by Cole McCade
Walk away. Walk away.
She backed up a few steps, tripped where the wooden planks met concrete, and stumbled to rights before turning and running.
She ran back to the Jackdaws, back to Gary’s, until the wind dried the streaks of tears on her cheeks and her gasping breaths made it hard to even think about crying. But she couldn’t do this again—saying goodbye, explaining herself. She waited outside the bar, just out of sight through the glass door, and peeked in every few moments until Gary disappeared into the stockroom. Then she shoved the door open and ran for the stairs, pushing through the stairwell door and clattering up to the apartment.
He’d changed the sheets. She couldn’t help a brittle laugh as she sat down on the bed, dragged her backpack into her lap, and checked inside. Everything still in its place. She changed clothes; she couldn’t stand to wear this sundress right now when it smelled like river water and Gabriel, and instead switched it out for her tank top and hoodie, fishnets and boots and skirt. A few safety pins held the rips in the skirt together well enough. Satisfied, she rummaged in the bottom of the backpack until she came up with a banded stack of bills. She slipped it under the pillows of the bed. Gary would find it later, when he couldn’t sleep for the hard square lump poking into his head. She could see it now—the scowl on his face, his witch-eye narrowed.
Dammit, girl.
Keep it together. No getting soppy now. She slung her bag to her back, then crept down the stairs and peered through a crack in the door. No Gary. Creeping with each footfall silent, she slipped out onto the bar floor and made sure the door closed soundlessly behind her.
“Going somewhere?”
Leigh jumped, squeaking. Gary leaned in the stockroom door, arms folded over his chest, watching her with an arched eyebrow.
“I’m not blind. I saw you playing peekaboo. I’m old. I ain’t senile.”
“Er. Sorry.” Leigh smiled sheepishly. “Hi.”
Gary squinted at her—just the one eye, the other still wide and bulging and a little yellowed and watery—then let out an exasperated sigh. “You don’t have to tell me. I know your leavin’ look. Get it before you disappear for days or weeks, and I gotta wonder if you’re gonna be a Jane Doe with a toe tag the next time I see you.” He ground his teeth with a grumpy sound. “It’s for good this time, ain’t it?”
Leigh lowered her eyes, staring down at the toes of her boots. “…yeah.”
“Why?”
“I just…I need to. I have to. I can’t explain it.”
“Yeah, well…” Clomping steps drew closer, before he seized her roughly and pulled her into an awkward hug full of sharp edges and that smell of horse shampoo and the brittle feel of old man bones. “Let’s—” His voice strangled. “Let’s fucking get this over with. I don’t like long goodbyes.”
“Me neither.”
Leigh buried her face in his chest and told herself she wouldn’t cry again. And she managed not to, just barely. This was why she didn’t like getting attached. Every person she left behind was another piece cut out of her heart, and by the time she left Crow City she wouldn’t have a single bit left.
Gary gripped her shoulders tight enough to hurt and pulled back, scowling down at her; his witch-eye gleamed wetly. “Well go on then, if you’re gonna go.”
“Sure. Right.” How she found it in her to smile, she didn’t know. “Later, Gary. Take care of yourself.”
“Dammit, girl, I ain’t the one anyone’s gotta worry about. You be careful out there.”
“I will,” she said. “I promise.”
When she left, Gary was hunched over the bar, with the photograph of his daughter trembling between his wizened fingers. She’d never seen him look so old as he did now, and she couldn’t stand it anymore. Once again she walked away, and told herself she could stand one more goodbye.
Because she’d hate herself forever, if she didn’t see her son one last time.
She didn’t remember the walk to the park. Every step took her deeper into a waking dream, time passing in a haze where one moment she was one place, the next moment somewhere else, with only the vaguest memory of the space in between. One moment she was straggling along the sidewalk outside The Track, and the next she was leaning against the chain-link fence outside the park between a bright red wooden cutout of googly-eyed elephant and another of a rainbow caterpillar.
She hooked her fingers in the fence and pressed hard into the metal, straining toward that lovely little boy, drinking him in with a ferocious hunger. He had a kite today, plastic with cartoon characters splashed across it, and the nanny was trying to show him how to get it into the air. It wasn’t working, but that didn’t stop him from trying again and again with a single-minded, concentrated intensity, his gaze never turning away from the kite.
She felt like that kite: held to him by a string, but never able to take off. Never able to soar, because no matter how far away she got she’d always be tethered to him and always reeling back. She bit the inside of her cheek and sniffled roughly, blinking over and over again with fierce determination.
“I’ll be back, baby,” she whispered. “I promise. I just need to go…figure out…everything. Me. And then I’ll be back, and maybe one day…”
One day…what? She’d be content to be Jacob’s wife again? She’d find a way to prove to the courts that Elijah should be hers, even if only on alternating weekends? As if any of those things would happen. She might come back one day, but she’d still just be the ghost haunting Elijah; the shade of the woman who should have been his mother. Accepting that felt like the hardest goodbye of all, when her life was beginning to feel like a series of goodbyes, repeated over and over again.
The nanny looked up. Her eyes met Leigh’s across the playground, and this time Leigh caught a click of recognition. Fuck. That perky little girl had seen her hanging around a few too many times. Leigh didn’t have much time. She fumbled for her backpack and her camera, while the nanny gathered Elijah and his kite and led him over to a bench and her bag. Leigh managed to snap one quick shot of his profile, blurry from her shaking hands, before the nanny took his hand and ushered him toward that battered maroon minivan, eyeing Leigh suspiciously the entire time.
Leigh stuffed the camera into her backpack and backed away, smiling faintly.
“Goodbye, Elijah,” she said, and turned away.
She couldn’t do it.
She couldn’t walk away from him. Her legs wouldn’t move. She was cut open and bleeding inside, and if she walked away right now she’d never be anything but this dead empty thing with her heart bled out and broken. She trembled, fists clenching. She wasn’t leaving Elijah. She wasn’t.
She didn’t know what she would do until she was doing it. She turned back and dove toward the minivan. The nanny was just lifting Elijah up and into his car seat. Leigh tackled her, slamming into her. She was smaller than the girl, but she had the element of surprise. The nanny reeled back with a cry, clutching at Elijah protectively, but Leigh snared her arms around his waist and yanked him away.
She’d expected a struggle, but the nanny’s grip broke. “Elijah!” the girl cried, while Elijah shrieked and reached for her.
Leigh hugged him close to her chest, turned, and ran.
She’d lost her mind. She’d lost her fucking mind, this was a kidnapping, and Elijah was crying and squirming in her arms. Her own son was terrified of her when she was a damned stranger to him, but she had him now and wasn’t letting go.
“It’s okay, baby,” she whispered. “Hush. Hush, I promise, it’s okay…”
She’d taken off blindly, but she risked a moment to stop, panting, adrenaline turning her head into a buzzing cloud. Her zinging thoughts tangled up with the cries at her back, the soccer mom army mobilizing with calls of she went that way! and call the police! and there she is!
The Greyhound station wasn’t far. Just a few blocks. If she disappeared between the buildings, she could be inside and settled with two tickets on the first
bus to anywhere before the police realized where she was going.
Elijah sniffled, pushing at her. “Leggo,” he whimpered.
“I can’t do that, Elijah.” She met his eyes, pleading with him. Begging for some spark of recognition, some kind of imprint that would make him look at her and recognize mother. “I promise I’ll explain everything later, but I need you to be brave for me right now.”
She didn’t have time to wait for an answer. People were running toward her, shouting, anger in the masks of their faces and the stiffness of their arms. She clutched Elijah closer and ran, stretching her legs as long as she could and pushing them as fast as they would take her. This was sheer insanity, but once she’d cashed in, she couldn’t cash out.
She’d dashed several blocks before she heard the first sirens. They bounced off the buildings, until she couldn’t tell which direction they came from. She skidded to a halt, gaze whipping left and right, trying to trace the source of the whooping call when she could hardly hear over her own thundering pulse. East. She swung a hard left and skittered down an alley. Elijah was heavy in her arms, but he wasn’t struggling anymore, a limp dead weight holding on to her. One more block over. One more block over, forcing herself to move when her calves were burning and her arms going numb, and she glimpsed the Greyhound sign and careened around the corner—
Squad cars rocketed around the opposite corner. She backed up, fear squeezing its fist around her, and turned to run back the way she’d come—but another car blocked the way with a screech of tires, whirling lights blinding her with panic-flashing strobes. Car doors opened with heavy bangs and uniformed officers poured out, ringing her from a safe distance, trapping her with her back against the wall and a dozen gunsights pointed right at her.
Leigh froze, staring, paralyzed by a gripping sense of loss, grief, defeat. What had she thought would happen? Had she really thought she’d get away with it?
Swallowing roughly, she buried her face in Elijah’s hair, closing her eyes against a too-familiar sting when she’d shed too many tears lately. “I’m sorry, baby,” she whispered. “I tried. I really did.”
“Hands up!” one of the officers barked. “Put the boy down, put your hands up, and step away.”
Leigh pressed her tongue to the roof her mouth, then nodded and bent to gingerly set Elijah down. Letting go of him felt like letting go of the last of her hope. She stepped back, raising her hands to either side of her head, palms out, as she wondered how far she’d get if she tried to run—before someone would end her grief by putting a bullet in her pretty little brain.
One of the officers lowered his gun and skittered closer, reaching for Elijah. “Come here, son. Come here. It’s okay.”
The first officer barked, “Hands where I can see them. On your head. What’s your name, lady?”
“Leigh. Clarissa Leigh van Zandt.” And as she rested her hands atop her head, as several officers closed in on her with Tasers and handcuffs, Leigh smiled a smile that felt like the most terrible thing she’d ever done in her life. “I’m his mother.”
CHAPTER TWENTY THREE
AT LEAST SHE WASN’T IN handcuffs.
They’d taken Elijah away, while Officer Maroni had grilled her and the cold thin air of the station had blown over her and that woman, that woman had sat across the way and picked at her scab and leered at Leigh like she knew Leigh had just lost the hardest battle she’d ever fought with herself in her life. She could still feel those icy sharp manacles around her wrists. But as soon as her name had come up on a missing persons report, someone had made a phone call. She’d been unlocked and left there under Maroni’s watchful eye, because “Someone was coming” and she only hoped that someone was her mother, and not Jacob.
Her mother, at least, might understand.
She had no illusions that it wasn’t her name buying her freedom. In Crow City the rich owned the police, which was how poor young boys ended up with a life sentence for selling weed but some rich teenage brat got away with multiple homicides by blaming “affluenza.” Leigh supposed she was a victim of affluenza, too, when she’d just tried to kidnap a little boy and the worst she had to show for it was a few awkward hours sitting in an uncomfortable chair, surrounded by people who smelled like tired sweat and stale laundry and old, stained urinals.
She stared down at her hands—at the nails she’d painted bright and glittery just to be a pretty girl for one night with Gabriel—while the seconds ticked by into endless minutes. Maybe hours; she didn’t want to look at the clock and realize that what felt like hours of eternity had only been moments counted out in the shrill cry of argumentative voices and contemptuous responses, while someone moaned a pained and tired lament from the holding cell.
Maybe this was purgatory. Another place like the Greyhound station, people just flies trapped in amber, but there was no hope of ever getting out. No one was coming for her. One day she’d realize something had gone terribly wrong. She’d never been arrested. The officer had shot her and taken Elijah away from the sight of his mother’s body bleeding out on the pavement, blank-eyed and staring up at the sky while some synaptic fever-dream made her think, in her last fading moments, that she was alive forever in this purgatory where the grayest of souls passed through the police station of the afterlife.
“Clarissa?”
Leigh stilled, closing her eyes. Her heart just…stopped beating. Like it had given up, too heavy and broken to keep pumping, holding its breath so the next wouldn’t force the cracks in it wide enough to crumble its walls completely.
Even after four years, she still hated the possessive way he said her name.
“Clarissa!”
Joy, disbelief, trepidation, relief. Was she a terrible person for doubting it all? For doubting the light in his face when she opened her eyes and watched Jacob as he pushed through the crowded station toward her? He’d aged, she thought dully—his cheeks sagging a bit more, his skin more sallow, those little love-handles starting to merge into a paunch. He looked…settled. Respectable. The kind of man she’d look at and think he’s a good dad who teaches his boy to play baseball on the weekends, brings home signed catcher’s mitts, and turns every punishment into a lesson to make his son a better a man. Only she knew he wasn’t that at all. He was just as good at faking that as he was at faking being a good husband, while he threw money at the problem and left some little redheaded girl to be both Daddy and Mommy for a five-figure paycheck. And still…still he must feel so righteous in that, the poor single father, because he was doing exactly what was expected of him and always would be.
Leigh watched him with an empty apathy so different from the sense of homecoming she knew she should feel right now. And suddenly it was back to that again: worrying about what she should feel instead of what she did feel, because that was what he’d want of her. Her resume as Mrs. van Zandt came with a very limited repertoire of acceptable emotions.
Then he was there, pulling her out of the chair and into his arms, gasping out a hoarse, sobbing sound as he buried her face in her hair.
“Clarissa,” he gasped. “You’re alive, thank god, I missed you so much…”
She stood still and silent and numb. This wasn’t real, she thought. Or maybe it was, and she was just a hollow horrible ungrateful person who couldn’t even let the father of her son care enough to love her, miss her, want her home, want to talk things out and atone for his mistake. She should push him away. She’d rejected this when she’d walked out, and she should push him away. But somewhere in another room was a little boy waiting to go home, and if she did what was expected of her she’d get to go home with him—instead of ending up in jail for attempted kidnapping. She could do this. She could do this because she loved her son, and she couldn’t live without him anymore. If this was the price for it, then so be it.
But her arms didn’t want to move, and this time the puppet-strings in her heart were no help. They bound her limbs tight to her sides. The warm familiar body wrapped around her wasn’
t right, wasn’t the one she wanted, but God if she ever wanted to hold that little boy again…
She closed her eyes tight. Wetness choked in her throat, built in her eyes, and she pulled against those invisible puppet-strings, pulled until they snapped and her heart broke into its last little pieces as she wrapped her arms around Jacob’s neck and became Mrs. Clarissa Leigh van Zandt once more.
“Yeah.” She gulped back a sob, closed her eyes, pressed her face against his chest. “Yeah…I missed you too,” she lied, the same way she’d once lied and said I love you too.
Her mother had been wrong. The heart wasn’t a woman’s weapon. It was lies.
Those little lies every woman told to survive, because they were the only way to keep just one small piece of her heart for herself and herself alone.
“Mr. van Zandt?” Officer Maroni interrupted. “Can you confirm that this is your missing wife?”
Jacob lifted his head, but didn’t let go of Leigh, keeping her so close he practically strangled her. He beamed through the tears streaming down his face, smiling like she hadn’t pointed a gun at his head and threatened to blow a hole in his skull before walking out of his life. “Yes. Yes, it’s her. Thank you so much for bringing my Clarissa home to me.”
“I have to ask, then—do you want to press charges for the attempted kidnapping?”
“No—God no!” His arm tightened around her. Tightening the fucking shackles. “I’m not going to press charges against my own wife. I’m just…I’m happy to have her back. I just want to take our son and go home.”
Officer Maroni gave Leigh a skeptical look. She knew what the woman was thinking. Here was Jacob in his seersucker suit with his perfectly groomed hair, and this tiny little scrap of a woman who looked like a barely-legal prostitute clinging on to her sugar daddy. She a strawberry, she thought for the second time in weeks, and fought back a hysterical giggle, forcing it to morph into a kind of wan, sappy smile as she leaned into her…her husband. Anything to get out of here, away from this stinking place. Anything to hold her son and hide from the terrible sinking feeling that she was about to put the lock back on her own cage, and throw away the key.
