by Theresa Weir
Claire woke up to the sound of Hallie scratching at the door to get out.
“Dylan?”
Scratch, scratch, scratch.
It was getting dark. Where was Dylan?
She tossed back the covers and got out of bed, the floor cold as ice on her feet. Where were her socks? She couldn't find her socks.
“Dylan?”
Scratch, scratch, scratch.
“I'm coming, Hallie.”
Hallie whined that high-pitched excited whine she used when she thought she’d found something really great like a dead squirrel. Claire let her out, quickly shutting the door behind her. Outside, Hallie took off around the house, barking.
Idiot dog.
Bleary-eyed, her head feeling as big as a watermelon, Claire turned around, intending to drag herself directly back to bed, when she stopped. In the middle of the kitchen table was her purse. And beside her purse, was her open wallet. She picked it up and looked inside. Two twenties and a ten.
The son of a bitch had taken most of her rent money.
You just lie there and rest. Ol Daddy Dylan will take care of everything.
Grrr! She could pull out her own hair. How could she have been so stupid? So blind? He’d taken care of everything all right. Now what was she going to do? There was a shop in town where she sold her artwork on commission, but winter was the slow season, the really slow season. So slow that she rarely sold anything from the beginning of January until tourist season started the end of May.
Damn.
The antique furniture wasn’t hers. The only thing of value she owned was her Jeep, and it wouldn’t be worth much now with the crumpled front end. She would have to see if she could pay her rent a little late. Maybe she could sell a picture somewhere.
Damn.
~0~
Claire’s cold lasted a week. During that time Libby came by and gave her a ride into town to pick up her Jeep. On the way there, Claire almost told Libby about Dylan. “You know those handcuffs you gave me?” she began.
“Use ’em yet?” Libby asked in a tone that said she knew she hadn’t. “How about that voodoo doll? Did you put some of Anton’s hair on it?”
“Anton? No ...” Claire said vaguely. “I haven’t done that.” She couldn’t bring herself to tell Libby about her abduction. Libby may have been a good friend, but she also loved passing on a juicy story. The weird thing was, Claire didn’t think of it as an abduction. And even though he’d robbed her and smashed her Jeep, leaving her with a repair bill she wouldn’t be able to pay, when she looked back on the whole thing it was like recalling an adventure. And now, with that adventure behind her, it didn’t even seem real.
She would catch herself daydreaming about him, and she would have to remind herself that the guy was a loser, an even bigger loser than Anton, who before Dylan had come along had been King of the Losers. So why hadn’t she turned him in?
She’d heard the police were no longer looking for him. That made her even more aware of her negligence in the law-abiding citizen department. She'd never done anything illegal in her life, except for an occasional U-turn.
Of course, there had been that time she’d accidentally gotten stoned. How was she supposed to know that Magic Muffins meant the little goodies had pot in them? She just thought it meant they were made from some super-duper recipe. They’d been super-duper all right.
“I still don’t get what you were doing out during that blizzard,” Libby said, bringing Claire back to the present. “You really need to get a phone, Claire. I mean it. At least a cell phone for emergencies.”
“You're right.” But that didn't mean Claire had any intention of getting one, not in the near future anyway, not when she didn't even have money for rent, thanks to her brief moment of misplaced compassion.
After picking up her Jeep and returning home, Claire came across the voodoo doll with Dylan's hair still glued to it. She stared at it for a long time. She picked up a black pin. Then she put it down, turned the doll over to the good voodoo side, picked up a white pin, and stuck it in the chest.
~0~
Dylan lay fully clothed on the bed of the hotel room with its orange spread and matching curtains, hands behind his head, watching an old episode of Kids in the Hall. When the skit ended, Dylan reluctantly changed channels. He should be watching the news to see if his disappearance was still a big deal. Claire had surely turned him in by now.
He didn't have to channel-surf long before he came upon an interview with the guy who'd walked away from the plane crash, the chess player, Daniel French.
He was talking about how bad Dylan had looked when he'd last seen him.
“Do you think he could have walked to safety?” the interviewer asked.
The man thought a moment, then slowly shook his head. “I seriously doubt it. He couldn't have gone far on his own. And then with that storm ... I'm afraid he's buried out there under ten feet of snow and nobody's going to find him until spring.”
The interviewer thanked the man, then turned back to the camera. “There you have it. An opinion that has been echoed around here for the past three days. The search has been called off. Every day that goes by has officials more convinced that the mysterious man going by a string of aliases has chosen a false name for the last time. Back to you, John.”
“How will anyone know what name to put on the death certificate?” John asked with that forced time-to-toss-in-a-joke voice.
“I don't know,” the correspondent on location said, unable to come up with a reply, probably pissed that good ol' John had made him look stupid.
Dead.
Being presumed dead was something Dylan had always fantasized about. What better way to start over? He clicked off the television, pulled the phone off the dresser to rest it on his stomach, and put in a call to New Orleans. He needed money. Maybe a new identity. Zeke could get both those things. He had another thought. Claire hadn't turned him in. He wished he could thank her for that. He really did.
Zeke was surprised and pleased to hear from him all right.
“I figured you were hiding out somewhere, just waiting for things to cool down,” Zeke said.
They bullshitted for a little while, then Dylan said, “Zeke, I need you to send me some cash.”
“No problem.”
“What about a fake driver's license and credit cards?”
“That, too.”
Dylan gave him the motel name and address.
“Whose name do I put on it?”
Dylan thought a moment. “Charles Black.” After hanging up, Dylan lay back in bed, hands behind his head, and stared up at the ceiling. Taking to Zeke had reminded him of the old days. His mind spun backward, to a time when life had been more magic than hardship.
Early childhood for Dylan had been a series of new and exciting locations. His parents were missionaries, moving from place to place, country to country, living in one poor village after another. He and his sister, Olivia, had ridden camels in Sudan. In Ethiopia, their classroom was nothing more than a thatched roof above a dirt floor, their beds made of the same woven material that kept out the sun and heat. Dylan had seen the highest mountain in the world, and he'd waded in the very sea Moses had parted. His heart had been stolen by a little girl in Madagascar who wore beaded gowns and carried a lemur on her shoulder, the lemur making his hissing cockroach seem pretty insignificant. And even though he was too young to understand the unrest in South Africa, he’d felt the injustice of it.
While living in South Africa, he and Olivia would lie in bed at night and listen to their parents talking from the kitchen. Dylan’s father, normally a gentle man, a person who had never once raised his voice to his children, would shout in anger, and bang his fist on the table in frustration.
South Africa was the beginning of the end.
One hot night, Dylan was awakened from a deep sleep by a woman’s screams. That was followed by a series of popping sounds and angry foreign voices, then the echo of booted feet— men ru
nning away.
Heart pounding, feeling sick to his stomach, Dylan left the bedroom and stepped into the narrow hall that led to the kitchen. Under the light of a bare bulb, his parents lay dead, murdered.
He didn’t know how long he stood there, unable to move, unable to pull his gaze away from the horror. Behind him, he heard Olivia’s groggy voice. “What’s wrong?”
“Go back to bed.” He turned and pulled her down the hallway to the bedroom, where she went back to sleep and he sat on the end of the bed, waiting for an adult to show up.
Dylan was ten years old.
He and his sister were taken to the American Embassy by Father Sebastian, a red-faced Irishman who’d worked with Dylan's parents. There they followed a long hall to be presented to a man behind a desk in a room that smelled like stale cigars. In one corner, an oscillating fan moved back and forth, clicking every time it reached the end of its sweep.
The man asked them about relatives.
Dylan’s father had never spoken about any of his family. “My mother has a brother,” Dylan offered. He'd seen him once, and hadn't liked him. The man had been a loud contrast to his father's quiet, almost shy reserve. He drank a lot and called his wife “the little woman.” Dylan didn't know what his aunt's real name was.
They had a hard time finding Uncle Hank. It seemed he'd changed his name and moved to Louisiana “because of a little trouble with the law,” Uncle Hank later put it.
And so Dylan and Olivia found themselves living with their loud, obnoxious uncle and timid aunt. On the day of their arrival in the little Louisiana town of Black Water, his uncle gave Dylan a pat on the head and a pellet gun, telling him to go shoot sparrows. Later, when he was by himself, Dylan poured the pellets out on the ground.
His uncle ran a gas station, Hank's Gator Stop. SEE THE LIVE ALLIGATOR, a huge painted sign near the road shouted. The alligator was kept in a tank next to the gas station. The tank was so small that the reptile couldn't turn around. Dylan's job was to add fresh water to the tank every day. While Dylan ran the hose over the alligator's spiny back, he would imagine the alligator getting loose and taking out its revenge on Uncle Hank. One day someone turned his uncle in to the Humane Society and some people came and took the alligator away.
“There goes half my income!” Uncle Hank shouted, shaking a fist after the departing truck and gator-filled trailer. He glanced around and saw Dylan standing there.
“What are you smiling about?” He took a swing at him, but Dylan dodged his fist and ran.
Dylan and Olivia were used to new and strange places, but they'd always had their parents for support. Their father's quiet strength had always been there to back them, along with their mother's displays of affection.
There was none of that in the Leary household. After years of emotional abuse, their aunt Doris had turned into a shell of a human, a robot who simply went about her daily chores, ignoring everything that went on around her. Even at a young age, Dylan realized that her withdrawal from the world was the only way she could cope. And yet he couldn't help but resent the way she wouldn't stand up to her husband.
If not for Olivia, Dylan may have killed himself.
Two years after moving to Louisiana, Olivia died. They said it was some exotic disease she’d picked up in Africa, but in Dylan’s twelve-year-old mind he knew sorrow had killed his sister.
With Olivia gone, Dylan’s life had no direction, no purpose. She’d been by his side most of his life. He couldn’t remember a time when she hadn’t been there.
It didn’t seem possible for hell to get any bleaker, but then Uncle Hank died of a heart attack. Two days after the funeral, Aunt Doris left. She just tossed her bags in the trunk of her car and drove away. Dylan was never sure if she’d left him behind deliberately or not. It was just possible that she’d never known he was there.
This time he was sent to an adoption agency in New Orleans. But it seemed nobody wanted a twelve-year-old with too much history.
Dylan began wandering the streets, playing checkers with some of the old men who hung out in the French Quarter. In New Orleans, he learned to beg for money. In New Orleans, he got dark from the sun and dirty from the streets, until he didn’t look any different from the rest of the street people, although once in a while a pretty woman would comment on the intensity of his eyes.
One day, when the old men got sick of Dylan beating them at every game of checkers, they shooed him away. He wandered down an alley with the usual voodoo shops and whorehouses. A drunk American staggered out of a red door set back off the alley. Young American guys were always coming to New Orleans to get drunk, get tattoos, and screw the whores. He proudly showed Dylan the tattoo he’d just gotten. Even though Dylan was only twelve, even though he hadn’t had much of an education, he knew you didn’t spell Hell’s Angels that way.
But seeing the tattoo gave him an idea. An idea he couldn’t get out of his head. He missed Olivia terribly. But it was getting harder and harder to remember exactly what she looked like, and exactly how she sounded when she talked.
And so he got the idea to play checkers for money. It wasn’t long before he’d made enough money to get a tattoo. Until he had enough money to spell “Olivia Forever.”
Chapter 16
Claire sat curled up on the couch in the corner of the loft, her feet tucked under her, a sketchpad across her bent knees, staring blankly at the wall. She hadn't accomplished anything since Dylan had left.
Old doubts plagued her. Were the pictures she'd done so far any good? Good enough to submit? The more she looked at them, the less confident she became. Her drawings weren't bright. Weren't eye-catching. They didn't shout at you.
Too quiet. Too soft. The voices of a million critics came back to haunt her. Maybe they were too real. Too bland.
She'd once had an art teacher who told her she'd never make it unless she changed her style.
But to change ... If she couldn't express herself in her own way, with her own talent, what was the point? Unwittingly, that teacher had helped Claire see the direction she needed to go. From that moment, she became a rebel, clinging desperately and perhaps foolishly to her own style, even if it meant never making it, even if it meant that she might eventually crash and burn. Because she would rather crash and burn than become yet another artist suppressing her talent to mimic someone else.
From outside came the sound of Hallie’s frantic barking, pulling Claire out of yet another daydream.
She noticed that the light in the room had changed, telling her evening was approaching, telling her she’d wasted one more afternoon.
From downstairs came the sound of the front door opening, then closing. A heavy footfall echoed through the house, carrying upstairs to where Claire sat still as a mouse.
Dylan?
“Claire?”
A male voice. One she thought she recognized.
Heart hammering, Claire put her tablet aside and pushed herself up from the soft depth of the couch. “Anton?"
Two weeks ago, she would have been thrilled to hear his voice. Two weeks ago, she would have hurried down the ladder to greet him. Now she hesitated.
What was he doing here? What did he want?
His footsteps moved in her direction. “Claire?"
She hung back.
She stared at the opening in the floor, watching until Anton’s dark head appeared.
“Claire!”
He was tan, very tan, as if he’d recently spent a lot of time on the ocean lounging around on somebody’s yacht. He flashed his white teeth at her and swung himself free of the ladder.
He wore a black leather jacket that he took off and tossed over the back of a chair. He stood there, smiling, waiting for her to throw herself at him.
Two weeks ago, she would have done just that.
“What are you doing here?” she asked instead.
His clothes were expensive. Dark, kind of shiny. His hair had been styled to perfection. He lifted his arms to her, his head tilted
in the sweet little boy way she remembered that said, I’m so charming and handsome that you’ll surely forgive anything I’ve done. Glittering from a ring on his pinky finger was what looked like a diamond. A big one.
She saw no reason to be nice. “When you cross over, you really cross over.”
“Claire, I came to see you.”
Had he always sounded so affected? Or was it something he’d picked up recently? “Don’t you mean, you came here so I could see you?” she asked.
He didn’t get it. That was obvious from the puzzled expression on his face. But he’d never been one to linger overlong on something he didn’t understand. He simply moved on. That had been one of the things Claire found fascinating about him—his ability to shrug things off and move on. It was a handy trait.
Looking at him now, she could see that it was just selfishness on his part.
“Come on,” he said, arms still outstretched in that look-at-me pose. “No hug? No kiss?” The new affectations were getting on her nerves. His mannerisms, his way of gesturing and posturing, were enough to make her stomach churn.
“If you’ve come to get your things, then get them and go.”
“Claire, Claire.” He shook his head and smiled, as if to say he wasn’t falling for this aloof game. He moved toward her. “You want me. You know you want me.”
Had he always been such a creep? Had she never seen him for what he really was? No, surely her judgment wasn’t that bad. The old Anton had been cocky, but this person in front of her—he was like a cartoon. A caricature of the old Anton.
“Get out of here or I’ll call the police.”
“You don’t have a phone.” His savoir-faire was fading.
“I got one.”
“You hate phones. You would never have a phone.”
He knows me so well.
In a flash, she understood him. Completely. He hadn’t been a master at being the perfect mate. He’d been a master at reading her. And he had fed on her need of him, her adoration of him. Now that he could see she no longer adored him, he was angry. To him, she was the traitor.
“You thought you could come back here anytime and I’d be waiting for you, didn’t you?”