The Meridians (21 page)

Packing was a shattering experience. Not only did packing mean she had to go back to the apartment where she and Kevin had been attacked and very nearly lost their lives, but Kevin resisted the idea of moving. He saw her packing items into the heavy-duty boxes she purchased at Staples, and immediately would either start screaming, or worse, would settle into a silence so stony and severe that it was as though she was living alone until he once more deigned to speak (or type) to her again.

No matter how much he complained, however, she was resolute. They were going to leave the apartment, and leave it quickly.

The drive to Meridian was the next hurdle that she feared. And she feared it for two reasons. First, she had never attempted to take Kevin on a road trip of any significant length before, let alone a fourteen hour marathon ride between L.A. and Meridian. She had no way of knowing how he was going to react, or if she was even going to be able to get him to ride with her in the moving truck. Almost as important, she had no way of knowing how she was going to get herself unpacked once she got to Meridian. Several friends had helped her move the larger items into her moving truck, but they would hardly be able to accompany her on her daylong trek through several states just so they could be there to help her unpack her armoire.

Luckily, at least one of the fears turned out to be fairly baseless: Kevin barely seemed to notice the trip. She made sure his laptop was fully charged the night before, and even purchased an AC/DC converter that would allow her to plug the computer into the lighter outlet in the truck, so Kevin would be able to stay on the computer all day long if he wished. The next morning, the morning of the move, she bribed him into the cab of the moving truck by promising him a Sausage McMuffin for breakfast and a Happy Meal for lunch
and
dinner if he came without pouting.

Kevin immediately - though without looking at her - came into the cab of the truck, and even went so far as to put on his seat belt without any fuss. There were a few moments on the trip that could have gone badly: moments when he had to go to the bathroom, which could have signaled the start of some very messy situations. But luckily there were rest stops close by at each occasion, and she was able to pull over and find a place for him to go to the bathroom within only a few minutes of his first complaints.

Other than that, Kevin spent the entirety of the day either typing on the computer, or watching DVDs on the portable DVD player she had purchased a few days before. He was instantly enamored of several of the Disney movies she had bought for him, though she noted that he preferred the softer, more mellow humor of such classics as
The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh
to the more melodramatic later Disney movies like
Aladdin
or
The Little Mermaid
. He cringed away from the DVD player whenever the villain arrived on scene, and she would have to pull over and comfort him, so she kept replaying the adventures of Pooh Bear and his other stuffed animal friends, over and over until she thought the next time she heard of a Blustery Day or a Smackerel of Honey she might have to scream.

Still, even though the trip went well, it ended up being longer than expected, due to the bathroom breaks and also just due to the fact that Kevin needed to get out and walk from time to time, as though he could not stand to be confined in the moving truck for too long without losing some important connection he had to the outside world.

That was wishful thinking, she knew: autistic children
avoided
connections; they didn't seek them out. Still, whenever they halted at a rest stop, Kevin was not happy until he had walked around the area, taking deep breaths as though inhaling energy from his surroundings.

The length of the trip, however, exacerbated her second problem. How was she going to get the beds or anything else unpacked if she was going to arrive at Meridian sometime around midnight? What was she going to do for sleep? She didn't know - it was never possible to predict - how Kevin would react to news that they were going to sleep in the moving truck. He might take the news as stolidly as a Spartan warrior, or he might throw a tantrum worthy of a sugar-crazed two year old.

So when she pulled up to her new home - a two bedroom house on a quarter acre - she was looking at the prospect of finishing the trip with more than a little trepidation. The sense of foreboding worsened as she realized that the street they lived off of was called Black Cat Lane. She wondered if that was an omen. Not that she believed in such things, particularly, any more than she followed the zodiac for her horoscopes. But there was no denying that she did have a bit of the superstitious about her.

Black Cat Lane, she thought, and sighed. Perfect. If a black cat runs in front of the truck, I'm turning around and going back.

No dark feline appeared, however, and so she was left without any excuse to turn back. Instead, she pulled into the driveway of the house, maneuvering the truck around so that it was facing backward, and then turned off the engine once she was in place.

She sat there for a long moment, listening to the sounds of Rabbit trying to get Pooh unwedged from the door of his burrow, then touched Kevin's shoulder gently. He didn't look at her, didn't look away from the brightly colored cartoon he was watching, but he did reach over with his own hand and touch her arm in response, so she knew he was listening.

"Kevin, honey," she said, "I have to get out and open up the house. You stay here, okay? You stay right here and don't move and I'll be right back."

Kevin barely moved, but she thought she saw his head go up and down the slightest fraction of an inch, which was as close as he ever got to a nod.

Lynette got out of the truck, and went to the front door of her new home, brandishing the key that Tom the realtor had sent her in the mail. She approached the door with no small sense of anxiety. She knew it was never a good idea to decide on a house without ever seeing it in person, but she also knew that she could hardly take Kevin back and forth multiple times with her to scout out a proper location and then make a purchase thereafter. So she was pleasantly surprised when she opened the front door and found a small but tidy front room, with track lights installed so that when she flicked the switch near the door the front room immediately lit up.

She turned to go back to the truck, thinking that maybe she could unpack a chair and set Kevin's computer up on the floor or a windowsill somewhere, but when she went back outside all thoughts of how she was going to unpack fled from her mind.

There was a man standing by the car, looking at Kevin through the window.

***

22.

***

Lynette felt her mouth open wide, and she was about to scream, then realized that the man standing beside the truck was just a stranger, not the gray man she had moved to escape from.

Just a stranger, she thought. My, how things have changed.

Out loud, she said, "Can I help you?"

The man started and turned, and Lynette couldn't help but flinch a bit.

The man wore a dark track suit, as though he had been out running, but was not breathing hard, not to mention that it was after midnight - a strange time to be out for a run. But stranger than his outfit was his face. He had light blue eyes, which seemed all the lighter when compared to the white, patchwork pattern of scars that crisscrossed his face. He was smiling, apparently at Kevin, but the smile disappeared when he saw her reaction to his appearance.

"Sorry," he said, and made a half-hearted attempt to hide his face behind his hands, then must have realized that he could hardly hold his hands to his face all night and dropped them to his side. "Sorry," he said again. "I have a face made for radio," he said with a sad laugh.

Lynette felt shame well up inside her, hot and uncomfortable. She felt like she had her mother shaking a finger at her again, something that she had not experienced for several decades. "Way to go, Lynny," she would have said. "I taught you never to judge a book by a cover, and here you are doing exactly that."

"No," she protested, though whether she was saying it in response to the man's statement or to the mental image of her mother's scolding she would have been hard-pressed to say. "It's just - I was surprised to see anyone out here so late."

"Me, too," he answered.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean I saw your truck and figured I'd stop and see who was new to the neighborhood," he said, and pointed to a nearby car, a small blue economy car that was parked across the street. He must have pulled up while Lynette was inside turning on the lights.

She looked at the man with a trace of suspicion, her Los Angeles training kicking in as she said, "So you just thought you'd stop off in the middle of the night to see if we were awake?"

"You must not be from around here," said the man, seeming to guess her thoughts. He held his hands up placatingly, then said, "I'm not a murderer or a kidnapper, just a nosy guy from a small town who saw your door open and your light on, spotted the moving truck, and thought I'd see if I could help with anything."

"At," she glanced at her watch, "half past one in the morning?"

He grinned at her. "You're from a big city, right?"

"Los Angeles," she admitted. "How did you know?"

"It shows in your face. You're worried about me, what I'm doing here, what my intentions are, and that just screams city girl."

She grinned in spite of herself. "Guilty on all counts."

"Well, sorry to disappoint you, but I'm looking for nothing more sinister than to see if you need any help moving in." He backed off another step, as though
he
were afraid of
her,
then said, "Again, I'm not a rapist or anything as exciting as that, so I don't want to get you riled up, but... you don't have anyone here to help you move in, do you?"

She should have said yes, she knew, should have said that her husband was inside turning on the gas or something else that would get rid of this strange man, but she didn't. Instead, she felt as though she should trust him, and, following her instincts, she said, "No, I don't."

"And I'm guessing that your son won't be much help, either."

She felt her hackles rise. Was this man insulting her boy? "What do you mean by that?" she said through clenched teeth.

Again the man raised his hands as though to show that he was not only unarmed, but completely incapable of harming a fly. "Nothing. Just he looks like he's around eight years old and, unless I miss my guess, he's very asleep right now."

Lynette glanced into the truck. Sure enough, Kevin's head was lolled backward, his eyes closed as Winnie the Pooh continued prancing across the screen of the DVD player on his lap. She looked back at the man and grimaced. "Sorry," she said. "Kevin's...special. Some people make fun of him."

The man started visibly. "Kevin?" he said. "His name's Kevin?"

Lynette felt her brow furrow. "Why?" she asked, suspicious once again.

"No reason," said the man. "I just...I knew a Kevin once."

This time Lynette did
not
believe him; felt as though he were lying to her. But before she could say anything about it, the man stuck out his hand and said, "I'm Scott, by the way."

Lynette looked at the hand for a long moment, then finally took it. "Lynette," she answered, and was more than a little surprised when the man didn't grab her and attempt to drag her over to his car and throw her in the backseat.

Instead, he let go of her hand after just a moment, turned, and said, "So you don't have anyone here, would you mind if I rounded up some help for you?"

"Why?" she asked with the slightest grin. "You got a moving company in your car?"

He grinned back at her. "Don't need one. Not in Meridian."

And before she could say another word he was gone, moving across her yard to the neighbor's house. The house beside hers was dark, only a porch light on in the gloom, but the man marched up to the front door as though he owned the place, then knocked on it hard. He knocked on it again a moment later, and then stood back as the door swung open.

"Coach Cowley?" said a voice, laced with equal parts sleepiness and surprise.

"Hey, Gil," said Scott. "Sorry to bother you so late at night, but there's a lady moving in next door to you and she doesn't have a single person to help her."

The door slammed shut without another word coming from the mysterious "Gil," but Scott came back with a satisfied expression on his face.

"What was that all about?" asked Lynette.

"That was me getting you that moving company you were talking about," answered Scott.

"One guy who slams the door in your face?"

"First of all, he only slammed the door because he was in a hurry. Second of all, he was in a hurry because he was in his boxers and not much else, so as soon as he realized that there was a woman in the area he probably wanted to get some clothes on. Third and lastly, I'm betting he's calling some people right now, and you ought to have half a dozen men over here inside of fifteen minutes to help you with your things."