River: A Bad Boy Romance (26 page)

“What do I need with a hundred more dollars?”, the old man says. “You paid for your ride and extra for the time in the air, that's good enough for me.”

“You could use it to fix the bits that don't work”, River says, trying to offer the man the money again.

“What bits don't work?” he says. “You got up there and back didn't you?”

“We did”, River says.

“Well then”, says the old man proudly. “Everything else is just character, like the wrinkles on an old man's face, and the scars all across his body. I mean we've all got scars haven't we?”

“I guess”, River says.

“And each one of those tells a story I bet. As do all the nicks and breaks and tears and shreds and holes and marks and dents and scuffs all over this wonderful beast. If I changed any of that, I'd be changing her story.”

“Well then take it for yourself”, River says, not giving up.

“I got everything I need. The rest of that first one was more than enough. Course if you want to go on again, it'll be one dollar ninety each.”

Maddy and River watch the old man, as he rolls up his sleeves, cranks the lever and starts the beast rolling again.

“Why do you keep it running when nobody's on it?” Maddy calls to him.

“Because otherwise she'd get used to it, and then I'd have a problem starting her again”, he says, as though the thing itself were able to decide whether or not to go on. “You've got to have a purpose in life, because if you don't, there ain't no point in continuing.”

Maddy watches the thing crank into action again, grumbling all the while, and then with a smile and a wave at the old man, they disappear back to their car.

Once inside, they share a moment of quiet contemplation, while River begins to roll a cigarette.

“Are you going to be ok, Maddy?” he says after a while.

“Are you?” Maddy says, reaching out to interlock her hand with his.

“You're going to be stopped for a while, back to normal, the old life. I wonder if you'll be alright getting moving again?” River says. He gums the paper and puts the cigarette in his mouth. A moment later, he turns to her. Above, the curved metal beast bears down upon them, like a robotic sentry of arbitration.

“I've just gone on my first ride”, Maddy says. “I'm not stopping now.”

“It's a big change”, River says.

“Are you ready for that?” Maddy asks. “You seem like you've been running from something your whole life. Are you going to be alright letting it catch up to you?”

“I guess we'll figure that one out together”, River says.

“One month from now?” Maddy asks, squeezing his hand a little tighter. River puts the rolled but unlit cigarette behind his ear, places his hand behind Maddy's neck and pulls her towards him. Their foreheads meet, before River kisses her gently. Across the top of her head, her nose, finally her lips.

“You promise you'll come”, River says.

“I promise”, Maddy says, a tear rolling down her cheek, and others beginning to follow it. River wipes it away with the back of his thumb, but they come too quickly for him to catch them all.

“You promise you'll be there waiting for me?” Maddy says.

“I promise”, River says, a tear of his own now rolling across his cheek. Maddy catches it with her lips, and it tastes salty.

“It's crazy”, Maddy says, laughing a little. “We hardly know each other, and look at us.”

“I reckon we've known each other our whole lives, we just haven't realised it”, River says.

“Don't tell me you believe in that soul mate, one person in the world for you crap”, Maddy says, smiling.

River smiles. “I told you I was spiritual, didn't I?” he says. “Maybe what I mean is that we've been looking for ourselves all that time, you know, like we've been looking for our purpose in life, and we've helped each other find it.”

They kiss, savouring the taste and touch of one another. Hot lips on soft skin. Already familiar movements on the edge of being missed, fading away like footprints on a sandy beach as the unstoppable tide rolls in.

“You can't stay?” Maddy says after a while. “Come back with me and stay in my house.”

“You know I can't”, River says.

“Nobody will know.”

“Somebody will find us and pull us apart from each other”, River says. “You know they will. I want to Maddy, I want to stay with you right now, but I can't. You know I can't.”

River holds her tight and Maddy folds herself into him, burying her nose into the crook of his neck. His skin smells like a forest in the rain, and here, poured into him, she feels safe. She feels complete.

“Just give me a little while longer”, Maddy says. “Just five minutes before we drive away.”

They sit there, in the front seats of their car, pressed into each other, while the mechanical beast struggles on, every turn an effort, but with no intention of ever stopping.

“You know, I found something of yours in the trunk of the car”, River says after a while. “You must have dropped it.”

From the glove compartment, he produces Maddy's pig shaped stress squeeze ball and hands it over to her. She turns it over in her hands, moving it about with a kind of detached sense of familiarity, like someone would a once loved children's teddy bear, found again after several years of adulthood.

Maddy eventually passes it back to River. She had forgotten it was something she was carrying at all.

“Keep it”, she says. “I don't need it anymore.”

River takes it back, squeezes it in his fist and then with his hand sprung open, he watches the pig immediately retake its original shape. Out of the glove compartment he takes his gun, and with Maddy watching from inside the car, he throws both of them into the nearest bin. When he gets back to the car, he digs under his seat for the money bag. He takes a wad of notes out, which he stuffs in his pocket, and gives the rest back to Maddy.

“What's this?” she says.

“It was never mine”, River says. “I don't know if it's all still there, but you better take it. Hand it back to the police or whatever.”

“What happened to money doesn't have an owner?” Maddy says.

“It doesn't”, River says, “so that can't be mine.”

He closes his door, adjusts his seat and mirrors, takes the cigarette from behind his ear and lights it. Finally, he turns on the engine.

“Is this it?” Maddy says, her hand on his knee.

“It's getting close”, River says.

“You promised me lunch”, Maddy says, reminding him, another tear pearling down her cheek.

“I did that”, River says. “And it's going to be the best meal either of us will have ever eaten.”

River drives away from the Ferris wheel and back towards the border, Maddy's head rested on his shoulder, and her hand sometimes on his knee, other times wrapped around his waist. Outside, people go about their business, each one oblivious to the life of the next. They laugh and they cry, and they listen to music, and Maddy watches the way the corners of River's mouth lift up when he smiles, and how his pupils go wider when he's excited, and they both feel like they are at the beginning of a long journey, rather than at the very end.

When River touches her, which is usually either on her wrist, or under her chin, or pinching her cheek, she feels like there is nothing else more important in the world. What Maddy feels, for the first time in her life, and for want of a better word, because Maddy isn't sure what the word she has going around her head really means, and the idea of admitting it to herself is so dangerous because it might at once be taken away, but feels it anyway, and can't help but feel it, is loved. She feels loved, and it fills her heart with so much warmth she never wants to feel any other way again.

In a dirty café, a hundred metres from the border, they eat a terrible meal of scrambled eggs and burnt rice, washed down with a beer each and a burning hot coffee that tastes like it's been made with road tar. The food is awful, but River isn't wrong. It
is
the best meal either of them have ever eaten, simply because the time they spend together over it, is the happiest either of them have ever been.

They hold hands and kiss, and sit there for as long as they can before it feels right for River to go. When he gets up, Maddy goes with him, but he tells her to sit back down.

“It's better this way”, he says.

“Like you've just gone to the car, and you'll be back in a minute”, Maddy says, tears welling up again in her sad green eyes.

“Something like that”, River says, and they both smile.

“This is it, isn't it?” Maddy asks, hopeful the plan has all been a ruse, and River intends to stay with her after all. Like he's going to the car to check it's locked, or to pick up something he's left behind. Like they're on holiday and he can't possibly leave her.

“Think if it like the moment when the Ferris wheel stops”, River says.

“With you at the top and me at the bottom”, Maddy says.

“With us both waiting to get on”, River says.

“Don't go”, Maddy says.

“You know I've got to, Princess, don't make this more difficult than it already is. One month we'll be together again.”

“One month”, Maddy says, her cheeks wet with tears.

“It'll go quicker than you think”, River says.

“Maybe for you.”

River squeezes her hand and kisses her on the forehead.

“What if you don't get through?” Maddy says, suddenly panicking. She holds on to him tightly.

“Don't think about that, Maddy”, River says, squeezing her back. “Remember to try and think more positively.”

River kisses her on the cheek, and raises her chin in the familiar way she has grown used to him doing, when he wants to make her feel better.

“I can't help it”, she says. “What if you get through and the police find you?”

“They won't”, River says. “If I get through, it means they know nothing about me. Once I'm across the border, I'll dump the car, get in a taxi and be on the way to freedom without a trail. Believe me. A month later you'll be there, and the two of us will be on the way to making our new life together.”

“As easy as that”, Maddy says, trying to be optimistic.

“As easy as that”, River says, and kisses Maddy deeply. “Now, come on. This isn't a goodbye. Our lives are only just starting. We ought to be happy not sad.”

“I am happy”, Maddy says, with tears in her eyes.

“I'll see you on the other side, Princess”, River says, squeezing her hand.

“Not if I see you first”, Maddy says, trying to be humorous to make herself feel better.

“I'll let you know where, don't you worry. I'll get a note to you as soon as I can.”

“Ok”, Maddy says, the tears continuing to fall.

“Keep your chin up, Maddy”, River says. “Come on now. You're a beautiful woman so don't let anyone else tell you you ain't. You got me?”

“I've got you”, Maddy says.

“I've got to go.”

“I know.”

“Stay here until I'm gone.”

“I will”, Maddy says.

“Just give me a couple of hours, that'll be enough”, River says.

“Wait”, Maddy says, just before he pulls his hand away from hers.

River waits. Maddy breathes deeply, looks squarely into his ice blue eyes and readies herself. Finally she lets him go.

He gives her one last kiss, they hug tightly, and he's out of the door before she can stop him.

Alone, for the first time in two days, she becomes immediately aware of herself, and can't stop crying. She looks at the door constantly, hoping that River will come back through. When she hears the car start up outside and begin to pull away, she knows he's finally gone. Fifteen minutes later, after the waitress has asked if she is alright and whether she would like any more coffee, she gets up, and leaves the restaurant. From the street, she can see the border gates clearly, but River's car is nowhere to be seen.

At the Albuquerque police station, there has been a special telephone number set up for all information pertaining to the bank robbery and kidnapping of Madeleine Parker. It's a number that has been displayed constantly on TV news channels, read repeatedly on the radio, and published with several leading newspapers. It is the number that Sally Cannon is now dialling, desperate to pass on the information her brother refuses to do so.

“Albuquerque Police Department”, comes the voice on the other end of the line, which belongs to a rotund office named Midland Jenkins, who has a charming telephone voice that makes him sound a lot more handsome than he really is.

“Oh, hi, look, I'm calling from out of state, but I've got some information relating to the Maddy Parker case.”

“Go on”, Midland says, immediately grabbing a pen and a piece of paper.

“Well, it may be nothing”, Sally says. “But I reckon I saw Maddy this morning in my patisserie.”

“And where would that be?” Midland says, misspelling the word patisserie and following it with a question mark, as he jots it down.

“Oh we're just in a small town, nowhere really, about two hundred and fifty miles east of Albuquerque, it's called Glebe.”

“And you think you saw Maddy in your shop?”

“I don't think I did”, Sally says, “I know I did.”

“And she was with the perpetrator?” Midland asks.

“Well, no, that's just it, she was on her own.”

“On her own?” Midland says.

“Yes, look, I know it sounds strange officer, but there she was, clear as day, wearing this blonde wig and just acting like she was in a dream.”

Midland writes blonde wig and dream on his notepad.

“She was wearing a blonde wig?” he asks.

“Yes”, Sally says.

“Where would she have got a blonde wig from?”

“I am not a detective, detective”, she says. “I bake French cakes and I bake them well, but I cannot tell you what she was doing in my shop, nor why she was there. All I can tell you is that she
was
there.”

“And you are certain of this?”

“I'm certain.”

“Have you told your local police force?” Midland asks.

“Yes”, Sally says. “I got the licence plate number of the car she was driving-.”

“Wait”, Midland says. “She was driving a car as well?”

“Yes”, Sally says. “I'm getting on to that.”