Don't Fail Me Now (12 page)

Thursday Afternoon/Thursday Night

Indiana-Illinois Border
Bristow, OK

Goldie's noise is getting worse and worse. She starts okay but sounds like a vacuum cleaner sucking up quarters once she gets going. Tim frowns at the dashboard approximately every sixty seconds, trying to diagnose the problem. I took him up on his offer to drive, and I'm trying really hard to focus on watching the trees whoosh by as we pass into Illinois. But ironically, the silence in the car is making it hard to relax.

Remember, you're sisters
, Tim said. Like I could ever forget. I've been holding on to Leah since I was seven years old—the idea of her, anyway. I always fantasized I would know her if I saw her someplace random, like she'd shine in a way only I could see. Then we'd walk slowly toward each other and hug,
instantly bonding over the shared pain brought on by our lowest common denominator. In my head it was always us versus Buck, us versus the world. It never even occurred to me it might be me versus her.

“Hey, Tim?” Denny pipes up from the backseat. “You said your sister . . . was my sister's . . . sister.” He speaks in a slow, probing way that makes me realize he's been trying to figure it out since we left the hotel. Leave it to this kid to be a lightning rod for the tension on everybody's mind.

“Yeah,” Tim says.

“We're
half
sisters,” Leah says pointedly with her face turned to the window.

“What does that mean?” Denny asks.

“We have half of the same parents,” Cass says. “The same dad but not the same mom.”

“You and Michelle and Leah?”

“Yup,” she sighs.

“But if you guys are sisters, then is she my sister, too? Can she go on my tree?”

“What's he talking about?” Leah asks.

“He's making a family tree for school,” I say.

“Yeah,” Cass deadpans, “this trip is for extra credit.”

“So
are
you my sister?” Denny asks.

“No,” Leah says. “You have to have at least one of the same parent to be siblings.”

“Hey,” Tim says, feigning injury.

“So you're her brother . . .” Denny says, starting to piece his puzzle together again.

“Stepbrother,” Tim corrects. “My dad married her mom.”

“Do you and I have the same dad?” Denny asks hopefully.

“No,” Tim says with a smile. “I wish.”

“Oh.” Denny thinks for a minute. “But if
they
have the same dad, why does
she
have a different mom?”

“You wanna take this one?” I ask Tim with a smirk.

“No, ma'am,” he laughs. “All yours.”

“Well, our dad kind of . . . switched moms,” I say. It sounds silly reduced to first-grade vocabulary, but I know it's still a trigger subject for Cass, so I glance back to check on her. Amazingly, both she and Leah are smiling a little bit, staring out their respective windows.

“You're allowed to do that?” Denny asks incredulously, and Tim stifles a laugh.

“If you're a jackass,” Cass mutters.

“So he switched from our mom to her mom?”

“Yup,” I say, biting my own lip to keep from grinning. I really don't know why it all seems so funny coming out of Denny's mouth, but I'm grateful for the levity.

“And then her mom switched from our dad to his dad?”

“You got it, buddy,” Tim says, barely holding it together.

“Was our mom mad?” Denny asks. Now even Cass is laughing.

“I think she's
still
mad,” I say, and Denny gives me a big, one-front-toothless grin. And I know it's really not funny, but for some reason a surge of laughter I've been holding in for the last few minutes—days, months, years, who's counting?—finally comes, and I throw my head back and let it wash over me like a new kind of tidal wave, breaking me open, shaking my whole body like it's trying to set me free.

• • •

We drive for hours under the vast sky of Illinois, fat clouds drifting lazily overhead, past the lush forests and rock faces of
Missouri, breezing through the northwest corner of Arkansas straight into the plains of Oklahoma right as the sun decides to set in all kinds of sherbet colors in front of us like a drive-in movie. All of our phones are turned off (Devereaux rule #1,000,001: When on the lam, technology is your enemy. Submitted to the official rulebook by M. H. Devereaux, April 27th), so there's nothing to do but talk or listen to the radio, and we do some of both, blasting whatever half-decent station is coming through with the least amount of static, catching pockets of Pharrell or Taylor Swift or twangy country ballads that I see Tim lip-synching along to. When the radio craps out or somebody rejects the available music, we start to talk, the conversation forced at first but then finding its legs, starting to flow. We find out that Leah plays clarinet and only got her braces off two months ago; that Tim led the SkeleTone Crew to a Northeast Regional Championship with an a cappella arrangement of “All About That Bass”; that they have a Labrador named Nemo; that Jeff and Karen aren't home much and that most nights, Tim and Leah eat microwave burritos and watch TV by themselves. So much for the magic of the white picket fence. Leah mostly wants to know if we see a lot of shootings in our neighborhood like on
The Wire
, and what's really in the ground beef at Taco Bell, but Tim asks more about our schools and home life, and while I try not to go into the details, I do get Cass to do some of her Aunt Sam impression, which gets us all cracking up again.

There's real terror, of course, lurking below the surface. I know we're in uncharted waters now and that all of the things that were worst-case scenarios yesterday—running out of cash, begging for food—are now best-case scenarios, replaced by the
new and infinitely more chilling worst-case scenario of being arrested and charged with grand theft auto and child endangerment and watching my siblings retreat into specks from the back of a police cruiser.
They'll try to split you up! Don't let them split you up!

But the more miles we put between us and the hotel parking lot, and the more the general mood in the car improves, the more I'm able to push that fear down. In a fit of denial, I even make Tim stop at a Walmart in Tulsa so I can get a little $15 five-by-five dome tent and a couple of cheap polyester blankets for the kids to sleep on. I'm down to $101.87. There's no amount of math that can make that stretch till Sunday.

“It's better than the trunk,” I say as I pass my gifts around, and Leah actually squeals with glee.

We follow signs to a free campsite in Bristow, pulling up to the edge of Lake Massena just as the last of the purplish dusk gives way to night. It's basically a beach, with a grassy area and a picnic table but otherwise just endless pebbly sand up to the lake, and so while Tim sets up the tent on the grass and Cass gives herself her shot, Denny, Leah, and I kick off our shoes and run down to the water's edge to stick our toes in the cold black waves that are lapping at the shore under the light of a full, yellowy moon.

“This is better than the hotel,” Denny says, and I rustle his hair and let him splash algae onto my jeans with his overexcited stomps.

Since we have no way to get hot water, dinner tonight is an assortment of cheese and peanut butter crackers washed down with the last of a half gallon of grape Gatorade from Family Dollar. We eat sitting pretzel-legged on the beach,
knee-to-knee in a tight circle to keep the wind from blowing sand onto our meager feast.

“We'll get better food tomorrow,” I say, wiping my mouth with my wrist. “We're not far from Oklahoma City, and they've got to have a mall.”

“Why do we have to go to the mall?” Leah asks, perking up.

“The food court,” I say. “You can get all kinds of stuff from the trays people leave behind.”

Leah wrinkles her nose. “So we're, like, stealing people's leftovers?”

“We have to eat,” Tim says.

“What about going to a Whole Foods and just eating the free samples?” Leah asks.

“We can do that, too,” I say. “Good thinking.” She smiles.

“They have free cookies at church!” Denny says. “But you have to sit through the boring part first.”

“Come Sunday, if we still need food, we'll get some church cookies,” I promise.

“What day is it now?” Denny flops back onto his elbows and stares up at the moon, his eyelids starting to droop.

“Thursday,” Cass says.

“What do you think Mom and Jeff are doing now?” Leah asks softly, drawing her knees up to her chin, her question punctuated by a reedy chorus of literal crickets. With her hair tucked behind her sticking-out ears, she looks especially vulnerable. Just like Cass, she puts up such a tough front that it's easy to forget she's still a child.

Tim shakes his head. “I don't know.”

“We should call them,” she says. “I don't want them to worry.”

“I think it's too late for that.” Tim's jaw tenses, and he swigs the dregs of the Gatorade and then tosses the bottle like a football back onto the grass.

I wonder if Mom's worrying about us, for reasons other than the bail money. I wonder if Aunt Sam will even tell her we're gone. If I could call my mom in jail to tell her we were okay, would I? Or would I let her sweat it out, give her a taste of what it feels like to think the one person you're supposed to count on might not be coming back?

“You can call them,” I say, standing up and rubbing the gooseflesh on my arms. “Be vague, but let them know you're alive. Try to stall.” I actually feel sort of bad for the Harpers, alone in their giant house, their fancy home alarm blinking away, oblivious that any sense of security they had has been shattered.

I kiss Denny goodnight, promising that Cass will tuck him in and sing him to sleep with our “safe” song, Mom's favorite oldie, the one she still has on vinyl tacked up to the living room wall years after she sold her parents' record player, by the band with the impossibly ironic name the Mamas and the Papas. I try to hug Cass, but she darts out from under me before I can touch her. Typical.

• • •

Even though I've been acting like it's no big deal, I'm not looking forward to sleeping in the car. I've never done an overnight before, just occasional naps between classes or back when I was much younger and Mom and Buck would take us on long, circuitous drives that featured lots of random stops but no identifiable destination. The vinyl upholstery on the backseat is ripped in three places; two are patched with curling silver
duct tape, plus the surface of the seats are ribbed in this weird way that makes your butt hurt if you sit on them for too long. I never sleep well anyway, but this is a new low. I pull a sweatshirt off the floor, give it a sniff test (old French fries and body odor, check), and roll it into a makeshift pillow, then lie back and try to let the sound of giggling from inside the tent help me feel right again—as right as I can feel, anyway. Does anyone ever feel really great, or is that just a lie we all agreed to keep telling as a species?

There's a knock on the window, and I look up to see Tim standing with a toothbrush jutting out of his mouth. I bet Denny gave it to him. That kid never met a cootie he didn't like.

The front door handle lurches up and down a few times before Goldie finally lets him in with a metallic squeak.

“Hey,” he says, dropping the toothbrush in the cup holder, and then just kind of stands there frozen, bent awkwardly at the waist, half-in and half-out of the car. After a few seconds I realize I'm watching
him
realize that we're basically sleeping on top of one another. Unless he folds himself into the trunk, which would require the removal of a number of ribs, he'll have to recline the front seat so that his head is separated from my waist by just a few inches. Gasoline smell aside, a twin bed might be less intimate.

“It's okay,” I say. “I know it's tight, but if it's any consolation, the sleep will be terrible.”

Tim's face reddens as he breaks into a bashful grin. “Great,” he says. “Whenever I travel cross-country to see an estranged invalid, I like to arrive as unrefreshed as possible.” He sits down and slowly cranks himself to a semi-horizontal angle. “Sorry,”
he says, looking over his right shoulder so he has the most flattering possible view of my chin and nostrils. “I know I don't have any right to talk about him like that.”

“‘Estranged invalid' isn't trash talk; it's a fact,” I say.

“I guess.” He puts his hands behind his head, his elbows spreading out like tetrahedrons. “It just feels weird to rag on a guy I never met.”

“I could rag on your dad,” I say. “I hear he's so old, he was a waiter at the Last Supper.”

Tim laughs. “He's only forty-four, but I could see that.”

We shift in the darkness for a few minutes. I can see the moon upside down through the window, a waxing gibbous. I hate that every time I see it, I think of him. It's really inconvenient. Couldn't he have pointed out some star that would eventually explode, like everything else he touched?