CHAPTER 6
My house lay sleeping in a patch of fog on the corner of Delaware and Kenneth. Caleb parked the BMW across the street. “You sure about this?” he said. “You can still come with me.”
“You won’t even tell me where it is you want me to go!” We’d been arguing about this for the past three minutes.
He shook his head. “No offense, but I can’t tell you unless you promise to come with me. If I tell you and you don’t come, the Tribunal might get the information out of you.”
I thumped my head against the headrest and stared up through the moonroof in exasperation. “And I can’t promise to come with you without knowing where I’m going!”
“Impasse central. Here.” He leaned across me to open the glove compartment and took out a pen. He didn’t touch me, but I could feel the warmth from his arm like a low-banked fire. “The Tribunal took my phone along with my wallet. Give me your phone number. I’ll call you as soon as I get a phone, make sure you’re okay.”
He wanted my number. What did that mean? Were we going to stay in touch? I didn’t want to think that this might be the last time I’d see him. He looked up at me expectantly. “Okay.” I grabbed the pen, scribbled my cell phone number on a corner of the folder, then tore off the corner and handed it to him. “Did you try to take them on all by yourself? That seems like something you’d do.”
“Noticed that, hunh?” He inhaled deeply. “I got my butt handed to me.” He leaned into me, very serious. “Look, I just wanted to say thanks. You risked your life to free me. If it wasn’t for you, I’d still be in that cage.”
“And without you I never would’ve gotten past the parking lot,” I said. Our faces were very close. The dark womb of the car enfolded us. Deep in his black irises I saw a glint of gold. Faint stubble roughened the tan skin of his cheeks and neck. Under his shirt, his broad chest rose and fell.
“You’d be safe with me.” His warm voice was soft, as if he’d reached out to caress my cheek. “Come with me.”
For the briefest moment everything stopped. My breath, my heart, the turning of the earth, everything paused, awaited my reply. I saw myself falling into him, pressing my mouth to his, his hands on my skin.
But as I leaned farther, the edge of the brace cut up under my breast. I blinked, jolted back into the real world.
I looked away, adopting a light tone. “I bet you say that to all the girls you meet in cages. I need to hurry up and get money out of my dresser for you before Mom and Richard wake up and start yelling at me.”
He didn’t say anything for a moment, running a hand through his wild hair. Then he got out of the car. “What are you going to tell them?”
I got out too. “No idea.”
He walked to my side of the car, staring at my house, a typical low-slung, California ranch–style three-bedroom. I could just see the tops of the tomato stakes in the side yard where Lazar had stood. Mom and I had started planting there when I was six. The plants liked me. They grew at a wild pace, clustering close to my bedroom window. “What was it like, growing up in a place like that?” Caleb asked.
“You know, normal, boring,” I said. “Or maybe you don’t know.”
“I think I saw it in an old TV movie in a hotel room in Singapore once,” he said. “Let’s go.”
“Wait here. I’ll be right out.” I started across the street.
But he followed, his long coat flapping behind him. I stopped at the curb, whispering, “What are you doing? What if they see you?”
“I’m walking you to your door,” he said. Unlike most people, when he lowered his voice, it just got quieter, not whispery. The effect was strangely intimate.
I struggled to keep my own voice down. “Now is not the time to be a gentleman.”
“I can’t help it. My mother used to smack me on the arm if I didn’t stand up whenever a woman did, open doors for her, all that stuff.” He shrugged.
“Then she must’ve taught you it’s not polite to make so much noise that a girl’s parents wake up and ground her,” I said.
“Maybe you deserve to be grounded.” He smiled. “You
were
out all night with a strange boy.”
I gasped a quick laugh and smacked him on the bicep.
He gave an exaggerated wince and rubbed his arm. “Ow. Okay! I’ll stay here.”
“Good. Thanks.” He stepped back into the long shadows of the cypress trees along the driveway. With his black coat, dirty face, and dark hair, he blended almost seamlessly into the darkness. Throwing a “not bad” look at him, I tiptoed up the walkway to the fat pottery Buddha my mom kept by the front door. It lounged next to statues of the white rabbit in a waistcoat and a pot of overflowing azaleas. I tilted Buddha and slid the hidden front door key out from under him. Looking over at the cypress trees, I put a finger to my lips. I thought I saw Caleb nod, but it might have been the wind in the branches.
I unlocked the front door, then put the key back under Buddha. With one last glance in Caleb’s direction, I silently entered and shut the door behind me.
My heart thumped hard. Mom and Richard would go ballistic as soon as they knew I was home. I’d never stayed out all night before without them knowing where I was. Had they called the cops?
I glided into the living room, past the ceiling-high shelves stuffed with books, sidestepped Richard’s rowing machine, and headed toward the hall to my bedroom. I kept about a hundred dollars stashed in my dresser. With that maybe Caleb could make it to his mysterious destination.
“Desdemona, is that you?” My mother’s voice swooped up out of sleep to a hysterically high pitch. A light clicked on. I turned to see Mom and Richard, uncurling from the couch in the living room, shell-shocked and furious.
“Are you all right? Where have you been?” Mom was on me in a flash, grabbing my shoulders, scanning my face, checking me for injuries. Richard walked up slowly behind her, rubbing his bearded cheeks with one hand as he shook his head at me. I hastily rolled the folder I was carrying into a tube and held it down at my side within the folds of my dress.
“I’m fine, Mom, really. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to . . .” Had Caleb seen the light go on?
“We called the police!” Mom looked more upset than I’d ever seen her.
“Your mother was very worried,” said Richard in that soft voice of his that cut through any argument. “Why didn’t you call?”
“I know. Did I mention that I’m sorry?” Neither of them was softening.
“You are going to sit down and tell us exactly where you were and what you were doing!” Mom pointed at our threadbare wingback chair. “This is so unlike you, I thought . . . I thought something had happened to you.” She fiddled with the Triple Goddess symbol she always wore around her neck. Tears sprang to her eyes. Richard put his arm around her shoulders and led her to the couch.
My heart gained about eight hundred pounds. I sank into the wingback chair. “I am so sorry, Mom, really. I forgot my phone, and I met this boy after school . . .”
“A boy?” Mom’s eyebrows almost popped off the top of her forehead. “You were out with a
boy?
”
“Yeah. I met him after school and he invited me to a party.” My brain was working overtime. How to make this plausible and yet not give anything important away?
“You’ve been at a party this whole time?” She exchanged a look of disbelief with Richard. “The only party on the planet without a single phone in it?”
“It was out in the desert,” I said. That was true. “And I didn’t realize how far out it was till we got there, and by then nobody could get reception.”
“Okay, okay.” Mom’s hands were shaking. Richard stroked her back, but she started to pace. “So I’m expected to believe that you were at a party in the desert with a boy you’ve never mentioned before, for fifteen hours?” She paused to give me her “I know better than that” look. “Honey, you’ve never even been out on a date.”
“Guess I have now,” I said, making sure to look her right in the eye. “He didn’t tell me how far it was—somewhere out past Barstow along the 15, like, halfway to Vegas. They had a bonfire next to this big rock formation, and I think I sat in a cactus.” I stood up and tugged the back of my dress around, searching for the holes.
Mom studied me, as if I were some new life-form she’d just found under a rock. “So you went to a party with a boy. Did you drink any alcohol?” She walked right up and sniffed at me, scrutinizing my face.
“No!” My voice had the ring of truth in it now. “I swear to you, Mom, I did not have a drink. I just had a soda and a hot dog, and so did Caleb.”
“Caleb?” Mom’s eyes bored up into mine. I’d towered over both her and Richard since puberty. “So his name is Caleb?”
Damn. I’d meant to use Jake Peters’s name, but Caleb had slipped out. No going back now. “He’s just this guy.”
“How crazy was this party?” She took my chin and tilted my head down to look her in the eye again.
“Marijuana? Ex? Meth?” asked Richard.
Mom was pacing again. “We’ve been to a few parties in our lives too, you know.”
“Mom, you know I’m not into that stuff. I don’t like the thought of being so out of control.”
“Okay.” Mom stopped pacing and gave me a determined look. “It’s nearly six a.m. You and I are going to have a talk. Then I want you to take a shower and get ready for school.”
School? After the insanity of the past hours, I couldn’t imagine dragging myself to classes. And how was I supposed to get the money to Caleb? “Mom, I’m really not feeling all that hot . . .”
“That’s what happens when you stay out all night partying,” she said crisply. “Maybe next time you won’t go so far, remember your phone, and come home at a decent hour. Now, excuse us, Richard.” She took me by the arm and led me toward my bedroom. “It’s time for a mother-daughter chat.”
“I’ll call the police, tell them to stop looking.” Richard walked to the phone.
I cast a final glance out the front window but saw no sign of Caleb in the gloom outside. Richard mouthed “Good luck” at me as we headed down the hallway.
“I know you know the facts of life,” Mom said, shutting my bedroom door. “But we need to talk about this boy you’re seeing and why it’s not okay for him to take you out to all-night parties.”
“He’s not really like that, Mom.” I knew how that sounded as I pulled my dress over my head and slipped off my sandals. I slid the folder onto my desk out of sight. “He got dragged into it too. And before we knew it, we were hours away.”
“But what does that say about his judgment? And yours?”
She talked on as I eased out of the brace and stepped into the shower. I’d heard a lot of this before; Mom often babbled her free-living beliefs to me. Only this time she sprinkled in more warnings. I made the appropriate responses from behind the shower curtain as she paced my tiny bathroom.
She finished up by saying that if I ever needed to talk to her about anything, she’d be there for me. And I was grounded for a month.
I didn’t protest. Any chance of sneaking money to Caleb was gone now. Would I ever see him again? I couldn’t imagine never looking into his dark eyes again.
I got out of the shower, and wrapped a towel around myself; then my mom gave me a tight hug. “You know I love you, Desdemona,” she said.
I hugged her back. “Me too, Mom. And I really am sorry.”
Her hazel eyes shifted back and forth between mine. “Anything else you want to tell me about this Caleb guy?”
Did she sense I was lying? “Like what?”
“Is he cute?”
Holy crap, she was smiling.
I shrugged. “Um, yeah. He is.”
He’s ridiculously hot, Mom. In fact, if you knew how hot he was, you wouldn’t want me near him.
Her smile widened. “Okay, you get dressed and I’ll make you some eggs.” She started to leave.
“Mom, can I ask you something?” I said.
“Of course, honey.” She turned in the doorway.
“What exactly did they tell you about me in that orphanage in Russia?” I tried to make it sound casual, grabbing a comb and looking into the bathroom mirror. “Did they say anything about my biological parents?”
She took a moment, standing there, then cleared her throat. We didn’t talk about the adoption much. I avoided it so she wouldn’t feel like she wasn’t enough of a parent. Maybe she avoided it for the same reason. “No, unfortunately. I asked them, but they had very little information. I found you in an orphanage in Moscow, but you’d been transferred from out in the boondocks and the records on you were minimal.”
I turned to face her, running the comb through my hair. “Did you notice anything, like, weird about me?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said automatically, then froze, her eyes flickering with thought.
“What?” I said. “You thought of something.”
“They were afraid of you,” she said. “The people at the orphanage. I never told you before because I didn’t want to disturb you. But they didn’t tell me about you at first, and when I saw you and wanted you, they tried to persuade me not to take you. That just made me want you all the more.”