Silencing Joy (6 page)

C: There are two double beds.”

For effect, Will wiggled his two fingers
close to my face.

“D: We have to conserve money because I only
have so much cash. I don’t think using a ‘dead man’s’ credit card
when you’re on the run is too smart.”

“Wow,” I said acerbically. “You
are
cranky when you’re tired.” That comment won me a disapproving
look.

Inside the room, he dropped my bag on the
floor and headed to the bathroom.
Okay, so I’m not 007. Give a
girl a break!
I had only been on the run for approximately six
and a half hours.

The first thing I did was head for the
thermostat, turning it up. My nose felt ice-covered. I picked up my
bag and set it on the bed near the bathroom. I rummaged through
looking for pajamas as the bathroom door opened. I had every
intention of making a joke about how men blame women for hogging
the bathroom, but then Will stalked out in just boxers.

“What the hell...?” I blurted out.

He walked right pass me. I had to look away.
My face heated. I heard him collapse with a thump on the bed by the
window.

Through the pillow, he mumbled, “It’s either
this or nothing at all. I’ve been in those clothes all day. The
‘boys’ have gotta breathe you know. Do you know what it’s like to
sleep in jeans? Yuck!”

“Ahhh, TMI!” I yelled at him, covering my
ears with my hands. “Ugh, go to sleep, cranky-pants.”

He punched the pillow a few times as I headed
straight to the bathroom, my face burning with embarrassment for
Will’s little boxer short parade.

When I finished with my nightly routine, I
slipped under the covers and fell asleep as soon as my head hit the
pillow.

I was traipsing through tall grass, looking for
something, but I couldn’t remember what. My camera was around my
neck. The sun was grazing the top of the mountain in front of me. I
smiled and thought, “How beautiful, what a great picture.” I lifted
my camera to my face. Suddenly I was violently shoved from behind
and fell. I felt my camera smash from my weight. I tried to flip
over, but someone was holding me down. The long grass was in my
hair and face, scratching me all over, even poking through my
clothes. I struggled again to flip over. I was successful, but my
victory was short lived because straddled above me was Tommy. I
screamed and thrashed. I tried to get away, but he was too strong.
The horrible feelings that were paralyzing the night that Will was
beaten came back in a blinding flood. I heard a voice. I couldn’t
make out the words at first.

“Joy! Joy!” I finally woke up to see Will on
top of me.

“Stop. It’s Okay. Stop.” He had my hands
pinned and straddling my stomach. “It’s a bad dream. Calm
down.”

My sight cleared. I was drenched in
sweat.

“Get off me, I can’t breathe.” Will’s weight,
combined with my fear, was causing shortness of breath. Will looked
down at me.

“Cute stomach,” he says jovially. I realized
my shirt had ridden up around my ribs. I thrashed around now from
mortification as my face flamed. He lifted off me and lay down
beside me. The sunlight filtered around the curtains on the window,
letting me know it was morning.

I rolled the other way towards to edge of the
bed and crawled into a fetal position as I waited for my heart to
slow down. Gently, Will put his hand on my shoulder and shook me a
little.

“Hey, Joy?” He hesitated. “You know, you have
had a traumatic experience. Nightmares are part of it.”

I spoke without moving or looking at him.
“Thanks Dr. Will. Go back to bed.” I sniffled as tears penetrated
my closed eyes.

The bed shifted as Will got up and went into
the bathroom. I heard the shower turn on. The covers were gathered
at the bottom of the bed, and I reached down and pull them tight
around me. I wanted to think about something – ANYTHING – that
would take that awful memory of the dream out of my brain. Images
of Tommy burned on the back of my eyelids. Wetness formed again in
the corners of my eyes and dropped lightly onto my pillow.

The doorknob to the bathroom clicked, and
Will came out.

“Hey, why is it that all hotels give free
shampoo that smells like flowers. Half of their customers are men.
Shouldn’t the soap and shampoo smell generic? I think that is
discriminatory.” He had a grin on his face as he glanced at me. I
couldn’t help but smile at his ridiculous tirade. “Bathroom is all
yours,” he told me.

The bathroom was still steamy from Will’s
shower. It felt good because, no matter how hard I tried, I
couldn’t shake the chill that seemed to consume my bones. I twisted
the shower knob to the hottest setting. I’m not sure how long I
stood under the blazing hot water, but it felt good. My skin was
red and my fingers pruned. A knock on the door broke me from my
trance.

Will yelled from the other side, “You
okay?”

“Yes,” I yelled back.

“You okay!?”

Guessing he didn’t hear me, I yelled louder.
“Yes!”

A creak sounded. I peeked out from the shower
curtain; Will had stuck his head in the bathroom.

“Joy?”

“Get out, please.”

“You’ve been in here a really long time,” he
says. “I was getting worried.”

“I answered you when you asked if I was
okay.” I spit with aggravation.

“It wasn’t too convincing.”

I couldn’t see him anymore other than his
reflection in the mirror on the wall. His face was furrowed with
worry.

“I’ll be out in a few minutes. You’re letting
out all my precious steam,” I said attempting to sound upbeat. The
door clicked closed.

When I came out of the bathroom, there was a
coffee sitting by the TV. Will was sitting in a chair on the other
side of the room, sipping on a coffee of his own.

“I’m ready.” I busied myself by repacking my
stuff. “Is this for me?” I ask out of politeness as I picked up the
coffee.

“Yeah. I already checked out.”

“Thanks.”

I gathered my stuff and headed for door. Will
stood up and took my bag from me.

The car was freezing inside. It felt like a
morning in December, not early October. I definitely did not have
the right clothes for this weather. Neither did Will. In fact, Will
had nothing but the clothes on his back.

“Where are we headed?” I asked as Will
steered the car out of the parking lot.

“We’re headed to a safe house,” Will
pronounced, then slipped deep into his thoughts.

I pulled out my cell to give my parents and
Jen a call. I hadn’t talked to my parents since before the
incident. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to. I just knew they would
know something was wrong when they heard my voice. My parents and I
were never terribly close. Since college, they definitely gave me
my space. The most obvious “space giving” part was that they moved
to Michigan. They were already “snowbirds” in Florida during the
winter, typically leaving for Florida on November 1.

“What are you doing?” Will asked in
disbelief.

“I’m going to call Jen, then my parents.
What’s the problem?”

“Do you have any idea how easy it is to track
a cell phone?”

“Sorry, I don’t typically GPS people. Derek
called you from his last night,” I huffed.

“That was totally different. Our phones are
secured by the government, and we weren’t staying in that location
long enough to be tracked.”

I held the off button down and tossed the
phone in the back, throwing a minor tantrum. Not a full blown one,
not yet.

“So, Mr. Espionage, how am I going to contact
my family? Should I cut words out of newspapers and magazines and
glue them in the form of a secret message?” I couldn’t help but be
sarcastic.

“We can deal with it later. Right now, let’s
just get to where we need to be.”

“And, where would that be?”

“Greenwich Lake in Maine. It’s a small town
area...secluded. The house is right on the lake surrounded by a
thick forest.”

Silence sat between us, uncomfortable and
aggravated.

I finally broke. “How do you like working for
the FBI?”

“When I’m not getting my face pummeled and
dying, it’s actually a great job. I’m finishing my education, get
to put bad guys away, and they’ll pay for me to go to college.”

“How many kids does the FBI recruit?”

“I’m really not supposed to say. The program
is kind of a secret. The way you know about it is getting
recruited. I really shouldn’t have mentioned what we are. The FBI
had to be creative to catch some of the criminals that are using
youth to further their means.”

“When this is all over, Derek and I will be
assigned somewhere else. We’ll be needed in another place, maybe a
gang in the city or another high school. We’ll play the part until
we look too old. At that point, they will give us different
assignments, or we can do something else. Each person that gets
accepted into the program generally does it for four years. It’s
one of the Special Units in the Public Corruption Division.
Recruits can renew if they want.”

“That is really interesting. I can’t believe
stuff goes on like that.” I pause. “You said you remembered me from
school. What made you remember me?”

Will shifted uncomfortably in the driver’s
seat. “We would have been in the same grade.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know, I stayed back twice. I would have
graduated with you.”

“Oh and...?”

“And...I just noticed you. That’s all.”

Somehow I didn’t think that was it. So I
pushed.

“That’s all?”

“Yeah...and we had pizza together...once.
About two years ago, your friend Kristin and a bunch of other kids
went out for pizza after a football game. I was there with a couple
of my friends,” he informed me, uncharacteristically shy.

I tried to think back. That was before
Kristin said all that terrible stuff to me. It had to have been a
Friday night. All of a sudden, it dawned on me.

“You’re right. You were with Joe and Steve.
Everyone pushed a bunch of tables together at Maretti’s Pizza. Wow,
good memory.”

“I only remember it because you were there. I
always wanted the guts to talk to you, but our paths never seemed
to cross.”

“Why didn’t you just come up to me in the
hall?” I asked.

“A poor loser druggie like me, come up to
you? I don’t think so. I was a real one then, not a pretend one.
That’s why they gave me this assignment. Tommy and his friends had
to believe that I was legit.”

His view of the past made me reflect. I
thought of myself as a pretty observant person, being a
photographer. But it occurred to me at that second that I didn’t
really see anything at all. I always lived my life in a comfortable
bubble, only letting in the things or the people I wanted to.

“Sorry,” I said in a soft voice.

“Sorry? What’re you sorry for?” He turned to
me for a brief second.

“Sorry that we weren’t friends in high
school.”

Will pulled over for gas and a bathroom break
and bought two more coffees and a few muffins from the coffee shop
attached to the gas station. It was now ten in the morning, and we
had been on the road for a couple of hours. Outside had warmed up;
the temperature would probably hit seventy degrees. We had been in
Maine since last night, but this place seemed to be really off the
beaten path.

As we pulled back on the road again, I
thought about my classes. If this dragged out, I would need to
retake the entire semester. It was only a month and a half into the
school year. Then I pondered what I would do for money while I was
here. I only had what was in my pocket. I was already told I
couldn’t use my bankcard. My mind raced with all the things I
should have done to prepare for this.
How could I prepare, when
I didn’t see it coming?

We munched on our muffins and gingerly drank
our hot coffees.

Between bites I asked, “So what made you get
into drugs and stuff?”

“That’s not a hard question. My parents,” he
says deadpan. “My parents were coke heads. I was raised in a family
where we barely had money for milk and bread. My father went from
job to job, and my mother never got off the couch. You saw my
place. I still live in the house I grew up in. It was originally my
grandparents. They gave it to my mom and dad when they got married.
It’s bought and paid for. All my dad had to do was pay the taxes
and utilities, and he still couldn’t put food on our table. All
their money went to drugs. I am a victim of my environment,” he
said as if he was repeating something he heard from a
therapist.

“Where are they now?” I questioned.

“Dad died in an overdose. Mom is in a mental
hospital in RI. I go see her once in a while.” He didn’t sound
pained, just like it was a way of life.

Sorrow riddled my gut. Granted, my parents
and I were never extremely close, but at least I had consistency,
love, and food on the table. Now, more than ever, I wished I could
talk to them.

We finally turned off onto a dirt road, the
kind with grass growing up the middle. It was a road, but the grass
indicated it wasn’t used that much.

After a mile or so of trees, trees, and more
trees, we came to a gate overgrown with bushes. Will slipped out to
open the gate with a key he had. As he swung the gate wide enough
for the car to pass through, I noticed that the bushes were stuck
to the gate, not growing around it to make others believe they had
reached a dead end.

Will pulled the car up, stopping to lock the
gate again. After miles of trees in their foliage splendor, we came
to a beautiful clearing with a lake. Will drove up to a house...no,
a cabin made out of logs. The house was so picturesque it could be
in a tourist magazine. Massive tree trunks supported the front
porch. Rocking chairs settled by the door. This place looked more
like a vacation house than a safe house.