“Oh, shut up.” Roy sounded sick of me. “Christ,” he said to Savannah, “you didn’t tell me what a pain in the ass this guy was going to be.”
“He seems to forget how desperate he is,” Savannah said as if I wasn’t there.
“I’m turning around,” I said.
“No, you’re not,” Roy said, and I felt something cold against my cheek just in front of my ear. In my rearview mirror, I could make out his face a few inches behind mine and it took me a second to realize that he was holding the barrel of a gun against my head.
“Get that thing away from me,” I said.
He lowered it. “You cool now?” he asked. “Just keep going straight.”
The whole game had changed with the appearance of the gun, and I did as I was told. I thought of how a guy in a movie would act in my place. He’d come up with some brilliant scheme. Some way out of this mess. But I felt anything but brilliant. I was an idiot and all I wanted was for this night to be over and to get my baby girl back. I felt tears burn my eyes and was glad of the darkness.
We were mostly quiet for the rest of the drive. It took about an hour. Savannah asked me a few questions about Bella. How she was doing. How much she missed her.
“I don’t want to talk about Bella,” I said. I felt like it made Bella dirty or something, talking about her with them. Bringing her into the van. I hoped she was sleeping in some really comfortable bed tonight, safe in a warm house with Erin. I kept her in my mind as I drove. I will never do this to you again, Bella, I thought to myself. I’d find some other way for us to get by. I’d never let her out of my sight again. We passed a sign welcoming us to Virginia. So now we were crossing state lines. Didn’t that change the nature of a crime? Involve the FBI or something? I had no idea and I kept my questions to myself.
“Truck stop’s off this exit,” Roy said.
“Get in the right lane,” Savannah told me.
I took the exit ramp and after a short distance, we pulled into a huge parking lot where a couple dozen semis were parked.
“Turn off your lights and drive slow through here,” Roy said.
I turned off my lights and cruised slowly between the rows of trucks that dwarfed my van. Tall lampposts threw scattered light here and there in the lot, but for the most part, we were in darkness. At the far end of the lot was a gas station and a low building that must have been a restaurant, because the blinking pink neon sign out front simply read EAT. Savannah leaned forward, eying the trucks. They all looked alike to me. I figured most drivers of these big eighteen-wheelers slept in their rigs and I wondered if we were being watched. I thought of the license plate on the back of my van. It would be hard, maybe impossible, to read it with my lights off. Same with the magnetic Brown Construction signs on the sides. Still, if anything happened, it was me and my van they’d be after, not Roy or Savannah. I figured that was part of the plan.
The lot was quiet. There was the occasional sound of passing cars from the nearby highway, but there wasn’t much traffic this time of night. Everything in the lot seemed eerily still, the only motion that blinking EAT sign in the distance.
“That one, by the fence,” Roy said.
I’d barely noticed the truck he was talking about. It was parked away from the others. Away from any of the overhead lights.
“Pull up next to the rear of it,” Savannah said.
I pulled up so that the rear door of my van was about even with the rear of the truck.
“How will you get in?” I asked.
“It’ll be unlocked,” Savannah said, and I realized the driver must be in on the whole thing, too.
Savannah twisted in her seat to look at Roy. “How did they mark the cases this time?” she asked.
“Just the usual X’s,” Roy said.
“How many?”
“Fifteen.”
“Wow.” She sounded pleased.
“What are you talking about?” I asked. “Why would they mark—”
“You don’t need to know,” Roy said. “The less you know, the better.”
He was probably right. If anything went wrong, the less I knew the better off I’d be, but I felt so pissed off and taken advantage of and just plain stupid that I needed to know. And suddenly, I got it. “You’re not really stealing baby formula, are you,” I said.
Savannah laughed. “Oh, we absolutely are. You’ll see. Cases of it.”
“Baby formula no babies’ lips will ever touch,” Roy said as he slid open my van door and got out.
“What does he mean?” I turned to Savannah.
“You are such a rube.” Savannah started to open her door, but I grabbed her arm.
“Spill it!” I said. “Is it drugs?”
“What do you think?” she said, trying to twist her arm free. “It’s coke. Cut with formula. We take a few cases, deliver them to our middlemen. Then we collect a ton of money and we’re on our merry way.”
“Shit!” I let go of her and pounded the steering wheel. “Get the hell out of my van. I’m leaving.”
It was her turn to grab my arm, her nails digging into my skin. “You do that, and social services is going to get a nice anonymous tip about a homeless little girl living in a van with a pathetic asshole of a father.”
Roy knocked on my window with the barrel of his gun and I jumped. Savannah leaned closer until her face was inches from mine. “We understand each other?” she asked.
I swallowed. I had to pick my poison—do this drug deal or lose Bella. No contest. I gave Savannah an angry shove. “Just make it fast,” I said.
Roy knocked on my window again and I rolled it down. “You’re lookout,” he said. “You see anyone in the lot, let us know.”
I didn’t say anything. Didn’t react in any way. It was like I was disassociating from the whole thing. I wanted it to be over with.
One of them opened the rear doors of my van and all I could see behind me was the black night. I couldn’t see the back of the truck from where I sat, but in my side-view mirror, I could just make out Roy’s and Savannah’s legs in the darkness. I heard the rear doors of the semi creak open, the sound loud and echoey as it bounced off every other truck in the lot. I watched as Roy’s legs disappeared from my view, and I guessed he’d climbed inside the truck. In a minute, Savannah appeared in my rearview mirror as she loaded a case of formula into the back of my van. I didn’t turn around.
“Just think about the money,” she said to me. I didn’t answer. I wondered just how much the drugs were worth to pay everyone involved in the heist. My cut was no doubt the smallest amount anyone was making.
I could hardly see anything from where I was parked, so I didn’t feel like much of a lookout. Rows of trucks blocked my view of the gas station and the EAT sign, and the part of the lot I could see was filled with pools of light and stretches of jet-black shadow. I felt more tense as the minutes passed, turning my head from side to side, trying to peer between the trucks for a sign that someone was onto us, but everything was quiet. The only sounds besides the occasional car on the highway were some muffled words between Savannah and Roy, an occasional grunt, and the sliding of another case into the back of my van.
I’d almost relaxed when something caught the corner of my eye. I leaned forward, squinting. I was sure I’d seen something or someone move, way in the distance at the end of one of the rows of trucks. I stared in that direction until my eyes watered, and just as I began to think it had been my imagination, I heard the faraway sound of footsteps, coming fast. There was more than one person. I couldn’t see a thing and the sound echoed around me so that I wasn’t sure exactly where it was coming from.
Suddenly, two men ran into one of the pools of light no more than thirty yards in front of my van.
“Hey!” one of them shouted, their arms waving in the air. They yelled something else, but I had no idea what they were saying. It was like my brain was misfiring, only one thought running through it: get the hell out of here!
I turned the key i
n the ignition and squealed away from the truck. Roy shouted at me and I heard the unmistakable crack of gunfire as he fired a shot toward the men. I felt the weight of my open rear doors swinging behind the van as I swerved past the men, pressing the gas pedal to the floor, thinking, Don’t let them read my sign. Don’t let them see my plate. I heard more bullets sing out, so close the sound made me duck. I didn’t take the time to look in my rearview mirror to see if either of the guys had been hit as I sped through the lot. My eyes were focused on the exit and soon I was careening down the long ramp toward the highway.
I went about half a mile before I pulled over, my heart hammering against my rib cage. I climbed out of the van and shut the rear doors, but not before I saw the cases of formula tumbled all over the place on the mattress that had become Bella’s and my home on wheels.
Back in the van, I took off again, my foot like a pile of lead on the gas until I realized I’d better stick to the limit. I slowed to sixty-five, and the van grew quiet enough that I could hear my breathing, hard and fast.
What the hell should I do? I’d stranded Roy and Savannah with those two guys. I didn’t want to picture the scene in the parking lot. Roy and his damn gun. Should I try to go back? No way. I was done with this. So finished. I got off at the next exit and turned around to head back to North Carolina. They’d tricked me into this mess. Now they could find their own way out of it.
But I was the one with thousands of dollars worth of cocaine in my van, no money in my pocket, and my little girl probably wondering if her daddy had gone to heaven and was never coming back.
28
Erin
I had the feeling I was never going to fall asleep. I was still awake at one in the morning, maybe because Bella had asked me to leave a light on and I’d never been a good sleeper unless my bedroom was totally dark. I didn’t have a night light in the apartment, so I’d left the closet light burning and the door open a couple of inches. That seemed to satisfy her, but the light lay in a swath across her face as she slept and I had to stare at her because every time I looked away, I forgot she wasn’t Carolyn. I needed to keep reminding myself this was some other little girl in my bed and in my heart. I’d felt crazy plenty of times since Carolyn died, imagining that I saw her on the street or heard her voice from across the room. But tonight I felt perfectly sane. Almost content. Yes, this was a screwy situation, but for this one night, I was thinking about someone other than myself. My God, I’d been wrapped up in me! I hadn’t even realized it until tonight. All of my energy had been funneled into my grief, my dread of returning to work, my sad day-to-day existence. Tonight, I’d barely thought of myself. I’d thought of making Bella feel comfortable and secure. Travis had given me a gift, and I wondered if on some level he knew it.
We’d had a good evening, Bella and me. Before dinner, we took a walk around the little lake near my apartment complex. There was one spot where a short bridge crossed over a creek, and I had to run across it holding my breath. I tried to make it into a game with Bella to hide my anxiety, but ever since the night on the pier, I hated being on any structure above water. I used to love to dive, but even the diving board at our neighborhood pool gave me the jitters now. It had gotten ridiculous.
On the other side of the bridge was a small playground, and Bella played on the swings and slid down the sliding board, but most of the time, she stayed close to my side, not running ahead as Carolyn would have. Oh, Carolyn. If only Carolyn had been a little more clingy. A little more afraid. If only I hadn’t listened to Michael that night. You’re so overprotective sometimes, Erin. You’re going to make her afraid. Maybe if Bella had been with Travis, she would have struck out on her own with a little more courage, but she only wanted to hold my hand as we walked, and I didn’t mind a bit.
She helped me make dinner, tearing the lettuce for our salads. We had soup, salad and bread. That was just about all I had in the apartment unless we dipped into the frozen dinners again. She didn’t eat her salad and she made me cut the crust off her bread and then surprised me by eating only the crust, but she did eat half a bowl of chicken-and-rice soup. Then we had a little tea party with cookies for dessert, and finally I did what I’d been dying to do ever since finding that note in her pocket; I gave her a bubble bath and washed her hair.
“What’s a bubble bath?” she’d asked when I told her my plan.
“You’ve never had a bubble bath?” I asked in disbelief.
She shook her head. “I had baths in the tub in our burned-down house,” she said.
I wanted to ask her about that house. How had it burned down? But I thought better of asking her anything that might make her sad when she was already feeling pretty vulnerable.
I ran the bath for her and loaded it with bubbles. There must have been ten inches of bubbles on top of the water and from her wide-eyed reaction as the foam expanded in the tub, I believed she’d been telling me the truth about never having a bubble bath before—or at least not one so wildly extravagant. She undressed herself, skinny little thing, and she weighed just about nothing as I lifted her over the side of the tub and settled her in the water. I used the shower head to wash her hair, careful not to get my shampoo in her eyes. I had a new unpackaged toothbrush that was way too big for her mouth and she whimpered while I brushed her teeth, but she toughed it out. She was squeaky clean, her cheeks pink and shiny, when I tucked her into bed, and she leaned against me the way Carolyn used to as I read to her from Winnie the Pooh, and her body grew heavy with sleepiness. I went to bed then myself, not wanting her to wake up alone and afraid, but I hadn’t been able to sleep at all.
Now I picked up my iPad from the night table and logged into Harley’s Dad and Friends. There were a couple of messages asking Where’s Erin? and I realized that for the first time in many months I hadn’t checked the group since early that morning.
I read through the posts from the day. It was the usual stuff. There were a couple of new people with fresh, raw grief. A few more in the same stage as me. Some of them blamed family members or doctors or God. Some had a ton of guilt over things unsaid or undone. For a moment, I felt distant from it all, like I had left these online friends, so precious to me, behind in the past day.
Hi all, I typed. Sorry to go AWOL. It’s been a crazy day. I’m actually babysitting a little girl C’s age. I was one of the parents who didn’t share our children’s names. I would have been okay with it, but I’d promised Michael I wouldn’t share identifying details about her or our family. So it’s been a strange day, I finished.
Within a few minutes, I’d received a string of responses.
Wow, I don’t know if I could do that!
I bet it’s been good for you. You have such a good heart, Erin.
I quickly felt at home with my online friends again, wrapped up in the understanding of these strangers. We wrote back and forth for a while, then I tried to read but my eyes kept drifting to Bella. She was sucking her thumb, her lamb clutched tightly against her cheek. Carolyn’s polar bear had been discarded on my sofa.
At two, I closed the cover on my iPad but still couldn’t sleep. I had sleeping pills I could take, but I wanted to be alert in case Bella needed me. So by two-thirty, I was every bit as awake as I’d been at eleven, and I finally got out of bed and walked into the kitchen to make a cup of tea. I’d just sat down on the sofa to sip it when I heard Bella crying. She ran into the dim room looking frightened and confused.
“Bella,” I said, “I’m right here.”
She ran to me and I lifted her onto my lap. I almost couldn’t bear how scared she looked. “Did you wake up and forget where you were?” I asked.
She nodded, hiccupping through her tears. She was crying hard, the way a much younger child might cry. So hard she could barely catch her breath. “I want Daddy,” she said.
“Oh, I know,” I said, rocking her, her sweet, clean hair beneath my lips. “We’ll see him in the morning at the coffee shop. He’s going to be so happy to see you.” I was g
oing to have trouble letting her go tomorrow. Send her back to living in a van? How could I?
I started to sing. I’d never been much of a singer, but Carolyn loved it when I sang to her, so I went through “Jack and Jill” and “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” and gradually Bella’s crying turned to little intermittent shivers. I felt so good that I could calm her and that she felt safe in my arms. But then she said, “Stop singing now,” in a tone that told me my voice had grown more grating than relaxing and I had to laugh.
She suddenly climbed down from my lap and ran to the sofa for the polar bear and her purse. She climbed back onto my lap with the lamb, bear and purse surrounding her. She tried to open the purse.
“You want your dolly?” I asked, helping her with the clasp. We’d put the doll back in her purse after playing with it in the dollhouse. I didn’t want to forget it in the morning.
“Yes,” she said.
I opened the purse and she dug her hand in and pulled out the little doll with the long blond hair. Then she slipped her hand inside again and pulled out her toothbrush. It had never occurred to me that Travis might have “packed” anything for her. “Oh, honey,” I said, “here’s your toothbrush! We can use this one instead of that big one in the morning, okay?”
“I got money in here, too,” she said, turning the purse upside down. A bunch of coins fell out along with a five and a one and the two photographs.
“You do,” I said. I was curious about those pictures. I turned on the light next to the sofa and lifted the photograph of the teenage girl.
“That’s my mommy,” Bella told me again.
I hadn’t gotten a good look at the picture when I saw it the other day in the coffee shop. Now I could see that the girl, who couldn’t have been more than fifteen or sixteen, was wan-looking. She had a really pretty smile, but her skin looked as though you could see clear through it. So pale. The picture was old, or maybe the edges were simply felt-like and damaged from spending so much time in Bella’s purse.
“She loves me very much,” Bella said, “but she lives too far away for me to see her.” I could hear Travis telling her this. Hear her repeating his words. I wondered if she could be dead, but then I remembered Travis saying that she lived in Beaufort—certainly not too far away for Bella to see her. I wished I knew their custody situation. Why did Travis have her? I looked at the pale, pretty teenager again and wondered if she missed her little girl. Maybe Travis had kidnapped her. That thought would never have crossed my mind a day ago, but now it was clear that Travis wasn’t making the best decisions for his daughter. My heart did a little flip-flop at the thought of the girl in the photo—Robin—aching for her daughter. Her missing daughter. I imagined how she longed for her. You’re projecting. I could practically hear Judith’s voice inside my head. Of course I was projecting. I couldn’t imagine my daughter being alive somewhere without feeling a desperate need to have her with me. I was going to have a long heart-to-heart with Travis when I saw him. He’d dragged me into this situation and now I had a right to know exactly what was going on.