“Hmm.”
“You didn’t read that book when you were a kid?”
“Um … about a bad cook?”
“About Alexander’s bad day. I thought every kid read that book.”
“I didn’t read much.” He shrugged, then delivered the first egg onto the waiting plate. It still didn’t break. “More?”
“No, thanks.”
“Sausage? Or there’s bagels.”
“This is fine.” She wasn’t that hungry, and she’d rather not swallow another bite of bagel after eating one four mornings in a row. She grabbed two forks from the silverware drawer and set one on the other plate. After a sprinkling of salt, she took her first drippy bite. Hmm. This wasn’t a bad way to eat eggs, after all.
Marcus turned his sausage one last time, then shut off the burner and joined her at the table with a heaping plate.
“So,” Aubrey said before he could revisit the topic of the Table. “You didn’t like to read? Even at four, five years old?”
“Nope.”
“Goodnight Moon? Where the Wild Things Are? The Little Engine That Could?”
He shook his head to each title.
Pity surged, though he clearly didn’t understand what he had missed. “Didn’t your parents believe in reading?”
Marcus’s fork impaled a sausage link, and he bit off half and swallowed it before answering. “Books are expensive.”
“That’s why there are libraries.”
His mouth curved. Why was that funny? “So books were important in your house?”
“My mom’s degree is in literature.”
“Oh.” He pushed his chair back from the table, then paused. “So … she could get a Bible. If she wanted one.”
“Well, not ‘get’ as in own one, of course … but yeah, she got a pass to an RRR when she was working on her dissertation.”
Marcus nodded and headed for the dishwasher, a hint of awe behind his eyes. Only those holding doctorates—or, in her mom’s case, working on one—could gain access to a library’s Religious Reference Room. Among other legal religious literature, these rooms housed multiple old Bible translations. If one’s thesis was state-approved, one could use banned books to develop that thesis. Mom had written something about philosophical contradictions in the original parables. Aubrey should have made time to dig up that old thesis, read it, discuss it with her.
“Do you think they’re still in custody? My parents?”
Marcus looked toward the silent radio, as if the news might come on spontaneously and announce her parents’ fate. “I don’t know.”
“They probably don’t know I haven’t been caught.”
He shook his head.
“I wish I could let them know that I’m okay, and that we’re working on getting Elliott.”
Marcus nodded.
“Marcus, does your family know about all the things you’re doing? Or would they turn you in?”
He retrieved his shoes from the laundry room and his keys from the hook on the wall. Had she overstepped again?
“My mom wouldn’t have turned me in,” he finally said.
“But she’s safer not knowing.” Like Lee.
He shoved his feet into his shoes without unlacing them. The slight hunch of his shoulders seemed to bear a sudden physical burden. Oh … wouldn’t have. Long past tense.
“Or is she … did she pass away?”
He seemed to stop breathing. His head bowed.
“What happened?” She shouldn’t ask, but she couldn’t ignore such a visible pain. If he tried to clam up, she’d change the subject. After all, he’d let her avoid one.
As she concluded he wouldn’t answer, his voice trickled out. “Her heart.”
“You were really young?”
“No.”
“It must have been hard for—for your dad.” For you.
“He left. When I was two.”
“That’s heinous,” she said, the first word suited for that magnitude of abandonment.
Marcus’s left hand rose to his neck.
“I’m sorry, Marcus.”
His gaze jerked up from the floor. “Don’t.”
Okay, that qualified as clamming up. “She was a good mother, the way you talk about her.”
“She read Treasure Island out loud. From the library. I was about seven or eight. I liked it. I kept asking her to borrow it again, and she kept saying no. She’d bought it for me for Christmas.” His hand lowered to his side and unfurled slowly. “Well. I’ve got to go.”
“I’ll clean up,” Aubrey said.
“Okay.”
When he was gone, she scoured the kitchen, ending with the egg-caked frying pan she’d set to soak. What kind of father deserted his family? He had to know his two-year-old would ask Mommy when Daddy was coming home. She rewound time thirty years or so and imagined the man she still barely knew, a toddling soldier with coffee-cake curls and caramel eyes, thigh high to his mom and vowing to be responsible. For his family. The way his dad refused to be. Oh, Marcus.
Did every child need a father, barring outright abuse? Or was a baby better off without someone in his life who would even consider discarding him?
She was scrubbing a perfectly clean pan.
She shut off the water and dried her hands on a worn but clean towel. Now her options were more pacing, more jabbering to Marcus’s dog. Surely it wouldn’t hurt anything to step out onto the deck for a while, to breathe in the outdoors even if it was damp and cold out there.
The minutes of contemplation finally found her staring at his bookshelf. Of course. When inactivity is ready to send one over the edge, a book is always helpful. But no good mother would distract herself with a book as if all was right with the world, as if her baby slept safely a room away. She’d be no different than a father who complied with a breakup and never asked, “What about the baby?”
Stop it. She’d told Marcus that Brett hadn’t abandoned her, and he hadn’t. The decision rested on her as much as Brett. He was nothing like Marcus’s father, and she’d make sure Elliott knew that.
She needed to look at something other than these walls. If only she could tug down that panel and bring out Karlyn’s Bible, but no. Those books, those figures, were invisible for a reason. Maybe she was cowardly, but she couldn’t make herself expose them.
Her other choices were limited in topic. Carpentry or film theory or the abridged classic that Marcus’s story had given new significance. She tugged out the shiny paperback film book. A book this thick, with a binding this tight, would bear evidence of reading. This one had barely been opened.
Aubrey forced herself through the first chapter. Flicker fusion, beta movement, persistence of vision. She didn’t care. No wonder Marcus hadn’t read this, if he didn’t like to read in the first place. Why did he own it? Oh. She’d already read this paragraph. Twice. She turned the page, not wanting to. Great, chapter two. A history of Hollywood, starting with the Motion Picture Patents Company.
She swapped it for the children’s book. At least it was fiction.
By the afternoon, Aubrey had finished the exploits of Jim Hawkins and returned to the film book. At some point, she set it aside and stared at his dormant computer on the corner desk. Of course, she couldn’t touch it, not even to browse online. If the con-cops got hold of it and saw Internet history logged while he wasn’t home … which would mean they had already entered the house with a warrant, but … still. She browsed his movie collection instead, which would take her at least a month to get through even in her current idleness. The cluster of silent films at the front of the first row gave away the chronological organization, so Aubrey worked her way backward. Hours later—having escaped into the Old West, pirate-infested seas, and a bank heist—Aubrey stretched her lazy limbs and jogged a few laps around the house. Indy kept pace for half
a lap, then stopped to watch her.
The key in the door jolted her every cell to attention. Marcus hadn’t said anything about coming home early. Maybe Lee had done some more cooking. Well, Indy could be the welcoming committee. Aubrey burrowed into the couch, picked up the film book, and pretended to read. The door opened.
Her baby cried.
Chest seized. Feet flew. Not real, couldn’t be real, oh God, oh Jesus, make it real.
Infant carrier on the counter. Not Elliott’s. But the music in the air was his fussing. His hiccups, his gasping, his indignant voice demanding the location of his mommy. Elliott.
Her socks slid around the counter. His soft cheeks, the blond fluff on his head, his nose, his moist eyelashes. The buckle slipped between her thumb and finger, then clicked open. The safety belt lifted away. Elliott in her arms, and another sound louder than his fussing, a sound that heaved from the depths of her body. Time melted into saltwater that ran down her face and all over her baby.
When the crying faded, Aubrey stood like a bent tree, and Elliott’s tiny hand filled itself with her sweater, and Lee stood watching them.
“You?” Aubrey said.
Lee stood with her arms in a loose fold. Her eyes held no more warmth than two frost-encrusted windows. But she nodded.
“H-how?”
“The method is immaterial.”
Elliott thrust an arm past Aubrey’s clutch, and the nails of his open hand grazed her nose. “Where was he? Did they take care of him?”
“He appears to be healthy.”
“But where …? How did you … Lee, how?”
The arch of Lee’s eyebrows deflected Aubrey’s questions without even a second of consideration.
“Thank you,” Aubrey said, the two most inadequate words she’d ever spoken. “I … You … I don’t know how to thank you.”
“Gratitude isn’t necessary,” Lee said.
“Of course it’s—you don’t understand, this is the greatest gift you could—my baby …”
Lee nodded as if she could possibly understand.
“Why?” Aubrey said. “You don’t know me, why did you do this for me?”
“I didn’t.”
“You didn’t do this?”
“I didn’t do it for you.”
So she’d done it for Elliott? By default, anything done for him was done for Aubrey, too. Oh … of course. “This was for Marcus.”
Lee’s gaze lowered to Elliott and assessed him with the same detachment she’d used to clean and bandage Marcus’s back. “I was in a safer position to achieve this than he is.”
“Not to mention he’s coming home to me every night. Now I can move on.”
Lee flicked a dismissing glance and gathered up her keys.
“But listen, I don’t care why.”
Lee nodded and moved toward the door as smoothly as a stream.
“You should think about it, though—him and you. You didn’t do this because he’s just a friend.”
Elliott fussed into the silence, while Lee opened the back door and started down the garage steps. Aubrey hurried after her with her son’s warm, chubby form clutched close. His cheeks were flushed with distress, not illness, and his weight in Aubrey’s arms was unchanged. But the reassurance of a nurse wasn’t something to ignore.
“Lee, wait, please. You looked at him? He’s fine?” Aubrey said.
“Yes.”
“Thank you.”
Another nod. Another turning away.
“Wait,” Aubrey said. “What do I tell Marcus?”
Lee faced her, expressionless. “The truth.”
31
“This is Marcus’s bedroom. You’ll sleep in here, with me. I won’t have to hug a pillow tonight.”
Elliott arched his back, and one of his fists beat the air. Aubrey shifted his weight from the crook of her arm. His squirming ceased once he could see outward, and his back settled against her chest.
“This is a hallway. It could use some artwork, don’t you think? And this is the living room. Marcus sleeps on the couch there, without any pillows. He’s probably never been to a chiropractor in his life.”
Elliott’s body erupted in a hiccup.
“Exactly. And this is the kitchen. It’s very … well, I don’t know what it is, I guess it’s just a kitchen …”
Tears rained into Elliott’s hair. She’d try to contain them if there were any point. Elliott’s blue eyes sparkled up at her. At least her spells of weeping didn’t scare him. That he couldn’t hear them probably helped.
In a few minutes, she swallowed the rest of her tears and rubbed a finger over his tiny knuckles, then returned to the living room. She pushed aside tattered magazines to nudge the back of the bookcase. Nothing moved. Under harder pressure, the panel swung down like a rusted hinge.
Wooden figures wobbled as Aubrey eased Karlyn’s Bible from beneath them. She couldn’t do this one-handed, but when she tried to lay Elliott on the rug, her hands refused to let him go. Finally, the hand under his back withdrew, then the one that cupped his head. His blue-socked foot punched the air above him, and his smile showed off his gums. Aubrey scrambled up and grabbed the pink-bookmarked Bible without losing Elliott from her peripheral vision. She scooped him up again and settled on the couch.
“You’re not going to have that operation, baby boy,” she whispered. “We have to hide, I don’t know how long. No more medical records for us, anywhere.”
Her baby’s eyes trusted her, blinked slowly. Sleep fogged his gaze.
“We can’t go back, Elliott. So we have to go forward.” Yellow down caressed her lips as she bent over his head. “Forward is Ohio. And then maybe farther, I don’t know yet. And forward isn’t an implant. It’s our lips and hands moving.”
She didn’t know what sign language could do for her child. She didn’t know more than five words of it. But something inside her drew itself up from its former curl of silence, stood taller than she’d thought it was. She’d find a way to communicate with her baby.
Elliott’s eyelids closed.
“Go to sleep, Mommy’s got you now.”
The reminder didn’t birth tears this time. Her hum existed only for herself, but it bolstered this something inside her that had reawakened with the return of Elliott. After a minute, the hum gained words.
“What a friend we have in Jesus, all our sins and griefs to bear! What a privilege to carry, everything to God in prayer …”
Elliott’s breaths left his body with wisps of dreams inside them, like Marcus’s carving come to life. Aubrey opened her best friend’s Bible, and the pages rustled between her fingers.
“This is why we can’t go back, baby boy,” Aubrey said. “Because this book is true, no matter what.”
She should ask Marcus if she could keep the Bible. Karlyn would want her to have it. How she’d hide it while on the run, she couldn’t imagine, but she couldn’t leave it here. She had nearly finished the book of Luke when Indy lifted her head and rushed to the back door. Marcus was an hour earlier than usual. Then again, he didn’t punch a time clock.
In a minute, he appeared at the entry of the living room. “Aubrey, I’ve—”
The air held the taste of his shock.
“I’d like you to meet my son,” Aubrey said.
He lurched forward two steps, then more. “I … I don’t … how?”
“I don’t know exactly, she wouldn’t tell me, just brought him here.”
“Who?”
Aubrey tried not to shrink into the couch. “Lee.”
Emotions flashed across his face too fast for distinction.
“She’s fine, Marcus.”
He snatched his cell phone from his pocket and speed-dialed. “Where are you?” His bark didn’t give Lee more than a second to answer. “Park. Now.”
He was halfway to his truck before Aubrey could catch him. Elliott fussed at the jarring passage through the kitchen. “Marcus, wait—”
His strides paused, but he didn’t glance back.
“Elliott needs diapers.”
Slowly, he pivoted to face her.
“And baby wipes. And I had to go back to work, so I don’t, um, make enough milk for him. Lee brought a bottle, from wherever he was, but he needs more formula. Baby formula.”
And baby powder, baby soap … But for now, Aubrey stuck to the most immediate necessities. The moment lengthened, and then Marcus nodded.
Her hand was pulling her earlobe. She dropped it to her side. “I think I’ve complicated your life all over again.”
“I’ll take care of it.” He headed again for his truck.
“Don’t you want to know his size?”
“What?”
“Diapers. He’s in size two. Whatever formula you get will be fine, I don’t buy organic or anything. It’s expensive.”
“Okay.” Then he was in the truck, and then he was gone.
32
Marcus shut off his truck and jumped down to the gravel parking lot. Why had he picked this place? The little park was secluded compared to most public places, especially on a snow-sodden evening. Still. They could only say so much on a park path owned by everybody. Homes weren’t safe, though, if the Constabulary had identified her as Elliott’s … kidnapper. Really, that’s what she was. Maybe an agent planned to watch her, tail her to work, follow her into the hospital … Marcus’s strides lengthened as his neck muscles shortened.
Limp snowflakes landed on his hair, seeped into his scalp, dribbled down his neck. A white-haired woman passed him, hurrying toward the parking lot, tugging noisy twin girls by the hands.
“Going to turn into rain any minute now,” she said without slowing.
“Thanks for the warning,” Marcus said.
In a few minutes, he reached the garden. Lee sat amid the flowers, of course—or at least, where the flowers would be. Every spring and summer, this was her favorite picnic spot, surrounded by a rainbow of blossoms. She told him the name of each without expecting him to keep track of them. He did know geraniums on sight, ever since she’d called them her favorite. “They grow regardless of conditions, Marcus.”
Seek and Hide: A Novel (Haven Seekers) Page 19