by Sara Beitia
He opened the window just wide enough to slip through. After he dropped to the ground, he hurried across the yard, across the street, and into the alley.
The night seemed really empty. The snow had stopped again and the ground was wet as the flakes melted when they hit the ground. Everyone seemed to be wherever they belonged instead of out here—probably bathrobed-out like his parents in front of the TV. Albert had always found it spooky how shifting a few hours changed the streets from a world of cars on their way home from work, school buses stopped at corners, other kids on their way home for family dinner, to a world of silence and stillness. Everyone was where they were supposed to be for the night; everyone except Albert Morales and—he hoped—Olivia Odilon. Maybe it was because his nerves were tweaked, but Albert found the stillness eerily dreamlike.
Then he remembered he was supposed to be downtown in half an hour, which wasn’t going to happen if he kept screwing around. So, as it seemed he’d been doing every time he left the house lately, he broke into a slow jog, as fast as he dared.
T he sun has long set behind the mountains by the time they make it up to the scattered group of cottages around the lake. In the gloom, the dark water looks like a basin of blood and Albert can hardly make out Olivia’s face, even though she’s standing right next to him.
“Which house was it?” he asks impatiently. His stomach is doing nervous acrobatics now that they’re here. His eagerness isn’t just simple excitement at the thought of being reunited with Lily … it’s tainted with a superstitious nagging that now that they’re here, it was too easy. There’s a metallic taste in his mouth he tries to ignore.
“Over there,” she says shortly, pointing to a vague shape up by the water. She begins walking and he follows.
“So now we … what? Go up to the house and knock?”
She shrugs. “I don’t know any more than you do. Let’s just, I don’t know, have a look around.” Her words are slurred and her steps unsteady.
Albert nods wearily, the dim light from the moon and stars streaking like tracers in front of his eyes. He’s so tired he feels he’s lost his sense of place … like there’s never been a time when he hasn’t been walking and searching, and there never will be. His life feels like a permanent, restless middle of the night. The back of his tongue itches.
“Are you coming?” Lily is calling softly to him from up ahead … Lily.
“Dude, are you coming or not?”
Jerking his head up, he realizes that he’s spaced off. Then the illusion or dream or whatever it is clears like mist and he can see Olivia’s silhouette in the darkness.
The sense of dreaming only grows stronger when Olivia leads them down a long, narrow path to the cottage itself—a tiny, weathered building almost on the edge of the water. By moonlight they search the exterior of the rough, shingle-sided cottage, rustling the bushes and trees and calling out Lily’s name softly. There’s no sign of her anywhere. The small drifts of snow against the house hold no footprints except the ones Albert and Olivia are making.
The door to the cottage is locked, of course, and the shuttered windows are locked, too. By this time Albert is no longer sure he hasn’t crossed over to dreaming; his thoughts and movements are slow and frustrated by air that feels thick and resistant like water. It’s like a dream of running desperately toward something and not getting anywhere no matter how hard he pushes the muscles of his legs.
Rattling the door latch again fruitlessly, Albert says to Olivia, “Maybe she figured out a way inside and she’s hiding in there.”
From somewhere at his back, Olivia makes a noise somewhere between a moan and a protest.
“Lily!” Albert calls suddenly, his voice ringing in the silence. He shakes the locked and deadbolted handle and pounds the surprisingly sturdy door. “Lily, it’s me!”
“Albert—” Olivia says, grabbing his wrist.
He shakes her off and charges around to the back of the cottage, repeating his assault against the back door and still calling loudly for Lily.
“Albert!” Olivia says again sharply, slipping under his arm to put herself between him and the door. “This place is a vault. She’s not in there.”
He drops his hands. “But she has to be,” he says stupidly. He pulls out the envelope, worn from riding in his back pocket, and stares at Lily’s letter. “It says here she’s gone to ‘the last good place’ and that she’ll wait for me here. She must’ve known I’d remember …” he says, forgetting that he barely did, and that he’s had to get the rest from Olivia.
“She said she’d wait as long as she could,” Olivia corrects gently. “But hey, there’s still the boathouse.” She points toward the long shack spanning the beach and the nearby dock.
They leave the house and head down the path to the boathouse, and what they find there is more nothing. No sign of Lily. The door to the narrow building is unlocked and when they let themselves in, darkness and the sound of lapping water against the dock are what meet them. It takes a few moments for their eyes to adjust to the dark, and then they can make out the vague shapes of the stuff hanging on the wall pegs. The place is empty of life.
“Maybe there’s something, though, something left behind,” Albert says to Olivia, his voice echoing off the walls and the water. “I wish I had a flashlight.”
“I don’t know what good it will do,” Olivia says, “but I think there should be a light of some sort in here.”
She pushes into the gloom, feeling her way carefully along. Albert watches her shadow moving, holding his breath and glad that she’s able to make sense of the alien shapes she touches, shapes he sees only as vague question marks. The wet wood smell is strong in here and the air doesn’t taste clean.
That funny nagging feeling he’s had for the last several hours has come back stronger, a feeling that was briefly asleep but is awake again now. And here he was yelling like an idiot when he has a feeling that someone might be nearby who’d followed them. It isn’t a particular sound or smell that makes the feeling so strong … he’s not sure what it is. Even so, he’s convinced someone else is nearby in the darkness.
Just as Albert has decided, no matter how dumb it sounds, to say something to Olivia before she finds a flashlight and lets anyone who is looking know they’re there, Olivia lets out a cry of triumph and blinds Albert with the light of a battery-operated lantern.
Now that it’s lit, the boathouse shows a few signs that someone has been there recently, but those signs aren’t at all comforting. The words he’s about to say die on Albert’s lips, overshadowed by a fresher fear than the one of being caught.
Looking beyond what’s supposed to be in the boathouse—the old life jackets and paddles and fishing poles and tarps and buckets—it’s clear what’s not supposed to be there. And from what’s not supposed to be there, Albert knows someone has been sleeping here. There’s a heap of smelly clothes in the far corner, the odor detectable even from where they stand near the door. These clothes are piled on a tarp with a foam life preserver on top like a makeshift pillow on a foul bed. There are some rotting food scraps, more than a couple of empty booze bottles, and a pile of magazines. Moving closer, Albert prods the glossy stack with his foot. The pile collapses and fans out, Good Housekeeping sliding down to reveal Hustler and an old issue of Time near the top.
“Transients,” Olivia says softly. “When we used to come here, I remember hearing adults talking about them coming in the winter. We should get out of here. Don’t mess with any of it.”
But Albert isn’t really listening. He can only think that if Lily has been here, if she’d been surprised into dropping an earring, or a shoe—
—or a chunk of hair, pulled out as she ran away from a stranger sleeping here—
—it would’ve been the easiest thing in the world for someone to drop whatever it was into the water and watch it sink …
Despair threatens to overwhelm him and Albert pushes these thoughts away, trying to find anything else to hold on to.
He can come up with nothing, and feels himself close to sinking into the black pool.
“I’m so tired of Lily making us worry!” Olivia cries, dropping the flashlight and pressing herself suddenly and hard against Albert’s skinny chest.
And though he truly doubts whether it is the truth, he says to Olivia, as he’s said to himself many times already, “It’s going to be fine.”
Up until now, confronted with this empty, smelly boathouse and that black water, he hasn’t honestly believed in any terrible outcome. In death. Not really.
The flashlight has rolled into the corner, shooting light up at a weird angle.
“I hate her,” Olivia says, barely loud enough to be heard.
“No you don’t.” Albert isn’t sure he’s right, but he wants to be. He can’t understand why Olivia wanted so badly to come with him if she does.
“In some ways I do.” A small sigh. “At least, I wish I did.”
Albert puts his arms lightly around this girl who clings to him. He pats her back awkwardly and makes shushing noises like she’s baby. She lets out a series of hiccuping sobs. It feels weird to hold her, but kind of familiar, too; he notices that Olivia’s hair smells like Lily’s … he could almost pretend this is Lily, that the last hours have been a bad dream and he’s stumbled on Lily after all. But Olivia is smaller, and sharper, and no matter how he wants to hold on to the illusion for a few more moments, he can’t. She isn’t Lily. Albert feels even more lost and lonely than if he’d been alone.
The itch in his throat grows stronger, tightening his airway, and then Albert is pushing Olivia away and making a jerky course for the door, trying to catch his breath.
“W hat was that for?” Albert exclaimed, his hand flying up to the spot where Olivia had kissed his cheek. According to the giant illuminated dial on the face of the movie theater, it was just after midnight. He’d been pacing up and down the sidewalk in front of the building when Olivia appeared out of nowhere and took his hands in hers.
“Shut up, dumbass,” she hissed between her teeth as a terrible grin stretched across her mouth. Still holding his hands, she pulled him toward the entrance. “You’re late—I was afraid you weren’t coming.”
“It wasn’t that easy—”
She gave his hand a hard squeeze. “Never mind. Remember, we’re on a date. Got it? Hold my hand and try to act like you like it.”
Maybe it was his nerves, but he disliked being treated like an idiot by this girl. Yet they were together now in the search for Lily, so he decided it was easier to let it go than start something over it. He gave her hand a hard squeeze that she ignored as she led him up to the box office window. She asked for two tickets to the midnight show, which turned out to be a teen slasher pic that had come out two months earlier.
“It’s started already,” the ticket taker told them. Then he gave Albert a knowing glance and said, “Maybe you don’t care.”
“Just give us two tickets,” Olivia said, sliding four bucks under the little half circle cut in the box office window. The clerk slid the tickets back with a shrug.
Frontier Cinemas was a rundown, second-run theater in a rundown strip mall on the seedy edge of downtown. In all his months living in Little Solace, Albert had passed it a few times on the way to better places, but he had never been inside. The lobby was dim and everything seemed to have a layer of old dust. The air smelled of mildewed carpet and stale popcorn.
Besides the bored-looking guy slouched behind the snack counter and the equally bored-looking woman ripping tickets, the place was empty. Still, Olivia looked around nervously.
“Let’s hurry up and get inside,” she said, pulling Albert toward the theaters.
The roar of the surround-sound blasted them as they went through the door. It was too loud to talk, so Albert let Olivia lead him through the near-deserted place to a couple of seats in an empty row near the screen.
Once they were seated, Albert put his mouth almost against Olivia’s ear and whispered, “Can I talk now?”
By now she’d dropped the grin and his hand as well. Turning on him with her more familiar scowl, she leaned close and whispered, “I think Perry saw me leave the house.”
He had to strain to hear her. “When you snuck out?”
He felt her head nodding. He glanced up when the girl on the movie screen let out a shriek and the light’s glow turned red with the fake blood soaking the scene.
“Do you think he followed you?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe not.” Even at a whisper, competing with the blaring movie, her tone was completely unconvincing. After a moment she said, “If he did follow me, then I guess he’ll be waiting for us outside the theater.”
Albert’s stomach sank. “What are we going to do? If he knows you’re with me, he’s going to put two and two together …”
“Yeah. So we’ll wait until this shitty movie is over, then we’ll sneak out the back exit during the credits, before the lights come on, and hope we get lucky.”
“That’s it? Hope for luck—that’s your best idea?” The words came out in a breathless squeak that made her flinch away in irritation. “Luck hasn’t done much for us so far.”
“You have a better idea?” She paused and when he didn’t argue, she went on, her breath hot on his ear. “Wonder which of us is parked closer. Where’s your car?”
“It doesn’t exist. I got here on foot.”
“Doesn’t matter. Either way, we’d be too obvious wherever we went.” She was thinking out loud. “We’d be seen eventually, probably sooner than later. The cops will be looking for you. And Perry will be looking for both of us. Not to mention your parents and my mom. So we can’t drive any identifiable vehicles.”
“So what—we take the train? A bus?” He wasn’t sure what she was saying.
“You really aren’t from around here, are you?” Her sentence was cut short by a giant onscreen explosion and more screams. The momentary glare of the fireball illuminated the scornful expression on her face. It was an expression Albert was beginning to think she wore a lot. “There is no train or bus to—”
“Don’t say it,” Albert said, even though there was no way anyone could hear her besides him. Still, he had to stifle the urge to cover her mouth with his hand. He was sure the dirty look was still there, but at least it was too dark to see it.
“The Last Good Place. So we’re going to walk.”
“In February? Up in the mountains? How far is it?”
“If I remember, it’s less than a hundred miles. Totally doable, I think. It’ll only take a few days, and we won’t have to worry about cops running our plates.” She seemed to be smiling again. “Where’s your sense of adventure, Frodo?”
“This isn’t a joke.” But after his initial surprise at the idea, it started to make a kind of crazy sense. “They can’t follow what they can’t find, is that the idea?”
She nodded, her movement a dim blur in the dark.
Albert could almost feel the angry spittle showering his face as he imagined his mother shouting up at him in the aftermath of what she would call “a stunt like this.”
“So, what, we’re just going to walk a hundred miles?” he said. “Just like that?”
“Going to have to,” she said.
“Okay then.” Once it was decided, he felt something he wouldn’t have expected: he felt relief. They now had something definite they were going to do. No more waiting.
Then they both leaned back into their seats, their necks craned as they gazed at the screen in front of them, neither of them really looking at the flashing images. Albert closed his eyes, not enjoying the movie at all.
After the seemingly endless bloodbath finally ended and the credits started to roll, Olivia leaned over the armrest until her mouth was once again at Albert’s ear. “Are we really doing this?”
“I think we are.”
The lights were coming up now and people were starting to rise. She tapped his wrist. “Now.”
; They both stood, walking quickly but trying not to draw attention. Olivia got to the door first and pushed it open, the dim light of the hall seeming to flood the movie theater. Just outside, a right turn led down a winding hall back past the bathrooms to the front of the theater; just to the left was the side door exit. Olivia went for the exit but Albert stopped her.
“If your stepfather did follow you, he’ll probably be right behind us.”
“Then shouldn’t we hurry?” She pushed on the exit and said, “Let’s just go.”
He followed.
It was a dark night, overcast, but the parking lot lights were bright. Olivia led them on a winding route along the back of the building, through some prickly branches of evergreen shrubbery and into the dark, narrow lanes of the residential neighborhood behind the Frontier property.
“Where are we going?” Albert finally asked.
“To my car.”
Before he could say anything else, they were beside a little two-door junker car and Olivia was keying the lock. “Get in already,” she snapped, adding, “and don’t just sit there with the door open and the dome light on!”
“I thought we decided it was too dangerous to drive?” Albert asked.
Olivia was already pulling away from the curb. “It is,” she said, “but a well-placed car is a useful, um, misdirection, don’t you think?”
“What?” They’d just begun a life on the run, and already he sucked at it.
“Shit,” Olivia breathed, ignoring him as her eyes left the road for the rearview mirror. “Lights just went on back there. Maybe we are being followed.”
Albert twisted around to look and saw the pair of lights gaining. His heart collapsed.
“I hope this works,” she said.
“Hope what works?”
But there was no need for her to respond as it became very obvious what she meant. She put her foot down on the pedal until they were going about fifteen over the limit. She ran the stop sign at a major intersection, and they were lucky there was no traffic at the moment they blew through. Three blocks on the other side of that road, she made a series of moves in such rapid order it was almost instantaneous: right before a smaller cross street, she flipped on her right turn signal, and still going way too fast to make the turn, she cut the headlights and cranked a hard left. Albert braced himself on the dashboard against the motion, all the time watching the headlights in the rearview mirror. They were still on the other side of that stop sign Olivia had run, maybe far enough away that her Evasive Driving 101 maneuver could actually work.