Accomplice (14 page)

It was late by the time we finally pulled up our drive, and my mom was in the kitchen, stirring something on the stove. I could see through the screens on the back porch and then the glass of the back door. I remembered her critique of my appearance, how I’d been so angry at her. But it hardly mattered. All that mattered was that Chloe had stayed hidden. We were thirty-six hours from the whole thing being over. I thought about Dean and wished there was a way to let him know.

My mom looked pretty in the warm kitchen light. She’s younger than most moms, about fifteen years younger than Mrs. Caffrey, and she could have been a girl, standing there. It was easy to see her sitting across from my dad at the diner, blushing while she tried to figure out if she should offer to pay for her food. Getting used to hearing her name dressed in my dad’s voice. It felt like Dean said my name differently from anyone else. He said it carefully, and even though it was probably him just concentrating on getting all the sounds out smoothly, it felt gentle.

Then again my mom and dad grew up together, so there probably wasn’t a time when he said “Amy” and she believed no one had ever pronounced her name with such care. It wasn’t the kind of thing I’d ask her, anyway. It wasn’t the kind of thing I’d ask anyone, except maybe Chloe.

“Something smells good!” Dad bellowed on the way through the porch. He stood behind her and crooked his arm around her neck. She craned her neck to kiss him.

“Uggghhh,” I said. “Get a room.”

“Heads up, peanut—we have a room. We have a whole house.” Dad started to spoon rice straight into his mouth. “If your mom and I wanted to have at it right here in the middle of the kitchen, there’d be nothing you could do about it.”

“Bart!” Mom’s face flushed. “What’s gotten into you?” She swatted him away.

Dad leaned back against the counter. “It must have been that hot little hostess, swishing around in front of me. Whoa, Nelly. No one’s paid me that much attention since…well, I don’t know. When was the last time you paid me some attention, honey?”

Mom laughed and adjusted the heat on the stove. She spooned half the rice into the serving dish.

“He’s talking about Teddy Selander’s sister,” I said.

“Oooooooh, I heard she’s trouble,” Mom said. “The reverend at St. Luke’s warns about her in his sermons.”

“Really?” I tried to picture being so trashy a minister would preach about me.

“No, I’m kidding. Go set the table.”

“No dinner for me. I just ate a ton of cheese fries. Do people really talk about her, though? What did you hear?”

“I heard enough. Let’s just say she’s not famous in a good way. You’re going to want to sit down and eat with us—it’s paella.”

“It smells terrific, but really I just want to go to bed.”

“Already?” She examined me. “You okay?”

“Yeah, I’m just beat.”

“Well, set the table, anyway.”

“ ’Kay.” I reached for forks, knives, napkins.

“And before you go up, can you just run this over to the Caffreys’?”

“What? No, Mom. I just want to go to my room.”

“Finn. Please. It’s rice. It’ll dry out if it gets cold.”

“I don’t want to go over there.” My voice sounded louder than I meant it to. The party in our kitchen kind of fizzled. My dad went to the cupboard and pulled out two plates.

“Help your mother.” His voice was quiet. He’d switched from frat boy to funeral director. “It’ll take you five minutes.” I zipped my coat back up and Mom handed me the oven mitts.

On my way out, I heard her say to him, “Well, that was a little bit harsh.”

“I’m tired of the teenage thing,” I heard my dad say. That stung. It’s not like I could help the teenage thing.

“Bart, it’s a tough time.”

“She needs to realize it’s a tough time for other people, too—” My dad’s voice faded behind me. I trudged through the yard with the casserole, arguing with him in my head. Of course it was a tough time for other people—I didn’t need to go over to the Caffreys’ to figure that out. Seeing Dean was enough—if I thought any more about the tough time that Chloe and I had ushered in, I’d have to hit myself with a piece of wood.

At Chloe’s house, Cam sat in the kitchen, drawing. A plastic model of a horse stood in the center of the table. It was one of those science models. Half of it looked like a regular horse and then, on the other side, you could see the bands of muscles in some places, the skeletal structure in the others. I knocked on the door and he made the noise that meant you weren’t allowed to say a particular word.

“Cam, I’m just knocking.” Way before I even understood what was different about Cam, Chloe taught me to speak to him like anyone else.

“He’s smarter than both of us,” I remembered her insisting. She told me, “Don’t use baby talk like he
doesn’t understand you. He just doesn’t know how to connect to you.”

“Cam, this dish is kind of hot.”
Nothing.
“Hey, Cam?” And that got the noise again. When I rang the bell, Cam didn’t even look up. His pencil never stopped moving across the page.

Mr. Caffrey came scuffing in from his library, calling out, “One second.” He saw me through the window and asked, “What’s this? Dinner? You tell that mother of yours she doesn’t have to do this. We really appreciate it, but—”

“It’s paella.”

“Well then.” Mr. Caffrey eked out a sheepish smile. “Keep it coming.”

“How are you guys?”

Cam blared his noise as I asked it.

Mr. Caffrey blinked, then lowered his voice. “It’s
guys
.” Cam blared. “It’s been a rough couple of days around here. We shifted some routines and sometimes that causes trouble.”

I nodded. “Mom said to eat it while it’s hot, because it might dry out otherwise.”

“We’ll do that, thank you.” Another blare. Mr. Caffrey shut his eyes for a second and rubbed his temples.

“Okay, then.” Cam’s horse had one eye and one empty socket.

“Thanks again.” One last blast from the Cam alarm and I backed out the door. The windows on the second floor sat dark, and I wondered if Mrs. Caffrey was lying down in her room. Maybe she had gone into Chloe’s. In the kitchen, Mr. Caffrey leaned over Cam’s drawing, pointing out parts.

My mom and dad had sat down at the dining room table and left a plate set there for me. I started to shake my head, but Mom spoke before I could. “We just wanted you to feel welcome—it’s fine if you’d rather rest.” She looked toward my dad and he looked at me, then nodded.

“Thank you.” I paused, half-expecting to hear Cam’s odd blurt. “I’m going to just head upstairs.” All that was left of their dinnertime conversation was the sound of their forks and knives sliding across the plates. It was like the sadness from the Caffreys’ house had spread.

Once I closed my bedroom door, I felt restless. I wasn’t tired so much as I was tired of performing. I checked my e-mail just in case Dean had tried to get in touch. There wasn’t anything, but the cops probably had his laptop, too. Word had apparently reached the masses about the diplomatic breakthrough of me and Dean meeting over cheese fries, because it looked like someone had just dumped the names of the most obnoxious girls from school in my inbox. I just checked them all and hit
DELETE.
I even emptied my trash folder right after so that I couldn’t go back and read them later.

Probably some were sent right after last night’s Lila Ann Price broadcast, but even that didn’t matter. What was anyone going to say? I didn’t have anything left to say back. Besides, in less than two days Chloe would be back and then there would be total chaos. The whole planet would be reaching out to us. I had to make sure there was space.

When we had first started planning, we made lists for everything. Food to pack, sparse clues to be left behind. In the week before, we’d had to-do lists two pages long. It’s how we dealt with stress—we felt braver once we’d made backup plans for all the things that could go wrong. And then one of the last things on our to-do list was to burn all our to-do lists.

With thirty hours left, my fingers were actually cramping—I wanted so desperately to sit at my desk and write down the dozens of things we needed to remember. Chloe and I had promised each other, though, and those rules had gotten us this far. Really close. So I wouldn’t even let myself catalog out loud the tasks we needed to complete just in case my parents came upstairs and stood outside my bedroom door. But I thought them. I burrowed under the covers and tried to keep track by counting on my fingers.

1. Trash.
   
2. Chloe’s shirt in the woods.
   
3. Take down the towels we’d stretched across the two basement windows.
   
4. Make sure we left Nana’s TV on channel 7 and a taped recording of
   Days of Our Lives
   in the VCR.
   
5. Check the bathroom, carefully. Bring a towel to dry off the shower and faucets.
   
6. Put back in the old roll of toilet paper. (We’d taken it out in case my grandmother remembered how much was left.)
   
7. Take the roll Chloe had used in my backpack.
   

And also I had to hit Chloe, hard. That was the one part I kept going back to in my head. I’d have to take her into the woods and hit her really hard.

Then I’d have to leave her to find her own way home.

The alarm on my phone rang at three-thirty in the morning, and I silenced it on the first ring. I almost groaned, but then remembered to be quiet and carry my shoes downstairs. I felt bad for just walking past the stables, for not checking on the horses or the sheep or Chauncey. My dad had taken up a lot of that slack lately and that comment about too many animals had been the first time he’d mentioned it. With Dad, things had a way of percolating. He had said it once now, so there would be more coming.

It was dark outside but I saved the penlight for the woods. And even then, I used it sparingly—the last thing I needed was some cop following me to my grandmother’s house. At some point in the past week, I had stopped worrying about the vague assailants that Stranger Patrol and McGruff the Crime Dog had taught us about when we were little kids. I’d become more worried about cops than robbers. And really, most of the time since Chloe left, I would have welcomed some crazy coming out of the brush to snatch me. Not some pervert or
anything. But someone who would hide me until I gathered my strength and fought him off. And then it would be like I’d risen from the dead. Like it would be for Chloe.

I let myself into my grandmother’s house. I felt my way to the cellar stairs so that crazy Bella Livingston didn’t see a light on and come snooping around. Chloe didn’t call out even when I eased my way down the steps. For a second, I saw her stretched out across the sofa and thought,
She’s dead.
And I didn’t even think about it in terms of never seeing her again or never lying on our backs in the field behind our houses. I just thought,
There’s no way out of this now
, and inched closer to her on my knees. When I saw her chest rising, falling, relief lapped over me and I thought,
This is a tenth of what it will be like when Mrs. Caffrey sees her tomorrow
. I tried to imagine what Dean would say to her, the first time he saw her again. I wondered how he would say her name.

Chloe still had her hair braided. I remembered being so angry earlier, realizing she’d lied to me about the shower. Sure enough, when I touched it, in the back, behind her neck, it was damp. The sides, the feathery parts right near her temples, were really soft, like silk threads.

I don’t like remembering what happened next. I mean, it was confusing, for one thing. It felt like me kneeling there, and also not me. I’d been so stressed out all week,
and even the weeks before, really. Everything had gotten so complicated. I was thinking about how happy everyone would feel when Chloe came home, and how I felt happy just to see her eyes flickering under her lids and know she was okay. She was dreaming. The strands of hair tucked behind her ear felt so soft. So I just reached out my hand, to brush the soft piece of her hair with my fingers. Like you rub a rabbit’s foot—for reassurance maybe. Chloe woke up and she didn’t even move at first. Her eyes widened and she grabbed my wrist.

Chloe had just woken up, she didn’t know it was me, and that scared her. But when she reached for me, I thought that she felt happy, too. The whole thing was almost over and we’d executed it. Ourselves. Together.

I just reacted, and it must have seemed to her that my hands held her down. Chloe had grabbed my wrist and it seemed like she was trying to hold my hand against her face. Maybe she moved to sit up, but I thought she leaned up into me. I thought she was craning her neck toward me. She never screamed or shoved me away or anything like that. She must have just been struggling to sit up but I’d tried to check on her, so my body was crouched over her body. And then, I guess it was like some instinct misfired. I’d never kissed anyone before. I remember thinking that her lips were as soft as her hair.

Chloe would say that she screamed and that I covered her mouth with my hand. We needed to be quiet in the
basement. That’s all. We had said that. She bit my hand, hard, and I didn’t cry out even then. She kept yelling, “Are you crazy?” I remember that’s what she first yelled because I felt crazy. I almost told her yes because in those seconds, everything had seemed so sure. And then nothing was.

She stood up and held her hand to her lips, like I had been the one to bite her. “What are you doing?” Everything she said, she said so ugly. She didn’t sound like herself at all. She tried to tell me to get out, but it’s not like I had any place to go. She wouldn’t sit down on the couch and calm down. She wouldn’t sit anywhere near me. She kept saying, “Finn—what the hell?” She walked toward the stairs and I thought,
She’s just going to walk upstairs and leave. She’ll flag down a car. She’ll go home.
But then she pivoted and almost rushed at me, asking questions. It wasn’t even two days after I had told Lila Ann Price,
“Chloe and I—we can talk to each other about anything.”
But that wasn’t true anymore. She asked me again, “What the hell?”

And I said, “What do you mean?” And she just shook her head and kept pacing.

After a while, she just faded. She sat in the corner with her arms clasped around her knees and wouldn’t really look at me. I tried to find something to offer up and finally told her that I’d seen Cam, that he’d been drawing a horse with her dad.

“Cam probably hasn’t realized I’m gone,” she said blankly. She was like Chloe, but with the lights out.

“When I came down the steps, it was scary because you didn’t say anything,” I explained. “Usually you’d call out to me or something. So I thought something had happened, that you’d been hurt or sick.”

“I don’t really care what you thought.” But as coldly as she said it, she stood up then and said, “Before I fell asleep, I was trying to figure out all the things we had to remember.”

“I did the exact same thing!” But it rang out fake.

Chloe kept going as if I hadn’t said anything at all. “You should take back your sleeping bag on this trip. There’s also still a lot of trash here.” She picked up a packed yellow plastic bag. “I think this is all of it but maybe if you could just check around…that way we’ll have a second set of eyes.”

We just started knocking things off the checklist, working side by side like usual. Each time one of us completed a task, the tension in the room eased a little more. I almost didn’t leave on time—I figured that if I stayed a bit longer, eventually we’d have to get back to normal. But we had one more day. If my parents woke up and found me missing, the whole thing would unravel pretty quickly. I packed up the trash, looped my hand under the cord of the sleeping bag. I tried to tell Chloe that I was sorry—that the whole thing was just a weird short
circuit and everything would be fine, but she just said, “Let’s leave it alone. It was a strange moment; this is a strange time.”

And I said, “Great,” but didn’t feel relieved. “I should be back here tonight at two?”

“That should give us enough time. But listen—I think we should just meet in the woods.”

“Can you handle that?” I asked. In response, Chloe glared at me. “No—I’m serious. It’s probably going to be nuts tomorrow. You’re taking your first steps outside of this basement.” Her eyes rolled. “Don’t underestimate that. You might get disoriented. It’s not like you’ll have a cell phone to call me if you need backup.”

“I’ll be okay,” she said to me. “And if I’m not, it’s better if I’m on my own.” I let that sit for a second and tried not to let it sting. But then Chloe kept going. “If someone sees me, if they find me—I’ll just say I had a copy of your key made. I’ll tell them you never knew I was here.”

No one would ever buy that. But that didn’t erase the fact that Chloe had thought of it. It felt like a gift she’d wrapped for me. When I left the basement, I remember thinking,
This is the last time that we’ll exist in this hidden corner of the world together.
Even then, I thought we’d be closer than ever because of the secret between us.

The next time I came down to my grandmother’s
basement, it would just be my grandmother’s basement—damp and smelling like newsprint and homemade jam. When Chloe called out, “Wait!” I thought she had realized it, too. But she held the wooden shelf in her hand.

“No way,” I said. It wasn’t like we had just veered in a weird direction anymore. We’d derailed. Into a foreign country whose name neither of us could even pronounce.

Chloe just shook her head. “It not a big deal. We said we’d do this yesterday.” Meaning: before. I wondered if everything from now on would be split like that. She sighed. “Could you please just take it?” I just stood there, dumbly. “We’ll figure out what to do later on.”

I lifted it out of her hands and tried to fit it under my arm. Balanced everything carefully, and then tried to take one of the stairs. The shelf slid and clunked down. Chloe’s giggles started slowly and built up into a full fit. “It’s not funny!” I told her. I was tired of trying to balance everything, trying to say the right things and keep all the stories straight.

“Oh, come on,” Chloe said. “You should see what you look like. You’ve got the sleeping bag in one arm and then the backpack full of wrappers and cans and now a big wooden beam. You look like some crazy homicidal camper.”

I laughed, relieved that Chloe could still make jokes, could still find me funny. “I can’t take this,” I said and lifted the shelf a little way off the floor. I meant the shelf, but I meant other things, too.

Chloe shook her head. “I guess not. Besides, where would you stash it from Bart and Amy?” I used to think it was funny when Chloe called my mom and dad by their first names. But she was living in a basement, while my mom cooked for their family and kept her mom doped up. Maybe that deserved a little respect. She came forward and picked up the wood.

“Thanks,” I said.

“No, it was a stupid idea. If someone saw you with it, they’d ask all kinds of questions.”

I wondered if other people ever felt like this talking to Chloe, like they were diffusing a bomb. Tugging one wire was harmless, but if they said the wrong thing, if they snipped the wrong line, then the whole thing would explode.

“Do you want me to bring food tonight, so that you can have a real meal? Before…” I meant before the absolute chaos that would be her return.

“I think it’s better if I get myself good and hungry,” Chloe said. “Could you imagine if you called the cops and my breath smelled like cheesesteak?”

I still couldn’t imagine calling the cops at all. “It’s
going to be a rough few days,” I said. I meant:
We have to stick together on this.

Chloe always heard both the things I did and didn’t say. “It’s going to be fine,” she told me, saying it with enough certainty in her voice that it felt okay to keep walking up the steps, to step out into the early morning, and go back to one more day of acting like the saddest seventeen-year-old girl in Colt River. At that moment, though, I might have qualified as the most desperate.

It was almost six
AM
, and there was no way my dad hadn’t woken up yet. The one saving grace was that it was Columbus Day. We had it off, and the neighborhood had the sleepy feel of a bank holiday. I forced myself to walk the couple blocks through Nana’s little development slowly, deliberately. I’d gone past maybe five houses when I noticed a white van creeping up the street behind me. The closer it got, the harder it was for me to breathe, to swallow. I thought,
That’s it
, trying out all the cop show phrases in my head:
sting operation, perp, I’ve been tailed
. And when I heard the thump behind me, I just about dropped to the ground, waving my hands in the air. I turned, and it was just the newspaper, packed in plastic. The yellow bundles dotted the driveways along the street, but it didn’t even occur to me to steal one. For the first time in a week, I didn’t care whether or not Chloe was in the paper.

I hit the woods sprinting and tried to outrun the flashes of Chloe and me on the sofa. By the time I reached the edge of our property, my parents’ bathroom window was lit up, but I’d pretty much expected that.

I gambled. I figured my dad hadn’t been downstairs yet, so I’d just get to work in the barn. I gave the sheep their grain first, because otherwise they’d make a racket and tip off Dad, time-wise. I stashed the backpack and sleeping bag beneath some old leather saddles we rarely used anymore, then poured some kibble into Chauncey’s bowl and led the horses out to the west pasture. I carried bales of hay over there in case the grass was too sparse. After the sheep ate, I turned them out to the paddock and started in on the barn. I got the foul straw piled into a wheelbarrow and took it over to spread on the dead spot in my mom’s garden. Then I spread new straw over the wooden planks of the barn floor and tossed in some pine shavings.

I’d started on the water pails next and was uncoiling the hose when I heard my dad call in, “What is this?”

I made myself busy. I was tired of looking my mom and dad in the eye while I lied.

“Just figured I’d get an early start,” I explained.

“I’ll say.” My dad blew over his cup of coffee. “You want some help with the heavy lifting?”

“Heavy lifting’s already done,” I told him.

“That’s my girl.” I felt him tousle my hair. “How about I go in and get some breakfast going? We’ll do it up—eggs and sausage, corn bread—”

I thought of Chloe getting herself good and hungry. “Nah—I’ll just grab a bowl of cereal or something.”

“Well, I’m going in to make a real breakfast. If you smell something good, you should just grab a plate.” But I was busy thinking to myself,
Tomorrow we probably wouldn’t eat breakfast. I’d have run out to meet Chloe in the fields behind my house, dragging her, and screaming. The cops would be out here in seconds. We’d probably call the rescue squad. Then the press conference. Maybe we’d need to do some interviews.

By the time I sat down on the porch steps, my arms ached and my hands were raw and red—blisters threatened to bloom on my palms. But the animals seemed content as they milled around. I led the horses back to their stalls and they kicked up, whinnied at the fresh hay. It was almost done. That’s really all I kept thinking. I leaned back on my elbows and tried to pretend the dry leaves under me were grains of white sand. Instead of the low murmur of the sheep mingling around, I made myself hear ocean waves crest and break against an imaginary shore. But it wasn’t really working—I’d hear my dad slam a pan on the range or the radio go loud. Somewhere
from up in the house, I heard my mom’s blow dryer whir on, eventually click off.