, its small and silent screen. I never would have guessed. But that was really something. When Chloe and I were out in the woods, thinking we were so alone, Tess and these two men I didn’t even know had been racing toward us, knowing just where we were. All because of something strapped to my wrist, so light I barely felt its weight.
I guess my jaw must have gone slack, because Chloe nudged me.
“That’s engineering,” she whispered, and gave me a smug little smile.
Tess’s uncle turned around. “We’ve got water up here.” He had a big voice to go with his big body. “Anybody thirsty?”
Chloe and I nodded, and he passed two bottles to Tess to pass to us.
“I’m guessing you’re Sarah-Mary?” he asked, looking at me.
I nodded. “Thanks for picking us up.”
Everybody laughed, even Chloe. I got the joke. Understatement of the year. My nose was running full-on now. Chloe handed me the tissue packet from her bag.
Ray glanced over his shoulder. “And your name, sister?”
Even with him saying “sister” like that, I almost jumped in and answered for her. I was that used to our routine. Before I could get a word out, she put a light hand on my knee.
“Sadaf,” she said. “My name is Sadaf.”
I closed my eyes, working to make my brain change over. There was no reason for me to keep calling her Chloe anymore, even in my head. I could call her Sadaf all I wanted now. And I would. I was used to Chloe, in the habit of it, but I wouldn’t want somebody to call me something that didn’t have anything to do with me. She knew my real name, and I knew hers.
“And thank you for your help,” Sadaf added. “Thank you so very much.”
Nobody laughed this time, probably because you could hear in her voice that she was about to cry.
Ray and Tess’s uncle both said they were honored, and Tess turned around and nodded to show she was honored too.
“But how?” she asked. “How will I get across?”
Tess shook her head like she didn’t know, and her uncle did the same. Only Ray glanced back over his shoulder and gave her another quick smile.
“You ever seen The Sound of Music?” he asked.
Sadaf tilted her head. “Yes,” she said, sounding nervous, like she maybe had the same image that I did of the von Trapp family climbing up over those mountains at the end of the movie.
If she was in for that kind of hike, in this weather, he probably shouldn’t smile about it.
“It’ll be a little like that.” He looked back at the road. “We’re going to go see some nuns.”
Ray cut the lights just before we turned onto a private drive,
but the moon was bright enough that I could read St. Vincent’s Home for Aged Sisters on a sign sticking up out of the snow. Behind the sign was a two-story farmhouse with a green porch light and a wooden cross by the door. An extension with the look of a long mobile home was attached to the right side of the house, with a wheelchair ramp running along the front.
“The nuns are aged?” Tess’s uncle asked. He sounded as unimpressed as I was. Maybe I was still thinking of The Sound of Music, but I’d been expecting a stately abbey with gates, or at least a church with a steeple. This little farmhouse with its flat-roofed extension looked as low-rent as Berean Baptist.
“Some of them are aged,” Ray said. We continued to roll forward, though slowly, by only the light of the moon. “The young ones do the caretaking.” He paused. “Relatively young.”
Sadaf ducked to get a better view, her lips rolled in so they didn’t show. She tapped her gloved hands against the knees of her pajamas like she was providing her own drum roll.
“How come all the windows are dark?” I asked, loud enough for Ray to hear me. “I thought the nuns knew we were coming.”
Tess turned around and gave me a look like I was being rude, or paranoid. I understood Ray was doing us a favor, and that he probably knew what he was doing. And I didn’t want to make Sadaf more anxious than she already was. But a half hour earlier, I’d heard Ray call somebody and say we’d arrive a little after one. It was ten past one now, so we weren’t late. It seemed like somebody should have waited up.
“They know we’re coming.” Ray’s voice was pleasant, but he didn’t say anything else as we rolled right past the farmhouse. We approached a barn with peeling white paint, and it was only after we turned in behind the barn that I saw a crack of light between the big wooden doors.
Tess turned around to give me an I-told-you-so smile as Ray cut the engine.
“We can all go in.” He stretched his hands out over the wheel, pulling on one wrist, and then the other. “Sadaf. You’ll want to bring your things.”
Tess’s uncle opened the van’s side door and helped each of us out, telling us to be careful and to watch for ice. I was only thinking of hurrying, and of getting out of the cold and up to the doors, but Sadaf, walking just ahead of me, slowed her pace by a scattering of rocks and gravel the plow must have scraped up. Just as I moved beside her, she bent down, snatched up one of the rocks, and pushed it in her coat pocket.
“Why’d you do that?” I whispered.
She either didn’t hear me, or she didn’t want to say. My guess, which made me sad, was that she was so scared and tired that she didn’t trust anybody anymore.
“It’s okay now,” I said, and I hoped she at least believed it after we’d followed Tess through the doors and into the barn, where two older women stood smiling at us like they either didn’t mind the odor of cow manure or they’d just gotten so used to it that they couldn’t smell it. Bright lamps hung from one of the rafters, and though the barn wasn’t exactly toasty, it was warmer than outside. There were three stalls on our left, and their doors were closed, but I could see scattered hay and the black haunches of a cow through the lower opening of one. Next to the stalls, rectangular bales of hay were stacked high on a pallet next to a black tarp. Along the far wall was a rider mower, a Ping-Pong table with a shoebox on it, another pallet with bags of feed piled on it, and next to that, a salt spreader.
“Welcome,” one of the women said, rolling the door shut behind Ray. She was white, as tall as Tess’s uncle, and almost as wide across the shoulders, and though she had a wooden cross hanging from a black cord around her neck, she wasn’t dressed like a nun. She wore a brown turtleneck under overalls, and duck boots that squeaked when she walked. “We’re so glad you’re here!” she boomed. “I’m Sister Janice, and this is Sister Eva.”
Sister Eva smiled and gave us each a nod. She was Asian, about my height, her dark hair gone gray at her temples. She wore a baggy sweater, a long skirt, and red galoshes that said Property of Brandon on the outside of each.
“You all are nuns?” I asked.
Sadaf gave me a nudge. But Sister Janice seemed pleased. “Oh yes!” she said, her blue eyes bright. “We’ve just gotten out of the habit!” She kept a straight face for a second, then she started laughing while Sister Eva made a face like maybe it was a joke she’d heard too often.
Sister Janice looked at Sadaf and went serious. “I see you’re injured, dear, there on your lip. If it’s recent, we’ve got some Tylenol back at the house. Or would you prefer an ice pack?”
Sadaf’s hand went to her lip, her gloved fingertips grazing the cut. “I’m fine,” she said. She touched the rim of the blue knit hat like she wanted to make sure it was straight. She still had her flag pinned to the side.
“Are you the only one leaving?” Sister Eva asked. She had a low voice, and an accent I didn’t recognize, so leaving sounded like leabing.
Sadaf nodded.
“You can walk fine?” Sister Eva glanced at Sadaf’s boots.
Sadaf nodded again. She didn’t ask how far, or what we were all doing out there away in a manger, which was what I wanted to know. Ray had walked over to where the hay was and stepped up on the edge of the pallet, and without even asking anybody, he reached up with both hands and tugged one of the bales from the top. He turned around and lowered the bale to the tarp. When he stepped back up on the pallet to reach for another, Tess’s uncle took a few steps toward him.
“Is this something we need to do?” he asked. “Can I help?” He was already taking off his jacket like he assumed the answer was yes.
“Only if you have a good back.” Sister Janice followed him to the pallet. “They’re about forty pounds each. Don’t strain yourself.”
I guess Tess’s uncle wasn’t worried about it, because he reached up and brought down a bale without even stepping on the pallet. And then Sister Janice reached up and pulled down a bale, giving it a little toss onto the tarp—maybe just to show she could.
Sister Eva turned back to the rest of us. “I can’t reach the high ones,” she said. “I always have to wait until the stack is lower before I can pitch in, and even then I have to take care.”
Tess and Sadaf both looked at me like I might know what was happening. I didn’t. We all looked back over to the hay bales. Neither Ray nor Sister Janice was restacking the bales with any particular care. It was like they were just trying to get the weight off the pallet as quickly as possible. I squinted down at the pallet, realizing.
“Are you kidding me?” I still had my mittens on, and I pressed one to each side of my head like I was trying to hold in my brain. “You all have a tunnel in here? There’s a tunnel coming out of this barn?”
Sister Eva nodded like it wasn’t so surprising. “The border’s not even half a mile away.” She touched the sleeve of Sadaf’s coat. “Don’t worry. The passage is narrow, but tall enough for even a grown man to walk upright. And it’s safe. Your guide is walking over now. Or I should say under.” She checked her watch, which was digital, with a neon pink strap that fastened with a silver strip of duct tape. “She should be here in ten minutes. Do you need to use the bathroom before you go? I can take you into the house.”
Sadaf shook her head.
“You’re sure? It’s no trouble.”
“We just went,” I said, because I didn’t want her to keep hassling Sadaf about it, and also because it was true. Only a half hour earlier, Tess had announced to everyone in the van that she’d needed to pee since Fargo, and after Ray pulled over, Tess, Sadaf, and I got out and walked far behind the taillights for privacy, and then relieved ourselves in the middle of the dark road, as none of us wanted to wade into the high snow on either side. Mid-stream, I’d called out that I was sure I was getting frostbite where I definitely did not want to get frostbite, and both Tess and Sadaf laughed, though I hadn’t been joking.
Sadaf set her messenger bag on the barn’s dirt floor. “I should help,” she said, moving past Sister Eva. By the
time she got over to the pallet, the top three rows of hay had already been moved to the tarp. She staggered under the weight of the first bale, so we all went over to help, though Sister Eva told us there was no real hurry, and the four of us smaller people should be smart and lift in pairs.
I’ll admit that the only reason I helped was that I would have felt bad just standing around when everyone else was working. I hadn’t gotten any sleep since we’d left Lakeville the previous morning, and it wasn’t as if the earlier part of our night had been easy. But it turned out helping move the hay was a good feeling. I partnered with Sadaf, and after we lifted and set down just a few bales, I was warm enough to want to take off my coat, and that was the first time I’d felt warm in a while.
I was also grateful to have something to distract me from the fact that if everything went as planned, Sadaf and I were about to say good-bye. It was what I wanted. But it seemed like it was coming up too fast. In just a few minutes, maybe, she’d be gone from me. Probably forever. Already I felt an ache in my chest, as real as if I’d swallowed something sharp.
After the last bale was moved, Sister Janice lifted the pallet, and Sister Eva pulled back the small blue tarp that had been underneath it. And there was the hole, the size of a Monopoly board, and not so deep that I couldn’t see dirt at the bottom. A rope ladder lined one side, held in place by two wooden stakes dug into the barn’s floor.
Sadaf was quiet, peering down.
“That’s just the way up,” Sister Janice said. “The actual tunnel is much larger.”
“Will I have light?”
“You’ll have a headlamp. Like a miner.”
“How in the world?” Tess’s uncle was on his hands and knees, peering down. He looked up at the nuns. “You’re telling me you dug a tunnel over half a mile long?”
“Oh, we didn’t.” Sister Janice waved her hand. “Someone brought in a boring machine. A smaller one, but still.” She sighed. “What an amazing piece of machinery. They rolled it right in through those doors.” She waved her hand toward the doors we’d come in.
American Heart Page 29
