“Yes.” He put a hand on her knee and she wished it were under different circumstances.
He guided her toward his father’s house and they dropped Dwight off. He seemed scared at first but after a few moments he was exploring Martin’s home, stretching his legs on foreign furniture.
“What’s all this about?” Martin asked from beneath his mustache as they were about to leave.
“I’m afraid I have a family emergency back home,” Meg said. “My mother, she’s not well. I need to pay her a visit.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. Would you like me to make you some coffee for the road? You’ve got an awfully long drive ahead of you. You don’t want to be falling asleep at the wheel.”
“We’ll be fine,” Brian said. “You just take good care of that cat.”
At the door Martin grabbed Brian’s arm. “Be careful.” His eyes were wide, perhaps with fear. A father’s intuition, Meg supposed.
“We will.”
They jogged down the front steps and stepped into the car, driving toward the place she’d wanted so badly to leave behind.
A few minutes later, as they pulled onto the highway, Meg’s pulse raced. There were no more streetlights to illuminate the way. Instead there was a crescent moon and darkness so thick it seemed the shadows would multiply and engulf them both.
She drove a little faster and tried to quiet her thoughts. There were a few words that kept echoing in her mind, words she wished she’d never thought in the first place. Words reserved for the witching hour of her shifts at work, not out here in the dead of the night.
I’m going to die here.
Chapter Six
Gillian Foster woke to the sound of tapping. It was faint, faraway, and she didn’t want to acknowledge it. She wanted only to remain in her dream where the shadows couldn’t get her or her daughter, where she could finally be at peace. Brian wouldn’t tell her she needed more meds and her therapist did not exist in the first place. There was only a pleasant glow, a sunny field perhaps. She couldn’t make sense of it but that didn’t matter. What mattered was the tranquility of it all.
But as the tapping grew louder so did the real world and she was pulled slowly from the sunny field or whatever lovely place it was, until she opened her eyes and saw a man just outside the car. He tapped on the window.
She rubbed her eyes, covered her mouth as she yawned, and nearly jumped out of her seat when she saw the badge and uniform.
It was a cop. A cop was knocking at her window and he was here to take her and Meg away, to bring them back home where the shadows would get them.
The man didn’t seem in any rush. He signaled with his hand for her to roll the window down. She looked to her right. Meg was snoring underneath the blanket in the passenger seat.
Gillian decided then she would do whatever it took. She would not let the man, cop or no cop, make them go back.
Beneath her jacket, the knife seemed heavier as she rolled down the window. “Morning, Officer.”
He nodded. “Ma’am.” He kneeled down and looked toward Meg. “That your daughter?”
Gillian nodded. “Yes. She snores just like her mother.”
He didn’t laugh. She couldn’t judge his expression beneath his sunglasses and that made her anxious. Had he already run the license plate? It was a rental of course but that probably didn’t matter much. They likely had the number on record somewhere in connection with her.
He inhaled and spat on the ground. “Can I ask what you and your daughter are doing sleeping in a high school parking lot on a Sunday morning?”
She tensed, tried to slow her breathing. “I’m afraid I couldn’t keep my eyes open last night, Officer, and I made the mistake of passing the last rest stop for god knows how long. I figured I’d just pull off the highway and catch a few minutes of sleep. Except a few minutes turned into a few hours and then some.” That was good. Keep him talking and try not to ramble.
“You know it’s illegal to sleep in your car?”
“No, Officer. I didn’t. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have.” Her vision was fuzzy, her head spinning. She needed her medication. It was in the glove box, which seemed impossibly far away.
“Where were you travelling, ma’am?” He was sounding more and more impatient, kicking his feet now and then against the front tire.
“We were visiting family in Rhode Island. We were going to leave in the morning but you know how family can be. My mother, she drives me mad. So I kindly asked my daughter if she’d like to leave early.”
“Is that right?” He kneeled down again and looked at Meg.
Don’t you fucking think about it, Gillian thought. Her right hand fidgeted, the fingers readying, if need be, to grab the blade and do whatever was needed of them. She took a deep breath. You can do this. You can kill a man if it’s to protect your daughter.
The man took off his glasses and she knew then. She would have to use the blade.
He opened his mouth. She prepared for him to ask her to step out.
“I can’t say I blame you. I haven’t spoken to my mother in the better part of five years. Listen, next time you’re feeling drowsy, get a motel or find a rest stop ahead of time. You did the right thing pulling over but some guys aren’t as nice as me. This is a small town and there are plenty of officers looking for something to do, even if it means arresting a woman and her daughter for taking a nap.”
Meg murmured in her sleep, turned over.
“I’ll do that, Officer. I’m sorry again.”
He tapped the side of the door. “You have yourself a safe trip home.”
She watched him walk away and told herself she could have done it if need be. She could have done anything to anyone who tried to stop her.
“Who was that, Mommy?” Meg said, yawning and stretching, wincing at the sun beaming through the windshield.
“Just a concerned policeman, honey. Let’s go get some breakfast.”
“Okay. I want pancakes. With chocolate chips.”
“Of course.” Gillian waited from the cop car to pull out of the lot and then shifted into drive.
The knife still felt heavy against her chest, perhaps heavier now.
Two towns over, halfway through New York state now, they stopped at a diner with ripped vinyl cushions in the booths and greasy table tops that made Gillian’s coffee cup stick every time she picked it up.
Meg ordered chocolate chip pancakes with sprinkles and whipped cream.
Gillian ordered toast and a few slices of bacon.
She wasn’t hungry after this morning but truth be told, she hadn’t been hungry in a long time. The pills did that. They did lots of things, made her groggy, tired, pale. You could name a side effect and she had acquired it. But as her husband and doctors were fond of saying, the pills were a necessary evil. Schizophrenia could not go untreated. She was sick and needed help, they said.
As if she couldn’t deduce that herself.
The waitress brought their food over and Meg dug in, humming as she chewed.
Gillian took a few bites of the dry toast and sipped her coffee. Staring out the window, she wondered where they would go next. She didn’t have much of a plan in mind. She knew that as long as they kept moving, they were safe.
She thought of the commercial on the radio the night before.
You can keep running but you have to sleep sometime and when you do…
Except that she’d slept last night and she was still here. Perhaps she’d dodged them for now or perhaps they were always watching, always waiting for the opportune moment.
“Mommy, how come you’re not eating your food? You always tell me to finish my entire plate.”
Gillian looked at her daughter and smiled when she noticed the dollop of whipped cream on the girl’s chin and nose. She grabbed a napkin and wiped Meg’s face clean. “I guess I do say
that, huh?”
Meg nodded.
“Okay, if you say so.” She finished a piece of toast and then another, but her body didn’t seem to notice. The food was dead weight in her mid-section. She tried to remember the last time she had enjoyed a meal.
Meg sipped her chocolate milk. “How come you can see the bad things but no one else can?”
Gillian had thought about that for a long time, had come up with a few theories but none that felt concrete. It was hard to prove something that seemed to only exist in your mind.
Except she knew they were real, just as real as the shitty food on her plate or the cop who she was prepared to kill an hour ago.
She knew this because she felt them, not just saw them.
And she had done some research at the local library during her free time. While Meg was at school, Gillian would read through books, first on her disease, then on other things. Psychic phenomena, ghosts, parallel universes. Things that should have seemed crazy even to her. But after a while they made more and more sense.
“You know that your mommy has a different brain than you, right?”
Meg nodded. They had discussed the issue before, albeit briefly.
“Well,” Gillian said, “I think that because my brain is different, it allows me to see things that other people can’t. It lets me tap into something that the normal person doesn’t even know exists.”
“Like a secret door.”
Gillian rubbed her arms, suddenly covered with bumps. “Yes,” she said. “Like a secret door.”
“And that’s where the bad things live. Inside the door.”
“Yes, I suppose they do.”
Meg made swirls with whipped cream residue on her plate. “Does that mean the door was already open when you first found it?”
Gillian sipped her coffee. It had gone cold and tasted like chemicals. “No, sweetie. It was closed when I found it. But I think I accidentally opened it.” She thought of the pamphlet, of signing her name and thinking she was going to finish school and be something more than what she’d turned out to be. And then the phone calls and finally the nightly visits. She’d opened the door quite easily without knowing it.
And no one else, aside from her daughter, who believed everything so easily in her childhood, considered Gillian to be sane. She’d been diagnosed a year before things had gone sour. It was too much of a coincidence, Brian had said but he only believed in what he could see and touch.
Gillian looked at the check and put down a ten-dollar bill. She stood up and put her coat on. Meg was still drawing with her fork. At first it looked like a few random shapes, no discernable pattern, but Gillian froze when it all came together.
“Let’s get going,” she told Meg, hurrying her daughter along.
“Okay.” Meg put down her fork and grabbed her doll.
Gillian pulled her along quickly. Not because they’d been in one place for far too long or because she feared the staff recognized either of them.
But because her daughter had drawn a door with the whipped cream on her plate.
An open door.
They drove west for three days, sleeping at a rest stop two nights and staying at a motel on the third. Gillian wore sunglasses as she checked in and tried not to fidget while the attendant at the front desk typed away at the computer, looking up every so often.
Early the next morning, before they checked out, Gillian woke with a start. She was sure she heard knocking on her door. It was the police officer. He had come back to take them away. Her daughter would be forced to live with Brian, poor unknowing Brian, and Gillian would never truly know if Meg was safe. Because she herself would be sent away to a place with padded rooms.
She sat up in bed, careful not to disturb Meg, and waited for the knock to come again.
There was a harsh wind outside, rattling the dirty windows. Sunlight was filtering in, though the grime made it seem discolored.
For a long moment, waiting for the sound, she wondered if it wasn’t the officer after all. She wondered if there was something else on the other side of that door. Something like a shadow that had no body to which it belonged, a darkness that had latched onto her and her daughter.
She winced and waited.
The knock did not come.
It had been a dream, her imagination, part of her illness.
That’s what she told herself as she got up and showered and packed. After drying her hair, she pulled the room’s curtain aside and peered through the filthy glass. There was no one out there, nothing except for her car and a newspaper dispenser. Which got her thinking. She found some change in her purse and stepped outside, stretching and shivering a bit in the early morning chill.
She fed the coins to the slot and pulled out a paper.
She tensed as she unfolded it and looked at the front page, ready to see a picture of her and Meg. A series of robberies in a nearby town and car bombings in the Middle East took up the headlines. She flipped and flipped until, grinding her teeth, she saw her name under a headline.
Schizophrenic woman who kidnapped her daughter still missing.
She read on but found nothing new. Police had no leads. The woman’s husband begged his wife to bring their little girl home.
Gillian thought of Brian, alone in the house. Was he pacing around, talking with a private investigator? Was he spewing names out, calling her a crazy bitch like he had each night he came home drunk? Or was he beside himself, roaming the empty rooms and wishing he could have them back?
Gillian wanted to believe the latter was true. He was a good man at heart and that counted for something but he was too rigid, could not believe for even a moment that something was happening to her, something outside of her sickness.
She thought about calling him. Just to let him know they were okay. She owed him that much.
Something rustled from behind.
Gillian dropped the paper and spun around, letting forth a scream.
It was Meg, standing in the doorway with a blanket wrapped around her like a cape. “What’s wrong?”
Gillian shook her head and tried to catch her breath. Her heart pounded too quickly. She wondered how long she could keep this up, constantly not knowing what was around the corner. “Nothing’s wrong. Just getting some air.”
Meg looked at the fallen newspaper.
The image of them was facing upward.
Gillian picked the newspaper up and tore it into pieces. She tossed the debris into the trashcan and brought Meg inside.
“Was that us, Mommy?”
“No. Just another girl and her mother. That’s all.”
“It looked an awful lot like you and me.”
“Well it wasn’t. Now stop asking stupid questions.” Gillian winced, wanting to take the words back.
Meg’s eyes glistened. Then there were tears falling down her cheek.
“I’m so sorry, honey.” She hugged Meg, rubbing her back. “I didn’t mean to yell. Your mother’s just exhausted.”
“I miss Daddy,” Meg said, sobbing now. “I want to go home.”
“Me too, sweetie. But you know we can’t right now. We’ve talked about this. Once mommy figures everything out, we’ll be okay again and we can go back to the way it was before.”
“I want to,” Meg said. “I want to so bad. Just close the door with the bad things and bring us home.”
Gillian rubbed Meg’s hair and tried to quiet her. If only it were that easy, she thought. I’d have shut it the moment it first opened. I’d have put a pad lock on it and tossed the key into the deepest body of water I could find.
“Mommy?” Meg pulled away and wiped at her eyes. They were blood red now, matching her nose and cheeks. “You promise that wasn’t us? On the newspaper?”
Gillian nodded. “Of course.”
“Pinkie swear?”
Gillian looked as her daughter reached out, the tiny finger uncurling and waiting for her mother to tell her the truth. Because you could not lie when presented with a pinky swear. It went against everything the gesture stood for.
Gillian reached out and returned the embrace with her pinky finger.
A few hours later, back on the road, they drove past a billboard. One moment it was an ad for a local hardware store, the next it was for Northeastern College Night School. The slogan beneath seemed so innocent, so unsuspecting. Call us today and start your future now.
And below that, in letters that seemed withered and deformed: You can’t run forever.
A few seconds before, when the hardware store advertisement had been there, a large bearded man had been holding a hammer and leaning against a storefront. Now, his features were gone and so was the store. All that stood on the billboard, aside from the jagged letters, was a large shadow, watching her with features she could not see.
“Mommy, watch out!”
Gillian spun her head back to the road just in time to see a minivan coming toward her. She had veered into the opposite lane. Horns sounded from every direction. The van came close enough so that she could see the teenager behind the wheel, screaming and flipping her off.
She swerved back into the right lane and took her first turn onto a side street. She pulled up to the curb, in front of a gas station and market, and parked.
Her ears rang and her vision was fuzzy. Her mouth and tongue seemed too dry.
Her pills. She needed her pills. She pointed to the glove compartment. “Sweetie, can you pass mommy her medicine?”
Meg reached out with a shaky hand and opened the hatch. She handed Gillian two pill bottles, one of them falling near the brake pedal. Gillian smiled. “It’s fine. Everything’s fine.” Gillian reached down, and opened the first bottle. There were only four pills left, just enough to last her for two more days. The second bottle was the same. She took one of each and dry-swallowed them.
Her head began to feel too heavy. She leaned back in her seat.
“Why did you do that?” Meg asked. “Why did you almost get us hurt?”
A Debt to be Paid Page 5