by Luanne Rice
When I got to the house, Astrid was home, her white Mercedes in the driveway. With her super-human hearing, I knew I’d have to be smart and fast.
I pulled open the big slanted metal doors that led to the cellar. She’d never expect me to enter that way. Then up the basement stairs, down the short hallway past the kitchen, and up one flight to my room. I held my breath, listening.
I heard the fax machine. She was in her office—my mother’s whale room—on the phone again. The whirring transmission made it impossible to hear who she was talking to, but I was glad she was distracted.
Today I was ready. Last night I’d hidden the Volvo key on the ledge outside my window. I grabbed it and stuck it into my jeans pocket along with my cell phone.
Then I dove into my closet, rummaged for the duffel bag that I’d already filled with a fleece, my rain slicker, underwear, extra jeans, my diary, bottles of medication, my toothbrush, the packet of my mother’s letters, and all the birthday and Christmas money I had.
“Who’s there? Maia, is that you?”
I froze. Astrid had finished faxing and making her call, and her vigilance had kicked in. I heard her footsteps on the stairs and quickly locked my bedroom door, just as she began rattling the knob. That lasted exactly three seconds, and then she ran down the hall. I knew what she’d do next: call my father and try to head me off at the pass.
I had to move fast and couldn’t risk her grabbing me if I went through the house. I threw my duffel out the window and, just like yesterday, climbed out and shinnied down the pine tree.
Wind blew through the lilacs. They’d just bloomed, and their scent was stronger than perfume. Tiny purple flowers tossed overhead, mixing with the pine needles. I had lived here since birth; my parents had brought me home to this house, and the smell was as familiar to me as anything in my life. I tore through the trees, made it to the garage door, and hauled the door up in one wild motion.
I hadn’t started my mother’s car in a long time, but it was an indestructible Volvo station wagon and it fired right up. I backed out, my heart beating so fast it could have run the engine. Wheels squealing, I flew out of my driveway, leaving Astrid running after the car, yelling and waving.
My plan was to hit the highway and disappear, but I had a lump in my throat that made me turn right onto Shuttle Meadow Avenue. My phone buzzed in my pocket. I ignored it. I passed my old elementary school and Heckler Pond, where I had learned to ice-skate, and didn’t feel an ounce of sentimentality. Leaving home meant leaving home. You had to abandon old things to the past. I was ready.
But Billy.
Martindale Street wound up the steep hill above the pond. Tall trees shaded it, but every so often I’d glance right, and through the branches could see the opposite rise where my house stood.
My phone kept buzzing, the different rhythms that meant that Astrid, and maybe by now my dad, were both calling and texting. I didn’t even look.
I pulled into the circular driveway. The massive brick building, Gothic with spires, arched windows on the first floor, and oxidized green copper roof rose before me. This was a different perspective from any I’d ever seen before; I scanned the upper stories, trying to locate Billy’s window, but everything looked different, being so close.
A bunch of kids my age were clustered in a play area full of swings, seesaws, picnic tables, and a jungle gym. I saw Mary Porter, Anna Jacoby, and Kevin Hernandez from school. I could ask them where Billy was. I could do that so easily, but I was frozen in the car.
How many times could I say a private good-bye? I had thought yesterday in English class was it, then in study hall today, and now here I was at the Home. I had to see him one last time.
The car running, I gripped the steering wheel hard with my elbows locked, just begging the stars to let him walk by. That’s when I spotted him sitting alone under a maple tree, leaning against the wide trunk. And, as if the stars had decided to answer, he looked up and saw me, too. Then my heart had the biggest jump start ever—he leapt up and came toward me. I got out of the car.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
“I came to say …” I said, but I couldn’t get the words out.
He looked in the backseat and saw my duffel.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
“Away,” I said.
Our eyes burned into each other. I felt heat in my chest, knowing that this really was the last time. I wanted to reach over, touch his hand. I hoped he could read my mind and somehow know he was the only person I’d miss, that I’d come here today because he was, ineffably, mine.
“Away where?” he asked.
“To see my mother,” I said.
“Can I go with you?” he asked.
I stared at him. Had I heard right? No, I had to be dreaming.
“Will you take me?” he asked.
It was real. This was happening. His eyes were begging me.
“But people will miss you. They’ll wonder where you are,” I said.
“I live in a group home,” he said, gesturing at the building. “They won’t wonder for long.”
And then he touched me—just one finger on my wristbone—so quickly I would have thought I’d imagined it if it didn’t tingle all through my body.
“I can help you,” he said.
“Help me?”
“Yeah, you’re running away, right? I know how to do that. No one will catch us,” he said. He was already hurrying around the car.
I didn’t think after that. I climbed into the driver’s seat, he got in beside me, and we sped off.
Barely five minutes away from the Stansfield Home, I was already checking the rearview mirror.
“Is this your car?” Billy asked.
“It was my mother’s,” I said. “But yes, now it’s mine.”
“Why didn’t she take it with her?” he asked.
“Where she lives she doesn’t need one,” I said, looking in the rearview again. I pictured Mom in the road-free wilderness at the fjord’s edge. “You’re shotgun, so you’re navigator. Can you pull up a map on your phone?”
“I would,” he said, “but I don’t have GPS.” He held up his cheap, old-fashioned flip phone.
That’s right—the state of Connecticut probably didn’t provide foster kids with iPhones and unlimited data. I felt like an idiot.
“Here, you can use mine,” I said, fumbling in my pocket.
“I’m picking up on the fact that you think they’re already following you,” he said.
I guess it was obvious, considering I was looking over my shoulder and in the rearview as often as I was keeping my eyes on the road. I tried to act normal with him, but I couldn’t get over the fact that he was here. I was driving along, having an actual conversation with Billy Gorman, and it was hard to keep my voice from cracking.
“Yes,” I said. “They’ll be looking.”
“Look,” he said. “I know a few things about being followed. My dad …” He stopped for a few seconds, as if deciding whether he wanted to tell me this. “My dad was on the run for a few days before they caught him. Evasive measures, that’s what he called them, and how he stayed ahead of the cops. Does your dad know you’re going to see your mom?”
“Well,” I said, “he’ll guess it’s in my top three destinations.”
“What are your other two?”
I thought a minute. “There aren’t any.”
“If they think you’re going north, get off the highway,” Billy said. “And head south.”
“But that’s the wrong direction,” I said.
“Sometimes you have to go the opposite way,” he said, “to get where you want to go.”
“Well, type the address into GPS.”
“No. I know the way. Besides, you should turn off your phone.”
“Why?”
“They can use it to track you. GPS works both ways. It shows you where you’re going, but also shows cops, or your parents, where you are.”
My
phone was my lifeline: Gen, Clarissa, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook. But Billy was right—that Find My iPhone feature would kill us. My dad had it on his computer, and all he had to do was click “search,” and my mobile would appear as a tiny dot, in real time with an exact location, showing him where to find my phone—and me.
I decided The Plan outweighed texts and social media, at least for now, so I took the next highway exit and handed Billy my phone. He turned it off. I thought of what some kids in school said about Billy, that he was the son of a killer and maybe evil was in his genes. How well did I know him? Could I trust him?
My crush easily overpowered the questions, and here I was, taking evasive measures.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“Go left here. We’re heading to the other side of Route 9 south. It’s the old back road, not the highway. The state police will be watching for your car, but they can’t cover all the two-lanes. My dad was big on that.”
“He told you?”
Billy didn’t answer.
The narrow road, dappled with shade, followed the Connecticut River. We passed white churches and big old houses. A square granite building, a juvenile detention center—a jail for kids—had bars on the windows, a reminder of Turner. But most of what we saw was beautiful: white horses grazing in a field, a family of deer in a birch grove, kids in a blue convertible, blowing their horn and waving when we passed them.
I began to relax. So did Billy. With only the gear shift between us, I felt crazy-thrilled. Our anxiety drifted out the open windows. He laughed, for no good reason, and so did I. He reached over to jostle my shoulder; involuntarily I reached up and gripped his hand—just for a second.
“We did it,” he said. “We got away!”
“Woo-hoo!” I said.
“When I woke up this morning I didn’t expect to be on a road trip this afternoon.”
“Ha,” I said, pleased at how happy he sounded.
“But it’s not legit yet,” he said. “It won’t be till we get snacks. We’re gonna need lots of snacks,” he explained.
“Should we look for a store?”
“Let’s get a few more miles under our tires,” he said.
“Then we’ll load up,” I said.
He nodded. “The other key element,” he said, “is music.”
He turned on the radio. Ariana Grande came on, but he pressed the SEEK button and stopped at one of the low ninety-point-something numbers, where alternative and jazz stations lived. A saxophone, deep and alluring, played; I glanced over at him.
“This is your music?” I asked.
“Yeah, it’s John Coltrane. You don’t like jazz?”
“I do,” I said, even though I’d hardly heard any. “It’s just odd for a high school kid.”
“Not for me.”
The mystery of Billy continued. I glanced over. “How did you start listening?”
“A trip to New York City,” he said, and left it there.
The station played another set and, at the end, the host said the artists had been Thelonious Monk, Chet Baker, and Charlie Parker. “Next up, All Blues.”
“Miles Davis, my favorite,” Billy said, turning up the volume. I paid extra attention to the soft trumpet and heard passion and desire. I wondered what Billy had been doing in New York that had led him to this music.
Across the river, a sprawling, white-domed nuclear power plant took up acres of land. We passed through small towns with hardware stores and coffee shops, ponds and streams. This was not the land of malls or Walmarts. Forty miles after leaving Crawford, we crossed a wide bridge over the estuary, and we were in Black Hall.
“My family used to go to a beach near here,” I said. I recognized familiar landmarks: the boat launch, bait shop, fish store, and ice cream stand. Beyond the river’s mouth, Long Island Sound sparkled blue in late-afternoon light.
“This is near where I grew up,” Billy said. “Where we lived. Stay on Shore Road. I’ll tell you when to turn.”
“But shouldn’t we keep going?”
“Definitely—this is just a pit stop. I have to get some stuff.”
When he gestured, I pulled a right under a train trestle. An old-fashioned wooden sign said HUBBARD’S POINT in carved script. The road wound past a small cemetery filled with oak trees, up hills lined with tiny cottages that all seemed to have colorful shutters with sailboats, anchors, or pine trees cut into the wood.
There was a round boat basin and a sandy parking lot, a crescent beach wrapped around a blue cove of Long Island Sound. Billy inched down in his seat, barely able to see over the dashboard. We passed two women power walking; I figured he didn’t want them to see him. He directed me through the parking lot, to the road that ran the length of the beach, dead-ending at a marsh.
“Pull behind this house,” he said of the last house on the right. It was small, not at all fancy, two stories with a front porch. There was a FOR SALE sign in the front yard.
I did, tires crunching on a drive made of crushed clam and oyster shells. I felt them sink down, as if the driveway was built on sand. The cottage was pale blue, the paint fading, clearly weathered by salt air and storm breezes. The windows were shuttered. A rusty red truck parked near the marsh was up on blocks, the wheels taken off. The place was deserted.
I parked. The car was completely hidden under a portico built of simple two-by-fours and wide pine slats. I always noticed things like that, because my mother had given me my own tools for my twelfth birthday, helped me build a tree house, shown me how to chop wood. She said someday we’d build our own house on a cove full of whales. We were the Whale Mavens and Construction Crew, after all.
“Who lived here?” I asked. It was obvious no one did now, and my muscles tightened waiting for Billy to say he had, that this was where his mother had been killed. I remembered everyone saying it had happened in the family house.
“My grandparents,” he said. “It’s their summer place; it’s not winterized. But they don’t come anymore. My grandmother died right after my mother, and my grandfather moved away and turned into a hermit.”
“I thought maybe the house was yours,” I said, wondering about the tone in Billy’s voice. “You mentioned that you grew up around here.”
“Next door,” he said, pointing as we got out of the car.
That cottage was almost identical in design. It was missing a few weathered silver shingles. It had white shutters. No, as I looked more closely, they were cream, the color of the inside of a shell. One on the second floor had pulled loose from its hinges and was banging in the wind. I felt cold inside, seeing the place where his mother had been murdered.
Billy reached under a loose board at the back of his grandparents’ house. He found a key and unlocked the back door. The house was dark, with arrows of light slanting through the shutters. It smelled musty, like dust, mildew, and sea air had been trapped all winter. Old sheets covered wicker furniture. The walls were natural wood, and there were bookcases on either side of a stone fireplace. The room felt cozy, and I was suddenly so sleepy I wanted to curl up on a sheet-covered sofa—just for a few minutes. I couldn’t help yawning.
Billy walked into the kitchen and started rummaging through drawers. He pulled out some wrenches, a screwdriver, and a handful of something that clanked. Coins? I wondered. A row of ginger jars sat on the counter, and he went straight for the one in the middle. He raised the lid, took out a key ring, and closed it again.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“We have to ditch your car,” he said. “The police will be looking for a Volvo wagon, and they know your license number.”
“I can’t do that,” I said. “There’s no other way to get to the boat that will take me to her. And it’s far.”
“There is a way,” Billy said, holding up one large wrench and opening his hand to reveal a bunch of lug nuts. “The truck.”
“It doesn’t have wheels.”
“They’re under the house. I can put th
em on, but we have to wait till dark. The neighbors … well, they’re nice but nosy. It would turn into a big thing if they saw me here.”
“Why, you’re allowed, aren’t you? It’s your grandparents’ place.”
“It’s for sale,” he said. “So is our house next door. Well, officially my grandparents own it. They called it ‘the Molloy compound.’ Like the Kennedy compound, I guess.”
“But you’re Billy Gorman.”
“Gorman’s my dad’s name.”
“Oh, yeah. Right,” I said, feeling dumb.
“The Molloys—my mother’s family—built these cottages.”
“Won’t they be yours someday?” I asked. “Or do you have brothers or sisters, cousins?”
“Nope,” he said. “The proceeds of the sale are going to Connecticut Victim Services. I’m an only child, and so was my mother.”
“These grandparents were her parents?”
He nodded. “They hate my father. And they hate me.”
“Because you’re his son? You’re also your mother’s—their daughter.”
“It’s complicated,” he said, his voice sharp.
He turned away. I couldn’t understand why their feelings for his father would carry over to him. Why hadn’t they tried to take care of him instead of sending him to foster care? Why couldn’t the proceeds of selling the beach cottages be used to help him pay for his education, support him so he didn’t have to live in the Stansfield Home? It seemed his grandfather was his only relative left, and now he was a hermit. Billy had been abandoned.
“It’s dinnertime,” he said. “Let’s eat.”
He went into a small pantry off the kitchen. The shelves were full of canned goods, and he chose a few and carried them to the stove. Ten minutes later he filled our plates with tiny hot dogs, brown bread, and baked beans.
We ate every bite. Outside the sun was setting. Soon it would be dark. We cleaned up. While putting dishes away I kept glancing over at him. His jaw was set, tense, as if he was holding a lot of feelings inside.
“Maia,” he said, “I’m gonna go next door. You can wait here if you want. It might be better if you did.”