Invisible (17 page)

Early morning light shot through the screens, alive with dancing motes, claiming the small, close space. Patting around on the small table beside my makeshift bed, I located my cellphone, pushed myself up, and dialed.

A man’s voice answered. “Down to Earth.”

What was Ahmed doing back in Baltimore? “Hey.” Someone was up, moving around in the kitchen. I lowered my voice. “It’s Dana.”

“Oh, Dana. I heard about your sister. Terrible thing.”

“Thank you.” I pinched the bridge of my nose, lack of sleep making my head throb and eyes feel gritty. “So you’re all back in Baltimore?”

“No, no. Just me. Halim sent me to retrieve the New Orleans estimate.”

Our next shoot. Good. The heady aroma of coffee drifted into the room, tantalizing. “They’ve nailed down the date, then?”

“Ah, no. They’ve decided to go with another firm.”

I was stunned. Halim and I had worked for weeks putting together that plan. The owner himself had driven us to the airport and shaken both our hands. “He can’t do that!” I fought to keep my voice controlled. “He signed a contract. Tell me he didn’t ask for his deposit back.”

“Not yet, but you know he will.”

That money was long gone. We’d already spent it finalizing things for Chicago, paying for the airfare to New Orleans, the week at the hotel. Robbing Peter to pay Paul. It should have worked. It almost had. I stared at the ceiling, the wood darkened and streaked by time. “What about the crew? Have you paid them?”

A sigh. “How?”

“Use the money we got from the Chicago job. Make sure you draw your pay, too.” Halim and I would have to live on credit for the time being. Damn the money he’d just loaned his brother.

“Mr. White has not paid the balance. He says he’s waiting until the police inquiry is resolved.”

No. That was impossible. He didn’t have any legal right to do that. We’d completed the job and now he could go ahead and build his luxury high-rise. “Well, he can wait all he wants for that, but he can’t get out of paying us. We’ll take him to court.”

Of course we wouldn’t, but how else would we pry the money away from the man? I had no idea what the legalities were surrounding something like this. Could White claim the job hadn’t been completed to his satisfaction? Was he entitled to hold back payment for liability purposes?

“Halim is hoping it won’t come to that.”

“Hope doesn’t pay the bills. Tell Halim I’ll give White a call.” Clattering came from the kitchen. I lowered my voice again. “Have the police figured out who she was?”

“A homeless person. They think she was drunk and sleeping it off.”

“Why there, though? Wouldn’t it have been easier to find a park or a shelter? Why break into a guarded building?” Although we both knew just how well guarded the building had been.

“Maybe she’d been sneaking in every night, and unfortunately, this was one morning she didn’t wake up in time.”

We couldn’t just keep calling her “she.” “Do we know her name?”

“Jane Something. Washington, Hamilton. That is it. Jane Hamilton.”

Jane. I’d pushed the button that had killed a woman named
Jane
. “Not the name of a woman who would break into an abandoned building. What had she been doing there? Does she have a family?”

“The father identified her body.”

He’d been forced to look at what I couldn’t bring myself to see. Had he held any hope for his homeless daughter, or had he been happy just letting her be? He certainly couldn’t have foreseen the path she’d end up choosing. “That poor guy.” What path would Peyton choose? Had watching her mother suffer, losing her at such a young age, been the kind of thing that could derail her? Look how my mother’s death had derailed me. It was good I was staying longer. Maybe I’d been kidding myself thinking otherwise.

“That poor guy has been talking to reporters, Dana. CNN picked up the story. For the past few days, they’ve been showing a photograph of Jane, and the video of the building going down. When I came into the office this morning, I retrieved a number of phone messages, all of them threats. The last said he would report us to Homeland Security.”

I sucked in a breath. Homeland Security terrified us all. Anybody working with dynamite had to watch their step and make sure they followed every obscure guideline and rule to the nth degree. One anonymous phone call could tie us up in knots for weeks, if not months. “That’s ridiculous. Don’t even go there.”

“Forgive me, Dana, but we’re Saudi. We have to go there.”

And there it was. I could be worried about Homeland Security, but only as it affected my job. Ahmed and Halim were in a different situation entirely. I shivered again.

The wood veneer covering the walls of the small room looked orange in the light, the same whorls printed over and over across the cheap planks, no attempt to disguise them as anything but what they were: imposters.

“Ahmed, tell me something.”
Be careful what you wish for
, my mother used to say. “Did Halim bring me into the company because I’m American?”

A dove cooed outside my window. The back door slammed and a car engine started up. A distant train’s whistle. Ahmed’s silence spoke the loudest.

So Halim hadn’t seen anything special in me, nothing other than my eagerness to learn and my American citizenship. “The New Orleans contract’s in the safe,” I said. “You know the combination.”

“Dana—”

“Tell Halim I’ll be back in a few days.”

“Halim said you were coming back today.”

“Then I guess we’re all full of surprises.”

 [PEYTON]

I
T TAKES FIFTY YEARS FOR A SEA TURTLE TO DECIDE
to have babies. When the time comes, the female drags herself out of the water and onto the shore and digs her nest. She lays about one hundred eggs, which takes an hour. Then she’ll cover her nest with sand to conceal it before crawling back to the ocean. Every night for three weeks, she’ll continue to do this. Sometimes, she’ll dig a fake hole to throw off predators. When she’s finally done, she abandons her babies. She goes back into the ocean and never once looks back. She’ll spend the next two years swimming around, getting psyched up to do it all over again
.

Meanwhile, the turtle eggs are baking under the sun, at the mercy of hungry crabs and birds and snakes. Maybe a hundred survive. When they finally emerge, they’re teeny replicas of their moms and dads. They have the sense to know they’re not free and clear, not yet. They’ll wait until it’s dark before scurrying as quick as they can to the water. If they’re very lucky, they won’t end up being someone’s dinner on their way
.

When they finally reach the water, they dive right in. And
then they disappear. No one knows where they go. It’s years before they reappear as sturdy adolescents
.

Scientists call these the lost years
.

Peyton dropped the plastic bottles labeled with the Gerkey logo into the waiting carton. Pressing down the flaps, she pushed the box against the lip of the tape gun. The machine sucked the box from her grasp and spat it out on the other side. She carried the sealed carton over to the waiting dolly, placed it on top of the one she’d just completed, and returned to her spot by the conveyor belt. All around her, people worked doing the same thing. Drop. Push. Carry. Her shoulders ached and a paper cut throbbed across the web between thumb and finger, where the tape had caught hold of the latex glove and torn away a piece. The guy on the radio sang about hitting the highway his way. God, she hated country music.

On the other side of the spinning metal tray, Ronni hummed as she scooped up bottles. She loved working at Gerkey’s. She liked the discounts. Half-price hand lotion. Seriously?

“So what’s it like, having Dana around?” Ronni asked.

“Super.” A big fat lie. But even though Ronni was ten years older than Peyton, she was too dense to see through the sarcasm.

“She used to be my babysitter, you know. She wasn’t so bad. Sometimes she let me stay up and watch
Saturday Night Live
.”

It had been just Peyton and her dad in the kitchen that morning. Even so, she had felt Dana’s presence everywhere, stretching out and touching them as they had breakfast.

Ronni pressed the tape flat. “I totally forgot how much Dana looks like your mom.” She frowned, and Peyton could tell she’d just realized how lame
that
sounded.

Queen of the obvious, that was Ronni.

Ronni jerked her chin at the box Peyton had just taped shut. “Redo that one.”

“Why? UPS doesn’t care if the tape’s crooked.”

“It could get stuck in the automated machinery.”

“Whatever.” Peyton yanked off the tape. Ronni didn’t used to be such a jerk. It had something to do with the hormones she was taking to get pregnant. Peyton had heard all about temperature charts and fluctuating levels and in general, way more than she’d ever wanted to know about the baby-making process.

The highway song ended and a new one began. Peyton groaned. “Not this one again.”

“I love this song.” Ronni clicked her pen and jotted something down on her clipboard.

“It’s about
shoes
.”

“It’s about more than that,” Ronni said, seriously. “The shoes are just a symbol. Besides, you used to like country.”

Peyton had
never
liked country. “If you let me listen to my iPod, we’d both be happy.”

“It’s a safety rule and you know it. No earphones on the floor.”

“There should be a safety rule about being forced to listen to lame music.”

The whistle sounded. The assembly lines whined and the bottles trembled to a stop.

The floor was quieter now. She could hear the guys on the other line talking about their fishing trip last weekend. The country singer sang about an old sweater as they walked toward the time clock.

“What’s next?” Peyton asked. “Her bathrobe?”

“I told you,” Ronni replied. “They’re symbols. Like, shoes mean freedom. Sweaters mean comfort.”

Help me
. “I know what symbols are.”

The foreman nodded at them. “Hello, ladies.” His gaze lingered
on Peyton, full of sympathy. Peyton scowled and tugged off her gloves.

“Don’t forget to put on a new pair when you clock back in, Peyton.”

One time. She’d forgotten to put on a new pair of gloves one time, and after that, the guy lived to remind her. “It’s lotion,” she told him. “It’s
supposed
to go on skin. It’s not like we’re making paint thinner.”

He nodded at her, as if she hadn’t said a thing, his gaze moving to the next person in line. Why did she even bother?

Ronni pulled out her ID card hanging on a lanyard around her neck and passed it beneath the scanner. “Coming?”

“Maybe I’ll catch up with you later.” The last thing Peyton wanted to do was sit around the break table with Ronni and her friends. One of them was pregnant, one was breast-feeding, which always made Peyton nervous about looking at her, and two had toddlers. All they did was talk about teething and diaper ointment and the sale at the mall on baby clothes.

Ronni shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

Peyton pushed through the exit and let the door latch behind her. She’d need her ID to get back in, which was another dumb thing about the place. What was in the place worth stealing? Like someone from Banana Boat was going to pay Peyton a million dollars to tell them exactly what was in Gerkey’s Baby Soft Lavender Hand Cream. Like there was anything in the whole freaking factory that was the least bit interesting at all.

Not that she’d ever tell Mr. G that. He took that stuff very seriously.

She’d discovered the large flat boulder her first day at Gerkey’s. She still couldn’t understand why no one else had found it and claimed it for themselves. It sat facing the lake, its basin gently
scooped, and protected all around by pines. She wriggled into place, the cold stone stinging through the denim of her jeans. Later, the afternoon sun would glide across the rock and warm it. By summer, she’d be sweating.

She pulled out her cigarettes from her bag. Tapped one out, lit it, inhaled deeply. She tilted her head back and exhaled a stream of smoke.

By July, the lake would be warm enough to swim in. Though some people could tolerate the freezing temperatures earlier in the season. Eric, for example. Her mother, for another. She’d go running in, lifting her knees high and squealing, and then suddenly dive below the surface. She’d emerge, gasping, calling to Peyton to join her. But Peyton would refuse. She hadn’t realized there would be a finite limit. She examined the cut on her hand. Just a little scrape, but it hurt every time she opened her hand.

She had to clean her aquarium when she got home. Maybe she’d pick up that plastic Keep Away sign she’d seen at the dollar store. But maybe not. It probably had lead in it or something. Her mom had gotten into that kind of thing, toward the end. Peyton knew all about how black mold could hide behind walls and how weed killer could seep into groundwater.

“Hi.”

She squeaked and jumped. It was just LT Stahlberg standing beside a big tree and shuffling his feet. God. For some reason, he’d stuck aluminum foil under his hood. It poked out all about his round shiny face. No wonder his cheeks were so red.