Sorrow Road (31 page)

The first thing Carla did when her feet hit the frozen ground was to look up. Just for a second, because there were people behind her, shuffling and wrangling their belongings, also eager to get off the bus.

The sky was clear. The sun was the color of a saltine cracker. Snow had been pushed back into a low dirty-white hedge that ran alongside the sidewalk. It was very cold, and very windy. Carla moved on, clearing the way for the other passengers.

She felt … well, how did she feel? She wasn't sure. That was a new thing. Before, she had always known how she felt. Exactly. She could describe her feelings precisely. She could even select the right words for other people's feelings. Her friends would come to her with a hot whirling mess of half-formed thoughts and vague impressions and blunt yearnings, and Carla would sort it all out for them, separating the various emotions, reverse-engineering their moods.

Not anymore. Now she was just as blind and bumbling as everybody else when it came to feelings. She had intended to figure it all out on the long bus ride, but instead she mostly slept. It was not a restful sleep; she jerked awake each time the bus rocked sideways or the driver braked hard, wondering where the hell she was. Then she'd doze off again, head jammed sideways against the seat back, backpack secured on her lap with both hands.

Her dad had offered to drive her to Acker's Gap.
No thanks,
she had said. He'd offered to buy her a plane ticket to Charleston and then hire a limo to get her the rest of the way. She turned him down again. She wanted time to think. She'd only been on a Greyhound bus one other time in her life—she had visited her friend Sandy Lightfoot in Owensboro, Kentucky, the summer after seventh grade, because the Lightfoot family moved away once school was out for the year—and she remembered that a bus ride created an amazing space for thinking. It took a long time, but unlike flying it featured the same old crap out the window that you had seen a million times before, so you did not get distracted by awe. You could focus on what you needed to think about.

Kayleigh Crocker was going to pick her up. Carla hadn't told her mother that she was coming. She wanted it to be a surprise.

Back in Arlington, her dad had fixed things for her. She was not sure how she felt about that. Without him—and had she been, say, a homeless veteran with psychiatric issues or a black teenager with anger management problems, and had she done
exactly the same thing
—she knew the outcome would have been far different.

But Sam Elkins knew everybody in the world who mattered and, in addition to knowing them, he also was owed favors by them, because he had done things in the past on their behalf. So it all happened very quickly, in a blur of insider privilege: the store dropped the charges, the cop withdrew the resisting arrest complaint, and the judge told her to pay the fine and mind her manners henceforth. Those were not his exact words, Carla had explained to Kayleigh when she called her the night before and asked for a ride from Blythesburg to Acker's Gap. But close enough.

And now Carla understood about courts. She had thought she did already—everyone thinks they do—but standing in front of somebody in a black robe, waiting for your entire future to be decided, was a watershed experience. Carla had listened to her mom talk about it, and she'd learned about the court system in her civics class, but the actual
feel
of it—of watching the little mole on the left side of the judge's mouth sort of jump as she spoke, of smelling the aftershave on her attorney's pink shaven jaw, of hearing the brief creak of leather as the deputy standing in the back reclasped his hands and the gun belt shifted on his hip, of realizing that her life was completely up for grabs at this moment—was very different from hearing about it or reading about it. It was like seeing pictures of the circus—and then walking the tightrope. She was scared out of her mind, and she never wanted to be in this kind of place ever again, and she knew exactly where she needed to be.

As they were walking out of the courthouse her father had said, “So, where do you want to go now, young lady?”

Carla's reply: “I want to go home.”

And here she was.

“You got a car?”

A pesky old woman had climbed down out of the bus right behind her and then followed her onto the concrete pad. She had long, greasy hair with blond highlights that had grown out a long time ago, leaving the gray parts in charge. She was dressed in what looked like an accumulation of knotted-together dishrags, safety-pinned scarves, and ratty overlapping blankets. She smelled like a dirty bathroom.

“No,” Carla said. She hoped Kayleigh would be getting here soon.

“'Cause if you did,” the woman said, arching her scraggly eyebrows, “I was gonna ask you for a ride.”

“Well, I don't.”

The woman sniffed repeatedly. Either a bad cold or drug habit, Carla thought. Smart money was on the latter.

“Okay, well,” the woman said. “But if you did, that's what I was gonna do.”

The bus had loaded right back up again with the people who'd been waiting on the pad. Carla didn't want to inhale that noxious exhaust when the bus left, which it would do within minutes, so she headed for one of the benches.

The old woman followed her.

Leave me alone,
Carla thought, but did not say out loud, because some people only got more clingy after that, bolder, as a kind of perversity took hold of them. Doing the opposite of what you asked became a mission. Whereas if you ignored them, you had a fighting chance of seeing them give up and go away.

“I got bit by a cat,” the old woman said. She wriggled her bare right arm out of its nest of materials and stuck it out, underside turned up. An abscess had cracked the scabby white surface and now bloomed like a fierce yellow flower. “Bite got infected. That's why it looks so bad. Them infections get real dangerous. I was in the hospital in Charleston for a week and a half.”

Carla scooted to the far side of the bench.
Come on, Kayleigh. Come on
.

The old woman had only bothered her a few times on the ride itself. Once to ask Carla if there was a toilet on the bus. Once to ask if Carla had a tissue. And once more to apologize for the two times she had already interrupted her.

It was not a cat bite. That was obvious. It was a DIY drug portal that had been poked at too many times with a filthy syringe. Carla did not know why the woman had chosen her as the audience for her spontaneous confessions—her fibs, that is—but she had.

Lucky me,
Carla thought.

Her one-word, noncommittal answers finally began to wear down the woman, who picked obsessively at the skin around a fingernail and made a few more remarks about the overly aggressive cat. Carla said nothing. Finally the woman left. Carla settled in to enjoy these last few minutes of solitude.

She wanted to think about everything that was ahead of her. One of the most important things was her job, which she was even more excited about, now that she had been away from it for a few days. She couldn't wait to get back to the interviews. She had called Sally McArdle on Monday, and explained what was going on—although she left out some of the more embarrassing parts. You did not lie to Sally McArdle. And Sally McArdle had said, in a curt voice that Carla found far more satisfactory than she would have found a gushy, gooey, sympathetic one: “Okay, fine. Clean up your mess over there and then get back as quick as you can. We need to finish things up.”

And then there was Travis Womack.

That was another reason Carla was glad to be back. She had been thinking about him. A lot. It was not a boyfriend kind of thing—at least she didn't
think
it was, because, Jesus, he was
ancient,
he was older, probably, than her
father
—but it was something. She just didn't know what. Do you ever know, though? That's what she was thinking about now, as she sat on the cold bench. Does anybody ever figure out what attracts them to one person and not somebody else? She had discussed that with her mom once, when her mom first started dating Clay Meckling. People talked. Wow, did they ever! Clay was younger than her mom, more than ten years younger, and—this being Acker's Gap—people were on fire with gossip. At one point her mother said to her, “Look, sweetie, we never really know why we like someone, beyond some common interests.” Carla had rolled her eyes.
Common interests
was, like, the lamest phrase in the world. Then her mom said: “But in the end, you have to decide if it's worth it. Doesn't matter what anybody else thinks. It's up to you.
You
decide if the person you have chosen is worth all the fuss and the bother, worth changing your life for.”

“Is Clay worth it?” Carla had asked her.

“Yes,” Bell said, after a pause. “Yes, I think he is. But we'll see.”

Carla looked around. She was alone on the little square pad now. The other people who had been on the bus with her and disembarked here in Blythesburg had drifted away. Including the woman with the gross-looking arm and the lie that went along with it.

Lies.

That was the issue, right? Carla had been knocked back by the possibility that Travis Womack used illegal drugs. That he had only
pretended
to be clean that night to throw her off the trail. Maybe he even had an arrest record. She would be seeing him again when she went to Thornapple Terrace tomorrow. And she absolutely
had
to know: Did he have a record? If he had a record, she'd never be able to introduce him to her mom.

Or to consider pursuing—Carla could not even think the word without blushing—a
relationship
. God, no. Not possible.

She pulled her cell out of her backpack and sent another quick text to her friend Brad. Brad Turim. She had already texted him twice during the bus ride.

Brad was the absolute best tech guy on the planet. Carla had gotten to know him when she worked in Web design at a start-up last year. One day the bosses came in and fired the entire design staff.
Boom
. Just like that. Some venture capitalists they'd been counting on had turned out to be not so adventurous, after all, and withdrew their offer. But Carla had kept in touch with Brad—who did not get fired, of course, because the techies never got fired. Somebody had to keep the computers up and running. It couldn't
all
be about social media marketing and PR. Somebody had to know how to actually do something.

She had asked Brad to check out the name Travis Womack. Run it through some databases, the ones that were easy to access—and the not-so-easy ones, too. See what came up. If he had a record, Brad would find it. And then she would know what she was dealing with.

She texted:
Just checking back. Anything yet?

His instant reply:
Bosses everywhere. Getting 2 it soon

Carla heard the
toot-toot
of a car horn. She looked up. Kayleigh Crocker waved at her from behind the front windshield of her white Scion, mouthing the words, “Come on!” Carla jumped up, slinging her backpack strap over her shoulder. Despite all that she had gone through in the past several days—hell, the past several
months,
if you counted the panic attacks and the sleepless nights and the crying jags and the complicated wodge of emotions—she was aware of something stirring in her heart right now that surprised her, frankly, with its simplicity, something that felt an awful lot like happiness.

She was home.

Three Boys

April 9, 1942

Lying was a lot easier than Harm had thought it would be.

Lying itself was a snap—he lied routinely to his gullible teachers, and to his even more gullible parents, and he lied to his girlfriends and to his little sister, Rosemary—but lying to an official representative of the federal government? That, Harm had assumed, would be difficult.

It wasn't. It was the same. He stood in front of the man at the recruiting station in Charleston, who gave a quick, bored look at the form Harm had just filled out. “Okay,” the man said. He was wearing a uniform, but he did not seem much like a soldier to Harm; he had a belly on him, for one thing, and Harm was pretty sure that a real solider would not have a belly. “Okay, you're fine, kid,” the man added. He reached for the knobby black handle of a chunky rectangular stamp. He brought the stamp down upon the top sheet of paper.
Thunk
. He re-inked it on the moist red pad, and stamped the second page and then the third.
Thunk. Thunk
.

“Okay,” the man said again.

On that paper, Harmon Arthur Strayer had scribbled this in the blank for AGE: “16 yrs.” Alvie and Vic were sixteen, but Harm was only fifteen. He would not be sixteen for another three months.

Harm's heart was beating fast and loud, so loud that he was pretty sure other people could hear it. He had been told that lying to the government meant you could go to prison. What if that was true?