“Is someone with you?” I asked her, unable to keep my voice from trembling with hope. “Is your mother here… or someone?”
The little girl didn’t answer. Only now did it occur to my muddled brain that the voice I’d heard, the woman calling, must be…
“Angeline! There you are!”
I followed the sound of her voice and saw her. A tall, slender lady in her thirties. A kind, pretty face with pretty red hair falling to her shoulders. She was wearing a navy-blue overcoat and jeans. Having finally found her daughter, she was stepping toward her. She hadn’t seen me yet.
Then she did. She spotted me. She froze in her tracks. She stared at me with wide blue eyes.
She looked at her daughter again. Very quickly, she said, “Angeline! Angeline, come here right now. Come to Mommy right now!”
That broke the spell. Angeline turned away from me and ran to her mother, her pink sneakers crunching on the dead leaves. Clutching her ball in one hand, she clung to her mother’s overcoat with the other and tried to hide in the folds of it.
The red-haired lady licked her lips. Staring at me, she began to back away. She was leaving me! She was going to leave me here!
“No! No, wait!” I said.
I managed to get to my feet, reaching out a hand to her. The mother took another step away, pulling her child with her.
I called out, more harshly than I meant to: “No! Stop! Don’t go!”
The mother froze at the tone of my voice. She clutched her daughter to her more tightly. Her eyes traveled over me.
I took a stumbling step toward her.
“Please,” she said. She spoke in a near-whisper, as if she could barely get the words out. “Please don’t hurt us.”
I stopped moving. I’d been so desperate for help that it hadn’t occurred to me what I must look like to her. A filthy, bloodstained, battered young man-and with a gun stuck in the waistband of his pants! I must’ve looked like some kind of madman or escaped convict or a killer or something. The sight of me must’ve terrified the poor woman out of her wits-but I hadn’t thought of that.
“Hurt you?” I said, confused.
“Do you want money? I can give you some money. Please…”
“No, no…”
“Please. My daughter. She’s just a child. You can do anything you want to me, but don’t hurt her.”
“Mommy!” the little girl cried out tearfully. She clutched her mother’s coat tighter in fear.
Openmouthed, I stared at one of them and then the other. Finally, some understanding worked its way into my befuddled brain. My eyes misted over. I shook my head.
“No, no, no,” I said. “Listen to me, listen. I swear to you, I swear: they could give me all the money in all the banks in all the world, and I wouldn’t hurt a single hair on your head or on your daughter’s. So help me. So help me.”
She clutched her child even tighter. She took another step away, eyeing me suspiciously. “What do you want then?”
I stopped moving. I held up my hand to show I wouldn’t come any closer. “Help. Please. I just need help.”
The lady’s lips trembled. Her eyes were swimming. She was so scared of me she was close to tears. I could see she was a nice lady, and it hurt my heart for her to be afraid of me. But I was desperate for her not to leave.
“What sort of help?” she asked. “I can give you some money. I don’t have much. But I have some.”
“Have you got a phone? If I could just call my mom and dad… They’ll come and get me. They’ll take me home. Please.”
She licked her lips again. I saw her eyes go to the gun in my waistband. I put my hand on it.
The lady let out a cry of fear and turned her body to shield her daughter from a bullet.
“No, no, no-here!” I said. I drew the gun out of my waistband. I took it by the muzzle and held the handle out to her. “Here-take it.”
There was another moment before she dared to turn around and look. Then she did. A look of surprise came over her face as she saw me holding the gun out to her.
“Take it,” I said. “I would never hurt you. Never. You’ve gotta believe me. I just want to go home. Please. Take the gun.”
I could see in her eyes that she was confused now. She didn’t know what to think of me. She just stood there, staring at the gun, trying to figure out what to do, how to protect her little girl.
Finally, she edged toward me cautiously. She reached for the gun gingerly, as if she was afraid I was trying to trap her, lure her in and grab her or something. When her fingers touched the gun, she snatched it quickly and leapt back out of my reach. She pointed the gun at me. It made me pretty nervous. It’d be just my luck today if I escaped from, like, a million guards and then got shot by a mom who pulled the trigger by mistake.
She just stood there, pointing the gun, not really knowing what to do next.
“Look,” I said. “There are men after me. Bad men- dangerous. I don’t know how far away they are, but they may still be looking for me. If I could just use your phone…”
Holding the gun on me, the lady swallowed. “It’s…
It’s in the car,” she said uncertainly. “I don’t have it with me.” Then she added: “It doesn’t work out here anyway. There’s no signal.”
“Well, listen, I really need to call…”
“All right, all right,” she said. She thought some more. I could see she was making a plan. “You can come with me. We can drive back down the road. It usually picks up a signal at the bottom.”
I nodded. “Great. That’d be great, ma’am, really. Uh… Do you think you could stop pointing the gun at me now?”
She looked down at her hand as if she’d forgotten the gun was there. When she saw it, she considered it a long moment. Finally, I guess she came to a decision. She took a deep breath. She slipped the gun into the pocket of her overcoat. I took a deep breath too, relieved.
“Okay,” she said. “Come with me.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Dateline I followed her out of the woods. It wasn’t easy. I was hurting all over and walking slowly. A few times, the red-haired lady had to wait up for me, even though she was walking with the little girl. She’d pause and watch me hobbling as fast as I could, trying to catch up with her, and I thought I saw a little mom-like sympathy come into her eyes. It was a nice thing to see. I was in need of a little mom-like sympathy at that point.
When we came out of the trees, there was a rolling slope of dirt and grass. There were picnic benches here and a rusted, dilapidated swing set. After everything that had happened, it was the oddest sight to see. So normal, you know. If it hadn’t been for the pain and the blood and the muck all over me, I would’ve wondered if my whole ordeal that day had been a dream.
Beyond the grass there was a dirt parking place. There was only the one car there-her car, a Ford Explorer, just like my mom’s, even colored brown like my mom’s.
I waited while the red-haired lady strapped the little girl into the child seat in back.
“Is the man bad, Mommy?” I heard the little girl ask softly.
“No,” the red-haired lady said. “He just needs help. Don’t worry. Everything’s going to be fine.”
I sat in the front passenger seat as the lady drove over a narrow dirt road. It was a long road, strewn with rocks, and slow going. The Explorer bounced and jarred as it hit holes in the earth and up-sticking boulders. Every bounce went through my body in a flash of pain.
The lady and I were silent at first. But then I decided to try to make conversation. I wanted her to see I was a good guy so she wouldn’t be so scared of me.
“My mom has an Explorer too,” I said to her. “It’s the same color.”
She glanced over at me. I thought maybe she started to smile for a second, but I guess she stopped herself.
“I’m really sorry I scared you,” I said. “I guess I must look pretty gnarly at this point.”
She glanced over again. Things were improving, I could tell. She was a mom, you know, like my mom, so I could kind of read her, tell what she was thinking. She had that little quirk at the corner of her lips that moms get when they don’t want to forgive you for something but they can’t help it.