Perfect Escape (20 page)

“Oh, yeah, that’d be comfy. Aren’t you worried my
E. coli
will surface in the middle of the night, and when I shit my pants the germs will explode all over your side of the seat?”

“Don’t say ‘shit’ with a baby in the car,” he mimicked.

“He’s heard worse,” Rena reminded us.

I sighed. “Okay, I’ll tell you what. I’ll pull off at whatever the next town is. We’ll hopefully find some pizza, and then we’ll decide where to sleep.”

Grayson nodded wearily. I had a feeling he was too exhausted to argue. He had slept crouching in a chair the night before, after all. And had followed that by spending all day being pummeled by his fears. That had to be tiring.

We found a pizza place—Mama Mio’s—right down the street from a ratty-looking motel. Mama Mio’s looked as if it had enjoyed its heyday in 1986 and didn’t want to jinx success by changing with the times. There were high school football jerseys hanging from the walls, the accompanying team photos showing boys with feathered hair and cheerleaders with giant ’dos and jean jackets. A dusty old
pinball machine squatted in one corner, alongside a jukebox filled with songs by a-ha! and Murray Head and Scandal.

We ordered two large pizzas to go and took turns in the unisex bathroom while we waited for them. Even Grayson used the restroom; either he was too worn down to argue or, I hoped, he’d realized that using a public restroom wasn’t the end of the world.

We took the pizzas back to the motel, where, fortunately, the grungy-looking clerk didn’t care if any of us was over eighteen. I used cash to pay for the room, realizing that the wad of bills in my pocket was getting smaller and smaller, but afraid that Mom and Dad would be online, tracking the credit card, and would know that we were somewhere in the middle of Wyoming. The last thing I needed was a door-pounding wake-up call by the county sheriff in the morning.

The room wasn’t anywhere near as clean as Rena’s motel had been. The bedspreads had rips in them, and there were ashes on the nightstand. There was a hole in the wall where the shower head should have been, and the toilet looked like it hadn’t been scrubbed since Mama Mio’s was busting out MC Hammer on the jukebox to a full big-haired ’80s crowd.

Rena and Grayson complained aloud about the room, pointing out to each other the layer of dust on the TV and the obviously used bar of soap, complete with a few of the previous occupant’s hairs, on the side of the bathroom sink,
but I was too hungry and too exhausted to care. Truth was, I probably would’ve slept in the car if Grayson had pushed for it. But I was glad to have somewhere to stretch out. I knew we had a long day of driving ahead of us in the morning, and my back was already sore from sitting behind the wheel for so long. And I was tired and grumpy. But I had Jack the Road Trip Mascot strapped to the front of Hunka, and a scrape on my elbow from falling off a jackalope, so all in all I was pretty content.

I dropped the pizza boxes on the bed and went directly to the bathroom to run cold water over my face.

Rena and I weren’t able to get Grayson anywhere near the beds, but with the help of about fifty antibacterial wipes, we finally persuaded him to sit in the vinyl chair by the window and eat a few pieces of pizza.

I flipped through the snowy channels until I found a grainy cartoon station, and we watched that while we ate.

“Your baby doesn’t ever cry,” Grayson said after a while. “He sleeps too much.”

Rena’s forehead creased as she bent to look into Bo’s carrier. “Not normally,” she said. “I should probably wake him up, huh? He’s probably just worn out from all the commotion today.” She pulled the blanket off Bo and shook the carrier, making soft clicking noises with her tongue. After a few seconds, I could see Bo’s little hands and legs start to move around, followed by a squawk.

All at once I was stuffed and so exhausted all I could think about was stretching out and going to sleep. I got up
and moved the pizza boxes to the table and crawled up the mattress, landing facedown on a pillow, the floaty and buzzy feeling of sleep pressing in on me. I could hear Grayson’s and Rena’s voices as I drifted off, but they sounded far away and tinny, as if I were standing at the end of a long tunnel, listening in.

“He’s probably hungry…”

“… hope so. You don’t mind…”

“
Uh-uh-uh
… it’s okay… I’ll just go…”

“You don’t have to move…”

“He’s really cute… worry about germs…”

“… not really… why do you…?”

“I guess I was just made that way.
Uh-uh-uh
…”

“… we all have our issues, I think…”

My arms and legs felt so heavy I couldn’t have flipped over had the place been on fire.

And then I was out, feeling warm and happy and like this was any other night, not like I was about to see my best friend tomorrow for the first time in three years and beg her to help me.

If they kept talking, I didn’t hear them. I was busy dreaming of unicorns and leprechauns and giant hopping jackalopes, my brother and I happily riding on the back of one.

I woke up with my stomach growling again.

I looked around the room, which looked no better under the sunlight streaming in between the curtains. Grayson was curled up in the vinyl chair Rena had disinfected for him last night. Rena was sprawled out across the other bed, her head at the wrong end, her arm stretched protectively over Bo’s middle. Bo was asleep with his mouth open, his little arms stretched over his head in a victory pose. He was wearing the new pajamas I’d bought him. They were huge on him.

Grayson was right. That baby was too quiet. If he woke up crying in the night, I never heard him. But Rena didn’t seem worried about it.

The TV was still on, but the sound was muted. The remote was on Rena’s side of the night table. They’d found a news station, the kind with headlines constantly scrolling across the bottom of the screen. I had a pang of homesickness,
thinking of the number of times my mom had said,
Those stations make me crazy! I can’t decide if I should be listening to the person talking or reading the words at the bottom, and I end up trying to do both. It’s exhausting!

I sat up and rubbed my eyes, squinting at the words at the bottom of the screen, looking intently for any stories about two missing Missouri kids. After a few minutes, I decided maybe we were safe. Maybe calling Mom and Dad had calmed them down. Maybe they figured we were old enough to handle being out alone.

And if that’s what I thought, maybe I was still dreaming.

Mom might be okay with me being out on my own, but not Grayson. Grayson was her “sick child”; and as much as I loved Mom, she was way too overprotective of him. She lived her whole adult life waiting for Something Horrible. She must have spent countless days fearing… When would his illness take him away from her forever?… When would he kill himself?… When would he simply walk away, down the highway in that awkward way of his, and never come back again?… When would he be buried under an avalanche of the rocks that he loved more than anything he’d ever loved in his whole life?

For Mom, everything non-OCD-related Grayson did was an accomplishment. Things the rest of us do every day without thinking twice. Did he get dressed in less than two hours? Walk outside and pick up the mail? Make lunch? Any sign that Grayson might be getting a handle on his illness was a reason to celebrate.

Everything else… was tragedy waiting to happen.

If only she could’ve seen him yesterday. She would have been so happy.

I knew then that no matter how many times I called Mom and Dad, they would not stop worrying. I knew that even though Dad said he was on my side and we could talk it out, when I got home, I would be punished. They would fawn over Grayson as if he were a puppy saved at the last moment from execution. They would tell me I’d let them down. They’d have betrayed quavers in their voices, and I knew that no matter what I did, there would never be a moment in my life when I would make up for this. The time I ran away. The time I thought of myself first. The time I made everyone suffer with worry. Poor, poor Grayson. As if he didn’t have enough cards stacked against him, his sister had to go and do this to him.

I reached over and grabbed the remote, pressing the channel button until it was back on the cartoon channel. I left it muted and stared at the fuzzy screen, imagining myself as the characters, being pummeled by giant rocks and having my hands slammed in doors and my tongue run through blenders. Would any of that ever be enough?

Probably not.

After a while, the rumbling in my stomach got to be too much, and I slipped out of bed and walked over to the table where the pizza boxes still sat. The top one was empty, but there was still half a pizza left in the bottom box. I pulled out a slice and scooted behind the curtain to eat it.

The sunlight made me blink and squint, but at least it felt warmer, as if spring had actually decided to really get here after all. In the light of day, the parking lot of the motel revealed a straggly-looking clientele—beat-up cars and potbellied men in ripped undershirts coughing and spitting while their dogs peed on tires and rooted around beneath the overflowing Dumpster. I gazed up and down the road as far as I could. Everything had a faded look to it, as if this was a town that had given up.

I heard movement behind me and turned to see Grayson blinking up at me.

“Close those,” he grouched, his voice scratchy. “You’ll wake up the baby.”

As if Bo had heard him say this, he started fussing. I let the curtain drop to a close and now was blinking in the dark room, trying to make out the shifting figures of Rena and Bo on her bed.

“What time is it?” she asked groggily.

“I don’t know,” I said. “We should get on the road, though. Sorry I woke Bo.”

“It’s okay,” she said. “I’m surprised he slept the whole night. He hasn’t ever done that before.” She got up and padded around the bed to the diaper bag she’d set on the dresser top. She rummaged around inside and came out with a diaper.

By then, Bo was screaming like crazy. Someone pounded on the wall next to us, and Rena made shushing noises while she wriggled him out of his pajamas and changed his diaper.

Grayson had gotten up and gone into the bathroom. I could hear the water running in there.

Rena finished changing Bo’s diaper and pulled him onto her lap, scooting backward to the head of the bed and cozying down under the covers on her side. Bo’s cries got more frantic and then were suddenly replaced by slurping noises and Rena’s soft singing.

I bent to put on my shoes as the bathroom door opened and Grayson emerged, towel and soap in hand, his hair slicked back on his head. He wasn’t wearing his glasses, and he walked with a confidence I hadn’t seen in him for… ever.

“Come on,” I said, trying not to look too surprised. (Mom would have made a huge deal about this step—probably held a party in his honor—and I so didn’t want to act like Mom.) “We can go get gas while she feeds the baby. That way when she’s done, we’ll be ready to hit the road.” I grabbed my purse and dug the keys out of it. Grayson didn’t move from where he was standing. “Come on,” I said.

He went back to his chair and sat down, rolling the soap into his towel on his lap. “Why don’t you go and I’ll stay?” he said. “I’m sick of the car. And I want to eat a little.” He reached over and fumbled with the pizza boxes.

“Okay,” I said, and opened the door to leave.

Grayson chewed, looking straight at the TV, but Rena didn’t move at all. I thought I heard a soft snore coming from her bed.

As I pumped gas into Hunka, feeling the early spring
breeze coax goose bumps up on my arm, I remembered the last time I spent the night with Zoe. Her parents had long since stopped letting her spend the night at our house. We always had to stay over at hers, even though she and I would wait until her parents were asleep and would sneak out to meet Grayson in the backyard.

“He’s not that weird, you know,” Zoe had said, closing her door softly for the third time. She’d been checking every fifteen minutes to see if the light in the den was off yet, signaling that her parents had gone to bed. They were still up. “When it’s just him and me, he’s almost totally normal.”

“I know,” I said, even though I knew Grayson and totally normal were a far cry from each other. But Zoe was my best friend and I wanted to support her. And Grayson was my brother, and even though he was a pain sometimes, I still wanted to defend him from people like Mr. and Mrs. Monett—people who think that just because someone isn’t like them, there must be something wrong with him. “And he loves you.”

“Exactly!” Zoe had said, pointing at me over the magazine she was pretending to be interested in. “You’d think they’d want me to be with a boy who loves me. Especially one who’s known me my whole life.” She slapped the magazine shut and sighed. “I wish they’d see that he can’t help it that he counts sometimes, but it doesn’t make him a bad person.”

He can’t help it.

I knew this. He couldn’t help it. So why was I, all these years later, standing at a gas station in Wyoming expecting him to change? Would Zoe be disappointed in me when she found out what I’d been doing to him over the past two days?

I finished filling the tank and stood leaning against the car for a few minutes, my eyes closed, my face turned toward the sun. The wind felt so good.

I pulled out my cell phone and turned it on. There was a text. Eagerly, I opened it, hoping it was Zoe finally responding to one of mine.

It was from Mom.

We know about the money. We are confused. Come home. We need to talk.

They knew. To my surprise, my knees didn’t buckle and I didn’t start to hyperventilate. I didn’t pass out, and the ground didn’t open up and swallow me whole. I didn’t even feel like crying.

They knew. And I wasn’t going to die from it.

But if I admitted that, even to myself, then I would have to admit that running away had been a complete overreaction. And I wasn’t prepared to admit that. I was too far in.

My call to Dad had probably tipped them off about the money. I guess on some level I knew that all along. Maybe on some level I wanted them to put the pieces together, to
find out what a horrible person I was when I was still hundreds of miles away.