How to Disappear (4 page)

“Thanks, Mom.”

“You’re welcome.” There’s another pause. “And, Jack, I know it’s hard to see him locked in there, but Donny’s still your loving brother. Remember.”

No thanks, Mom.

So maybe the universe did provide.

Slightly.

In the form of a
HELP WANTED
sign in the window of the Bluebonnet Motor Court Motel. A robin’s-egg blue, sagging-roofed building in the middle of a long block anchored by the Five Star on one corner and a bright green Jiffy Taco on the other.

Not that I take this sign as a
sign
. But figuring it for as close to divine signage as I’ll ever get, I make myself walk over there. I have to talk myself through it, like when you’re learning the fox-trot in seventh-grade gym.

Right foot. Left foot.

Face frozen in a pick-me smile even though (when learning
to fox-trot) Connor was going to knock over the other boys to get to me first.

But this is now. Texas. Bluebonnet.
Go!

A buzzer is triggered when the door to the lobby opens.

I’m just this side of jumping out of my skin, scooping it up, and racing back to the dump. I pretend that I’m about to face the panel of judges at a pageant. (I only did one, but it stays with you.)

Pick me.

The lady behind the counter is fiddling with a necklace that says
Luna
in gold cursive letters, watching
Animal Planet
in front of an electric fan upwind of me. A good thing, because even if the paper towel scrub removed the stink, the pink liquid soap left me smelling like a gummy bear. Who hires a gummy bear?

The part I’m not expecting is that when she asks, “What happened to you?” my impulse is to tell her.

Which is bad.

Why does every impulse I ever get have to be bad? I’ve gone so far as to write
DON’T
on my palm just in case I had the sudden impulse to give it up to Connor at spring formal. This was
after
he plowed through half the dance team and I dumped him.

Luna pours iced tea out of a plastic pitcher into a paper cup and slides it across the counter.

“Was it your boyfriend?”

“No!” I say it so loud, it’s like a puppy that scares itself by
sneezing and falls over. Only I tip backward into the lobby’s one chair.

“Oh, honey,” she says. She has a nice Texas twang and a sweet round face. It’s the first second I’ve felt slightly relaxed since it happened. This is also bad. I need to be vigilant, not relaxed.

“The job. Is it still open?”

“Don’t you want to know what it is first?” Then she smiles.

I want to trust her so much, it’s ridiculous. If I had my phone, I’d be typing in memos to self.
Stop trusting people
would top the list. Just after
Hide
.

“If it’s legal, I don’t care what it is.”

And the legal part is probably negotiable.

“Maid,” she says. “You work for tips. Still want it?” I’d nod if bending my head didn’t hurt. “We’re maybe a third full.” Which, given the lack of cars in the lot, might be an exaggeration. “But it’s better on weekends, parents visiting over at the college and such. And there’s a room—not much of a room, but it’s got TV.”

“Yes!” There are times when cleaning out toilets in Texas is right up there with a guided tour of heaven.

“I didn’t say you’re hired. You ever done any heavy cleaning?”

“Tons.”

She gives me a look.

I try again. “I really need this. Things didn’t work out with my boyfriend. As you can see. Please.” My voice catches from hearing myself say this out loud. “If I don’t get work, I’ll have to go back.”

“What did he do, break a chair over your head?”

I don’t even blink. “Biker.”

Any idea that I’m still a trying-to-be-honest, parties-yet-adheres-to-the-Ten-Commandments kind of girl is dead and buried in Ohio.

Luna nods with a look of lie-induced understanding. “You got ID?”

“I got out with what I had on.” Props for thinking on my feet if not for moral rectitude. “But I’m
sure
I could get ID—”

“How old?”

Twenty-one? Everyone who wants to drink says twenty-one. But I don’t want to seem like a high school kid either. A beat-up kid so young that a responsible motel clerk would call up the police so they could come right over.

“Nineteen?”

“What’s your name?”

Why, why, why hadn’t I thought of a name?

I’m staring straight out at the Jiffy Taco three-course Mex-Italian dinner advertised on an easel outside their front door. It’s a pizza pie made out of cheese and tortilla chips, with rice and beans.

I say, “Bean.”
Bean?
“Uh, it’s my nickname.”
Bean???

For the rest of the day, Bean sits on the bed in the maid’s room at the Bluebonnet. Listening to the decrepit ice machine building up power to drop its jagged cubes into the metal tray, wheezing and rumbling until the ice clatters to rest.

Every time the ice drops, her heart stops.

When I pull into the cul-de-sac, the sun is setting purple, and the flames are out. The air is tinged with smoke, and there’s a light rain of ashes. Two fire trucks are blocking the driveway, an ambulance at the ready, lights flashing, in front of the house.

I leave the car in the middle of the street and sprint between the trucks.

My mother is standing in the front yard smiling, ridiculously calm. Her two settings are overly parental and ridiculously calm. Around my dad, the given was that he controlled everything. Once she got out from under his thumb and into the dullness of desert suburbia, her inner control freak was unleashed—largely on me.

She sees me coming and holds up her hand. “It was the clothes dryer. Lots of fuss about nothing.”

Three different firefighters and our next-door neighbor Mrs. Lasky say, “It wasn’t nothing.” The firefighters keep coming out of the side of the house wearing protective gear, carrying blackened objects to the sidewalk.

The image in my head is Don sneering at me. What I thought were empty, stupid words turn out to be this: someone set my house on fire.

As warnings go, it’s impressive. I’m warned. I want to grab my mom and hide her somewhere. Then I want to burn Don, and I want him to know it was me. I can tell myself,
This isn’t who I am,
a thousand times, but I still want to do it.

“Laundry rooms.” The firefighter shakes his head. You’d think that up and down the streets of Summerlin, Nevada, dryers were blowing up.

“Too much lint in the hose,” my mom says as if she believes it. “Probably. Did you know that smoke detector batteries can catch fire spontaneously?”

Sure they can. I ask the firefighter, “Can you check this out? Can you find out what the problem was?”

Because there’s no way there was too much lint in that hose unless someone doused it with accelerant and stuffed it in there. This was all set up and ready to launch if I turned down Don.

Someone did this.

I try to calculate how hard it was to make this happen. What skills were required to walk past three Rottweilers and the motion sensors undetected and make a dryer ignite like clockwork when I
was driving through the desert, halfway between saying no to Don and pulling into my driveway? This has strategy, planning, and execution so far above Don’s pay grade, it’s mind-blowing.

This demonstrates what I grew up knowing:
you can get to anyone, anywhere, anytime if you know what you’re doing.

“It’s not the end of the world, Jack!” my mother says. “You should see your face. If the worst thing that happens to me in my life is I get singed hair, I’m doing fine!”

“You have singed hair!”

Someone set my house on fire when my mother was in it.

I want to stash her in Witness Protection—except we didn’t witness anything, and I’d be ratting out my own brother. She’d never let me rat out Don, even to save herself. If I told her, she’d say I was exaggerating or misinterpreting, anything to avoid seeing reality. I’m the good one, but Don’s the son she’d go to the mat for.

Also, if we disappeared, a bunch of guys who knew my dad would figure that my mom had ratted
them
out and gone into hiding. They’re cool with her being a lawyer who prosecutes industrial polluters. Poisoning rivers isn’t their line of work. But if we vanished, they’d think we’d turned, and they would find us:
Anyone. Anywhere. Anytime.

Witness Protection would be suicide. Calling the police would be suicide. Calling out Karl Yeager would be suicide. Anything but saluting my smug shit of a brother would be a trip to the morgue.

I say to the firefighter, “Aren’t you going to check this out?”

“Don’t worry, kid. No one’s arresting your mom for appliance abuse.” He thinks this is funny.

“Isn’t there going to be an investigation?”

He sighs. “Is there something you want to tell me, son?”

“No, sir.”

New plan: I’m going to find Nicolette Holland.

I’ll tell Don. This girl freaking murdered Connie Marino in the bloodiest possible way. She’s a homicidal cheerleader who crossed Karl Yeager. I’m not letting my mother burn while I stand around watching from the moral high ground.

I’m not saying what I’m going to do when I find Nicolette Holland, but I’m going to keep stalling for time while I figure it out.

I keep my head down, look people over fast, and turn my head away faster.

I become a fan of the $4.99 Jiffy Taco lunch special. You can divide it in half and save the cheese enchilada for dinner. I leave money with Luna in quarters and one-dollar bills. The delivery guy never sees me.

I’m hoarding money, for obvious reasons.

Because when I’m not scrubbing up messes and pulling strips of paper that say
SPARKLING FRESH
across the bowls of newly cleaned toilets, I’m watching crime show reruns about how even if the US Marshals relocate you and give you a new identity, bad guys find you. How even if you’ve been on the
lam as a respectable housewife for forty years after blowing up an ROTC building in 1969, the FBI still finds you.

Every TV show I watch bangs into my head what I already know. Short of locating an armed cult and hiding out in their bunker until the End of Days, I’m toast.

Luna keeps saying, “Bean, sugar, can you please send for your birth certificate and get yourself a new ID? Mrs. Bluebonnet”—that’s what she calls the motel’s owner, who lives in South Carolina and shows up for surprise inspections—“is all, ‘Hire Amurrican, y’all,’ and I have to show her something.”

Where do I get an ID that says my name’s Sabina Magyar? (I told Luna “Sabina” because it was the only girl name I could think of with the sound
Bean
in it. Then she said, “Where’s that from?” And I said, “Hungary,” because why not?
Magyar
means
Hungarian
in Hungarian. I don’t even know how I knew that.)

Where do I get
any
ID?

If I don’t figure it out fast, I’m a lot closer to doom.

I don’t feel that doomed when I’m busy scraping fossilized nachos out of the hallway carpet. But when I need something I can’t get in the lost and found, when my supply of left-behind pink plastic razors runs out, or when I need more quick-change hair dye or tampons or cheap sunglasses that hide half my face, I obsess about whether it’s better to go out after dark (when they can’t see you coming) or in the light (when you can see
them
coming).

I keep finding South Texas emergency numbers taped up in the utility closet. The number for the battered women’s shelter is circled in red.

Bean says, “I’m not a battered woman. It was just that once, when I was trying to leave. It’s just, if he finds me, I’m dead.”

Luna’s completely into it. “He shows up at the Bluebonnet, he’s gonna hear one or two things from me!”

“Luna, no! Say you don’t know me!”

I feel like an idiot for telling her one tiny fragment of the truth.

“I’ll do you one better. He shows up, I’ll text you the second he turns around.”

About getting texts. I’m not sure how you get a cell phone, but I’m pretty sure you need a credit card and money and a lot of other things I don’t have.

I tell her, “Unless Apple’s handing out free phones—”

“You don’t need a fancy phone does tricks,” Luna says. “The market down by Mickey D’s has burners. And they’re cheap, girl.”

Cheap burner phones.

If I had it in me to walk three blocks without a phalanx of bodyguards, I could call Olivia on a totally anonymous, prepaid burner phone.

This is both reassuring and terrifying.

The homeowners’ insurance guy gets one whiff of the burnt laundry room and offers to put us up in a hotel until he gets us “sorted out.” I want to stay on the Strip because of the security. Vegas is twenty minutes away, but my mom isn’t going anywhere. She hands me a can of room freshener—which is like trying to subdue a rhino with a toothpick—and says, “Spray.”

The only way to get this sorted out is if I work something with Don. I have to tell him yes, and he has to get the fire-starter to stop. But you can’t drop in on a guy in prison when it’s not visiting day unless you’re his lawyer. Showing up twice on one visiting day was pushing it.

I’m left praying, white-knuckled, that Don doesn’t screw up and lose his Thursday phone call privilege. I’m banking that whoever
expects me to do this thing is smart enough to let the acrid smell of melted plastic bring me to my knees. I don’t need Yeager’s minions showing up in Summerlin with flamethrowers before I have the chance to tell Don I capitulate.

All I can think to do in the meantime is cyber-stalk Nicolette.

I wasn’t the guy who could hack into INTERPOL during recess in third grade, but in five minutes online, I can tell that Nicolette leaped off the grid the exact moment Don says Connie got stabbed. The next day, Nicolette was gone.

Her friends’ posts read like a collective panic attack. There’s a week of
Nicky! Where are you?????
followed by a bunch of cheerleaders praying for her speedy recovery. From what, her homicidal tendencies?