by Sara Taylor
I took issue with her thinking on a whole bunch of levels, but Ma gave me the look that said “drop it,” so I kept my mouth shut.
She got in touch with her brother first, explained about her impending wedding and her need to run away. He had done well for himself, lived in a shared apartment in Utah, worked for an insurance company during the day and went to school at night, and he promised that he’d help her any way he could, she just needed to get to him.
Ma had been a little more difficult. Anna-Maria’s email had come while we were in Florida. All she needed was for someone to get her out of Texas; if she were dropped by the side of the road in New Mexico she would be eternally grateful. Even with the frank descriptions of the girl’s situation Ma was understandably hesitant about kidnapping—because, legally, that’s what it was—her friend’s daughter, had eventually agreed to meet Anna-Maria and give her a chance to be convincing in person, possibly drop in on her parents and assess the situation at home, but made no promises.
What had happened to our front wheel, Anna-Maria said, had been an act of God: three days around Mr. Rue had more than convinced Ma that there was no point in arguing him out of marrying his daughter off; seeing how it was that Anna-Maria’s mother lived convinced her that she couldn’t allow the girl to unwillingly share that fate. And that was how we came to have a refugee from Gilead, Texas, riding shotgun between me and Ma, glancing over her shoulder every so often but mostly keeping her eyes straight ahead, except for when she tipped her head back to drop gummy worms into her open mouth.
I made bets with myself that she’d crack, take off in the middle of the night or just walk out on us in broad daylight and hitch her way back, but she didn’t. It doesn’t matter that what probably drove her to stay with us, what drove her onward, was fear of what would happen if she did go back; her courage was in facing her fear of the unknown world.
CHAPTER XVI
We could have got to Utah in two or three days of steady driving, but Ma didn’t want to take any chances. She’d not written the book on how to disappear forever and never be found, but she’d read it plenty of times. Task one was simple: play the waiting game. Annie was only a few weeks shy of eighteen, and when she got there no one could force her to go home, so we dropped off the grid for a bit.
Annie wouldn’t cut her hair but Ma dyed it in a rest stop bathroom in Wichita Falls at two in the morning on our first night out of Gilead, and with ripped jeans and a pair of amber-tinted aviators and a paisley-print bandana instead of her white cap covering her hair she looked like any other countrified teenage girl with questionable fashion sense. Even so we stayed away from people, didn’t act cagy but avoided busy places, prime business hours, and to me it felt like the beginning again, like we were once more truly on the run. Ma didn’t say anything at first, and I didn’t say anything because I didn’t know what to say, and Annie didn’t probably because she was terrified and didn’t know how to talk to normal people.
Ma had told Margaret-Mary that we were headed to Nevada when she asked, and after laying tracks north until we hit the border and Ma went in the trunk and dug out the other set of license plates, the not-really-legal ones we’d been given when we bought the car in West Virginia, the ones registered to an old woman too blind to drive. We doubled back with those plates on and struck out west—now that she was helping, Ma wasn’t about to half-ass it, but she wanted to stay as much on the right side of the law as she could, and transporting a runaway minor across state lines for any purpose was right out; she knew from her parents’ shady past that state lines, state cops, state sovereignty and the differences in states’ laws could be used to a person’s advantage.
We stocked up on field rations from an army surplus and instant coffee and drums of water and went looking for no man’s land, some place to hide right in the open until we could get back to life as usual. We drove until we nearly ran out of country, stopping within a stone’s throw of the Rio Grande. It was national parkland, and there was heaps of it, stretching far enough in desert and mountain that I felt like we could never be found.
And there we sat for five weeks.
There were official campsites, so we bought our permit, parked our car, and pitched our tent, and as far as anyone was concerned we were on a perfectly innocent family camping trip.
It should have been dull as hell, hanging out in the middle of nowhere, moving every few days to a new campsite within the park, just in case. At first Annie was quiet, “processing” as Ma put it, and Ma had even less to say than usual. Then the waiting started getting boring, and Annie started getting comfortable around us, and we all calmed down a bit because it’s impossible to stay that keyed up for long even if you are convinced that the police have the dogs and the choppers out combing the country for you, and I realized that I should have enjoyed their silent phase while it lasted. I tried talking to Annie a bit to bring her out of herself, but every conversation turned into a debate, and you couldn’t debate Annie. It didn’t matter if she was right or not, or even if she thought she was right or not, she’d still win. And then I’d feel stupid and cranky, and then feel juvenile because I felt cranky and wanted to pitch a fit. I figured with all of those brothers and sisters she would have been taught the edict of “let the younger ones win sometimes.”
There was only one time that Ma stepped in: like her brothers and sisters, Annie was curious as to what I was.
“I’m a human-fucking-being. I just so happen to be doing less of the fucking than I’d personally prefer.” I’d thrown in the gratuitous profanity in the hope of shocking her enough to drop the question, but she was relentless.
“You have to have a biological sex—everyone does. It’s part of being a ‘human-effing-being’ as you put it.”
“Sex I may have, but what it is or isn’t is nobody’s business but mine.” I’d been, as always, fastidious about doing my dressing, undressing, and other personal business well out of sight of everyone. “And gender I do not, and that’s the long and short of it.”
“Everyone has a gender,” she said.
“Well, Alex doesn’t,” Ma cut in, her voice hard-edged. “And there is nothing wrong with that. And that is the end of this conversation.”
We all retreated to our own corners after, but I had the distinct feeling that I was the only one that felt ruffled, angry and powerless.
Annie didn’t turn everything into an argument when she talked with Ma, though, and it wasn’t long after they got into the habit of chatting with each other that I felt something awful creeping up inside me, that made tears squeeze out of my eyes when I thought too hard about it and no one was looking. Ma loved me, but she preferred Annie. Didn’t matter to me that I was her kid, that Annie wasn’t long for our company, that I was fifteen and she was nearly eighteen and probably some kind of genius besides, that Ma had no other source of adult conversation and I didn’t count because I still didn’t dare disagree with her. Ma liked talking to Annie, and Annie liked talking to Ma, and that left me out in the cold, and feeling about five years old. I’d never been jealous of Ma’s friends before, but she’d never had a friend that was so young, that I viewed as more my peer than hers.
Good thing we were out in the nowhere lands, or else I may have lost it. We could have been on a boat, with me stuck close to them every moment.
At first light I wandered out—Ma shouting after about snakes and scorpions and flash floods, sum total of our standard morning conversation—and left them to their reading and their talking. It was and was not like the mountain I had known when we first set out. This landscape was steeper, scrubbier, the land more bone than flesh, more rock than earth. At first I thought the whole place just looked dead, kaput. But the arid land had a dusty, painted beauty of its own, and it crept into my bones as I grew familiar with the trails and overlooks and the clear bareness of it all. As much as I loved it, it did not cease to be an alien landscape, familiar only in that I’d seen it on TV, read about it in books; we could as w
ell have been on the moon. And I missed green. I craved verdancy. I still wanted to go home.
Every morning I went walking, if only to avoid their intellectual romance, and every afternoon I meandered back. At Ma’s suggestion, Annie dragged me through the schoolbooks we had—it was not as painful as I thought it would be, and she was patient, and kind about my mistakes, so that I could not help but like her teacher self. And in the evenings my mythic desire was satisfied, the one I’d had when we first left home and Ma told me a story for the first time: after dinner, as the darkness began to fall, we built up the fire, lounged around it thinking and watching the stars come out, and when she wanted to Ma would break the night sounds, not so much tell us a story but remember for us a bit of life-before-my-father. And sometimes, if I felt like it, I would recite poetry. They’d been big on us learning poetry in grade school and I had a mind like a bucket for rote memorization; I could do a lot of Frost, and heaps of the Romantics, and bunches of dirty ones that I’d found by myself, but mostly I said the ones that made something in me thrum, the ones I’d learned on my own more recently because I wanted to be able to keep them with me, if we left suddenly and abandoned the things that we’d picked up on the way. I told my mother that she was the bread and the knife, told the sky that I was myself three selves at least, and in those moments I felt that I was at least Annie’s equal.
On the twenty-first of July, the day she turned eighteen, Annie was awake before both of us, standing at the edge of the campsite, watching the sky like she was about to go before a firing squad. Ma had a cake for us to have for breakfast, Lord knows where she got it, and Annie perked up some at that. Then Ma put the battery back into her cellphone—I remembered then the moment in the diner, realized that that was the moment that she’d made up her mind about kidnapping Anna-Maria—and handed it over.
“Call whoever you need to, there’s a lot of credit on there.”
Annie looked blank for a moment, then took the phone out of hearing and tentatively dialed a number.
“Who’s she calling?” I asked.
“Her brother, I’m guessing. She didn’t want him to know where she was until today, so he wouldn’t have to lie if his parents asked him. Help me get this stuff in the car. As soon as she’s ready we’re going to roll.”
When Annie came back to where our campsite had been there were still tear tracks on her face, and her nose was red, but I could tell that they were happy tears.
We stopped in the first town we came to, hit a laundromat and a truck stop to get showers—the goal up till that day had been to hide; we hadn’t bothered so much with creature comforts—then we went to the big thrift store and kitted out Annie: new shirts, long pants, jacket and shoes and a bag to hold it all in. Then to a department store for things you really didn’t want to buy secondhand: socks and underwear, a plastic sleeve for her documents, notebooks and pens and a Bible. She’d taken nothing with her when she’d left but the papers she had to have and the clothes that she stood up in.
You’d have thought we’d bought her the moon.
She still ducked down whenever she saw a cop, seemed a bit skittish around people, but Annie was more relaxed—she was in disguise, she had reached the age of independence, she was too far away from home for anyone to recognize her, had been gone too long for everyone to still have their eyes peeled for her.
Now that I knew our time together was coming to an end I enjoyed having her around. She smiled and cracked wise and we all sang along to the radio and ate popcorn while watching the sun set and slept in the car, and I wondered if this was what life would have been like if I’d had an older sister.
The day before we got to the brother in Utah, Ma got quiet again, and I wondered if leaving Annie meant leaving her happy mood behind. When we stopped for food for the last time Ma wrote out her cell number and made Annie memorize it until she could spit it out without thinking.
“If anything happens, if anything goes wrong, if ever you don’t feel completely safe, call up and say, ‘Give Alex a hug for me,’ OK? I don’t know if I can trust anyone with you, and I want an out for you if things go wiggy. Give me your brother’s details, just in case.”
We found the apartment complex late in the afternoon, outside of the city proper, where there was room for green things and breathing. It was a 1950s affair, well kept but not much prettier than the place we’d stayed in Florida. But the area looked a little safer, like the people breaking into your house would be after electronics instead of meth money, like the residents would have electronics that would make breaking in worthwhile. We sat in the car for a bit, taking in the scenery—the brother had said he’d be getting home earlier than usual, but Ma didn’t seem inclined to rush. I figured she was worrying, brother or no, about sex trafficking or organ harvesting and a bunch of other sordid possibilities. Annie I couldn’t read at all.
Before we got out of the car Ma pulled three twenty-dollar bills out of her wallet and made Annie put them in her bra.
“Call me and I’ll come and get you as fast as humanly possible. I promise.”
Then we all three went up to the door.
Annie paused in front of it, and I saw the curtain of one of the front windows twitch. She was getting up her nerve to knock when the door shot open, and a young man who was twenty years or so off from being the spit and image of his father shot out, grabbed her up around the middle. Then they both started crying, and I figured Ma had been worrying in vain.
We stuck around long enough to meet the roommate—a quiet Mormon boy working towards a medical degree—see the apartment, and hear the brother’s story of running away from home, which involved stowing away in a moving van and sleeping rough, and was a few hundred percent more harrowing than Annie’s. Then there was hugging and hand shaking and more hugging, and then we were in the car and Annie was on the front step of the apartment with her brother’s arm around her shoulders, waving us off.
It felt anticlimactic, so I was glad when Ma stopped at the first diner she saw and took a booth in a quiet corner.
“Coffee, lots of it,” she said when the waitress came. Then amended: “Half caff if you can do it,” when I pointed out that she’d never sleep again if she drank regular at that time of day. We sat there for a good long while, bent over two hot mugs, thinking our own thoughts, and I was sad that Annie was gone but I was happy that it was just us again, that I didn’t have anyone to be constantly shown up by, that I could be unapologetically and unabashedly myself.
“Is that what it would have been like, having an older sister?” I asked, and Ma looked up sharply.
“Maybe,” she said. “Why do you ask?”
“I’m glad I don’t. I like it being just you and me.”
“Things would have been different, if you’d grown up with one.”
“Yeah, then I’d never have gotten a word in edgewise.”
“She didn’t talk that much.”
“Not at first, but once she’d gotten warmed up . . . I thought I was in school again.”
She laughed at that, then looked thoughtful.
“Speaking of, we’re going to need to think about enrolling you soon. When we left Florida I thought we would have gotten to the end of the road before we got to the end of summer. School starts up in a month, and between the car and the extra slack weeks I really need to find some work—we’re running out of money.”
“We could go for a cheaper car,” I suggested.
“No. The station wagon was expensive, but it should get us where we’re going with the minimum of maintenance. I don’t want another flying-wheel incident.”
“Well, apparently that was all God’s fault, so we’re probably safe from that happening again anytime soon. How many people do you know that have joined cults that you’re worried about a repeat?” I asked.
“That would depend on how you define ‘know’ and how you define ‘cult.’ A lot of people have a religious phase—some people it lasts their whole damn lives. You only need t
o worry, I guess, when they want to get out and they can’t. Or when they force their kids into it. Kids make everything complicated.”
“How do they do that, exactly?” I was just a little offended by the comment.
“They’re human beings without rights, sort of potential human beings, and you get one thousand chances to screw them over before they grow up. I’ve known people that joined for themselves, but stayed for their kids—you can’t change something that big in someone’s life without giving them whiplash. You have to give Annie some credit, even if you don’t like her—it takes guts to walk out.”
“I never said I didn’t like her.”
“But you don’t.”
“I do too!”
“Lie to yourself all you want, Alex, but don’t try it on me.”
CHAPTER XVII
We sat in the diner until past dark, bathed in the steam of cup upon cup of thin, sour coffee, with dinner an intermission in the middle. Then, when we couldn’t stay any longer without risking caffeine toxicity or seriously pissing off our waitress, we got back in the car. We didn’t get on the highway, though, but drove just out of town, then pulled over.
“At least in this boat sleeping outside will be half comfortable,” Ma said as she took the key out of the ignition and a coin out of her pocket. “Call it, front or back.”
I got the front seat to myself, stretched out comfortably with my head pillowed on spare clothes, but even so I woke up periodically throughout the night and could feel that Ma was still awake, still thinking.
I couldn’t get back to sleep at the point where it was too dark to see much, but too light already to go on pretending that it was still night. Ma I don’t think had slept at all. When I sat up to fumble clean socks out of my backpack she was standing beside the car, smoking a cigarette and staring up at the sky.