Page 24

23.

I waited for my father all afternoon, sitting stiffly on a bed in the motel room with the lamps turned off and the blinds drawn. I finally had the means of freedom in my grasp—the keys to the truck, an afternoon with no supervision—and yet I’d completely abandoned all thoughts of escape. I was nailed in place by guilt and terror. All I wanted was my father to come back and reassure me that the security guard was still alive, that they didn’t know that I was the one who shot him, that everything was going to beOK.

Outside, the sun had finally made an appearance, judging by the strip of light that leaked from underneath the curtains. I marked the passing hours by the movement of that little patch of sun along thestained blue carpet, before dusk swept it all away and I was left alone in the dark.

At some point, it dawned on me that my father had given me all his money, and therefore had no way of paying for a taxi back to our motel. He would have to find someone to give him a ride, or hitchhike, or scrounge up some change and figure out the local bus system. Which perhaps explained why it was already sunset and he hadn’t yet arrived.

This was reassuring, but not reassuring enough.

The clock radio on the desk marked six, then seven, then eight o’clock—long past the time when my father had ordered me to abandon ship and head back to Montana. I began to realize that I’d been worrying about the wrong thing entirely: The issue wasn’t how he was going to get back to the motel, the issue was whether he was going to make it at all. Whether something awful had happened to him.

They’ll be looking for me, he’d warned, before running off withoutme.

Why would they be looking for him, and notme?

As I sat parsing through our last conversation, it began to occur to me that perhaps my father wasn’t running because of something I’d done. It was possible he’d done something himself. But what? He’d gone to talk to a friend; that’s it. And yet there had been that scratch on his face, which suggested an altercation. I imagined an argument and a scuffle with his old friend. It was possible that my father had stolen something, too: The shopping bag, when I’d opened it, held a heavy beige metal box, labeled IBM Power Series 850 . I was pretty sure it was a computer hard drive.

And who, exactly, was the they he had been referring to? They had always been his catchall word, encompassing the vast web of government bureaucrats and police state agents and elected officials and corporate overlords; but most of the time, when he used it, what he meant was the feds. Was it possible that the feds had finally caught up with him, here? But no matter how much I puzzled over it, I couldn’t figure out why the authorities would have chased him all the way to Seattle. Was he right about them coming after him for his manifesto? But only twelve people had even read it. I was pretty sure the police wouldn’t come after him for thought crimes of such an insignificant scale.

My imagination hadn’t yet expanded to match the size of my father’s ambitions.

By the time the clock display flipped over to nine, my fear of getting in trouble with my father won out over my fear of accidentally abandoning him in Seattle with the feds on his heels. I packed up our belongings, threw in the paper-wrapped soaps just because, and crept out to the truck.

I paused at the entrance to the highway. It would be so easy to point the truck south toward California, toward Silicon Valley and a wild shot in the dark. Instead, I settled on the path of least resistance. I headed back east, the way we’d come, alone.

—

The drive back to Montana took almost twice as long as the trip to Seattle. I crept along in the slow lane, terrified by the cars zooming past me, trying to render myself invisible to the highway patrol who would surely arrest me for driving an unregistered truck without a license. At one in the morning, somewhere near Spokane, exhaustion and hunger caught up to me. I pulled over at a gas station, bought myself a desiccated hot dog off the spinning racks of doom, and then slept the rest of the night in the truck, my stomach gurgling unhappily.

I hoped that, with morning, everything would feel less ominous. No dice. I woke, stiff and bleary and sick with the knowledge that I’d shot a man, and the only person who could help me make sense of the situation was the father I’d left behind in Seattle. A father who may, himself, have done something bad. As I finally turned onto the familiar roads near Bozeman the following afternoon, my hands aching from my vise-grip on the steering wheel, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was very, very wrong.

And so I disobeyed my father. Instead of heading straight back to the cabin to wait for him, I drove to Gallatin High and parked out front.

At exactly three o’clock, teenagers began pouring out of every orifice of the building, a torrent of pimples and hairspray. I could practically smell the hormones from where I sat, slumped behind the wheel of my father’s truck. Throngs of girls, arms tangled together, swarmed past the truck, casting a curious eye at me before immediately deciding I wasn’t worth their attention. A boy wearing a sideways WWF baseball hat jumped on my fender and then jumped off again while his friends jeered.

They looked like foreign creatures, these teenagers; so vivid and real and yet also pale copies of the pretty technicolor teenagers I’d seen on television. I’d never before been in such close proximity to my own peer group, and from this perspective it was more obvious than ever that I was a different species altogether. Kids like these didn’t worry about the feds showing up at their door; they didn’t have to wring a chicken’s neck if they wanted meat for dinner; they weren’t made to read Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature at age nine. They certainly didn’t shoot strange men with their father’s unregistered handgun.

When Heidi finally materialized in the doorway of the high school, my despondency lifted. She was limping her way down the steps, in conversation with a girl in full orthodontic headgear and a sweatshirt that read MATH: The Only Subject That Counts, and when her eyes finally rose to the street she immediately clocked my father’s truck. Heidi stopped, said something to her friend, and then headed straight toward me. I was relieved to see that she was smiling; though it was a crooked sort of a smile, her brows furrowing even as her lips tuggedup.

I rolled down the window and she leaned on the frame, taking the pressure off her bad leg. She looked different from when I’d last seen her in November; less puppy, more hound, her nails painted red instead of pink and her eyes rimmed in dark liner. “I don’t believe it. Your dad finally let you borrow his truck?”

“Sort of,” I said. “I was wondering—could we go to your house? And watch TV?”

“My house?” She gazed over the top of the truck, reading an invisible clock in the sky. “I mean, sure. I’d love that. But I only have a few minutes because debate team practice is at four. You sure you don’t want to do it tomorrow when I’ll have more time?”

“No. It has to be today.”

Something about my voice made her smile fade. “Is everything OK?”

“I don’t know, Heidi,” I said, and started to cry.

—

Her house was exactly as I’d always imagined it, a sweet mint-green bungalow on a quiet block near the south edge of town. It was a study in Librarian Chic: crocheted heirloom blankets that smelled like lavender, a tea cozy shaped like a chicken, and two fluffy cats who had shed enough hair on the furniture to knit a sweater. Books were stacked in piles everywhere, though not the kind of books I was used to: Heidi and Lina preferred self-help and celebrity memoirs and rom-coms with candy-pink covers.

I sat with a cat in my lap, while Heidi brought me a damp washcloth for my eyes.

“Maybe you could call the Bozeman police?” she said. “They’d probably be able to help you find him.”

“That’s a terrible idea. You know how my dad hates the police. What if he got into trouble with them and it was my fault?”

“But for what? I don’t get it. You went with him to meet a friend and then he just ran away? What do you think could have happened?”

I shrugged. I had soft-pedaled my problems to her—leaving out the data points that might frighten her, like the fact that I’d shot a man—and focused instead on the marginally less-alarming truth of my father disappearing three states away. But secretly, my mind was going to darker and darker places the longer I had to think about what had happened in Seattle; places I sure as hell wasn’t about to go with Heidi.

“Maybe we should ask my mom to help. She might have ideas.”

I suspected my father wouldn’t like this much, either. Heidi turned on the television with the remote and began scrolling through channels. “So, what are we looking for?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “The news, I guess.”

She rolled her eyes at me. “They don’t put grown-ups on the news just for going missing, Jane, especially if you haven’t even filed a report.”

Still, she humored me by flipping rapidly through cable channels. (Cable! I’d never seen such a treasure trove of trash.) We cruised past episodes of Bewitched and Judge Judy and Blue’s Clues; stopped long enough on MTV to watch five women in nipple-y tops writhe to a song about being best friends for-ev-ah !; and finally landed on The Oprah Winfrey Show . I would have been more excited, if it weren’t for the fact that I was looking for a news segment informing me I’d killed a man.

“I don’t think the news is on right now,” Heidi offered. “I have to leave for practice, but you could stay for a while and see if it comes on.”

“No, I should go home. I should have been home hours ago. He’s probably been trying to call me.” I seized on this idea, perking up a bit. “Probably, he’s worried about me. Because I haven’t made it home yet. God, I didn’t even think of that.”

“See? You don’t need to freak out. It’s going to be fine. But it was nice that you got to come over, for once.” Heidi stood as I gathered my keys to the truck. We were hugging goodbye, my face buried in the sticky nest of her hair, when I heard a stentorian voice cut through Oprah’s theme music.

“On news at five, our update from Seattle on the explosion on the Microsoft campus. Police have released surveillance footage of two people who are wanted for questioning in the murder of chief scientific officer Peter Carroll by a homemade bomb…”

Over Heidi’s shoulder, I caught a glimpse of a familiar brick building, caution tape framing a partially collapsed wall, the blackened hole regurgitating mangled office furniture. And then the image cut to two grainy black-and-white video stills, side by side on the screen. A man in a dark suit and mirrored sunglasses, head down, walking through a lobby; and a blonde in a skimpy dress and parka, blurry, on the other side of a plate glass window. The angles were high; the images pixelated and out of focus; it’s hard to imagine now that anyone would have recognized my father and me in our unlikely disguises. But to me, the photos were crystal clear.

And of course, I’d just told Heidi enough about my predicament that she might be able to figure out what she was seeing, too.

My self-preservation instinct kicked in. I grabbed the remote control and turned off the television just before Heidi snapped her head around to look at the screen. When she turned back to look at me, her face had corkscrewed into a puzzled twist of confusion.

We were silent for an uncomfortable moment.

“You know you can trust me, right?” Heidi said slowly. “Like, I’m really good at secrets. I swear. No judgment.”

“I know,” I said. The static buzz in my ears was making it hard to stand upright; I worried that I might pass out right there in her living room. I was still trying to fully absorb what I’d just seen, but I knew one thing for sure: no way was I going to involve Heidi in whatever we had done. “I’m sorry, but I really have to go.”

I stumbled blindly out the door and climbed into the truck. Heidi came out to the porch to watch me leave. I lifted a hand and waved at her as I started the engine, hoping that I came off as cheery and unconcerned, even though my insides felt like overheated Jell-O.

I waited for Heidi to wave back, but she just stood there, motionless as a statue, as I drove away.