Chosen (40 page)

‘She was OK with me. She was like, motherly?' he says.

Dodie inhales sharply and hides her face in her hands.
Motherly!
A surge of laughter comes up her throat like sick. She counts to ten, finds the phrase
Let it go
in her mind, tips her head back to see a twizzle of tawdry tinsel.
You'd better be good, you'd better not cry
pumps from some vast speakers, and she bleats out another laugh.

‘What?' Seth says.

Rebecca pulls a face at her and takes a final gurgling slurp of milkshake. Seth munches loudly in a way that would make Stella scream.
Stella
. Dodie pushes away the milkshake.

‘Mum?' Seth says. Is he reading her mind now? His hand, all salty from the crisps, clamps hers. ‘Did she, I mean . . .' He clears his throat. ‘Did she . . . I mean was it, like,
suicide
?' This last word sticks in his mouth, but Dodie hears it. She nods.

‘That's what she said. Her head was all like . . .' He twists his head to one side and she shudders, her innards turning hot and liquid.

‘Did
you
find her, Dode?' he whispers.

Their eyes meet for a flinch of a second.

‘Come on, guys,' Rebecca says, grabbing his arm, ‘we can do this on board. We'd better buy some stuff – it'd look sus going through security with nothing.'

They follow Rebecca into a shop where she buys bags and books and gum and tampons and tissues so that they can look like normal passengers. Dodie puts her passport in the pocket of her new, tacky flags-of-the-world bag. Seth unwraps a stick of gum and puts it in his mouth.

They remove shoes and coats to go through security; put the brand-new bags full of brand-new stuff in the trays. Dodie retrieves her jacket gladly when it comes through the X-ray machine; it's hers, a part of her, and the parts are hardly holding together now. In the pocket there's a tissue, a pound, a bus ticket, her lipstick and a Lego pig.

The flight is ready to board and they go straight on. It's only half full, so they could spread out, but the three of them cram together in a row, Dodie in the middle.

They watch obediently as the air steward performs the safety procedure routine. The take-off flattens them back against their seats and the plane tilts into the rain and cloud of the winter afternoon. Rebecca has her eyes shut, specs clutched in her hand. Her freckles swarm against her skin, gone milky pale. She opens her eyes and catches Dodie's look, puts her glasses back on.

‘Did you know
he
died too?' Rebecca says.

‘Who?'

‘Our Father.'

‘No. When?'

‘A couple of days ago. He was really sick but, of course, no doctors.'

‘Like John,' Dodie says and Rebecca nods. A quiver passes between them. ‘So he's dead, then.' Dodie digests this for a moment, can't make it matter. What was he to her?

‘That's when it all started to, like, fall apart,' Rebecca says. ‘Helicopters, police and that. Fights. Actual shouting in the corridors, and no one telling us anything. I was shit scared, I can tell you.'

‘I didn't hear a thing.'

‘Nor did I,' Seth says.

Dodie notices that his hands are trembling as he savages the skin around his thumbnail. She catches his hand and pulls it away from his mouth. And he starts to bite his lip instead. ‘Calm down,' she says, as much to herself as to him. She squeezes his bony knee. ‘It's OK, we just get to Jake and after that we can talk and it'll all be OK.'

They are quiet for a while. Seth chews gum. Rebecca takes her glasses off and shuts her eyes. The pilot tells them how high up they are and what the temperature is in Florida.

‘Why did Martha take Jake?' Dodie says, reaching across Seth to touch Rebecca's arm. ‘She's nice, isn't she?' she pleads. ‘She wouldn't do him any harm?'

‘Yeah,' Rebecca says. ‘Martha's OK.'

‘Maybe she was trying to keep him safe?' Seth says. ‘She
is
his auntie, I guess. Great aunt?'

Dodie stares. ‘Great
what
?' she says.

‘Well, she's Mum's sister so –'

‘
What?
' Either the plane has hit some turbulence, or it's her stomach plummeting.

‘Didn't you know?' he says.

‘What?
What?
' On the screen the plane noses clumsily down the east coast of the continent. ‘What?' she says again. ‘Martha is Stella's
sister
?' She's silent for a moment, her mind scrambling. ‘But she never said. Why wouldn't she say? Are you sure?'

‘Yeah. She came with Our Father to pick me up from Sheffield. Mum said she was my aunt.' The way Seth's chewing his gum is starting to drive Dodie mad. She puts her hands up to her eyes, cups the warm dark, feels the tickle of her lashes on her palms as she pictures Martha's face. But it's nothing like Stella's.

‘Are you sure?' she says again. ‘Why didn't she tell me then?'

He shrugs. ‘It was the night I was meant to be babysitting,' he says, adding, ‘Sorry about that.'

Dodie snorts.

He tells her about the night he left, the shock of stran gers in the house, the rush of it all, no time to pack even.

‘Why did you agree to go, then?' she asks.

Puzzled expressions chase across his face. ‘Mum said . . . School . . .'

‘Were you being bullied again?'

He swallows hard, ignores the question, and rattles through the story: the hotel, the first-class flight. He tells her about the films and the on-board food and then his voice trails off as he gets into his arrival at Soul-Life. ‘I was totally freaked,' he says. ‘I didn't know it was going to be a churchy thing, I thought it would be like a house and . . .' His fingers go to his lips as if trying to retrieve something slippery from his memory.

‘The day you left, do you remember what time it was?' Dodie asks. ‘Was Stella wearing the red dress?'

Seth nods. ‘That
weird
red dress. After school.'

‘I must have just missed you,' Dodie says weakly, her mind going back to that dark, wet afternoon. It seems like years ago. She sees Stella's reaching hand, glittering with rain.

Seth shrugs and stretches the gum between his lips, sticks his tongue through the grey skin of it.

‘Will you spit that out,
please
?' Dodie says. Funny how you can long for someone until your bones ache, and then be irritated so quickly by their habits. She gives him a tissue.

‘Sorry I couldn't let you know,' he says. ‘I tried, but I didn't really get a chance. I lost my phone –'

‘Doesn't matter,' Dodie says. ‘It's OK now.' She folds the tissue, puts it in her bag and attempts a reassuring smile. Something's coming back to her and she needs to concentrate. It's something Stella told her once: how she had an older sister, not Martha, that wasn't the name but it did begin with M – Marjorie or Melody or something? And
this sister couldn't have a child of her own and had tried to steal her, to steal Dodie herself when she was a baby, that's what Stella had said:
steal
. Her own sister had tried to steal her child. Could Martha be that sister?

‘
Jake!
' she says, a shock jolting through her. ‘Why did Martha take him away when I was locked up? Why was I locked up?' Her voice rises and she takes deep breaths. Has Martha stolen Jake? The air feels thick in the cabin, made of plastic, hardening in her lungs.

‘Shhh,' Rebecca says.

‘I didn't even know Jake was there,' Seth says. ‘Until Obadiah said –'

‘Who?'

‘The old man. He was, like, Our Father's right-hand man kind of thing,' Rebecca says.

‘He was the one who told me Martha had taken Jake,' Seth says. ‘When the fire started he made Hannah unlock the peace-pods – and we had to get out of there fast.'

The steward is there with a trolley. ‘Coffee? Soda? Beer?'

Dodie shakes her head and the others ignore him. He shrugs theatrically, rolls his eyes and clanks off down the aisle.

‘Everyone was going ape-shit,' Rebecca says and then, catching Dodie's expression, adds, ‘Martha
will
look after him.'

Dodie moans. ‘But what if . . .?' But she cannot even bear to name her fears.

‘We've got the address and instructions,' Seth says. He pats her knee and tries to sound reassuring. ‘It'll be cool.'

He takes an envelope out of his pocket and she grabs it. The instructions have been downloaded from Google and printed out. It tells them to hire a car at Tampa and gives directions to an address on the highway towards St Petersburg.

‘Oh God, oh God.' Dodie rocks in her seat trying to urge the plane forward; the flight is three hours, three whole hours and then there is the getting to the house and who knows how long that could take?
Tried to steal you when
I was ill. Tried to turn you against me.
It was something like that that Stella had said, and Dodie had taken it as some comfort that Stella hadn't let her be stolen. Taken it as evidence that she wanted her. But later she'd decided it was a lie. Stella
was
a liar. She gets a sudden image of the toes, the empty, dangling hands. Her head throbs and her mouth fills with sticky water as if she's about to vomit.

‘Hey, try and relax,' Rebecca says. She takes Dodie's hand. ‘Try humming.'

‘No,' Dodie says, ‘not that. And . . .' She suddenly remembers those bodies behind the open doors. ‘People were
dead
,' she says.

Rebecca looks out of the window. Raindrops flee across the scratchy glass like sperm racing to their destination, the plane slumps and wallops through a patch of turbulence and the seat-belt sign pings on.

‘Yeah,' Rebecca sighs. ‘After word got round about Our Father dying and Martha pissing off, it all, like, blew up, fell apart and helicopters everywhere, and I don't know. I don't know what was going on. Some people ran off and some, like, freaked out at the thought of being out in the big bad world and wanted to follow Our Father. There were these pills.' She stops and shudders. ‘It was like a kind of virus spreading and people topping themselves all over.'

Dodie shuts her eyes and swallows sickly, thinking of the looming pall of smoke, picturing the pills beside the old man. Obadiah.

‘I'd already decided to leave,' Rebecca says, ‘but it was hard, it wasn't like you could just walk out, was it? It wasn't just
you
made me want to leave, before you came I was starting to think, like, this isn't me, though they hardly give you room to think. I never knew you were in a peace-pod,' she adds. ‘I didn't even know they existed. I thought you'd legged it after John died.
Lucky cow
, I thought. If I'd known what was going on . . .'

‘In-flight store – want anything?' says the attendant. His trolley is packed with perfume and toys. ‘Pantyhose on special,' he adds. ‘Nice line in lingerie.'

They all shake their heads and he tosses his head as he flounces on up the aisle.

‘I'm watching a movie.' Rebecca puts her earphones on.

Rod! The thought of him shoots through Dodie like an arrow. She should try his mobile, you never know – but she hasn't got a phone any more. She holds the plastic pig tight in her fist and it's wet with sweat.

Seth's asleep, mouth hanging open and Rebecca's pretending to be lost in whatever's on the screen. Dodie puts on her own earphones and watches a news channel: all terrorism and flooding and freakish storms and fires. You could think Our Father right, you could think it was all rushing towards an end, but there's sport too, of course, and then an old episode of
Frasier
, which actually makes her lift the corners of her mouth and forget for a few seconds at a time where she's heading and the reason why.

The three-hour flight seems to take six but at last the pressure changes, the pilot thanks them for travelling with him, wishes them a safe onward journey. They get out of the airport in the hot golden glue of late afternoon. The nearer she gets to Jake, the tighter a screw turns in her guts. Has Martha stolen him? No. That's sick talk, Stella talk. Don't think like that. Picture him instead. She knows his eyes are blue and his wispy hair is dark and that he has fading stork marks at the nape of his neck but she can't picture him all together, only one detail at a time, and nothing will do but to hold him in her arms. The air is humid and flower-scented and she scuffs her feet on some waxy petals on the concrete while she and Seth wait for Rebecca to rent the car.

‘Do you think he's all right?' she asks Seth, and he says yes, of course, and it's a comfort to hear that, though she knows he's got no more idea than she has. ‘Why would she do that?' she pleads, unable to stop herself. ‘Why would she take him? Why would she steal him and leave me locked up? What if she's not there?'

‘Shut up,' Seth says. ‘I don't know, right?' She's startled to see tears wobbling in his eyes. It makes her see that this
is happening to him too. He loves Jake too. Think of his shock. Plunged so suddenly into this, this panic.

‘Sorry,' she mutters. She takes off her jacket and jumper and gets a sour whiff of sweat from her armpits. Taxis churn and hoot and planes take off and land and the air charges about in the wake of all the movement, all the burning fuel, hellish despite the efforts of the stiff and waxy flowers.

A
ir-conditioning makes the car icy inside. Shivering now, Dodie sits up front beside Rebecca, the directions on her lap. Rebecca clamps a bottle of Coke between her thighs and takes an occasional swig as she negotiates them out of the airport and on to the low highway where the ocean gleams through the haze. They do not speak except to work out the way. The road is terrifying with all the metal bullets shooting along and the fumes of heat and petrol shimmering the insubstantial world outside the windows. It takes less than an hour until they find the intersection and leave the freeway.