I turned around.
“Ronnie? What are you doing here?”
“Come on,” he said, turning and stalking off toward the door, not even bothering to wait to see if I was following him.
We walked to the parking lot, where his truck sat filthy and ragtag right up front. I wondered if I had walked past it going into the bookstore, my mind so far away I hadn’t even noticed that the truck that had been parked in my driveway for six years was sitting right there in the parking lot.
We climbed in, and I pushed my backpack and purse onto the floorboard between my feet.
“What are you doing here?” I repeated as he pointed his truck toward the highway. I watched the lane turn into two lanes, and then four, my spirit soaring higher with each growing lane, with every mile between me and that awful house.
“Harold called me last night,” he said. “Told me you beat up one of their girls and I needed to come get you. Then your friend Dani’s mom called, said you’d run away and would be at the bookstore, in case I wanted to call the police to pick you up and send you back to the Camerons’ house.”
I was stunned into silence. All that low mumbling and the funny tone in Dani’s voice… her mom had told me yes just so I would be sitting somewhere long enough to let the cops come get me.
“I sent you down here to stay with Clay,” Ronnie grumbled, looking straight ahead, his dashboard rattling on the road. “But I know how headstrong you can be, and your mother would not want you being a runaway.” His mouth straightened into a tight line at the mention of my mom.
“Thank you,” I practically whispered. Something about being with Ronnie didn’t feel right, but it felt so much better than being with my father. I didn’t mention the things I’d wanted to say to him all this time. Why didn’t you ever call me back? Why didn’t you let me come home for the funerals? Why did you make me leave in the first place? I wanted to ask him if he had himself under control now, if his grief was still consuming him. Have you brushed your teeth? I wanted to ask him. Have you changed your clothes? Is the motel room a rotting mess of empty food containers and filthy sheets?
But instead I asked, “Can I get a Coke?”
He pulled over at the next fast-food restaurant we saw and bought me one, handing it across the seat, our fingers brushing. His fingernails were dirty. His hands were dry. Meg’s blood was still under my nails, but I didn’t care.
“Have you cleared out the house?” I asked when we got back on the road.
“Some,” he said, and I could tell he didn’t want to talk about it, but I pressed. It was my house, too, and I had a right to know.
“Did you find any of our stuff?”
“Some,” he said again.
“Anything worth keeping?”
He shook his head, took a deep breath. “Total loss.”
“You didn’t keep anything?”
Annoyance crept into his voice. “No, Jersey, it’s trash.”
I pondered that. Our whole lives, the lives of four people, tossed in a landfill with all the other garbage. Why do we spend so much time collecting stuff, anyway, if that’s what it comes down to in the end?
“So are you still living at the motel?” I asked.
“If you call it living, sure,” he answered.
“Is there power in Elizabeth yet?”
“Yes.”
I sipped my soda, feeling the cold sink down into my fingers and toes, the sugar and carbonation rushing to my head. I kicked off my shoes and held my feet under the floor vent, letting the air-conditioning dry my sweaty toes. I’d run out of things to ask him. He wasn’t going to give me answers—not real ones, anyway—so what was the point? We both slipped into silence. I leaned my head against the window and watched the lines being eaten up by the front of the truck, until my eyes were too heavy from watching and I fell asleep.
I awoke when my body sensed that we had stopped moving. I sat up straight, stretching my stiff neck, and looked around. We were in a parking lot, but not one I recognized. I peered out the window. We weren’t in Elizabeth, I could see that much. Ronnie had put the truck into park and was staring straight ahead through the windshield, his hands resting on the bottom loop of the steering wheel.
“Where are we?” I asked on a yawn. I grabbed my soda and took another sip. It had gotten warm and watery, but it still tasted like heaven. A sign on the side of a nearby building said WAVERLY PUBLIC LIBRARY.
“Waverly,” he said, as I made the connection. His voice was rough and scratchy. He was born in Waverly, Grandfather Harold had said of Clay. About an hour thataway.
“Waverly? Why?”
Waverly was about an hour southeast of Elizabeth. We’d driven through it once or twice on road trips, and Mom had always pointed out that she’d grown up there.
“Godforsaken hellhole,” she’d always say. “Hold your breath. You don’t want to breathe in judgment. Oppression is contagious.” And even though we had no idea what she was talking about, we’d always make a game of it—see who could hold their breath the longest. See if we could make it all the way through the town without taking a breath.
Ronnie picked at the steering wheel with his dirty thumbnails. “At the funeral…” he said, and then he paused so long, I wasn’t sure he’d ever finish. He reached up and wiped his jaw with his hand a few times, then went back to picking. “Some people showed up, Jersey.”
“I wanted to be there. I should have been.”
“I was trying to keep you from being hurt.”
“My mother died. It’s too late to keep me from being hurt. I should have been there.”
“Your mom’s parents came,” he said, leveling his eyes at me at last.
I sat back, stunned. I had never met my mom’s parents. Mom hadn’t seen or talked to her parents since before I was born. They’d told her that if she wanted to run off with that drunk troublemaker Clay Cameron, she no longer had a family to come home to, and Mom had taken them at their word. She had been glad to do so. She always talked about how they judged her, how she was never good enough for them, how they never understood her and forced her to be a perfect little princess when all she wanted was to be normal. When they disowned her, she was glad to be done with them. To hear her tell it, she had no idea where they lived, much less if they were alive or dead. I think in our hearts we all assumed they were dead.
But they were alive.
And she was the dead one.
Ronnie went back to picking, I think because it kept him from having to look at me. “They didn’t even know about Marin,” he said. “They knew about you because your mom was pregnant when she ran away. But they didn’t even know Marin existed.”
“She didn’t run away. They disowned her,” I said, not caring a bit. “That’s their own fault.”
“They live here in Waverly,” he said, as if I hadn’t spoken at all, and my insides started to turn cold as all the pieces fell into place. Mom growing up here, telling us to hold our breaths so we didn’t catch the oppression and judgment alive and well in Waverly. Ronnie was driving me to the very town where my grandparents lived. “They’ve always been right here. They still live in the same house your mom grew up in.”
“But they didn’t bother to come by until now?” I wanted to keep him talking, to turn the conversation around. Maybe I could stop what I knew was coming. Maybe if I made him understand how much Mom hated them, he wouldn’t do what he was about to do. Again. “They didn’t care enough to try to see us until after she was dead?”
Ronnie shrugged. “They said they tried. When you were a baby. But according to them, your mom called the police to have them escorted off her property. She told them she never wanted to see them or speak to them again. Of course, this was when she was still with Clay. They… gave up.”