She grabbed the phone, tried to dial 9-1-1, but there was no dial tone. Her cell, then. No, they had left their phones in the car. She dumped Chloe’s bag, found her wallet and car keys. No cell.
Julia checked the bath, adjusted the temperature, went back out to Destiny. “Talk to me.”
“I’ll kill him,” Destiny said through clenched teeth. A nasty bruise was forming along her jaw; otherwise, she seemed okay except for being soaked with snow.
The man had come face-to-face with Julia as he rounded the corner. She grabbed his coat and he shoved her. She held on tight and said, “Who are you?”
He laughed and flung her down. By the time she got up, he had disappeared. She had found Destiny in the snow, stunned.
“Not if I find him first. After we get you into the tub.”
“Huh?”
“You’re hypothermic. We have to warm you up.” Julia helped her out of her clothes down to her underwear. “Can you stand?”
“My feet. I can’t feel them.”
“I know.” Julia couldn’t feel hers either. Her cheeks burned as if she had been slapped. Damaged skin coming alive in the heat of the room. “Come on, help me. Get up.”
Destiny struggled to her feet and stared at Chloe. “Date rape?”
“We don’t know that. Not yet. Come on, while you still have toes.” Julia steered her into the bathroom, helped her into the bath. She kicked off her boots and took off her slacks and stepped into the warm water with her daughter. It felt like iron rods were being jammed through the bones of her feet.
She used a facecloth to warm Destiny’s cheeks. The bruise grew angrier. “I’ll find him and kill him,” Destiny said, shivering so hard that Julia had to hold her shoulders. A good sign, the body coming back.
For the first few months after Destiny was born, Julia thought about simple tasks she had relinquished. Like bathing her baby. No time to dwell on the irony of this moment. Chloe needed her too.
“Don’t try to get out without my help. I need to check on your sister.”
“Don’t call the cops unless she says it’s okay.”
“I have to.”
“No, not unless she says so.”
“Then what do I do?” Julia said.
“You’re her mother. Figure it out.”
I brought this on them. I brought this on my daughters, and I brought judgment on my son, and anything I do—
I search you and know you, Julia.
Not Matt’s voice, not a voice at all, but a truth, the truth she had staked her life on, no matter how angry she got. Because unlike her father, and unlike Tom and unlike Andy, God had a way of staying with her.
And so she prayed. Dear Father, show me what to do.
You’re their mother. Be their mother.
Tuesday, 10:32 p.m.
Close them, Chloe told herself.
Though the light scalded her eyes, she couldn’t force her lids to drop and make all this go away. What this was, she wasn’t quite sure. She only knew it was unforgivable, and if she could make the light go away, she could crawl into a ball and fade away.
Mother had promised that Father waited for them on the other side, two fathers if you believed the math. I know my transgressions, and my sins are ever before me, a burden too heavy for Chloe to consider, let alone lift to the throne room of heaven.
Washed whiter than snow didn’t add up because that was what had made her stumble, the notion that snow would hide what she did today and that tomorrow she could go to see her birth father—surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me—and no one would know.
Instead, her tracks led her other mother and only sister to her, and now her sin would be ever before them. And the WaveRunner, though it wasn’t clear why she thought that. Perhaps if Julia would stop stroking her face, she could figure out the sum of all of this. Then she could tally her debt and slip into the black ocean where the uncountable and irrevocable could hide.
“Let me pray with you,” Julia said. Chloe couldn’t find those words because Rob had kissed away her prayers. Suddenly the sister had her arms around her, saying “You pray and I’ll say the amen,” and so Julia did.
Chloe clawed at the girl—who? Oh yes, Destiny, who was far stronger than she looked because she held her tight while their mother asked God to soothe His child and strengthen her and let her know—KNOW—she prayed. Let her know the peace that transcends all understanding, and Destiny said yeah, that, and then said she would go to the car and get their phones and Julia said no, I will and Destiny said no, she needs a mother now and you’re the only one who qualifies for that and Chloe clutched Julia’s hands because the wind howled and the light flickered and died.
And she was suddenly so very terrified of the dark.
Tuesday, 11:14 p.m.
Destiny trudged through the storm, bundled in Chloe’s down jacket, a cotton blanket wrapped around her head and shoulders. She had to browbeat Julia into giving her the keys to the Mercedes so she could retrieve their phones.
What Julia didn’t know was that she had also taken the keys to Chloe’s rental.
As insane as it was to hike that extra block, Destiny was not going to let the kick to her head, or whatever had been done to Chloe, pass without a fight. The wind whipped at her, and she had to bend over to fight it. When she straightened up, she realized the motel windows were lit with a spooky red glow from the emergency lights. No electricity and the snow was up to her calves, some drifts shoulder high.
Destiny had packed towels inside the top of her boots. Luke would be proud of her forethought. She would never do to him what Chloe had just done to her husband.
How bitter to hope her sister had been date-raped rather than to discover she had indulged in the most sordid type of sex. And Julia—what was Destiny to make of her? How humiliating to have a near-stranger strip and bathe you to save you from hypothermia. It was a kind and wise thing to do—but still.
Destiny clicked the key to unlock the Mercedes, then had to dig through snow to get to the door handle. She grabbed Julia’s wallet, iPad, and phone and shoved them into her own backpack. The glove box yielded up a flashlight. The spare-tire compartment in the back provided another flashlight and a couple road flares that might be useful if a snowplow came along. Luke would be proud of her clear thinking.
Survival was easy to sort out. It was matters of the heart and body that remained complicated.
With the backpack over her shoulders and blanket over her head, she headed for the street where Chloe’s car was parked. She should have dried her hair before she came out. The strands stiffened in the frigid wind. She could be wrapped in a down blanket right now if they had thought ahead before racing out of the Westin.
Turn back. That would be the smart thing to do.
No way. If she could hitchhike from Illinois to California, she could trudge one block in a blizzard. She’d run Chloe’s car for a little while and dry her hair over the heater.
She turned left at the main road, then spun around. Which way had they come to get from Two Brothers Cafe to the motel? She couldn’t see a thing, could barely keep her eyes open against the wind. Somewhere nearby was the harbor. She had seen it on MapQuest.
Take a long walk off a short cliff could easily translate into take a snowy walk off a short pier into the angry Atlantic.
Destiny sheltered in the doorway of a shuttered shop, took off one mitten, and dug a phone out of the backpack. Julia’s phone—but she didn’t have the luxury of searching for hers under all the other stuff in there, not with her fingers numbing rapidly.
She thumbed it on, trying to find the navigation feature.
It rang. Home, the screen said. No way, Destiny was not going to talk to Julia’s husband.
The street map came up quickly. Yes, she should have turned right. More good news—she was only a couple hundred feet from the bar, and Chloe’s car was on this side of the street. She’d get warmed up while she searched for any scrap
of paper that would indicate who that guy was.
The phone rang again. More Home.
None of my business, she told herself. Then again, Julia had been good to her. It would be twenty minutes before she got back to the hotel and who knew what kind of crazy was going on there, with the Chloe situation.
Destiny owed it to Julia’s husband to tell him that his wife was okay. She clicked on the icon, was startled when the screen came live with the face of a teenager.
“Hey,” he said. “Who are you?”
Do You see, God, why I have no patience with You and Your tricks?
“I’m Destiny,” she said. “And I’m guessing you’re Julia’s son.”
“Yeah, something like that. Where’s my mother?”
“She’s in a motel room.”
“So why do you have Mom’s phone?”
“She left it in the car. I volunteered to get it for her.”
He peered into the screen, his hair matted and his face puffy. “So who are you?”
“I’m traveling with your mother. Helping her with some things.”
“You look like the Virgin Mary with that thing on your head.”
She laughed. “Hey, dude, I gotta run. In case you haven’t heard, we’re in the middle of a blizzard.”
“Wait, don’t go yet. Can you show me the storm?”
“You want to see the snow?”
“My mother says I’m a curious pest.” His mischievous grin was almost a smirk. Exactly like Destiny’s. Luke had run film on her so she could see what she looked like when she wheedled for something.
She had to end this call before she found herself donating her liver, kidney, eyes, and heart to this kid.
“Please?” Dillon said.
“I suppose.” Destiny stepped out onto the sidewalk and aimed the phone at the store so the snow would contrast against the faint light from the window. She moved back into the doorway. “Did you see it?”
“That is one radical storm,” he said. “So my mom’s okay, right? My dad’s trying to book a flight to New York and hire a truck or something to come rescue her.”
“No one needs rescuing. We’re at this motel in some town north of the city. We got caught out and took a room.”
“What are you doing now? You have the phone, so why are you still outside?”
“You are one nosy cashew,” Destiny said.
The kid laughed. “Yeah, everyone says that.”
“I’m going to the car to get some stuff.”
“I thought you said you already went to the car.”
“This is a different car. Now can I go?”
“Wait,” he said. “Why do you have a blanket on your head?”
“I came from Los Angeles, wasn’t exactly prepared for the Snowpocalypse.”
“Los Angeles, whoa. Do you work in film?”
“Pal, it’s not like I have time for an extended conversation.” Destiny was about to end the call, but the look on his face—a cross between fascination and awe—stopped her. “Yeah, I do conceptual art. Which means—”
“You make monsters and aliens and all the cool stuff. So what’s your name? I study the credits and follow some of the artists. I might know you.”
“Destiny Connors. Do you need my social security number too? Come on, man, I gotta go.”
“Before you hang up, could you turn to your left? Please.”
She sighed, did what he asked before realizing the kid had maneuvered her into the faint light from the shop’s security light.
“Oh my goodness,” he said. “You’re my sister.”
Oh, God, if You love me like Luke says, please don’t make me do this. Please, Chloe is enough pain for me to swallow.
“Why would you say that?”
“Because you have the cow eyes,” he said. “No offense, I have them too. I trim my eyelashes, you know. Because they’re so girly.”
Destiny laughed. “I got teased when I was a kid, so I used to squint to try to make them smaller. Gave myself a headache for a full year in seventh grade.”
“Want to know how else I know you’re my sister? And by the way, thank you for not denying it.”
She gave him an exaggerated squint, making him laugh. “Tell me quick because I’m freezing my tush off here.”
“Mom told me about her two babies when I was, like, in fifth grade. And I just knew, even then, that at least one of you would be in Hollywood. Because that’s what I want to do, and it’s such an itch in my blood that I knew you or the other girl would have the same thing. Because . . . see, I love my parents but they don’t get me. And I just imagined somewhere one of my sisters would be like me. Because I didn’t want to be, like . . . out on this island of weird by myself.”
“You’re not, Dillon.” Destiny pressed her hand against the window, let the cold glass freeze any notion of tears. “You’re not alone.”
“Are you going to come to Dallas?”
“Sure, someday. That would be cool.”
“Promise?”
“Sure, man.” Destiny would promise anything to get off this phone call.
He blinked hard. “Can you come soon? I mean, like, real soon.”
“Let me get through this blizzard first, okay? I gotta run, pal. Tell your dad Julia will call as soon as I get this phone to her.”
“See you soon.”
“For sure,” Destiny said, then ended the call before she promised anything more.
After sliding her mitten back on and rewrapping the blanket, she headed for Chloe’s rental. The snow had filled in the back windshields of the cars Julia had swiped less than an hour ago. The wind shrieked, rattling the phone wires overhead.
The gusts were so fierce, she could imagine a telephone pole snapping in half, wires snapping like a whip and slashing through her skull.
Destiny couldn’t help herself—she had to frame the scene. The next morning, blizzard past, sky razor-blue. Snow blazing in the winter sun. People poking out of their stores and homes like frightened mice. Drifts high enough to swallow any man. Parked and abandoned cars, only the occasional sideview mirror or car antenna poking through the mounded snow. A teenage boy, shovel in hand, is the first to brave the sidewalk. Clearing the snow in front of his father’s butcher shop, he works quickly to stay warm.
The shovel hits something hard. He prods, sees something like a ruby under the snow. He digs eagerly as if for buried treasure or just to alleviate a burdensome task—until he realizes that he’s uncovered a frozen river of red. He wants to back away, hide his eyes, but his curiosity won’t let him and so he scoops and sweeps until he sees a woman’s head, crushed on—
“Stop it,” Destiny yelled. “You make yourself crazy.”
The wind howled back as if to laugh. Sister, you’re two blocks past crazy.
She held the flashlight with one hand and swept the snow off the back of the car she thought might be Chloe’s. No Westin sticker. Should she go back a car or keep moving in the same direction? A ten-second silent debate was all it took for the snow to whiten where she had just cleared.
Use your head. Destiny fumbled in the pocket of Chloe’s jacket, found her keys, and pushed the unlock button. She heard the beep, beep but couldn’t see a thing in the snow. She couldn’t even tell which way the sound came from.
Don’t panic. Panic button. She stabbed at the key, thrilled when a horn sounded. That way—she turned and saw red lights flashing through the snow.
Three cars down, an absolutely chilling hike. Destiny brushed the snow off the door handle, opened the door, and got in. The Honda was considerably smaller than the Mercedes Julia had rented and warmed up quickly.
The radio was set to an all-news station. Destiny sneered at the reports of the Nor’easter, state emergency, power losses. Unnaturally high tides perked her interest. How far was the motel from the water? What she knew about ocean tides could fit in a tube of eyeliner. The heat felt so good, her eyelids suddenly felt like high tide coming in . . .
. . . everything sliding away . . .
. . . snow-shrouded sleep, so warm . . .
. . . and what really did happen to Chloe . . .
. . . and why should she really care . . .
And then a crack of thunder, glass shattering as something crashed in on Destiny. She didn’t care, just wanted to sleep but cold air poured in, fresh air that somehow she knew to drink in until she was strong enough to open her eyes.
A sign had crashed through the passenger side window, missing her by inches.
Her head throbbed. She opened the door to the storm because she had to throw up. She gagged and splattered what was left of Tom Bryant’s lunch into the night.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Julia had warned about carbon monoxide poisoning in the snow. Words that hadn’t registered as Destiny ran the car, taking in the heat and the comfort while snow piled up all around, blocking the tail pipe.
She struggled to get her backpack on, dug the flashlight out of the mess of safety glass and splintered sign. There were shopping bags in the backseat. Chloe had bought stuff for the Colorado snow, enough to go around. She shouldered the bags, wrapped the blanket back around her head, and headed back into the storm.
Wednesday, 12:13 a.m.
“Thank God,” Julia said as Destiny tumbled through the door, arms laden with bags.
“Sure,” she said through blue lips. “Now stop staring and shut the door.”
“I was worried sick.” She had been pacing between the bed where Chloe dozed and the window. Ten minutes passed and then twenty. Julia was about to wrap in a bedspread and search the blizzard for Destiny.
Julia led her into the bathroom, helped her with her boots and socks, then—over her protests—made her take off her jeans. She used the flashlight Destiny had brought back to check for frostbite. Her legs were stark white, cold to the touch. Julia soaked a towel with warm water and wrapped her feet and legs.
“I’d tell you that you’re an idiot,” Destiny said, “but I can’t feel my tongue.”
The bathroom had cooled considerably. If the power didn’t come back soon, they’d be left with wet towels and blankets and no heat.
To Know You (9781401688684) Page 19
