Can't Bear To Run (Kendal Creek Bears, #1) (7 page)

“Okay,” I said, grabbing tightly onto Karen’s wrist. “I can, I’ll get down there.”

He nodded curtly, and vanished through the door. The hinges creaked painfully before the screen’s metal frame slapped against the jamb.

“That’s what we were here for,” Karen said, looking into my eyes. “Are you okay?”

I swallowed hard, and nodded. “I think,” I said, “I always had a feeling it would come to this. Him leaving, and me left behind.”

She exchanged a look with Matt. They both returned their attention to me a second later, but neither spoke, they just listened.

“He wasn’t what you thought,” I heard myself say. “He was bad. He kept me here, wouldn’t let me out. Guilted me into thinking I was nothing.”

Karen pulled me close. I let my head fall into the curve of her neck as hot tears came again. “But I didn’t think it’d be like this,” I whispered. “I didn’t think I’d feel like this.”

I shook as a sob worked its way through me. I was crying, yeah, but it was with a mixture of horror and relief. “He wouldn’t let me leave. Wouldn’t let me be who I am. But now he’s finally left and... And I feel okay.”

I sniffed, hard, trying to gather myself. I wondered, in that moment, if I would ever come clean to my friends. I wondered, really, if I would ever come clean to anyone, including myself, about what had happened? Or would I just bury it like I did all the pain Dan had put me through? Would I just pretend it never happened and go on with my life?

It was impossible to say.

Matt had to go a few minutes later. Work, he’d said. Karen stayed once again, to help me adjust and just to talk to me. I’ll never forget her, never forget what she said and what she did.

But at the end of the day, I couldn’t stay there. I couldn’t just wait around for Dan to come back and find me – and I’m certain he would, if given the chance. Maybe he’d gotten a case of amnesia and ended up at some hospital in Boston, or even further away. Who knows?

The only things I knew for sure were that he was still alive, and I had to get the hell out of there. Not only because I was scared of him ever coming for me, but because in a way, I
did
feel guilty, underneath it all.

And anyway, I had to figure out who I was.

After six years of being
told
who I was, it was just about time to find out. What better way than by selling everything I could, and just hitting the road? It’s an old notion, a little romantic and a touch poetic. I felt my inner Kerouac flare to life as I fired up Booger, my old Jeep, stuffed the wad of cash in my pocket I’d managed to finagle out of the bank, along with what I’d managed to round up selling my junk.

I don’t know if I’ve ever felt quite as free as I did when I saw the Boston skyline disappear behind me in the haze of an early morning in my rearview mirror.

I don’t know why, I don’t know how, but I’d decided I’d just go to a damn music festival. I’d never been allowed to before, so why not?

I plugged the coordinates of the venue – Denver, Colorado – into my phone and let the GPS satellites find me. Twenty eight hours, four minutes and eight seconds in the future, I was going to find my destiny. That destiny, I thought with a loopy, confused brain, was the guy whose name I didn’t even know. I hadn’t the first clue how or why, but it was just a feeling that gripped me, deep down in the stomach, and wouldn’t let go.

If only I’d had the first clue what destiny would look like when I found it, things would be a lot easier. Of course, if that were the case, finding it would be something everyone did instead of a fool dream that only a few bothered to reach for.

But whatever, I told myself, it didn’t matter. I didn’t have anything in Boston. I didn’t have anything anywhere. Those are the moments when a person can really throw themselves into finding a destiny they’re not even sure exists. After all, if I ended up back in town, at least I would have seen some things. At least I would have let myself roam, if even for a fleeting time.

And if I
did
find it, whatever it was – whoever it was – it couldn’t be any less interesting than a life lived underground, hardly coming up for air, drowning in whatever boring job I managed to land with a liberal arts degree and zero experience.

I turned up the radio.

“Michael Fucking Bolton,” I said out loud, as the opening bars of
What Am I Supposed To Do Without You?
filled my ears. I shook my head. “Whatever the hell I want,” I said, answering the song’s rhetorical question. “Wherever the road takes me, I’m ready to see it.”

As I switched the station, and belted out some Guns N Roses, it occurred to me. Kerouac? I woulda made him proud.

––––––––

I
couldn’t possibly explain why going to Denver made any sense. It’s true, I did want to see a few acts at the Rocky Mountain Experience music festival which started in T-minus-two days from my point of departure, but that was just a convenient excuse.

I guess the reality is, it mattered so little where I went that the first place I came up with any flimsy reason to go to, I went.

These stories are all supposed to go like this: boy meets girl, girl says no to boy. Boy gets all excited and proves to girl that he’s the man of her dreams. Boy and girl have a problem, girl finally relents, boy sweeps girl off her feet.

That’s nice. It’s always seemed like a nice fake sort of yarn to spin, but the thought
had
occurred to me that I might be in the middle of something like that. Love stories always have some kind of harrowing situation that brings the lovers together, right?

Then again, when’s the last time you saw “hit husband with baseball bat, skipped town” in a Sandra Bullock movie? And unless my soulmate was Earl, the guy at the Quik Stop counter outside Des Moines at three AM, I hadn’t met my prince charming.

So let’s face it – things weren’t looking so great for my prospects at a long and beautiful life. I had this wretched and fairly ridiculous feeling that sooner or later, Dan would turn up again, and he’d probably say something to someone, and through a convoluted series of twists and turns that is so strange it can only happen in real life, because no one would ever buy it in a book, I’d be picked up at some ratbag motel in the middle of nowhere, extradited to Boston, and I’d spend my prime years getting a bunch of prison tats and trading cigarettes for toilet wine. Really though, he was knocked out for four hours. No way could he have survived that. Right?

I told you I’d watched a lot of cop shows.

Somewhere around Omaha, the fumes I’d been running on – adrenaline, coffee, and those weird little energy shots – started to run out. Nothing was helping. I passed a motel that was almost certainly the place where more than one serial killer hid out at some point. The walls were flaking brown stucco and the parking lot was filled with parked semi-trucks. Not that I have anything against truckers, it’s just that those sorts of places tend to harbor mask-wearing villains that like to rip women’s guts out.

Uh, in the movies anyway.

With visions of machete killers dancing through my mind, I pulled into the first motel I came across that didn’t look like the sort of place you rent by the hour when you just really need to pull off and doink your old lady. It was nice enough. James, the guy at the desk, was old and smiled too much, but it was fine. He even cut me a deal since I was renting the room so late and leaving the next morning.

As dawn spread gray tendrils across the wide open sky, I turned the old brass doorknob and stumbled into my room. I was so absolutely wiped out that I would’ve slept through a crying baby on an airplane. As I fell into the bed and flicked on the TV, it really hit me.

I was
free
.

Not free in the liberated sense, but free from, well, literally everything.

Except in the back of my mind, it really, really didn’t feel like it. It seemed like I was trapped by that freedom, by the fact that I was absolutely alone to my fate. Just me and the open road, and God knows what on the horizon. It sounds very romantic and appealing – hell, it did to me when I started out – but a few lonely hours in a hotel when you haven’t been alone in as long as a girl can remember, well, it does funny things to her head.

Then again, I’d been awake for over twenty-four hours at that point, and so passing the hell out was a lot more appealing than ruminating on the future. My dreams though, had a different idea.

*

W
hen I woke to the blaring alarm on my phone, sun lay across the paisley comforter in a languid, yellow pool. The room was frigid, with the little AC unit turned to 65, and I was a happy girl. Warm and safe under the surprisingly luxurious blankets, I didn’t much want to move. The most I managed for almost an hour was to turn on the TV and stare blankly at the local weatherman who had a slicked over mop of silver hair and a seersucker suit.

“Well hi there, Andy,” I said to the man on the screen. It’s a habit of mine, talking to things that can’t talk back. Just seems easier, I guess. The weather looked good – nary a hint of rain the rest of the way to Denver. Open road, clear skies. Hard to ask for more.

Except the ghost in the back of my mind wasn’t so willing to sit down and shut up. Impatient and unwelcome flashes of the dreams I’d had the night before kept swimming through my head. Images of Dan in awful states loomed in my brain. But the worst of them weren’t the ghastly images, rather they were ones where he was whole and angry.

And coming for me.

Intellectually I knew he couldn’t find me. There wasn’t a single trace left behind. No notes, no emails, and I’d bought a burner phone on the way out of town. I’d been smart enough also to use only cash, so he couldn’t read credit card records. All of that, of course, assumes he’d want to find me in the first place. But then again, this is Dan Dodson we’re talking about, so of course he wanted to find me. Not so much because he wanted
me
, but I knew he wasn’t going to give up on something he considered his property. He’d never been the sort.

The fretting was pointless, I knew that. Or at least, that’s what I kept telling myself. Moments later, images of that stranger – the impossible guy who I was almost convinced didn’t exist outside my imagination – came to my mind, breaking Dan’s spell.

By the time I snapped out of it, the local news had been replaced by a TV doctor talking about some new colon cleanse that made him feel like a new man. “Right,” I said. “If all it took was an enema, we’d all be singing in the streets.”

I laughed at my own joke, more for the comfort of hearing laughter than at my own wit, but admittedly, it was a pretty good zinger.

The phone on the desk chimed. I reached over and grabbed the eggshell colored handset and lifted it to my ear to be greeted by a recorded message. “Hello, room 107, please be advised that checkout is in five minutes.”

“Shit,” I grunted, and heaved myself up off the mattress. Immediately I wanted to be back under the covers, but somehow I was still in bed and it was almost eleven. When you’re trying to make tracks across the country, lazing about for half a day isn’t really the best idea, so with a heavy heart, I jumped in the shower, scalded myself for a couple of minutes and then climbed out.

The water was so hot that my skin was pink and prickly. My loose-hanging oversized
Transformers
shirt and old, holey-kneed jeans felt good after the heat. The main thing though, was that I was wearing whatever I wanted.

“You need a man who likes your dork,” I told myself. “Right, like I need a man at all. I’m past that shit. Too much trouble.”

Grabbing my duffel bag, I gave myself one last look in the mirror and pulled my hair back into a ponytail before heading out to the office.

Receipt in hand, I wandered slowly to my Jeep and gave one final look back to the place that had served has my safe haven for the first night of my new life. There was a certain gravity to the whole thing. I felt like I’d turned a corner of some sort, that even though I’d been “alone” for a couple of weeks, that this was really the new beginning I’d taken so long to find.

I still had no idea why I was going to Denver.

Then again, I had no real clue what I was doing at all. It was as good a place as any.

GPS on, radio turned up. “Got a half-tank of gas, a pack of cigarettes and I’m five hundred miles from Denver,” I said, paraphrasing
The Blues Brothers
, although I had a mostly full tank of gas, and hadn’t smoked any cigarettes since college, and I was much closer than a thousand miles. But come on, it ain’t every day you get to quote
The Blues Brothers
in a contextually accurate way.

Looking over at the phone I bought, I half expected a dozen texts from Dan. Or a bunch of emails, or maybe some missed calls.

Oh right, I cut myself off from everything I know
.

Some days, it was hard to know that I can’t ever go home. Other times? It seems like I never had a home at all, and that made running even easier.

––––––––

I
’ve never in my entire life watched my speedometer like I did along the stretch of road between Nebraska and Colorado. Every time a patrol car went past me, or I saw one stopped on the side of the road, my throat got all tight, and I had to tell myself to calm down. It was so stupid. So, so, stupid. He couldn’t find me, I wasn’t even a suspect, and honestly it was sort of a long shot to think he was even still alive.

I kept thinking back to Detective Morgan and his slightly awkward but earnest demeanor. I’d never been afraid like this, not even in the worst times with Dan. I kept on telling myself it would get easier as time went by, but that’s a hard sell to someone who gets sweaty palms and pit rings with every single police sighting she has.

“Get a grip, Raine,” I told myself, loudly enough to go over the top of whatever guitar solo butt-rock song was on the radio. “You’ll find someone, everything will be fine.”

I gulped, hard. That was the first time I’d vocalized the idea that I was looking for someone. Maybe I’d been wishing for someone to actually love me since Dan stopped almost as soon as we tied the knot. It was a scary thought to entertain, that I’d been trapped like that, but it was impossible to ignore.