“What’s the name of this little town?” she asks.
“Not really a town exactly. Just part of McKinley County. The mailing address is technically Gallup, though that’s a pretty long way south of here.”
Carly looks to Jen, happy to have been proven right. But Jen is staring up into the birdcage, oblivious. Either hypnotized by the birds or paralyzed by fear. Or both.
“But that’s a different state,” Carly says.
“Not sure what you mean,” the woman says, sounding patient.
“Gallup is in New Mexico, and this is Arizona.”
“No. This’s New Mexico.”
Carly feels Jen’s reaction, at her left side, without even looking. She’s been promising Jen they’ve already crossed over the line into Arizona at long last.
“Really?” As though it could still turn out not to be true.
“You girls lost?”
And then Carly realizes her mistake. She’s raised a red flag, just what she’s been teaching herself not to do.
“No, ma’am. Not at all. We’re on a road trip with our dad. He’s out gassing up the car. He told us we were over the line into Arizona. Wait till I go tell him how wrong he was. How far from here to the state line? You know. Just so I can tell him.”
“Twenty miles or so. Maybe a little more.”
Carly is careful not to look at Jen, knowing how hard that news must be settling in. More than a day’s walking. Just to get to where they thought they already were.
“OK. Thanks, ma’am,” she says.
“You girls have a good day.”
Then the woman puts her nose back down into her paperback book. She doesn’t look at Carly’s or Jen’s feet as they walk out the door.
Carly watches Jen walk down the shoulder of the road with her backpack balanced on her head to keep the sun out of her face. There’s more of a spring in her sister’s step.
“We didn’t end up getting to rest much,” Jen says. “These are really bouncy.”
She bounces more stridently, to emphasize the point, but carefully, so as not to drop the backpack.
“I just wanted to get a little farther away from there first,” Carly says. Which is phrasing it mildly. They ran scared, but at a fast walk.
She’s using the jacket-held-over-her-head method. Her backpack is heavier.
“Did you get their address?” Jen asks.
“Yeah, I’m holding the number in my head till I can write it down.”
“These sure are a whole bunch better. Can we rest now?”
But there isn’t much of a place to stop. Nothing like that nice bench they’d had before.
“There’s a rock,” Jen says.
They walk to it and sit.
The sun is off at a slant already, and Jen’s still doing that thing she’s been doing, looking around as if there’s something worth seeing out here.
Carly slips off her backpack and digs around in it until she finds the little blank book, its pen still clipped on. She flips to the first blank page and writes:
We owe $7.00 to the St. Ignatius Thrift Store at 3397 Route 264, McKinley County, sort of near Gallup, New Mexico. Look up zip code.
She sees Jen peeking over her shoulder.
“How much do we owe by now?” Jen asks.
“Over thirty dollars. But it’s OK. Teddy’ll give us the money.”
“You act like he has money. He doesn’t have money.”
“Well. Some. Not much. But that doesn’t matter. He’ll give us what he has. Teddy’s like that. He’ll know how important this is to us, and he’ll find a way.”
“You act like he never did a thing wrong in his life.”
“He didn’t. It was Mom—”
She tries to stop herself. But the word Mom slips through the gate.
Jen’s mouth forms a small, tight O.
“Now who’s speaking bad at the dead?”
“Sorry.”
Oh, shit, Carly thinks. We should have called him again in that last town.
And that’s more than true. They should’ve done a lot of things in that last town. They should’ve gotten someone to give them a little money, in that special way Carly’s learned how to do without raising big flags. And bought food. And bought sun-screen. And rested. And, yes, called Teddy again. Because Teddy will buy them a ticket to ride a bus or a train. Or maybe he’ll drop what he’s doing and drive out to get them. They only have to walk until Teddy answers the phone. It was never supposed to take nine days.
“We’ll call him again. Next phone,” she says. “We have to walk if we’re gonna get someplace by sundown.”
Jen doesn’t even complain. Just unfolds her skinny legs and brushes off the back of her jeans.
They start off down the road again.
They hear the first engine they’ve heard in a while.
Carly looks over her shoulder to see an old motor home lumbering up the hill. Her heart falls when it slows and then stops in the road alongside them. A middle-aged woman leans out the window. Carly can feel air-conditioning pouring out of the rig. It feels weirdly comforting, something she forgot existed.
They’ve been lucky with the weather. Warm but not hot by day and cold but not freezing at night. But it’s getting warmer now.
“You girls OK out here all by yourself? Need a ride?”
Just for a minute, Carly considers that it might be safe, just this one time, to break their no-ride policy. This woman can’t be dangerous. But Carly can’t get a good enough look at the driver.
Then it hits her, the lunacy of what she’s considering. She must be more tired than she realizes. Even if they’re trustworthy and nice, they’d ask questions. They’d want to know where the girls were headed. Carly couldn’t just say, “Take us up the road as far as you’re going and then we’ll walk some more.” No, they’d get involved. They’d want to help. All grown-ups want to help.
This trip would be so much easier without all these grown-ups wanting to help.
“No, ma’am, but thanks. We live right around here.”
“Around here? Really? Thought there wasn’t another thing clear to Arrow Rock. Nothing much out here.”
“Well, it looks that way,” Carly says, pasting on a smile. “But our house is down a dirt road just a quarter mile up.”
“Want a lift?”
“Thanks just the same, ma’am, but you wouldn’t offer if you’d seen our dirt road. You’d never get down it in this big thing. Need four-wheel drive. It’s fine, though. Really. We walk out here all the time.”
Carly can hear the tapping of the driver’s fingers on the steering wheel. Good, she thinks. He wants to go.
“Long as you’re OK,” the lady says.
Then she rolls up her window, and the motor home takes off uphill with its engine groaning.
The girls walk on.
“You’re getting to be a good liar,” Jen says.
“Thanks.”
“I didn’t mean it like a compliment.”
The woman turns out to be right. There isn’t another thing clear to Arrow Rock. Not even an old house with a hose coiled on its side. Not even a tree with wormy crab apples.
“We could sleep standing up in a field,” Jen says. “Like a horse.”
“They probably have coyotes and stuff out here.”
“Oh.”
They stop and put their spare shirts on right over the ones they’re wearing, and their jackets. Now Carly’s pack is lighter, and she wears it like a hat, the way Jen always does. To keep the setting sun out of her eyes.
Half a mile down, Jen runs off the road a few yards to pick up a walking stick. She doesn’t say it has anything to do with coyotes. Then again, she doesn’t need to.
It’s getting dark fast, and cold, so they walk off-road to a rock hill and find a space to tuck in. That way there’s only one side of them vulnerable to coyotes. And they can hold some of their heat in that small space.
That’s where they sleep.
Well, Jen sleeps. Carly stays awake most of the night, teeth chattering, stick at the ready. But so far as she can tell, there’s nothing awake out here in all this nothing. Except for her.
She wonders if it’s possible to freeze to death out here. Probably not, but she can’t help worrying. This is the first night they haven’t found some kind of shelter, if only a dumpster. She wraps herself over Jen, just in case.
Jen cries in her sleep through most of the night. Carly makes up her mind that she will never mention this. Like it never happened. Like she never saw. Because she would be humiliated if someone witnessed her crying in her sleep. And she wants to spare Jen the humiliation.
Then it hits her that it might already have happened. And she would never know.
ARIZONA
May 10
“Bus station!” Jen shouts. “Score!”
It’s after seven in the evening, and the sun is all but down. A bus station is the best thing that could have happened to them. In fact, a bus station’s the best thing that’s happened to them in a long time. Though neither has said so out loud, that one night out in the cold was something they don’t want to try again.
Not that they can take a bus. Until Teddy answers the phone, there’s no money for any option but the one they’ve been using. Sometimes Carly wonders if walking is really the only way, or if it’s just the only way that doesn’t scare her too much, make her think they’ll be caught and handed over to child services. But she feels like she can’t rely on any new thinking, so they’ve just kept walking. It’s worked so far. Next call to Teddy will be the one. This will be over soon.
They step up onto the wooden porch and read the sign on the door to see when’s closing time. Nine o’clock. That’s good. Earlier than some.
“Wait here,” Carly says, knowing a few steps saved at the end of the day would have to feel good to Jen. “I’ll go inside and see what time a bus comes in.”
“Maybe last bus already did.”
“Then they’d close earlier.”
She swings the wooden door open, and the arrivals and departures board is right there. She doesn’t even have to go inside to read it.
“Eight thirty,” she says. “Last bus is at eight thirty.”
Which still leaves a lot of logistics and problems. If there’s a crowd at eight thirty, even a small one, they can get lost in it. If not, this might or might not work. Like everything else in life lately, it’s hard to know until they try.
At a little after eight, they go inside and wait by the gate, as if expecting someone. Then they get a break, and the only guy who seems to work here goes into a back room. Carly runs to the door and pushes it open, letting it swing shut again with a bang. As if they’ve gone outside.
They slip into the tiny, two-stall ladies’ room and sit on the toilets, one in each stall. With their feet pulled up. For a long time.
They can hear the bus come roaring in, but as far as they can hear, nobody gets off and comes through the station. All they hear is the man who works here punch the ladies’ room door open. Carly’s blood freezes, thinking maybe he comes in and cleans in here after hours. But his footsteps retreat, and the door swings closed again.
Then they hear him lock up for the night. Probably a little early.
It fills Carly with an exaggerated elation. As if they’ve just been locked into a five-star hotel. With room service. Something at the back of her brain registers the sadness of this. But if she focused on that, she’d lose this moment. So she pretends she doesn’t know it’s there.
The first thing Carly does is unlace the new boots and ever so carefully ease them off. She has blisters on her heels. Bad ones. She can see that the heels of her black socks are soaked through, but she doesn’t know if it’s blood or clear fluid from the broken blisters or both.
They’re good boots, as far as that goes. They give her feet a lot more support. Overall, her feet feel better than usual. But the boots are too big, so her heels don’t lock down right. They lift up and sink down with every step, rubbing against the stiff leather. Maybe they’ll break in. Maybe she’ll get protective calluses. Maybe tomorrow’s miles will be a nightmare, and she won’t be able to hide the pain anymore. Lots of things could happen from here.
She peels off her thin socks.
A big, ugly flap of skin drapes off one heel.
She washes the worst foot first in one of the ancient pedestal sinks, yelping out loud when the liquid hand soap touches her heel.
Jen sticks her head through the door. She’s been out in the main waiting room, kicking, and trying to bump and jiggle, the vending machine.
“You say something, Carly?”
“Nope,” Carly says.
She washes her other heel, then wraps both feet in toilet paper and slides her clean pair of socks over that.
Then she goes hunting.
“Look what I found,” Carly says, holding the wire coat hanger behind her back.
She walks to where Jen is sitting cross-legged on the floor, staring longingly into the only food-related vending machine. There’s also a soda machine, but Carly has no magic keys for that and no ideas. Both machines have been centered over a spot where the linoleum flooring is missing.
“Money? You found money?”
“Next best thing.”
She shows Jen the wire hanger. It seems to take a minute to compute in Jen’s head. Carly thinks she can see raw data rattling around in there, waiting to fit. But Jen gets there eventually.
“Get those corn chips,” she says.
“I doubt it. They’re on the top row. I think we have to go with bottom-row stuff.”
“OK, let’s see. Trail mix. Peanuts. Licorice. Potato chips. Peanut butter crackers. Which one should we get?”
“Which one? Are you kidding me? We’re getting everything we can knock out of there.”
In fact, Carly’s thinking maybe she can get multiple packages of each thing. But when she bends the hanger properly and pokes the peanuts down into the tray, she realizes that the one behind it will not mechanically push forward where she can get to it.
Still, five items. That pretty much makes this Thanksgiving.
She looks up through the high, dirty window. The station has outside lights on all four sides, making a nice glow for them to see by, while at the same time making it darker inside than out. So they can move around unobserved. Not that anything or anyone seems to be moving out on the street.
She briefly wonders what day of the week it is.
A huge tan moth beats his wings against the window from the inside. She can hear him. Tapping on the glass. She knows in her head it’s the light he’s after, but she can’t imagine wanting to get outside when you could sleep here. Even if she were a moth.
“Where’d you find a hanger?” Jen asks, startling her.
The peanut butter crackers finally fall, and Jen dives her hand into the tray to grab them.
“In the office back there. There’s this pole where they can hang up their coats. And there was one wooden hanger and two wire ones. The money’s all locked up, I guess.”
Jen eats peanuts in silence for a minute, then dives a hand into the tray when the trail mix drops.
Then she says, “Hey. Carly. Just this once, can we…you know…just eat everything we’ve got? All at the same time?”
“Sure,” Carly says. “Just this once.”
Truth is, Carly needs this moment, too. Even sixteen-year-old grown-ups sometimes need a celebration. Especially when times have been hard.
She takes out her little book and stands, examining the machine until she finds a shiny silver label. It says this machine is serviced by Harmony Vending, 21900 Navajo Boulevard, Holbrook, AZ 86025.
She copies down the address.
“Are all five of those things seventy-five cents?”
“Yup,” Jen says.
She pauses. Doesn’t write anything for a minute.
“Three dollars and seventy-five cents,” Jen says.
It’s half true. She would have known that. Given a little more time.
“I also found one other thing,” Carly says. “There was a first-aid kit back there. And I opened it up and took out two big adhesive bandages. You know. In case I get blisters from these new boots. Just in case. My heels are feeling a little rubbed.”
“OK,” Jen says.
“Are your feet OK?”
“The best. These cross-trainers are the bomb.”
“Good. So…”
“So…what?”
“So, should I put that in the book?”
“Hmm,” Jen says. Her mouth is full of black licorice. “We don’t know what they would cost.”
“I was just thinking, if the guy were here and I said I had blisters, he’d probably give them to me. I mean, I think they’re to hand out. Not to sell.”
“I guess.”
“So you think it’s OK?”
“Probably. Yeah.”
“You don’t think it’s sort of…breaking a promise to ourselves? Like our honesty system is breaking down some?”
Jen chews in silence for a moment, her eyes closed.
Then she says, “Maybe a little bit. But I don’t think it’s a very big deal.”
Carly nods a few times. Then she looks down at the wire hanger and carefully bends it back into wire hanger shape. It looks a little worse for wear. But she hangs it back up on the pole in the back office. It’ll still hold coats, which is the main thing. And then only the adhesive bandages are a little over the line.
Carly calls Teddy’s cell phone number from the pay phone while Jen washes up in the ladies’ room, an odd bathing system with paper towels, liquid hand soap, and water. Jen always seems to find a way to be gone while Carly calls.
She braces herself for the recorded announcement of how much is left on the prepaid calling card she bought herself on that miserable Christmas in New Mexico with her mom and Wade. She doesn’t really want to know. She knows it can’t be much. She shouldn’t be leaving messages every time. She’s been running it down too fast.
It’s just around two minutes. It’s running out.
It rings. And rings. And rings. The way it used to when Teddy was out of minutes on his cell phone. Then Carly hears a click, like Teddy picking up the phone.
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