Everyone stared at me—my sister in her half-cocked sort of way, Hobbs right behind her, a stranger beside him, and Red Grass—as rain dripped off my nose. My back burned with the need to be rid of my pack, but I couldn’t do it. Not yet. It was time for my line. I had to say this right, or I’d ruin everything.
“You have a lot of nerve showing up here,” said Hobbs. I glanced at him, the anger in his eyes as clear as the array of tattoos on his skin, and everything I’d threatened him with earlier came back to me with all the comfort of wet socks. “How the hell did you even find us?”
The perfect segue.
“He was tracking you.” I cleared my throat, repeated myself with more assuredness, and didn’t squirm as I looked into eyes that labeled me detestable. “He has a fancy device; I can show it to you. He planted the tracker somewhere on your water filter, I guess, put it there one day when you—”
I had more lines—a whole Oscar-worthy story of how a smallish woman might snatch a gun from a biggish man—but it didn’t matter just then. Hobbs and J.D. pushed by, took Red Grass by the arms.
“Don’t hurt him,” I whispered, which wasn’t one of my lines, as the men walked off together into the night.
“Come in,” Olivia said like a hostess, and I retrieved her suitcase from beside the door. She gasped, pulled it into her hands and to her chest, and thanked me half a dozen times before leading me inside.
Archaic oil lamps cast a flickering radiance on the wooden walls. Around the room lay a random assortment of odd furniture, including a table and chairs made of leather-lashed tree parts, a solitary canoe paddle in a corner, and two mattresses covered with patchwork comforters. At the line where the room was lost to darkness sat a woodstove with a flat top for cooking; I half expected Ma Ingalls to appear with a spoon in her hand.
The door closed behind us, and I spun around, looked past my sister. It was beyond sense to be worried for Red Grass, of all people. If anyone could take care of himself … And it was his turn to say the right lines now. I’d done my part.
“They won’t hurt him,” Olivia said, as if sensing my thoughts, tasting them on her tongue. “They just want answers.”
Shadows bobbed around her, made her fierce, a giantess. Her braids were untangled. Her skin glowed. And maybe it was because of what Red Grass had said to me about how I chased people away that I couldn’t even summon a proper scold for what she’d put me through. What I asked, I asked without anger, because I needed to know.
“Why do you keep running away like this? Are you testing me? Do you hate me?”
“No, Jazz. I love you,” she said. “And I’m sorry. It was wrong, what I did, and my heart felt hollow for it.”
I cried for the first time in years, a warm berry still cradled in my hand.
An hour later, Olivia and Hobbs sat together like Siamese twins in a frayed mauve chair, with her head nestled into his shoulder and his arm slung around her in a show of couplery. Whatever tension had existed between them earlier? Gone. Which left me and my desire to go home at a distinct disadvantage.
I needed to be with him, Olivia told me earlier when I pressed her about why she’d left. For once I didn’t question her dangerous attraction, was grateful in that moment simply to have found her and too welled up with emotion to say much anyway.
It was a different story altogether when Hobbs and his friend J.D. returned without Red Grass. So after Hobbs found the disk on the bottom of his water filter and J.D. left to flush that disk down the toilet—which worked somehow, though there didn’t seem to be any electricity in the house—I asked plenty of questions.
Where’s Red Grass? What have you done with him?
Red Grass was locked up somewhere for the night.
Where?
In an outbuilding on J.D.’s land. Somewhere he wouldn’t cause more trouble while everyone got a good night’s sleep, Hobbs explained, as J.D. reappeared with a blanket and water in hand, then went out the front door once again.
I relaxed a little. It seemed, at least, that Red was being treated humanely.
Hobbs sat in the worn chair, said it was time to figure me out because I was just full of surprises, and I was reminded, strangely, of my interview with Emilia Bryce. Olivia climbed into the chair beside him as the lines came back to me, the story Red Grass had asked me to tell. How I’d seen him with the tracking device at the restaurant and recognized it for what it was. How I knew that following him was the only way I’d see Olivia again. How I’d trailed him in secret for a while before realizing that handing him over would be the only way to prove myself trustworthy again. How a golden opportunity presented itself when he tripped hard, and I was able to snatch his bag—and the gun inside it. How he’d been a surprisingly good listener with a pistol pressed into his side.
Two ways to look at things.
I held my breath. Waited to see if they’d buy it.
Hobbs held out his hand. “I’ll take that gun,” he said.
I closed in like the hills of West Virginia over the Kennaton U pack resting against my legs—home now to Red Grass’s knife, gun, and phone, which lost reception somewhere in the woods. How opportune it would’ve been to call home if it had worked, insist that my father come to get us, make him remove us from these people who were turning us into stranger-selves. I should’ve done that in the first place—insist my father step up and take charge of my sister. This never should’ve been my responsibility. Would the world crash down around us if he let go of his grief—and his booze—for one day? He was the damned dad.
He was the damned dad.
And I’d tell him that now if I could, if the damned phone worked.
“I’m keeping the gun,” I said. “Call it insurance. Two men and—”
“—two women together,” Hobbs finished. “Isn’t that how you got Red Grass to give you his knife? But a gun and a knife aren’t the same thing by a long shot, are they? No pun intended.”
Maybe not, but he wasn’t getting it—or the opportunity to realize that the Smith & Wesson was bullet-free, that Red Grass had taken the ammunition out himself.
“You’ll just have to trust me,” I said.
“Will I?” His eyes sharpened. “And what’s my insurance? How do I know you didn’t call me in and that my father’s not already halfway here?”
Father? I didn’t show my surprise or tell him that he was wrong—that it was Red Grass’s phone number on the poster, that there wasn’t anyone to call but him. As I watched my sister’s hand land on Hobbs’s chest, I decided to respect Red’s request and say nothing about those truths. The poster had made Hobbs run and hide, therefore the poster was power. Besides, this was interesting. Why had Hobbs stolen from his father?
“I didn’t call you in. I won’t do that now, either, as a goodwill gesture for you taking care of Olivia,” I said. “I just wanted to be back with my family.”
He brushed a hand over my sleepy sister’s hair, and she burrowed closer to him. This had turned into more than something to watch; this had become something to worry over. And, from the look in his eyes, he knew that I knew it, which gave him a sort of power, too.
“So you’ll play the good girl now?” His eyes dared me to reveal myself, as rain battered the cabin’s solitary window. “That’s what you want me to believe?”
I knew that nothing more would happen tonight, as long as I agreed. Tomorrow I’d have to deal somehow with the man locked in an outbuilding. Tomorrow I’d have to tear Olivia away from all this, and it wouldn’t be easy. I’d be the blind one not to see how this life suited her—the wild adventure of it all, even the bad boy she’d latched on to. But tonight? All I had to do was agree. Easy. Still, every part of me felt like a clenched fist when I did it.
I’d be a good girl.
For now.
Anyone would examine the devil if presented with a safe opportunity, which is why I studied Hobbs once he’d climbed into bed beside my sister, left me with the empty mattress. I wasn’t stupid. I wai
ted until I knew he was asleep—his breath sounds deep and even, his features smoothed over like stained glass. He lay across from me, and the light from J.D.’s reading lamp, cast from the other side of the room where he would sleep, hit him just so.
The devil had a bump toward the bridge of his nose; no surprise that I hadn’t been the first to punch him. Too-long brown hair flung over his face like dirty mop strands. He had a cleft in his chin. I wasn’t sure how I felt about those, but it worked with his tough-guy image, and was one of the few tattoo-free parts of his face. There were other tattoos, I knew, along his arms: faces that disintegrated, shapes that were half-man and half-beast, boats and birds and mountains. He wasn’t horribly ugly, I guess.
I closed my eyes, felt the sting of salt and dirt and exhaustion behind my lids. Tried to tally the amount of sleep I’d had since leaving home. Couldn’t honestly recall. Breathed. Counted to a hundred. Shifted my legs. Opened my eyes. This, at least, was normal. I rarely had an easy time falling asleep, even when I was dog-tired. Olivia, on the other hand, could sleep anywhere, at any time, as if she’d dipped into the genetic pond that was our mother’s tendency for constant sleepiness enough never to be troubled by insomnia.
I got up, walked past Hobbs on light feet. J.D. sat in his shabby chair, reading a book. Lonely or content, I couldn’t tell.
“J.D., I’m sorry to bug you,” I said as quietly as I could, “but can I get a glass of water?” Sometimes it helped bring sleep, sometimes it didn’t.
He set the book aside—“Of course”—and returned in short order with a tall glass, which I drank in a way that would best be described as hungry. My throat opened, and I gulped, eager for the water. He refilled the glass.
“You’re dehydrated. Sometimes it sneaks up on you. You’re cold, too,” he said when I shivered.
“A little damp.” I patted my denim shorts.
He reached into the shadows and opened a wooden chest behind the chair. J.D. at least was no devil, with his ready smile and sociable manner. He wasn’t conventionally attractive—his dark hair threaded through with gray, his nose filling too much of his face, and his brown eyes both close-set and wide—but he was easy enough to look at.
“My sister left the country years ago and asked me to keep a few of her things,” he said, still bent over, rifling through the container. “I’m sure she wouldn’t mind if … Ah, here we go.”
He produced a pair of sweatpants, which I gratefully traded for my wet shorts in his bathroom—a small room with a toilet and a yellow tub that felt too modern by a mile for the cabin, and a mirror that I avoided. When I returned to the main room, I found J.D. in one of the wooden chairs, holding a child’s coat and with a wistful expression on his face.
He motioned me toward the cushioned seat. “Better?” he asked, as I parked myself.
“A million times.” I nodded toward the coat. “Is that your sister’s too?”
“Alice tried to have children of her own, but …” He grimaced, and I recalled the story Hobbs told about the crosses occupying the land behind his house. “It’s Hobbs’s jacket,” J.D. continued. “Alice married his father and became his sort-of mother for a good part of his life. I guess that makes me his sort-of uncle.”
I raised a brow. “Well, you’re nothing alike.”
“No?”
The question hung in the air as I took another sip of water. “He’s reckless, dangerous, a drifter, and a thief,” I said. “You, on the other hand, seem like a nice person. Sorry, I know you like him, and that he’s sort-of family.”
His expression never changed. He really did have the strangest eyes. Open-diary eyes.
“I wouldn’t say Hobbs is dangerous,” J.D. said. “Reckless?”
My fingers tapped the glass. “You don’t think it’s dangerous to live the life of a train hopper, or reckless to cover your whole body with tattoos? He’s going to regret the hell out of that when he’s eighty-four.” If he lives that long, I added silently.
“It wasn’t always tattoos,” said J.D.
“You mean he looked normal once?”
“It used to be pen markings.” J.D. held my gaze. “He’d draw all over his arms and face. Red pen, blue pen, green. He liked green.”
“See now, that’s weird, you have to admit,” I said with a quirk of my lips. “What’s wrong with plain old skin?”
“Nothing, but his wasn’t plain. It was scarred with cigarette burns and worse. The drawings covered the scars for a while. I’d draw them myself sometimes. Eventually he made them permanent with tattoos. I think they make him feel … normal.”
Shame wasn’t something I’d often felt. A few times, but not often. I felt it now, though. Remembered the thought I’d had a few minutes before while looking at Hobbs’s dented nose: No surprise that I hadn’t been the first to punch him.
“Who did that to him? His father?”
“He’s not a good man. Hobbs has always said his time with my sister was the happiest in his life. Your sister seems to make him happy, too.”
Now I understood better why the poster had made Hobbs run, what it was that he feared. I could tell J.D. the truth—that it wasn’t Bill’s phone number on the poster, that there wasn’t anything to fear over that at all. I could do that. I could tell Hobbs, too, in the morning. But the poster might’ve been the last power I had left. I’d have to think about it.
My quiet didn’t go unnoticed by J.D.
“I’m sorry. I’ve made you uncomfortable.”
“No, I’m glad you told me,” I said, but didn’t loosen my grip on the glass.
“At least you know the truth. If Hobbs were all bad, would he have asked that I drive you and your sister to the glades tomorrow before trying to find Beckett—this man who has some of his coins?”
“Wait—” I leaned forward. “You have a car?”
“Truck.”
“Oh, my God”—I stood, all but leaped out of my skin—“you can take us home!” I lowered my voice. “Please take us home.”
“I’ll help you, but first he wants to make good on his promise to your sister. He wants me to get her to the glades in his stead, because he can’t do it himself anymore. Isn’t that what you want, too?” J.D. watched me with a curious light in his eyes, his fingers steepled near his chin.
I nodded woodenly, reminded myself that this was progress. This was Olivia at her destination. This was a vehicle, taking us to a place where there would be a working phone. This was the promise of a ride home.
I returned to bed after saying good night to J.D. Turned on my side. Looked again at Hobbs, those tattoos.
Train hopper, thief, devil. Victim.
Every time I thought I knew how to categorize him, something changed; he wouldn’t sit neatly in his box. I reminded myself that I couldn’t afford to care. Tomorrow, control would shift back to me. And maybe it made me a bad person, but I wasn’t above using Hobbs’s fear to end my personal nightmare.
The nightmare didn’t end that night, though. Once I finally slept, I dreamed again of the caged city of Oran, but this time Hobbs was outside the gates, dodging hands that meant to drag him through the bars, one set of them mine. And I had a feeling that maybe Olivia, who’d always been the freest bird I knew, was right there beside me.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Wishes
OLIVIA
Playing games after Christmas Eve dinner at Babka’s was one of our traditions. Some of the games were carried over from her childhood in Slovakia, like throwing walnuts into the corner of the room, then opening them with hope that the nut wasn’t fractured or rotten. Other games were invented.
My favorite invented game was called Wishes.
Here’s how it worked: Think of something you’d wish for someone else. Write it on a slip of paper. (While writing, you could not get pen marks on Babka’s white tablecloth or the wish would be void and you would have to wait a whole year before you could wish it again.) Fold the paper in half, exactly. Sleep with the wish under y
our pillow for seven nights, and dream every night about the wish. If the wish was pure enough, if it was worthy, it would come true.
There was no rule that said you couldn’t share wishes—it didn’t make them void or anything—but, for the most part, Babka was the only person who shared her wish. Every year, she wished that Grandpa Dušan was at peace, and then she’d look at the empty chair she’d put at the table for him in case his spirit came for the meal.
I’d shared my wishes when I was little, but back then they might not have been called worthy. I wished a Hollywood star would drive through Tramp and try some of Babka’s biscuits, then tell all of her friends so we could become famous. I wished everyone could see voices and colored letters, and taste words. (That’s impossible, Jazz said.) I wished Jazz would get married to someone with a big house, and we could all live with her and their twelve dogs. I wished my sauce could win a million-dollar prize in a sauce contest. (I wished I could find a sauce contest.) My wishes turned more serious as time went on, though, and they turned private, too.
Sometimes I wish I could forget him, Mama said to me once about her father. I don’t want to miss him anymore. She fell into a long up-and-down after that. That was the first Christmas I made a wish for her:
I wish Mama would forget about Grandpa Orin, because it’s what she wants, too.
Every year after that, I made a wish for Mama. I’d put the paper under my pillow—folded exactly in half—and leave it there for seven nights starting on Christmas Eve.
I wish Baby Jesus or Santa Claus would come to our house and take the letters and put them in Grandpa Orin’s mailbox.
I wish Grandpa Orin would forgive Mama and un-disown her.
I wish Mama would finish her story and send it to Grandpa Orin, and that it makes him love her again.
I wish Mama and Grandpa Orin could be reunited.
It never occurred to me until after Mama died that there might be a danger in the way we went about wishing, by asking a force outside ourselves—be it fate or luck, Santa Claus or Baby Jesus—to make something come true. Maybe wishing made it less likely that we’d try to make things come true on our own. Maybe wishing made something inside us go lax.
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