6. Sam thinks about his choices.
A gap in the hotel curtains let in a beam of light, one that landed on Pill’s eyes but didn’t wake her. She was out cold, her blanket wrapped around her head and swirled at the neck. Thank God I had remembered the blanket. She would not go to sleep last night. She kept jumping between beds, her face getting redder, and nothing could settle her, even the Cartoon Network. She couldn’t stop chattering and moving. After midnight I forced her to lie down and I sat next to her on top of the covers so she was trapped, but she kept rambling about the dog in the accident. The cage was twisted and bent and had somehow pierced the dog’s leg, and after she had pulled the cage prongs out, there were these holes in the dog’s leg that started bleeding. She wanted to put bandaids on them, but the dog escaped before she could do that, and now she couldn’t stop worrying about it, the dog running off with those bleeding holes in her leg.
“They would get plugged up with scabs, right? Even without a bandaid?”
“Right,” I said.
“But what if the scabs came off and she started bleeding again and there was no one to fix her? What if she couldn’t find her people and she had to live in a graveyard and it scared her because there were ghosts?”
“The bleeding would stop,” I told her. “And the dog probably had tags they could use those to find the owners.”
She would calm down for ten seconds and then start up again, going over and around the same problems, the wounded leg, the dog being lost and alone. She couldn’t let it go, and nothing I said would satisfy her. Eventually I just turned off the lights. She quieted for a minute, and I thought, finally, and I flopped into bed, exhausted from everything that had happened, exhausted from thinking about it, worrying over it. I needed to peace out for a while, and I thought it was going to happen—I was starting to drift off. But then her little voice came at me through the dark: “Sam?”
“For the love of God, Pill, go to sleep. Please.”
“I’m scared.”
I lifted my arm. “Come here.” She jumped into my bed and burrowed under the covers and scrunched up against my side. She fidgeted, fussing with her blanket, which smelled sour and dank. She shook it out and spread it across both of us, then she changed her mind and wadded it up and clutched it to her face. She grabbed my wrist and pulled my arm tight around her shoulders, and that seemed to help, she stopped moving. Her breathing slowed and deepened, and finally she was out. But then I was awake and couldn’t sleep. I kept seeing the man’s face, the one eye and the blood, which in my memory became less liquid and more gelatinous, a semi-clear goo you could peel away. I kept doing that in my mind, peeling away the layer of goo to see his whole face, I don’t know why. It’s like a clue was there under the mess, one that would make everything clear. My life. The accident. Was it my fault? I had swerved onto the shoulder, and because of that, he had plowed into the truck. Otherwise it would have been me who ate the back of the semi. Me and Pill. I didn’t know if that meant I was lucky or if I’d gotten away with murder. You weren’t supposed to leave the scene of the accident—I remember that much from driver’s ed. So I had broken one law at least. Maybe also kidnapping. I was eighteen, an adult technically, and Pill was my sister, so I didn’t know if that counted as kidnapping. Either way Frankie would blow a gasket when she found out. She’d call the police probably, though she’d be embarrassed to have them looking in her house.
I slept for a few hours, but I woke too early, and all I could do was lie in bed. A soft gray light glowed around the edges of the curtains, getting brighter until it was an electric yellow, a beam slicing through the dust-flecked dark of the hotel and landing on Pill’s face. It was a new day. A day without low-fat granola. Without Frankie. Or Mr. Toessler, glaring at me in AP Calc like he was trying to figure out what was wrong. I was smarter than he was—that’s what was wrong. And now I didn’t have to pretend it wasn’t true. I didn’t have to respect him, or any of them. Which was a relief. Whatever mess I was in, I could at least be myself. Finally. I had two thousand dollars, a car, and my brain. Everything would work out.
I woke Pill and got her going and we drove to a gas station. I bought a sausage biscuit for myself and a jelly donut for her. Frankie never let us have sugary stuff for breakfast, so Pill was shocked by this development. When I handed her the donut she paused, staring at it, and then she took it very carefully, reverently, like she was accepting a priceless relic, and she touched her tongue to the powdered sugar coating. I offered her a bottle of milk to wash it down with because I wasn’t totally irresponsible, the girl needed some nutrition, but she shook her head at that idea and pointed to the fountain drinks.
“Eeh, I don’t know, Pill. What about some orange juice?”
She frowned.
“Alright, but just for today.”
She filled a cup with Mountain Dew, and she snapped on the lid and pierced it with a straw like she had done this a hundred times, though she hadn’t. Which concerned me slightly, how natural it was for her to hook up to a junk food buzz first thing in the morning, but one problem at a time, I told myself. She took a long pull of her drink and smiled up at me and panted, her tongue bright yellow. “Yip!” she said.
Think about your choices. That’s what my wellness teacher would have said. That was her mantra, her message. The little choices we made today, the ones that didn’t seem to matter, led to serious consequences later in life. No one woke up one day and decided to become an alcoholic, she said. It was a series of little slips that led you down the wrong path and then suddenly, there you were, in a heap of trouble. She was speaking from experience, as it turned out, because halfway through the year she got fired for drinking on the job. They found bottles of rum and vodka in her filing cabinet. She had been using them to spike soft drinks she sipped on throughout the day.
I was thinking about her now as we climbed into the car with all our junk food, wondering if this was one of the little slips in judgment that she was talking about, one that would lead on a path of doom. But another part of me thought, who cares? The sausage biscuit tasted amazing, and Pill was in a state of euphoria, eating her donut and drinking the Mountain Dew, rocking back and forth on the seat, licking her fingers, humming. I’d never seen her so happy. While we ate we watched people come and go through the glass doors of the gas station, and it was peaceful and happy just sitting there.
I checked my phone. Frankie had tried to call last night, and then she had texted me, wanting to know where we were, though she didn’t sound overly worried. I had the impression that for a few hours at least, she was okay with us being gone. I didn’t hear from her after that, probably because she had passed out on the sofa. I would need to let her know we had left home. Otherwise she’d think something terrible had happened and she’d go to the police. So I sent her a short text explaining that we were okay, we had made a decision to leave. Which seemed abrupt, but how else could you put it? She would explode when she saw it, but that didn’t bother me now that there was some distance between us. What could she do? Nothing. Nothing. I felt a delicious sense of freedom. I could do whatever I wanted. I could be a Sumo wrestler. Though I didn’t know anything about how you actually became a Sumo wrestler. So I searched up “Sumo near me.”
There wasn’t much, just the Chicago Sumo Club, a bunch of guys who got together and drank beer and watched Sumo. And there was a place named Vern’s Gym, a WWE training center. It had a huge picture of Hakuho on its homepage—Hakuho, crouching forward, fingers reaching for the dirt. A good sign, I decided. Pill and I would pay a visit.
7. Frankie comes to
The phone was ringing and it woke her up but she couldn’t find the damn thing. She searched frantically, shoving her hands under the couch pillows, between the cushions. She slid the magazines off the table and her phone fell with them—she could hear the clunk as it hit the floor—but it wasn’t her cell that was ringing, she realized. It was the landline. She stumbled to the dining room and picked it up just as the answering machine started, so she smacked it until it stopped. Someone from the high school was on the line, wanting to know where Sam was.
“He isn’t in school?” she said.
“No, ma’am, he isn’t.” Ma’am yourself, she thought. But why wasn’t he at school?
She couldn’t get her mind to turn over, it was frozen. She had texted him last night, asking where he was, but did he answer? She couldn’t remember. Christ, her brain was so slow this morning.
“I will call you back,” she said. She hung up and called out for him. No answer.
She rushed to his room but he wasn’t there, and his bed hadn’t been slept in. She checked Priscilla’s room, which was also empty, and then she grabbed her phone. Last night she had sent him a message asking where he was, but did he answer? She couldn’t remember. She checked, and there it was, a message from him: We’re okay. We decided to leave home. Don’t look for us.
Her fingers were shaking so violently it was hard to type, so she dictated her message: This better be some kind of joke. You’d better get back here right now young sir or you will lose every privilege that makes your life worth living. She sent it, then waited. She started pacing, her breathing getting tight, as if the asthma was coming back after all these years. Stupid asthma. Still no answer. She texted him again: Well? When can I expect you? But then a message came back: her number had been blocked. The nerve. The absolute nerve of that boy. She threw her phone across the room and it bounced and slid across the floor, spinning.
She went back to his room. His laptop was gone but his textbooks were still there. Some of his shoes were gone. His duffle bag and cell charger, gone. So he just packed his stuff and left like he was going on a trip somewhere, a little vacay. She would have slapped him if she could, if he was right there in front of her. And Priscilla too. They were in cahoots, those two. But of course Sam had no idea what Priscilla was really like, what she was capable of when you needed her to do something she didn’t want to do. He would find out.
She drank some coffee to clear her head, and it helped. A plan started to form. She would go to the police and tell them everything, show them the text. And they would marshall their resources and find those two recalcitrant brats and bring them back home. It couldn’t be that hard, surely, to find two kids.
She drove to the police station, a small one-story brick building on Main Street, and she parked in front of it. Her feet were unusually cold, so she turned up the heat and waited to warm up sufficiently. “I’d like to report two missing children.” That’s how she would start. And they’d ask questions, probing for details, and she’d show them the text—We decided to leave home. And they would wonder about her, because Sam was well-known in Lost Nation as an academic wunderkind. Maybe they’d think that she was to blame. Why would such a smart, respectful boy just up and leave unless something was wrong at home? And then they’d want to come in her house and look around, and they’d see the mess and judge her even more. But the worst part—the part she couldn’t stand—was her colleagues finding out. If they knew her kids had run away, they would judge her harshly and use it against her somehow.
She couldn’t possibly tell the police, she realized. She couldn’t tell anyone. And maybe it wasn’t necessary. Those two brats would come back, most likely, when they ran out of money. Sam was smart but not as smart as he thought—he had very little experience in the real world. And with Priscilla in tow—what could he do, really? They would be back in a few days, a week, tops.
But just as she was about to leave, an officer came out, stood on the sidewalk and bent sideways, peering at her. He was short and muscly, his waist loaded with pistols and radios and God-knows-what-else. He came closer and she lowered the window.
“Can I help you?” he said.
“No, that’s okay. I changed my mind.”
“Changed your mind about what?”
“My back door was unlocked this morning and I was worried someone had broken in, but then I remember I had left it unlocked on purpose last night because my ex-husband was coming in from Chicago after a late flight. He lives in Hawaii and he was coming to visit the kids and so I left the doors unlocked, but then I realized it’s tonight that he’s coming, not last night, silly me, so everything is fine. I don’t need anything. Except maybe more coffee.” He leaned in, checking her eyes closely. There was a thin, fresh cut on his chin.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine, thank you.” Though her ‘thank you’ came out more like ‘fuck you’ in tone, and he frowned. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Yes, I’m fine. Truly.” She wiggled her fingers in a goodbye, rolled up the window, and put the car in reverse. When she drove off he was still standing there, hands on hips, watching her leave.
On her way to work she thought up her story: Her ex-husband lived in Hawaii, which she never mentioned because it never came up, but there it was. Sam was stressed and confused about his future and wanted to go visit his father. And Priscilla went with him. That would stop people asking questions. In the meantime, she would sign Sam’s acceptance letter for him. He’d be all too happy to go to Princeton after having a taste of the real world.
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