"It's okay," she said, while they stood waiting for someone to answer the doorbell. "Even if it isn't good, it's better than what I left, isn't it?"
"I don't know," he said. "I hope this was the right thing."
.
Da n i e l ' s a u n t was a thin nervous woman who worked as a hotel maid near the convention center. Delia was kind but tired, distracted by worry. Her hair was caught up in a hundred tiny braids with beads on the ends. She had a daughter in college and she'd taken in subletters to help with the tuition. Anna gathered that Daniel hadn't been aware of this fact. This meant that another family was living in the basement, and there was, it seemed, nowhere for Anna and Daniel to stay.
"I thought you could maybe take Tanya's old room," Delia said, but her daughter's bedroom was being used for storage, stacked high with boxes filled with things that Delia and Tanya were trying to sell on eBay. The people downstairs were playing loud music. Anna stood in the hall listening to Daniel and his aunt, and she felt the rhythm coming up through the walls. She was mesmerized by the movement of the beads at the ends of Delia's braids, the soft musical clicking every time she turned her head.
"Tanya's room looks kind of full, actually," Daniel said, in a tight voice that made Anna shiver. She was acutely sensitive to oncoming storms. She pressed the palms of her hands to the cool wall and felt the bass coming through in pulses. Thinking about the other times she'd run away, about how much less complicated running away was when it was only you and you were only going a few miles from home and no one else's family was involved.
"And she'll be home over the holidays," Delia said. " Maybe you could stay in the living room?"
But the living room was tiny and open to the kitchen, almost entirely taken up by an overstuffed sofa. It was clearly the room where Delia spent most of her time when she was home. There were magazines and half-completed crossword puzzles open on the coffee table, an ironing board set up with a neat stack of pressed clothing folded at the end of it, a gray cat sprawled asleep on the sofa. A TV blared commercials into the air.
"I wonder if you'd mind waiting in the car for a few minutes," Daniel said to Anna, and by this Anna understood that they were leaving again. She sat for a long time in the car with the seat reclined, staring at the mountains. She felt hollow and worn thin. It was obvious to her at that moment that their plans would end in catastrophe. The sunlight through the windshield was too bright.
"We're going to my friend's place," Daniel said when he came to her. He looked flushed and spent, as if he'd been shouting. She looked past him at the house. His aunt was standing in the open doorway, wiping tears from her face. "He doesn't live that far from here."
"What did you say to her?" Anna asked, but Daniel pretended not to hear. He pulled out of the driveway and when she looked back the front door was closed.
His friend lived in a sprawling ranch house on a cul-de-sac with the same reduced color palette as the larger suburbs: white houses, blue sky, green-brown lawns. This sheer white light.
"Why don't we just go to your uncle's place?"
"Because he lives in a small apartment and my friend's got an entire house to himself."
"What's your friend's name?" she asked, on the way up the driveway. Daniel was walking ahead of her with the bags.
"Paul," he said. "We worked together when I was here last summer."
P a u l w a s a wiry man in his early twenties, with blond hair and an earring and a tattoo on his neck, a splash of orange. He took them on a tour. The house seemed to have at least three bedrooms, closed doors along the upstairs hallway. Paul had friends who came to stay with him sometimes, he said. A roommate who was here every couple of weeks. He showed them the garage, where an expensive-looking silver car was parked next to a motorcycle.
"One rule," Paul said, when he showed them into the storage room beside the garage. He was sorry that this was the only room he could give them, he'd said. All the other rooms had other uses. "You can't ever go into the basement."
"I think he's a dealer," Daniel said later, when he and Anna were alone. He had lapsed into a deep silence. She was surprised to hear him speak.
"But when you knew him, last summer. "
"He was working construction," Daniel said. " Looks to me like there's been a career change."
The storage room wasn't large. There was a foldout sofa, a layer of dust on the linoleum floor, a bare lightbulb overhead. Daniel was embarrassed, it was obvious to Anna, and she wanted to say something to make it better but didn't know what she could possibly say. She sat on the sofa looking out the window at the backyard, the brownish grass and falling-down fence. Daniel seemed to be having some difficulty looking directly at her. In those last two weeks in Florida they hadn't talked much, she realized, about the actual circumstances in which they'd live after they ran away. He'd told her his aunt had room for them and she had imagined a mansion.
She wanted to leave but she had no more than eighty dollars to her name. She was here and there was nowhere else she could go.
Th e d a y s in the house were long and empty. People came and went, cars pulling in and out of the driveway. She heard voices upstairs and on the stairs to the basement. The day after their arrival Daniel went to work at his uncle's construction firm. A house was going up across town, Daniel told her, lying beside her at night. A huge sprawling McMansion of a place with pillars and a portrait of Joseph Smith carved into stone above the door. Daniel said it was creepy, actually. He'd been raised Catholic, but he wasn't about to litter any house of his with religious iconography. Anna tried to imagine what their house would be like, if they ever lived in a house that was theirs. The thought of living with Daniel indefinitely was somehow awkward. He was working overtime and went jogging in the evenings. She didn't see much of him.
Six voice mails came in from Gavin, like dispatches from a foreign country. Pleas for information, questions about her whereabouts, invitations to the prom. She listened and then deleted them. She sometimes cried at night.
Before the pregnancy began to show she got a job in a doughnut shop. It was down on a main street, a twenty-minute walk. She'd never had a job before but the work was easy and the manager liked her. It was a pleasure to escape from the silent house. She didn't mind it, although the smell of doughnuts made her nauseous some days. She served coffee and counted change through long afternoons while the question of paternity hung overhead like a cloud.
On t h e i r third or fourth week in the house she woke at three in the morning, thrown out of sleep by an unremembered sound. Daniel was standing by the storage-room window, staring out at the backyard through the smallest possible opening in the curtain. He looked stricken.
"What time is it?" she asked.