Deliver Her: A Novel (21 page)

CARL

Sprinting past the disinterested clerk, the first thing Carl saw in the back of the bus depot was Mia kneeling beside a large trash can. The second thing he glimpsed was a pair of legs, splayed toward the ATM in the corner.

By now, Iris had come inside. She stopped short at the sight of Mia on the floor. “Oh, my goodness. Is that Alex?”

“No.” Mia brushed the hair out of the young woman’s face, ashen next to her red ski coat. “It’s Reyna.” She tapped the girl’s cheek gently. “Reyna. It’s me, Mia. Wake up.”

“Leave me alone.” The girl rolled over toward the wall of vending machines, a phone curled in one hand.

“What’s wrong with her?” Iris asked.

“Sleeping it off, I think, judging from the fumes.” Mia grabbed the girl’s jacket and tugged. “Reyna, wake up. I mean it.”

The girl blinked, scraping the back of her hand across her mouth. “Hey, Mia.” She reached out to touch Mia’s cheek, a move the young woman dodged. “Uh-oh. Am I in trouble?”

“You tell me.”

The girl struggled to sit up, shrinking at the sight of Carl and Iris crouching in front of her. “No, Iris. Please, please, please don’t tell Ellen.”

“Reyna, listen to me,” Mia said. “Did you see a girl here a little while ago? Waiting for a bus?” Mia began to describe Alex. When she mentioned the lip ring, Reyna’s hand fluttered to her own mouth. “Yup. Right there. My friend,” she said dreamily. “She bought me this.” Reyna looked at her empty hand in confusion. “Wait.” On the floor beside her, she spotted a candy wrapper and swatted at it. “I mean that.” She waved the wrapper in Mia’s face for inspection.

“You talked to her?” Carl asked.

Reyna cupped a hand by her mouth, her head rolling onto one shoulder like a rag doll’s. “Who’s that?” she asked Mia in an exaggerated whisper, pointing up at Carl.

“My friend. Why did she buy you candy?”

“Cos she wanted to use my phone for a teeny minute.” Reyna squinted, pinching her thumb and pointer together and holding them up to Mia.

Mia waved the hand away. “Who did she call?”

“Chill
out
, Mia. You don’t have to be mean.” Reyna half rolled back to the wall.

“Let me in there.” Iris squatted next to the girl. “Reyna, honey, who did Alex call?”

Reyna turned back and smiled. “Iris. Hi. You’re so pretty.” She pursed her lips. “Who’s Alex?”

“The girl with the candy. Who did she call?”

“Her bestest friend in the entire world.” Reyna’s eyes were dreamy. “To say good-bye.” After several tries, she managed to land a wobbly finger on her lips. “Shhh. It’s a secret. She said I couldn’t tell
anybody
.” Her head fell on Iris’s shoulder. “I want a best friend.”

Reyna’s eyes fluttered shut. Carl took advantage of Reyna’s state to slip the phone from the girl’s hand and flip through it. By some miracle, the device was not password-protected.

Mia tapped Reyna’s face again. “Look at me, Reyna. Did Alex get on the bus?”

Reyna swooned. “I
think
so.” Her eyes began to close again.

“You’re sure?” Iris prompted.

“Ninety-nine point nine nine nine nine nine percent sure. Know how I know? Cos she did this.” She held up two fingers in a
V
. “Peace out.” She turned her hand to examine the symbol. “And then, poof, she disappeared.” Reyna leaned against the trash bin again and closed her eyes.

“Looks like Alex sent a few texts,” Carl said. Holding the phone out of sight, he read the first one to Mia:

Sorry
, I can’t help you anymore.

“God. So dramatic. What do you think it means?” Mia asked.

“Not sure. Maybe her mother will have an idea. Here’s another one, to a different number.”

Sorry to leave you, Shay-Shay; doing something I wanted to do for a long time.

“Shay-Shay sounds like a nickname. Must be a close friend.” Mia commented.

“I’m hoping she was referring to going to Happy Corner. That’s still my guess. I’m calling the troopers to stop that bus.”

Carl asked Iris if she would mind going to the counter for paper and a pencil so he could note the two phone numbers and messages. In her absence, he continued to scroll the phone’s history. “There was also a recent outgoing call to somebody named Lydia,” he said.

Mia looked up in surprise. “Lydia is the little girl at Hope Haven. She and Reyna are tight. I’m surprised Reyna had it together to make that call.”

As Iris returned with the writing supplies, the store’s welcome mat sensor bleated. Mia looked over at the door, then stood up and waved wildly. “Ellen, back here. We’ve got Reyna.”

A tall black woman in a brown velour jogging suit hurried over, her face creased with worry, and knelt beside the sleeping girl.

“How did you know to come here?” Mia asked.

“Strangest thing,” she said, rubbing the girl’s cheek. “Lydia came to me and said your friend called her.”

“My friend?”

“That’s what she said.”

Ellen said Reyna’s name repeatedly, but the only response was a noxious snore. “Well, she’s breathing. That’s for sure.” Sitting back on her heels, Ellen glanced up at Carl. “Who’s this?”

Mia introduced him. “It’s a long story.”

Ellen got to her feet. “Lydia told me it was your friend from the living room. A girl with a pink braid.”

Mia turned to Carl. “Lydia must have talked to Alex at Hope Haven. Maybe that’s what Lydia was trying to tell me in the hall.”

“The two apparently had quite a conversation,” Ellen said. “Anyway, she told Lydia that Reyna was in trouble at the bus station and to get help. So here I am.”

A snuffle rose from the floor.

“I’ve got to get her back to the house,” Ellen said. With Carl’s help, she lifted the girl to her feet, and the two haltingly guided Reyna outside to Ellen’s car, with Mia and Iris following. With Reyna buckled into the backseat, Carl handed Ellen the girl’s phone.

“I’ll definitely be hanging on to that for a while,” Ellen said, preparing to drive away.

Mia turned to Carl. “So. What do we do now?”

“We follow the bus to Colebrook.” Carl hoped his interpretation of Alex’s texts was correct—that she wasn’t alluding to anything more dire than a fan’s visit to a band’s shrine.

ALEX

“Colebrook: 60 miles”

As the road sign whooshed by, Alex perched on the edge of her seat gripping her bag like a grandma, every nerve on high alert, as if she’d chugged three Red Bulls in a row, expecting at any second for the driver to summon her to the front of the bus as if she were a kid acting out on a class trip, demanding a second look at her ticket, booting her off. She had been surprised he’d even let her on at all, considering the soggy mess she was. She supposed he saw all kinds.

Once seated, she waited for a passenger to recognize her—one in particular, a gray-haired lady in thick white socks and Birkenstocks eating a smelly salad two rows up, who gave Alex the stink eye when she passed.

Alex sat frozen like that for miles, twirling her braid. Gradually, as the minutes ticked by and the driver slurped coffee from a giant thermos and riders bent over their lit screens, it dawned on her that no one on the bus gave a crap about her at all.

All anybody cared about was their own journey.

She dropped her braid and settled back into the plush seat, placing her bag beside her. For the first time since this morning, since rolling over to the shock of Camo Man’s ugly brown work boots, Alex was free. In control.

Nothing would stop her—not a herd of moose (mooses?—the elusive plural distracted her) charging the highway, not a truckload of creepers, not a two-faced artist, not even that wasted girl in the bus depot. What kind of friends would dump somebody there like that, Alex had wondered. She’d told the store clerk the girl needed help, but the guy had barely looked up from his gross girlie magazine.

Reyna
. That had been a bonus, being able to use her phone to contact Shana and Evan.

It had taken Alex awhile to connect the girl to Hope Haven. After all, her number one mission had been to buy a bus ticket, not do the Good Samaritan thing. In fact, had the girl’s head not rolled back against the garbage can, Alex might never have noticed her necklace, a scrolly gold version of her name suspended on a chain. Very
Sex and the City
, Alex thought, although those necklaces had been over for, like, centuries in Riverport.

Reyna.
Not a common name. Lydia must have said it a bazillion times between sobs, back in Hope Haven’s living room, while Alex impatiently channel surfed waiting for Mia. As the little girl stared at Alex (little kids were always mesmerized by her lip ring and colored ponytail), a ginormous image of Alex’s own face flashed on the flat-screen behind Lydia—not a Pic Stitched Facebook selfie, but her really,
really
rough high school ID photo, the one with the high pigtails she wore on a dare from Cass, who argued that no one would
ever
see their ID pictures after they graduated, as she collected her own pixie cut into a Pebbles-like arrangement on top of her head.

Sorry, Cass. I love you, but you definitely got that one wrong.
As if her hot mess of a picture wasn’t embarrassing enough, the television ticker underneath dribbled cryptic details.
(Seriously? Medium weight? How can you tell that from a picture of my head?)
If she had had more time with Reyna’s phone, she would have loved to search on the #FindAlex hashtag. Maybe she was trending.

After the shock of seeing the TV coverage, she’d wanted only to get out of Hope Haven
fast
and to find her way to the bus station.

Lydia had followed her to the shelter’s back porch, watching as Alex dragged open the shed door, shifting shovels and bags of fertilizer to get at Hope Haven’s sad collection of bikes. She chose an ancient model with thick, mushy tires and a rusty basket and wheeled it out.

“You can’t ride a bike in the snow,” Lydia had said, pushing her glasses up on her nose.

“Watch me. Anyway, it’s not snowing, exactly.” Dropping her bag into the basket, Alex put up her hood and started down the shelter’s sleet-covered driveway, slipping and sliding and leaving a herky-jerky trail in her wake.

She had convinced Lydia to keep her “borrowing” of the bike a secret by promising to look for Reyna in her travels. Later, she’d figure out a way to tell Lydia where she’d left the bicycle: behind the bus depot, wedged between an ice dispenser and a mountain of milk crates. It had done its job, getting her to a gas station, where she asked the guy in the little glass booth for directions to the bus depot. Not that she hadn’t been scared shitless sometimes, the road so slick in spots she literally went sideways. Once, on an incline, the brakes failed.
This is it,
she thought, preparing to sail over the handlebars. But she hadn’t; something kept her rooted on the bike seat.

Not something. Cass.

Alex had gotten off the bike then and walked with it a bit along the dark road, brittle ice cracking under her thin soles like glass. Sleet had needled her cheeks; the adrenaline began to wear off and a rawboned chill seeped in instead. To take her mind off the panic tickling the back of her neck, she had forced herself to focus on the moonlight filtering through the trees and the lacy patterns it left on the ground—until the designs began to resemble ghoulish claws.

Freaked out, Alex stared straight ahead, periodically touching her neck where Cass’s scarf had been. The gas station guy had said the depot was only a little ways up the road, hadn’t he? Alex sniffed; what would happen if she missed the bus? She could sleep at the bus depot, but that might be sketchy. She was starting to get hungry, too. There would be abundant food once she arrived at Happy Corner, but what if she had to wait overnight? Her only money was needed for bus fare.

She could remember being this cold and wet just once in her life: the day she waited for her mom after a soccer game. As uncomfortable as that had been, Alex knew that her mother was around the corner and that she wouldn’t forget her. What were her parents doing right now? she had wondered. Did they even realize she was gone? Imagining her mother and Jack cozy at their kitchen table, Alex’s throat had gone all tight.

Leaning her head on the bus window now, Alex was certain she would have given in to the tears at that moment on the icy mountain road had she not spotted the galloping neon horse on the building up ahead, beaming at her through the sleet.

MEG

In the wan light of Jacob’s glove box, the cellophane packet of multicolored pills gleamed like beads from one of Alex’s grade school craft kits.

“Pull over.” The packet in her palm, Meg’s hand shook uncontrollably.

“I can’t right now. What if a trooper stops?”

“You should have thought of that before you decided to ride around with this evidence.” A salty-sour swirl of wine and chicken fingers coated Meg’s throat.

“Evidence? Geeze, Meg. Calm down. I’ll get off at the next exit, I promise. You can get a coffee. I’ll explain everything.”

“How am I supposed to calm down about
this
?” She swung her palm toward him.

“You’re making a big deal out of nothing. As usual.”

“This is
not
nothing.” Meg pressed herself against her door and faced him. “Do
not
turn this one around, Jacob. These are
your
pills. What about the ones in the basement? Are you going to lie to me again?”

Jacob worked his cheek again, the blue-gray vein pulsing. “Just let me get off the highway so we can talk.”

Over the next one-point-eight miles, Meg counted the mile markers hurtling by so she wouldn’t lose her mind. God help her. The pills were Jacob’s, not Alex’s.
It doesn’t change anything. Alex still did all of those other things.

But it did change things. This information cast Jacob’s reaction in the den last Sunday in an entirely new light. If he’d only been honest and admitted the pills were his, she might have thought things through differently, discussed the situation rationally with Melissa, bookmarked Begin Again’s website in her “Alex” folder for a future day.

She would have, wouldn’t she?

“How long, Jacob?”

They were off the highway in an unlit weigh station, Meg incapable of waiting until the next official exit. Jacob kept glancing over his shoulder worriedly.

“We’ll be in trouble if we’re caught here,” he said.

“If we’re caught, it’ll be your fault. I’m asking you. How long have you been using?”

“I’m not
using
. It’s a few pills. You make it sound like I have track marks down my arm.”

“Answer me.”

He laced his fingers behind his neck, staring at the car ceiling. “Not that long. Just since I started with Ben.”

That was a good six months, Meg calculated.

The hours and the driving were killing him, he continued. Some guys on Ben’s tree crew took stuff to stay awake. “It worked for them, so I figured, what’s the harm?” Jacob glanced sideways at her.

“So you were high on the job, using that equipment?” She shuddered, recalling the saw’s whine in the background of this morning’s conversation.

“It kept me going. You were always up my ass to get more hours.”

“Don’t do that, Jacob. Don’t even
try
to make this my fault.” She thought back to the multicolored pharmacy buried in their basement cushion. “What are you taking, exactly?”

Jacob hesitated. “Mostly Provigil.”

Meg knew about the medication, having encountered a resident or two over the years dabbling with the drug to make it through grueling twenty-hour shifts. The residents crashed in the lounge after it wore off, sleeping like the dead. Meg always thought it a dangerous game, despite the drug’s limited potential for abuse when people took it as directed.

Which Jacob wasn’t.

Meg shook the packet at him. “There’s more than Provigil here,” she said.

Jacob shrugged. “The guys kinda pool their stuff.” There might be Ativan (to help him sleep if the Provigil hadn’t worn off), Dexadrine (a short-term fix when the Modafinil ran dry), maybe a Xanax or two to chill at home, he guessed.

Speed. Uppers. Xanax, the old faithful. Any one had a deadly potential for abuse, but taking them in tandem, in ragtag dosages, was irresponsible and dangerous.
And
addictive.

He swore there weren’t any more drugs in their home; the packet stuffed in the pillow had been it.

“How could you let me think they were Alex’s? How could you do that to your daughter?” Meg wanted to scream at the injustice of the deceptions: first Shana, and now Jacob, sacrificing Alex to cover their own asses.

“I didn’t
do
this to Alex. I only meant to leave the pills in the basement a day or two. Until I left with Ben.”

“A day or two that changed everything. If I had had any idea
—
”

Meg shifted in her seat to face him. “You could have told me Sunday night in the den. You let me go on and on about Alex
—
”

“I was planning to get rid of them. To stop taking them altogether.”

Wasn’t that what every addict said when they were cornered?

“Really. I was,” he countered at Meg’s raised eyebrow. “I . . . I don’t like how they make me feel. I figured blaming it on someone at Alex’s house party would be a good enough cover until I could get rid of them. If I created some doubt, you’d let it go. I never imagined you’d send her away over it.”

“It wasn’t
just
that. But it was the last straw. Don’t you see, Jacob? You’re the whole reason we’re even in this car right now. Why Alex is out there somewhere right now . . .” She wiped her car window and stared out of it.

“That’s bullshit, and you know it. Obviously you and Melissa set these wheels in motion a long time ago.”

“Melissa didn’t . . .” Meg stopped herself, unwilling to involve her sister. “It was me. I did the research. You saw how worried I was that night. And you belittled me, just to cover up your nasty habit.”

“A few pills don’t make it a habit. I’m not an addict.”

“That’s good to hear,” she sniffed. “Be sure to tell your daughter that when we see her.”

“Meg, no. Don’t say anything to Alex. I’ll take care of this on my own. I promise. Everything will be fine.” Jacob’s skin gleamed with perspiration.

Meg moved closer to inspect his face. “Are you on something right now?”

“No. I swear. I haven’t taken anything since this morning. Go ahead. Check my eyes.” He clicked on his visor light and widened his eyes. The car light was too dim for her to get a good fix on his pupils.

She thought back over the past few months: Jacob’s nighttime wanderings, his irritability, the uncustomary outbursts with the kids, lack of attention to his appearance. And of course, his surprise announcement on the deck.

She’d chalked everything up to his unemployment. Had it been the drugs all along? Or had his habit propelled his business into a free fall?

Then the fight at Alex’s Sweet Sixteen. “Is that why you left early that night, Jacob?”

“Left where?”

“Alex’s Sweet Sixteen. Did you leave your daughter’s birthday party early to get high?” Meg reached over and yanked the keys from the ignition. “Never mind. Don’t even answer that. Get out. I’m driving.”

“No, Meg. I’m fine. I swear.” Jacob draped an arm over the steering wheel protectively. “Besides, you were drinking wine at the house.”

“Half a glass, hours ago. I’m fine. Get out, Jacob.” She tossed her phone at him. “You’re in charge of that.”