Run (5 page)

I open a box of dye and apply it with the thin plastic gloves that come in the box. I smell the chemicals as my hair eclipses from brown to blond. I rinse in the sink, the acrid odor wafting through the still air of the bathroom. I use the paper towels to wring out the water and then, in what I think is a brilliant move, I turn on the hand dryer and rotate my head against the warm spray of air. I am in Maui. I am in Tahiti. I’m on the beach and I have a tan. A handsome boy looks at me and I smile.

The dryer stops and I look in the mirror and I see her.
Mom
. I look just like my mother. It was unintended genius.

Hayden, awakened, seems to agree.

“I miss Mom. Do you think they found Dad?”

I indicate the second box of hair dye. “Your turn, Hayden.”

My brother knows what to do. He climbs up on the counter and lays his head in the sink as I wet his hair with lukewarm water. It reminds me of when he was a baby and Mom washed him in the sink instead of the tub. I hold onto that memory for a second. He scrunches his eyes shut as I rub in the dye. When I’m done, he will be transformed. He’ll no longer be the little boy with the shock of blond hair, the one that makes him look like he’s stepped out of the home page of a cute kids’ clothing website. While he was getting his disgusting green apple gum, I was shopping for a dramatic change, a way to erase what happened to us. To no longer be the kids we were. I didn’t really notice the name on the dye box until that very moment.

Dark and Dangerous.

I break into a smile for the first time in hours. It is a weak smile and kind of twisted, but it’s real. It makes me think of my mother—she would have laughed at my choice for Hayden’s dye job. And I would have laughed right along with her.

Chapter Four

Cash: $113.30.

Food: None.

Shelter: Ferry bathroom.

Weapons: Same crappy scissors.

Plan: Going to the bank.

THE NEXT MORNING WE SNEAK out of the bathroom. The front page of
The Seattle Times
stares out from the blue metal vending box and my heartbeat starts hammering like a nail gun. Fast. Despite a mostly sleepless night, I am now as awake as if I’d guzzled ten lattes in a row. The ferry smells of fresh coffee and donuts, but as hungry as I thought I was, I no longer want to eat. I cannot focus on anything—only the photographs of our house in Port Orchard and the image taken of me at the beginning of the school year.

I despised that photo back then.

I hate it even more now.

My eyes follow the headline.

PORT ORCHARD MURDER MYSTERY STUNS NEIGHBORHOOD

FATHER DEAD, MOTHER AND CHILDREN MISSING

Hayden studies the newspaper’s front page with the same intensity as I do. Glancing at him I see that his mouth is open and I’m pretty sure his expression is a genuine jaw-dropping gawk. I pull three quarters from my pocket, damp from a night in the bathroom, and slot them into the machine. The coins fall one by one. I remove all the copies of the day’s edition and, with a quick glance around me, I shove all but two in the recycling box. I hold out one for Hayden. One for me. I don’t want him hovering over me. I need to see what the reporter scraped together in the hours after our father was murdered.

We slide into a hard, molded plastic booth near the galley, across the boat from Princess Angeline’s portrait. Her beer-bottle glass eyes still penetrate mine when I look over at her, but I don’t care.

My heart is pounding and wetness blooms under my arms and wicks into the only shirt I have. But right now I feel more anxious than gross.

The victim was Rolland Cassidy, 42. Missing are his wife, Candace, their daughter, Rylee Ann, 15, and their son, Hayden Joseph, 7  … 

No one ever calls us Rylee Ann and Hayden Joseph, and since neither of us had those names a very long time, they don’t incite much recognition. My photo with my old hair does, however. The picture of the house does.

The last family member seen was the 15-year-old girl, who talked to a neighbor around 4 p.m.

“Things like this don’t happen here,” said the neighbor, who preferred not to be identified. “Things like this don’t happen to nice people like the Cassidy family either
.
”

I want to call Mr. Swanston, because I’m pretty sure he’s the unidentified neighbor, and tell him how this is exactly what happens to nice people like us. Did he think that evil only comes after the bad? That darkness only seeps into a corner?

Hayden looks up at me from the paper. He reads at a third-grade level, something that Mom said could only occur because of homeschooling. It was the only thing—besides the always-available refrigerator—that was good about homeschooling. His eyes are pooling with tears.

“Are we going to find Mom today?” he asks.

I put my arm around him. I cannot answer that question and if I did and I told the truth, he would shatter right there in that Formica booth. I can’t have that.

“Look, don’t cry. Don’t make a move. I’m getting you a hot chocolate.”

“I don’t want any.”

“I don’t care,” I say as I start to get up.

“Is everything all right?” A woman in a maroon sweater and expensive jeans says to me.

I look at her. “He’s fine. He wants a hot chocolate and I don’t think it’s a good idea. Sugar, makes him hyper.”

Her face is kind and she nods. “My boys lived on sugar and they turned out all right. One’s a doctor.”

I smile politely and shrug my shoulders. I don’t know why she had to add that her son’s a doctor. I imagine she probably worms that detail into any conversation she’s in. I get that she’s proud of her son, but honestly, why bring
that
up?

I turn to Hayden. “Stay right here. I’ll get you that hot chocolate.” I look over at the woman. “And a donut too.”

As I loop around the ferry with the speed of an Olympian, I notice a man looking at the
Times
front page. Me and that bad school photograph again. I drop three quarters in the vending box on the opposite side of the ferry and take out the rest of the papers. I dump them in another recycle box. Even though my hair is way shorter and blond now, I’m not taking any chances.

A few minutes later I return with the hot chocolate, a coffee and two maple bars. I don’t need the energy, but I do need something in my stomach.

“When the boat docks we’re going to the bank,” I tell Hayden. “After that, we’re going to find a place to stay.”

“What about Mom?”

My reassuring smile fades. “We need to establish a home base first. He won’t kill her. You know that.”

Hayden doesn’t really know it, not in the way that I do. But he nods anyway. I know that the man who has our mother wants to possess her. He won’t kill her. Killing her would take away all that motivates him. Keeping my mother, owning her, was what kept him breathing and hunting. It also kept us running. No one could help us.

IT HAD ALL STARTED SO innocently. I remember my mother telling me about it. It was before Hayden was born. I was about his age when I first started to understand that we were a little different from other families. It might have been earlier, but when you’re not of school age, you don’t mark time the same way. Seasons blend together and time seems to go on forever. No rituals divide the months. No back-to-school shopping. No carnivals. No winter breaks. I’m not even sure where we were living then, except I remember the smells of the country. Cow smells. A dairy farm was nearby. The land was flat, long, and green all the way to the edge of the horizon. Later, I learned we had been living in eastern Nebraska, not far from the Iowa border.

Mom was on the sofa talking to somebody on the phone. It wasn’t a cell phone, but a landline that ran from the wall in the kitchen all the way to the living room. Her voice carried a sharp edge that brought me from my bedroom upstairs. She was crying. Seeing Mom cry made me cry too. I watched from the hallway. Something told me to stay put. Just listen.

“  …  what am I supposed to do now?” she was asking.

I moved a little closer, but still out of view. It was nighttime and I was wearing a pale yellow flannel nightgown. On my feet were slippers made to look like pink bunny rabbits. I loved those slippers more than anything. I never saw them again after that night.

“  …  tell me just how that’s supposed to work?”

After a long silence, Mom hung up the phone. She stayed very still on the sofa and wrapped an old crocheted blanket around her shoulders.

I recall something else just then.
It was Christmas time
. Our tree was up next to the fireplace. Why hadn’t I remembered this before?

I take my mind back to that place. I stood there frozen, watching Mom. I had the impulse to run over and hug her, but I was too scared. Later, when I thought about the reasons for my reluctance to interfere, I figured that it had to do with the fact that my mother was a private person. To see her crying almost seemed like a violation of her privacy.

Then she saw me. I felt a jolt go through my body. I was caught. She recovered a little and motioned for me to come closer. I followed the trajectory of her finger to a spot next to her on the sofa.

“Honey,” she said, “I’m all right, but I do have something to tell you. It’s about tomorrow. We’re going to take a little trip tomorrow. It’ll be fun.”

Her eyes were red and nothing that came from her lips seemed like it could possibly be fun.

“Where?” I finally asked.

“That’s the fun part,” she said, trying to sound upbeat. “I don’t know.
We
don’t know.” Her eyes left mine and wandered around the room. I followed them until her gaze stood still.

On our coffee table was a travel magazine with the image of a log cabin in the woods.

“We’re going out West,” she said.

Her random choice scared me. It felt desperate. “Why?”

But my mother had pulled herself together now. She was in full-on survival mode, an affectation that I later knew to be a complete façade. “Because we have to get away from someone. Someone bad. Someone who wants to hurt me.”

I didn’t understand exactly what she meant. But the funny thing about it was that I didn’t even ask. I just accepted it. The next morning, I found her in front of the fireplace burning papers and photographs. I watched my own image get licked and then devoured by orange and blue flames.

Ten minutes later, we were gone and my name was no longer Shelly. We took nothing with us. Not even those pink bunny slippers. I always missed those slippers so much.

“Anna,” she said, trying out my new name as we drove toward the highway, “starting over will save us. Starting over is the only way we can survive.”

Chapter Five

Cash: $107.80.

Food: Coffee and a maple bar for me, hot chocolate and a maple bar for Hayden.

Shelter: None at the moment.

Weapons: Same scissors.

Plan: Stay calm.

BEFORE WE LEAVE FOR THE bank, we make one more stop. If I’m going to get into the safe deposit box, I’m going to have to look like
her
. Mom. Her backup ID is in Dad’s wallet. My hair is pretty much Mom-ready right now. But my clothes still look like a teenager’s. A hoodie and jeans might work, depending on the bank cashier’s mood. I can fake her latest signature no problem—she doesn’t know that I’ve done it a time or two to get out of speech class. It isn’t that I mind getting up in front of a group to give a speech on a subject, like how social networking is driving people further apart and not closer together. Or maybe a demonstration speech on how to make fortune cookies with subversive messages like:

Holy crap! You’re a loser.

You will never find love.

Your best moment was so five minutes ago.

I did that demo speech in January and got an A-minus. What I don’t like are the impromptu speeches—the ones in which the teacher tells you to share a story from your childhood, to talk about family traditions that you value most. Or anything genuinely personal. I’m a good liar, but not to people that I see every day. I can lie to strangers without even the tiniest flutter of remorse.

I drag Hayden to the Lost and Found office in the ferry terminal at Colman Dock. It isn’t open yet, so we sit and wait, mostly in silence. We watch people come and go. We also notice a homeless man with a garbage bag of cans. I hope we never end up like some sad soda-can forager.

Finally, a door opens and we pounce on a young man with a faint moustache and stubble on his chin behind the counter.

“Our mom left her jacket on the ferry the other day,” I say, as if my inquiry is more out of boredom than urgency.

“Yeah, that’s right,” Hayden says.

I shoot him a look. This is
my
deal. My little brother is just supposed to keep his trap snapped shut.