How to Disappear (17 page)

I say, “Yes, sirrrr,” in the exaggerated slur we used to use when we were sassing our dad behind his back.

Don says, “Don’t you sass me, boy,” imitating the voice I haven’t heard for four years but that still gets me going—along with the guilt that I closed it down.

I’m hunkered down with Mrs. P. Curtains drawn. Getting groceries delivered to the welcome mat. Watching TV and baking.

I’m not waiting for him.

I’m hiding out.

Not feeling a tenth of the way safe.

The Home Shopping Network doesn’t have news. Every time Mrs. P nods off, I grab the remote and hit up the local news on channel nine.

Nothing.

No armed assaults. No barroom brawls. No murders.

I mean, somebody thought she saw a bear cub in a tree. That was news. They interviewed her for five minutes.

If we killed the guy, it would have to be news.

Where is J ditching the car anyway? Peru?

I think he’s coming back.

Maybe.

I grill Mrs. Podolski lamp chops (into the yard for mint leaves, back in under ten seconds, world record) and return to the Home Shopping Network for an ongoing sale of loose gems. Mrs. P’s birthstone is the opal. Cat’s is aquamarine. My real one ought to be rubies.

I keep coming back to bloodred.

The brightest thing I wear now is beige, but bloodred is my signature color.

Mrs. Podolski says, “The price of a good woman is above rubies. That’s a proverb for you, Cathy.”

This might explain one or two things.

By Thursday, Mrs. P is so sick of pastries, I have to stop rolling dough. When she grabs my hand with her little, liver-spotted fingers, I can’t believe her grip.

“I’m going to read your palm, Ruby,” she says.

For a second, I’m terrified she’s going to figure out who I am and why I’m in her living room by tracing the lines of my hand. Until I remember that nobody can do that. There are no real fortune-tellers or real witches or real bogeymen.

Maybe bogeymen.

I let her massage my palm with the tips of her fingers.

Meet a dark stranger. Check.

Go on a long journey. Check.

She gets distracted by a mound of cubic zirconia on TV before she gets to long life.

After a while, she’s so sick of me folding her afghan over her knees and waving my palm at her for the word on long life, she’s ready to throw me out of the house.

She thinks I poisoned her coffee. When J finally shows up, tapping on the kitchen window, she thinks he’s come to arrest me.

I want to hug him until my arms are too tired to keep hugging. But he swoops in and hugs me first. I’m enveloped in it. Also trapped. But all I feel is relieved.

When he steps back, he looks me over like the vice principal checking for bra straps and too-short skirts and random inappropriateness.

He says, “Good job! You look great.”

I have black hair parted down the middle, black eyebrows, and red bow lips. I turned one of Mrs. P’s old thermal tops into a white waffle-weave shirt. Over a black skirt.

Blah.

But a different style of blah.

“Like I looked terrible before?”

“You were supposed to look different, that’s all I meant.”

“Joking.”
I reach up to touch where his cheekbone is swollen, but he pulls back. “You still look pretty beat-up.”

I’m so glad to see him, it’s borderline pathetic. I tell myself I’d be happy to see a friendly dachshund. Facing the fact that I
don’t like being alone. But it’s not the same thing. The dachshund wouldn’t have its paws under the waistband of my awful skirt.

He says, “Can I get into the garage?”

I start to hand him my key ring, but why? There isn’t any reason Mrs. P can’t see him. It’s not like she’ll remember. And what if she did? What if she told her totally indifferent son, Walter? I could go,
No, Walter, it wasn’t my boyfriend, it was a praying mantis
.

The worst part is, it would be plausible.

No, the worst part is seeing J with her. How sweet he is.

I wish I could keep him. Bag him and drag him back to Cotter’s Mill. Go,
Hey J, I’m not who you think—fooled ya! Wanna be my boyfriend?

Pretend he never saw me stab that guy. Another episode of things that look like the fun kind of bad spinning out of control. Him spinning with me.

He walks through the kitchen door like nothing happened. Like he’s my playmate with a half-assed disguise. Not my partner in what might have been a crime.

I have to keep reminding myself that him-and-me isn’t real.

That even if I don’t ever go back home (reality), if I accept that and go,
Yay, new life with permanent bad hair and giant thighs
(reality), he’d still be with a made-up girl.

If I’m with anyone ever from now on, that person will be with a made-up girl.

Mrs. Podolski yells, “Officer!”

J says, “Can I get you more tomato soup?”

He looks over at me, smiling at me, and I try to think about something other than the fact that at some point I’m going to have to shed Catherine G. Davis and never see him again.

Such as, how weird is it that a lady who buries her silverware can still tell if her soup comes from a can or from a fresh tomato?

And how hot J looks in oven mitts.

I settle Mrs. P in front of the TV with soup and Sprite on her favorite tray (violets painted on a white metal background) and her favorite nighttime show (QVC selling handbags).

Back in the kitchen, J is staring down my stash of Toaster Strudel and Oreos. The cupboard door is hanging open. If my life didn’t revolve around avoiding death every minute when he isn’t underfoot distracting me, I’d die of shame.

“You don’t feed her this crap, do you?”

“Constantly. If I stuff her veins with enough cholesterol, who knows, I could inherit that couch.”

I swear he’s trying to figure out how many bags of Famous Amos chocolate chip cookies it took to pad my behind. Calculating how big I’ll be once I’ve emptied that cupboard down my throat.

“Do you ever worry about malnutrition?”

“Do you ever worry girls will smack you?”

“I feel relatively safe as long as I outweigh you.”

“Not for long.” I pull a box of Hostess Sno Balls from the cupboard, take out a Sno Ball, and bite into it.

“Are we going to share?”

“Nope.” But I hand him one, a pink one. I don’t even know why I eat this garbage when the kitchen’s full of things I baked.

He says, almost casually but in a tight, tight voice, “I’m supposed to be in my cousin’s wedding. This is probably what they’ll serve. I was going to cancel, but maybe I should keep everything looking normal. You think?”

This is it. The kiss-off. He leaves, and I’m out of here. I’ll call Walter from the bus, tell him to get another aide for Mrs. P. Fast.

I say, “Classy. Where is it?”

“South Dakota. The drive is going to take longer than the whole event.”

“Come on. No bachelor party and rehearsal dinner and binge drinking with the bridesmaids?” (Camel chitchats while exiting oasis.)

“Maybe the binge drinking.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow. I should be back by Monday. Tuesday if I’m passed out in a drunken stupor with a couple of bridesmaids.”

Tomorrow?

I feel something I’m not supposed to feel. Big-time. I make myself smile. My face is the kind of mask that doesn’t have tear
ducts. “Help yourself. You want a drunk bridesmaid, go to. It’s not like I’m your girlfriend.”

He looks relieved.

I feel miserable. Resent that this wedding is cutting into my temporary true romance because I can’t do this again anytime soon. Gainesville, Florida next. Or maybe Pullman, Washington.

I hate this. I hate that he can’t know Actual Me. Hate that I can’t go sneaking out with him in Cotter’s Mill. Take him to a party on the lake where Liv and Jody get to look him over, and Summer embarrasses herself with shameless flirting.

I hate how not-normal and approaching expiration this and everything else is. I hate that I can’t keep him. I hate everything about this.

Then he hands me a box.

“What’s in here?”

“No big deal—it’s a phone.”

“You can’t go getting me phones!”

“What if I’m up in South Dakota and the only thing to talk to for miles is a cow?”

“You got me this because talking to me is better than talking to livestock?”

“Don’t forget phone sex.”

“What?”

“That was a joke.”

It’s a cute green burner. Expensive for a prepaid.

I want to hurl myself around his neck.

He kind of grabs me, followed by neck-wrapping.

Sweet.

Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet.

I really like this guy.

Damn.

This is a bad idea.

I don’t look like the prep guy who shows up at Yucca Valley Correctional with clockwork regularity because his mother makes him anymore. I look like Jeremiah from El Molino, unshaven and scraggly haired, a cross between a hipster and someone who’s been camping for too long.

Don says, “Nice hair, Jacqueline.”

“Nice jumpsuit. You have something to tell me you couldn’t say on the phone?”

Don’s eyes narrow. “You’re here to dance like Pinocchio. Some people need to see me pull your strings.” His head bobs as if he’s inviting me to stand up. “So dance.”

I don’t move. “You’re the one in the cage, not me.”

“Don’t be such a smug bitch! You think you disappear in the middle of this, ditch my car, and
nothing happens
?” His voice is rising. He glances across the prison yard. “Try to look like a guy getting a message. Is that too hard for you? You don’t want to be sorry.”

A
you’ll be sorry
from Don is his most reliable promise. He saves it for special occasions.

“Fine!” I sound just like Nicolette with the defiant little
fine
of the defeated person: not as much fun when you’re the one who’s defeated. “Everybody knows you made me come. Take a bow. Can I go now?”

Don says, “Are you stupid?”

I look around the yard, wanting to figure out who he’s trying to impress.

“Words need to start coming out of your mouth, Jack-off,” Don leans in. “And when you get around to doing this thing, make sure it’s an accident.”

This thing I’ve been pushing further and further into the realm of the theoretical, parsing out directions I could go as if they were equidistant points on a compass. But here’s the reality: I’m taking concrete instructions from a man I visualize with slime dribbling out of the corners of his mouth when he speaks.

“That’s why you wanted me to take your gun? So I could stage an accidental shooting? Clever plan, Don.”

“Just finish her.”

For a second, I hope she’s on a bus out of El Molino right now, heading for somewhere I’ll never find her. Then the thought of never seeing her again makes me feel something close to panic.
Followed immediately by the image of my mother’s house burned to the ground.

“Jesus! I’ll just make her disappear. She’ll go on a hike and whoops—something like that. Does that float your boat?”

“It’s not my boat you have to worry about.” Don looks around as if he’s still trying to spot someone. “It’s Yeager’s boat. And you’d better float it good.”

I’m making every muscle in my face stand down, a skill well honed when kids wanted to meet up after school to see who was the badder ass. I knew I could break them in half but declined, seemingly impassive, afraid of what I’d do to them if I said yes.

If Don sees me panic, he’s right, I’m his bitch. I try to sound as much like him as I can manage. “How much longer does this puppet show have to take?”

With an intensity that spews up through his rage, he says, “I flap my lips, you nod like a good little boy.”

I start nodding.

“Not that much!”

“Fine.” I stop and sit there glaring at him while he tells me the plot of a science-fiction movie he got to see for good behavior. I nod at appropriate intervals until the buzzer goes off and visitors are ushered out.

Just before he stands up, he says so quickly that it’s almost as if it didn’t happen, “The thing with Mom. I don’t know how long I can hold them off. They’re not nice guys. You’ve got to get this done.”

“Don!”

He’s on his way out before I can even get a read on his face. “Have a good one,” he calls to me casually, as if he didn’t just tell me his friends are going to execute my mother.

This whole thing is a play I don’t want to be in.

“Whatever you say.” I try to sound cowed pretty loudly on the chance he’s sneaking glances all around because we’ve got an audience that has to think I’m going to do what I’m supposed to do. I try to sound like I’m afraid of him.

It’s not much of a stretch.

The sprint to the car, the fumbling with the phone, the attempt to sound something other than scared shitless is getting old.

Fortunately, my mother is so annoyed, she doesn’t notice.

“Where are you, Jack? And where’s your phone? And why did you turn off the tracker? You’re supposed to be camping, not hiding.”

I’ve called my mom on the burner. That’s how thrown off I am.

“I might have left it somewhere. Sorry. I bought this cheap one.” There’s a long silence while she waits for me to elaborate. It’s like playing chicken with someone who doesn’t even have eyelids and couldn’t blink if she wanted to.

“
What
did I say about being responsible?”

How do I answer that?

“Jack! Where’s your itinerary? Or are you just wandering through the countryside losing things?”

“Just the phone. And a sweatshirt I could care less about.” I throw in the sweatshirt to give her something trivial to call me out
on, and to distract her—a tactic developed over years of trial and error. It doesn’t work.

“This isn’t safe! You were supposed to be sending me your
detailed
itinerary. And answering my calls!”

“Come on.” I play the military card again. “Guys my age are fighting in Afghanistan.”

“Don’t equate driving around aimlessly and letting your sweatshirt walk away with
fighting for your country
—”