by Kelly Creagh
But there was something daunting about the futile act of collecting and tucking away things she knew she wouldn’t need, especially when she had already done the real packing the afternoon before.
The previous day, as soon as Gwen had dropped her off from school, Isobel had gone straight to her room and emptied out her backpack. She’d refilled it with the essentials: a pack of granola bars swiped from the pantry, two water bottles, a black hoodie, and a pair of hiking boots.
Her backpack sat underneath her bed now, hiding in the shadows, waiting.
Inside it, sitting on top of everything else and folded with care, lay Varen’s green mechanic’s jacket. He would need it when they came back, she thought. After all, Baltimore would be cold.
Isobel turned from the bag and made her way to her dresser, opening the top drawer. Without looking, she pulled free a stack of T-shirts. Returning to the suitcase, she tossed them onto her bed instead.
She couldn’t do this. She couldn’t pretend anymore. Grabbing one of the big pillows from her bed, she stuffed it inside the bag, then closed the flap and zipped the sides.
Done.
At least this way, it would shorten the guesswork on her parents’ part. It would leave them with no doubts that she’d tricked them and used them, that she’d planned her escape right from the start.
Maybe knowing would somehow lessen their pain.
“Packing a little light, aren’t we?”
Isobel glanced over her shoulder to find Danny standing in her doorway. Arms folded, he leaned against the frame. His usual smirk seemed to be in hiding, plastered over by an uncharacteristic look of solemnity.
He nodded toward her suitcase. “Generally speaking, I think hotels stock those. ”
Scowling, Isobel grabbed the handle of her suitcase and picked it up, shrugging in the same motion. As she made her way to the door, she had to wonder how long he’d been standing there, watching.
“I like my own,” she said, setting the bag upright and flush with the wall.
“Yeah,” he said. “I bet you also like your own underwear, but I didn’t see anything like that go in there either. ”
She sighed, hands going to her hips. “Don’t you have anything better to do than spy on me? What do you want?”
His eyes drifted to the carpeted floor. “I dunno. ” He kicked the doorjamb with the toe of one sneaker, then lifted his shoulders all the way to his ears in a shrug before letting them drop.
“I mean, I was going to go nuclear on you about the scuff marks I found on my bike, but I know it won’t do any good. You won’t tell me why you took it. Or where you took it. Or what made you decide to drag it behind you instead of, y’know, riding it. ”
Turning, Isobel went to her closet to fish out her parka. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.
“Are you running away for good?”
She stopped. Looking over her shoulder at him again, she scanned her brain for a prepared answer, realizing too late that she didn’t have one.
Her brother stared at her in blatant accusation, like a lawyer who’d just asked his obviously guilty client, “Did you do it?” There was something else there too, hidden beneath. It was something she hadn’t seen in her brother’s face since he was very small. Vulnerability.
She had to wonder how long he’d seen this coming. Apparently long enough at least for him to have had the opportunity to tell someone. Their mom or dad or even a school counselor. But for some reason, Danny, Snitch King of America, had kept his observations to himself. Then she remembered that if not for him and his special powers of persuasion, their father might never have gotten her the plane tickets to begin with.
Could it be that Danny had guessed her plans from the very beginning?
Regardless, Isobel knew it would be useless, not to mention cruel, to evade his candid question. If he’d wanted to blow the whistle on her, he’d have done so already.
“No,” she said. “It’s just . . . there’s something I’ve got to do is all. ”
Taking the shift in her attitude as an invitation to come in, Danny strolled across the threshold and into Isobel’s room. Wandering over to her dresser, he said, “Like, Luke Skywalker leaves Dagobah to save Han and Leia gotta do, or Dick Grayson stops being Robin to go to Blüdhaven and become Nightwing gotta do?”
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Isobel’s eyebrows shot toward the ceiling, and she regarded her brother with an expression somewhere between bewilderment and hilarity.
She fought against the urge to grin but found herself powerless to resist, knowing that her brother had asked the question in all seriousness. “The first one? I think?”
“Oh,” he said, picking up some small item from her dresser and turning it over and over between his fingers. “In that case, I guess your room’s not up for grabs. ” He shrugged. “Just, y’know, beware the Dark Side. And don’t forget this. ” He held out the trinket he’d been tinkering with, the small butterfly key-chain watch he’d given her for Christmas.
“Right. ” Isobel plucked it up from the center of his palm. “I won’t. ”
He started for the door and then, catching himself before walking out, turned back. “By the way,” he said. “I heard Mom and Dad talking the other night. Dad said something that made Mom freak, something about you and the fireplace poker. I heard her say that if you didn’t start acting like yourself again when you and Dad got back, like, for-real you and not plastic you, then she was going to take you to see a shrink. ”
“What?” Isobel said. “You mean like . . . a doctor?”
Again he shrugged. “Psychologist or psychopediatrist. One of those ‘psycho’ people,” he said. “Just thought you should know. I mean, you’d tell me if Mom and Dad were thinking of giving me up for medical experimentation, right?”
Isobel’s brow furrowed.
“See,” Danny said. “Normally, this is the part where you’re supposed to say something like ‘Oh, you don’t have to worry about that, they’ve already got plenty of chimps’ or ‘They’re only interested in acquiring intelligent life-forms. ’ C’mon, Iz. I’m dying here. I mean, if there was such a thing as a little brother union, I’d have filed a grievance back in November. ”
She didn’t respond. She only looked down at the butterfly watch in her hand.
“Okay,” he said. “Or I could just leave you alone to conduct your sad emo transformation in peace. ”
He sighed, then turned and shuffled down the hall to his own room.
Isobel’s cell phone, sitting on her bedside table, gave a soft ting, indicating she’d received a text. But she didn’t have to check the screen to know who had sent it or what it said.
Shutting her door, Isobel pulled her backpack out from underneath her bed, taking a moment to fasten the butterfly key chain to one of the front zippers. Then she took her backpack to the window and opened the sash, sliding it all the way up the frame.
Her curtains billowed on either side of her as she leaned out into the night air.
Over the roof’s ledge, she saw Gwen standing in her backyard.
Gwen raised a hand to her throat, which was wrapped in the scarf Isobel had given her.
Isobel, understanding the gesture, touched her own collar, lifting up the tiny hamsa charm as proof that she had not taken it off, that she still had it.
Gwen gave her a thumbs-up, her glasses glinting like signal lights through the gloom. She held her arms out in front of her, and without hesitating, Isobel pitched the backpack over the roof’s ledge.
It soared straight into Gwen’s waiting grasp.
After that, they gave each other only one last parting glance before Isobel ducked back into her room and Gwen hurried to wherever she’d parked her Cadillac.
Isobel shut her window, turning the locks.
As she got ready for bed that night, somewhere in the very back of her mind,
she wondered if she was doing so for the last time.
THEY ARRIVED AT THE AIRPORT well before dawn the next morning.
Isobel’s mom dropped them off near the front sliding doors of the terminal, while Danny stayed in the backseat, comatose, a bit of drool glistening in one corner of his open mouth.
After hugging her mom good-bye, Isobel leaned down to peer at her little brother through the darkened window. She found it hard not to envy the peaceful look on his face, even with the drool.
During the flight, Isobel put in a pair of earbuds that would keep the threat of conversation with her father at bay. She didn’t think she could afford any more heart-to-hearts.
As it turned out, she didn’t have to worry about chitchat. Shortly after the plane leveled out at maximum altitude, her dad reclined his chair and closed his eyes. It wasn’t long until his breathing became deep and steady. It made her wonder if he had slept at all the night before either.
They landed just after daybreak and left the airport in the rental car, a gold coupe. As they reached the highway, the sun began to open its lazy eye. Weak light filtered through the crisscrossing branches of the barren trees lining the highway. Beyond, the horizon flushed a reddish pink.
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Soon the highway grew wider, and the outline of tall buildings loomed into view. The coupe shot like a pinball down the final ramp, coming to a stop at the end of a four-lane row of easy-flowing traffic.
Isobel leaned forward in her seat in order to peer up at the skyscrapers, while every so often, her dad would point out a landmark or statue.
Tiny doughnut shops and fast-food restaurants sat squished in narrow strips at the bottom of taller buildings, while pigeons bobbed along on the sidewalks outside their neon-lit windows, attacking bits of bread and wadded-up wrappers.
Her dad made a right turn onto another wide street embedded with metal tram tracks.
A homeless man in a long coat lay huddled within the recesses of a darkened doorway. He clutched a tattered blanket close to him, the soles of his worn shoes poking out from underneath.
Sirens erupted somewhere behind them. Their whine seemed to blare on forever, growing to ear-piercing volume as an ambulance crept past on their right, screaming with urgency even though it didn’t rush like the ones back home.
It didn’t take Isobel long to realize that was because it couldn’t rush. Instead the ambulance conducted an odd “excuse me, pardon me” scoot and slide through the rows of cars doing their best to angle this way and that in order to make room.
Leaning closer to the window, Isobel looked skyward, noticing how every tall streetlamp bore its own purple banner, each depicting a cartoon bird’s head in profile, a big yellow B stamped on its neck.
When they passed a covered bus stop, its plastic siding lined with posters and advertisements, Isobel noticed the bird again, along with a slogan for the Baltimore Ravens football team.
“Oh yeah,” her dad said, following the path of Isobel’s gaze. “Home of the Ravens. Named for Poe’s poem. ”
Isobel stiffened at the mention of Poe.
“You know,” he said, an odd look crossing his features, “now that I think about it, isn’t Poe supposed to be buried somewhere in the city? Maybe we should go out after breakfast tomorrow and try to track him down. Ask him if I got it right. What do you say?”
Isobel turned to face her window, afraid of what he’d be able to read in her expression. To her relief, the harbor drew into focus, patches of silver dancing amid gray waters.
“Hey, Dad,” she said, pointing. “Look. ”
A wide and open redbrick pedestrian walkway stretched from the road down to the water. Flanking the walkway, two long identical glass-paneled malls faced the harbor shore.
“Oh yeah,” he said with a sigh. “Right. Shopping. Or we could do that. ”
As they turned into a jammed intersection, her dad went quiet, his expression turning stern while he concentrated on navigating out of the mess. Isobel was relieved that he made no further mention of Poe, and by the time they arrived in the lobby of their hotel, she was sure he’d forgotten about his suggestion of visiting the writer’s grave.
At least until they entered the check-in line.
“Huh,” he said, squinting. “That’s an odd coincidence, isn’t it?”
“What?” Isobel said, glancing around.
Her dad stepped out of line, going to the nearby wooden stand filled with paper pamphlets advertising local attractions. He returned with a glossy postcard paper that bore Poe’s picture front and center. It was the same image Isobel had found in the Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe book that Varen had once lent her, the one that depicted him with hollow and haunted-looking eyes, their centers like two black marbles.
“Join us for the annual Edgar Allan Poe birthday celebration,” her dad said, reading the header on the brochure. “Six o’clock January nineteenth. That’s tomorrow. ”
His brows came together while he flipped the postcard from front to back.
“Humph,” he said. “That’s kind of funny, don’t you think, Izzy?”
“Yeah,” Isobel replied, nodding, though she didn’t dare meet his gaze. “Weird. ”
25
Sweet Sorrow
That evening Isobel’s dad took her to the Inner Harbor for dinner, deciding on a seafood restaurant one of the hotel clerks had suggested.
As soon as the hostess seated them in a booth, Isobel took out her phone.
It had been at least two hours since Gwen’s last text update, in which she’d said something about being in Chinatown, New York. Isobel knew that since Gwen was using the Brooklyn trip for her own cover, the text was most likely a coded message indicating her arrival in Baltimore. That would clock Gwen’s entire drive at right around the projected eleven hours.
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Isobel had responded immediately, texting back that she and her dad were spending the afternoon at the aquarium. After that, she’d waited, and waited, her phone never leaving her fist. She’d expected to receive some response that would let her know that Gwen had received the info and that she was now headed in Isobel’s direction. But that never came.
Isobel was starting to think that maybe she and Gwen should have planned better. Maybe she should have snuck out last night when Gwen had come to pick up her backpack. That way, they could have left together and made the drive overnight. Of course, that would have caused more commotion. Neither of them would have their current cover and both would be as good as fugitives on the run, especially if Isobel’s parents guessed they were together. At least this way, no one was looking for either of them. Yet.
“Away at last and you’re still hot-wired to home,” her dad sighed from behind the thick, plastic-coated menu. “Who are you texting with?”
Uh-oh, she thought. Sensing an impending end to her phone usage and, consequently, her only link to Gwen, Isobel typed in a quick message, knowing she would need to make it count.
JUST GOT TO THE M & S GRILL AT THE INNER HARBOR. BUT I THINK DAD’S READY FOR ME TO DITCH MY PHONE.
She hit the send button just as their drinks arrived.
Isobel clamped her phone shut. She kept it tight in one hand, waiting for the buzz that she hoped would follow any moment.
Her father folded his menu as their waitress, a thin young woman with a straight-up-and-down figure, hovered close to the table. She wore red lipstick and a matching headband lined with silk flowers. Her dull expression reminded Isobel of the blank look the seniors got during the last few weeks before graduation.
“Do you know what you’d like?” she asked Isobel, pen poised against her notepad.
“Uh. ” Isobel glanced down at the menu in front of her for the first time and flipped it open, still never letting go of her phone. “Um, what are you getting, Dad?”
He watched her from across the booth.
Chin in hand, elbow on the table, he seemed to affect the exact same expression as their waitress. “Crab cake platter. ”
Isobel refolded the menu and held it out to their waitress. “Same,” she said.
Their waitress tucked both menus under one arm and, without writing anything down, slid the pen and notepad into an apron pocket and zipped out of sight.
Alone with her father again, Isobel became keenly aware of his unwavering gaze. She tried to ignore it, but with her phone now disqualified as a suitable distraction, she began to feel like an ant caught in the incinerating beam of a magnifying glass.
She pulled her lemonade toward her. Taking a sip, she swirled the pink liquid with her straw. The ice clinked against her glass, the sound seeming to drown out the thrum of the low chatter around them.
She looked up and her eyes met with her father’s.
“What?” she asked.
“It’s a phone,” he said, “not a game show buzzer. ” He gestured to the hand that clutched her cell. “I honestly doubt you’ll miss anything crucial if you put it away for a while. ”
Reluctantly Isobel pressed the phone to the table. She had to peel her fingers back one at a time in order to force herself to relinquish it to the starched white tablecloth. It sat there, three inches from the edge, like a pink hand grenade waiting to go off.
“Okay,” her dad said, “that’s a start. But how about you put it in your coat pocket instead?”
Isobel reached for the phone again, but just as her fingers came in contact with the plastic, the cell gave a short buzz, Rattling against the table.
“Mind if I do the honors this time?” her dad asked.
She stiffened when she saw her father’s hand float toward the phone, his fingers stopping to hover just above. She had to tuck her hands between her knees to keep herself from snatching the phone out from underneath him.
“Sure. ” She shrugged. “Go for it. ”
Picking up the phone, he flipped it open.
His face glowed in the white light of the LCD screen.
Isobel felt her breath catch. Beneath the table, her foot began to waggle. She squeezed her knees together, keeping her hands captive as she watched his eyes narrow and his brows creep toward each other, forming an angry knot in between as he thumbed through the texts.