The Orphan (11 page)

There was another kind of magic, one she called the Reliving. She was lost inside it now, back inside Pete Sampson, and he inside of her, where he had come to dwell.

Pete Sampson worked as a sales representative at Gebhardt Audi-BMW in Boulder, and he was good at his job, but not good enough to earn the kind of commissions that would allow him to live in Boulder. In the meantime he lived in an apartment in Lafayette, a small but growing town approximately eight miles east of Boulder. His commute each morning led him through a series of paved roads zigzagging across rural east Boulder County, and because he didn’t begin his weekday shifts until 10 a.m., morning traffic was almost always thin. It was a stress-free drive, one Pete could enjoy at a leisurely clip, sipping a coffee and listening to sports talk radio. He drove an older BMW, one of the first 5-series, with over a hundred and seventy thousand miles on it, but it was still a fun car to push through the turns coming in on Valmont, the winding road that took him to the dealership’s front door.

There were large houses and some small farms along the way, long split-rail and barbed-wire fences keeping small herds of cattle or a few horses back from the road. Heading into town meant aiming west, and the view of the mountains rising above Boulder was always something to appreciate.

It was an average Thursday morning that spring when Pete came down 95th, made the left turn onto Valmont, and began to crest that first small hill when he saw the woman in distress. She seemed to come running at the road, at him, as if she were going to leap in front of his car. Parked on the gravel shoulder perhaps fifty feet behind her was an old yellow hatchback, the hood up, and the woman was waving one hand, flagging urgently. The situation presented itself quickly, not leaving him much time to make a decision.

Pete didn’t own a cellphone, and he wasn’t the sort of guy to pick up a hitchhiker, but she was a long walk from town, and the good guy thing to do was at least pull over and make sure it wasn’t an emergency. The woman wore a nice dress and heels and she looked respectable. He wasn’t scheduled to start his shift on the lot for another twenty minutes, and even if he was a few minutes late, hey, who knew? This gal might need a new car. This could be his next commission. And it was the right thing to do.

All of which passed through Pete’s brain in the time it took him to swerve into the oncoming lane to avoid striking her with his car, set down his coffee between the driver’s seat and the emergency brake, and downshift as he nosed ahead of her and checked his rearview mirror.

She was already hurrying up along his passenger side, leaning down to the window. Pete reached over the seat and rolled the window down. Wind blew strands of sandy blonde hair inside the car and then the neckline of her dress was there, the pale top bone-nubs of her sternum visible in the V of purple and gold fabric. She was already talking before he saw her mouth, and then her face was filling the window, eyes behind gold-framed sunglasses with smoke-tinted lenses.

‘Thank you, thank you, oh, I can’t believe this morning,’ she was saying, talking fast but not quite in a tone of panic. Flustered, was his first impression. Her forearms and bony elbows jackknifed across his windowsill as she set her chin on the backs of her hands. ‘Can you help me out? Are you going into Boulder? I’m in a bit of a pinch here.’

A part of Pete knew already he was not going to be able to say no, but he wasn’t eager to have a passenger, either. He had the weirdest feeling he should ask a few questions first, slow this down – not because he was unnerved by her, but almost to protect her, since she seemed ready to hop into the car with any creep who would have her. Maybe it was simply happening too fast.

‘What’s the trouble? Your car break down?’ Pete said, looking back over his shoulder, to the open hood of the yellow hatchback.

‘I had a terrible night,’ she said, grimacing in a kind of apology. ‘My car is screwed. I have to make a phone call. I have to get out of here. Can you drop me at the next gas station or some place like that? It would be a huge help.’

She appeared dressed for work in an office of some sort. She was somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-five.

‘Yeah, all right, hop in,’ Pete said.

She did just that and then some, opening the door and somehow crumbling into the seat and slamming the door and juggling the mess of her purse and a little black notebook all in a flurry he hadn’t expected for a woman in a dress and heels.

‘You are a life saver,’ she said. ‘Seriously, thank you so much.’

There was the scent of candy, sweet cheap perfume, something like grape soda and old flowers. Pete’s nostrils wrinkled against the potency of it and he notched his own window down a couple of inches. He checked both the side mirror and the rearview before pulling back onto Valmont, shifting the BMW up toward forty.

She babbled about the horrible night she had just made it through, something about a girlfriend who had left her at the bar, then her boyfriend, who was an asshole and no longer, as of this morning, her boyfriend at all, and then something about running out of gas, her boss, all of it out of order and coming too fast for Pete to really follow the sequential narrative, if there was one.

While she prattled, sometimes giggling, other times groaning with self-disgust (‘How do I get myself into these stupid situations?’), Pete noticed certain things about her that put him on a nervous edge. Such as, her dress was the kind with a silk belt below the buttons, and the belt was loose, the knot unraveling, as if the dress were on the verge of flying apart. Also, her legs were pale, gangly, bruised at one knee and inside the left thigh. Her hair looked a bit unwashed, slept on, and her shoes – the white wedge heels – were dirtier than could be attributed to a little road dust from this recent car trouble.

This lady’s a desperate mess, was what it came down to. She doesn’t have car trouble. She’s got life trouble. Bars, bad boyfriends, and the way she’s talking over herself, she’s on some kind of drugs, or coming off them. Bottom line: this is not someone you want in your car. Get her out as soon as possible.

‘Where did you come from?’ Pete heard himself asking. He was thinking of the way she had come running at the road, not like she had been on the shoulder to begin with, but as though she had come scurrying out of the field or some small patch of woods he might have missed. ‘Looked like you were running back there.’

‘Did you see that house? The red one?’ she said, not looking at him. She was digging into her purse, flipping through the pages of her little black notebook. She would focus on one page for a moment, shake her head or bite her lip, then tear through more pages. ‘That’s where I was staying. At my friend’s place. But she split, left me all the way out here in the middle of nowhere.’

‘But what about your car?’

‘Which one?’ she said, ripping another page out and crumpling it into a ball before stuffing it back in her purse. Her knuckles were chapped.

‘The yellow hatchback with the hood up?’ Pete suggested.

‘Oh, that’s not mine. I lost my car yesterday, at the bowling alley. Long story.’ She smiled, laughed, and he saw her large eyes behind the smoked lenses, checking him out as he drove. Her eyes were twitchy.

Pete steered through the first of the long S-turns on Valmont. He had to concentrate to keep his eyes on the road. The curves here could sneak up on you.

‘You seem nice,’ she said, as if he had just offered to buy her a drink and now she was the one sitting in judgment. ‘What do you do?’

‘I work at Gebhardt Motors,’ Pete said. ‘The dealership. You need a new car? I can help you with that.’

‘What kind of cars do you sell?’

‘Audi, BMW, used European imports mostly. But we get a little of everything.’

‘Out of my league,’ she said. ‘I bet you’re good at your job.’

Pete wondered if he had just insulted her. Or offended her. He was only twenty-eight. He made just over thirty-two thousand last year. He hadn’t thought of them as being in wildly differing income brackets – hadn’t thought of her income bracket at all – but the comment gave him the impression that she existed in a pocket of life that did not bother with income brackets.

‘It’s really good of you to help me,’ she said, touching his right arm, allowing her hand to linger there, long enough for him to feel the cold of her palm and fingers through his dress shirt. ‘What’s your name, sweetie?’

‘Pete,’ he said.

‘I’m Sheila. Nice to meet you, Pete.’ She smiled at him. She was leaning over in her seat, too close for a stranger.

‘Okay,’ he said, nervous in ways he could not explain. Or maybe it was this – she was making him feel pervy, though he had no such intentions.

‘She took all my money, Pete. My friend did. I have to find a new place to stay. I’m really at a loss here.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

‘Am I making you late for work?’ Sheila said.

‘No.’ Pete checked his watch. A Casio G-Shock too thick for his lean limbs. It had been a gift from his dad. ‘I have a few minutes. Our shifts are a bit flexible anyway. I work on commission, so if I’m a little late or whatever, it just comes out of my pocket.’

Sheila seemed to find this very funny. She laughed too loudly and her teeth were large. The longer he was in the car with her, the less attractive she became. Not that he had been thinking it mattered.

Pete exited the second S-turn on Valmont and followed the straight lane into a cluster of more houses lining the two-lane country road. He reduced his speed, knowing that cops sometimes tucked themselves in here to radar people taking advantage of the country roads. He imagined being pulled over right now with her in the car and something about that unsettled him. He felt like he was up to something risky here, he did not know what.

‘So,’ he said, clearing his throat. ‘What do you need? A phone? A service station? Where should I take you?’

Sheila turned on her seat, facing him. She snapped her little black notebook closed. Her tongue poked out at the corner of her mouth and wet her top lip.

‘That depends on how much you’re willing to help me,’ she said. ‘I’m up for anything, you know? Is there a bar around here? I could use a drink.’

Pete laughed. He looked at her. She was smiling.

‘Or whatever,’ she said, facing the windshield again. ‘I need a shower too.’

Well, okay, this was wrong. She was proposing something here, something like prostitution, he knew, and this was part of her scheme, wasn’t it? The speech about car trouble, the bad boyfriend, the bad night. It was all some sort of sales pitch. Maybe she wasn’t, like, officially a prostitute, but there was some kind of game happening here.

Pete was not flattered or interested. He was scared. He did not have a girlfriend, but he had dates, friends, a life. He had goals. He was a decent-looking guy. He neither wanted nor needed any of this. His stomach was acidic. Her candy perfume was making him feel sick.

And that was what made it all so strange, why he couldn’t explain how twenty minutes later, after letting her use a pay phone at the gas station on the corner of 75th and Arapahoe, then crossing Valmont again to drop her off at the Residence Inn hotel suites, he found himself walking into the room with her. He couldn’t even remember who had paid for the room, how they wound up with a key. His thoughts had turned thin, slippery. Speaking had become difficult and his limbs felt weak.

At the gas station, she’d said something about him not looking too good, and then he sort of blanked out for a few minutes, and when he returned to a state resembling normal alertness, he was in the passenger seat of his own car. Sheila was driving the BMW. He felt very tired, and still scared, but he could not pinpoint the exact nature of his fear. Checking into the hotel, he couldn’t remember the last time he had spoken, or what he had said to her. She seemed to have stopped talking too.

And yet he could hear her, or follow her drift. Little prompts in his mind. Simple hand gestures, her pink chipped-polish fingernails cueing him this way and that. He felt as though he were under arrest. Being followed by a secret camera crew. Several times he thought of running away, but every time he considered this his knees locked up and his back stiffened.

Maybe I need a day off
, he thought as Sheila opened the door to the room and waited for him to enter. He couldn’t move.

‘What’s the matter, Pete?’ she said, though he was looking right at her and he could swear that her lips did not move. ‘Don’t you want to come inside?’

He looked away. Looking directly at her was difficult. He would focus on the room. That would help. There was the couch, a small end table with a lamp, the Guest Services card standing next to it like a little teepee.

She locked the door behind him. They were in a Residence Inn suite, the kind with the kitchenette, living room and loft bedroom on the second floor. There was a fireplace. It was like being in someone’s house. He felt like he used to when he ditched class in high school, the guilt poisoning every bit of fun he thought he’d have. Had he thought at some point this would be fun?

What was happening here? Whose idea was this?

He was sitting on the couch, staring at the blank gray TV screen. He wanted to turn it on but he could not see the remote control. He tried to stand up but his legs and body felt enormously heavy. Had she drugged him? No, that was not possible. He had not ingested anything since she got into his car. His coffee had gone cold and he was sure he hadn’t touched it after meeting her.

Seeing her running from the field into the road, that felt like something that had happened yesterday, a week ago. What time was it? He attempted to check his Casio but his wrist felt tied to the couch. He looked down. It wasn’t.

‘I’m just going to make a few phone calls,’ Sheila said from behind him. Her cold fingers were at his neck, then digging into his hair, climbing the back of his head like a large spider. She caressed his scalp, making his skin tingle.

Pete looked up to see her but she was on the other side of the room now, sitting in the chair at the desk, where the phone was plugged in. She was over there, at least ten feet away, but he could still feel her fingers massaging his scalp. Pete turned on the sofa and looked where she had been standing, because maybe someone else had followed them in?