Gail got out of the car wordlessly, walked around to the driver’s side, and got in. Jon leaned against the open door. “I love you.”
Gail stared straight through the windshield and took a long time to respond. And when she did, just before pulling the door closed, all she said was “Me, too.”
Jon watched her drive off. Me, too? What was it going to take this time? Two more apologies? Three? A bouquet of flowers and a fucking poem? He shook his head and turned back to the wagon.
He opened the driver’s-side door and knelt in the gravel. He pried the plastic covering off the steering column and sorted through the wires until he found the ignition. He cut apart the wiring harness, and Eric’s words from high school echoed in his head: red to brown. He wrapped the wires, and the radio turned on, flooding the car with country music. Yes. He sparked the yellow against the red, and the starter kicked and kicked, until finally the engine rumbled to life. Jon smiled—his teenage years hadn’t been entirely misspent.
He darted to the back of the car to remove the trailer. He knelt to unclasp the chains and unlatch the hitch. Maybe it was the rumble of the exhaust in his ear, or maybe he just wasn’t paying attention, but he didn’t hear the boat’s motor.
“Hey!”
Jon looked up. Two large men in flannel shirts drove an aluminum johnboat right up onto the muddy bank.
“Hey, motherfucker!”
Jon jumped to his feet and yanked the trailer from the hitch. Boots pounded the gravel as he scrambled into the driver’s seat. He slammed the door closed and locked it. An angry, bearded face appeared at the window, yelling and pounding. Jon shoved the car into drive just as the passenger door swung open. The other man dove and grabbed Jon’s arm. Jon slammed the accelerator and yanked the wheel to the left. Gravel slapped against the wheel wells as the wagon careened out of the parking lot. The momentum of the turn proved stronger than the man’s grip on Jon’s sleeve, and he flew from the open door, rolling across the asphalt. Jon swerved into the northbound lane, and the passenger door slammed shut.
Jon peered into the rearview mirror as he sped off. The man lay in the middle of the road, his friend bent over him. The man on the blacktop didn’t stir. Jon slowed, urging the man to move, but he didn’t. Jon’s scalp prickled, and his eyes flicked from the mirror to the road ahead and back again. As he approached a curve, he slowed even more, his eyes fixed on the mirror, but the man wouldn’t move. They finally disappeared behind the trees, and Jon gunned it.
Gail
Gail sat in the Walmart parking lot with the cell phone on her lap. Of course there was a Walmart. There was always a Walmart.
Although Gail sat still, and Maya slept soundly in the back seat, Gail vibrated internally, with exhaustion and confusion and rage. So, she wasn’t just a liar, she was a stupid liar. And this from the man with whom she was racing toward the border, toward a new life, risking—and trusting—everything. She knew that she wasn’t a liar, but as she sat in the Walmart parking lot with the phone in her lap, she couldn’t help wondering whether she was stupid.
When she first saw the final consent, she was instantly wrapped in a warm blanket of relief. They could go home. That email told her exactly what she wanted to hear, and she didn’t stop for even a moment to consider whether it was real. But what if Jon was right? What if they drove back to Elmhurst and walked right into a trap? What if they took her baby?
She looked down at the phone and thumbed the familiar number, even though she knew that she shouldn’t. She pressed the dial button before she could change her mind. She held the phone to her ear, and as it rang, she formulated the questions, because she knew that she could hear the truth most clearly during those first few seconds of surprise.
“This is Paige.”
“Is it real?”
“Gail?”
“The final consent. Is it real?”
“Yes.” Paige sounded confused. “Of course it is.”
“Were the cops involved?”
“What? What are you talking about?”
Gail closed her eyes and leaned against the headrest. It was real. It was true. She was right. “So, she’s ours?” she managed.
“Yes, Gail,” Paige said. But she seemed to have regained her bearings, and her voice hardened. “Maya is yours. You got what you wanted. I hope that you’re happy.”
Gail blinked at the pickup truck parked in front of her.
“Is that it?” Paige demanded. “No other questions?”
“What do you mean?”
“You take Carli’s baby, you tear her life to shreds, and you don’t have the common decency to ask how she’s doing?”
Gail stopped breathing for a moment as she took in what Paige said. She felt the urge to shout at Paige, to explain herself, to make excuses. But as she digested the words, she tasted their truth, and instead she just said, “How is she?”
“How is she?” Paige asked, her voice rising. “How is she? She just gave her baby away to the people who stole her. And you know why she did it, Gail? Do you know why?”
Gail said nothing, squeezed the phone.
“Because she wants to see Maya again.” Paige let that hang in the air. “She gave away her baby so that she can see just a tiny sliver of that baby’s life.”
In the silence, Gail could hear Maya stir in the back seat. She tried to form words, to say something, to defend herself, but no words came.
“I wrote your home study,” Paige said. Anger crackled through the phone. “I know all about you and Jon and your families and Marla.” Paige paused, and Gail could hear her breathe. “In this whole fucking fiasco, Carli might be the only mother worthy of the name.”
Shame flooded Gail as Maya started to cry. The phone beeped. Jon. “I have to go,” Gail said quietly. She hung up on Paige and answered Jon’s call.
“Where are you?” Jon demanded.
She heard the question through Maya’s scream, but at first, she couldn’t answer. For a long moment she didn’t know where she was or who she was or how she got there.
“I’m in the Walmart parking lot,” she finally said. “By the garden center.”
Carli
Carli went to the cellar and sorted through the piles of boxes until she found one filled with videos from when they used to have a VCR. She dumped them on the floor. She found another box filled with Randy’s wrestling trophies. She stacked them along the wall behind the water heater and brought both boxes upstairs.
She started in the kitchen, carefully packing the bottles and formula into the first box. Then she went into her bedroom and neatly folded each of the outfits that Marla had bought at Goodwill and stacked them into the other box. She put the diapers on top of the clothes and the creams and ointments on top of the diapers, and she put both boxes next to the crib. She checked her email on her phone, but Gail hadn’t replied to her message. She wondered where they were, whether they were still in the country, what Gail would think when she read it. And she wondered how long she would continue to wonder. Carli went to the kitchen and found a screwdriver and pliers in the shoebox on top of the fridge. On the way to her bedroom, she checked her email again. Still nothing.
They brought the crib in from Marla’s truck assembled, but the cellar door was narrower than the front door. If she was going to get it down there, she’d have to take it apart. But the crib was old, and the screws were stripped. She struggled to loosen them.
“What the fuck are you doing?”
Carli looked up to find Marla at the door, her hands on her hips. “Taking it apart.”
“Why?”
“I’m putting it down the cellar. I can’t look at it.”
“You’ll get the damn baby back.”
Carli met Marla’s glare, forced her voice steady. “No. I won’t.”
“The cops might still find them. Anything can happen.”
“It won’t matter if they do.”
Marla’s eyes slowly narrowed. “Why?” she demanded. “What did yo
u do?”
If they came back, Marla would find out what she had done. Besides, Carli was past caring what Marla thought. “I signed it.”
“Signed what?”
“The final consent.”
“Why the fuck would you do that?”
“Paige said they might come back.” Saying it to Marla, watching Marla’s face contort with disgust, made it seem less likely, less true, but she’d already made her decision. “Once they have the final consent, they won’t have a reason to run.”
Marla grew still in that dangerous way of hers. “You still don’t get it, you dumbass. She. Works. For. Them.”
“I just want to see my baby again.”
“You are one stupid little bitch.”
Carli turned back to the crib with the screwdriver. She couldn’t look at Marla anymore. She had made her decision.
“You can leave the crib where it is,” Marla said. “But start packing your own shit. I want you out of my house before dark.”
* * *
Carli didn’t wait until dark, and it didn’t take long for her to pack her things. She packed her clothes and her shoes and her computer and her textbook. She packed her yearbooks and her makeup and deodorant and a bottle of shampoo and a bottle of conditioner. Five garbage bags in all. Eighteen years. Just five bags and a computer.
When she carried the first bag from her room, the TV in the den was turned up loud. It sounded like Here Comes Honey Boo Boo. In the front room, Randy was driving a Lamborghini through Miami with the cops on his tail, while Wendy chewed gum and paged through a Cosmo. Wendy looked up and squinted at the bag.
“What’re you doin’?”
“Marla kicked me out.”
Randy paused his high-speed chase. Wendy snorted. “She’s kicked me out a dozen times. Just ignore her. It’ll pass.”
Honey Boo Boo’s mom cackled from the den. Carli knew that Wendy was right, but she had to get out. It wasn’t just the slaps in the head and the threats and the insults and the cigarette smoke in her face. She’d gotten used to Marla’s bitterness, her hatred. That was the problem—she’d gotten used to it all. She had stopped thinking for herself. She was turning into Marla.
“I wanna leave.”
Wendy’s eyebrows squirmed in confusion. Randy cocked his head. He regarded her for a long moment, then nodded and stood. He reached for the bag in her hands.
“Let me carry that for you.”
With Randy helping, it took just three trips to the car. Carli came back to her room and scanned it for anything she was forgetting. The volume of the TV in the den increased.
“What about those?” Randy pointed to the two boxes at the foot of the crib.
Carli checked her phone but found nothing from Gail. She was probably in Canada already. She had probably become a new person. She would probably never check that email address again.
“No,” she said. She forced herself to look away from the crib. “I won’t need those.”
Jon
Something rattled under the hood of the station wagon, and the muffler rumbled. The steering swung loose, bordering on nonresponsive. Halfway to Detroit Lakes, Jon found the keys nestled in the console, rendering his high school skills irrelevant. He fiddled with the radio, trying to find music that would soothe, that would settle, but it was mostly country or Christian rock. The best he could manage was Journey.
None of this distracted Jon from that man lying in the road. He didn’t move. He might have just been gathering himself from the fall. At worst, it was probably no more than a concussion, a broken arm, maybe. But Jon didn’t see him move, and he couldn’t shake the idea that he might have killed somebody. He fought the urge to turn back. That was nonsense, of course—he couldn’t drive a stolen car back to check on the man he stole it from. And his wife and his baby were waiting. They had to get over that border. He didn’t see the man move, but he had to wall it off. He wouldn’t tell Gail. He wouldn’t search the Internet for a carjacking just north of Dunvilla. Jon Durbin stole that car. If the man in the flannel shirt was hurt, Jon Durbin had hurt him. Allen Reynolds had nothing to do with it.
He found Gail just where she said she’d be. Maya was screaming when Jon opened the door of the Camry, but Gail just sat very still in the front seat, ignoring the noise. Still pissed off. They loaded everything from the Camry into the station wagon without a word. Gail climbed into the back with Maya and mixed a bottle. Maya pulled at the formula, and eventually the car fell quiet.
The lakes and pines gave way to fields, the earth freshly turned, and they passed through sad little towns like Bejou and Winger and Plummer. Maya fell asleep after she was fed, and Gail slumped against the window. Rush was playing on the radio, but Gail’s silence seemed to drown out the music. Jon looked at her in the rearview mirror. He couldn’t do anything about that man on the blacktop just north of Dunvilla, but he’d better do something about Gail.
“Listen,” he said. “I’m sorry about this morning.”
Gail didn’t turn from the window. When she spoke, her voice sounded dead. Rotten. “Maybe you’re right,” she said.
Jon knew that he was right, but he also knew to keep quiet.
“Maybe I am stupid.”
Shit. She had her teeth into this one.
“I was scared, Gail. And tired. I don’t think you’re stupid.”
“And a liar. Don’t forget about my lies.”
This was going to take until Winnipeg. Maybe longer. “Gail. We’re both under stress. I haven’t slept in three days. I’m just worried about Maya.”
“But what if it’s true?” she said. “What if Carli really signed the final consent?”
It wasn’t. Jon knew it in his bones, but he could play along. “We’ll hire a lawyer to contact Paige when we get to Winnipeg. We’ll do it from the other side of the border.”
Gail finally turned from the window and locked eyes with him in the mirror. “That’s not what I mean. If it’s true, what would that say about Carli?”
It would say that she was a confused teenager who couldn’t make an important decision, and once she did, she couldn’t stick with it. It would say that if she somehow ended up with Maya, she would get confused and distracted and their lives would devolve into the kind of shitshow that Jon knew only too well. It would tell him that he was doing exactly the right thing, that every mile they drove north was a mile toward safety. Instead, Jon just said, “The only thing that matters is that the three of us stay together.”
Gail turned back to the window and mumbled her next question. “And what does that say about us?”
What the hell was she talking about now? He tried to find her eyes in the rearview mirror again, but she was staring out the window at the stubbled fields.
“What do you mean by that?”
Gail said nothing.
“Gail. What do you mean by that?”
She wouldn’t look at him. She didn’t move. She said nothing. She just stared out the window.
Marla
Marla lit her next cigarette from the last and drank from a can of Cherry Coke. She turned off Honey Boo Boo after Carli left—that was mainly for Carli—and was watching Ice Road Truckers. She still couldn’t believe that stupid bitch signed the final consent. Free pass for the Durbins after all they did. And she was surprised when Carli left. Marla didn’t think she had it in her. She thought for sure that Carli would come into the den with apologies and excuses, begging for another chance. She’d be back, though. She thought that being pregnant taught something about real life. She didn’t yet know that was the easy part.
Marla finally turned off the TV and drank another gulp of soda. The only sounds in the house were Randy’s war and the occasional murmur from Wendy. She checked her phone to make sure that she hadn’t missed a call from Larry. She thought about calling him again but couldn’t gather the energy for it, couldn’t find the hope that she had felt just the day before. He and Kurt had probably already given up. They were probably already
driving back.
She thought about calling Bradford, but he might know what Carli had done, that she had signed the final consent. When he first showed up with his fancy suit, his talk about all-points bulletins and state police and Canadian Immigration had felt solid and real and hopeful. But then Carli gave him that notebook, and that hope got buried by rage.
What a dumb little bitch. Marla didn’t mean to hit her, but when Carli gave him the notebook, Marla’s blood started pounding like it did sometimes, and her vision narrowed to a small dark tunnel, and she couldn’t think anymore. She couldn’t even remember Bradford leaving, just the heavy weight of anger that forced her hand into the side of her daughter’s head.
It bothered her that she couldn’t stop that hand, but there was something else that was bothering her, something tugging at her. Right before that smug son of a bitch started to interrogate her, right before Carli went for the notebook, two stray thoughts had collided and were forming themselves into a question. Marla tried to sort through the conversation before the blackness, to see if she could piece it back together, but she failed. It probably didn’t matter anymore. The Durbins were probably across the border, looking for apartments in Winnipeg. Seven hundred thousand people in Winnipeg. They were gone.
Marla grew still in her chair. The border. Canadian Immigration. Homeland Security. Passports. The Durbins would be stopped at the border when they tried to use their passports. They’d be locked in a tiny room, and Carli’s baby would be taken from them and sent south. That was too easy, though. Durbin would have thought through all that. He would know how to get fake passports, and that would probably take a day or two. And he would get them on the Internet the way that Wendy got her fake ID when she was seventeen. They would have to be sent somewhere. Grand Forks was just south of the border. Passports and Grand Forks—that was the connection that the blackness had erased yesterday. Marla sat very still for a long time and sorted through the possibilities and probabilities until they hardened into certainties. She thought about calling Bradford, but all she could see was that bastard’s self-righteous smile. When she picked up the phone, she dialed Larry’s number instead.
Other People's Children Page 22
