Full Ride (3 page)

“The Joneses did a one-way rental,” the announcer said. “They paid with a credit card. Don't they know these things are traceable?”

I closed my eyes. It was useless. We couldn't hide.
Everything
was traceable.

“Roger Jones's wife and daughter are moving to . . .” The announcer hesitated dramatically. In his radio studio, wherever he was broadcasting from, he began tapping his fingers in a cheesy drumroll. “Bradenton, Florida!”

My eyes flew open. I let out a great gulp of air I hadn't realized I'd been holding in. I laughed.

“He's wrong!” I said. “They don't know anything! They're just joking around!”

Relief made me giddy. What had I been worried about? This was some stupid radio show, not a team of hard-hitting investigative reporters.

Then I looked over at Mom. I wouldn't have said it was possible, but her face was even paler now. Her lips looked gray. No, there was a thin line of bright red, too, where she was biting down so hard, she'd drawn blood. But she didn't seem to notice.

“Mom?” I said doubtfully. I reached over and flicked off the
radio. The sudden silence felt painful in my ears. Then a semi zoomed past, making the whole car shake. I jumped, all my fear returning.

“Mom, what's wrong?” I asked. “Didn't you hear—they
don't
know where we're going.”

But my voice sounded uncertain.

“I thought he was overreacting,” Mom mumbled. She seemed to be in shock.

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

Mom turned to face me.

“The lawyer,” she said. “Mr. Trumbull. He insisted on renting a second trailer. So we could switch. Overnight, when it was dark, while you were asleep . . . I did tell the U-Haul guy I'd be returning my trailer in Bradenton, Florida. Mr. Trumbull's having someone else do that for us. To throw everyone off our trail. And Mr. Trumbull used a fake name, he paid in cash, so the trailer we're actually using can't be traced. . . .”

I squinted at Mom, my brain working at a snail's pace. Daddy's defense attorney, Mr. Trumbull, had known the U-Haul guy would recognize us. Mr. Trumbull had known the U-Haul guy would tell the media. Mr. Trumbull had saved us from being exposed before we even got to our new home.

“Why didn't you tell me before?” I protested.

Mom winced.

“I didn't want to scare you,” she whispered. “I didn't think . . .” She glanced toward the radio I'd silenced. “I didn't think it would matter.”

Another truck zipped past us, and this time Mom scrunched down in her seat as if she was trying to hide.

“What good is that going to do?” I snapped.

Mom didn't answer. She just hit the accelerator, spun the steering wheel, and sped back onto the highway. She pulled out
too close to a green minivan, and the driver blared his horn.

“Mom—watch out!” I screeched.

Mom sped up, struggling to keep control of the car.

“I should have done everything Mr. Trumbull suggested, right from the start,” she muttered. She hunched over the steering wheel and turned her face to the side, away from the minivan swerving past us. An exit appeared to our right, and Mom veered toward it. She barely managed to stop at the bottom of the ramp. She sat there clutching the steering wheel and gasping.

“We'll take back roads from now on,” she said.

•  •  •

Miles later we came to a Walmart on the outskirts of a pathetically tiny town. Mom made me wait in the car while she ran in—her head down, her hair hidden by a raincoat hood, even though it wasn't actually raining. Then we both sneaked into the filthy restroom of an ancient-looking gas station next door. Mom pulled out a box of Clairol Nice 'n Easy.

“What color is that?” I asked. “Dried mud?”

“It's something that won't look too weird when it grows out,” Mom said. “So I won't have to keep buying hair dye.”

Did she mean this was her natural hair color?

I reached for the Walmart bag.

“What'd you get for me?” I asked.

The bag was empty. Mom frowned apologetically.

“Mr. Trumbull said there were at least a dozen pictures of me floating around out there with the news articles about your daddy,” she said. “Remember—in
Vanity Fair
, in
Time
, all those online stories. . . . But they just kept using the same one of you over and over again. And—Becca? You don't really look like that anymore, anyhow.”

I knew the picture she was talking about—I'd seen it with the news stories and spread all over the Internet and on TV, too.
It was one that I'd kept as my Facebook profile picture for more than a year because I'd liked it so much. My friends and I had all gotten our hair cut and styled and then we'd gone for professional photos. The stylist had told me if I went supershort, I'd look like one of those perky, pixie-cute gymnasts in the Olympics. I'd look like a model. Everyone would want to look like me.

I glanced at myself in the hideous gas-station mirror with its scratched-off splotches and painted-over graffiti. Mom was right: I didn't look perky or pixie cute anymore. My hair had grown out into a shapeless, untrimmed mass that hung down below my shoulders. In the fluorescent light, my skin was greenish, the unsightly color relieved only by the dark circles under my eyes.

Even I didn't recognize myself anymore.

“But, Mom,” I protested. “Shouldn't I dye my hair, too, just in case?”

Mom winced.

“We can only afford one box of hair coloring, okay?” she said. “We can't use the credit card anymore. Gas is three cents more a gallon here than in the last town we went through, and we're going to have to fill up at least once more. . . .”

She was serious. A cheap little box of hair coloring, three
cents
—things like that could ruin us. Without the credit card, we were that close to being penniless.

I turned my face toward the wall.

“Becca?” Mom said. “We're going to be fine. There are thousands and thousands of Susan Joneses out there, probably almost that many Becca Joneses. Mr. Trumbull told me everything I need to do. I change my appearance a little; no one's going to know who we really are. It's true that we're not going to have much money. But we can handle that.”

I made a sound that could have been a snort, could have been a gasp. Mom sighed.

“I needed to have this talk with you, anyhow,” she said. “Without a credit card, we won't ever be able to buy anything unless we have the cash in hand. I know it's not what you're used to, economizing, but . . . I remember how it works. It's how I grew up. And I survived.”

Mom's stories about her childhood—about her entire life before she met my father—were about things like eating squirrel stew and being grateful for it, or about getting blisters on her feet from outgrowing her shoes, but not wanting to tell her parents because they couldn't afford new ones.

I started to complain, “Mom, you were miserable growing up.”

Then I looked at her.

She had such a death grip on the Nice 'n Easy box that the sides were caving in. And her expression was resolute but hollow—her clenched jaw, pursed lips, and narrowed eyes might as well have been a mask. I could tell: All her determination was paper thin. If I said one thing wrong, just the sound of my voice could pierce her mask and her resolve and everything holding her together.

What if there's nothing underneath?
I wondered.
What if there's actually nothing holding her together except the mask?

“You survived,” I said, parroting Mom.

Mom rewarded me with one curt nod.

“We will too,” she said. “We'll be poor but honest. Nothing wrong with that.”

Poor but honest . . .

The words struck me as strange somehow. No, worse than that—wrong. It was the “but.” “Poor” and “honest” seemed to go together fine. Of course, if you were honest, you'd end up poor. It was rich people whose honesty would be surprising. Most people couldn't be rich if they wanted to be honest; most people couldn't be honest if they wanted to be rich.

Oh . . .

Oh . . .

Oh no.

I was thinking the way Daddy thought, the way he'd taught me to think.

I was so horrified to find Daddy's thoughts in my mind—practically his voice in my brain, doing my thinking for me—that I reeled to the side, hitting my head against the wall.

“Becca?” Mom said, panic in her voice, the mask slipping.

“I can be honest,” I said, as if clutching for a mask of my own. I might as well have been trying to hide behind tissue paper. I gulped. “But how can we keep Daddy a secret if we're being honest?”

“We won't
lie
,” Mom said. “I guess we just won't talk much. Except to each other. We can say anything we want to each other.”

I was fourteen, remember? Maybe all mothers of fourteen-year-old girls want to believe their daughters can tell them anything. Maybe Mom wasn't as blind as she seemed, huddled in a filthy bathroom, about to dye her hair the color of mud on our way to a new city and a new life where she thought we could start fresh, the past left behind and forgotten, our futures rosy, both of us bursting with joy at the thought of being poor but honest.

But maybe most mothers had always been their daughters' favorite parent. Maybe most fourteen-year-olds and their mothers had used all those years to build up to the deep, important teenage confidences.

Me? I'd always been closer to Daddy.

We crossed over into bland, boring Ohio on a one-lane, out-of-the-way bridge. I kept sneaking glances at Mom with her newly mud-colored hair. She'd also hacked a lot of it off. Considering she'd styled it using nail scissors in a gas-station bathroom, she didn't look as bad as you might expect. But she didn't look like herself. She just looked . . . wrong.

It felt wrong to be in Ohio, too. Back in fifth grade when we had to memorize the states and know how to find them on a map, Ohio was one of those states I always forgot.

But now I would be living there. That was where Mom had found a job.

It was late in the day when we arrived in Deskins, Ohio. It looked like it'd been built about five minutes before we got there. Everything in the downtown looked new, and many of the housing developments we passed were still just half-finished. In the dim light of dusk, it looked like the new houses were marching across the fields, taking over.

Nobody has any history here,
I thought, and smiled.

“There's the hospital,” Mom said, pointing at a shining glass building set far back from the street.

I squinted out the window. The concrete sidewalks around the hospital didn't look dry yet; trees with their roots in burlap lay on the bare ground nearby, just a promise of eventual landscaping. The side of the hospital was still framed by scaffolding.

“Is it even open yet?” I asked.

“Last week,” Mom said. “But they're doing a gradual start-up, so it will be a while before they're at full capacity. That's why they're still hiring nurses.”

“Your job's a sure thing, though, isn't it?” I asked, suddenly anxious. “It's not like they'll suddenly decide you need another interview, only in person this time, or that you need to take some test, or—”

“Becca,” Mom said, and her voice was steely now. “All I have to do is fill out paperwork. I have good experience. They were eager to hire me.”

Mom had worked as a nurse until a few years earlier. Then she and Daddy had decided she didn't need to work anymore, because his company was making so much money.

Of course, now we knew where all that extra cash really had come from.

The full meaning of Mom's explanation sank in.

“Wait, Mom—your experience—you had to tell them where you worked before?” I asked. “So they know where you're from? And—”

“Relax, Becca, they don't know anything,” Mom said, waving my concerns away.

I grabbed her arm, my anxiety escalating.

“How can you be so sure? How—”

Mom pulled up to a stoplight. It had just turned red, so she
had plenty of time to turn her head and look me right in the eye. But she didn't. She kept staring straight ahead.

“Mr. Trumbull helped with that, too,” Mom said. “He said there are ways to deal with this, that women use when they're trying to escape abusive relationships, and—”

“Abusive?”
I shrieked. “Mom, Daddy never beat you! Or me! Anyway, it's not like he could hurt us now even if he wanted to. He's going to be in prison for the next . . .”

Ten years.
That was all I needed to say to finish the sentence, but it was all too new and fresh, like a wound that hadn't scabbed over yet. I couldn't force the words out.

I wish I had. I wish I had said “ten years” in such a cold, clinical voice that Mom decided to treat me like an adult. Maybe she would have told me everything right then.

Instead, Mom reached over and patted me on the shoulder. She finally turned and looked me in the eye, but her expression was guarded. This time she was wearing a mask of concern and pity. When she spoke, she sounded like she was speaking to a toddler.

“Becca, we're safe here. I promise,” she said. “You don't have to worry about anything.”

Maybe that tone had worked on me when I was young, happy and secure and certain that, no matter what, Mommy and Daddy and everybody else would always love me. But I was fourteen and my whole world had just fallen apart, and I wasn't certain of anything anymore.

How could I not worry? How could I ever feel safe again?

•  •  •

The new student orientation at Deskins High School was the next afternoon. We were lucky school started later in Ohio than in Georgia. Still, Mom and I barely had time to unload everything into our tiny new apartment, return the U-Haul trailer, and squeeze in quick showers before it was time to go.