Walk Me Home (2 page)

“I’d let it go cheap.”

“How much?”

“How much’ve you got?”

He carefully empties his jeans pockets. Separates out a few noncash items. Carly can’t quite see what they all are, but one looks like a red rock and another like a guitar pick. He counts a few bills, then digs back into his pocket for a handful of change. Adds it up, pointing to each coin, his lips moving.

“I only have twelve dollars and thirty-five cents.”

“Sold,” Carly says.

Carly’s the first to sit down at one of two library computers. She pulls up her e-mail on the Web. She hasn’t checked it for ages. Eleven pieces of spam mail. One e-mail from her friend Marissa in Tulare. It says, “Carly, why didn’t you tell me you were moving? Where did you go? Write back, OK?”

Nothing from Teddy at all.

They get their first ride with a sweet middle-aged woman. Plump, with thin, graying brown hair.

“Where are you girls going?” she asks when they pile into the backseat.

“West,” Carly says.

“Well, I know that. But where?”

“Um. Home.”

“But where’s home? You girls seem awfully young to be out hitchhiking by yourselves. I usually never pick up hitchhikers, but I was worried about you. How far do you have to go?”

Carly kicks herself for not anticipating this problem in advance.

“It’s just down this road about twenty miles,” Carly says.

“Does your mother know you’re out here alone?”

In her peripheral vision, Carly sees Jen begin to cry quietly.

You’re in charge now, Carly tells herself. There’s nobody else. If a problem comes up, there’s no one to run to. You have to solve it yourself. So go ahead. Save the day.

She glances at the odometer. Memorizes the number plus twenty miles.

“It’s like this,” Carly says. “We went out last night with some friends. And they drove us way up into the mountains. We didn’t know we’d be going so far. And we didn’t want to go back with them because they’d been drinking. Our mom would kill us if she knew. So we’re hitchhiking home—I know. I know it’s a bad idea.
We’re never going to do it again. It’s scary. But if you’ll let us off twenty miles up…”

The woman sighs. “I’m just glad it was me who picked you up.”

“Yeah. Me, too. Thanks. We appreciate it.”

Then the potential flaw in Carly’s plan sinks in. What if twenty miles goes by and they’re exactly in the middle of nowhere? No houses as far as the eye can see?

She sits on the edge of the backseat, peering through the windshield. Trying to be nervous without looking nervous. They pass intersection after intersection of long, paved roads crossing the highway. A scattering of ranch homes in each direction. If that changes, Carly will need to pretend she was wrong about the twenty miles.

Her luck holds.

When the odometer hits the magic number, Carly says, “Next intersection. If you’ll just let us off right up there…”

“I can drive you all the way home.”

“No. Please. That’ll just get us in trouble.”

Another big sigh from the front seat. The driver pulls over and lets them out.

“You girls take care, now.”

“We will. Thank you.”

They stand at the side of the little highway and watch her drive off.

Jen waves.

“Shit,” Carly says. “That was close.”

“Close to what? She was nice.”

“Too nice.”

“How can you be too nice?”

“She wanted to help us.”

“We need help, Carly.”

“You know what she would’ve done. Don’t you? If she’d known we don’t have anybody? She’d have called child protective services. I don’t want to get put in a foster home, Jen. We don’t even know if they’d keep us together.”

“So what do we do, then? Do we still hitchhike?”

“Yeah. I think so. I think we have to. But this time let’s have our story ready.”

The man who picks them up next doesn’t seem interested in their story. He doesn’t express any concern for their well-being. He’s maybe forty. Thin and pale, like his skin has never seen the sun. He wears heavy, black-framed glasses. He won’t stop looking at them in the rearview mirror.

They drive for well over an hour without any questions. He doesn’t even ask where they’re going.

Then, when he finally speaks, all he says is, “You’re making me feel awfully lonesome. Up here all by myself.”

Carly doesn’t answer. Neither does Jen. But Jen shoots Carly a look. A silent question. Are we in trouble? Carly doesn’t know. But it doesn’t feel good. There’s an “ick factor” in the car. That was something Teddy used to say. This ick factor has hovered throughout the ride, Carly realizes. She just hadn’t looked it in the eye. Until the man spoke.

She reaches into her backpack and feels around for her hairbrush, a round brush with a narrow round metal handle. The handle has a plastic cap on the end, but Carly pries it off with her thumb.

They’re coming through a town. Thank God.

“Let us off right up here,” Carly says. “Please.”

She can see an intersection. And a stoplight. But the light turns green, and the driver speeds through it.

Carly looks over at Jen, who’s gone stonelike again. Carly worries her sister’s bones might melt, the way they did last night. They can’t afford that kind of collapse now.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I wanted to make that light.”

“Well, you made it. So pull over. Please.”

“Next light. You can walk back.”

Carly squeezes her eyes shut and prays for the next light to turn red. It does, and the driver has to stop. Only then does Carly remember how she told Jen she doesn’t pray.

Jen’s on the passenger’s side. The safe side to get out. She tries to open the back door. “It’s locked.” She tries to pull up the lock button. It won’t pull.

Ick Man is watching in the rearview mirror. “The child safety lock is on,” he says.

“Then take it off!” Carly shouts. Just at the edge of panic. “And let us out!”

No answer. Nothing moves. Carly watches the blood drain out of Jen’s face, leaving her skin white like a porcelain doll.

“Open this door or I’m getting the gun,” Carly says.

The light turns green.

Carly pulls the hairbrush out of her pack, careful to keep it behind his head, where he can’t see it in the mirror. She presses the round metal of the end of the handle to the back of his head.

“Do
not
step on the gas,” she says.

The back door locks click up. A beautiful sound. Jen swings the door wide, and they bolt out of the car. The man drives away with his rear door still open.

“Oh, my God,” Jen says. “Oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God.”

“Relax, Jen. Calm down. We’re OK.”

“I can’t do this, Carly. We can’t keep doing this.”

“OK. We won’t, then. No more hitchhiking. I promise.”

“So what are we going to do, then?”

“We’ll walk.”

“To
California
?”

“Not to California. Of course not. Just from one phone booth to the next. And when Teddy picks up the phone, he’ll drive out and get us. Or he’ll wire us money for a bus ticket or something. But the more we walk, the closer we’ll be to home, and the faster he can get us there. And we won’t be in one place long enough for anybody to decide they want to help us by putting us in foster care. We’ll just walk along like we know exactly what we’re doing. And if anybody asks, we’ll just say we’re walking home. That’s true. Right?”

“We’re walking home,” Jen says. As if the story needs rehearsal.

“Right. We’re walking home.”

They walk until dark. About ten hours.

Carly calls Teddy four times that first day. Teddy doesn’t pick up.

NEW MEXICO

May 9

Carly is keeping a close eye on Jen. Maybe even more so than usual. She’s watching Jen walk on the shoulder of this skinny, raggedy little blacktop road, kicking at the scrubby grass and gravel at the edge of their path.

For a time, Carly doesn’t know why she’s keeping such an eagle eye on Jen this morning. In most ways, it’s a morning like any of the last nine. It’s just their new normal.

She looks up ahead to see the black road dip down into a valley. And in this valley is…nothing. Just more scrubby weeds. A line of low mountains at its far end, mountains they will have to walk across in time. In the far distance, a few rock spires in different shapes and sizes, like the classic desert formations she’s seen in old cowboy films. And the clouds are edging the sky in great puffs, dense at the mountains, more sparse above their heads, white on top and copper at their bottoms, unable to crowd together and cover the steely blue sky.

Too bad, Carly thinks. Because they’re fresh out of sunscreen as of yesterday.

The clouds move on the stiff breeze. They scud, Carly thinks. She’s not certain why—or from where—she remembers that odd word, but she’s quite sure the clouds scud.

Jen does another exaggerated kick step, and Carly puts her finger on what she’s been noticing. Where’s all Jen’s energy coming from? They’re both exhausted. Sure, they’ve only been walking for less than an hour so far today. But when you put in the miles they do, day after day after day, you wake up tired. There’s no such thing as rested. There’s no such animal as fresh.

Jen stops and looks all around them, 360 degrees. She’s been doing that all morning. Thoughtfully. As if there were something out here to see.

“Pretty here,” Jen says.

“What’s pretty about it?” Carly asks, clear in her tone that the kid is talking crazy.

“Well,” Jen says, looking all around again. Breathing in a piece of that sky. “There’s that.”

She points at the wind-whittled formations just in front of the mountainous horizon.

“You’re nuts,” Carly says. “It’s rocks.”

“Pretty rocks.”

“No such thing.”

They walk a few steps more, Jen kicking a few more times. The crunch of their footsteps and the click of kicked gravel is the only sound. That and the wind in Carly’s ears.

“The sky,” Jen says.

“We have clouds at home, you know.”

“Not the clouds. The sky.”

Carly stops. Jen walks a couple more steps, then notices and also stops.

“You’re being stupid,” Carly says. “It’s the same sky everywhere.”

“No, it isn’t. I never saw a sky like this one.”

“Don’t they teach you anything in school? The sky is the sky. Each place doesn’t have its own sky.”

“I know that. But this sky is bigger.”

“You’re just seeing more of it. You just can’t see so many miles of sky where we come from.”

“Right,” Jen says. “That’s what I mean. That’s what’s different. That’s what’s better.”

Carly sighs and walks again, and Jen joins her. A bit more subdued. And though it ignites a pang of guilt in her gut to admit it, Carly is more comfortable with Jen that way. That’s what’s been eating her about Jen all morning. How could she act…almost…happy? At a time like this?

Out of nowhere, startling Carly, Jen squeals and breaks into a run, her backpack bouncing wildly. Carly looks up to see what Jen has seen.

Horses.

Three horses graze in a field, behind a fence almost laughable in its construction. It’s made with branches for posts. Some straight, some curved, some forked. Branches standing straight up out of the ground, at intervals, strung with three strands of wire in between. Not barbed wire. Just wire. And it goes on forever. Two of the horses are white, but not as pretty as that makes them sound. Dirty white, with long yellowish tails and ribs showing just a bit.

But the third one is a beauty. A brown-and-white paint, with a brown tail and a thick white mane so long it trails down below the bottom of his neck. Carly never thought much about calling a pinto horse a paint, but she sees now why that description fits. It’s as though someone took brown paint to a white horse in big, broad splotches, then got bored and stopped halfway through.

The paint looks younger. And he acts younger.

As Jen gets closer to his fence, he’s infected with her energy. He runs the fence line toward her, then turns and runs away, bucking as if trying to shake off something invisible, kicking out his heels.

Jen squeals laughter.

Carly stops and watches, trying not to sort out the parts of her that both do and do not like what she’s seeing.

Then Jen breaks stride and hops on one foot, four hops, yelling, “Ow, ow, ow, ow,” one “ow” for each hop.

She hops over and stands at the fence, holding one branch post, and looks at the bottom of her filthy white sneaker. The horse has stopped running as well and seems to be trying to decide whether he dares approach her. Jen drops her foot and leans over the ridiculous fence, trying to entice the paint to come close and be patted.

Carly breaks into a trot.

“Don’t,” she says. “Maybe he bites.”

“He won’t bite me,” Jen calls back.

“And you know this
how
?”

“He won’t.”

By the time she catches up to them at the fence, the horse is rooting around in Jen’s palms with his muzzle, twisting his lips and showing yellow teeth. Carly stands close enough to smell him. That deep, musty, not-at-all-unpleasant horse smell.

“You want some food, don’t you?” Jen says to him, the way you’d talk to your pet dog. “But if I had some food, let me tell you, I’d eat it myself. You can eat grass. You’re lucky. Wish we could eat grass. And sleep standing up in a field all night and not mind.”