The Runaway

by Jo Barney

  September 2009

  Starkey shifts in his chair, looks again around the circle as he reaches for the knife, takes it out of its case. “We searched for Smiley, didn’t we? And here she is, back in our family. So handy.” Leaky’s foot has stopped bumping into my hip. No one is moving, maybe not even breathing. I try to speak, know I can say nothing that will change Starkey’s plan. I hold my hands in my lap to keep them from shaking.

  “Have you come back to be forgiven, Smiley? Or did our message on the mailboxes around the park scare you into thinking you could convince us of your loyalty to us?”

  Mailboxes? I don’t know what he is talking about. Doesn’t matter. He keeps talking.

  “Neither is possible. You’ll stay with us a day or two and spend time regretting your decision to run away from us. Perhaps you’ve even told the police about our family. Lila says they’ve been all over the park and the neighborhood today. One officer even warned her about a crazy transient who they suspect has killed a couple of people. ‘Be careful, young lady,’ he said. ‘Don’t be alone in this park.’ Lila says she laughed in his face.”

  Lila’s dark eyes deny that statement. They are wide with fright.

  “What did you tell them about the family, Smiley?”

  My mouth is so dry I have to pull my lips apart to speak. “Nothing, Starkey. I didn’t tell them anything about us.” It’s the truth, but my eyes fill up and my tight throat won’t allow me to say more. My legs tingle under me, and I shift my butt. That’s when I realize I‘ve peed my pants.

  The bearded man, Seattle, stands up. “It’s a little late, Starkey. Your family looks done in.” He holds up a bottle. “And you and I need to catch up on things over a nightcap.”

  The circle rustles, adjusts itself, looks at its father. Starkey shrugs. “We aren’t in a hurry to teach this particular lesson. Tomorrow morning.” He slips the knife into its holder, then the holder into his pocket, stands and comes toward me. When he smells the pee, he makes a face, says, “God, she’s a mess,” and tells Jasper to tie me up, then cover me with Leaky’s damp bag. He and Seattle move off toward the tent Starkey sleeps in.

  “I still have to go,” I say to the boy, and he leads me out of the circle and to a bush hanging over the latrine ditch. He hangs onto my hair as I pull down my underpants and squat. “You really in deep shit, girl,” he says as he ties my hands behind me. I can’t tell if he’s cracking a joke or scared. I decide scared when I feel his fingers shaking on my arm. He leads me back to the fire, wraps another rope around my ankles. I’m not crying anymore, but Leaky is, his arm over his eyes, his mouth curved into a tight-lipped pucker like he’s in pain. Someone lays a blanket over him, and I whisper, “Goodnight, Leaky.”

  Then I try working the ropes holding me, and I understand that I will not escape this time. The family is quiet; only the sputtering fire and an occasional laugh from the tent break into the stillness. Then in the starlit silence, I hear the rustling of leaves and know someone else can’t sleep either, may even be using my bush.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Ellie

  September 2009

  She’s been gone almost three days, and I’ve had plenty of time to think. My son is haunting me, but so is Sarah. I know what the graffiti, the orange smiley face, is saying. She’s in danger, or was, before she left. The family in the woods is looking for her, and I’m guessing they don’t know about her staying in this building. If they did, they would have waited for her right on the front steps. But they do know that she has been around the park. Sarah should not come back here. I need to warn her, but I don’t know where she is. Maybe that’s good—the fewer who know, the better. Nothing I can do.

  About Danny, either. He’s a grown-up man now, still simmering with hatred for his mother, I suppose. He hasn’t tried to contact me since that time I told him I wouldn’t send him money. Nine years. I wonder if I would even recognize him. Maybe his eyes. I’m different, too. Clean and sober doesn’t mean you look better. In fact, I look a lot older without the hair dye, despite my nightly rubbing in of Pond’s. I’d probably look younger if I thought clothes were important, and maybe lipstick. And if I ever had a decent night’s sleep.

  Then tonight, sleepless, I have a revelation about Sarah and Danny. I understand that I might have it all wrong, what is happening. Sarah kept hinting she’d seen Danny somewhere when she looked at his picture. But he hasn’t been in this town for years, since she was a little kid. Or has he? Since he left, something in me has been waiting for him to come back and make his threat good, to pay me back for the life I handed him.

  Maybe he is back. Maybe Sarah has seen him on the street somewhere. Maybe…and then, somewhere in the craziness of early morning half-dreams, it hits me, and I wake all the way up, panting, upright. I know why she recognized Danny. Starkey. Same age, tall, tells a god-awful story about a bad childhood. Not Danny’s childhood, bad as it was, but one even worse, to explain his behavior. The evil grandfather could have been an evil mother, the sex stuff invented to get kids to talk about their own terrible lives, the frightening disguise, the bandanna and the whiskers, a hook to pull his recruits into his circle and keep them there.

  “I’ll pay you back for this goddamn life,” my son said. And now this is payback time. He’s killing people with his father’s ivory-handled hunting knife and leaving the bodies within steps of me. He’s threatening Sarah, maybe because she’s run away and has chosen me over him. He’s known all along where she was. Playing with us. He is heading in my direction, murder by murder. And he’s furious because now Sarah has escaped him. That leaves me.

  Sleep-deprived panic city, I tell myself, but I don’t go back to sleep. I sit up in the dark until morning, and now I’m drinking lukewarm instant and thinking those same heart-stopping thoughts in the broad daylight. They still make sense. They explain it all. My son is back.

  I write out a note to the super, breaking my lease. I am leaving in four days, I say, when the rent is due. Sorry for the short notice. Something came up. After I shove the note under his door, I go out and get one of those free newspapers that list apartments for rent. And I go to the bank and take out my savings, enough for first and last month’s rent. Then I pick up a couple of boxes and a jar of coffee from the 7-Eleven, and I come home.

  A couple of boxes aren’t enough, not even for the kitchen stuff. I put the water on for coffee, wonder if anyone in the building has extra boxes. Probably, the way some of them move around. Then I hear a sound, like a baby crying at my door. What now?

  I open the door. It is not a baby. It is Sarah, covered in blood, reaching out for me.

  Welts and bruises surge on what I can see of her body. One eye is purple, and when I get her clothes off, I see where the blood is coming from. Someone has carved a smiley face on her arm, has crossed it out. The last slash is deep enough to show muscle and bone beneath it.

  Sarah faints as I clean and bandage her. At times, I can’t see what I’m doing and have to stop and wipe away the blood. And the tears running down my face. I slow the flow of blood from between her legs with a towel, wrap her in the Japanese robe and get her to the bed. As I cover her with my quilt, she stirs.

  “Thank you, Ellie,” she says, and then she closes her eyes again. I put my cheek to hers, feel her breath on my ear, her warm skin on mine. She’s alive.

  Then I hear it. The smoke alarm. The kettle has burned dry on the stove. I hurry to the kitchen, hoping it hasn’t melted onto the burner, like it did once before, and as I turn off the heat, I hear a knock at the door. Someone nearby thinks I’m burning down the building. I go to explain, and it is the super, on a mission. I have a phone call, he tells me, and could I turn off the alarm if the crisis is over? I hand him the broom and tell him to do it himself while I go to the phone, put the receiver to my ear.

  “Careful,” a man breathes. “You’re in trou…ble.” I stand there listening to silence and realizing that the voice I’ve just heard is my son’s, ten years
older.

  I run back to my apartment, lock the door, shove the leather chair against it, and go into the bedroom.

  I sit next to Sarah all day. Her forehead doesn’t feel hot, and the next time she wakes up she can talk a little. She tells me how she went back to the family to warn the kids that the police were going to search the forest. But Starkey caught her, kept her tied up, told the family that because she was disloyal, she would be an example to them.

  The next day he made everyone hit her with their fists and call her names, even Leaky, who couldn’t stop crying. Only Owl, the retarded girl, and a couple of new kids hit hard, so Starkey made the rest of them use the bat. Sarah passed out, and when she woke up, Lila was washing her off, taking off her wet clothes and putting a pair of her own jeans on her.

  “‘Shush,’ Lila whispered. Starkey’s in his tent.’ Lila’s nice,” Sarah adds, her eyelids at half-mast.

  “Sleep,” I tell her. “There’s plenty of time to talk about this.” She closes her eyes. What I have plenty of time to do is think. I am responsible for her pain, for the blood seeping through the gauze I’ve wrapped around her still arm. For the red towel under her. I jump when I hear noises in the hall. They move on. I keep thinking.

  I am the one who said to leave things be, don’t get involved, the one who believed that a person should take care of herself. But I don’t know what to do about this girl, this Sarah, about the phone call from my son. So I sit by the bed, watch the bruised eye become more purple, the color move down her cheek like a flood of hurt. When she wakes up again, midnight, she is hungry, and I find a can of soup in the boxes I’ve tried to pack. I feed her and she goes on with her story, as if its telling will make the horror go away.

  That afternoon, she says, Starkey took off his belt and beat it against Lila’s back. He’d recognized the clean jeans she’d given Sarah. Then he sent the family out and told them to bring back a feast. They’d have a party that evening.

  The celebration began with Dumpster pizza and stolen bottled tea. “Dessert,” Sarah said, pushing back against her pillow at the last spoonful of soup, “was me.”

  “Bebop brought out his white bucket and when Starkey raised the bat, he began a slow rattle, his drumsticks, smooth branches beating on plastic, scaring me. They’d untied my arms, made me lie down.” Sarah swallows and keeps going, her voice so soft I have to lean in close. “Kids’ feet held down each of my hands. Starkey took out his knife and pressed it into my arm. He cut across the freesia, Ellie.” She looks at her arm, wrapped, still bleeding a little. “Then I blacked out again.”

  I give her a glass of water, and in a few minutes she continues, her story so terrible I breathe in gulps, like someone is choking me.

  When she came to, the new guy was pulling Starkey away from her, yelling at him, and the kids were huddled on the far side of the fire, cringing away from the tangle of bodies crashing around them, spewing clouds of dust and fir needles into the air. Only Mouse stood watching the two men go at it, the homemade drumstick in his hand, its wet point shining in the red flames of the fire.

  “Then Jimmy leaned over me, yanked me up, told me to run fast, and he wrapped his sweatshirt around my arm. And I ran, heading down in my bare feet, through the blackberries, around Doug firs, crashing through the bushes, flying, maybe, finally lying down under a roof of ferns, falling into some kind of sleep. When I opened my eyes, blue sky leaked between the fronds, and below me was the water tower.”

  Sarah’s feet twitch under the blankets. I’ll let her look at them, coated with Mercurochrome and wrapped in strips of torn-up sheet, some other time. I nod to encourage her to keep talking.

  “I crawled, hanging on to rocks and trees with my one arm, zigzagging down the hill, resting when I found a flat spot, until I came to the official trail, the signs pointing to the forest’s trailhead, the park, and the street to your house. I don’t remember very much of this last part.”

  Sarah sighs, grimaces. “I just knew you’d be here.” Then she goes back to sleep.

  I cannot move. Sarah’s hell has become mine. We’ll each have to deal with it. For once, this is my business. The beaten girl in front of me has taught me that even an old lady needs to face life, fight for something, for someone. Even if it means facing her son one more time. This time, neither of us will run away.

  By the time she wakes up again, I have a plan.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Sarah

  September 2009

  I don’t tell her all of it, of course. I can’t find the words to tell her, not when her face is so white, her eyes wide with disbelief and something else. Pain. My pain, shooting in waves from my arm to my chest and into her. And the other pain, flowing from between my legs. Ellie thinks I’m miscarrying. She’s tucked a towel under me, tells me it’s going to be okay, I’ll maybe even be glad someday, even if I did care for Peter. Someday when I’m ready, someday when I…I love her for saying these words, like a mother might, for not seeing how this red river just keeps coming, no lumps of tiny baby, just blood.

  She’s spooning soup into me again. I like the spoon coming at me in a steady rhythm, the way my mouth opens to receive it, the way she says, “Good girl.”

  Ellie gives me a pill, leftover, she says, from when she had a bad cut a long time ago, but it’s probably still good enough to keep infection away. Now I need to sleep, she says. I feel her checking my arm, looking at the torn petals, the butterfly bandages and gauze she’s stretched over the blossoms. Her hand slips under the quilt, changes the towel, and I hear her take a breath, walk to the sink, run the water over the cloth, say, “Oh, oh.”

  I wake up because the bed is dipping with the weight of her sitting next to me. “I need to ask you some questions,” she says. “When I’m finished, you will go to the ER to make sure you are doing okay.” She has a pencil and a pad in her hand; she looks serious, like what I answer will be important to whatever she is going to do. I’m not sure I will tell her anything else. I can still feel Leaky’s nervous foot, see Jimmy’s fear-shot eyes as he wrapped his sweatshirt around me. I don’t want to go through it again, not even in my mind.

  “What?” I ask. I can’t look at her.

  “No need to get upset. I just need to know where that camp is, what part of the forest. No, don’t do that. Look at me. I’m not going to call the police. I want to help your friends, Leaky and Jimmy and Lila, like they helped you. I just need to know how to find the camp.”

  She’s too old to think like this. What can she possibly do? “No way will you find it. I got lost when I went up by myself this time. It’s really hard to tell you where to go. The trails run all over, with signs on the real ones, nothing on the little paths where most people don’t go. It’s impossible.”

  “Please, Sarah. I have another reason for finding the camp. It has nothing to do with you, all to do with me. I can’t tell you, but you have to trust me. I need to get up there, right away.”

  When she sees that I’m not talking, she turns my head toward her, forces me to meet her eyes. “I got a phone call from someone up there, I don’t know who. The voice threatened me, us, maybe, said I was in trouble, like I should watch out. I’ve got to understand why. An old lady. I mind my own business. I may not have friends, but I don’t have enemies, either. Until now.”

  She’s thinking about Rick, maybe. And about Peter. No enemies, but dead anyway.

  “And something you don’t know. A fourteen-year-old boy was found dead on the play equipment a few days ago. Why would someone kill a kid like that?”

  He tried to phone home, that’s why. Starkey laughed when he talked about Sampson. I think of Leaky and Jimmy and the frightened looks on their faces. I think of Jimmy giving me his sweatshirt, maybe getting caught after I got away. But this old woman can’t do what she says she’s going to do—walk into camp, save the kids. Not all by herself.

  “No,” I say. I can’t bear the thought of losing Ellie, too. I roll my body toward the wall, even t
hough I can feel blood moving out of me with the turning.

  Her hand touches my back. “Sarah,” she whispers, “I am the cause of those dead people. I am responsible for creating the monster who is forcing the family to be his killers. I am the mother who didn’t love her son enough to stick with him during his bad times. I am a selfish old woman who minded her own business.”

  I can hear her choking sobs, and I turn back to her. Her head is on the bed, her fingers pressing into the quilt.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Starkey is my son, Danny.” Her muffled, anguished words frighten me, make me move my throbbing arm to touch her hair. “He called to tell me I was in some sort of trouble, a jab to torture me, to tell me that he has returned to pay me back like he promised.”

  We are silent for a while. Then she raises her head and says, calm and straight—like she’s moved on to the next part of a plan, her tears the fuel to get her on her way— “When you come into the forest from the downtown, how do you go? It must be different than coming up from the park, especially with the heavy stuff you might be carrying.”

  She is right. There is a longer way to the top of the forest, a road cut into the hillside on its far edge. Lila said that the road was for fire trucks, and we laughed because the little creek we lived by wouldn’t put out anything larger than a campfire. “They bring the water up, stupid,” she said, like she knew. “I saw it once on TV. In California.”

  If Ellie could find the road, go to the top, and then come down, she might be able to get to the camp. But then what? “That’s nuts, Ellie.” I’m feeling woozy and sick to my stomach. “I might throw up.”

  “Not yet,” she says. “What did you just think of?” She’s so close I breathe in her coffee breath, the paper and pencil forgotten.