American Heart

by Laura Moriarty

  His blue eyes watched, heavy lidded, as I re-folded the note. He made a sound like a kitten mewling. I picked up the butter knife, looking at my reflection in the blade. I could only see a sliver of myself, some of my nose, and half of one dark eye. No one would know. No one was watching, not even Boogie, and not anyone from above. Only Matt himself might remember.

  But this was not the person I was, either. Not when it came down to really doing it. I still didn’t believe anyone was watching, watching out, or watching over. But I could repel evil with what was better. I could turn the other cheek.

  I stood up and put the butter knife back in the drawer. I put the cheese grater away too. The spoon I’d used to lure Boogie to the bathroom was still on the counter, but Boogie had licked it clean. I could only smell the faint whiff of Boogie breath if I brought it right up to my nose, but just doing that made me gag.

  I put the spoon back in the drawer with the clean ones—it’s not like I was applying for sainthood. I shut the drawer and crouched low again, looking down at his sleeping face. His mouth was open. He breathed softly, in and out. I could see a flake of yellow wax in his ear.

  “I’m Sarah-Mary, by the way,” I said.

  I slipped the bills in my coat pocket and left him there, just with himself.

  8

  I WAS JUST getting ready to jog back across the street to the pancake house when Chloe stepped out from behind a parked car and scared me so much I said a bad word. When I saw it was just her, I said another one. She was holding both our bags, and even in just the dim glow of the streetlight, I could see she looked mad, like I was the one who’d scared her.

  “I told you to wait in the restaurant!” I whispered. “How long you been out here?”

  She reached forward and slapped my shoulder. It didn’t hurt because of the thickness of my coat, and because she didn’t do it hard. But she definitely slapped me. I stepped away from her. “Watch it,” I said.

  “You were gone so long. I was scared for you!” Her blue hat was on crooked. “Why were you there for so much time?”

  I nodded. I guess I had been in Matt’s apartment for a while. So it wasn’t exactly crazy for her to start to worry that I was getting killed or raped or chopped up into little pieces. I don’t know how she was planning to help me out, but I have to say, it was sort of sweet that she was worried enough to come across the street and wait in the cold.

  “I’m fine,” I said. I looked over each of my shoulders. Cars were still rolling by in the street, but no one seemed to notice us. I took my backpack from her and reached in my coat pocket. “And here you go. That’s all you gave him, right there.”

  She looked at the bills, then back up at me. “How . . . ? How did you . . . ?”

  “I got my methods.” I might have had a little swagger in my step, hearing myself say that. I liked that she was looking at me all impressed, and anyway, I didn’t want to tell her about the roofie in the drink, or why my hand still smelled like peanut butter. She already seemed stressed out enough. She was breathing deep, one glove pressed against the cross strap of her bag.

  “So you’ll pay for a hotel?” I asked. “That’s a Super 8 up the road. See it?” I pointed at the lit-up sign, maybe a quarter of a mile away. “We can share a room if you want to save money.” I moved over to the sidewalk and started walking, waving her over. It was too cold to just stand and talk.

  “Yes, okay.” She hurried over and fell in beside me. “But you don’t . . . you don’t want to go to the bus station now? Maybe it would be better to call from the hotel room and see when the next bus leaves for your town?”

  I waited before I answered. She was going to argue with me, as soon as I told her. But I’d already thought my decision through. I had two reasons for changing the plan. One, I felt bad for falsely accusing her of lying to me, even in my own head. And two, she still didn’t have ID. The new plan was the only one that would work. I could hear our footsteps on the pavement, and the cars purring by on the street.

  “I’m not going home tomorrow,” I said. “I’m going to hitch with you all the way. Up to Canada.”

  She stopped walking. “You can’t do this,” she said. “What about your aunt? What will she think?”

  I didn’t even slow my step. She hurried to catch up.

  “Sarah-Mary!” she said. She said my name like it rhymed with secretary. I looked back at her, but I didn’t stop walking.

  “Sarah-Mary! Answer me, please. What about your aunt? She’ll be alarmed if you don’t come home.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” I said, my tone hard, like I meant it. Which I did. It was really none of her business. I’d deal with Aunt Jenny when the time came. I was already in so much trouble that it made no sense to get more worried about it now. Also, it seemed to me Aunt Jenny was the last thing Chloe should be concerned about. If I left her now, she was done. She might as well go turn herself in. She couldn’t buy any kind of ticket, not without ID. And she couldn’t hitchhike on her own. She couldn’t even get a hotel room with her accent. Really, if I went home now, I’d either have to lie to Caleb and tell him I got her an ID and a bus ticket to Canada no problem, or I’d have to tell him the truth and explain that I’d left her in St. Louis in as bad a shape as he’d found her, or actually a little worse off, as now she didn’t have a car to sleep in, and she was about a hundred miles farther south of Canada than she had been.

  When I pictured Caleb looking back at me, neither of those options sounded very appealing.

  “Look,” I told Chloe. “It’s no problem if you can buy me a bus ticket home from Canada. I don’t know how much that’ll be.”

  She nodded, still looking worried. But what else was she going to do? She didn’t even point out that she’d already given me a hundred dollars for a bus ticket. But I planned to use that on food. I wanted to be able to buy whatever I wanted, without her going all nutritionally obsessed every time, or not letting me order bacon.

  “What’s your plan for the border?” I asked.

  She didn’t say anything. This time, I was the one who stopped walking.

  “You don’t have a plan?”

  She took off one of her gloves and rubbed her eyes. “I don’t know,” she said. And just the way she said it, I could tell she was tired.

  “I was just headed north,” she said. “That is all I could think to do.”

  I didn’t say anything. That made zero sense, for her to have just started driving north from Arkansas, with no plan about how to cross into Canada. Canada might let her in, but it didn’t seem like the US would just let her out, like Oh, what the hey, you made it this far! And it wasn’t like she could just sneak across, and not go through a checkpoint. They would for sure have drones cruising around, even out in the countryside. And it would be a lot colder up there. What did she think she was going to do? Burrow through in the snow? In her nice boots with the little heels?

  “We’ll figure something out,” I said, starting to walk again. That’s how it worked sometimes. When you really had to find a way, that’s when you found it.

  I sounded like Tess. That’s what she would have said. But I knew it wasn’t exactly true. Obviously, sometimes there isn’t a way, no matter how hard you look.

  Even though I was paying in cash, the clerk at the Super 8 wanted to see my ID. That was no problem—my fake ID was still tucked in with my makeup in my backpack. I have to say, Matt P. really had done good work back in September: Rachel Robbins of Bend, Oregon, who’d turned twenty-one just the previous August, really did look like me, and the weight and height were exactly right. The clerk squinted at the photo for a long time, and then she quizzed me on my address and my date of birth like she was a grouchy bouncer in a club. But please. I could have rattled off the answers in my sleep.

  “Sorry,” she said, sliding the license back across the counter. “You just look so young.”

  “Oh, thanks.” I gave her a nice smile. “Lucky genes. My mom’s half Portuguese.”

>   That was just a safety lie, in case for some reason she had to meet Chloe. For now, Chloe was outside, waiting while I paid and got a key. We didn’t know how often they were showing her picture on television, and even though she looked different now, wearing her eyeglasses and the knit hat, there was no point taking extra risks. When I came out and told Chloe our room was on the third floor, she knew, without me saying anything, that we should walk right past the elevator and take the back stairs up instead.

  The room was just a normal hotel room, freshly vacuumed, with two double beds and a heater humming under the closed blinds of the big window. But it felt strange, the two of us standing there in the doorway together, looking at the yellow bedspreads with their matching green pillows. For all I knew, Muslims had some special rule about how and where they were supposed to sleep. But I guess she decided it was okay. After she walked in, the first thing she did was unzip her boots and wriggle out of them. She left them right by the door.

  “You are going to shower?” She pointed toward the bathroom. Its flickering fluorescent light had been left on. “Before bed? Or in the morning?”

  “I think tonight,” I said. Now that we were inside where it was warm, I felt how tired I was. But I hated to go to bed with cold toes. “If you want to go first, you can.”

  “Yes, thank you.” She rubbed her ear. “I will be fast. You need to use the toilet?”

  I shook my head. She took off her white coat and hung it in the little closet. But then, still wearing the knit hat, she went right into the bathroom, with her whole bag, and closed the door.

  Weirdo city, I thought. I couldn’t figure out why she’d take her whole bag in with her. Even if she’d wanted to change in there, even if she was just modest, she could have taken what she needed out.

  I could hear heavy footsteps overhead, somebody walking around in the room above. Without even taking off my backpack, I went over to the bed by the window and fell down at a diagonal across it, holding my hands over the heating vents. I heard the toilet flush in our bathroom, the sink running, and then the first spatter of shower water. I pulled both my arms in close to my body, trying to think.

  Maybe she took her bag in the bathroom because she was worried I would go through her things. I don’t know if I would have thought of it, but now that she was being all cagey, looking through her bag seemed like it would have been the responsible thing for me to do. I wouldn’t have been super nosy. I would have done just a quick search for suspicious materials, like they did at malls, and some of the grocery stores too now. Really, it would be my right to tell her I needed to look through it, and now I was thinking that maybe I’d do just that when she came out of the bathroom. I mean, I was going pretty far out on a limb here, believing that she hadn’t hurt anyone, and that she didn’t plan to. I’d feel awful if she turned out to be lying.

  But she might not be lying. And she might be offended if I said I wanted to look through her bag. She probably would be offended—she seemed the type. She might even say no, even if it was just a bunch of clothes in there, just as a point of pride. I might say no, if it were me. And if she said no, what exactly would I do in response? Leave her here? Turn her in? It wouldn’t do any good to give her ultimatums I didn’t plan to carry out.

  I was still lying there and worrying about it when she came out wearing black wide-legged pants, a white sweatshirt, and a pair of fluffy pink socks just like the ones she’d given Caleb. But the big difference was she’d taken off the knit hat, so I could see her hair. She hadn’t gotten it wet, and it looked thick and wavy, maybe from the humidity of the shower. When she came over closer to the lamp, you could see a little red in it, glossy in the light.

  “You got pretty hair,” I said, because it was true, and because it surprised me. I mean, you would think if your religion made you keep your head covered all the time, you wouldn’t put too much work or even thought into how your hair looked. But she’d definitely dyed it.

  She made a groaning sound, touching the top of her scalp. “It’s henna,” she said. “But I haven’t been able to get it done since summer. My roots are atrocious.”

  She set her bag, all zipped up, between the other bed and the nightstand. I looked down at it, but I didn’t say anything. She’d left her glasses off, and her face was shiny from some kind of moisturizer.

  “The water pressure is good,” she said, sitting on her bed with one leg tucked in, her other foot resting on the floor. She had a dry washcloth pressed up against the ear that she’d been rubbing. “But it gets very hot. Be careful.”

  I rolled my eyes. I was pretty sure I knew how to take a shower. I picked up my backpack and headed to the closet. Before I hung up my coat, I took off Tess’s watch and zipped it in the pocket, as I wanted to protect it from the steam of the shower. But I’d already decided I was going to take everything else, my whole backpack, in the bathroom with me. If I couldn’t look through her stuff, she couldn’t look through mine.

  “Do you take long showers?” she asked.

  I already had one foot in the bathroom, but I leaned back out so I could see her. She was sitting there on the bed, her hands resting on the knees of her black pants, looking at me like she’d asked something that wasn’t strange at all.

  “Excuse me?” I asked.

  “You’ll be in there how many minutes? Do you think?” She was smiling at me, but I’m sorry—it was an odd question. I didn’t know what she was planning on doing while I was in there. I looked at the old telephone on the nightstand. She was going to call someone, maybe.

  “I take a normal time in the shower,” I said. “Why?”

  She nodded, still smiling. “I’m going to pray. It will take longer than usual, because I could not pray during the day. I do not want to startle you when you come out.”

  I kind of made a face. I know it sounds rude, and I didn’t mean to be, but I couldn’t help it. I was thinking, yeah, I would have been startled if I’d come out and seen that. I knew the way Muslims prayed from television and movies. They weren’t like Christians, who could pretty much do it on the sly if they felt like it, just bowing their heads with their fingers clasped. For Muslims, it was this whole-body workout, with all the standing up and kneeling down and bowing and then standing up again, over and over. I’d seen videos of thousands of them doing it all at once, the women separated from the men, and something about it, so many people doing the exact same thing at once, seemed a little sci-fi to me.

  I felt bad about making the face, though, so I tried to say something nice.

  “Don’t you have to, like, face a special direction or something?”

  “That’s right!” she said, real enthusiastic, like I was a third grader who’d gotten two times two correct. “We face the direction of Mecca. I have a compass. I keep it with me, just for that.” She unzipped her bag like she was getting ready to show me.

  “Okay, well . . .” I’d already ducked into the bathroom. “Have fun.”

  Probably not the best thing to say. But it was safe to say, by anyone’s measure, that I’d had a long day. And I didn’t want to see her compass. I didn’t want to know which way Mecca was. I was getting scared again. I just wanted to shut the door.

  It felt strange, taking a shower right after she’d been in it. It probably shouldn’t have. At Hannibal High, all the girls in my gym class had to jump in and out of little shower stalls one after the other, soaping down and rinsing off fast, with Mrs. Reisig waiting there with her whistle if anyone took too long. But this was different, because it was just one bathroom, with a proper tub and a door. It was like all of a sudden Chloe and I were roommates, or even family, like we knew each other way better than we did. Her damp towel was hanging on the hook behind the door, and she’d left her pink-handled toothbrush out. As quick as she’d been, there was still steam along the edges of the mirror, and I could smell her mint-smelling soap, or maybe her lotion. She’d already packed it away, whatever it was, so I just used the shampoo and soap and lotion that t
he hotel set out for free. The shower did get plenty hot, but I didn’t mind. I stood under the faucet with my eyes closed for as long as I could stand it, trying to let the heat of the water seep into my bones.

  Almost eight hours had passed since I’d said good-bye to Caleb and watched him walk back to the McDonald’s alone. I doubted Aunt Jenny had called the police. She might have called my mom to yell at her, but my mom probably wouldn’t pick up. I just hoped Caleb wasn’t in trouble. Probably not. Aunt Jenny was probably being good to him, consoling him for getting left behind. And secretly pleased that I was gone.

  After I turned off the water, even when I turned off the fan, I couldn’t hear anything through the door. I had no idea how long it would take a Muslim to pray, but she’d made it sound like something extended, even by regular Muslim standards. I dried off slowly and got into my pajamas, and I took my time combing through my hair. I started to wrap my hair in a towel to keep it from dripping, but then, just to see, I stretched the towel out long, pulled one edge of it over my hair, and criss-crossed it at the neck so just my face was showing. It didn’t look exactly right. The towel was thicker than a scarf, and probably not as long. But it gave me the general idea. I turned my head from side to side, my gaze on my reflection.

  I still didn’t look foreign, even with my dark hair and eyes. I’m pretty much almost 100 percent Scotch-Irish, with just a little French, so it would take more than a headscarf to do it. But it was interesting to think about what I’d be like if I’d been born someplace else. I’d still be me. I guess I would. But I might think it was perfectly normal to go around with a scarf on my head, and so going around without something on my head might really feel as crazy as walking around without a shirt. Even if I moved to a country where nobody wore one, I’d be like, Uh, no thanks, I’ll leave mine on. And I’d probably have some weird name that wouldn’t even seem weird to me. I might be out there praying with her right now. Maybe not. If I was still me, I might have stopped praying, and believing in the rules, just like I did here. I mean, underneath, scarf or not, it would still be my head.