“From that man, you mean?”
“I wish I only meant that. But I guess I mean from that man and all the other men like him.”
“That’s a lot for a girl your age to have to think about.”
“How can I not, though? It could have been me. I got away because the bathroom door was heavy and it had metal on it. And because he was standing too close to it. And because it hit him just right so it rattled his brain and he couldn’t get up right away. It was just luck. It wasn’t that I’m smarter than those other girls, or braver. Just lucky. What really bothers me is that I knew there was such a thing. I knew girls got caught up in . . . what my teacher called ‘human trafficking.’ And I hated it. I thought it was terrible. But I didn’t feel like I just had to try to do something about it. Until it almost happened to me. Why are we like that? Why do we not care enough about things until they happen to us?”
“I have no idea,” Bea said. “Maybe because if we cared that much about everything, all the time, all at the same time like that, we’d die of exhaustion. We’d have no time or energy left to run our own lives.”
“Maybe.” But, truthfully, it sounded like a lame excuse.
“I don’t know what you can do for them.”
“Neither do I.”
But at some point in her life, Allie now knew, she would have to find a better answer than that. Because it’s so much harder to ignore something that almost happened to you.
“Then there are the girls like my friend Jasmine. Or I thought she was my friend, anyway. Nobody kidnapped her exactly. But she stays with that guy on purpose. He hits her and makes her work selling herself out on the street, and she keeps going back. She could have stayed in the group home, but she ran away and went back with him. Why?”
“Lots of women stay with men who abuse them.”
“Yeah, but why?”
“I’m not the world’s foremost expert on human nature. But I’d guess those women are looking for something. Something they never got. Something they figure they need. Maybe this man convinces them he has what they’re looking for.”
Allie shivered, remembering a moment when it had almost worked on her. We’ll get you the best meal of your life. Tell me what else you need to be happy, and I’ll buy it for you.
“And those men know exactly what they’re doing when they take advantage,” Allie said.
“I’m sure I wouldn’t know about that.”
But it didn’t matter to Allie. She didn’t need to have that thinking confirmed. It hadn’t been a question in any way.
Allie stared up at her own house. Home. It filled her with an unexpected sense of dread. As if it had always been a place of great danger, but she hadn’t known it. But she knew it now.
In fact, it didn’t look like home anymore. It looked completely familiar. But it did not feel welcoming in any way.
“My goodness,” Bea said. “You really did have everything, didn’t you?”
It felt strange to hear the assessment of her home through Bea’s eyes. Truthfully, she had gone to school with kids who had everything she’d had and much more. She had not felt the slightest bit advantaged at the time.
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” Allie said, “but you can’t park here while I’m inside. You need to just drop me. And then . . . I don’t know. Go around the block, I guess. I mean, you have to come back for me. But we have a neighborhood watch thing going on around here. And this van sort of . . . stands out.”
A long silence. Allie could feel it crackle with subtext.
“You act like I don’t know my station in the world,” Bea said, her voice crisp and tight.
“I didn’t mean it like that. I just don’t want us getting reported. I don’t want to get caught. I want to get some stuff and get out of here. That’s all.”
“Fine. I get it. Just go. Phyllis and I will give you five or ten minutes and then drive by.”
But still she sounded more than a little affronted.
Allie let herself into the backyard via the side gate.
The pool sat uncovered, crispy-looking brown leaves floating on its surface. At one of its concrete sides, near the lounge chairs, three inflatable pool mattresses lay stacked one on top of the other.
“Perfect!” Allie hissed out loud.
She ran to them and grabbed one, opening the two inflation tubes and squeezing the air out.
No more hard metal van floor under my hip, she thought as she rolled it up tightly and left it by the gate.
She circled the back of the house, trying windows. The kitchen. The dining room. The den.
All locked.
Allie sighed. She had hoped to get in and get out without leaving any obvious signs of illegal entry. But what did it really matter now?
She let herself quietly into the garage. There she picked up a rubber mallet her father used for pounding vintage hubcaps onto the vintage cars he restored. Or had used to restore, anyway, before he’d learned that large boats were an even better hole into which to shovel your family’s money. She grabbed a dirty towel off the open hamper in front of the washing machine.
She carried them back to the dining room’s French doors.
The front door was padlocked, or so Allie had been told. She hadn’t verified this detail with her own eyes. She assumed that anyone worth their salt—a person whose job is to lock people out of their own houses—would padlock the back door as well. But somehow the French doors to the dining room must have seemed more like windows. They’d been left as Allie had always known them.
She knew exactly which pane of glass she needed to knock out. Then she could reach through and unlock the doors from the inside.
Allie closed her eyes and held the mallet in position, ready to strike. Nothing happened. She felt as though she’d sent a signal to her arm to swing the mallet. Apparently it had not been received. She opened her eyes again and felt around inside that resistance. Just as she was not a person who stole smartphones, she was not a person who broke windows. It felt entirely outside her nature.
But this needed to be done.
She closed her eyes again and pushed harder against the sensation. The arm swung as directed. The sound of glass breaking, falling inward and smashing on the Spanish tiles of the dining room floor, made her jump. It sounded violent. Like some kind of sudden danger. Something Allie had never meant to invite.
She opened her eyes and regarded what she had done.
How long would the house sit empty, one pane of glass broken on these French doors? Would it rain in? Would leaves blow into the dining room?
More importantly, was there a compelling reason why she still cared?
She wrapped the towel around her arm to prevent cuts, then reached in and unlocked the door from the inside.
Allie stepped into the only home she had ever known. The place she had never imagined herself leaving until . . . how many days ago? She couldn’t remember. She couldn’t imagine. Seven? Ten? Twelve? And how was that possible? The whole world had changed since then. She was a different person and her life was a different life. How could it not have been at least months? Maybe more like years?
The memories the house reawakened seemed faded and ancient and dulled by absence.
The house itself felt different.
Allie set the towel and mallet on the tiles. She wandered through the dining room and along the hall toward the stairs, feeling the ways in which the house had changed. Like a person you always thought you could trust. But then, when you found out they lied to you, purposely and with malice, you had to go back and reframe everything you thought you knew about them. You had to rewrite an entire history.
Allie padded up the stairs, sensing something about houses that she hadn’t known before: They are not entirely inanimate. They can be alive or dead. When they are alive, gas runs through pipelines to create heat. Water flows from faucets. Electricity creates light. Was this house alive or dead? Had someone turned off all its living functions before padloc
king the doors? Or were the utility bills stacking up, shutoff warnings filling the mailbox to overflowing? Or . . . wait. Had enough time even gone by for the utility companies to notice a change?
She pushed the maze of thoughts out of her head again. She was a kid. It hit her fairly suddenly. She liked to think of herself as mostly grown. But as a fifteen-year-old, it was not her job to keep a house alive. It was not something she had ever learned, nor should have felt compelled to learn at her age. It was her parents’ job. A job at which they had failed miserably.
It was okay for Allie to flounder in the details and give up trying to understand.
She swung the door of her room wide.
On a closet shelf she found two overnight bags that she and her mother had bought in South America. Intricately handwoven, functional art. One had been intended for her mother, but somehow Allie had inherited both. Her mother’s South American bag had been one more small belonging above and beyond being needed, or even used.
She pulled them down and began to fill one with clothes.
Even a few days earlier Allie would have bemoaned the fact that these were her least favorite clothes. Her favorites had gone to New Beginnings with her, and were gone forever. She registered this fact, but did not react to it. After a few days of owning only the clothes she was wearing—after simply getting dirtier day after day, with no way to shower and no clean outfit to change into if she had—clothes were clothes, and any were welcome.
All of her life standards had transformed.
She stuffed the second woven bag with her piggy bank, laptop, iPad, Kindle, and phone, along with a coin collection she had inherited from her late grandfather and a one-ounce gold bar that had been a present from her one and only uncle, now deceased. She threw in the jewelry she deemed worth selling: a heavy woven necklace that she thought was real gold, and a diamond engagement ring that had been passed down through her father’s side of the family.
She looked around the room, wondering if that was enough. Then she experienced a wave of dizziness, closed her eyes, and decided not to look around anymore.
Everything she saw in this room was a small component of Allie. Something that defined the person she had always thought herself to be. But it was all irrelevant now. Allie suspected the dizziness had come from this huge, destabilizing realization.
The thing to do was to stop looking around. Stop poking that emotional center to see what waves would emanate.
She needed to walk out again. The faster the better.
Allie stopped at the gate and picked up the rolled and deflated pool raft, which she tucked under her arm.
She charged through the gate, leaving it flapping open behind her. She trotted across the side lawn, weighed down by her sudden riches. She craned her neck to peer up and down the street, hoping to see the familiar white bakery van. The street was empty. Her stomach buzzed with nerves. She felt like a thief, which irritated her sense of the rightness of things. It was the second time that day she’d had to defend the right to her own belongings. This time she was forced to defend it to herself.
Just as she came out from beside the house and into the front yard, she felt the pool raft slip out from under her arm. She reached down to grab it. Then she straightened, bolting forward again at the same time, and ran into her next-door neighbor, Mrs. Deary.
Literally. Ran into her. Almost bowled her down.
“Oh,” she said. “Mrs. Deary. I’m sorry.”
“Alberta? What are you doing here?”
“Oh,” Allie said again. Then a pause fell. And stayed for a beat too long. Allie knew they both must have heard and felt the hesitation. Lying was not in Allie’s wheelhouse. “I didn’t bring enough stuff to the group home. So my social worker brought me over here to get more.”
Allie expected Mrs. Deary to look around in an attempt to locate this mythical social worker. She didn’t. She was a small woman in a big, loose print housedress, like something from the fifties, with half-glasses stored on the crown of her head. She stared deeply into Allie’s eyes as if reading a treasure map.
“I heard you ran away.”
A cold river ran down Allie’s throat and spread through her belly and gut. Down her thighs.
“Where did you hear that?” she asked, wondering if her voice was shaking. It felt as though it was.
“Somebody called me. Somebody from social services. They wanted to know if I’d seen you. If you’d come back to the house. They left me with a number to call in case I saw you.”
The more words came out of Mrs. Deary’s mouth, the more her forehead wrinkled with the intense gravity of the subject.
“That’s all over now,” Allie said, surprised that lying flowed so easily. “There was this girl there who threatened me, so I stayed away for a day. But I went back. They should have called you again and told you I was back.”
“Yes.” Mrs. Deary arched one eyebrow slightly. “They should have.”
A movement caught Allie’s eye. She turned to see the bakery van pulling around the corner. She dropped her bags and windmilled her arms to signal Bea. The pool raft hit the grass again.
“They have a pool at this group home?” Mrs. Deary asked.
“No, just lousy mattresses,” Allie said, fast and desperate. “Here’s my social worker now. Gotta go!”
She scooped up the dropped items and sprinted for the street.
“That’s your social worker?” her neighbor called after her. “Why is she driving an old bakery van?”
“Her car broke down,” Allie shot over her shoulder. “She just borrowed this. Normally she drives a Prius.”
She pulled the passenger door of the van open and threw the bag of clothes and the pool raft around the seat and into the back. Then she climbed in with the bag of electronics carefully clutched in her lap.
“Drive,” Allie said. “Drive.”
“Who was that?” Bea asked, stepping on the gas.
“A problem,” Allie said, staring at her neighbor in the side-view mirror.
Mrs. Deary stared back. She was standing in the middle of the street, watching the van drive away. As if memorizing the license number. But maybe Allie was reading that in. After all, you can’t know what’s happening inside a person while they stare. You can only imagine. And imagination can be a highly fear-based phenomenon.
“Neighbor?”
“Yeah.”
“What’s the problem?”
“She said she had a number that somebody at social services gave her. In case she saw me.”
“Hmm. Think she’ll call them?”
“I have no idea,” Allie said, trying to breathe normally. Then, when she should have left well enough alone, she added, “But I have a bad feeling about it.”
Bea swung the van around a corner and the troublesome neighbor disappeared from view.
“A Prius?” Allie asked out loud.
She tried to remember if Polyester Lady drove a Prius. Maybe that was where the idea had come from. No. As best Allie could remember, her actual social worker drove something American and big.
“What about a Prius?” Bea asked.
“I don’t know. It’s just weird. I started lying because . . . well, I had to. Or I guess I felt like I had to. And then the lies got kind of . . . specific. And I don’t know where all those details came from.”
“I won’t even point out the lesson there.”
“Thank you.”
They drove for a mile or two in silence.
“I just didn’t want to go to jail,” Allie said. “Or . . . you know. Juvie. I think that sounds like the worst thing ever.”
“I don’t think so. I’m not sure it sounds bad at all. I’ve considered it. It wouldn’t be hard to get into a place like that. Just walk into a police station and own up to some of the things I’ve done.”
“Why? Why would you want that?”
“A roof over my head and three square meals a day.”
“What about your cat? Phyllis?�
�
“I heard somewhere that the pound has to hold them for you until you get out.”
“She’s so old, though.”
“I know. But still. When you think you can’t provide for yourself and your cat . . . it changes your thinking. About . . . you know. What’s safe. What’s desirable. That bottom line of food and shelter starts to look like the only thing that matters. I guess it always was the only thing that mattered, only we didn’t know it, because we thought a thing like this couldn’t happen to us. Those were the good old days, huh?”
Allie opened her mouth to answer. All that came out was a sigh.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Nobody Takes My Ancient, Peeling Lettering
Allie circled the van, plotting and planning.
It sat parked in the dirt somewhere between the Cayucos pier and quaint little Highway 1. In other words, they had made it almost as far up the coast as they had the first time. Maybe twenty miles south of zebra territory. And they hadn’t been stopped and arrested. But somehow Allie didn’t expect that luck to hold.
“We could peel off a lot of the lettering,” she said to Bea, who had recently stepped out to see what Allie was up to. “A lot of it has peeled off already, at least at the edges. Or we could get some white spray paint and paint over them.”
“No,” Bea said, simply.
“Why not?”
“Well, first of all, if that nosy neighbor of yours wrote down the license number, it won’t help much.”
“But we don’t know if she did or not. And besides, even if she did. You have to be driving right behind a van to read its license plate. But if she just called in a description of the van, I mean . . . seriously, this thing is not hard to pick out of a crowd. It’s fairly . . . unusual looking.”
“And then there’s the second reason.”
“Which is?”
“I won’t let you.”
“Oh.” Allie opened her mouth to say more, but then opted to leave it at that. She sensed she should stop talking, for reasons she did not poke or prod or otherwise deeply examine.
“This is my husband Herbert’s van. Herbert is gone now. How much of him do you think I have left? What do you think I own as evidence that he once existed? Our little trailer is gone. I have a couple of cartons of things I left with a friend in Palm Desert. I have no idea when I’ll see them again. Other than that, I have this van he used in his bakery business. It’s really the only thing I have that’s left over from our life together. And I did not invite you to paint over its lettering so no one will notice that you ran away from some kind of a home and you’re traveling with me. So the bottom line is that you won’t be making any changes to my van. Did I make myself sufficiently clear about that?”
Allie and Bea : A Novel Page 16