by Elle Casey
“Maybe it sounds crazy to say this, but you should be proud of yourself.” He looks up at me in the mirror.
“Thanks.” It shouldn’t matter that he admires what I’ve accomplished, but somehow it does. It makes me feel like it’s okay to have some personal pride.
“Did you ever think about saving up your money and then disappearing? Going to another town and reinventing yourself there?”
“Every day,” I say, sighing as I watch trees slide by my window. “Every single day.” I know what he’s saying underneath that question: that I should have done this. I shouldn’t have stayed as long as I did. That I had the power to leave and never used it to help myself. I don’t blame him. It’s hard to understand a person sometimes when you can’t walk in their shoes.
“And what stopped you?” he asks.
“Circumstances weren’t right. Pavel would get suspicious and start watching me too closely. Something would scare me and make me think if I tried, I’d get killed. Alexei . . .” I stop, not wanting to go down that road. Where is he? What’s he doing? Who’s feeding him dinner?
“Alexei? Who is he?”
How can I possibly explain Alexei to him? He’ll think I’m crazy. He’ll think there’s a part of me that wanted to stay there. “Just some guy.”
Thibault lets it drop, for which I’m grateful. I feel like I’ve already overshared.
The exit off the highway is up ahead. He slows down and turns off, sending gravel dust up around the windows. He shuts his. “The road gets a little rough from here. Bumps and potholes. The parish doesn’t maintain it much, since it’s hardly used. I’ll take it slow.”
“Thanks.” I reach over and take the baby’s hand, stroking the back of it with my thumb. He doesn’t seem to mind the rocking much, but I sure do. I hold my lower stomach with my free hand, hoping it’s going to end soon. Damn, that hurts.
“I’m going to ask you for something, but I don’t expect you to answer me now about it, okay?” Thibault says.
I’m instantly suspicious. “Okaaayyy . . .”
“If you feel comfortable with it, and feel like you can trust me with it, I’d like you to think about telling me what it is exactly you’re planning to give to Holloway.”
My temper flares, but I tamp it down. He’s being as nice as he knows how to be, and I can tell he’s trying not to push, even though he really wants the info. “Why do you think you need it?”
He slows down some more and takes a particularly big bump that rocks the truck hard. “Well, I was thinking that if I know all the parts of the puzzle, I could help you put together a plan of action. Get you headed into the sunset with the best chances of making a go of it.”
Thibault sending me into the sunset. I like the image but feel just the tiniest bit sad about who I’ll leave behind, both Thibault and Alexei. Life is so damn complicated sometimes. I wish I could just cut all the cords and disappear. Start over. Forget that I care about certain people.
“You don’t trust me, do you?” I ask when the car finally stops rocking. I need to get all the cards out on the table. I’m tired of playing games with people. From now on, my life is going to be run at face value. Time for some hard truths.
“I want to. I really do.”
“I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t. Your job is putting criminals behind bars, and I’ve been working for one for five years. I guess that makes me a criminal too.”
“Technically, it probably does. But I think, based on what you’ve told me, there are extenuating circumstances. And if that’s the case, I’m sure if it came to a legal situation with the state, the prosecutor would be willing to make you some sort of deal. But only if you’re able to hand over the information that gets convictions on murderers, drug dealers, and sex traffickers.”
The reality of my situation is too depressing. I’ve avoided thinking about the criminal aspect of what I’ve done pretty well so far. Thibault bringing it up is a serious downer, and I’m having a hard time not holding it against him. “I’ll do whatever I have to do, like always.” I stare straight ahead, letting my mind go blank. The car bounces some more, but I hardly notice. I’ve gotten pretty good at detaching, even when sitting in the midst of chaos.
“Guess what’s for lunch,” he says a few minutes later, startling me out of my self-induced trance.
I look at him in the mirror. “Sandwich?”
He grins big. “Peanut butter and jelly, baby, with extra-crunchy peanut butter.”
I can’t help but smile back. “Can’t wait.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Thibault sets two sandwiches along with big glasses of milk down on the coffee table in the living room, waking me from the nap I caught on the couch.
“Oh, shoot. I’m sorry about that. I fell asleep, I guess.” I reach up and touch my hair, trying to smooth down the bumps. I look around the room and see that he’s been busy cleaning. All the covers are removed from the furniture, and the air smells like dusting spray.
“No big deal. Your body obviously needs it.”
I nod at the transformation in the room. It looked old and smelled musty when we came in, and now it looks warm and fresh . . . inviting. “Wow, you cleaned this place up fast.” I look at my wrist, but there’s no watch there. “Or I slept like Rip Van Winkle and it’s really late.”
“Nah. Just a half hour or so.” He drops down into a recliner opposite me with a plate in his lap and a glass of milk on the arm of the chair. “I have lots of practice cleaning this place up.”
“How’s that?” I sit up and place Tee on the couch cushion next to me. He slept in my arms as content as could be while I snoozed away the rest of the morning.
“Every time we came here with our grandparents, it was my and Toni’s job to pull all the covers off the furniture and dust everything down. My grandfather would chop wood and my grandmother would clean the kitchen. It was a team effort.”
“When was the last time you were out here?” I bite into my sandwich and chew slowly.
“Four years? Five years? I don’t remember.”
“You and Toni are close, huh?”
“Yeah. We bonded over our mutual shitty childhood.”
Not wanting to bring the mood down by digging up too much unhappy history, I choose a different tack. “You said you came here with your grandparents. Does that mean you lived with them all the time?”
He shakes his head. “No. We lived full-time with our parents. They weren’t very nice people or very happy. When we were with our grandparents, it was like our sanctuary. No yelling, no fighting, no anger-management issues.”
I’m struck by how our lives have somewhat paralleled. Before he said this, I would have thought we had very little in common. “That’s how it was for me, too, kind of.”
“Really? Tell me about it.” He pauses as he grabs his sandwich. “If you want.”
“All of my grandparents have passed on. My dad, too. My mom . . . who knows where she is. She’s been gone a while. I lost track of her after she went to prison. I knew at that point that she was never going to change and become a real mother to me, and I didn’t need that negativity around me all the time. Just going to school was hard enough.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Thanks. Yeah, my parents weren’t worth much to me. Even when I was real little, I spent a lot of time with my grandmother, but by the time I was twelve years old, my parents were hopeless. Services came and got me out.”
“Drugs are terrible on families.”
“Yep. Drugs, and my father was also a car thief.” My smile is sad. “I got some great DNA running through these veins, let me tell you.”
“Sounds like your grandmother was a pretty cool person, so I guess you’re right about that.”
I nod but say nothing. I appreciate him trying to put a positive spin on things, but I’m afraid whatever I say now will sound too much like self-pity.
Thibault’s gaze roams the room. I follow it and take in the
details: another one of those cuckoo clocks, only this one is much bigger; antlers from various animals hanging on the wall; family photos on the shelves; old board games stacked on top of one another on a table.
“Yeah, we always liked hanging out with our grandparents here,” he says. “They were really cool. They just let us run amok. There’s a lake not too far from here that Toni and I used to go to and swim around in for half the day. I remember doing cannonballs, trying to make the biggest splash I could just to piss Toni off.” He takes a sip of his milk. “But I wouldn’t go there and swim nowadays.”
“How come?”
“Gators. There never used to be that many, and they never bothered us, but I imagine that place is totally infested with them now. They don’t have any predators out here, and they multiply like rabbits.”
Pavel has been known to hide bodies inside the stomachs of gators. It makes me literally shiver to imagine it. “Brrr, no thanks. I don’t need to swim in a gator-infested lake. I don’t even need to see it.”
“Okay. I hope you don’t mind snakes, though.”
I slowly lower my sandwich from my mouth. “I actually do mind snakes. Do you mind telling me why you said that?”
“Well, you know . . . this tends to be a very . . . uh . . . snakey area. They like the trees and the leaves and the sunshine . . .” He’s trying really hard not to laugh.
I slowly lift my feet from the floor and tuck them under me, balancing my plate in my lap. “Thanks for the information.” I glance over my shoulder toward the bathroom.
“What are you looking for?” he asks.
“I’m trying to figure out how I’m going to get from here to the toilet without actually touching the floor.”
He laughs. “You don’t need to worry about it. There won’t be any in the house.”
“Can you guarantee that?”
He shrugs. “Mostly.”
I shake my head slowly. “You sure love getting on my last nerve, don’t you?”
He grins, taking a big bite of his sandwich. Then he points to his chest. “Me?” he says around the food.
I chuckle. “Yeah, you.”
He frowns at me like I’m crazy.
I sigh, looking around the room for something else to talk about. This feels like flirting, which is fun, but a bad idea to encourage, considering our situation.
“So . . . you said there’s not much cell phone signal here. And I don’t see a computer, and you said there’s no TV, either. What are we going to do all day?” I look at him for an answer and watch his eyebrow slowly go up. Too late I realize I’ve flirted with him again. Talk about a loaded question.
He points with the remainder of his sandwich at the bookshelves. “We have cards and board games.” He clears his throat after. It sounds like he has a frog in it all of a sudden.
“The only thing I know how to play is crazy eights.”
“Well, then, we can spend some time learning a few basic card games.”
“So what you’re saying is, we’re pretty much going to die of boredom out here.”
He chuckles. “We could talk.”
I shrug. “I think I’ll probably sleep a lot. If this baby keeps eating the way he does, I don’t know how I’m going to stay awake long enough to play a whole game of cards, anyway.”
“You don’t have to do anything if you don’t want to. I can keep myself busy. I already plan to work some of my frustrations out on the wood-chopping tree stump out back.”
“What frustrations?”
The air between us is charged. I did it again. Dammit. He’s going to think I’m sweating him or something.
“Oh, just the usual kind.” He winks and then chugs down the rest of his milk, standing with his empty dishes in hand.
“You finished fast,” I say, pointing to his plate, desperately trying to move past the innuendo I keep serving up.
“My sister, Toni, says I’m capable of eating a sandwich in three bites.”
“You took four,” I say.
“Watching me pretty closely, I see.” He winks again, embarrassing me with that more than with his comment. “Taking care of damsels in distress kicks up my appetite, I guess.”
I snort and look away.
He puts his dishes down on the table and holds out his hand toward me. “Come on. Let’s go.”
I reach up and take his hand, letting him help me up off the couch. “Where’re we going?”
He lets me go and leans over to pick up the baby. “For a walk.”
“Out there? With all those snakes and gators? No, thank you.” I reach up to take the baby from him, but he turns away so I can’t reach him.
“You’ll be safe, I promise. Any snake tries to get you, I’ll grab it and throw it across the woods.”
“While you hold my baby? No, I don’t think so.”
“Okay, I’ll kick it.”
I look down at his leg. “With that knee of yours? Nope.”
“Oh, yeah, that’s right. I forgot . . . Some crazy woman hit me with her car.”
“Give me that baby.” I take Tee from him but gesture toward the door. “Go on, then. Let’s take this silly walk. It’s going to be the first and only one I’m taking in this place, though. I’m putting my foot down on that. I don’t like reptiles of any kind—little ones, big ones, or slithery ones, especially.”
He grabs his crutches from the nearby chair and eases his way over to the door. “Okay, Miss Bossy Pants. Let’s go take our one and only walk.” He holds the door open so I can go out before him.
We’re not thirty feet from the back door when it hits me: this place is amazingly beautiful. “Oh, my good lord. This is so pretty.” Moss hangs down in trailing bits from the huge, gnarled trees whose branches sweep out and dip down before rising to the sky. Everything is dark green, blue-green, or brown. The color palette God used here is so serene. I can’t believe there are serpents hiding in it. It just doesn’t seem right to have danger lurking in something this picturesque.
“This is my paradise. This is where I go when I need to think.”
I stop and look at him. “I thought you said that you haven’t come here for five years.”
He leans on his crutches and looks out into the forest. “That’s true.”
“Sooo . . . that means you haven’t been doing much thinking for a long time, I guess.” I feel like he’s revealing something very personal to me. I wait impatiently for him to respond.
He smiles just a little. “You might say that.”
“I get it.” I kick some sticks out of my way as I shuffle through the soft, rotting leaves. Thibault swings along behind me. “I haven’t done much thinking for the past five years, either. I just got up every day, went to work, and did what I was told to do.”
“I think a lot of people do that. Me included.”
“Like a damn robot. Brainless.”
“It’s not brainless; it’s survival. At least it was for you. From what you’ve told me. Sometimes you get locked into a routine, and then a change in the routine seems riskier than sticking it out.”
“Yeah. I can relate to that. That’s definitely me. But it’s not you, right? You love your job and your life.” I look at him for confirmation.
He’s staring off into the trees again, lost in thought, or so it seems. Then he speaks. “About a year and a half or two years ago, my sister got it into her head that she needed to talk to the family of the man she killed.”
I’m not sure where he’s going with this, but I’m definitely intrigued. His sister is obviously crazy. “What for?”
“I’m not exactly sure. She tried to explain it to me. I just thought she was nuts at the time. She said there were too many loose ends. No closure. She wanted to apologize. I always thought that was just some silly psychobabble, especially since there was no way those people were ever going to forgive her, but it meant a lot to her.”
I try to put myself in her shoes. If Pavel came at me with murder in his eyes, and I fought bac
k, killing him, would I have the burning desire to explain myself to his family? Apologize? I think of Pavel’s cousin Alexei, the sweet, simple-minded man who ate my horrible cooking and laughed about silly things with me, and the answer is simple: Yes. I would absolutely need to try. He’s the only person in that family I could ever care about, and I would feel bad about turning his world upside down, taking away the person who provides for him financially.
“I understand what she means by that. I got a lot of loose ends I’d like to tie up, and I haven’t even shot anyone. But if I did, I’d want to tell the family I’m sorry. Not everyone is evil through and through, you know? Even bastards who deserve a bullet for some of the things they do are kind to some people. Even gangbangers have moms and brothers and cousins who love them, who will miss them when they’re gone, who need them in their lives to be happy or safe or whatever . . .”
“Are you going to tell me what those loose ends are?” He keeps walking. He sounds like he’s challenging me, daring me to do it.
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
He walks past me, his crutches dragging up rotting organic matter hidden below the upper layer of decaying leaves.
I don’t like seeing his back as he walks away from me like this. It feels like he’s leaving me behind, and although I know it’s all in my head and I also know we’re both better off if he actually does do that, I want to stop him. I want him to wait for me and Tee. “I just . . . need some more time.”
He pauses, looking down at the ground. “Tell me when you’re ready. I’m not going anywhere for now.”
“But you’re going to go eventually.” It’s better if we’re absolutely clear about this. The flirting we’ve done is silly and fun, but it’s also dangerous. Living in a dream world can cause me to lose focus. “And so am I.”