Walk Me Home (retail)

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

  It’s just around two minutes. It’s running out.

  It rings. And rings. And rings. The way it used to when Teddy was out of minutes on his cell phone. Then Carly hears a click, like Teddy picking up the phone.

  ‘Teddy? Teddy, is that you?’

  Silence.

  ‘Teddy?’

  It’s a recorded message. A woman with a robotic, irritating voice. She says, ‘I’m sorry. The cellular number you have reached is not in service at this time, and there is no new number.’

  Carly hangs up fast. In case the woman was planning on saying more.

  Jen is all dressed again in her clean shirt when Carly gets back into the ladies’ room. She’s washing out her socks and underwear in one sink. She looks up, apparently startled by what she sees in Carly’s face.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Jen asks.

  ‘Nothing. He just wasn’t there.’

  Carly leans over the other sink and drinks her fill of cold water.

  ‘You look like something’s wrong.’

  ‘No, everything’s fine,’ she says, then dries her face on her sleeve. ‘We’ll just try him again. He must be working a second job or something. I’m sure he’s in his own place by now. And I just bet he has to work a lot.’

  She’s hoping Jen won’t ask why working two jobs would prevent him from answering the cell phone in his pocket.

  ‘Maybe he’s out of minutes. And can’t afford more.’

  ‘Yeah! Maybe.’

  ‘What would we do then?’

  ‘I could call his work tomorrow.’

  Until she hears herself say it, she doesn’t realize it’s that simple. Of course. She can just call Ralph. The guy he’s been working for. Ask him to get a message to Teddy. She’s a bit shocked, in fact, that she didn’t think of it until now. A weight lifts from her full belly, leaving her feeling light and clear again.

  ‘Do we know his work number?’

  ‘No, but we know it’s Ralph Martin Construction. So we can get a listing.’

  ‘Doesn’t that cost a dollar? Or two? How much is left on the phone card?’

  ‘I don’t know, Jen. We’ll figure it out. Want me to wash your hair?’

  ‘Yeah. Definitely.’

  She leans Jen forward into one of the sinks and wets her hair thoroughly under the tap. This station is so old that there’s actually hot and cold running water, both coming out of one tap, so you can make it just as warm or cool as you like. And you can leave it running. Not like those new ones where you press down and the water blasts as long as it feels like blasting, then stops on its own.

  She soaps Jen’s hair with liquid hand soap, because it’s all they have.

  As she’s rinsing it out – and it’s no small job to get all the soap out of Jen’s thick, coarse hair – she says, ‘Wait till we get home. Till we’re living with Teddy again. We’ll get that hair conditioner that smells like mangoes. And shower gel.’

  ‘I hate that foofy stuff,’ Jen says. ‘It’s for girls.’

  ‘You’re a girl. Stupid.’

  ‘I’m not a girl like you are.’

  ‘And we’ll have clean sheets every few nights …’

  ‘How do you figure?’

  ‘Because I’ll wash them myself. And we’ll put lotion all over ourselves every night, and we won’t have scaly elbows and flaky shins.’

  ‘I couldn’t care less about elbows and shins. I just don’t want to ever walk anywhere ever again. If you say go get the mail at the end of the driveway, I’ll hook up some kind of little cart to take me down there. Like an old-lady cart. Or I’ll get one of those bikes with the “chicken power” motors. And we’ll have wieners and beans every night for dinner, and candy bars for desert. Not candy bars for dinner.’

  ‘You’ll get sick of wieners and beans.’

  ‘I could never get sick of wieners and beans.’

  ‘OK. I think I got all the soap out. Squeeze out most of the water over the sink. And then dry it with paper towels as much as you can. I’m gonna wash up now. Don’t look.’

  ‘Why would I look?’

  ‘I don’t know. Just don’t. And don’t leave your socks and underwear hanging on the stall doors like that.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because we might need to scram out of here fast in the morning.’

  ‘Oh. Right.’

  Carly strips out of everything but her socks, then looks up to the milky glass window into the alley. It has a hole about twice the size of a baseball broken out of it. In the outside light, she can see a light mist of rain falling.

  ‘It’s raining,’ she says.

  ‘You’re kidding.’ Jen’s combing her wet hair, and can’t seem to immediately break away from that to look for herself.

  ‘Just a little bit of rain.’

  ‘Thought it never rained in the desert,’ Jen says, popping up.

  ‘Sure it does. Just not as much.’

  They stand side by side a moment, staring.

  Then Jen says what Carly hasn’t quite gathered together yet.

  ‘Damn. The one time we can’t stand out in it.’

  They stare a while longer, then Jen makes herself comfortable – at least, as comfortable as one can get on a tile floor, curled in a fetal position, using her pack as a pillow.

  Carly jumps up, bracing her hands on the windowsill, and reaches her face up to the hole in the window, still naked, a mist of light rain on her sunburned face.

  She wakes knowing she dreamed about Teddy in the night. But, try as she might, she can’t remember what she dreamed about him. She scrambles for it like something precious pouring down a drain. But it’s already gone.

  Arizona, 12 May

  ‘Hey, a gas station,’ Carly says. ‘With a little food store. Finally. Finally we can get something to eat.’

  ‘But there’s nobody getting gas there,’ Jen says.

  Carly’s special system relies on people. People who can be talked out of a little money. The trick is to be clear that their parents are only slightly lost or briefly delayed. That they can rejoin their parents right here, right at this station, if they simply stay put. All they need is a little something to eat while they’re waiting.

  ‘Somebody will come.’

  Jen looks around nervously. Surprisingly few people have passed them all morning.

  ‘What if they don’t?’

  ‘Well. There’s somebody working in the store. That’s as good as anything.’

  But when they get there, there’s nobody working in the store. Just a hand-lettered sign on the locked door. CLOSED THURS 12 MAY OWING TO FAMILY EMERGENCY.

  They sit down on the curb by the door.

  ‘May twelfth,’ Jen says. Like it’s a thing that couldn’t possibly be true.

  But Carly knew that already. She’s been counting days.

  ‘The payphone is outside,’ Carly says. ‘I’ll call Teddy’s work.’

  But she knows she probably can’t. Not with the time she has left on the card.

  She marches over to the phone, dials in the numbers for her calling card by heart. And finds out the card is less than a minute from spent. Not enough to call directory assistance. She walks back to where Jen is sitting, careful to feel as little as possible.

  ‘What happened?’ Jen asks.

  Carly sits down beside her. ‘Card’s used up.’

  ‘Oh.’

  They sit a while longer. The sun is almost directly overhead. It’s warm for May. Nothing like summer desert heat. Just warm. Maybe eighty. But when you’re walking in the sun all day, it adds up.

  Carly looks up into the sun, squinting and watching light radiate out from that yellow beast. Somewhere inside herself she knows it’s desert straight through Arizona and halfway into California. And that it will be summer soon enough.

  Except Teddy’ll come and get them. Teddy will save them. They won’t be walking by then.

  ‘Know what really burns my butt?’ she asks Jen. ‘If Wade hadn’t had to or
der steak and eggs, I’d be making that call right now. Takes a special kind of a son of a bitch to ruin your life even after he’s dead.’ She squints up at the sun again. ‘Think he did it on purpose?’

  It’s that thing nobody’s said. So far. Carly wonders if Jen will think she means the steak and eggs, and the way it robbed her of phone-card money. But no. Of course not. Jen won’t think that. Jen will know exactly what she means.

  ‘I’ve been trying not to think about it.’

  ‘Oh. Sorry.’

  ‘I don’t know, Carly. I don’t know what to think about that.’

  ‘Never mind. We’ll just worry about what’s right in front of us.’

  Carly levers to her feet and walks over to the water and air island, the place where people fill their radiators and tires. To check and see if the water hose is running. It is. So she waves for Jen to come.

  Maybe it’s not the kind of water you’re supposed to drink, she thinks. But she tries it, and it tastes normal. She gulps it down for a good minute, gorging herself, then hands it to her sister.

  ‘I’m going to dial the operator and tell her it’s an emergency. That I’m a minor, and I’m stranded, and I don’t have any money, and I have to make a call and get help.’

  In other words, exactly what she’s so carefully hidden from everyone but Jen since this journey began.

  She doesn’t wait for an answer. Just marches to the phone and follows the instructions for dialing the operator.

  ‘Hello?’ she says. ‘Operator? I have to find a number, and I have to make a call, and I can’t pay for it. I’m only sixteen, and I’m out here with my twelve-year-old sister and our mother is dead and I have to call my …’ a quick flinch, as she reminds herself to lie, ‘… father and he’ll come pick us up. I don’t have any money to put into the phone, but it’s an emergency, OK? We’re in trouble.’

  Humiliatingly, in the middle of the last sentence, she starts to cry. Because she’s not lying. It hits her as she hears the words come out of her mouth. Teddy is not their father. But everything else is true.

  ‘I need to call Ralph Martin Construction in Tulare, California.’

  The operator doesn’t even connect her with directory assistance. Just gets hold of the number somehow. Even dials it for her. And it must not be collect, either, because Carly doesn’t have to give her name.

  Next thing she knows, she’s talking to Ralph. Just like that. It makes her stop crying. She feels thoroughly rescued.

  ‘Ralph. It’s me, Carly. Is Teddy there?’

  A long silence. Too long.

  ‘Jocelyn’s kid?’

  ‘Yeah, Ralph, it’s me. Can I talk to Teddy? It’s really important.’

  ‘Honey, Teddy doesn’t work here now.’

  ‘Where does he work?’

  ‘I don’t rightly know, hon. He just up and left. Couple months after your mom moved you guys to New Mexico. Said he couldn’t stay in this town another minute.’

  ‘Did he say where he was going? Think hard, Ralph. Please. Really, please. This is really, really important.’

  Ralph doesn’t think hard.

  ‘Not to me. He didn’t say a thing to me. But let me ask Jud. Teddy was pretty good friends with Jud. Can you hold a minute?’

  ‘I think so. I’m on a payphone.’

  ‘I’ll be as fast as I can.’

  Carly chews on her thumb while she’s waiting. Not her thumbnail, but the whole thumb. She watches Jen, who’s staring in fascination at something in the window of the gas station convenience store. Like she’s reading something written there.

  Ralph’s voice makes her jump.

  ‘You there, Carly?’

  ‘Yeah, Ralph. I’m here.’

  ‘Jud says Teddy went up to Trinidad. But that’s all he knows.’

  ‘Trinidad? That sounds like another country or something.’

  ‘Naw, it’s up in Northern California. On the coast. Little town up in the redwoods. Up by Eureka. Nice up there. You could probably track him down, ’cause I’m thinking there can’t be more than a dozen contractors up in that neck of the woods. But Jud doesn’t know where he settled.’

  ‘Oh,’ Carly says.

  ‘You good now?’

  She begins to cry again. No. She’s not good. But there’s no point telling Ralph that, because Ralph has already given all the help it was ever his to give.

  ‘Yeah, thanks,’ she says, trying to keep the crying out of her voice.

  Then she hangs up fast, because she knows she failed.

  She walks back to Jen, who’s still staring at the window. Jen’s looking at a map. There’s a map of Northeastern Arizona taped to the inside of the window.

  ‘Smart, huh?’ Jen says. ‘I bet this way they don’t waste so much time giving directions. Operator wouldn’t put you through, would she?’

  Jen doesn’t look away from the map and see Carly’s tears, so maybe Carly has an extra minute to wrestle them back in.

  ‘No,’ she says, wiping her eyes roughly on her sleeve.

  She’ll tell Jen. She will. But right now she has no idea how. She needs time to think.

  ‘S’what I thought. I could’ve told you. Money makes the world go round.’ She looks over at Carly. Takes in her condition. ‘Don’t get all bent about it. It’s no big deal. We’ll get some money soon.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Now look at this. This’ll kill you. This highway’s been going partly north. West, yeah. But also north. And, if anything, we need to go west and south. We’ve already gone probably ten or twenty miles out of our way. And now look. This’s where we are.’ Jen points to a roughly drawn red arrow that marks their location. ‘And in just a couple miles, it turns and goes even farther north. And then it loops around and goes south again. I don’t want to go all that way out of our way. I think we need to cut through. You know. On these little roads. We need to get off this highway and go this way again.’

  The payphone rings. They both turn and look at it. But neither girl moves. It’s unsettling to Carly. As if the phone knows she’s here. But she forces her attention back to the map.

  ‘But those roads … they’re so …’

  They’re small and confusing. They’re such fine lines on the map. They’re probably just little residential dirt roads. Reservation roads. For locals. And not a one goes straight through. Or even straight. It’s a maze.

  ‘So … what?’

  ‘I feel like we’ll get lost.’

  The phone is still ringing. It’s on what may be its twelfth ring. But Carly hasn’t been counting.

  ‘We’ll just keep going west,’ Jen says. ‘We’ll watch the sun.’

  ‘Why is that phone ringing?’

  ‘I dunno. Answer it.’

  ‘Come on. Let’s just go.’

  But as they’re walking out of the gas-station lot, it hits her that maybe Ralph or Jud is calling her back. Maybe they know more after all. Maybe they found out, right after she called, that somebody else knew more.

  ‘I’m gonna get that,’ she says.

  She grabs it up, but doesn’t say hello. It feels too volatile to say hello.

  ‘Are you there?’ she hears. ‘Is somebody there?’

  It’s not Ralph. It’s the operator. Her belly ices over with panic.

  ‘Yeah …’

  ‘Did you get the help you needed, honey, or should I call somebody for you?’

  ‘No!’ she shouts. Way too loud and defensive. Badly played. She just gave away a lot. ‘No, we’re fine now. He’s gonna come pick us up.’

  But, just as she says it, it hits her that maybe the operator stayed on the line the whole time she was talking to Ralph.

  ‘Honey, do you and your sister have someplace safe to go right now?’

  Carly slams the phone down.

  ‘Come on,’ she tells Jen. ‘We’re going. Fast.’

  ‘Why? What?’

  ‘The operator’s going to call somebody to come help us. We’re going to do just what yo
u said. First road goes off to the left, we’ll take it. Get as far away from the highway as we can.’

  ‘Maybe—’ Jen begins.

  Carly doesn’t let her finish. She can’t afford to. She can feel where this is headed. She grabs Jen by the sleeve and they set off down the road double-time.

  ‘We didn’t come all this way to get picked up by child services,’ Carly says as they nearly jog. ‘If we’re gonna get put in different foster homes or something, we could’ve just sat where we were and waited for them to come and get us. We wouldn’t have had to go through all this. We didn’t go through all this for nothing.’

  Jen never answers.

  A road appears to their left. They have no idea what road it is or where it goes.

  They take it.

  By sundown they could be anywhere. They’re headed for the setting sun, but then the road keeps curving. They could be going around in a circle for all they know.

  They’re in a different sort of neighborhood now. Reservation residential. A fence made of old discarded tires. Squat stone houses with three or four pickup trucks out front, stone mesas towering behind. Tiny wood or stone shacks with old motor homes or trailers parked nearby, often more than one, like inexpensive housing compounds. And though they don’t see a soul close-up – just plumes of dirt rising from tires on the next road over, or people sitting outside too far away for Carly to confirm her theory in their eyes – she’s nursing the distinct impression that they don’t belong here. They are outsiders in this place. She can feel it.

  ‘Maybe just cut straight through,’ Jen says.

  They try that. But it’s brushy. Hard going. And Carly keeps getting a bad feeling they’re on private property.

  ‘Maybe we could sleep there,’ Jen says, pointing.

  There’s an old yellow school bus, sitting mostly down in a gulley. No tires. No windshield. No grill.

  It’s cold. And they want someplace sheltered to sleep. They haven’t said so out loud. They haven’t needed to. It’s just a thing that’s there.

  ‘Maybe,’ Carly says.

  Because it’s cold, but also because it’s more important than ever that they sleep somewhere. Because they haven’t eaten in over twenty-four hours. And Carly is running out of steam. The walking is hard with no road. And she’s upset all the way through her insides, and that’s sapped what little strength she had to begin with. But something bothers her about the school bus. It has towels or sheets or something over the back windows.