Sisters in the Wind(53)
“I’m waiting for my contact to update me. Should be any day now,” he says, flicking his hand in pain before running it under cold water.
He makes eye contact with me and shakes his head to convey Not now.
It isn’t until we are swimming and Daunis leaves to sit in the sauna that I corner him.
“Say it.” I’m frustrated with his persistent bad habit of withholding unpleasant news.
“They’re investigating you, Lucy. Not as a victim. As a person of interest.”
The world quietly closes in on me. It’s the opposite of an explosion.
I don’t know whether to ask questions, spill my guts, or remain silent.
Instead I submerge myself. It’s not the first time I’ve waited beneath the surface until I feel safe.
* * *
When I greet Jamie the next morning, I’m bleary-eyed from lack of sleep and crying. He fixes his coffee. I go through the motions of making a cup of tea. He searches the cabinet with the medicines and hands something to me. Eye drops.
I go to my bathroom and douse my eyeballs with the red-eye relief. When I return to the kitchen, I hand over the drops so Jamie can put them back in the cabinet. The only reason I don’t hide in my room is to keep my regular patterns.
Today of all days, I need everything to be normal. Until it isn’t.
It feels like an eternity until my physical-therapy appointment.
At 1:55 p.m., I walk from my bedroom to the entry. Jamie is on the phone with Hazel, so I pause in his doorway.
PT, I mouth while pointing at my watch.
He stares at me for a beat too long before nodding and continuing his work conversation.
I will miss you, Jamie. If I could’ve chosen a brother, it would’ve been you. The instant you walked into the diner, Mr. Prada Boots, I knew you’d change my life.
The elevator opens. Daunis brightens instantly. Her arms are full of shopping bags.
“Headed to PT,” I say.
“You want me to keep you company?” She offers sometimes.
“I’m good.”
Jamie and Daunis won’t know I’m gone until I don’t return from PT in an hour. I’ve already canceled the appointment. This elevator ride is the beginning of my head start.
He will tell her about the investigation. They’ll assume it’s why I’m running away. One of them will check the bus schedule. There’s a two thirty p.m. Greyhound bus headed south. I’ll gain another hour or two lead by the time they search for me at the main bus station in downtown Lansing.
Meanwhile, I’m about to get picked up at two p.m. sharp by a group of college students heading to Chicago. I flushed the slip of paper with the driver’s contact information from the ride-share bulletin board. My coat and backpack are in my bedroom, along with my laptop. I’ve left almost everything in my room, just in case it buys me another half hour of Jamie and Daunis wondering where I am.
My burner phone is in the back pocket of my jeans. My zippered pencil pouch is in the front pocket of the CMU hoodie Daunis bought for me to wear to the baseball game next week. In addition to my cash and preloaded credit card, I’ve got a fake ID that I bought from a mechanical-engineering major with a minor in computer science who I met in the bathroom at the IET building. She’s a clever one. If you need an intelligent go-getter, hang out with tech girls. They have resources and can get shit done.
I walk to the hotel entrance. By now the presence of valet drivers, a bellman, and two security guards does not faze me. I’m even used to the tribal cop car parked to the immediate left of the hotel entrance.
The gray Toyota RAV4 is exactly where it’s supposed to be—to the right of the hotel entrance, at the end of the drop-off lane. Just another ten paces.
“I knew we’d cross paths again.”
I freeze instead of running on my barely healed femur. The voice comes from behind, the same one that said I had a week to give them what they wanted.
Of course she lied.
Of all the foster sisters I’ve had, the liar broke my heart.
WHEN I WAS SIXTEEN
2006
Missus baked a cake for my sixteenth birthday. She had asked about my favorite kind two days prior.
“Chocolate, with chocolate frosting,” I replied, remembering the chocolate bar she enjoyed every afternoon with a cup of coffee.
“Same as me. How wonderful.”
I’d been at Hoppy Farm for three months now. Long enough to become familiar with farm routines, yet not so adjusted as to forget Devery’s instructions about fitting in. My braid was shorter than those of both Hoppy wives but styled the same way—a hair tie at the nape of the neck and a second at the end of the braid.
By the time I turned sixteen, I knew I wanted to remain at the farm. Missus had told the truth: I never went hungry. The food was excellent. Produce grown at the farm, either canned from last harvest or fresh from the many hoop houses. Eggs collected each morning by Tonya and Jennifer, each wearing special aprons with dozens of tiny pockets to keep the eggs from knocking together. Milk, butter, and meat from the cows. My stomach issues from Bridget’s reliance on processed foods were a faint memory.
I gained weight each month. Not only from the size of the meals, but from the muscles that came with physical labor.
A chore list filled nearly an entire wall in the kitchen. It was an enormous dry-erase board in a handmade wooden frame with a basket attached for the colorful markers that wiped away with a soft cloth. Every Sunday night the board was scrubbed clean, and the days of the week were written in the header row. Each column had two rows: indoor chores and outdoor chores. Missus wrote the chores for the week, with input from Mister.