Run and Hide (10 page)

Three knocks, harder and more separated, attacked the shack’s front door as I sat upright on the blankets. Thanks to years of dirt buildup, there was nothing visible through the windows.

Two knocks.

“Ana.” Only a whisper.

I was going insane. What was happening? A dream, a daydream? Had I been drugged?

“Ana?”

I didn’t move, didn’t breathe.

The slow creak of the handle sent my heart rate to sprint. My feet, legs, torso, arms, hands began to shake. Gently at first, and then violently as I experienced an extent of fear I hadn’t known to exist.

Another creak followed; the front door had been opened. From my room I could see nothing, but I stared in the direction of the bedroom door that led to the main part of the house. A faint blue light was exposed through the seam between the bottom of the wood door and wooden floor. One footstep, then another, and then a third. I couldn’t run anywhere; I couldn’t hide without passing through the part of the house the intruder was in. I couldn’t move.

“Hello?” the voice whispered, and I squeezed my eyes closed and hoped with everything I had that whoever it was wouldn’t find me.

The handle to my room’s door turned. And the door flung open. My heart froze, as did my feet, legs, torso, head, arms, and hands as a tall male holding a lighted cell phone stepped into my room and shined the light on my face.

“Ana?”

I hadn’t dreamed it. The person
was
speaking my name. I glanced at his body, horrified, and slowly my emotion transformed from fear, to confusion, to shock, then back to fear again. I couldn’t see his face, but was certain of the tall man wearing black jeans and a plain black t-shirt in front of me. And he was staring at me. I reached for my phone, and gulped as I shined its light toward the intruder. And there Eric Brantley stood.

Searching with his own phone’s light, he saw the entire room: blankets, clothes, me sleeping—and the sight seemed to daze him. His face turned solid and unmoving, his body stiff and still. I tried to think of a word to begin the multitude of thoughts that had poured into my brain, the overwhelming flush of them that was dominating the moment. My head was shaking, and my eyes were frantically searching the room, as if some answer were to be found hidden in the cracks of the walls. No answer came, and no words came. I breathed heavily, eyes wide, and moved constantly, spastically.

“What is this?” His voice wasn’t as deep as usual. In fact it grew higher with every word.

“Get out.” They were the only words I could force out of my mouth, and once they were out, they felt right. I let my feelings escape through my voice and volume. “Get out of here now! Go, just go, go, get out!”

With each word I had moved closer and closer to him. I crawled for a step or two before standing, and when I stood my speed increased.

“Ana, calm down, what the hell—?”

“Get out!”

By this time I’d reached where he stood, despite his attempts to back away from me. I pushed him with all my strength, once. The emotion had found another release. I pushed again, just as hard and just as fast, but when he recovered again I pushed and didn’t let go. My fists screwed into two spots in his t-shirt and I wrung them in my hands while I pushed even harder. I bent my knees to let my legs aid the force I pushed him with, and he did all he could to loosen my grip, soften my push, dodge my force.

“Get out, what are you doing here, go! Go now!”

I couldn’t control anything I was doing, the emotion—the indescribable emotion with an uncountable number of ingredients—had taken over my body and my judgment. That emotion soon found yet another escape path. Tears formed and fell with consistency, with pain. They turned my voice raw, animalistic. They turned me insane.

Behind the screams of my tantrum I could hear Eric’s voice pleading, “Ana calm down! Calm down please, I’m sorry. Chill out, come on. Ana, please.”

Finally I stopped yelling. I had gotten him through the bedroom door and almost to the front door he’d left open. I attempted to push, shove, throw him back through. He caught his balance just as he reached the doorframe.

“Chill, okay. I just saw you walking the opposite way from your house so I followed you to make sure you were okay, and then you came here and …” He was practically yelling, as if trying to recollect the series of events in his brain.

“Just leave!” I cried to him. Literally. Everything in my body and mind genuinely wished he would concede.

A tremor rang in his voice as he begged me again, “Please, Ana.”

I threw my hand against my forehead, so hard the impact caused pain. My head turned away from him as more tears and sobs pushed the emotions out.

“Calm down,” he said. “Breathe.”

No, no, no.
My knees crumbled beneath me and I fell like cloth to the floor, where I hugged one knee and let the other leg stretch out aimlessly away from me. I must have spoken the thought aloud, loud enough for Eric to understand.

“Why?” he begged, “Ana, what’s wrong? Why are you in here, sleeping?” He moved over to me and knelt beside me, cradling my limp body. I let him shelter me.

He sat, and guided my head onto the soft part of his shoulder, bending his neck so his head lay on top of mine. The worst of the emotion had gone, so much so, I could actually begin to understand the levels of pain I was enduring. Embarrassment, failure, uselessness, weakness, grief. He let me cry while he stroked my back in silence for a time I couldn’t measure.

“I live here,” I told him finally, no reason left to lie.

“Why?”

“My mom died.” It was the root of everything.

“Can you explain?”

Why not?

I told him all of it. My dad’s mummification, my forging of letters and documents, my doctor aunt who claimed she couldn’t be my aunt, my cowardice, and my finding and squatting in the shack. I told him about the bus ride from Georgia and how I didn’t want people to know me. I explained my trips to the gas station, and the way I’d been living. I explained that Ludlowe and Ms. Hawthorne were watching me closely and I was running out of time to come up with a guardian. The only thing I didn’t tell him was my name—to him I was still Ana.

“Ana, you don’t have to live here alone, there must be other options.”

“Like what.”

“Like the doctor, you can go confront her again and tell her the whole story. I’ll even go with you if you need it. Either way we’ll find you a place to live. You can’t live here.”

I responded with a sniffle. “Talk about you,” I begged.

He didn’t protest as I thought he might, and let out a short sigh.

“I live in a home with one woman and six guys including me. The woman is my mother, four of the guys are my brothers, I am the fifth, and the sixth is my mother’s ‘friend’ who disappears whenever Dad’s about to come home.” He startled me when he said this, but I stifled my sniffles and kept still, letting the sound of his heartbeat on my cheek add rhythm to the melody of his voice.

“My mom is forty-three. Isaiah, her friend, is thirty-two, I’m sixteen and my brothers are fourteen, thirteen, eleven and eight. My dad works in Beijing and is paid good money, so I just work for spending cash, and something to do. I like most people, and people generally like me, primarily because I don’t ever let them get too close, but I don’t have friends, only acquaintances. Sometimes I just say stuff to shock people, to make them wonder.” He waited for me to respond with words, but I just nodded and encouraged him to keep talking. So he did.

“I said I was giving up dating, too, after first semester sophomore year. All the girls I’d dated got bored with me, just like I became bored with them. My only close friend is my youngest brother. He looks up to me, and I watch over him. Literally. He’s four foot five. My other brothers are just … bad. They screw around in school, get in trouble all the time, get bad grades, fight, all that stuff. Regardless of how much I try to talk to them, they just all want to act out, and given our ridiculous family life I can’t really blame them. Mom has had her friend in and out of the house since most of them were little. I was older, thirteen, the first time I ever saw them together. At least I was old enough to kind of understand. My brothers were too young to be exposed to what she does. But then again, I don’t know if you can ever get old enough for that.

“She tells us not to ever say the name ‘Isaiah’ around Dad. One time she slapped me when I told her I would. I tried not to laugh at her pitiful attempt at acting like a mother. And since then I have been and forever will be the demon child.”

His voice trailed off and his mind left the conversation. I placed my hand on his chest and felt his broad torso. I looked up at him. How had he concealed so much underneath those plain tees and hoodies?

“What about your dad?” I asked, desperate to bring him back. “What’s he like?”

“He’s fine. When he’s home, he’ll take all of us fishing down in South Carolina. He buys us each a gift and buys my mom two. Mom acts like she could never have eyes for another man when he’s around, and so we all pretend.”

I took in the words he said and felt amazed. He had shared so much with me. He was even making me feel better, less weird. Less stupid.

“You should go to sleep,” he told me, and he was right. It startled me how right he was.

“What time is it?”

He slid his phone up and the blue light shone up onto his face. “Twelve forty-five.”

“Oh my gosh, don’t you need to be home?”

“Mom just assumes I’m at a friend’s house. Honestly, I don’t even have to leave here, she wouldn’t know or care.”

I lay down as he suggested and he pulled the blanket over me up to my shoulders. He tapped his fingers on the floor before he leaned away and stood to leave.

“Goodnight.” He began walking toward the door.

“Eric,” I called.

He turned to meet my gaze in the darkness. “Yeah?”

“Stay?”

I could see the smirk even in the absence of light. “You and your mixed signals.”

He wasn’t in the room.

“Eric?” I called, to no answer. I realized I was sweating just as I realized how hot and humid the air was. I pulled off the blanket and a piece of notebook paper folded hamburger-style fell from it, onto the ground to my left. I crawled over to retrieve it, and his barely legible handwriting revealed the following:

I happened to roll over and wake up at about four, and realized how dumb it was to leave my car parked outside. Not suspicious at all, right? I’m going to leave so I won’t bring any extra attention, you know. Text me when you wake up.

He wrote his number below that and finished the note off with:

I hope those eyes are all dried up now.

I hurried to grab my phone and add him as a new contact, and as I entered his last name to save it, it shocked me to see that it was already eleven forty.

Hey, it’s Ana.

It was Sunday, and I had homework to do, that was,
if
I could manage going back to school knowing Ludlowe and Hawthorne would be watching my every move and waiting to pounce. I grabbed a pair of jeans I’d already worn and swapped them with the pajama pants I slept in. I was running out of clean clothes.

In the bathroom I brushed through my hair, made it hang nicely against the sides of my face as a heavy breath left my nostrils. Satisfied, I headed back to the bedroom to grab my bag. I left the shack thinking of last night, relieved to have one person to share the whole mess with—even if it wasn’t the smartest decision ever to let him in.

When I closed the front door, the staggering heat flushed over me and it hurt my skin, but I continued down the front steps. As soon as my shoes were on the hot asphalt of the road, my phone vibrated against my leg.

Startled, I grabbed it and slid it open to answer the call … revealing the word “Dad.” I had just answered a call from my father. I hung up quickly, not prepared to speak to him, not wanting to. He would probably just think the call had dropped. Sure enough, less than a minute down the road I felt the vibrating again. This time, I viewed the outside screen first. “Dad” was what showed, and I let it ring. I hoped he wouldn’t leave a voicemail.

At the gas station, I brushed my teeth and bought breakfast—this time, a bagel, granola bar, and bottle of orange juice. I realized the younger clerk who always watched me with a magnifying glass must only work on the weekdays, because I was looking at an old, round, bald man with a couple of missing teeth. He was nice, but I was learning to be more suspicious of everyone.

Back in the shack, I wished I’d bought a couple of bottled waters and an ice pack. It was way too hot for no air conditioning. The air inside almost felt worse than outside. I felt another, shorter vibration on my leg and I checked the front screen.

“1 New Message.” I opened the message, and it was Eric.

How are you eating, and washing yourself, getting around? Can you send me a list of the things you need?

Could we go somewhere … with ac?
I responded.

Pick you up in ten.

Eight minutes later he called me to say, “Come outside.”

Strange, the entire interaction. Things had changed so rapidly in the past forty-eight hours. Friday morning I had pretty much eliminated, or at least neutralized, all the imminent threats to my secret. Now, Ludlowe and Ms. Hawthorne clawed at my brain as they worried and pressured me, and I was hopping into Eric’s car. Eric, who now knew everything about everything, and was determined to help.

As I walked up to the car, he smiled widely, and I plopped into his passenger seat.

“Wal-Mart okay?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said. I leaned back into the car’s leather seat and enjoyed the jazz that lingered in the background. When he pressed the gas, the towering trees beside us swayed to the jazz in the speakers, sunlight dancing in between their branches. It felt almost like life again. Almost like I wasn’t hiding anymore.

But the drive to Wal-Mart was short. We parked, and the jazz cut off as the engine did. We stepped out into the weight of heat that the Carolina sun was spreading with pride. And I looked over to Eric, realizing I was trusting him with my whole world.

When we walked into Wal-Mart, he turned right and led us into the McDonald’s inside. I chose a seat by the window, and he pulled out the chair beside it so he could sit, and I revealed the gas-station meal I had brought with me.

“You should get something too,” I suggested.

“I am pretty hungry,” he said. “Be right back.”

He walked to the counter, and I heard him ordering a sausage biscuit meal while I sipped my orange juice and enjoyed the relief of the cool air inside. I watched him fidget and tap his foot while he waited for the woman behind the counter to hand him his food. Why was I here with him? What was I doing?

Once he’d gotten his order, he turned around, about-face style, and rushed back to our table.

“All right, give me just a second …” Applying jelly to the two halves of the fluffy biscuit that wrapped the processed sausage, he moved swiftly, then when he finished, he looked up at me expectantly. “Okay, let’s see what we can do to get you taken care of.”

I chuckled at his militant tone. “Well, to answer your questions, I bathe after school in the gym showers—I used to bathe in the gas station, with paper towels, but the clerk found me out last week. Scariest thing ever. And I still don’t know what to do about weekends yet …” I realized I’d just told him that I hadn’t showered since Friday. Pushing my nose into my shoulder as if I had an itch, I took a secretive sniff. No smell. Thank God.

Eric nodded and chewed, then wiped spilled jelly from his lower lip. I had the floor.

“I still buy food at the gas station. Hence this delicious breakfast.” I waved my hand in front of my bag of food as if displaying a prize on a game show. “But I’m running out of money.” I looked at the ground, then took out my bagel and bit it. “What else had you asked?”

“How you get around.”

“Oh yeah, that one’s easy. I walk.”

He nodded again, and I forbid my face from showing any expression as he examined it. “What about laundry? I remember there was that pile of clothes in the corner.”

“Yeah.” I hoped the reason he noticed wasn’t because they smelled. “I’m still not sure about that one actually.”

“I know of this Laundromat over near Archdale, I can drive you up there on Saturday mornings, I think they’re closed on Sundays.” The solution was perfect, except it meant I would be dependent on him. The line between
what the hell, why not?
and
too far
was blurring.

“But this is only temporary,” he added, “we’re going to talk to your aunt, well maybe your aunt, next week. We’ve got to convince her to help you out.”

How far was he letting his fascination with me go?

“You don’t have to do all of this. Throwing out ideas is fine, but I can handle myself.”

“Anything to get me out of the house.” He looked at me and smiled before reverting his attention to the warm hash browns he would soon attack. “And I want to be one person you can actually rely on, you know.”

The realization hit me like a bullet and I tensed. I leaned all the way back in my chair. “I don’t want to depend on you.”

“What do you mean?” He stopped chewing and glared at me.

“You can’t get attached,” I said. He could still ruin everything. All he had to do was tell one person the truth, and Ana was gone. Sydney—mortified. All he had to do was tell me one lie, and everything would crumble.

“I need to go,” I said bluntly and stood to leave. I grabbed my half-empty juice bottle and bag, throwing the bag away as I walked toward the exit.

Eric stood abruptly, finishing a bite, and rushed after me. Speed walking, I got all the way out of the Wal-Mart before he caught up to me and grabbed hold of my elbow.

“So this is what you do, huh?”

“
Excuse
me?”

“You pull me in, and you give me just a taste. Just enough to make me ask for more, and then you run again.”

“I’m leaving, Eric.”

“I come, you run, right? You’re used to running.”

“I have to run!” I yelled at him, turning to face him as he wiped the last of the hash brown crumbs from his face.

“No you don’t.” he pleaded, and it was instantly fact. “And I can tell you’re getting tired of it. I’m not here to screw you over, Ana, I promise.”

I crossed my arms and hugged my waist. “Don’t promise me anything.” My voice was stone yet my eyes deceived me as they quivered, threatening approaching tears.

“Ana, what …” His voice was frustrated, but for whatever reason his facial expression took pity on my conflicted mind. “I’m driving you home, you don’t even know where to go from here.”

He let go of my elbow, letting his hand slide down my forearm in the process, only to let it slither between my fingers at the bottom of the descent. He held firmly and led me—the unwillingly willing tower of pudding I was sure would topple over any second—to his car parked a few rows to the right of the entrance and a few spaces back.

“You know I just let a lot of perfectly good hash browns go to waste for you.”

He opened the passenger door and I sat inside. I looked at him but he wasn’t looking back. He closed the door, and I stared out the window to the right of me as he circled and got in the other side. We sat silent for a moment. He didn’t turn the car on just yet.

“What do you want me to do, Ana?” he asked, almost yelling it, exasperated.

“Just take me home.”

“I want to help you–”

“I’m screwed up. No one should be pulled into this … this place I’m in right now. Not for any guilt, or charity, or crush or whatever this is.” He saw the bubble of water that floated above my bottom eyelids, and stared at me for a moment without speaking, hands firm on the steering wheel even though the car still wasn’t on. His hands were sweating, as was the rest of him. I let my eyes trace the veins that showed through the skin on his hands and arms. I then noticed the sweat drizzling from my own forehead, the usual with him, only partly provoked by the steaming air outside.

“
This
is none of those you just listed off,” he said.

The ignition was cranked before I could say another word. Backing out of the parking spot, he replaced his jazz CD with a rock one and turned the volume up so loud I couldn’t hear my thoughts anymore. It made me forget whatever it was I was so upset about. I watched him listen, sipping the screeching sounds his speakers spoon-fed to him like cough medicine. He laid his head back against the headrest and took long, slow, breaths. Noting his newfound serenity, I followed his lead and relaxed my neck, letting it cradle into the shape of the seat. Then I turned to watch the trees pass by again.

“Oh … shit” I heard him say.

“What?”

We were pulling up to the shack when he turned down the blaring screech of electric guitar and drums.

“What is it?” I begged again, and then thought to check out our surroundings. A red car sat parked some way ahead, but right beside the road, in the corner of the intersection. Its lights were off, but a black shadow of a person was visible inside.

“It’s okay,” Eric said, to comfort me, but I didn’t hear him. I was busy scanning the shack with my eyes for any sign that someone else had been inside it.

“Oh my gosh, what are they doing here?”

“I don’t know. No one’s usually around here, right?”

“No, never. What’s around here? Oh this is just perfect.”

I pressed my hands into my forehead and stared into my lap. Entangled trees covered each side of the road except where the shack stood; okay, it probably wasn’t anything to worry about, but what would any person need to stop on this road for?

“If people come around here, this place is too dangerous for you to be staying.”

“Oh, thanks Eric. I had no idea people seeing me would be dangerous. What am I supposed to do?”

“Look, I’m just saying. I don’t think you should go in now. They might see.”

“Well, where can I go?”

“I’ll just drive someplace. You’ll have to stick with me for another hour or so.”

I glanced at him when he said that, but he kept his eyes focused on the bright red car ahead of us as we drove closer to it.

“You really think it’s that big a deal?” I asked as we approached and passed the shack. “Can’t we just … circle around and hope he leaves?”

We were passing the car then, and I could see the man inside much more clearly than before. He was unfolding a large map that he’d spread over his lap and dashboard.

“He’s lost,” Eric said.

I shrank into the seat and looked away from the man while Eric nodded and smiled at the man, who must have noticed us passing.

“We better wait a while to come back. All it takes is one person to think something’s suspicious enough to call the cops.”

He was right. What would I have done if I were alone? Walk back to the gas station? To Radio Shack?