by Sara Beitia
Legs aching from squatting on the blacktop, Albert wished MacLennan would hurry up and leave, too. He crawled back from the edge of the dumpster and sat all the way down with his back against the dented blue metal. He wanted to scream and curse and kick the dumpster until it rang with the same frustration he himself was suffering. Not only had he completely failed to get Lily’s journal back, he’d been forced to watch it go to the last person on earth who should have it.
There was no doubt in Albert’s mind that now that Kogen knew the diary existed—thanks to me and my brilliant detective work—and had it in hand, he would destroy it immediately.
And when he did, there went the best proof they had of Kogen’s crimes. Actually, the second-best proof, but what would’ve been the first best—Lily herself—was nowhere to be found, and half of what she’d endured was probably stilled locked in her brain anyway. What details there were existed only on the pages of her journal.
Gone with it was any protection Albert could promise to Lily, so that he could convince her it was safe to come home. She’d left because she was terrified of her stepfather, but had she recovered from that buried place in her mind the full reason why? Did she remember the details, or did her journal really hold the sole story behind the gruesome night of her accident? There was no way right now to know. Albert felt as if he’d been running forward in the dark and just bounced off of a particularly hard brick wall.
Several minutes passed as he struggled under the growing weight of his gloom. He tried to think of what to do next. It took him a while to notice that the night was once again dead silent, except for the cattle and the distant buzz of freeway traffic on the other side of the hill. He didn’t hear MacLennan, nor had he heard MacLennan’s truck drive away.
Once again Albert edged to the corner of the dumpster, ignoring the pain in his calves. He peered around the corner and came almost face-to-knee with MacLennan’s legs, barely a foot away. The breath startled out of him, Albert leapt to his feet and scrambled back a bit. He gave an involuntary yell.
“What the hell?” MacLennan cried, his words echoing loudly.
Albert looked from MacLennan’s face to his clenching fists and back up to his clenched jaw, and realized in that fraction of a second that MacLennan was liable to be dangerous as well, now that he knew that Albert knew his part in this dirty business.
After a split second of startled hesitation, Albert sprang into the sprint of his life before MacLennan had a chance to recover from his own surprise. Knowing he was pushing his luck, Albert ran as fast as he could anyway and hoped his lungs continued to cooperate.
His body was thin and wiry where MacLennan’s was a beefy football player’s, and with his head start, Albert was able to accelerate out of MacLennan’s sight and, more frightened than ever, zigag his way home.
Almost there, Albert keeps saying to himself as he tries to ignore his sore body’s desire to curl up somewhere and shut down. His muscles are aching and his feet feel like they’re collapsing. The mountain lakeside resort where he and Olivia hope to find Lily is only a few more miles up the road. Feeling the pressure of time and pursuit, they’ve agreed wordlessly to keep going until they get there.
Once we find her and I know she’s safe, he thinks, then I can stop. Sleep for a week. But not until we find her.
“How long are you going to ignore me?” he asks Olivia after a while.
Of course, she acts like he hasn’t spoken and just keeps walking.
“Whatever it was that pissed you off, I’m sorry.” It isn’t the warmest apology, but he’s pissed at her for being a drama queen when the last thing they need is more drama.
She ignores him.
“We both love her. No matter how much she makes us worry.”
“She holds us hostage with it,” Olivia mutters.
Albert guesses he’s glad that Olivia is speaking to him again, so he ignores what she actually says. He has a strong urge to point out to her that she uses sarcasm and bitchiness to keep people at a distance—then acts hurt and bewildered when it works.
Instead he tries changing the subject, now that they’re apparently talking again. “We should be happy,” he says. “We’re almost there and we haven’t been caught.”
She mutters something under her breath.
“I can’t believe our luck,” he says. “No cops, and he hasn’t caught up with us, either. I’ll bet they never even knew which way we went.”
“What the hell, Morales,” she says. “Don’t jinx us.”
He scoffs.
“What about when I saw Perry?”
“I think we let our paranoia get to us. I’m not sure it was ever really Kogen we saw back there. I mean, if it was, he gave up surprisingly easy.”
“Unless he’s setting some trap,” she says.
They keep walking, but now she lets him fall in step next to her.
He stares down at his feet as they move one in front of the other. Something has been on his mind, but he’s afraid to say it and get Olivia riled up again. He finds himself saying it anyway—he can’t help it. “Do you ever wonder what would have happened if she’d just said something, back when all this started? Before the accident?”
Olivia says nothing for a while, and just when Albert thinks she isn’t going to, she says, “I don’t know. Maybe she was going to. But she was so angry. I think she wanted to hurt him first … maybe herself, too. I guess she did that.” Her voice is shaking, and Albert can’t tell if the emotion is anger or sadness or a mix. “And then … well, everything happened and it was all a big gross mess. Is a big gross mess.”
“I don’t want to upset you again. We have different views on what makes Lily do what Lily does. Maybe we should just—”
Giving a half laugh, she wipes the corner of her eye. “Maybe we’re both a little wrong. But you don’t really know her. I guess I don’t get why you’re so … hung up.”
Because I do know her, and I love her, and she needs me. Needs. He isn’t about to say that word to Olivia. You act like you don’t really like her, he thinks. He doesn’t ask, So what about you? He wonders why she’s pressing him so much now that they’re in too deep to back out. He wonders if either of them is up to finishing what they’ve started.
“Forget it,” she says. “I just wish more than anything that she’d told me, straight out, before it got as bad as this. I think she actually tried once, but she couldn’t just come out and say it.”
“What do you mean, she tried?”
Thinking for a moment first, Olivia says, “I don’t even remember what we were doing, just that it was me and Lily and no one else, and we were talking. Maybe that’s why I remember it so well—we weren’t talking a lot by then. She says to me, something like, I should stay clear of Perry. It was like she’d arranged to be alone with me to tell me that, and something more, but she never got to the something more. She said it twice. And I just thought she was mad at him, as usual—she and my mom and she and Perry and she and both of them were always fighting about something, before the accident. And then a while after the accident, too … until she left.”
“And that’s all she said? Before that night and the accident and everything—she never said anything after?”
“That’s all she said,” Olivia repeats. “Come on—Lil never talked to me, not about real stuff. How much really real stuff did she talk about with you? Did she ever talk about Perry?”
The question cuts. “Not much,” he says.
“W hat’s this?” Albert asked.
Lily grabbed his paper lunch-sack with one hand and snatched his peanut butter sandwich from him with the other. She stuffed the soggy bread into the bag and tossed it several feet into the trash can in the corner, arcing the throw for a three-pointer. It was lunch period, the forty-five minutes that were Albert’s favorite of the day because this was the only time he could see Lily without having to worry about either of their parents. He survived the other sucky minutes and hours of the day thinking of
the ones he spent with her. Right now they were sitting at a small table near the door to the kitchen, a table that was always empty because it was down a short “L”, a little apart from rest of the lunchroom.
“It’s lunch,” she said, dropping a small cooler onto the table with a hollow thud. “I wanted to do something nice … your lunches are usually so pathetic.”
“Have you been hauling that thing around all day? Haven’t people been staring? Asking if you were carrying organs for transplant?”
“Ha ha,” she said. She sat down and took the lid off the cooler. “Shut up. You’re going to hurt my feelings, after I went to all this trouble.”
“Cool. But why, again?”
She handed him a plate and a fork and a paper party napkin covered in little teal elephants on a pink background. “Because you’re sweet and cute and I really like you.”
He looked down at his plate, feeling suddenly shy. “I really like you, too—”
“Don’t spoil it,” she said, waving off his stammering. “Just eat.”
There wasn’t much time in a school lunch period to sit and savor the stuffed pitas and large slab of bakery chocolate cake Lily had brought for them to eat, and the noise of the student body and the dreariness of the cafeteria wasn’t exactly ambience. But Albert ate like it was, because it was sweet of her to try.
When the lunch period was almost over, she said, “I have one other thing to give you.”
“I already feel guilty.” He wondered what it was.
“Maybe I’m hoping you’ll buy me a steak and take me to a movie this weekend,” she laughed. “Crafty me.”
“By ‘steak,’ you mean ‘hamburger,’ right?”
She said, “Ugh. I just realized how dumb this is.” But she pulled something from the back pocket of her jeans anyway and handed it to him. “Well, there it is.”
He looked at the thing in his hand—a photograph.
“Thank you,” he said, meaning it. “I thought you said you didn’t have a picture you could give me.”
“I know what I said. And I really don’t have any pictures I like enough to let you see,” she said, “except you keep asking. So I decided I wanted to give this one to you. It’s just an old school shot from before my accident. Totally embarrassing. But I hope you like it.”
“I do,” he said. The picture was a studio snapshot, and didn’t look much different from the girl who sat in front of him—though the girl in the picture wore her hair longer than the Lily he knew. Also, the faint pencil-line scar she had on the left side of her forehead wasn’t part of the face in the photograph.
They both jumped when the bell rang, Albert looking at Lily’s picture, Lily watching Albert.
“Please put that stupid thing away now,” she said, getting to her feet. “You can look at it when I’m not around. It’s so dorky I can’t stand it.”
“You’re crazy. It’s beautiful.” He ripped a piece of paper from one of his notebooks and folded it around the picture before tucking it carefully into a book. “You’re like the poster girl for self-esteem issues.”
He was trying to be funny, but he was shocked to see that her eyes were shiny and her mouth was twisted awkwardly, as if she was trying to hold back tears.
“Oh, don’t,” he said. “I was joking. Don’t cry!”
Even from their corner, he could see that the lunchroom was emptying, everyone headed to their afternoon classes. He didn’t know what to do. When you weren’t in charge of your own life, there usually wasn’t time to figure it out before you were shoved off to the next thing you didn’t want to do.
But she took a deep breath and there were no tears. “Give me a break! I’m totally fine,” she said. “You’re the one person I can count on for that.”
He felt like this responsibility she gave him was another gift, weightless.
Albert’s throat tightened, just as he’d been afraid it would. But even as he tried to keep up the pace of his running he expected it to be MacLennan’s big hands, not asthma, that pinched his windpipe shut. Then the physical sensation passed and he was able to draw a jagged breath, and another, and he wondered if this was what a panic attack felt like.
His legs kept pumping anyway, barely stumbling, and his mind raced. As he replayed the last few moments at Federated Oil, he knew MacLennan was going to rat him out to Kogen. The two of them had good reason to keep Albert quiet, after what he’d seen tonight. Once Kogen knew Albert had been a witness to that private meeting, he would definitely be coming after him. That’s what had Albert terrified—once Kogen had it in for someone, that person disappeared, one way or the other. Despite the cold, sweat poured from Albert’s forehead and stung his eyes.
I’m in bad trouble.
In an amazingly short amount of time, Albert’s life had fallen apart. The way he saw it, there was no way to hold one piece together without another breaking away. Kogen was after Lily, Albert was sure … and now MacLennan was a new threat and he was after Albert, too, and Kogen already had it in for Albert, and of course Kogen was the reason Lily was gone in the first place. And with that he was back to Lily—who was so afraid of her stepfather she’d fled town, and who, as of this evening, Albert had once again failed to help or protect.
Looking around to make sure MacLennan or his truck weren’t lurking nearby, Albert cut through the neighbors’ yard and through the narrow breezeway along the side of their house, startling their dog into barking as he hurdled over the back fence into his own yard.
He pictured Olivia sitting in her bedroom, waiting for him to call and tell her that everything was fine and they could go to the police and Kogen would be arrested and Lily brought home safely.
But now going to the cops was out, because of MacLennan—and because of his failure. He wanted to tell the police what was in Lily’s journal, but it was such a ludicrous story that no one would believe any of it. He also couldn’t tell anyone that he thought he knew where Lily might be, because doing so would send Kogen right to her.
The trouble he and Lily were in was so deep.
As quietly as he could, Albert lifted the sash on his bedroom window and pulled himself inside. He shut the window behind himself and held his breath a moment. Leaving his light off, he sat on the edge of the bed and listened hard. He thought he heard the TV from the living room, but definitely no footsteps. The very smallest bit of his luck had held, anyway—apparently his parents had never known he’d left the house. He let out a silent, humorless laugh that shook his body.
He closed the window and latched it. As he was pulling off his shoes and wondering whether he had enough nerve to call Olivia tonight and tell her what happened, he had an idea. It was something that even a couple of weeks ago he never would have thought of, let alone seriously considered. But he was out of options.
What if he just left town? What if he stopped waiting for the cops to figure it out and he found Lily? If she was beginning to remember what her stepfather had done, maybe by now she remembered about her journal and what she’d written there. And if she did, the journal would no longer be the only piece of evidence against Kogen.
If she came back, she could testify, she could talk to the police herself. If she had remembered any part of what happened, they could still crush Kogen. It was worth a shot. Albert was starting to get excited as the idea formed. He would find her and stay with her and they would figure out a way to negotiate with the police from a distance, and they wouldn’t come back until Kogen was arrested. Maybe they could take Lily’s story to the newspapers, if they had to. The story would be out and Lily would be safe.
And Albert would have helped her after all. She’d be protected because of him.
And even if she still didn’t remember everything about that night, if it remained buried, then Albert would go to her anyway and neither of them would be alone anymore.
But then the image of Kogen holding a gun on MacLennan floated in front of his eyes. Things were falling apart for Kogen, too, which would make
him even more dangerous. Olivia was currently under the same roof as that man.
Cursing under his breath, Albert tiptoed out of his room and into the hall to grab the telephone. His muffled footsteps seemed to echo throughout the quiet house, but his parents didn’t hear.
Back in his room, Albert dialed Olivia’s number, hoping as he did that he wasn’t making things worse. She picked up after a couple of rings, answering with no preface to her whispered “What happened?”
Also whispering, he said, “You have to get out of there. Is there somewhere you can go?”
As briefly as he could, he told Olivia everything that had happened, beginning with MacLennan showing up at his house and ending with the abrupt confrontation at the gas station. Olivia said nothing as he spoke, only listened.
When he’d finished the story, Albert said, “If your stepfather reads the journal, he’ll know we know everything. That makes him even more dangerous. And MacLennan will stoke his paranoia if he tells Kogen I was there.” There was more silence on her end. “Are you going to say anything?”
When she spoke, it wasn’t what he’d expected her to say. “He had a gun?”
“Yeah. I mean, I don’t know anything about guns—for all I know it was a starter’s pistol. But I saw it,” Albert said. “MacLennan saw it. He was pissing himself, too.”
What she said next startled him again. “Wait. Patrick was there when Lily had her accident? And he just left her alone to die?”