How to Disappear (13 page)

I have no plan to answer. For once in my life, I have no plan—not even the old plan to hold off figuring out what to do until I found her. Because I have found her, and the brainstorm that was supposed to strike when she was within grabbing range is nowhere on the weather map.

What happens next?

Don’s phone calls come in all night, pulling me half out of sleep like a recurring nightmare that won’t loosen its grip. It used to be, I was jolted out of sleep by flashes of my father’s body, making out his shape in the dark garage, realizing why he was crumpled in that shape over and over until my mother forced me into therapy to “figure it all out.” No way in hell was I going to let anyone else figure it out. I knew what I did; that was enough.

At four a.m., I wake up with an image of Nicolette lying crumpled up at my feet. I reach over and answer the phone.

Don says, “Don’t you
ever
hang up on me.”

“Or what?”

Provoking Don is a dangerous hobby, but it’s late; I cut myself some slack.

“You don’t want to find out. Did you get her back? This is taking too long.”

Lying to Don comes so naturally, it doesn’t feel like lying. “There are three hundred twenty million people in the US. How long is it supposed to take to find one of them who doesn’t want to be found?”

“How long does it take to walk from the laundry room to Mom’s bedroom?”

I’m awake, fighting off the kind of unwanted emotion that makes you put your fist through walls if you don’t lock your arms against your sides. It would be easier if what could happen in the four seconds it takes to get from the laundry room to that bedroom didn’t come to me so easily—if a parent with his throat cut wasn’t already in my mental photo album.

“Don’t push it. Mom and I could disappear and leave you behind for Yeager to carve up like
that
.”

This shuts him up even though we both know she’d never do it. She’d never leave Don. We both know I’ve been so indoctrinated to take care of him that I took the envelope, and at some point I’m going to have to do
something
.

Don says, “Don’t crap your pants, but you don’t have much longer.”

“Because you’re God, and you’ll end the world if I don’t bow down faster?”

“Because Yeager is God, and you don’t want to piss him off.” This has the ring of absolute truth.

“Shit. How much time do I have?”

I’m not the only one who knows how to use silence for intimidation.

“How much time, Don?”

He pauses for so long, I’m afraid my cell will cut out before he gets to the point. “Yeager’s getting impatient. That’s all I know.”

The chance I’m falling back to sleep approaches zip.

So great, I told him where I live.

Semi-safe solitary life as wily fugitive versus life of mad kissing.

Score one for kissing.

There’s no point in changing out of a bad-looking outfit to promote the kissing, though. All I have are bad-looking outfits.

Reminders of reality.

The reality in which the safety of bad, brown outfits trumps romance. The one in which loneliness trumps good decisions, and bad impulses trump everything.

I could be packed and gone before he got here.

Race out the door.

Slip down the street.

Duck down alleys and through parking lots.

There are clumps of trees and huge flowering bushes that could shelter a motionless person until it was pitch-black outside.

I could be on a bus out of town with bronzed skin and pink-rimmed glasses in an hour. Less if I pushed it. Or if I hitched.

And then he’d look for me.

Great.

How romantic and deadly would that be? If he made noise about the missing girl with the bad wardrobe.

The noise he’s making is banging the knocker on my door.

I just about flatline. Press myself against the wall between the bed and the dinky refrigerator. Know this is bad. Do it anyway.

Unchain the chains. Unbolt the bolt. Pull the key out of the deadbolt.

“Are we expecting a crime wave?” He looks so much larger in my doorway than in his. “Hey, I brought you doughnut holes.”

He steps in over the threshold. Holding out a paper bag as if he gave it a great deal of thought and determined that the perfect gift for me is junk food that gives the sack it comes in grease spots.

What kind of normal girl is happy when a guy brings her this stuff?

“Really?” His face. I go, “No, J! I love this stuff.” Happy
face. “This isn’t a comment on the size of my butt, right?”

“If I’m remembering correctly, I’ve never seen your butt.”

Perfect. I’ve introduced body parts into the conversation.

Cat’s so forward!

It wasn’t this awkward at his place. Then again, the bed was in another room at his place, and we weren’t sitting on the edge of it.

He picks up a doughnut hole and gazes at it. “Are these gross? Should I try again? I could run to Food 4 Less and get something else.”

“Doughnut hole. Now.”

He spreads a dishtowel on the bed and pours out the doughnut holes. Powdered sugar billows up around the mound of them. Three minutes later, when we’re both in the throes of a sugar rush, he leans across the dwindling doughnut hole mountain and aims for my sugarcoated mouth.

My hands are in his hair. I’m holding his face in my hands, prolonging this kiss. I am so suddenly aware of the several layers of cloth between my breasts and his chest. When he’s kissing me, when he’s going after every molecule of sweetness on my lips, there’s a total eclipse of reason. I want more than I can have.

Then he starts to lift my T-shirt over my head from the bottom like he means it.

“Don’t.” This might be the most conflicted syllable ever spoken by a girl on a bed.

Score one for impulse control.

I say, “No, because if we do, you know . . .”

All I want is for him to keep kissing me and stop undressing me.

“I know you better than you think.”

Which is unnerving. But it’s just master-of-the-universe boy crap. It’s not like I’ve never met a boy before.

Steve, explaining why I was supposed to keep my legs crossed, basically said I had something they wanted. If I didn’t give it to them, they’d follow me down the street like a pack of hungry dogs. Which proved more or less correct. (Leaving out the part where girls who hand out doggie treats have even bigger packs following them around. Which I guess he hoped I wouldn’t notice.)

I can’t make out with this guy while I think about Steve trying to get me to behave.

I say, “Leave my clothes on me.” It comes out sharper than intended.

J pulls back. Holds up his hands like I’m arresting him.

Then I think,
What kind of college girl keeps her shirt on?
Either way I go, this blows south very fast. I say, “Religious zealots. Remember? In the trailer. Homeschool. Fire and brimstone.”

“I wouldn’t want you to burn in hell.” He might not be taking me that seriously.

“Next time you want to get it on with someone, try not to make fun of her.”

He’s sitting so he isn’t even touching me. “I understand the word
no
. Not that I’ve heard it before, but I get it.”

“You’re so full of yourself! Did anybody ever tell you that?”

“So we can assume the zealots beat the sense of humor out of you?”

The only thing in reach is a handful of doughnut holes. Which I throw at him.

He pretends he doesn’t like this and returns to kissing. Maybe just to distract me. I feel it in places I don’t want to be feeling.

Not now.

Not when I’m hiding.

Not when I have to be on top of my game and not under some guy who doesn’t even know my real name.

Doughnut holes might have been the wrong thing to bring. She eats them, but then she wants to know if I go out with a lot of girls, the message clear that guys who go out with lots of girls know enough not to bring doughnuts. I tell her the truth, maybe because no matter how this goes, it’s not destined to be a lasting relationship where things you said at the beginning come back to bite you later.

I say, “There was one long thing, not much else.”

“When did it end? It
did
end, right?”

“Six weeks ago. Something like that.”

She screws up her face. “Was she an evil bitch?”

“No.”

She tosses a doughnut hole at my face, presumably aiming for my mouth.

“Don’t worry,” she says. “I’m not looking for touchy-feely. I’m just not helping you two-time anybody while we have a good time.”

“Do people say ‘two-time’ this century?”

“They
should
.”

I have my hands on her shoulders, and all I want to do is kiss her and anything else she’ll go along with. I slip my hands under her big shirt, fingers against her skin, which is so soft, softer than you’d expect, softer than Scarlett.

She says, “Uh. Not that good a time.”

This is when my phone vibrates again. Don has a seemingly endless supply of cell phone minutes and an unerring ability to call when I least want to hear from him. She’s pressed against me, so she feels the phone’s vibration.

“Speak of the devil,” she says. “Is this her? And if it is, you’d better
lie
because I’ll hand you your ass tied up in ribbons.”

“You’ll hand me my six-foot ass with your hundred-pound-girl hands?”

“Does your girlfriend like it when the six-foot ass tells sexist jokes?” She sighs. “Not that you can’t see
tons
of other girls. It’s not like we’re together or anything. Just not
one
cheated-on one.”

“No girlfriend.”

I take her hand, and this time she doesn’t pull away from me. The phone starts buzzing again, and I tighten my grip. There has to be some other way out of this damn yellow wood, a shortcut I can find before Yeager finds it for me.

Somewhere in this confusion, there’s a workable syllogism.

Cat is girl; I like Cat; therefore, I don’t dispose of Cat?

Then I think,
Hurray for me; I only get rid of girls I don’t like.
What a stand-up guy. I only get rid of girls I
don’t
like who cut the throats of people I
do
like. And I only do that when my pathologically dishonest brother says my mom dies if the girl doesn’t.

Girl-whose-pants-he’s-trying-to-get-into versus mom-he’d-prefer-not-to-see-burned, and the guy stands there lusting after the girl in a converted garage, waffling about whether he’s going to answer the phone and deal with his shit brother. What a sick story that makes.

She says, “Did I just do something?”

“You want to finish eating carbs and go for a run?”

“
Those
are my choices? Let you take my shirt off me or run around the block? Very romantic.”

“I saw you running in the park. You run.”

She grins. “I hope you’re not the competitive type because I’m going to run circles around you.” She stretches out her legs straight in front of her, points her toes, and bends until she’s folded on herself.

“A little overconfident, are we?” I say as she looks up to see if I noticed how limber she is. I noticed. “You want to go right now?”

“Later, okay?”

Of course running should happen later, when it’s dark and no one who’s looking for her can spot her. “If that’s not romantic enough, I can always recite poetry to you. We know how much you love that.
Two rooooooads diverged in a yellow wood . . .
”

“Kill me now,” she says.

I can’t help flinching.

She’s very close to me, still touching my hand, as if she wants me to touch her again—about time—but as I’m reaching for her, she flops back against the pillows. “You’re not obsessed with poetry, right?”

“ ‘The Road Not Taken’ is the story of my life, but you don’t have to like it.”

“Don’t get upset, but that poet guy was probably tromping through the woods to drop in on his mistress,” she says.

“Did Robert Frost rise from the grave to tell you that?”

“Poets! Take Shakespeare. And that poem is for his coy mistress.”

“Not Shakespeare, Andrew Marvell. I thought the coy mistress was his wife.”

“You don’t think he was cheating with some coy girl?” she demands. Obviously, she does. “It’s all about getting girls on their backs,” she says. “Geez,
Had we but world enough, and time
, but we don’t, so lie down? Give me a break.”

“You
memorize
poetry? Hand over the borderline illiterate card.” I hold out my hand and she slaps it, palm to palm, as if we were playing the game where you extend your hands to see who has faster reflexes, and she wins.

“I’m not
completely
ignorant,” she says.

Then she throws back her head, laughing, her mouth lining up with mine. How am I supposed to resist this? I pull her back onto my lap, and she melts into me like warm wax, perfect fit, soft lips, her hands in my hair—for thirty seconds.

Then she says, “I’ve gotta go to work. Right now. Go write yourself a sad poem.”

I’m sitting on the bed (alone) finishing off the doughnut holes with a chaser bag of Funyuns. I’m staring down at my thighs as if I could see them expand before my very eyes. I’m moaning into the burner.

This is because I made him go away before I was ready. I told him I had to work. Right then. That minute.

Total lie.

Then I got stuck waiting for a computer at the library so I could talk to Olivia. And when I finally got a computer, after this tiny girl finished playing a video game with Barbies and twinkly sea horses, no Olivia.

She checks her phone constantly. Where is she? Probably eating dinner with her folks. I can see her on her screened
porch, eating Mrs. Pastor’s famous (kind of bad) tuna noodle casserole.

I can see the look on Steve’s face when Mrs. Pastor offered to show Rosalba how to make it. Me, later, begging Rosalba to make it. Rosalba batting at me with a wooden spoon that had tomato sauce all over it because she was using it to make something that actually tasted good.