The argument Sadie overheard between Mama and Daddy. Jack Smith’s suspicion that I was born in witness protection. Charla’s bizarre phone calls from prison. Rosalina’s wild tale. The enigmatic Anthony Marchetti. Al Adams and the card I held in my hand. I ran my thumb over the embossed seal.
William Travis McCloud.
Your father says he is protecting you.
Right words. Wrong father.
Daddy would risk his life for a perfect stranger. I’d seen him do it. I now knew that once, that stranger was me.
The finger made it through the X-ray machine without a hitch, but I lost an $8 pair of cuticle scissors.
“You’re in a dark mood,” Hudson remarked, as he crammed my laptop bag into the overhead compartment. “You haven’t said two words since the hotel. Except ‘Dammit’ when you had to say goodbye to your toenail clippers.”
I didn’t tell Hudson I’d left the hotel to meet Albert Adams. I wanted to, but I knew he’d be furious. He described his own afternoon as a complete waste of time. He waited two hours for Louie’s lawyer to show up and tell Louie not to answer most of the questions in the interview.
“I’m just tired,” I said, standing on my tiptoes to pull down the blanket at the very back of the overhead bin.
Hudson gestured me toward the window seat, and I buckled myself in, closing my eyes. An extra-enthusiastic flight attendant began her show, reminding me of an old Saturday Night Live skit with Tina Fey. My thoughts drifted.
Memory is a funny thing.
Perspective is so much more.
Now I knew why Mama dressed us like boys and cut our hair short.
Why she named a girl Tommie.
Why she colored away her distinctive gray streak.
Why she built a hidden storm shelter in a bedroom closet.
Why she loved and married my father.
Why that man, whom I trusted more than anyone in the world, held on to her secrets until the day he died.
Hudson flipped the pages of a Sports Illustrated, and I turned my attention to a glorious orange and gold sunset putting on a private show for everyone on the left side of the plane. My knee felt a gentle squeeze, and I looked down to see Hudson’s big hand, offering comfort, taking a chance. I thought about confessing everything I knew while we floated above the earth. Instead, I put my hand on top of his and left it there.
Every “why” on that list hurt. I had to stop counting the deceptions, or I’d go crazy. I had to stop parsing every memory, knowing I could imagine things that weren’t there.
In college, I studied a civil case brought by a twenty-year-old woman who claimed to have “recovered” a memory about her childhood piano teacher. She said that the image of him standing behind her with his hands cupped over her breasts while she played “Für Elise” came to her in the shower ten years later. The case turned on the defense testimony of a middle-aged college professor who told the jury about a study of sixteen young adults who had witnessed the murder of a parent as a child.
The memory of the murder burned like a brand, imprinted forever in their brain matter.
Not one of them, no matter how young at the time it happened, ever forgot it. Many of them could still recount the horror in precise detail. Yet another reason, the defense lawyer argued, to believe that repressed memory is a crock. The moments we remember without exception, he insisted, are unfortunately the horrible ones.
As I saw it, my problem was that what I needed to remember was probably very small, a single grain in a sea of waving wheat. If I could take over this plane and fly back to my childhood, I’d find that tiny grain and know what to do with it. My head bumped along on an insufficient airplane pillow beside a man who I believed cared for me deeply, who wanted to keep me safe. That didn’t stop the dread curling up in my stomach. The airplane banked steeply, tipping me on edge so that for a few seconds I had the eerie sensation that I could fall right out my window and into one of the tiny sparkling blue swimming pools below. That might be a blessing.
Every mile we flew closer to the Texas border, my chest grew tighter and tighter like the screw of a vise.
CHAPTER 24
Hudson dropped me off at the Worthington, clearly torn about leaving me. He ordered me to stay put in the room and open the door only for room service.
He’d left a client in the lurch to chase me in Chicago. He didn’t say whom. But when he finished up the job tomorrow afternoon, he would be all mine.
All mine.
While we were flying up in the heavens, a familiar space developed between the two of us that held all the things we wouldn’t say to each other. Like that I couldn’t bear the thought that Hudson had been to war and back, but that he could die, here, because of me.
So that made calling Victor the second I closed the hotel room door a lot easier.
I didn’t want to risk anyone’s life but mine.
I didn’t want to be manipulated anymore.
Not by Hudson, not by Mama, not by madddog12296.
I wanted some clean underwear and my gun.
I wanted to go home.
Victor let me off at our mailbox at the bottom of the road around midnight, the security lights of the house blinking through the branches of the trees.
Not Victor’s preference, but mine. I needed the walk up the road to clear my mind. I wanted to feel open black sky above my head, to see it twinkling like Christmas in summer, to remember when a hot Texas night felt like a security blanket instead of a threat.
About halfway there, I was sweating buckets, wishing I had let Victor drop my suitcase and backpack on the porch like he suggested. I noticed a vehicle half-parked under the branches of a tree near the house. Not Daddy’s pickup, which had been wheezing a little under the hood. I’d parked it in the garage before I left, deciding to take a shuttle to the airport. Could Sadie be back already from Marfa? No lights shone through the windows of the house. Maybe she was in bed. Why the hell didn’t she stay at the hotel like I’d asked?
A few minutes later, I stopped short. Not Sadie’s SUV. A small green Jeep parked recklessly, the front end on the grass. A security light shone directly into the front window, the necklace dangling from the mirror glinting gold.
The Jeep that was parked beside my pickup in a garage a few days ago.
The one stuffed with boxes and papers.
The hoarder.
No effort to hide the Jeep’s presence. And no one inside it.
I dropped my suitcase and backpack onto the grass and crept forward as close to the shadow of the tree line as I could.
Connecticut plates.
I ran the last yards across the open drive, kneeling down on the passenger side, tugging at the door. Locked.
I crouched perfectly still, held my breath, and listened. No sound, except the buzzing of cicadas near the lights as some of them met an early death. I crawled on my hands and knees through the gravel to the driver’s side, acutely aware that I was now an open target to anyone on the porch or in the house.
I lifted the door handle. Bingo.
I opened the door a quarter of the way and hurriedly shut it behind me to cut off the light. Then I threw myself flat over the passenger seat, the stick shift punching me in the gut, and stared at a pile of McDonald’s wrappers on the floor, waiting for a gunshot.
When it didn’t come, I groped for the glove compartment. Nothing much useful. No paperwork like an insurance card or registration that would tell me who owned the Jeep. No weapon. Just a dog-eared Jeep manual. And a mini Maglite. I punched the button. It worked. I raised my head cautiously. Something slithered across my cheek and I screeched.