Mary was in front this time, Mollie tucked in between our bags in the back. Another reason to hate Riki, and I did hate her, aiming my wrath at her small, squat body and unable to admit how over-easy it was to use her as this day's central target. I'd made no effort to get to know her, instead behaving like the closed-down, hyper-judgmental woman that I'm sure my kids had portrayed me to be. I twisted to glare in Riki's direction just because I could.
It had started to rain. Pour, in fact, the streaking water keeping me from seeing the green highway signs over our heads. I was searching for the first exit to a populated area where I could find gas. I'd hoped I wouldn't have to fill up, stretched as my finances had become that weekend, even though my mother had paid for about everything—I wanted to think I could sputter the hundred miles to Eugene on the last few gallons, but we'd been on E for too long, and now I was worried.
"What's that one say, Mary?" I asked her.
The wiper dashed the rain out of her line of sight for just a second. "Stafford," she called out.
"Stafford," I repeated. I didn't know if it was a place with gas stations or one of those exits that led to wide acres of farmland, but I couldn't take a chance: the arrow on my fuel gauge had sunk even deeper below empty. I turned off on the exit. Within five minutes I realized I'd blown it—we were driving away from buildings and people and toward wet emptiness. There were no turnoffs, no opportunities to flip around on this highway. And there were no gas stations. The engine faltered, the last of the fuel gone, the car jerking and coughing before it died.
I turned the wheel toward the shoulder and rolled as far as I could onto the gravel-and-weed bed and then shut off the ignition. I laid my face in my hands.
"What the fuck?" Amanda said.
What the fuck was right. What the fuck was I doing in this car with three girls I could hardly tolerate—one of whom I trusted not at all. What the fuck was I doing one hundred miles from my house—the only place I felt even the slightest bit safe anymore. What the fuck was I going to do to get us out of this.
Though the rain wasn't letting up, we still had three hours of daylight left, and that was a good thing. But not a single car had passed us on the highway. I told Amanda she had to stay with the little girls; Stephanie and I would go over the berm to see if we could find help.
"No way," Stephanie said, glaring at Amanda as if waiting for her big sister to bail her out of this one. But Amanda was worried about herself.
"You're not leaving me here," she said, sticking her head between the seats so her breath mingled with mine. "Forget it."
"What do you suggest?" I said. "Do you have a better plan?"
I knew it was a stupid question the second I asked it—of course she had a better plan: the three of them would get out of the car, thrust out their thumbs, and be on their way. But she didn't say that. She shrugged instead. "Just hurry up," she muttered.
Stephanie, sighing, climbed out of the car and up the steep roadside hill with me behind her, both of us clawing at the soaked ground to stay on our feet and pulling on the vegetation for leverage. Most of those bushes were blackberry vines, loaded with thorns that tore into my hands and raked my arms. Halfway up the incline, Stephanie shouted at me that she was stuck—tangled—and I rushed over to work the thorny vines from her short crop of hair, but not before the stickers had split red lines across her cheeks and forehead. She wiped the blood away and kept climbing until we reached the top—muddy, scratched, wet. Dogs barked at us from a yard not too far in the distance, and I saw a man come out the sliding door to see what the ruckus was about. "Hey!" I shouted, making my voice loud enough to compete with the pounding rain. "Can you help us?" He slammed the door shut and turned out his lights.
"What's wrong with him?" Stephanie asked as she slipped and slid across the muddy ground to the fence. "Hey, mister! Come back out here!" She turned to me. "Mom, make him help us!"
I looked at her through the rain and let myself believe, for the first time since we'd left the car, that Stephanie might be in this with me. That we were going to do what we had to do together. That feeling alone, slightly warm and almost delicious, pushed me on up the hill.
For an hour or so, we wandered across farmland and through thickets of wild brush until we finally came out on a small rural road. I dreaded the moment Stephanie would ask if we were lost, because we were. If I'd absolutely had to get back from here to my daughters left in the car, I wouldn't be able to. What if Amanda had grown sick of waiting? What if she was getting high in front of her sisters? What if she and Riki had jumped out and waved down a passing car, leaving her little sisters?
"She has a knife." That's the line that wouldn't leave me alone. "I'd better warn you, Riki has a knife."
Stephanie and I walked along the side of the road in silence, both of us shielding our eyes from the rain so we could catch any hint of an approaching car in the late-afternoon light. Finally, we did see one. A station wagon came right at us—a shiny Volvo, its wipers sweeping rain from the windshield. I waved my arms and shouted while Stephanie stayed back on the lower part of the road's shoulder. "Please stop!" she yelled from there. "Please help us!"
The car slowed, then pulled over, and I ran around to the driver-side window, my heart leaping at the first chance of getting out of this. The woman at the wheel rolled down her window a couple of inches, peering at my drowned-rat face and hair, while I explained that my car had broken down on a highway back there somewhere, and that I'd left children alone over an hour earlier. "Could you get us to a gas station?" I asked.
She, a neatly dressed woman in her forties wearing a soft sweater and a flashy wedding ring, glanced over at a girl in the passenger seat. Her daughter, I guessed. The girl, whose long white neck was adorned with a simple silver chain, was silent as she stared back at her mother, advocating neither for us nor against us. Two silver thermos mugs sat in the dashboard cup holders. The girl picked one up and held it tight in her hand.
"Okay," the mother said, turning back toward me. "I suppose. There's a place not far from here."
"Steph, hop in!" I called, and opened the back door. I slipped onto the leather seat, slopping mud and water into their spotless interior. Stephanie brought in more detritus on the other side. "I'm sorry about the dirt," I said, but stopped speaking when I registered the shock on both faces from the front—the mother-daughter pair who'd twisted around to look at us hadn't really seen Stephanie until now. They took in the eyeliner running in thick black streaks down her face; the quarter-size medallions wedged in her stretched earlobes; the spiked dog collar around her neck; at the Harley-Davidson tank top that had been her father's in college, under an open hoodie that was plastered onto her. I could tell the woman was about to chase us back out into the dusky afternoon. "Please. I've got to get to my little girls," I insisted, I begged. "I'm sure they're scared out of their minds." I didn't stop talking until she'd turned around, put the car in gear, and drove on. Then I sat against the warm seat. I closed my eyes and let my head fall forward, bowling-ball heavy, my sinuses aching from physical exertion and wet air, and my soaked legs and back hot and itchy against the upholstery. Trickles of acid stung my throat and I was about to open a window for fresh air to keep myself from going a little nuts when I felt Stephanie slip her hand into mine. She wrapped her cold fingers around my cold fingers. I looked over at my daughter in the dim light. Rivulets of black ran from her eyes to her chin. I felt her warm breath on my face in the warm, muggy car. I dared not scoot toward her or even relax in her direction; I dared not move lest she pull the hand back into her lap. I wanted to make a show of this, let the mother glancing in the rearview mirror know that my daughter was as worthy of love as her own, but I stayed still. Until we reached the gas station, Stephanie didn't let me go.
I called a tow truck from the Chevron station where the woman dropped us, and when that driver arrived, Stephanie and I traveled back out to the Stafford highway with him. As soon as we pulled behind my car, Riki and Amanda l
eaped out. "Where the fuck have you been?" Amanda yelled. "Do you know how long we've been sitting here?"
The tow-truck driver—an older man with a potbelly and black suspenders, gray whiskers, and bad breath—stood up straighter. His fist clenched and he shot me a quick look. If this were my kid, that look said, I'd knock the teeth out of that sass-mouth. He went around to the front of the car. I pushed past Amanda and climbed in; Mollie reached over to wrap her arms around my neck. Her face was red and puffy, and Mary's chin trembled. They'd burrowed into the back of the car, Mary said, and stayed there while Amanda and Riki stood outside and smoked, threatening to leave as soon as they found a ride. But Amanda hadn't left. Maybe she'd had the chance to go, but she had stayed to watch over Mary and Mollie. I'd let myself lose faith in her, sure she'd ditched her sisters, but she hadn't. I embraced Mollie and thanked Amanda, though silently. I still regret not stirring enough generosity in myself to tell her how grateful I was to find her there.
The driver poured gas in the tank, and I tried the engine. No matter how I fiddled, the engine wouldn't start. The fuel-injection system had seized, and there was no fixing it out there in the dark. Just as the tow-truck driver had warned me when I first got him on the phone—it's a bad idea, he'd said, a very bad idea, to let a car like mine run out of gas.
He packed our luggage and all of us into his truck, hooked up the car, complaining to himself and dragging chains back and forth, and hauled us to the nearest settlement, which was noth ing more than that same Chevron and a motel. He left my car in a bay to be attended to the next day, a time-and-a-half Sunday. While I wrote him a check, leaning over his hood, the teenagers, all three, ran away—gone before I could see them leave. I looked up, and they were no longer there. "Where'd they go?" I asked Mary, who shook her head. I shook my own head and cursed them, then lugged our bags and Mary and Mollie across the highway to the hotel. My mother was long home in Idaho by now. Once I checked in to a room, I phoned to tell her what had happened with the car. And to tell her that the three girls had jumped from the tow truck and disappeared. After I hung up, I settled into the pillows, though my back felt like a pile of bricks rather than soft flesh and warm blood. Mary and Mollie, already in their pajamas with the TV on and the covers of the other bed pulled up tight, seemed glad to be somewhere calm and safe.
"I'm hungry, Mom," Mary said out of that relative calm.
"Me too," Mollie said.
Of course they were hungry; we hadn't eaten since we'd grabbed sandwiches in downtown Portland that afternoon. The hotel had vending machines with bags of crap; the only other place within walking distance was the Chevron across the street, out here in the middle of nowhere. I put on my shoes and jacket and headed for the gas station. I had no idea how much money was in my account, but it wasn't much. If the attendant wouldn't take a credit card for food, we were out of luck. I'd put the motel room bill on that same card. I couldn't imagine how much the repairs would cost—more than I could manage. I scurried across the highway, remembering how Mollie had once asked me why when you're worried, your stomach gets so small. That's how mine felt now, tight and small.
When I got to the edge of the parking lot, I saw Stephanie leaning into the driver-side window of a souped-up sports car, a low, red, throbbing car. Stephanie was giggling, her hip cocked, and the boy in the driver's seat was grinning at her—she reached out her hand and he put something in her palm. I ran to the car, pushing my daughter aside and sticking my own face close to the boy's. "Do you know how old she is?" I shouted at him.
The kid, maybe seventeen or eighteen, leaned away from me and stomped on the gas pedal to make his car roar. "What's your problem, lady?" he said.
"My problem is that my daughter is fourteen years old. I saw you give her something. What did you give her?"
He looked over his right shoulder and sped his car backward out of the parking spot, forcing me to jump out of the way. Then he peeled forward across the asphalt and was gone.
Stephanie stood on the sidewalk, hands on her hips, with Amanda and Riki behind her. "Why did you just do that?" she said. "What is with you? Why can't you leave me alone?" She turned to look at the other two girls, as if waiting for them to join in the castigation. I stood with my hands on my hips also, the very picture of the irate mother, in front of the three of them. Stephanie took a step toward me. "Why don't you go back to the hell you came from?" she shouted in one last burst. A line she'd apparently been waiting to use on me at just the right moment, and the moment had arrived.
"Let's get out of here," Amanda said, tugging on Stephanie's arm. Then the three of them bolted. Like a startled flock of dull, gray pigeons, they were off all at once, leaving me to stand between two yellow lines. They melted into the night, hooting and shouting.
I plodded in the other direction, into the overlit gas station. The weary clerk nodded, as tired of me as I was of him. Shaking with anger and fear, I bought wrinkled hot dogs and chips and milk and the last sad apple in the place. And one ice-cold microbrewed ale.
When I got back in the room, the phone was ringing. It was my mother, who'd told her husband, who happened to be a state police officer, about what was going on. "We think you should go home tomorrow," she said. "If the girls are gone, they're gone. You can't stay there and look for them. If you leave them behind, it's because they've asked for it." She was frantic, I knew, to help me.
I didn't admit that I'd just seen them. I didn't tell her they'd taken off again. I just thanked her for her support and her ideas, which were both correct and impossible for me to imagine acting on, and hung up to go in search of any metal thing that would get the top off my bottle of beer. Mary suggested the buckle on her shoe and brought it over to me. I sat on the end of the bed and worked the thin silver buckle around the crimped cap, prying against it until my arm muscles were about to pop and my upper molars ground into the lower ones. Finally the lid flew across the room like a miniature Frisbee, pinging off the cheap wood dresser and flipping to the floor. I left it on the carpet and drank the beer in a series of long cold pulls while staring at an old episode of The Simpsons. Homer was beating Bart; Lisa was trying to calm everyone down. Mollie laughed. Mary asked if I was okay. I stood up to latch the chain on our door and to close the curtains over the windows. I shut us in for the long night ahead.
Eleven thirty was the hour shining from the bedside clock when I opened my eyes in the dark. Mary was shaking my shoulder. "Somebody's at the door," she whispered. Mollie sat up in the other bed, clutching her blankets to her chin. "Mommy, I'm scared," she said, her hair sticking out as if electrified.
I'd heard the pounding on the door, dull thuds, but had tried to convince myself the noise was coming from the next room and had nothing to do with us. But the sound was ours, and now the worst possibilities pushed into my mind: It was the police telling me one of the girls was dead. A county deputy informing me that they'd been arrested, raped, maimed, run over on the black strip of highway in front of the hotel. I wondered how to protect Mary and Mollie from the news on the other side of the door, and how to protect myself. I threw the bedspread around my shoulders and made my way toward the steady banging, not at all prepared to face whatever this was, many miles from home in a place where I had no transportation, no money. I peered through the peephole. It was Stephanie's face on the other side.
"What happened?" I asked her after I'd unlocked the door and yanked it open. Stephanie stood on the motel breezeway, cold air rushing around her and into the room, the lights of the Chevron station glaring in the background. I was face to face with her, cooled adrenaline pooling in my hands and feet. "Where's Amanda?" I said.
"She's sick," Stephanie said. "She needs help."
I peered down the breezeway for some glimpse of what was going on, then turned back to tell Mary and Mollie to climb in bed. I followed Stephanie, the concrete walk chilling the bottoms of my bare feet and the motel bedspread dragging behind me like a train. Around the corner, along another corridor of doors
that led to rooms just like ours, Amanda was lying on the ground, her eyes closed. Riki squatted next to her.
I stopped just before we got to her to glare at trembling Stephanie, who hadn't quit gnawing on her fingernails since I'd opened the door.
"What did she take?" I said, kneeling down. Amanda twitched; she moaned. I stared at Riki, sure she was the one who'd suggested they get drugs, which obviously they'd managed to do even way out here in Podunk. I put my hand on Amanda's face; it burned hot.
"Mom, she's not on anything," Stephanie said. "She's just sick."
"Jesus, come on, Stephanie," I whispered so we wouldn't wake the people in the room behind us, so they wouldn't call the front-desk clerk, who'd send someone up to kick us out. "Don't give me that bullshit. What's she on?"
I got Amanda to her feet and wrapped the bedspread around her body. Stephanie held her on one side while I propped her up on the other, and we began shuffling her toward the room I'd rented. "You have to tell me what happened," I said again. "Where'd you go? What did you take?"
"We didn't go anywhere, Mom. Why can't you believe me?" Stephanie's face drooped with fatigue and exasperation. She rubbed her eyes with her free fist. "We just walked around and she said her ears hurt. She has that bad cold."
That statement caught me short. I hadn't noticed Amanda had a cold. Wind gusted over the hotel railing, chilling me, embarrassing me. Even though I'd spent the past thirty-six hours with her, I'd failed to notice my own daughter's illness.
Mary let us into the room, and Riki stood Boo Radley-like in the corner while I rolled Amanda onto one of the beds and told Stephanie to get a warm washcloth. I called the front desk, and the clerk—the same guy Stephanie had badgered into giving out my room number while Amanda slumped across the lobby sofa—agreed to call a cab. "Could you make sure they'll take a card?" I said. "I don't have cash."
Live Through This Page 14