A Girl Undone

by Catherine Linka

  “You know, back in California, girls aren’t allowed to have guns.”

  “Well, why not?”

  I shrugged. “I was told it was too dangerous.”

  “And it’s better to leave you unarmed and completely helpless? Where’s the sense in that?”

  “Crazy, right?”

  Vera spent the rest of the drive chuckling to herself about Californians and their strange notion about keeping women safe from guns. Selena’s beauty salon was tacked onto the side of a one-story house. We opened the sliding door, and four Chihuahuas raced to greet me, tapping their tiny paws on my shins.

  I bent down and rubbed their squirmy bodies.

  “Ricky. Lopez. Chico. Jesus! Go to your stations!” The little dogs ran for four doggie beds covered in animal prints. There they sat at attention, wiggling to be let free.

  Selena, the stylist, wore a big, yellow rhinestone flower in the black hair that curled down her back. Her jeans looked like they’d been airbrushed on. I didn’t know how old Selena was, but she wasn’t afraid to flaunt it.

  Vera introduced me. “This is Tracy. She’s married to my niece’s son, Lou.”

  I was getting used to changing my name. Tracy went with the petal-pink sweater I wore.

  “I see you like my dogs!” Selena said. “I rescue Chihuahuas.” She pointed at a map of Canada plastered with dozens of little Chihuahua stickers. “Seventy-three dogs I take to new homes across the border. They love them there.”

  “Do you have another run planned?” Vera said. She checked to see I was paying attention.

  “Ay, no. And I have twelve dogs, but the border crossings are closed. Chief Mountain, Whitlash, Del Bonito. Can you believe it? Today only Detroit is open. I’m gonna have to take the perritos to a shelter in Denver maybe.”

  I’m screwed, I thought. If a little perrito can’t get across the border, no way I can.

  I heard only snatches of what Vera was telling Selena about giving me a new look, because I kept thinking about how Luke would push even harder for us to follow his plan if he heard about the border closing. Still, there was a chance we could cross in Detroit. I started when Selena peeled off my hat. “Sorry,” I said.

  “Is okay.” She combed her fingers through my hair. “How do you want to look?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “You think of a word to tell me what you want. Dra-ma-tic? Ro-man-tic? Sex-y?”

  “Innocent.” I needed to look innocent.

  Selena smiled. “This is your lucky day. You’re going to be blond.”

  “Blond?”

  She plucked a color chart off the wall and held it up to my face. She and Vera peered at me. “I think Topaz,” Selena said, fingering the fake-hair samples.

  Whoa. Suddenly, I’m Norwegian. “But my eyebrows—they’re brown.”

  “I’m gonna do a tip-top job. Do the eyebrows, too.”

  Selena painted on the chemicals while I sat in the chair, one eye trained on the front door, praying she wouldn’t have any other walk-ins.

  Then she and Vera visited while I processed under a hair dryer with Lopez in my lap. That’s when I spied this week’s People on the table.

  I’d made the cover again, only this time there were two shots: one cropped from the picture of Jessop Hawkins locking the Love bracelet on my wrist, and a fuzzier clip from my broadcast, me—desperate-looking, my spiky brown hair peeking out from the Peruvian knit hat. “Kidnapped Celebrity to Fugitive—What Went Wrong With Avie.”

  I pulled it over to me. Paparazzi shots of my house and of Dad trying to shield his face. Pics of Hawkins and an aerial of his Malibu compound. And, oh my God, no! Yates’ mug shot from his arrest at the anti-Paternalist rally in Sacramento.

  All the other pictures I’d seen on the news were so old they didn’t even look like him, but this! Selena slid the magazine out of my hand. “Time to wash your hair.” As we walked over to the sink, she tossed the magazine in the trash.

  I lay back and Selena leaned in with the sprayer. “When I come to the U.S.,” she said, “I am illegal. No criminal, but illegal. Every day I wonder if I gonna be caught.”

  I clutched the chair, not sure where she was going. “That must have been hard.”

  “I was very lucky. People help me. I meet my husband. We marry. Now I am legal and I help people.”

  My heartbeat quickened. “Are you—part of Exodus?”

  She screwed up her face. “What is that?”

  “Nothing,” I said, wishing I’d kept my mouth shut.

  “Close your eyes. I’m going to spray.”

  I sat back in the salon chair, and Selena turned me around so I couldn’t see the mirror as big clumps of pale blond hair dropped onto my lap.

  She blew it dry and then snatched a lipstick off a display and swept it over my lips before she spun me back to face the mirror.

  My hair was white blond. I reached up and touched the feathery bangs and the hair that stopped just under my ears. Then I ran my fingers over my icy blond brows.

  “Oh.” Vera sighed. “She looks like an angel.”

  I wasn’t Hawkins’ Letitia lookalike, or Maggie’s geisha spy, or the desperate girl broadcasting a distress call. The bright pink lipstick stood out against my pale skin, almost challenging me to be happy in a way I didn’t feel.

  Selena curled the lipstick tube into my hand. “You keep.”

  Maybe looking like an angel could keep me safe—at least until my dark roots grew out. If Luke and I could get to Detroit and across the border, we could hide until things cooled down or find someone the feds didn’t suspect to take the thumb drive to D.C. for us. Or if that didn’t work, we could maybe even reenter the U.S. someplace the feds wouldn’t expect, like Vermont. But I had to convince Luke to go to Canada with me, because realistically, it was the best chance we had.

  4

  Vera drove us back to her house. I sat stiffly in her front seat while she waved and nodded at people in the other cars, acting like it was perfectly normal to have a strange girl with her.

  “If anyone asks,” Vera said, “we’ll say you married my niece’s boy and you’re up from Salt Lake on your way to visit your daddy in Walla Walla.”

  She pulled into the drive of a faded blue one-story on a small lot. A pine tree decked out with Christmas lights stood in the center of a yellowed lawn.

  The house faced the neighbor’s and the two mirrored each other. Both had big, plain windows with rust stains under the frames and a front porch too small to keep you dry in the rain.

  An older woman peered at us from a window next door. Vera released her seat belt. “Remember: act like you’re visiting.”

  I leaped out and opened the car door for Vera, and put my arm through hers. I made a big show of asking about a bush with whip-thin red branches, saying I wanted one just like it when my husband and I had our own home.

  Vera kept up the improv with me until we got inside. I scanned the wood-paneled living room. The picture window was strung with Christmas lights and a tiny tree stood in the corner. A painting of deer hung over the rust-colored sofa, and a Nativity scene filled the brick fireplace mantel.

  The room felt years away from L.A. and Scarpanol and the Paternalists. It felt like someplace from Before.

  “You two must have driven all night,” Vera said, hanging her purse on a hook.

  “Almost.”

  “How about you give me those clothes you’re wearing and I’ll throw them in the wash while you lie down for a bit?”

  “That sounds really good.”

  Vera came back from the spare bedroom with a clean towel and a flannel pajama top that had been worn soft. “You can leave your clothes on the bathroom counter. I’ll take care of them.”

  I stripped off my shirt in the bathroom, exposing the strip of red silk wrapped around my chest. As I undid the pins that secured the ends, I caught sight of myself in the mirror. I look like a suicide bomber.

  I rushed to unwind the hanging from my body and
let it fall to the floor. Then I kicked it toward the tub, and pulled in a deep breath. Free.

  But as I soaped up my face and arms, I couldn’t block out the red silk pooled on the tile floor.

  The coded names of dozens of Paternalist politicians and foreign leaders, each one linked to bribes, favors, restrictive new laws, and moneymaking schemes, were embroidered into the crisscrossed branches of a blossoming cherry tree. And on the main branch all the others sprouted from—one name: Vice President Jouvert.

  I rinsed off, and dried myself with the towel.

  Maggie’d left two sections unfinished. One outlining a pipeline project with the code name “White Gold,” the other, the trillion-dollar “loans” Jouvert had taken from a source Maggie hadn’t been able to uncover.

  There was no one left who could finish what she’d started and get the last pieces of the puzzle. All her girls had scattered around the globe, and her assistant, Helen, couldn’t continue Maggie’s spying without them.

  I picked the hanging up off the floor and reattached the pins. It was my problem now. But I can’t walk around with it like this. It’s so red. So obvious. Soaking it in bleach could lighten it, but I had to be careful not to ruin the coding.

  Below the pajama top, ghostly bruises spotted my thighs and broken white lines had replaced the deep scratches I’d gotten when I was attacked on Mom’s grave. I ran my finger over the longest one. Was it really only three weeks ago? It felt like months.

  Vera had left the door open to the spare room. The bed was turned down, and flannel sheets lay under the faded apricot-colored quilt. It wasn’t even noon, but I burrowed under the covers. The soft flannel almost made me cry, it felt so good after two days of sleeping on a cold linoleum floor.

  An hour—and I’d get up, I told myself.

  I closed my eyes and, for the first time since Luke and I left Boise, let myself think about Yates. I wondered if he was finally awake. If his fever had broken. If the cops recognized him.

  I could ask Vera to call the night nurse.

  Right, and bring federal agents down on her and Harris? No way. You have to wait until you’re someplace safe.

  I don’t even know where safe is anymore. Is it Canada?

  Even if I managed to get over the border, how could Yates? His voice echoed in my head as I relived the night he helped me escape Hawkins, and I left California, thinking I might never see him again. For a moment I was back in the airplane hangar, Yates’ face bent over mine, his deeply blue eyes the only things I saw or wanted to see.

  I heard him whisper the words of my poem along with me, our lips brushing.

  Love wields the scissors. Love is the escape.

  I felt his hands on my back, holding me like something too precious to let go.

  Love is the rusted fire escape that shouldn’t support our weight but does.

  I drifted into sleep. Yates found me once. He could find me again.

  When I woke, the sun was going down, and someone was chopping wood out back. I peeked through the curtains. Luke was working his way through a large stack of wood. I threw on my clothes.

  In the kitchen, Vera was peeling potatoes. She nodded at the window. “He’s been at that for an hour. Harris got tired of watching him pace the office. Why don’t you take him some coffee?”

  Cup in hand, I headed outside. A face appeared in a window next door, but I pretended I didn’t see it.

  Luke had tossed his jacket on the ground, and rolled up his sleeves. His brow was beaded with sweat. He raised the ax over his head and swung it down in a perfect arc and the wood split and flew apart.

  “Hey, honey,” I said, loud enough for the neighbor to hear. “Thought you’d like some coffee.”

  He put down the ax and I handed him the cup. “Neighbor’s watching,” I whispered.

  I beamed at him like he was the sun rising over the ocean. The center of my world. The one I loved more than any other.

  “I like your hair,” he said. Luke smiled, and the look in his eyes made me drop my gaze. It felt real, not like my playacting.

  He kept his voice down. “The color reminds me of a snowshoe hare, wears a white coat in winter.”

  I felt for the soft fringe poking out from under my hat, not quite comfortable with how I was pleased he’d noticed. “Survival of the fittest,” I joked.

  Luke took a sip of coffee and frowned into the cup. “For the future, Vera’s coffee could use a couple tablespoons of sugar.”

  “That bad?”

  “Maybe next time you’d spill a little?”

  “Sure.”

  The sun was dipping down to the west. Mounds of ice lay on the grass like leaf-flecked lace. I nodded at the wood Luke had split. “This was nice of you.”

  “Least I could do. Them risking arrest for us.”

  A screen door creaked open behind me, and I heard a woman call, “Here, kitty, kitty, kitty.”

  Luke caught my eye. “Don’t turn around. It’s the neighbor. She’s come out twice already.”

  I shivered despite my winter jacket. “Has she tried to talk to you?”

  “Nah, she’s keeping her distance. Come help me stack.”

  We filled our arms with wood, then carried it over to the stack, and laid the newly cut pieces on top. The screen creaked again.

  “She’s gone.” Luke picked up his coat, and I saw him stop and look at the mountains brushed with the last light.

  They weren’t the mountains he’d grown up in. His were a couple hundred miles away. “I miss my home, too,” I said.

  “I never should have let them put me in that tunnel.”

  I searched for something to say. “We’ll know more about Salvation tomorrow. We shouldn’t jump to conclusions.”

  “You really believe that?”

  He took a step toward the house, but I stopped him, wanting a few more minutes alone. “Why Laramie?” I asked.

  Luke’s gaze darted away from me. “There’s a man who can help us.”

  “Yeah, who?”

  “Someone Barnabas knew.”

  “And he’s supposed to help us do what? Because you’re insane if you think we should go all the way to D.C. right now.”

  Luke didn’t answer.

  “That’s what you think, right? The feds didn’t stop us on the way to Pocatello so you think it’ll be easy. We’re risking our lives if we try going across the entire country to find Maggie’s contact.”

  “And you think the solution is to hightail it to Canada,” he shot back. “Well, I’m not leaving my country. And you shouldn’t, either.”

  My breath caught at the growl in his voice. I hardly knew Luke, but this didn’t feel even remotely like him.

  “Okay, so what do you think this man—”

  “Not out here,” he said. He flicked his eyes at the neighbor’s house and reached for my arm to take me inside.

  A face peered at us from the neighbor’s window and this time I noticed the large lead-colored glasses like a pair of binoculars trained right on us. I hoped Harris found us a ride even if it meant going to Laramie. At least that would take us closer to the border crossing in Detroit.

  5

  The evening news was on when Luke and I walked in the house. Vera guarded a frying pan on the stove, metal tongs in her hand.

  “Anything more about Salvation?” Luke said.

  “Not yet. Why don’t you wash up? I’ll call you if there is.”

  Luke ducked into the bathroom, and I lingered by the table, where chicken legs were stacked on a plate, ready to be dipped in buttermilk and rolled in corn flakes. “Can I help?”

  “That would be nice.”

  Vera tended the frying pan while I dunked and coated the chicken legs. The lead news story was Congress’ new Open Arms policy: an invitation to women from foreign countries who speak fluent English to come to the U.S., surrender their foreign passports, and receive automatic citizenship.

  “Open Arms, now that’s interesting,” Vera said, waving her tong
s at the screen. “What do you think about that?”

  “I think it sounds like a way to get women to come here and prevent them from ever leaving.” I speared a drumstick on a fork. “Sorry, I don’t have much faith in politicians anymore.”

  “You don’t need to apologize to me. I bet you’re right. I’ll be interested to hear what Radio Free America says about it later tonight. Those Canadian reporters always seem to know things about the U.S. that folks here don’t.”

  “Really? Like what?”

  A familiar face popped up on the screen. The air emptied from my lungs, and I dropped the leg I was holding. Buttermilk splashed across the table.

  Jessop Hawkins sat in an armchair across from an interviewer. Hawkins was bent forward, his hands clasped as if a PR person had briefed him on how to look concerned.

  “Do you know him?” Vera said.

  “He owns my Contract.”

  “That’s the man you were supposed to marry?”

  I hadn’t seen Hawkins since I’d left L.A. But even if his highly paid PR consultants coached him on how to act caring and distressed, they couldn’t change how his eyes were the color of cold, rust-stained cement.

  “Aveline is a victim in this tragic story,” Hawkins said. “She’s like many girls, young and naïve, who put their trust in someone who then takes advantage of them.”

  “So you contend that Aveline, who is currently wanted for treason—”

  A shiver shook my shoulders.

  “Aveline is not a traitor! She was kidnapped by a member of Exodus and brainwashed into becoming an active member of the organization.”

  “You’re referring to the young man currently in police custody.”

  I edged closer to the TV. “No, Yates—”

  “Yes,” Hawkins answered. “Yates Sandell.”

  My temples began to throb. I shouldn’t have left him.

  “But as I understand it, Sandell’s not talking,” the newscaster said.

  “He’s critically ill, but the doctors expect him to recover.”

  “Meanwhile,” the newscaster said, “despite evidence that points to your fiancée as a willing participant in the shootout with federal agents, you believe that charges against her should be dropped.”