by Deb Caletti
Annabelle started counting things then—ceiling tiles, sidewalk squares, and consonants in words. Steps. Strides. She went from speed to distance. Back in junior high, she learned that the long-distance run, tiring herself out, soothing herself with the rhythm of pace, helped the anxiety. It was like driving a screaming baby around in a car.
Back then, a three-mile cross-country event was huge. It still is—in high school, she made state. But after cross-country season ended in early November, she also just ran for herself the rest of the year. To stay in shape, but also for the nature-connectedness-science-y beauty all around outside and for the overachiever challenge of distance. Half marathons. Two marathons, just before her life went up in flames. And after it did, weeks after, when she could finally get up out of bed again, she put on her shoes. She went outside and ran. She ran until she was exhausted. She ran fast enough to blur the scenery in her mind.
When she did this, she discovered another trick. If she goes far and runs hard enough, her body hurts. She’d done this week after week even before now. Inflicting pain on herself. Punishment. That sounds a little sicko, but too bad. It is what it is. She wishes the punishment were more brutal, even though it’s pretty bad already and, thanks to Seth Greggory, about to get worse. Along with the punishment, she’s also doing the thing she most wants to do: flee.
Now, on this first day of her long journey, she is running along Lake Washington Boulevard again, but this time on the east side of the lake. The lake is pink-tinged with morning, and she can see the freeway beyond, and the cars lining up in their commute. School starts in just over an hour. Her seats will sit empty. People will wonder. People will worry. People will become uneasy. She shouldn’t even be in school anyway. Why they let her come back is beyond her. Every day, she makes people uneasy. They look at her like she’s got a bomb strapped to her chest.
To the east, straight through those hills packed with evergreens, is her destination for the day: Preston, Washington. The route ahead is filled with enticing Westward Ho! names: the Coal Mines Trail, the Bullitt Fireplace Trail, the Rainier Trail. Honestly, it looks a little dark out that way. It looks ominous, like the deep forests of fairy tales. Fear crawls up her spine.
You will not be weak, she tells herself. You will not think about Seth Greggory and the future. You will not imagine jails and handcuffs. The lecture evolves into a list of commandments: You will not count all the miles that are left. You will not be terrified. You will not let The Taker take over every silent moment in your head. That is not him, in that car. That is not you, getting out—
Stop!
There is a large building next to her. RENTON BIBLE CHURCH, the sign reads. CHURCH PARKING ONLY! VIOLATORS WILL BE BAPTIZED! She needs to pay attention. She is suddenly seeing problem number one: navigation. She doesn’t want to drain her phone battery, but she needs that GPS woman. They are about to have a very important relationship. She almost feels like she should apologize to her, for all the abuse she’s taken from her mother. This is one of Annabelle’s struggles, the sense that she must apologize and atone for other people’s actions.
“Let’s start fresh, you and me,” Annabelle says. “My mother isn’t exactly the most patient person in the world, so I’m sorry. She’s been horrible to you. I’ll do my best to be more respectful.”
“In one half mile, turn right onto Tenth Street,” the GPS woman says.
“I don’t even know who you are, and you’re going to be with me on the biggest trip of my life.”
The GPS woman is silent. She needs a name, for starters. As Annabelle heads for Tenth Street, she scrolls through some possibilities. Olive. Mrs. Cash. AJ. Big Rose.
“Loretta,” she says.
“Turn right onto Tenth Street.”
“Loretta it is, then.”
• • •
Somewhere just after the endless Highway 900, after a lunch stop for a bagel and water, Annabelle tackles the Coal Mines Trail, which parallels a railroad track before looping through a dark and fern-filled forest. She crosses a creepy wooden bridge. It is mossy-slick, and she has to watch her footing.
As she runs through the cool, dark woods, she begins to realize how alone she is. It feels dangerous, like the trees may start talking with gnarled wood mouths and reaching for her with twisted branch arms. She gets the creeps. It is alone-in-a-parking-garage fear, alone-on-an-empty-street fear, the kind of daily fear women are so familiar with that they forget how wrong that familiarity is. The damp path has splotchy parts. Mud smacks and dots her legs. And then: She’s out. She’s on Mountainside Drive and suddenly, shockingly, she grasps problem number two.
Hills.
Not just hills, but serious freaking inclines. And she is not unfamiliar with hills. Of course she’s run hills! But these are mountain foothills, which means they are the baby hills before she gets to the real deal of actual mountain passes. Already, as she makes her way up, she slows and leans forward, same as Mr. Giancarlo at Sunnyside Eldercare as he heads to the dining hall. Everything hurts. Her chest, her legs, her stomach. Probably this is also like Mr. Giancarlo at Sunnyside Eldercare, though he never complained. All Mr. Giancarlo used to say was Get that woman out of my room. What woman? There was no woman. Mr. Giancarlo had ghosts haunting him, too.
Annabelle shuffles. She can’t go fast, or she’ll never make it. She’s in excellent shape, training for this even if she hadn’t realized it, but sixteen miles a day could kill her if she doesn’t pace herself. At home, her friends are already in fifth period. This is taking a long time, much longer than she ever imagined, which is likely going to be problem number three. Seth Greggory is not exactly going to wait.
Her phone buzzes and buzzes. Wow! Look how popular she is, now that she’s not there. Now that people don’t have to face her and manage their own weirdness and sorrow. Of course, it could just be Gina, checking on her every two seconds. She can’t stop to look. This is her first day, and if she stops to look at her phone, she may just stop, period.
She can hear the freeway alongside her, I-90, humming along. Parts of the road have blind curves that scare her. She hopes she doesn’t get flattened by a car before she even gets out of her own state. Man, people drive fast. Problems number five, six, seven, eight!
Finally, she sees it—a tiny town, if you can even call it a town. There’s a single street with shops: a True Value and a Subway and the Preston Tire Center. She’s been out here once for a cross-country meet, but nothing looks familiar. After all of this running, she’s maybe a forty-five-minute drive from home.
“Help me, Loretta.”
“In two miles, take a left on Alder.”
“You’re a real friend.”
• • •
Her destination: the Secret Garden B&B, forty-two bucks a night. She booked it that morning, and she’s supposed to call home the minute she gets there so that they can decide what to do next. Annabelle loved The Secret Garden when she was a kid. She can still remember when the robin helps Mary Lennox find the key to the gate. So, okay, her expectations were high for forty-two bucks a night, but blame Frances Hodgson Burnett. The small, sagging house in front of her has faded gingerbread trim. The porch needs painting. On it, there’s a cat food bowl with dried stuff in it, and drapey cobwebs up in the corners, and a fat spider that has zero fear of being evicted. The welcome mat says only LCOME. But Annabelle is too exhausted and mud-splattered to care. She rings the buzzer. Twelve years later, an old hippie woman with waist-length gray hair answers the door.
“Yes?”
“I’m Annabelle Agnelli? I called this morning?”
“Oh! I was expecting someone . . .” Less muddy? Less covered in sweat? Less burdened, less crouched and exhausted? Someone not about to burst into tears? Someone whose life isn’t essentially over? “Older. Someone older.”
Clearly, the proprietor of the Secret Garden has not read or watched the news in the last nine months. Then again, Annabelle Agnelli may be utterly unrecognizable right no
w, even to herself.
Problems number nine, ten, eleven! She was stupid to think she could patch this thing together; stupid to think there’d be nice motels and cheap B&Bs along the way. There will be long stretches of country without any motels in sight.
This is why people plan for months. Her mom was right—you don’t just take off. Jason Dell had a team that followed along in an RV. He had a logistics coordinator, a driver, and the critical emotional support he needed. He had medical supplies at the ready, the right clothing and equipment, and meals prepared for him, along with a supply of protein shakes, protein bars, water, and snacks providing the hydration and thousands of calories required to keep him going. In that RV, he could sleep the essential eleven hours a night wherever he was.
It’s becoming very clear: This is a failed mission. She and Loretta can’t do this by themselves.
4
In her room at the Secret Garden, Annabelle rolls down her mud-caked socks. More problems: blisters at the back of her heels. New track shoes, what was she thinking? She wasn’t, is the answer. The blisters are puffy little waterbeds right where her shoes hit her Achilles. Now that she sees them, they start to shout and burn.
The bed has a floral spread, and there are unnerving paintings of bunnies on the walls. A doll sits in a rocker, and a teddy bear rests against a lace pillow on the bed. The house smells like potpourri and Lysol, and something beef-stew-ish. Annabelle hears Yvonne, proprietor of the Secret Garden B&B, rattling pans downstairs. A cat meows on the other side of the door. Annabelle wants to hold the lace pillow to her chest and sob, but it’s too icky to touch.
Her shirt is stuck to her back from sweat. She goes down the hall, takes the fastest shower ever, and changes into her Batman T-shirt. Yvonne agreed to launder her clothes. She imagines them spinning with Yvonne’s cat-hair nightgowns.
Annabelle is supposed to call home. She checks her phone. Just as she suspected, most of those missed calls were from her mother. People at school are probably relieved she’s gone. Gina is likely tapping her fingers and waiting for the apologetic call she knows is coming. I’m here, Annabelle texts. Will call ASAP.
She wants to go home.
God, what was I thinking? she says to Kat. This was silly! I am stupid, stupid, stupid. Mom can come pick me up, and it will be like none of this happened.
Let’s not forget The Glass Menagerie, Kat says.
The Glass Menagerie?
Ninth-grade play, don’t you remember?
Of course I remember.
You did this same thing when you got the lead. You brought the script home with all your lines highlighted and then you freaked the fuck out. Come on, Belle Bottom. Rally.
It’s like Kat is sitting right beside her. Ever since they were the only two girls in the sixth grade who were afraid of gymnastics, they’d always been there for each other. They knew the story of each other from then on, which is one of the largest things you can say about another person. Kat was there when Annabelle sent the big letter to That Bastard Father Anthony a few years ago, after he shocked them all by moving to Boston to become a priest, and Kat was there to hear Annabelle’s confession about her and Will on Will’s dad’s sailboat. Annabelle understood about Kat’s mother, Patty, and her drinking, and she kept the secret of the tiny butterfly tattoo Kat got. Kat could tell when Annabelle was counting things in her head from anxiety, and Annabelle could tell when Kat felt lonely even in a big bunch of people. They knew which books the other would love and hate. From behind, they looked so similar, with their thin shoulders and long dark hair, and their same taste in clothes. But they were different, too. Kat was more funny and brave than Annabelle, but more cynical, too. Science and math were hard for Kat—she wanted to be a writer. She got antsy watching science shows; she’d throw pillows and try to grab the remote, but if you interrupted her at the end of a book, you’d pay. Differences don’t matter all that much when you love someone.
There’s a tap at the door. Yvonne hands Annabelle a tray. There’s a bowl of beef stew, and a dish of green salad with that orange dressing on it that Annabelle can’t remember the name of, and one of those chubby Hawaiian rolls that Will’s family sometimes had with dinner.
“Wow, thanks,” Annabelle says.
“You said you had some clothes for me?”
The clothes are wrapped in a towel. “Sorry they’re so disgusting.”
“Also, you wanted these?” Yvonne hands Annabelle the scissors. Yvonne’s mouth is set in an unreadable line, but her words drip suspicion. “Is everything all right?”
She apparently thinks Annabelle might use the shears to slash her wrists or something, which might be an understandable assumption. Annabelle saw her own eyes in that bathroom mirror. They looked desperate, haunted. “Everything’s great! Thank you!” She adds several sunny exclamation points.
This is how cheerful she used to sound when talking to Theresa, her supervisor at Sunnyside Eldercare. And to Claire and Thomas, her bosses and the new owners of Essential Baking Company, and to all her teachers, especially Coach Kwan. And Will’s parents. And Nordstrom salespeople. And waiters. And every adult who maybe held some sort of imaginary report card as to what kind of human being she was. Truthfully, she used that voice with Will sometimes, too. Cheery and positive, even when she didn’t feel cheery and positive. Who was that talking? Not her. Some perfect, made-up version of her. Niceness is expected of her, not honesty.
• • •
She hobbles (and this is bad, very bad, the way the backs of her heels hurt) to the bathroom down the hall.
She takes one last look at herself, but doesn’t hesitate. The long brown hair—well, it has to go. She should have done this months ago. It’s harder to do than you think, actually physically harder, but maybe just because her hair is still damp and Yvonne’s scissors are dull. Fat lumps drop into the sink. She reaches around to the back. She doesn’t give a shit, honestly, how it looks. It’s a bit of a dramatic movie cliché, this sudden hacking of hair, but she doesn’t give a shit about that, either. What matters is that it’s gone.
In the mirror, there is her once-lovely face, looking gaunt and wrecked. Her hair is a sad, ragged helmet, like she’s the loser in the war. She looks awful. Finally, her outsides match her insides.
She sweeps what she can into the trash. Yvonne will be horrified. She’ll think Annabelle is running from the law, which in a way is true.
Back in the room with the creepy bunny paintings, Annabelle touches the chopped, uneven edges of her hair. The doll stares at her from the rocking chair.
What is she doing here? What has she done?
She is lost.
She is so lost.
And she is so, so terrified.
She starts to cry. She puts her face in her hands and sobs. She tries to do this quietly. Muffled sobs are even more desperate than loud, set-free ones. She can tell you all about sobs, their various forms. Crying can be a quiet drizzle or a torrential downpour.
Her phone buzzes. Her mom is calling, Annabelle is sure. Annabelle will tell Gina to come get her. She will apologize for her stupidity and her craziness. Gina will be here in an hour. Annabelle will ask her to bring a Kid Valley burger and onion rings. The orange dressing on that salad looks like cat barf.
But it’s not Gina. “Your brother has called me, like, fifteen times,” Zach Oh says.
Annabelle blows her nose.
“What is that noise? Is that a jet? Are you at the airport?”
“No, I’m not at the airport! I’m in a weird horror-movie B&B, where the dolls talk.”
“Malcolm told me. Forty-two dollars a night? What did you expect?”
“Disregard anything my brother said.”
“What do you mean, ‘disregard’?”
“Disregard! I can’t do any of this. It was stupid. I wasn’t thinking. I had a bad moment.”
“I can’t disregard! I just set up the GoFundMe. It’s got, like, eighty-six bucks in there already.” Zach just go
t accepted to University of Washington on a full scholarship to study financial engineering. He’s been trading mutual funds since he was in the sixth grade, and Malcolm thinks he’s a god. “Olivia is designing the Run for a Cause T-shirt. Wait. She’s yelling something at me. What?” Annabelle hears Olivia in the background. “She says to tell you we’re giving away the shirts with a fifty-dollar donation.”
“Zach, my heels are already a mess. My legs . . .”
“You did this same thing about The Glass Menagerie.”
Annabelle groans. Zach was the sound and lighting guy for the production. She and Zach have been friends since grade five, when they were partnered up to make puppets of Lewis and Clark. Most people come and go in your life, but Zach has stayed—through puppets and the awful middle-school play when they were talking bacteria and that one embarrassing semester they took chorus, through his dad’s job loss and her parents’ divorce, through the tragedy. And she’s known Olivia since middle-school orchestra. Olivia was first-chair cello, and Annabelle sat behind her, a total admirer of Olivia’s long hair, which is shiny as a mirror. They became even better friends when Olivia and Zach became a couple. Annabelle feels a little choked up. It’s the people who know you and love you that save you.
“Malcolm wants a website, but that’ll take a few days. You’ve got seven followers already on the Run for a Cause Facebook page, but two are dudes from Pakistan with shirts unbuttoned to their navels, and one is me and one is Malcolm and one is Olivia and two are teachers from Roosevelt.”