First Lady (5 page)

After a couple of tries, the engine sputtered to life. He shook his head in disgust. “This thing is a piece of crap.”

“No shit.” She propped her feet, which were clad in thick-soled sandals, onto the dash.

He glanced into Mabel’s side mirror and backed out. “You know, don’t you, that I’m not really your father.”

“Like I’d want you.”

So much for the worry he’d been harboring that she might have built up some kind of sentimental fantasy about him. As he made his way down the street, he realized he didn’t know either her real name or the baby’s. He’d seen copies of their birth certificates but hadn’t looked any farther than the lines that had his own name written on them. She probably wouldn’t appreciate it if he called her Winona. “What’s your name?”

There was a long pause while she thought about it. “Natasha.”

He almost laughed. For three months his sister Sharon had tried to make everybody call her Silver. “Yeah, right.”

“That’s what I want to be called,” she snapped.

“I didn’t ask what you wanted to be called. I asked what your name is.”

“It’s Lucy, all right? And I hate it.”

“Nothing wrong with Lucy.” He consulted the directions he’d gotten from the receptionist at the lab and made his way back to the highway. “Exactly how old are you?”

“Eighteen.”

He shot her his street fighter look.

“Okay, sixteen.”

“You’re fourteen, and you talk like you’re thirty.”

“If you know, why’d you ask? And I lived with Sandy. What did you expect?”

He felt a pang of sympathy at the husky note in her voice. “Yeah, well, I’m sorry about that. Your mother was . . .” Sandy had been fun, sexy, smart without having any sense, and completely irresponsible. “She was unique,” he finished lamely.

Lucy snorted. “She was a drunk.”

In the back the baby started to whimper.

“She has to eat soon, and we’ve run out of stuff.”

Great. This was just what he needed. “What’s she eating now?”

“Formula and crap in jars.”

“We’ll stop for something after we’re done at the lab.” The sounds coming from the back were growing increasingly unhappy. “What’s her name?”

Another pause. “Butt.”

“You’re a real comedian, aren’t you?”

“I’m not the one who named her.”

He glanced back at the blond-haired, rosy-cheek baby with gumdrop eyes and an angel-wing mouth, then looked over at Lucy. “You expect me to believe Sandy named that baby Butt?”

“I don’t care what you believe.” She pulled her feet from the dash. “I’m not letting some jerkoff stick a needle in me, so you can forget about that blood crap right now.”

“You’ll do what I tell you.”

“Bullshit.”

“Here are the facts, smart mouth. Your mother put my name on both your birth certificates, so we need to straighten that out, and the only way we can do it is with three blood tests.” He started to explain that Child Services would be taking care of them until her grandmother showed up, but didn’t have the heart. The lawyer could do it.

They drove the rest of the way to the lab in silence, except for the Demon Baby, who’d started to scream again. He pulled up in front of a two-story medical building and looked over at Lucy. She was staring rigidly at the doors as if she were looking at the gates of hell.

“I’ll give you twenty bucks to take the test,” he said quickly.

She shook her head. “No needles. I hate needles. Even thinking about them makes me sick.”

He was just beginning to contemplate how he could carry two screaming children into the lab when he had his first piece of luck all day.

Lucy got out of the Winnebago before she threw up.

N
EALY WAS GLORIOUSLY
invisible. She tilted back her head and laughed, then flipped up the radio to join in with Billy Joel on the chorus of “Uptown Girl.” The new day was exquisite. Puffs of blue clouds floated in a Georgia O’Keeffe sky, and her stomach rumbled with hunger, despite the scrambled eggs and toast she’d wolfed down for breakfast in a small restaurant not far from the motel where she’d spent the night. The greasy eggs, soggy toast, and murky coffee had been the most blissful meal she’d eaten in months. Every bite of food had slid easily down her throat, and not a single person had spared her a second glance.

She felt smart, smug, completely happy with herself. She had outwitted the President of the United States, the Secret Service, and her father. Hail to the Chieftess!

She laughed, delighted with her own cockiness because it had been so long since she’d felt that way. She rummaged on the seat next to her for the Snickers bar she’d bought, then remembered she’d already devoured it. Her hunger made her laugh again. All her life she’d fantasized about having a curvy body. Maybe she was finally going to get it.

She glanced at herself in the rearview mirror. Even though the old lady’s wig was gone, not one person had recognized her. She had transformed herself into someone blissfully, sublimely ordinary.

A commercial came on the radio. She turned the volume down and began to hum. All morning she’d allowed herself to dawdle along the two-lane highway west of York, Pennsylvania, which happened to be the nation’s first capital and the place where the Articles of Confederation were written. She’d detoured through the small towns that lay along the route whenever she’d wanted. Once she’d pulled off the road to admire a field of soybeans, although she couldn’t help but ponder the complexities of farm subsidies as she leaned against the fence. Then she’d stopped in a ramshackle farmhouse with a sign outside that read
ANTIQUES
and browsed through the dust and junk for a wonderful hour. As a result, she hadn’t traveled far. But she had nowhere specific to go, and it was glorious being absolutely aimless.

It might be foolish to feel so happy when the President was undoubtedly using all the power and might of the United States government to track her down, but she couldn’t help herself. She wasn’t naive enough to believe she could outwit them forever, but that made each moment more precious.

The commercial ended and Tom Petty began to sing. Nealy laughed again, then joined in. She was free-falling.

Mat was the world’s biggest chump. Instead of being behind the wheel of his Mercedes convertible with only the radio to keep him company, he was driving west in a ten-year-old Winnebago named Mabel on a Pennsylvania back road with two kids who were as bad as all seven of his sisters combined had been.

Yesterday afternoon, he’d called Sandy’s attorney to tell him about Joanne Pressman, but instead of guaranteeing that the girls would be turned over to her as soon as she got back in the country, the attorney had equivocated.

“Child and Youth Services will have to make sure she can provide a satisfactory home for them.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Mat had countered. “She’s a college professor. And anything’s better than what they have now.”

“She still has to be investigated.”

“How long will that take?”

“It’s hard to say. It shouldn’t be more than six weeks. Two months at the outside.”

Mat had been furious. Even a month in the foster care system could chomp up a kid like Lucy and spit out her bones. He’d found himself promising to stay with the girls that night so Child Services wouldn’t have to get them until morning.

As he tried to fall asleep on Sandy’s lumpy couch after his aborted attempt to get the blood tests done, he’d reminded himself how much better the foster care system was now than it used to be. The background checks were more thorough, home visits more common. But the image of all the kids the Havlovs had abused kept coming back to him.

Toward morning, he’d realized his conscience wouldn’t let him out of this one. Too much early influence from nuns. He couldn’t let either the Teenage Terrorist or the Demon Baby spend months stuck in foster care when all he had to do was baby-sit them for a couple of days, then turn them over to their grandmother on the weekend.

Joanne Pressman’s Iowa address had been in Sandy’s date book. He needed to get the girls out of the house early, so he decided they’d catch a morning flight to Burlington. When he got there, he’d rent a car and drive to Willow Grove. And while he was waiting for Joanne Pressman to get home, he’d have the blood tests done, even if he had to carry Lucy into the lab.

Unfortunately, his plan had fallen apart when he’d discovered needles weren’t Lucy’s only phobia.

“I’m not getting on a plane, Jorik! I hate flying! And if you try to make me, I’ll start screaming to everybody in the airport that you’re kidnapping me.”

Another kid might have been bluffing, but he’d suspected Lucy would do exactly as she said, and since he was already skating on the thinnest edge of the law by dodging Child Services, not to mention taking the kids out of state, he’d decided not to risk it. Instead, he’d grabbed a pile of their clothes, some food he’d bought last night, and shoved them into the motor home. He had four or five days to kill anyway, so what did it matter if he spent it on the road?

He wasn’t certain how aggressively the authorities would be looking for him, especially since Sandy’s attorney would surely figure out where he was heading. Still, there was no point in taking chances, so he was staying off the interstate for a while where tollbooth operators and the state police might already have the Winnebago’s license plate number. Unfortunately, between the Demon Baby’s screams and Lucy’s complaints, he couldn’t enjoy the scenery.

“I think I’m going to hurl.”

She was sitting in the motor home’s small banquette. He jerked his head toward the rear and spoke over the sounds of the baby’s howls. “The toilet’s back there.”

“If you don’t start being nicer to me and Butt, you’re going to be sorry.”

“Will you stop calling her that?”

“It’s her name.”

Even Sandy wasn’t that crazy, but he still hadn’t been able to pry the baby’s real name out of Lucy.

The howls subsided. Maybe the baby was going to sleep. He glanced over toward the couch, where she was strapped in her car seat, but she looked wide awake and grumpy. All wet blue eyes and cherub’s mouth. The world’s crankiest angel.

“We’re hungry.”

“I thought you said you were feeling sick.”

The howls started again, louder than before. Why hadn’t he brought somebody along to take care of these little monsters? Some kindhearted, stone-deaf old lady.

“I feel sick when I get hungry. And Butt needs to eat.”

“Feed her. We brought bags of baby food and formula with us, so don’t try to tell me there isn’t anything for her to eat.”

“If I feed her while Mabel’s moving, she’ll hurl.”

“I don’t want to hear another word about anybody hurling! Feed the damn kid!”

She glared at him, then flounced out of her seat and made her way to the sacks of baby food and diapers.

He drove for another fifteen miles in blessed silence before he heard it. First a baby’s cough, then a gag, then a small eruption.

“I told you so.”

Nealy backed out of the driveway from her first garage sale and pulled onto the highway. A huge green ceramic frog perched on the seat next to her. The lady who’d sold it to her for ten dollars said it was a garden ornament her mother-in-law had made in a craft class.

It was supremely ugly, with an iridescent green glaze, protruding eyes that were slightly crossed, and dull brown spots the size of silver dollars across its back. For nearly three years, Nealy had lived in a national shrine decorated with the very best American antiques. Maybe that was why she’d known instantly that she had to have it.

Even after she’d made her purchase and tucked the heavy frog under her arm, she’d stood talking to the garage sale lady. And she hadn’t needed a gray old lady’s wig or elastic stockings to do it. Her wonderful new disguise was working.

Nealy spotted a sign ahead for a truck stop. There’d be hamburgers and french fries, thick chocolate shakes and slabs of pie.
Bliss!

The smell of diesel fuel and fried food hit Mat as he stepped out of Mabel into the truck stop parking lot. He also caught a whiff of manure from a nearby field, but it beat the smell of baby puke.

A blue Chevy Corsica with a woman driving whipped into the parking place next to him. Lucky lady. Alone in her car with nothing but her own thoughts to keep her company.

Just beyond the gas pumps, a hitchhiker held a battered cardboard sign that read,
ST. LOUIS
. The guy looked like a felon, and Mat doubted he’d have too much luck getting a ride, but he still felt a pang of envy for the man’s freedom. The whole day had been a bad dream.

Lucy climbed out behind him with another ten-dollar bribe in her back pocket. She’d tied a flannel shirt around her hips and had the smelly baby under the armpits so she could hold her as far away as possible. Lucy was small, and he doubted that she could carry the Demon very far that way, but he didn’t offer to take her himself. He’d carried around too many screaming babies when he was a kid to be sentimental about them. The only good thing about babies was getting them drunk on their twenty-first birthdays.