Back in the car I asked for my phone back, and I was relieved when he handed it over. It had occurred to me that he might have thrown it away or flushed it down the men’s toilet. I said, “I think this is getting silly, and in the next two minutes you need to choose who we’re going to call. We can call your parents, or the police, or someone you’re related to.” He didn’t answer. “Or maybe the mom of one of your friends.”
He was grinning into the rearview. “Guess why not.”
“Because you don’t want to.”
“No. Because if you call them, I’ll say you kidnapped me from the library last night, and you wouldn’t let me go.”
The grin could have meant he was joking, but he also looked about to cry.
“I just don’t think you would do that,” I said. (It was the way I’d always imagined talking down an armed madman: “But you’re a good person. You don’t want to hurt me.”)
He thought for a second. “Yes, I would definitely do that. And I would tell them everything about the inside of your car, and that would be the evidence.”
“How would you explain your backpack?” I had pulled back out onto the road, heading in the direction that I hoped was toward Hannibal. I also hoped he was too preoccupied to notice.
“I’d throw it away. And if I didn’t have time to throw it away, I’d say you told me to pack my bag for an exciting sleepover at the library, only when I got there you took out this knife and told me I should get in the car, because you always wanted a child and now you could have one.” I wondered if he’d thought this up just now, or late at night in the library, or months ago.
I won’t lie: in a small way, it was a relief to have my mind made up for me, to know that calling for help was off the table. I felt, for a moment, like I wasn’t the guilty one.
And then he started to cry again, and I couldn’t even be mad at him. He was desperate and ten years old.
He wasn’t navigating anymore, and it seemed like the wisest thing would be to keep heading back east toward Hannibal, if only to have more options.
The two travelers did not converse much that afternoon, as both were tired and bewildered, though they stopped along the way for food and drink and played many games concerning road signs and the alphabet and the license plates of passing cars. Once, after a silence of many minutes, the boy sat up straight and began to sing out loud in a high voice like a floating balloon: “Speed, bonnie boat,
Like a bird on the wi-hing,
Onward! the sailors cry,
Carry the lad
That’s born to be Ki-hing
Over the sea to Skye-hye-hye-hye-hye-hye!”
The Library Lady smiled. “Where did you learn that?” she queried. “School,” replied the golden-faced lad. “You got any gum?”
The Library Lady replied that she did not, and the boy commenced chewing on his tongue.
“You know, you look like a cow when you do that,” remarked the librarian, and the two laughed heartily as they crossed the border into the next state.
I thought we were heading in the right direction, and if there were any signs pointing the way to the nearest big city, I either didn’t see them or couldn’t summon the focus to read them. I knew we were going east for quite a while, and since we’d started off going west, I figured that was good. We crossed a long bridge, one I didn’t pay much attention to until I was faced with “Cairo, Illinois Welcomes You!” That I could read. We had crossed the entire Mississippi Goddamn River without my noticing.
On the other side of the road, the side leading back to the bridge, traffic was backed up behind three state trooper cars. In a moment of near cardiac arrest, I thought they were looking for us, until I realized we were headed the other way. They were checking for drunks or fugitives or both, but not for us. At least not yet.
It was 1:16. If we’d been meandering for six hours, it would be at least four or five hours straight back. More than that, because I’d have to find a different bridge back to Missouri. By then Ian would have been missing for twenty-four hours, long enough for the police to pull out all the stops. If they saw my car approaching Hannibal with Ian in the backseat, I wouldn’t even have time to explain before they hauled me off and let Ian tell his story.
My best bet was to drive till Ian got tired of the whole thing, till he missed his family, till he agreed not to turn me in. Most kids gave up the runaway thing after—what, one day? Two? (I was thinking of those kids who hide in their own garages, with a jar of pickles and a teddy bear, and their parents know exactly where they are.) And in the meantime, he’d get a nice vacation from his mother and Pastor Bob. I could somehow introduce him to stellar gay role models. I could let him read The Egypt Game. We could find the wizard.
I was finally thinking clearly enough to realize I had to call the library, and now, or the Hannibal police would have two missing persons cases on their hands, and it wouldn’t be long before they linked them together. And come to think of it, this coming Saturday was the very one I’d lied about when I told Rocky I couldn’t make it to his cousin’s wedding—I’d mentally stored the date, reminding myself to take at least Saturday off and then say something about having visited the Field Museum—and I might be able to work with that. (How lovely, in the midst of what felt eerily like the first act of a Greek tragedy, to discover this one piece of luck.) I could send Ian back as soon as he was ready, then stay away myself for the rest of the week and pretend it was a planned vacation. It might be nice to have a little recovery time.
If I called Rocky now, before the police came knocking, before he had any reason to think I was lying, he might get it in his head that he’d known about this vacation all along. And if I hadn’t told him the details, it was only because he’d been ignoring me lately. By the time I called Loraine and she asked Rocky for verification, he’d gladly back me up. We all did that for each other instinctively anyway, not so much out of teamwork but from the assumption that if it was Loraine’s memory versus someone else’s word, you’d do best to believe the one that hadn’t been steeped in vodka.
I pulled over to the side of the road and said, “You can listen to me make this call. If I don’t call the library right now, they’re going to wonder where I am, and they’ll send the police out looking for me. Then the police will track my car, and then our little adventure will be over anyway.” The idea that the police would spend energy looking for a twenty-six-year-old woman who was four hours late for work when they had a missing child to worry about, and the idea that they could somehow electronically track a car that didn’t even have a CD player, somehow both skated by. He nodded slowly.
“You should say you’re very sick. Do you know a good trick?”
“I don’t need a trick. I do need you to be completely silent.”
I knew Rocky’s cell wouldn’t be on, as long as he was still inside the library. “Rocky!” I said to his voice mail, an octave too high. “Just calling to make sure Sarah-Ann and Irene haven’t burned down the basement yet. Please tell me Loraine remembered this trip and didn’t make a complete mess of things. She said she’d worked everything out with Sarah-Ann, but Lord knows what that really means.” I took a breath and willed myself to slow down. “So Chicago is freezing, I got here this morning, but everything’s good. Have a great time at the wedding this weekend, if I don’t talk to you before then! Sorry again that I couldn’t make it, believe me, I’d rather be there! Oh, and I’m wondering if I left my sunglasses on the upstairs desk yesterday! Call me later!”
Then I turned my own phone off. I wasn’t ready for the return call, and I wasn’t prepared to improvise more lies.
Ian said, “That was really good! About the sunglasses!”
“Thanks, I guess.”
And here I need to plead that despite all evidence to the contrary, I do have a conscience. I could picture the Drakes crying and praying and not being able to eat, even to swallow water. They were imagining he was dead or raped or lost in the woods. But I was also in sho
ck, and going on adrenaline, and I knew that if I focused on the Drakes for more than two seconds, I’d drive straight into the median. It wasn’t so much that I did not think of them, but that I could not think of them.
Ian was very quiet that afternoon, and I was thankful for the peace. He slept a little, then woke up and steered me north. “This way looks very familiar,” he said, as we passed a mile marker and a Video Palace. “I know we’re going the right way.” I stayed in the right-hand lane. It wasn’t as if we were in a hurry. I was still looking, ostensibly, for a place to cross back west, over the river. But at the same time, circling back toward Hannibal felt like a worse and worse idea. Wasn’t that the biggest mistake a criminal could make? To return to the scene of the crime? Besides which, the farther north we got, the closer we were to Chicago, where I knew my way around, and where no one would think to look, and where we had a place to stay. My parents were in Argentina, vacationing and visiting a “cousin” who wasn’t really anyone’s cousin, and they wouldn’t be back till Friday. We couldn’t get there tonight, but if I hadn’t been jailed by this time tomorrow, it might be a nice option.
He slept quite a lot, the deep sleep of someone who’s just suffered an asthma attack or a seizure. I doubted he’d even closed his eyes much the night before. He was relaxing finally, and I wondered why. Every mile we drove, I felt worse. Last night his parents would have called the police, and the police, although they’d have been very solicitous, very thorough, probably wouldn’t have gone into full code red. Ten-year-old boys run off to live in the woods all the time, and they come home when they’re hungry. But by now they had to be seriously alarmed. The earnest people of Hannibal were probably voting what color ribbon to tie on their car antennas and mailboxes. I wondered if Rocky had called me back to tell me all about it, but I still didn’t dare turn on my phone.
By ten o’clock that night, I was worried I’d fall asleep on the road. We got off the highway at a promising exit, and Ian spotted a budget hotel that looked not entirely horrifying. I paid with cash from the gas station ATM, and we checked in as Charlie Bucket and Veruca Salt, and got two rooms. (This seemed important, despite my limited funds. I hated to think of the way it would look to anyone—judge, jury, Ian’s parents, the media—if it ever came out that we’d stayed together at night. When my only defense would be “No! No! He’s probably gay!”) As we climbed the stairs, I said, “You didn’t leave your parents a note, did you?” I don’t know why it hadn’t occurred to me before.
“Yeah,” he said. I stopped on the landing. He was wearing his backpack across his chest, dragging his feet. “I just said don’t worry, and I left them directions for tuna.”
“For what?”
“My guinea pig. Her name is Tuna, and she’s a white crested. She’s named after tuna fish.”
“What did the note say?”
“It said basically, like, ‘One scoop of food every day, change the chips once a week, fresh water.’ I left it on her cage.”
“Nothing else?”
“No. Definitely no.”
I started climbing again, and wondered what else he hadn’t told me.
“Oh, wait,” he said. “There was one other thing.”
I stopped and put my forehead against the brick wall and felt the blood pound in my ears. “Yes?”
“It was just about her vitamin. You need to relax a little bit.” He turned and climbed the rest of the stairs backward.
The rest of the night felt like a hangover. I fell asleep easily and deeply, as if my subconscious couldn’t wait for the chance to work things out in dream logic. But I was awake by 3:11, staring at the red clock numbers and wondering if Ian was still in the next room. Beside the clock, I could just make out the biggest letters on a little folded sign:OOPS! FORGET SOMETHING?
It must have been about sewing kits and razors available at the front desk. I tried not to look at it. I closed my eyes. The comforter was scratchy, but of course that was the tradeoff for the hotel being cheap enough that I could pay cash. I had used my bank card that one time, but I wasn’t going to risk a paper trail again.
I felt like Alice, who jumped down after the rabbit never once considering how in the world she was to get out again. If Glenn were there, he would tell me to go with the flow, improvise, be spontaneous. Though actually, if Glenn were there, he might be too busy contacting the FBI to give inspirational advice.
Ian had given me a finger of toothpaste before bed, but I had no brush, and my mouth felt disgusting now. I could get a toothbrush from the desk. Which didn’t matter, because I was going to jail. And I was going to hell, for worrying about myself instead of his poor parents. Maybe some human rights group would come to my defense, and everyone would see how I’d rescued this child from a terrible fate. I’d escape to Mexico while awaiting trial. Ian would at least remember that someone tried to save him, once. Until the sun came up, I lay there running through various half-dreamed scenarios, most of them about jail, some heroic, some where everyone was yelling at me in Russian. I stumbled to the moldy shower with a horrible dryness in my throat.
(I make it sound as if I had no choice. I wanted to think I had no choice. Of course I had a million of them. The hot water of the shower made that clear. Maybe it came down to this: beneath all the justification, all the panic, I believed we were in the right. I believed this was the home of the brave. And here we were. Here were the brave.)
As I thought things through, I found that I was deeply, almost physically, relieved that Ian had left the note for his parents. The police would be alarmed, certainly, and the good folks of Hannibal would be out with their flashlights, but there was a profound difference, let’s face it, between a runaway and a kid who just vanished in the night. Among other things, the search would be local. They’d look in the shed behind his school, in the woods, at the Starbucks—and all over the library, certainly—but ten-year-old runaways didn’t tend to get themselves across state lines. They didn’t leave in cars. They didn’t have money. It would be a few days, at least, before they started looking into adult accomplices. Janet Drake didn’t even know my name. In a truly ideal world, suspicion would alight on Pastor Bob. They’d give him a hard time, check out his basement. If you’d asked me a week ago who would flee Hannibal with Ian, my money would have been on Pastor Sicko Bobbo.
At 7:00 I sat cross-legged on the bed and called the main library number. After that first pit stop, Ian had stopped demanding I surrender my phone—either because he trusted me now, or because he knew I was too deep in this mess to get out with a single phone call. I got Loraine’s voice mail, which I hoped she remembered how to check. She asked Rocky at least once a week to help her “get the messages out from in there.” “Loraine!” I said. “It’s Lucy, just checking in. Sorry we didn’t talk before I left, but thank you so much for taking care of everything. I assume Sarah-Ann is the one covering my hours this week, and of course she knows exactly what to do, but you could remind her that read-aloud is Friday at 4:30, and we’re on The Borrowers, which I think is in my desk. If she can’t find it, it’s by Mary Norton, N-O-R. And then the craft lady comes Wednesday, but I think that’s it. So . . . as I said when we talked, I’ll be back by Monday morning. I have my phone with me, and thanks for taking care of all this! Bye!”
If Loraine stayed true to form, in an hour or two she’d be yelling at Sarah-Ann for not remembering my vacation, which had clearly been scheduled weeks ago. “Even Rocky knew about this,” she’d say, “and he doesn’t even work under her!”
As I hung up, I looked at my phone and saw I had no messages at all. Four recent calls, though, all from the library yesterday morning, all before I called Rocky’s cell. They would have been worried, of course, especially if someone noticed all the lights I’d left on. But they hadn’t been worried enough to leave panicked messages, and that was a good sign. I imagined a couple of calm ones sitting on my home phone: “Lucy, we’re just wondering where you are,” et cetera.
Ian knock
ed on my door (fast and loud, a lot of knocks) and I opened it. He stood there fully dressed, hair combed, holding out his tube of toothpaste. His eyes looked red, but he was grinning and bouncing on his toes.
“I thought you could use some fresh breath,” he said.
15
Anthem
That day I let him sit in the passenger seat. He was probably tall enough, and I felt I’d be a safer driver without someone shouting things from behind me.
I’d bought him a packet of six little powdered donuts from the hotel vending machine, and now he was wearing them like rings, taking tiny bites from the outside edges. He had on a Cardinals cap, but it was big and boxy, like he’d never worn it before. I wondered if he’d dug it out from under his bed just because it seemed like something good to run away in.
I got back on the interstate. “So, where are we going, buddy?”
He looked surprised, like he’d forgotten he was the navigator. “Oh, you stay on this road quite a while, still.”
“We’re going toward Chicago,” I said. “Does your grandmother happen to live in Chicago? Because I know a place we could stay that’s a lot nicer than a hotel. It would take us a pretty long time to get there, but there’s lots of food, and books.”
“WE DEF-IN-ITE-LY HAVE TO PASS THROUGH CHI-CA-GO.” He was a robot now, apparently. “BUT SHE DOES NOT LIVE THERE.”
“Great.”
For one last time, I considered turning around and driving back to Hannibal without telling him. I could have distracted him from the road signs if I really wanted, and we’d be back by nightfall and I could drop him on a street corner and head out of town. But I could picture him so clearly dry-sobbing into his arm, saying “She came in on Sunday when the library was closing, and she made me get in her car, and she said she was taking me to get some candy! And I love candy, and I didn’t know better, because she wasn’t a stranger! And she started asking all about how much money my dad makes!” There would be a national search, and the newscasters would give the story its own theme music. I wouldn’t stand a chance, even in Mexico. And come to think of it, I didn’t even have my passport with me. No, he really had to want to go home. And judging from the blissful expression on his face as he stuck his head out the passenger window like a golden retriever, that wasn’t quite yet.
The Borrower Page 9