by Carrie Laben
“But we’re not.” Martha sounded satisfied. Like, at least she hadn’t been wrong even if she hadn’t caught Abby being wrong either.
“Not yet. Just in case. Wouldn’t want to be followed.”
Martha nodded, and that seemed to settle it for a moment, so cleanly that Abby let it go and started to worry whether the song would come back first or the damn hawks. But then Martha spoke again. “You’re not worried about Ryan following us, or any of them from back there. You told the truth the first time, they’re not the problem.”
Abby kept her eyes on the road. There was a hawk on the roadside power lines up ahead, but it didn’t rise or even turn its head as they passed.
“You’re worried about the house. The thing that killed Grandfather. I saw that you left the door open.”
“And you didn’t tell me not to.”
“I didn’t.” Martha sat for a moment. “But I saw the news in the diner, too. You knew it would come for Waite blood, eventually. That’s the same mistake Grandfather made.”
“I didn’t know that and you don’t know it either.” Since when did Martha get to have opinions about things like this? “It might not be the blood. It might be the land. It might stay put and just kill whoever is stupid enough to come poking around. That’s all we know so far.”
“But you’re worried now.”
“I’m just being careful. Which Grandfather never was.”
Behind them Buddy whined, smelling an argument Abby supposed. Martha turned to pet him and the tension in the truck eased perceptibly. She’d done right to bring him along after all.
“We’re just going to stick to the back roads for a while,” she told Martha, taking a left that looked promising. “Just do me a favor, please. Stop drifting.”
But how was she going to stop Martha from drifting when she couldn’t stop drifting herself?
Her last tweets and updates were only a few hours ago, just after they’d gotten the truck. She shouldn’t have been tired. Was she sicker than she thought? Sicker than the doctor thought? She could go inside gas stations instead of paying at the pump, stop at real hotels where the desk clerk would look her in the eye and smile and push energy at her because it was his job. But she shouldn’t have to. Martha should never know how close to true she’d been with that little “addict” jab in the restaurant the other night, shouldn’t suspect what was keeping her alive.
When she was a kid, she’d happily spent entire summer vacations with nothing but her family for company. But she didn’t know what she was missing back then. She thought being weak was normal.
She’d need to be sure that she had all her wits about her once they hit Minnesota. She’d need a plan.
“Why were we going to Minnesota anyway?” Martha said, but there was less sharpness and more sulk to it now. It wasn’t the voice of someone who was afraid or angry, just the voice of someone who’d remembered a few million squashed mosquitoes.
“It’s just a place I know how to get to where no one will recognize us.”
“We could go anywhere else in the entire U.S., Abby. I don’t think they abolished cheap motels while I was in the pen.”
“We can’t stay on the east coast, it’s too obvious. And any place within a hundred miles of either border is out, Border Patrol can stop whoever they like.” She was spitballing excuses—Border Patrol stopped very specific people who didn’t look much like Waites—but how the hell would Martha know that?
“I told you we’re safe. They’re not looking for us. I took care of it.”
“We’re not taking the risk. You make one mistake and we’re both fucked for life.”
“Abby…”
“No coasts. No borders.”
“That still leaves so many places! Literally hundreds of places!”
“Calm down.” It wasn’t easy, but Abby refused a laugh at “literally hundreds” or at how flustered Martha was getting. She forced herself to look solemn, a little vulnerable, instead. “It’s just… didn’t you ever think that after we stopped going there, that’s when everything started going wrong for us?”
“It wasn’t the cabin, though. It was Grandma dying and Mom and Grandfather fighting and everything that happened because of that.”
Fighting over you. No. That was too blunt a dagger for right now.
“I just thought it would make me feel better, okay? You have to admit, there are some good memories there. No one hassled us there. And what we need now is to not be hassled. Just for a little while. Once we’re done there, we can go wherever you want. Name it.”
“Whatever, Abby. You’re just going to do what you want, like you always do.”
“I’m serious. Name a place. Anyplace. If you want to go there, we’ll go there once it’s safe.”
Martha was silent for a minute, eyes on the road, doubt pinging through her thoughts, and then a little hope. “One of the girls in my book group had a grandma in Phoenix. She said it was way nicer than Buffalo. Warmer.”
Abby almost opened her mouth to argue—Phoenix, ugh, full of old people—but she did just all but give her word, and she needed Martha to trust her. Besides, Phoenix might not be so bad. Full of old people, and old people still watched the news on TV. If she ever found herself caught truly short she could get her old job back. To say nothing of the Facebook possibilities. Everyone’s grandmother was on Facebook now.
And it was true, the weather was nicer than Buffalo’s. She’d never again have to figure out what to wear to stay warm without looking puffy, or how much heel she could risk on the ice. She’d just have to be religious with the sunscreen. Which, obviously, she should have been anyway.
“I’ve never been to Phoenix,” she said, letting the smile inflect her voice. “That should be interesting. We could get a house with a swimming pool and swim all year.”
“Yeah,” Martha said, warming up in turn. “And Kelly said that her grandma had an orange tree in her back yard with the best oranges she ever tasted.”
“We can have orange trees. We can have lemon trees and lime trees and grapefruit trees. We can have a kumquat tree, what the hell. An orchard. Fresh juice every morning.”
“I’ve never even seen a kumquat. I thought they were, like, a made-up Doctor Seuss thing.”
“They’re little. Think of an orange the size of a grape. But they taste different.”
“Cool. I’ll sit by the pool and eat kumquats and drink beer and work on my tan all day.”
“Tanning’s out of style,” Abby said quickly, although she wasn’t exactly sure that was true in Phoenix. “Gives you wrinkles. Cool girls are pale now, and they dye their hair red.”
“Well, we’re screwed on being cool, then.”
“Hair dye has come a long way since we were playing with Manic Panic in the bathroom. If you paid for it, you could be a blonde and nobody would know the difference from the real thing.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, and you might have to be. Just to make sure no one’s going to recognize us.”
“Being blonde would be weird.”
“It doesn’t actually feel any different. I was blonde for six months in my sophomore year of college, but it got to be too much of a hassle to keep up with the roots.” And it had turned out that it made her hard to recognize. She knew by then that she didn’t want to go unrecognized.
“I’m sorry I snapped at you before,” Martha said. “I shouldn’t have said that stuff.”
“It’s okay, it’s not a big deal.”
“I just… I shouldn’t treat you like you’re Grandfather or Mom, you know? I know you’re not. But it’s hard to believe anything anyone says after dealing with those two.”
“Oh trust me, I know.”
Mom kept up the fiction that Grandfather was in the hospital for a few days, and then he died a third time, the official time. There couldn’t be a death certificate or a funeral, of course, but no one was interested in those things. The Advertiser ran a brief obituary, a notice with just eno
ugh beloveds and suddens to not look out of place. At school, even Mrs. Grant didn’t have the combination of gall and decorum needed to offer condolences; she took the note that Abby handed her and made a noise that might have been a cough, or a grunt. The kids didn’t make anything of it either, except Nicole, who said something cheerful about praying for them. Abby pushed her until she was so confused she walked into a desk and dropped her books everywhere. It wasn’t very satisfying, though Robert and Tabby Schmidt laughed.
Mom moved into Grandfather’s old bedroom, and let Abby move into hers. Mom also got a job at the Erie County Home. It was a shock—they weren’t hurting for money, Grandfather had had enough successful treasure-hunting expeditions to keep them comfortable for decades. Abby didn’t know all the details but if what he’d written about his plans in the notebooks was what he’d actually done, they had enough money for him to live on through Mom’s lifetime and Abby and Martha’s and their eventual children’s too, without him ever having to dirty his hands with anything as mundane as trying to grow or make or sell.
“He wasn’t good at work, so he thought it was beneath him,” Mom had said when she announced that they’d be coming home to an empty house after school from now on. She didn’t say “Don’t be like that,” but Abby could hear it fine. “Don’t be like Grandfather” was the message in everything that had changed, from the new portable TVs in the girls’ bedrooms to the pale-green curtains that had replaced the light-blocking drapes in the living room.
Being latchkey kids seemed exciting at first too. What could be better than unsupervised access to Grandfather’s books and a bedroom of her own to read them in for hours if she chose? She’d learn everything. She wouldn’t be like Grandfather because she’d be better than him, the best, unstoppable.
Sure enough, Grandfather had laid it all out at the beginning, in language as if he was copying words from one of the big leather-bound books that Mom had hidden—how he got inside of Mom as a little girl, the same way he must have done to Martha and where he’d been going. There were places and times, marked by star alignments, by stones and trees and natural wells, where you could make the transfer more easily, hold the new body longer, strengthen the bond. Depending on the place, the time, and your own strength, you could make it permanent. And then you left whatever sickness or weakness or old age your old body was weighing you down with behind, and ran off new and fresh.
Grandfather, looking at secret maps and charting the stars, had predicted that there was a place out in Minnesota where ley lines converged and making the transfer was so easy it barely required any power at all. On the strength of that prediction he’d bought a tract of land and built a cabin, and he’d been right. He celebrated being right for pages, as though he actually admitted the possibility that he could have been wrong. It barely sounded like the Grandfather she knew. He’d even gotten so cocky that he decided not to make it permanent with Mom—he still didn’t want to be stuck a girl—but to instead wait and see if she had any sons he could use when he got old.
It made Abby feel weird, sad, to see this evidence that he’d been young once, the same crawling feeling she got inside when she’d found some old black-and-white photos of Grandma smiling before her wedding, holding up a fish she’d caught, looking alive despite her high lace collar and the heavy old-fashioned locket she was wearing even at the seashore. Those young people must have felt so trapped inside the papery, brittle grandparents she’d known. If she wasn’t careful, that could happen to her too.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
As the sun passed the arc of the sky Abby pulled over and told Martha to have another go at driving. Martha whined about it less this time, and actually smiled as she accelerated down the first significant hill. Buddy barked, a happy sound even if it echoed uncomfortably in the cab. Abby pulled out her phone.
They’d found Bonetrager’s body. He’d been submerged in the pond. He’d been submerged in the pond for a week or more, the coroner said, even though he’d only been reported missing yesterday. The grandson was still missing, and there was a picture of him for the scrutiny of strangers—greasy-haired and wearing a nose stud, but smiling with baby-round cheeks. Criminal? Victim? The world had yet to decide between the two polar options.
There had been times when Abby had daydreamed, without the slightest sense of shame, about going missing, because if she wasn’t incapacitated immediately she’d more or less come back as Wonder Woman from all that public hysteria. This wasn’t one of those times, though. She tweeted a sweet-solemn condolence message under #justiceforJimB and retweeted the grandson’s picture with #findCaiden and scrolled through the responses to the hawk photo—a self-sustaining mixture of “you’ll get bird flu” and “I hope someone breaks YOUR neck” and “no you don’t get it, it’s art” that could go on for days—and waited for relief to come, but it didn’t. Slowly she realized that this was because she wasn’t tired or low-energy at all, she was fretful, anxious, and that was completely different. It was like that diet tip about eating too much when you were actually thirsty. She closed Twitter and just as she was about to put the phone down altogether she noticed a new news alert.
“Mystery body at site of Bonetrager slayings,” it said, and when she tapped it she learned that of the three bodies in the Bonetragers’ house, only two had in fact been Bonetragers. The third was a white man estimated between seventy and ninety years of age, cause of death indeterminate, known to no one on the local police force, carrying no ID—no wallet at all—and with no tattoos or scars or other distinctive marks that gave hope of tracking him down. Out of respect for the dead a sketch artist had created a portrait to use instead of a photo with this new story.
Abby opened the sketch and then enlarged it. She was able to stop herself from gasping but the cringe was unavoidable and for a moment she was surprised that Martha didn’t notice just as she’d noticed Martha doing the same thing on the back roads in New York. She wanted Martha to notice and care and be worried with her. Not that there was anything to stop for, anything to find here. The problem now wasn’t something buried in the mud, it was something criss-crossing the air on beams and zipping through wires over half the U.S. and maybe more.
The picture wasn’t Grandfather—he had Grandfather’s dark wicked eyes and high cheekbones and the same odd pouched skin on his neck, but the ears were less flared and the nose was just a touch broader, the chin a touch weaker. Still, it was nearer than an actor would have needed to be to play Grandfather in a TV re-enactment, nearer than some sub-Alex-Jones conspiracy theorist would need to ‘prove’ to the satisfaction of thousands that Grandfather was still alive. Or had been up until yesterday when the body had been found on the floor of a bedroom in the Bonetrager home, dead with old Bonetrager’s daughter and son-in-law dead on the kitchen floor downstairs and Bonetrager himself dead and rotting faster than he had a right to in the pond. Abby didn’t need to know this man to know that she would have feared him if she’d seen him in life.
“Are you hungry?” Martha asked, breaking Abby’s horrified contemplation of the black-and-white face on her screen.
“What?” Abby pushed the power button to wipe the face away and lock the phone again. “Of course not, we had that huge breakfast.”
“Hours ago. It’s pushing three already. Lunch places will be closing, and you said yourself that you don’t want any more fast food if we can help it.”
Maybe it was being shaken that made Abby decide to be agreeable or maybe she was hungry after all, a little bit. She’d pushed Ryan hard and she’d barely touched her omelet. Or maybe it was looking up again and seeing another hawk soaring over, one that looked larger than the last few—or else lower than she thought. Maybe it was wanting to show Martha the picture after all, and not wanting to do it in a moving car where Martha’s freak-out could kill them both.
“Okay. Next exit that goes to a real town and not a rest stop, then.”
She watched Martha check the mirrors. Like a person who’d been
driving forever, not a terrified automaton. Good. Excellent. So why did it worry her?
Well, because of things like that, she thought as they cut across two lanes and a cop’s lights started spinning in the distance. Coming closer. Obviously aiming for them. And not a big deal, really, in the grand scheme of things except that Martha had already started hyperventilating.
“It’s okay,” she whispered even though she didn’t need to whisper. “Just pull over, it’s okay, I’ve got this. I’ll take care of it.”
“You’ll take care of it?” Martha demanded this at a volume that they don’t need, not after Abby whispered.
“I will fucking well take care of it.”
The cop that got out of the cop car was so short and so butch it would be an offensive caricature if she wasn’t real. She could have been wearing a little Napoleon hat, had one hand tucked into her shirt like in the cartoons. She marched up to the truck with full Napoleonic force, ready to face down whatever bro was inside, and instead she got a crumpled Martha.
“You didn’t signal,” she said officiously and Martha was just a bit of wrack in her hands, but she didn’t seem satisfied. This annoyed Abby, who had seen Martha break a thousand times and knew that her current state was both real and extreme. This bitch was being uppity. Asking for too much already.
“What seems to be the problem,” she said like she wasn’t just a passenger but a person who was being driven.
“You didn’t signal.” The cop put her chin up as she repeated this bit of trivia, and Martha seemed to rot down further somehow. “And there’s an APB out for this truck. Stolen. You’re coming with me, girls.”
Motherfucker.
But Abby was not going to give as willingly as that.
“Really?” she said, and she pushed. And it should have worked. But it didn’t. The cop’s mind was a hard little dehydrated walnut like she hadn’t seen since…
Shit.
“You girls are coming down to the station.” This woman liked to repeat herself a lot, Abby thought irritably.