Escape (2 page)

“She left early,” Natasha explained. “She said something about having coffee downtown before school. Gaia, please, don't worry, okay? I will make a few calls, all right? I will try to find out what we really know. We have to believe that Tom is okay. We have to—”

“I have to go.” Gaia shot up from the bed and headed for the door.

“Gaia, come on, now, don't do that.”

“Let me know how the waiting goes for you.”

Gaia was out the bedroom door before she could even hear a response.
Two different kinds of people, that's all. Just two different kinds of people.

She shot over to her room, shoved a few random books into her bag out of habit, and slipped right back out and down the hall toward the front door. She needed to get downtown and find Tatiana.

But first, there was one more door she needed to open in the house.
One more emotionally baffling, still barely believable, highly complicated door.

Sickly Newborn

THIS HAD ALREADY BECOME SAM'S
favorite part of the morning. The part when he heard her footsteps coming toward the door at that brisk, almost military pace. It was like being a child on a Saturday morning and waking to that first whiff of his dad's French toast. He remembered the smell of butter and cinnamon frying in a huge tarnished copper pan, along with the promise of Japanimation cartoons to follow and then a game of chess in the park. Very few things were as thrilling to Sam as a childhood Saturday morning. But the sound of Gaia's footsteps came awfully close. And right now, lying in his lumpy twin bed, staring up at the dusty ceiling, Sam felt just about as much like a child as he had back then.

He had to admit, this bizarre circumstance did have an unfortunate air of infantilization—just waiting there like a child for Gaia to open the door. In fact, ever since he'd woken up that first morning—the morning after he was sure he had died—he'd felt like
some kind of sickly newborn.
That was what it had felt like. Like he was some premature newborn trapped inside an incubator and denied just about all human contact—certainly the kind of contact he'd needed. He'd needed a gentle hand to wake him and tell him he was alive instead of the cold, gruff voices
and sharp needles of his prison guards. He'd needed someone to talk to, maybe even cry to, instead of four white walls and a mattress that seemed to be made out of bricks and mortar. Sam had had no idea that resurrection could be so lonely.

But of course, he wasn't being altogether honest with himself. It wasn't really a mother's touch he'd yearned for in that cell. It wasn't just any gentle touch he'd imagined a thousand times over. It was Gaia's touch.
Only Gaia's.

Her knuckles rapped against the door, tapping out the secret signal. Sam leapt from his bed, knocking over three books and four magazines that were only a fraction of the mess that had surrounded him like a dusty fortress in the bed. He turned the knob, releasing the flimsy lock on the door, and stepped back to let Gaia in.

God, she was a vision. It was the exact same sensation every time he saw her—ever since he'd seen her face lying next to his, half passed out by the West Side Highway. The truth was, lying all those weeks in Loki's cold, ascetic compound, half conscious from morphine and whatever else they were giving him, Sam had honestly wondered from time to time whether it was all just some kind of dream. He'd considered it a very real possibility that he
was
in fact dead and that the compound was nothing other than a purgatory of sorts—some halfway nightmare place he'd been consigned to until they'd made up his room for him in
heaven. But when he'd opened his eyes and seen Gaia's face just inches from his own, sprawled out in the dirt by that highway. . . that was the first time he'd truly believed that he wasn't dead. That was when he knew she was no longer the imagined Gaia of his dreams or his memories. She was the
real
Gaia, with that lightly freckled, delicately chiseled face that no memory could possibly do justice to. Every time he saw her again, it was like waking up from a dream.

“Are you okay?” Gaia whispered, closing the door behind her and locking it.

“I'm fine,” Sam replied. “Why?”

“You just looked weird. I thought it was your back again.”

“No, my back is fine,” Sam assured her. “No pain today. No pain at all.” Sam had paused for a moment to breathe her in completely, when he suddenly realized that Gaia was the one who looked strange. Every muscle in her face had tensed up, not to mention her fidgeting fingers and her tapping right heel. “Are
you
okay?”

“No,” she said absentmindedly, looking back toward the door. “No, I'm not.”

Sam was struck by a powerful impulse to wrap his arms around her. So he slid a pair of his wrinkled khaki pants on over his boxers and sat down in the chair next to the bed.

This was basically the system he'd been using since being hidden away in her apartment. It was an incredibly
simple system, really. Every time his body ached to get closer to her, he stepped farther away.
Because he didn't know what else to do.
Because there was no book called
How to Come Back from the Dead and Rekindle a Romance.
Hell, Sam wasn't even sure there
was
a romance to rekindle. Things had been such a disastrous mess between them before he had. . . “died.” They'd had nothing but miscommunication and arguments for weeks, all thanks to the torture Josh Kendall had put him through. Gaia and Sam had broken up with almost nothing left to salvage of their relationship. But now. . .

Now Josh was dead. Now Loki was a vegetable in some hospital bed somewhere—talk about poetic justice. Yes,
they
were both basically dead, and
Sam
was alive. Now had almost nothing to do with then. It was
as if the earth's clock had been set back to before Sam's “death.”
And as far as Sam was concerned, if they could set the clock back to before his death, well, then why not set the clock back just a little further? Set it back to before Sam had ever met Josh Kendall. To before Gaia's uncle had begun to sink his claws into Sam. Set it back to when he and Gaia were just in love. When there was nothing dangerous about being in love.

The only question was, did Gaia want to set the clock back that far? Even if she did want to, was she ready to? Sam couldn't tell. He could certainly tell that
she was maintaining a certain degree of distance from him, but she could have been doing it for so many different reasons. After all, if you'd already seen someone disappear, it must be awfully hard to believe they might not disappear again. You couldn't have love without trust. And
how could you trust a man who'd al ready up and died on you once?

All Sam knew was that he wasn't going to rush anything. He was prepared to carry on in this isolated, untouched, infantilized, incubator-prison world of awkwardness. Just as long as he saw her every single day.

“Well, what's wrong?” Sam asked. “What's going on?”

“It's my father. . . ,” Gaia began, and then she trailed off. From out of absolute nowhere a tear had appeared on her cheek. She dumped her bag on the floor and crouched down against the wall, burying her head in her hands for a half second before visibly forcing herself to regain her composure.

Sam had no choice but to glue his fingers to the arms of his chair. The desire to crouch down next to her and hold her was like some kind of preprogrammed hypnotic command. His fingernails were turning white from clenching the cushy arms of the chair, but he knew a physical gesture would only turn into an awkward disaster.

“I'm sorry,” she uttered.

“No,” Sam said gently, feeling like he was calling to her from a hundred miles away, even though the room
was the size of the average rich man's closet. “Just tell me what it is. Tell me what I can do.”

“I don't
know,”
she replied. Her frustration was clearly near the boiling point. “I don't know exactly what's going on, but I know Dad is in trouble. They
took
him, Sam. They took him from the hospital. And I have no idea where. I don't know where he is and I have no idea who ‘they' are.”

Sam felt a flash of pure empathy for Gaia's father. He pictured her father being carried away with nothing to think about but how far he was being taken from his family—how far he was being taken from Gaia. Sam knew every one of those sensations far too well.

“Well. . . we have to find him,” Sam declared. “That's all. We need to start looking for him right now. We don't want to waste any time.”

Gaia froze for a moment and looked up at Sam. This rather obvious reply seemed to strike her in some surprisingly deep way, as if Sam had somehow said the thing she'd been longing to hear, even though he couldn't really imagine what else there could possibly be to say. If someone was missing, what else did you do but start looking immediately? Didn't they always say that the first forty-eight hours were some kind of critical period for finding missing persons? But still, Gaia's face had seemed to light up when he said it.
Like he'd just solved some riddle she'd been mulling over all morning.

“Yes,” she said, showing the first faint signs of a smile since she'd walked through the door. “Yes, that's right.
Right now.
I need to start looking right—”

“We,”
Sam corrected her.
“We
need to start looking.”

Gaia's smile faded from her face. “Sam. . . you don't need to be involved in any more of—”

“Gaia.” Sam searched her eyes for some common sense, trying to ignore their mesmerizing shade of ocean blue so as to complete his sentences. “Whoever the hell I'm hiding from right now is out there somewhere. And I'd be willing to bet my second life on the fact that those same people have something to do with whatever is going on with your dad. So
we
need to start looking for him, Gaia.
We
.”

Gaia stared into Sam's eyes. And she kept staring. She stared long enough to confuse him terribly and make his heart beat twice as fast. The longer she looked, the quicker his heart beat.

“What?” he asked finally, praying for her to blurt out a
ten-minute monologue
about how much she loved him—how much she'd
always
loved him and had dreamed about him every night he was gone the exact same way he had dreamed about her. . . .

“I don't know,” she said, lifting her bag off the floor. That wasn't what he'd had in mind. “I'm just. . . I need to talk to Tatiana. I need to—”

“Look, Gaia . . .” Sam stood up from his chair and took a step closer to her, trying not to make her feel
cornered. “I want to help you. And I need you to help me. If this is still your uncle doing this, then we both need to know that. If he's just a vegetable in a coma, then we need to figure out who
is
doing it. Either way. . . we . . .” Sam felt his throat beginning to close. “We
need
each other,” he stated finally. He suddenly felt like he was wobbling wildly on a tightrope, waiting for her response.

Gaia dropped her head down toward her scuffed-up sneakers. The silence was unbearable. “I know, Sam,” she uttered at last. “I know we do.”

Sam felt his entire spine light up.
Taking risks was beginning to grow on him.

“Why don't we meet up?” he went on, a bit too excitedly. “After you've talked to Tatiana or after you're done with whatever you need to do. Tonight. In my palatial headquarters here. And we can go over it all. We can go over what we know and what we don't know. We can try to plot out a strategy to find your dad.”

Gaia took another moment and then looked up at Sam with a simple half smile that made him nearly lose his balance again. “Okay,” she said. “Okay, you're right. We need a strategy.”

Sam breathed out comfortably. “Seven-thirty?” he asked.

“Seven-thirty,” she agreed. There was a brief, indefinable pause before she spoke again. “I have to go, okay?” “Okay.” Sam smiled slightly and then backed away
toward his chair. He felt like grinning from ear to ear, which made him a little sick. They weren't going to the movies, for God's sake,
they were meeting to discuss a litany of horrible tragedies.
He was just ecstatic that he had managed to earn a little bit of her trust back.

An Army of Thirsty Penguins

GAIA COULDN'T IMAGINE WHY TATIANA
would be so utterly stupid as to hang out at the Astor Place Starbucks before school. She'd told Tatiana at least ten times that the Village School's “master clique,” aka the Friends of Heather, aka the “FOHs,” gathered there in hordes at seven forty-five. They piled into Starbucks like an
army of thirsty penguins
—swaddled in black and white from head to toe, waddling around with their ice-cold attitudes, preening themselves endlessly, chirping frantically at ear-shattering frequencies, and
guzzling down grande lattes like they were about to become extinct.

Gaia would have to try and dart in unnoticed, fish
Tatiana out of the nightmarish squall, and get her safely over to Taylor's Bakery, where they could have coffee priced within their economic bracket and actually hear each other talk.

As she approached the corner of Astor and Lafayette, she could already see through the floor-to-ceiling windows that the penguin show had begun. Starbucks was packed. She took a deep breath, ducked her head, swung open the door, and entered the storm.

The chirping stung her ears as she slid past the painful snippets of profoundly idiotic conversation.

“Does my nose look fat today. . . ?”