Dreamland (14 page)

Connor kept hold of her hand, and she didn't once turn around.

They walked as fast as they could without seeming as if they were hurrying. Two doctors passed them without so much as glancing up from their charts. So far, so good. Dea scanned the hall, the clusters of nurses in their identical scrubs, all of them indistinguishable in her panic. Would they recognize her? Had these been the same nurses who had stuck her in the Crazy Ward in the first place?

They took the first stairwell they could find, moving quickly, in silence, to the ground floor. Dea was hoping the stairs would lead them to an emergency exit but instead they found themselves in yet another hallway. It reminded her of the maze she'd
walked with her mother years ago in Florida, the high white walls and halls that dead-ended or abruptly switched directions, signs indicating an exit that never materialized. Everything looked the same: blue doors and speckled linoleum floors and bad pastel art.

But finally the hall dumped them into a lobby, and then they were through the revolving doors and out into the dark.

The cold was shocking. The wind cut right through her sweatshirt and wrapped a hand around her lungs. The sky was clear. The glare of the hospital complex couldn't quite obscure a smattering of stars. Dea wrapped her arms around her chest, inhaling clean, sharp air, watching her breath condense in clouds. It felt like a long, long time since she had been outside. She still half expected an explosion of shouting to begin at any minute, hands to materialize from the dark and grab her.

But they made it to Connor's car without trouble. He'd parked at the edge of the parking lot, in a dark wedge of space between streetlamps. As always, the car smelled like gum and old wood shavings, and once they were inside—with the rest of the world locked out, pressed and flattened behind walls of glass—it finally hit Dea that they had done it. She was out. She should have felt triumphant but she was overcome with exhaustion. Her whole body was numb with cold. They had studied shock in Health Ed, and she was pretty sure that her uncontrollable shivering, plus the way her thoughts kept bouncing off each other like deranged rubber balls, meant she had it.

Connor punched on the heat, and wordlessly passed her a blanket from the backseat.

“All right,” he said. “Talk.”

“Not here.” She heard the wail of an approaching siren and tensed; but it was only an ambulance, pulling into the ER.

“Dea . . .” His hands tightened on the wheel. For a second, she was terrified he would order her out of the car.

“I promise, I'll explain everything. I swear. But we're not safe here.”

He exhaled—a long, heavy breath. “Where do you want to go?”

She shook her head. She was out and free and she had nowhere to go. She couldn't go to Gollum's—it was the first place the cops would look, and besides, Gollum was already covering for Connor. She had no money. No ID. No living relatives that she knew of. She wished, now, that she'd risked pocketing her cell phone and some cash from her purse. At least if she had money, she could get a motel room or buy a plane ticket somewhere.

She thought of the envelope full of rolls of twenty- and fifty-dollar bills, stuffed into the soft interior lining of the passenger seat in the VW.

“My car,” she said. “I need to get into my car.”

Connor stared at her. “Your car is totaled, Dea.” She was surprised that he sounded angry. “You nearly killed yourself. Remember?”

“I wasn't trying to—” She broke off. There was no point in trying to explain what had happened; it would have to wait until they were somewhere safe. Somewhere else. Instead she said, “I really wrecked it? Bad?”

“You drove straight into a tree,” Connor said, as if she were an idiot. “They had to pull you out. The hood folded up like an
accordion—that's what my uncle said. It's probably scrap by now. Demo'd.” She looked at him blankly and he said. “Demolished.”

She thought of two thousand dollars, shredded underneath the metal teeth of a giant machine. She needed that money.

“We have to check,” she said. “We have to make sure. Maybe they haven't . . . demo'd it yet.” Seized by sudden inspiration, she said, “It's evidence, isn't it? It's evidence of a crime.”

“What are you talking about?” Connor said.

“That was my mom's car. And the police think she's on the run. So they might keep the car, right?” The more she talked, the more it sounded possible. “Maybe—maybe they think the car is a clue. Or—or like proof that she was doing bad stuff. She probably
stole
that car.” Dea knew for a fact that she hadn't, but she needed to make Connor say yes; she needed to convince him to keep helping her.

“I'm not going anywhere until you tell me what's going on.” He yanked the key out of the ignition, cutting off the engine.

Dea took a long breath. “Okay, look. There's money in that car. I need it. I have nowhere to go. If I get caught, I'll get thrown back in there.” She jerked her head toward the hospital, looming toward the sky like a vast white wave tunneling toward them. “Everyone thinks I'm crazy, but I'm not. They think my mom ran away, but she didn't. You're the only one who can help me. Will you help me?”

For a long time, he just looked at her. Then he turned the ignition back on and put the car in drive.

Dea had crashed somewhere on the border of Marborough and the flat run of land on the western side of it. There was only one
tow company she knew of: Sanderson's, which was actually in Pellston. Mark Sanderson was in Dea's grade, and rumor had it he sometimes lent out cars to his friends for drag racing. If your car went to Sanderson's, there was no telling what it would look like when it came out.

They drove to Pellston in silence, with black space hurtling past them. Connor had obviously given up trying to get Dea to talk. There were things she almost asked him—not even about Kate Patinsky and whether she was still bugging Connor's family for information, or what people were saying about Dea at school—but normal, everyday things. It would make her feel real, like the same old Dea, and not like somebody just returned from a spaceship.

She couldn't believe that only a couple of months earlier she'd taken Connor on a tour, pointed out the mini-mart and the mega-mart, complained that nothing ever happened and that Fielding must be the most boring town in America. She would give anything to go back to being bored.

Dea had driven past Sanderson's Tow and Impound lot plenty of times but never paid it much attention. It was bigger than she'd remembered, a large lot encircled with a high fence and illuminated with large floodlights. In contrast to the surrounding darkness, it looked like the set of a movie, and the rows and rows of cars, lit up from above, were like carefully arranged toys.

The gate at the entrance was closed. A laminated sign instructed them to buzz. Connor did. A second later, a skinny guy with a shaved head and tattoos crawling up his neck all the way to his jaw materialized and unlatched the gate, which was encircled with a padlock. He waved them in. He had the
glitter-bright eyes and sunken face of a junkie. Still, she saw a resemblance to Mark. So: maybe his older brother.

Connor pulled up to the office, a tin-sided booth no bigger than a janitor's closet. Inside of it, a guy with a wide sprawl of a nose was leaning on a desk, watching something on a minuscule TV. He, too, had Mark's face but much fatter, as though someone had taken an air pump to his head.

“So what's the plan?” she said. But Connor was already getting out of the car. She climbed out after him, ignoring the temporary wave of dizziness that overtook her.

“What are you doing?” he whispered, glaring at her. They were standing on either side of the hood, facing off. “Get back in the car.”

The tattooed guy had shut the gate behind them. He shook a cigarette out of a pack and stood smoking, watching them from a distance.

“What does it look like I'm doing?” Dea spoke softly, so Mark's brother wouldn't hear. “I'm coming with you.”

“Let me handle it,” Connor said. He started walking toward the office.

She hesitated. She'd been assuming she could just weave her way among the cars, looking for the VW. Still she would need fifteen minutes at least—more, given how weak she felt—and Mark's brother wasn't taking his eyes off her. But she was sick of sitting around and waiting; she'd been sitting around, waiting, for days.

So she followed Connor, limping a little. As soon as she got some cash, she was going to buy a real pair of shoes. She was going to need to walk a dream soon, too. Her heart was
twitching like a dying insect.

She caught Connor as he reached the office. He shot her a dirty look but didn't say anything. It was too late to order her into the car, anyway. Mr. Sanderson was already leaning forward.

“Yeah?” was the first thing he said.

Dea realized that she and Connor hadn't agreed on a cover story. But without hesitation, Connor started talking. “I been working on my dad's car,” he said. His voice had changed. It sounded gruffer. More Fielding-like. As if he'd just come from drinking beers and fiddling with a transmission. “He's got an old VW. An original. Busted to hell, though, and we need some new parts. I heard you might have parts.”

Sanderson's jaw was working back and forth over a piece of gum. His eyes moved from Connor to Dea, and she was glad that she had her hood up. Reflected in the smudgy glass window, she barely looked like herself—just a sickly-pale girl with stringy hair and big dark hollows for eyes. She highly doubted Sanderson knew who she was, but just in case.

“We towed a VW about a week ago or so, yeah.” Sanderson turned his eyes back to Connor. He spoke slowly, as if each word was an effort. Dea imagined that if she could hear his inner thoughts, they'd sound just like radio static, or the buzz of a fly in an empty room. “Got pretty banged up. Don't know how much good it'll be for parts. Might be better for scrap. What're you looking for? You working the engine or body?”

Connor dodged the question. “Can I see it?”

Sanderson shook his head. He picked up a paper cup and spit into it, a thick brown liquid, like tar. Dea realized he wasn't chewing gum, but tobacco. “Don't have it here,” he said, and her
stomach sank. “Cops got it in impound behind the station. We won't see it till they're done. Could be weeks. You want me to call you when it's ready to go for scrap?”

“Sure,” Connor said. He scrawled down a name and phone number—both fake, Dea noticed—on a piece of paper, then fed it through the gap under the grille. “Thanks a lot.”

They reversed out of the lot, and Mark's brother swung the gate closed and locked them out. All the time, he was watching them as if he knew something. She was glad to be back in the car.

“Well, that's that,” Connor said, as soon as they were on the road.

“What do you mean?” Dea said. “Sanderson said my car's still in impound. So that's a good thing. It means it didn't get junked yet.”

“A good thing?” Connor repeated. “Dea, the cops have it. That's a very bad thing.”

“
Please
.” Dea's voice cracked. She knew she sounded desperate. She
was
desperate. And guilty, too—Connor should have stayed far away from her. He should have known better. “We have to try.”

“Try what? The cops are looking for you, Dea.”

“They're looking for me. They're not looking for
you
,” Dea said. Connor went silent. She'd never known guilt to feel this way, like there was something alive inside her stomach trying to get out. She added, “Besides, the last place they'll look is at the police station. Right?”

“This is crazy,” Connor said, shoving a hand through his hair, so it stood up in spikes. Dea remembered, then, the first
time she'd seen him: how he'd emerged from the water, how he'd smiled at her. “I have my own shit to worry about, Dea. My own shit to deal with. And everyone knows we're—” He broke off suddenly.

“Everyone knows we're
what
?” Dea asked. There was an ache deep in her chest. How was it possible for things to change so quickly, for time to squeeze down like a giant thumb, for everything to go so wrong? In dreams, everything was reversible. There was no time, and so nothing was done that couldn't be undone.

She wished real life were like that, too.

“Nothing,” Connor said, shaking his head. “Everyone knows we're friends, that's all.” Funny how she used to love hearing him say the word
friends
. Now it sounded flat to her, like soda left uncapped. “My
uncle
knows. As soon as the hospital gets in touch with him, he'll know I helped you run.”

“That just means we have to hurry,” Dea said. “You promised to help me,” she added softly.

They were coming up on Fielding again. Dea could see the ExxonMobil and mini-mart, casting beams of light toward the sky—like earthbound stars, drowning in the dark. A single red light was blinking at the intersection. If Connor turned left, they would reach Route 9, his house, her house. Her old house. She had never known how much she loved it until now: the old rooms, most of them unused, the vast comfortable sprawl of the place with all their pretty rented belongings.

Right was Route 22, which went past the police station—and from there, west out of Aragansett County and eventually all the way out to California.

Connor slowed the car to a crawl and then to a stop. For a second, they sat bathed in intermittent red light.

“Damn it,” he said, and wrenched the wheel to the right.

Dea could have kissed him.

A half mile before they arrived at the police station complex, when Dea could already see a halo of light hovering above the sprawling one-story building, Connor pulled over, bumping the car onto the side of the road.

“Get in the back,” he said.

“What? Why?”

He exhaled heavily. “You know this is idiotic, right? Because it is. Idiotic. I'm not going to get in trouble for harboring a fugitive or whatever the hell you are, and I'm not going to let you go to jail, either. I'm not even supposed to be here, okay? I'm supposed to be at Gollum's, helping her birth a frigging calf.”

“Really?” Dea couldn't help but say.

“It was her idea,” Connor said exasperatedly. “So my dad would be too grossed out to check. The point is, you do what I say now. So get in the back, and when I say get down, get down. Got it?”

Dea knew it was no use arguing with him. A small dark crease had appeared between his eyebrows, like it always did when he was going to be stubborn about something. Besides, he had a point. So she climbed out and moved around to the backseat, which was cluttered with random clothing and sporting equipment, old textbooks and a backpack, dirt-encrusted hiking boots, and empty soda bottles, as if all of the runoff from Connor's life flowed and accumulated here.

She cleared a space among the piles of clothing. She felt better back here, protected, concealed by the dark and surrounded by so many forgotten objects. She drew the blanket over her shoulders, folded it around herself like a cloak, like it might give her superhero powers.

They were nearing the police station now.

“Get down,” Connor said, his voice tight. Dea flattened herself against the backseat, her face pressed to an old sweater, inhaling wool fibers and the faint taste of cologne. A second later, she heard sirens shriek by. There must be an accident somewhere. Or—her stomach clenched—the cops had been called out to the hospital, to track her down, to bring her back.

She'd been expecting Connor to turn into the lot, but he kept going straight. She was desperate to sit up but knew Connor would yell at her, so she stayed where she was. Her cheek was starting to itch where it was pressed up to the wool.

“What do you see?” she finally said.

“I'm making a loop.” Connor was whispering, as if they might be overheard otherwise. “Checking out the impound lot. Entrances and exits. I want to know what we're dealing with.”

She couldn't stand it anymore. She sat up cautiously. She could feel the cold vibrating through the glass. Connor glanced at her in the rearview mirror but said nothing. They had passed the main entrance to the station, anyway. Connor hooked a right, and then another right down a service road.

“That must be the lot,” he said, narrating as if she couldn't see for herself. He was nervous. This lot was much smaller than Sanderson's but similarly fortified, encircled by a tall fence topped with chicken wire. “Guard hut.” Connor's fingers were so tight on the steering wheel that even from the backseat, Dea could see the white indentations of his knuckles. “Two cops.”

She had almost forgotten that Connor hated the police. He thought they were idiots and had never forgiven them for failing to find his mom and brother's killer.

Except for my uncle
, he'd said.
He's all right.
Briggs had been living in Chicago when Connor's family was killed. Connor had told Dea his uncle wasn't supposed to have worked his mom's case—he was too close to it, according to his superiors—but had insisted, vowing to learn the truth for his brother's sake. Because of his uncle's influence, Connor had ultimately been absolved, at least formally. There just wasn't enough evidence to pin the murder on him, even if there was no evidence to pin it on anyone else, either. He'd told her all this on the drive back from the Fright Festival, when they'd had to pull over because of the
rain, and she'd been desperate to ask whether it was true what people said about Will Briggs and his dad and the guitar—she didn't see how someone good could do something so terrible.

She thought of her mother, and all the midnight running away, and the frauds. Maybe people were more complicated than she thought.

Connor exhaled heavily. “No way in,” Connor said. One of the cops, starkly visible in the brightly lit interior of the hut, had a paperback bent across his knee—a crossword puzzle book?—but the other one, with the face of a hound dog left too long without its owner, watched them as they drove past. Dea hunched down in her seat, though she knew she couldn't possibly be seen.

Then she spotted it: at the very edge of the lot, a ruined sculpture of metal, broken lines of steel and singed rubber. Her heart caught in her throat. Connor had prepared her for this but still, she couldn't believe it: the car, her mom's car, was folded nearly in half. Its doors gaped open; she imagined they no longer closed correctly. Or maybe the cops had needed to wrench the doors from their hinges to get her out. Two tires were completely blown out, so the car listed like a ship in shallow water. She hadn't realized until now how lucky she was to be alive. She felt the sudden, wild impulse to cry, to call her mom up, to tell her she was sorry. Her mom loved that car.

“There it is.” Her voice, amazingly, was steady. She stubbed a finger into the glass, even though Connor kept his eyes on the road. “I see it. It's right there. Next to the jeep.” There were fewer than two dozen cars in the impound lot, scattered seemingly at random, many of them still papered with bright orange
parking tickets or fitted with a metal boot, like a monster's giant teeth, around one wheel.

“Did you hear me, Dea? I said there's no way in. They have guards posted for a reason.”

The lot was fenced on three sides and backed up on the station: a long, low building, jointed in several places where it had undergone expansion, so the effect was of a lumpy gray caterpillar tacked to earth. On the far side of the lot, next to the Dumpsters, three cops were standing, smoking, in the narrow wedge of light carved out by a propped-open service door. She saw the flare of cigarettes, like the distant glow of fireflies.

“Through the station,” Dea said. Connor was hooking another right, circling back around toward the front.

His eyes went to hers in the rearview mirror. “What?”

She looked away. She didn't like the mirror, and didn't like thinking of what she had last seen reflected in it. “There's a way into the lot through the station. I saw cops on smoke break.” He said nothing. “You could get in. You could ask to see your uncle.”

“Even if he hasn't heard you pulled a disappearing act by now,” Connor said pointedly, “I've never once come to see him at work. Don't you think he'll be suspicious?”

“Make up a story. Tell him you were with Gollum and got a weird message from me. Tell him you went to the hospital and I wasn't there. Or don't tell him anything. All you need to do is get in. Find a back door. Grab the money and get out. I would do it myself, if I could.”

Connor was quiet for a moment. They had turned off the service road and were bumping around toward the main entrance
again, traveling down a spit of a dirt lane barely wider than the chassis. “Where's the money?” he said quietly.

“In the passenger seat,” she said. “There's a hole under the seat cushion, and a stocking inside of it. It should be there. It was the last time I checked, anyway.”

Dea once again stretched out on the backseat, as Connor angled the car into the lot. She felt suddenly exposed. Every few feet, as they passed under a streetlamp, a bright disk of light swept over her. She eased down into the narrow space between seats, where it was shadowed, where she would be almost entirely concealed from view.

Connor parked and turned off the engine. Voices vibrated thinly through the windows. How many cops worked the county? Ten? Twenty? More? How many of them knew—or thought they knew—about Dea and her mom?

“Stay here.” Connor spoke quietly, without turning his head. “I'm locking the car. Don't open up for anyone.”

“Okay,” she whispered back. She was seized by a momentary terror—she didn't want him to go and leave her alone in the dark. But it was the only way.

He was gone.

Her legs soon began to cramp, but she was afraid to move. There seemed to be a constant flow in and out of the station, a rhythm of voices and doors and conversations abruptly interrupted or swallowed by distance. She tried to picture where Connor was and what he was doing—he must be in the building now, maybe even heading to see his uncle, scouting the building and its various exits on the way—but she was too nervous to be very imaginative, and a vision of Connor sitting in a plain white
room behind two-way glass kept intruding.

Or maybe—the idea came to her so starkly, in a flash, she went breathless—maybe he would sell her out. He might regret helping her.

She dismissed the idea as soon as it came to her, but the worry stayed with her. Her breath crystallized and dispersed, but sweat moved down her spine and pooled under her arms. She fantasized briefly about showers, running water, soap-scented steam rising from a bath. Her mother had always drawn the best baths, the surface knit with bubbles as thick as clots of cream, heavenly smelling.

She imagined she might wake up and find this had all been a dream.

No. A nightmare.

More minutes passed. She was sick with hunger, anxiety, and exhaustion. It felt like she had left the hospital days ago, though it had only been a matter of hours. She couldn't remember whether she'd eaten any lunch. Her right foot was falling asleep. She tried to adjust her position, and caught a textbook with her elbow, wincing as it thunked to the floor, and several papers, water-warped and ringed with coffee marks, fluttered bird-like after it. But no one heard; no one came. Her thighs were shaking now. She eased backward, shifting her weight off her legs, so she could sit down.

Where the hell was Connor? She had no sense of how long it had been. Ten minutes? Twenty? How long would she wait? She could spend the night here, if she had to. But if Connor had been caught, she'd need to move eventually. She wished he'd left the keys. She couldn't possibly stroll out of the car, dressed the
way she was dressed, and hope to make it even a minute without attracting someone's attention.

There was another volley of voices outside, a rapid-fire back-and-forth she couldn't understand, and then suddenly the driver's side door opened.

It was Connor. Even though he had his back to her, she could tell that he was shaking a little from the effort of keeping it together.

“Did you . . . .?” she whispered.

“Shhh,” he said. He turned on the engine. Then: “Yes.” A second later, an envelope thudded at her feet. She pulled it into her lap. All there. Two thousand dollars, maybe a little more.

“Did you have any trouble?” she asked. She was dying to sit up, to stretch out her legs, but she didn't want to move, not until they'd packed miles between the car and the station.

Connor didn't answer. She thought he must not have heard.

“Connor?” she prompted.

He sighed. When he spoke, he suddenly sounded much, much older.

“It's your turn to talk,” he said.