Page 44

Graceland – Paul Simon

Lena’s house was a beautiful old Tacoma home with a wrap-around porch out front and a huge yard out back where she grew flowers and fruit trees and kept fish in a pond.

Inside, she’d painted murals on every single wall, as well as some of the floors, and most of the ceilings. It was like being in a fairy-tale book.

She let me explore in a sort of stunned silence while she sat in her kitchen and drank tea that she’d made in a copper pot. She didn’t seem in a rush to ask me anything, and I wasn’t in the mood to talk, and it suited us both just fine.

When I finally made my way back to the kitchen, she was working on an iPad and looked up at me with a smile.

‘All good?’ she asked, and I nodded and settled on one of the kitchen chairs.

She told me that she used to teach grade school and now taught music, and when I said I played guitar, she pulled one out of a closet under the stairs.

She had a pale-green piano in the living room with scarred and battered keys, and she said she would get me practicing scales and chords because music was good discipline, and good healing.

My bedroom was on the second floor, and it was the only room in the house not decorated in Lena’s signature style.

I liked her murals, but I guessed if she took foster kids in, they might find it overwhelming.

One wall of the bedroom was painted light blue and the other three were cream.

I had a dresser, a walk-in closet and a queen-size bed, and the bathroom across the hall was just for me.

It all felt like luxury, and I was grateful, so grateful, that I’d ended up somewhere that was nice. Not just safe, but nice, too.

Later that afternoon, we went out to a mall to pick up some clothes and essentials, since I didn’t have any of my stuff and I had no idea where it was.

Still in Atlanta, probably. I wanted my clothes, and my black dress from Goodwill, and my makeup bag which had grown with items Brooke had bought or stolen for me.

And my cropped T-shirt from Target, and my trashy paperbacks, and Brooke.

The grief for what had been taken from me swelled in my chest, and I picked up more black dresses and tights and band T-shirts and cutoff jean shorts, determined not to go back to being Mouse.

Lena hummed with approval at all my choices and waved away my questions about who would pay for it, mentioning a stipend without offering any details.

That night, I laid awake wondering about Brooke, alternating between fear and anger and deep, aching longing.

There was a very real possibility her parents wouldn’t ever let her see me again.

Or that the authorities would stop us from seeing each other.

Or that she would choose to move to New York to be with her sister and closer to her brother, instead of coming back to her parents.

Or, worst of all, that she would come back to Seattle, decide she didn’t want to be with me anymore, and go back to her old life.

I didn’t think that last one was likely, but I couldn’t shift the feeling that we’d created something unique and special when we were alone, just the two of us, in the Mustang, with the whole world laid out for us to explore.

Would she even want me now life was getting back to normal?

Would she still care about me when she learned that it had all been in my imagination – that the police hadn’t been chasing us, and therefore it was my fault she’d been kidnapped?

I fell asleep when the sun started to peek around the edges of my curtains.

Which meant I woke up late, of course. I figured out how to use the shower and washed my hair with shampoo that smelled wrong, finger-combing out the tangles. I didn’t bother putting makeup on. I had no one to impress and no bruises to cover up.

I stumbled downstairs in one of my new outfits to find Lena at the kitchen table with her iPad again.

‘Good morning,’ Lena said with a warm smile. ‘Do you want tea? Coffee?’

‘Coffee would be great.’

She nodded her chin at the counter. ‘There’s some in the pot. Help yourself.’

Being in someone else’s house – especially living there – was weird. Lena seemed to know this, though, and was trying to make it easier on me.

‘I’ve been reading your notes,’ she said as I moved around the kitchen.

I was surprised by her honesty, and shocked that I had notes for her to look at.

‘Yeah?’

I missed drinking iced coffee with Brooke. Drinking it hot now felt wrong. I leaned back against the counter, cradling the mug to my chest all the same, and Lena twisted around to look at me.

‘You want to see them?’ she offered.

‘Am I allowed?’

‘They’re your notes, Jessie.’

I thought about that for a second, sipping my coffee. ‘I don’t think I do. I was there, I know what happened.’

‘That’s fair. Do you have any questions for me?’

I had so many questions that I didn’t know where to start. But one in particular had been nagging me.

‘How did they find us?’

Lena glanced down at her iPad. ‘I think you were stopped by police in Georgia?’

‘Yeah,’ I murmured, thinking of the super-friendly cop who had spent too long looking at Meredith’s ID.

‘He connected the two of you to the missing persons’ report and alerted Atlanta PD.’ She gave me a sad little smile. ‘Brooke’s car is very distinctive. They spotted you pretty quickly.’

‘Oh.’ I sighed, and stared down into my coffee. So, Brooke had been right. We should have detoured to another city.

‘Anything else?’ Lena asked, and I shook my head. I had so many more questions but they could wait for later. ‘Okay. There are a few things we should probably talk about.’

I went and sat down at the table, preparing myself for the worst.

I had been kicked out of St. Catherine’s.

I could still finish the school year being home-schooled if I wanted.

My mom wanted to see me.

My dad had written me a letter.

I had been asked to go to another police interview, with Seattle PD this time.

‘Do I have to?’ I asked, and Lena made a face.

‘You kinda do. Sorry.’ I thought she meant it, too.

I made a face back at her. ‘When?’

‘Today, I expect.’

I told myself it was better to get it all out of the way, rather than having the prospect of another police station hanging over me like a dark cloud. Despite what Detective Beaufort had said, I wasn’t completely convinced that Seattle PD were going to drop everything and let me go.

Lena opened her mouth, then closed it again, and I knew there was something she wasn’t telling me.

‘What else?’ I pressed.

‘You asked to be put in foster care instead of being sent back to your mom,’ Lena said cagily.

It took me a second to understand what she was implying.

‘I told the police in Atlanta that my mom’s boyfriend was abusive.’

Lena nodded. ‘They’ll want to make sure wherever you go next is a safe place for you.’

I realized that was why I’d been carted off to a hotel, then to social services, before someone had picked me up. They wanted to make sure my mom wasn’t abusing me too. She hadn’t, and she wouldn’t, but I still wasn’t ready to face her again.

Lena made some phone calls while I brushed my teeth and blow-dried my hair. Despite what everyone had told me – that I wasn’t going to be thrown in jail for murder – it was hard to accept. Going back to a police station felt like I was being led to my execution.

When we arrived at the station, I expected to be taken to an interrogation room, one like I’d seen in cop procedural shows, but the room was more like someone’s living room, with a couple of comfy couches and a coffee table and a big window that let in a lot of natural light.

It wasn’t modern, or particularly nice, but it looked like someone had made an effort.

Lena went straight to a couch and sat down. ‘You don’t have to be nervous,’ she said.

‘You don’t know me very well. I’m nervous about everything.’

That made her laugh. She pulled out a bottle of pale-blue nail polish from her enormous purse and started painting her nails.

If anyone else had done that, it would have annoyed me, given the circumstances, but I was starting to realize Lena was incredibly astute underneath her hippy, floral-skirt, kindergarten-teacher exterior.

The door to the room opened, and my heart started to thunder in my chest.

The policewoman introduced herself as Officer Gale. She had silver-gray hair, cut super short, and piercing blue eyes.

Like Detective Beaufort, she wasn’t wearing a uniform. But it felt like a carefully staged scene to not freak me out. Which obviously freaked me the fuck out. I didn’t know what angle they were trying to take. Was I still a suspect, or did they just want information from me? Or both?

‘Do you know why you’re here today, Jessie?’

‘No,’ I said. I was pretty sure there was something in the constitution about not having to incriminate yourself, but I hadn’t paid close enough attention in Social Studies class to know the exact details.

Besides, it wasn’t a lie. There were plenty of things that had happened in the past couple of weeks that they could be charging me for, and I wasn’t going to confess to anything until I had an idea of what they knew and what they didn’t.

‘Let’s start at the beginning. Why don’t you tell me why you ran away?’ Officer Gale asked.

I glanced at Lena, wondering exactly what I should say.

I needed to dance on a line between telling the truth and protecting Brooke from getting in any more trouble than we were potentially in.

I’d already told the police in Atlanta about the Creep, but they had no idea what we’d done since leaving Seattle: stealing hundreds of dollars at the convention, Brooke being kidnapped, stabbing Chris through the hand.

Plus, Brooke’s illegal gun that she’d been threatening to shoot me with. I couldn’t tell them about any of that.

‘Will you tell me the truth if I ask you something?’ I replied instead of answering her question.