by Kara Thomas
“I’ll be right back,” Jesse says to me.
“And what?” I snap. “We can catch up?”
In the doorway, Kat is staring at me with a look I can’t decipher. Once Jesse and Amos step around her, she closes the door, shutting me in.
I bolt after them, jangle the doorknob, and yell, “Jesse—don’t do this.”
When there’s no response, I ball up my fist and bang. “JESSE—”
On the other side of the door, the gun goes off.
KAT
NOW
Amos stands over the hole he just put in the floor, the gun still smoking at his side.
Jesse’s body is flush against the wall. His eyes are wild as they move from Amos to the bullet hole.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” I shout.
Amos shrugs. “She’s quiet.”
“You put a bullet hole in the floor!”
Amos clicks the safety on the gun back into place. “I’m not sure our security deposit is the highest order of concern right now.”
I glance at Jesse. His face has taken on a ghastly hue and he’s still practically hugging the wall.
I lick my lip. The taste of my blood, coupled with the pain behind my eyes, makes me gag. I step into the bathroom across the hall, listening to Jesse and Amos argue as I run the tap in the sink.
“What if someone heard the gunshot?” Jesse says.
Amos snorts. “Yeah, I’m sure the family of deer outside are calling the cops right now.”
I open the vanity doors, root around for a washcloth. Amos is the only one who uses this bathroom. There are no towels or washcloths up here; I’m not surprised. Judging by the smell and look of him, the last time Amos showered was probably around New Year’s. I close the vanity doors and turn the tap off.
I step back into the hall and nod at Amos’s gun. “Give me the bullets.”
“What? Why?” he says.
“So you don’t use them, obviously.”
There’s something unsettling about the look Amos gives me. He’s been drinking, yes, but he does that every day. It’s not like there’s much else for him to do around here.
For the first time, I can see that he doesn’t trust me.
I drop my voice to a whisper. “We obviously don’t agree on how to handle this situation. Until we figure it out, I’d rather you didn’t go around shooting things. Claire doesn’t need to know it’s not loaded.”
Amos holds my gaze as he raises the gun. Releases the clip of bullets and hands it to me.
I slip the clip in my pocket and head downstairs. On the last step, it occurs to me that Jesse still hasn’t asked if I’m okay.
* * *
—
I’m holding a hand towel to my nose, the water in the sink running pink from the blood I’ve washed away. I really should clean this sink, I think.
My mother would gag at the sight of this bathroom. This whole house would make her skin crawl.
Our landlord is a busted-looking old man who only comes by once a month to collect his fifteen hundred dollars cash and complain about his arthritis. I hang out upstairs when he’s here, because he gives me the creeps. Once, when Amos went to see friends in Burlington and didn’t come back for nearly two days, Jesse had to greet him and give him the rent. But the landlord brags about not having cable—hasn’t had it in twenty years—so I feel confident he has no idea who we are.
I rinse the hand towel again, run the tap until the water turns hot. I hold it to my nose and catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror. My eyebrow area is already turning brownish purple, and I am reminded of another big, huge problem.
I’m supposed to babysit the Dolan girls tonight.
The Dolans live in the nearest house; each morning I make the half-mile walk there before Mrs. Dolan leaves for work to give her two girls breakfast and put them on the school bus. At three p.m. I return to collect them and entertain them for forty-five minutes until Mrs. Dolan returns with a twenty-dollar bill for me. If you add in the time it takes me to walk to her house, I’m paid less than ten dollars an hour.
But, obviously, we need the money.
Tonight, Mrs. Dolan asked me to babysit from seven to ten, for fifty bucks. I’m just grabbing dinner with a friend, she’d said, which means she’s going on a date.
Anyway, I almost had a stroke when she offered fifty bucks, thinking of the dwindling pile of cash in my suitcase in the farmhouse. Almost all the cash cobbled together before we left went to the car and the first month’s rent.
We were supposed to have a hundred thousand dollars, split among us. Forty-five thousand each for me and Jesse, and Amos; ten thousand to Mike Dorsey. It would have been enough to hide out in the farmhouse for however long it took to get Canadian passports, and find a place to stay across the border.
Amos promised that he knew a guy who could deliver. He could get real passports, even—it would just cost several grand. Several grand it would take us months to save up, even with Jesse working now, driving a snowplow truck.
The point is, we need that fifty bucks. The money Jesse makes barely covers our expenses; I suspect that Amos is raking in a lot more during his trips to Burlington than his share of the rent that he dutifully forks over every month, but I can’t come out and accuse him of holding out on us when he’s not even supposed to be here with us. He was supposed to take his share of the ransom money and disappear on a yacht to the Caribbean or whatever.
The money hardly matters now, and in any case, I can’t go babysit the Dolan girls and act like everything is normal while Jesse and Amos hold Claire prisoner here. I certainly can’t do it with a black eye.
But if I cancel, lie that I’m sick, there’s the chance Mrs. Dolan will drive by the house to spy on me….
There’s a grimy basket of old Mary Kay cosmetics under the sink, next to all the cleaning products and my tampons. I haven’t dared throw away the makeup in case it belongs to our landlord’s dead wife—his favorite topic of conversation, according to Amos. I paw through the detritus until I find a crusted tube of concealer.
I’m using my finger to dab the makeup over my bruise when I hear the bedroom door. I step out of the bathroom, heart hammering, as Jesse plops down on the edge of the bed. He hooks a hand over the back of his neck; we’re the ones who are supposed to be dead, but he looked at Claire on the floor of that bedroom as if he’d seen a ghost.
I sit beside him, take his hand, and weave my fingers through his. He returns my tight grip.
“We have to leave,” he says. “Find somewhere else, fast.”
“We can’t.” The throbbing behind my eyes grows; I hold two fingers to my brow bone, picture the scar my hair still does not completely grow over. It’s so small, but such an easy way to identify me. “We won’t find somewhere new in time.”
We’d had to be sure none of the communication could be traced to us, which meant Amos had to handle everything. He rotated between different libraries, coffee shops with internet. Always on a burner phone. It was much harder than I anticipated to find an owner who was willing to forgo a background check.
We got lucky with this farmhouse, with the landlord who doesn’t ask questions and knocks a hundred bucks off the rent for all the work Amos and Jesse do to maintain the property.
I clutch Jesse’s hand harder. “Even if we found a place to stay, everyone will be looking for us.”
I study Jesse, watch his throat muscles tighten, his shoulders tense. “We can’t go back.”
Hearing him say it makes my insides go cold. What did I expect? For him to lie and say it’ll all be okay if we turn ourselves in—that everyone will forgive the extortion thing, all those searchers whose lives we put at risk on the mountain will give us a pass if I cry and say that I did it because my father was an asshole and my grandmother made me break up with my boyf
riend?
And what about what we’ve done to Claire? Amos just assaulted her, and I’m pretty sure we’ve crossed into unlawful imprisonment at this point….
But he’s gone.
My father is dead. My grandmother had been willing to pay to get me back; she would probably spend her entire fortune in lawyers if it meant she could get both her missing grandchildren back, to keep the Marcotte name from becoming a public disgrace.
He was the only thing she wouldn’t, couldn’t protect me from.
And now he’s gone.
Jesse extracts his hand from mine. Sighs and leans forward, face in his palms. “How did this happen?”
“Amos must have messed up,” I say. “Maybe he talked to someone at home, or maybe he even went back there one of the times he said he was in Vermont.”
Jesse is still hiding his face. An ugly thought rises to the surface of my brain: Maybe I am not the only one who has had doubts about our living arrangement. Maybe he’s weak, and he slipped up….
No, there’s no way. Jesse has as much to lose as Amos and me if we get caught. He hated the idea of extorting Marian, but he agreed to let Amos and Mike go through with it because he knew we needed the cash.
Jesse is in this as deep as Amos and I are. There’s no way he secretly reached out to Claire over the past six months or left some clue behind that led her here.
I move my hand from Jesse’s back to his thigh, feeling him tense under my touch. Lately, it feels like this is his natural reaction to me.
Something is wrong. Beyond the obvious—that everything has gone horribly wrong, and our life here isn’t what we pictured it would be. We are always tired, always stressed, wondering if we will ever save enough to get the Canadian passports and disappear north.
I knew our new life would not be a fairy tale, but it wasn’t supposed to be like this. Anger builds in me, all the things I’ve wanted to say to Jesse the past few months rising up in my throat. I’m tired of making the decisions, of being the one in control. I need him to give me a sign, to say or do something that will convince me our life here is worth fighting for.
Worth killing for.
All I can manage is “Is this about Claire?”
“What are you talking about?” he asks.
“The reason you’re holding back from me,” I say.
I thought I was imagining it at first, the way Jesse’s hands never seemed to move below my hips anymore. He was always too tired, too worried, until I eventually grew sick of how desperate I must have come across. Every night when he comes to bed, he curls up behind me, arms around my waist, pulling me to him like a life raft.
Like he needs me, but no longer wants me.
And now, I’m running out of time to find out why.
“Don’t deny it,” I whisper. “You’ve never let her go, have you?”
“It’s not that.” Jesse almost seems as surprised as I am by his answer. “It’s not about Claire.”
“Then what is it?”
Jesse looks at me. “If they’d never come between us, do you think we’d still be together?”
“What kind of question is that? Of course we would be—we talked about staying together when I left for college—”
“I know we talked about it, but how could you be sure? How could you know that once you got to college you wouldn’t have met some guy you had more in common with? How do you know you wouldn’t have changed your mind and left me behind?”
My stomach sinks. He’d said this wasn’t about Claire, but it has to be. Jesse can only be thinking about what happened on the mountain. How I’d failed the most important test when everything had gone wrong.
Because even though Claire was hurt, lost, and alone, all I could think about was the plan, and what happened if everything had been ruined. About what it meant if I couldn’t escape.
He wants to know if I’d do the same to him.
“Kat,” he says. “How do you know?”
“I can’t know,” I whisper. “I never got the chance to find out. We could have turned into different people, for all I know.”
“What do you mean?”
“That it’s naïve to say you’ll always love someone when you don’t know what the future holds. People can change—”
“Yeah, but feelings don’t.” Jesse’s face falls. “You’re saying you’re not one hundred percent sure your feelings for me will never change.”
I stare back at him. “And you are?”
“Of course I am.”
The look in his eyes does nothing to quiet the jackhammering in my chest. Months ago, I would have found such a declaration romantic. Now, there’s only doubt. What is he trying to convince himself of? That he made the right choice when I told him not to go after Claire on the mountain? Does he need to know how sure I am about him because, if not, he’ll wish he hadn’t stayed with me at that campsite?
Amos’s voice snakes its way back into my head, the thing he said to me at the quarry, before we got in the Camry and drove away from our lives. Guy obviously loves being a hero.
Every day for the past six months, I’ve puzzled over those words. I’ve had to wonder if Amos was right; if Jesse would do things differently if he got a second chance. If he’d save Claire instead of me. The only comfort was that I knew he wouldn’t get the opportunity.
What happened on the mountain happened. We got away.
Jesse wasn’t supposed to get a second chance to turn back.
CLAIRE
NOW
The bedroom door opens, making my heart ricochet from my chest to my throat. Amos wanders in, a bottle of Jack Daniels tucked under his arm. He’s put on some weight in the past six months and lost some of his tan.
“Where’s Kat?” I ask.
“In the shower,” Amos says. “Washing away the shame of getting her ass kicked.”
“I didn’t kick her ass,” I mutter.
Amos twists the cap off his Jack. “Oh, you totally did. It almost made me pop a boner.”
My cheeks fill with heat. Amos takes a swig from the bottle and offers it to me.
If it weren’t for the gun in his other hand, I would grab the bottle and break it over his head. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
Amos shrugs. “A combination of poor parenting and generational entitlement.”
I wish it had been his face I’d slammed into the dresser. Amos sits on the squat wooden chest in the corner of the room, eyeing me over his bottle of Jack.
“All of that shit at the lake house—you being decent to me,” I say. “You just wanted to find out what I knew. What I remembered.”
Amos stands. I recoil as he steps toward me; he grabs a pillow from the bed and settles back onto the chest against the wall, stuffing the pillow behind his back. “Gotta hand it to you. It’s impressive you found this place. I don’t know why Kat thinks you’re so stupid.”
I swallow the sting of rage. “You were there. On the mountain.”
“So you remember, then,” Amos says, considering the label of his bottle. “That’s impressive. I thought for sure you were done when Mike yeeted you into that tree.”
I consider my options; if I tell the truth, that I still don’t remember everything that happened, Amos might view me as less of a threat.
But pretending that I do remember might be my only chance at finding out, after all this time, what really went down on that mountain. And something tells me that no matter what, Amos is not going to let me leave this house.
I command my head into a weak nod. “Why did they want me there?” I ask.
“They wanted a witness.” Amos wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “If you told everyone a man with a gun took Kat away in the middle of the night, Marian might be more inclined to fork over the money to get her back. See, my grandmother may
be a bitch, but she’s as smart as she is cheap. We needed her to think from the beginning something bad had happened and Kat and Jesse hadn’t just run away.”
“You said take Kat away. What was supposed to happen to Jesse?”
“Jesse was going to be shot and thrown over the mountain during the kidnapping for trying to intercede,” Amos says. “At least, you and your boyfriend were supposed to think that’s what happened. Mike was gonna wave his gun around and demand you all stay in your tents. Jesse, of course, would ignore him and go to save Kat and then bang.” Amos makes a gun out of his fingers.
I stare at Amos. “And you thought I would just believe all of it was real?”
Amos shrugs, his expression dark. “You’d know the gunshot was real.”
A creak on the floorboards outside the bedroom makes Amos lower the bottle from his mouth. Jesse steps into the room.
“Get out, Amos,” he says.
“Uh, no, Jeremy,” Amos says.
Jesse sits at the edge of the bed. There’s something different about him—beyond the short haircut and the bulk he’s added to his arms. There’s a forcefulness in his voice I’ve never heard before.
“I’ve got first watch,” Amos says.
Jesse’s face turns scarlet. “I’m not leaving you alone with her.”
“Well, I’d be stupid to leave you alone with her,” Amos says.
“Guess neither one of us is leaving, then,” Jesse answers.
“Guess so.”
Jesse and I stare at each other for a bit before I say, “I hate your haircut.”
“I like yours,” he says back.
I glare at him. “Why the hell did he call you Jeremy?”
Jesse’s face flushes. Oh. That’s the name he’s been going by.
I turn on my side and draw the comforter up over me. Stare at the wall.
“Claire,” Jesse says softly. “Please talk to me.”
“I have nothing to say to you.”