Well.
I suppose all of this sounds ridiculous. Paranoid. Which of course I am, I admit that: paranoid through and through. Deep down I know that the only real risk is the sixth one, which is that someone will catch my eye, see something familiar about me. Someone with an uncanny ability to recognize a person. That someone makes a phone call, the police show up, I get arrested, and the last time Finch sees me is with handcuffs, getting hauled off, and I never get a chance to tell her what really happened, the truth about us.
I’ll wear a baseball cap. Plus I have a beard now, and it has come in long and thick, and though there is a hand mirror in this house, I’ve hardly seen myself over the past eight years. Still, I suspect I look different. Age and stress: they have taken their toll. But clearly, this is the greatest risk of all, being recognized. It’s no easy thing to disappear, and we’ve done it. I’m putting all of that at risk now, I realize that. But we are almost out of food and once the snow comes, we could be stuck at the cabin for weeks and there is no other way.
* * *
Early the next morning, Finch is buzzing with excitement, all riled up, and who can blame her, this being the first time she’s left the woods since she was an infant. I tell her to fill the canteens and get her pillow. I pull the blankets from both of our beds and carry them to the truck.
“Bundle up, sugar. Don’t want you to get cold.”
She grabs her jacket, hat, and gloves, and bunny-hops around the room. Then she stoops to pick up the kitten and tucks him under her arm. “Come on. Let’s go.”
“Walt Whitman’s staying here,” I say, shaking my head. That’s what Finch decided to name him.
“But he’ll be lonely. Scared. He might get into something.”
I shrug. “Then leave him outside.”
“He’s too little. These woods are crawling with predators, you know that. He could get killed.” She narrows her eyes and looks at me sternly. “Think about what happened to Susanna, Cooper.”
“Well then, leave him here and tell him to stay out of trouble.”
She mopes about this, dragging her feet across the floor, moaning. At last she settles the kitten into an old sweatshirt, tucked in a wooden crate from the root cellar. She leaves a small dish of water beside his bed.
Finally, I tell her we need to go. “You can sit up for the first part of the drive, but when I say so, you’ve got to duck down on the floor of the back seat and cover up.” She’s small enough that she can slide down between the front and back seats and tuck under a little nest of blankets and pillows.
Her face falls. “You mean I can’t go into the store?”
As hard as it is for me to deny her this, I know it’s for the best. No getting around it—she’ll slow me down. So many things to see and touch and ask about. It will nearly double our time. Plus who knows what she might ask or say, and someone standing close by might overhear. “Sorry, sugar.”
“But I thought we were both going. Together.”
“No.”
“I thought maybe since Jake didn’t come, it changed things. Like maybe we were operating under different rules now.”
“Well, we are, sort of. But not in the sense that you can come with me. I wish things were different, Finch.”
“Me, too.”
“But they’re not.”
“Okay.” Disappointment lingers on her face.
I promise myself to grab something special for her at the store, try to make up for this. “So can I trust you to follow directions?”
“I’ll follow directions. I want to go.” She starts bunny-hopping again.
“You’ll need to be real still in there. Someone walks by, we can’t have them see you squirming around. It’d be suspicious.” She’s still hopping. “Finch, are you listening?”
“I’ll be the stillest girl you’ve ever seen. I’ll be so still you’ll think I’m dead.”
“Finch.”
“Okay, I’ll be so still you’ll think I’m a statue.”
“Good. That sounds perfect.”
I fire up the engine and we drive out the long dirt road, stopping at the gate. I climb out, unlock it, pass through, stop again, and lock it. There’s nothing more inviting to snoopers than a gate that’s usually locked standing wide open. People see that, and they consider it an invitation to mosey right on in, regardless of any NO TRESPASSING signs. Once the gate is locked, we drive out the rest of the dirt road. White pines tower overhead, tall and thick. After a while we pass the gas station where we’ll stop later. There’s a green Ford Ranger outside, as well as two pickups and a silver sedan. We pass a little collection of houses, a village, I guess you’d call it, one with a big trampoline that must’ve been flipped on its side in a recent windstorm. “Look at that,” Finch whispers, her forehead pressed to the glass.