Run (10 page)

I wonder if she’s going to make me dig for every detail.

She is.

“Like?” I ask.

“He had friends in the sheriff’s office. Some people who made evidence disappear.”

“But why didn’t he just leave her alone?”

She grips my hand tighter. Almost hurting tight. “Because she had something he wanted.”

“What?” I ask, trying to get her to release me. “What did he want?”

Aunt Ginger keeps her eyes fastened to mine as she tries to read me like a book. I give her nothing. Her eyes glisten with tears.

“You,” she finally says. “He said he wanted
you
.”

Chapter Eight

Cash: $34.50 (I found a ten on the dresser).

Food: OK, if you like homestyle, which I do.

Shelter: Our aunt’s house for now.

Weapons: Gun, scissors, ice pick.

Plan: The same. Find Mom. Kill Dad.

THERE IS NO AIR IN the room. Not a single molecule of oxygen. I let out a gasp and Aunt Ginger is all over me. I don’t need CPR and I push her away. While I understand what she said, I still feel like the room is spinning and I’m unable to grab ahold of its meaning.

He wanted you.

“Honey,” Aunt Ginger says. “Honey, are you all right? Put your head between your knees.”

Of course I’m not all right. And I’m not putting my head between my knees. I’m beginning to wonder if Mom ran away from Aunt Ginger that first time because she was bossy and annoying and caring at the same time.

“I’m fine,” I finally say as Aunt Ginger makes a move toward the kitchen. She is a streak of long hair and she leaves a trail of concern as she hurries back with some water.

“Drink this,” she says. “You’re upset. You’re dehydrated.”

I want to say that everything she said is true. I also want to say that in the past twenty-four hours I’ve lost my mom, pulled a knife from my dead stepfather’s chest, found out that my bio dad was a serial killer, and not only did he want my mom, he wants me. Add Idaho to the list and just about anyone could see that I had ample reason to feel the way I did. Upset didn’t cover it.

“Thanks,” I say. “It’s just hard to take in all of this.”

“I know, honey. I can only imagine.”

I have calmed down now. I don’t know this woman, this sister of my mom, the aunt that I never knew I had, but I do know right then that she only means well. I see the lines around her eyes, the circles that underscore the anxiety that has held her captive since her sister disappeared.

“What do you mean he wanted me?”

“He found out that your mom had gotten pregnant,” she says, looking deeply into my eyes. “He made it known that he felt that you belonged to him.”

I feel a rush of bile. I could never belong to that rapist. I belonged to the dad who raised me. The dad that my creep of a bio father has murdered. I can’t speak for a moment, and looking down I see my hands shake a little.

My silence makes Aunt Ginger uncomfortable. She looks down to one of those old-time braided rugs that has probably been there since the day she and her husband—whoever he was—moved there.

“Rylee. I was there when he came for her  …  and for you.”

THE HOSPITAL MATERNITY WARD HAD the shiniest floors Ginger could imagine. A mirror finish, she thought. Their mother was too embarrassed about her daughter’s condition to be there for her, so Ginger volunteered to be Courtney’s birthing coach. Although she was still sixteen when she delivered, Courtney seemed to be a trooper about the whole thing. After an agonizing—and a little boring—wait for contractions to quicken, the birthing process went off without much of a hitch. Certainly there was screaming and the kind of facial contortions that suggest an imminent demise, and then a baby girl who’d been conceived in darkness was handed from her aunt to her mother.

Courtney didn’t look at the baby right away.

“I’m glad it’s a girl,” she said.

“I was hoping for that too. Look at her. She’s beautiful.”

Courtney was scrunched up in the bed as a whirlwind of hospital staff flitted about pulling bloody sheets, clamping this and that, stitching here and there.

“I can’t look. If I look, I might see him in her.”

Tears leaked from her eyes.

“She doesn’t.”

“It will make it harder to give her up.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I am afraid.”

“I know, honey.”

AS THE STORY AUNT GINGER tells plays out, I find out more about my mother and my life; and it illuminates so much of what has been hidden in the orchestrated turmoil of our lives. I remember one time when we were watching an episode of
Teen Mom
on TV and the girl who’d just had a baby was talking about giving it up for adoption.

“I could never do that,” I said.

“If it is best for the child,” Mom replied, “then it is what’s best for you. I know people who have considered doing it because, well, it was the only thing to do that was right.”

“Ditching your kid? How could that ever be right? I mean, they shouldn’t have got pregnant in the first place.”

“You’re right, but sometimes mistakes happen. Sometimes pregnancies are anything but planned.”

I knew Mom had me young. She told me she was eighteen, but now I know she was sixteen. I thought she’d been married to my father, the war hero, but that was a lie too.

“I know people who have made the decision to keep their babies and have regretted it,” she had said. “I know others who contemplated the same thing and they now hate themselves for ever having thought so.”

I wonder now where I fell on the spectrum my mother had laid bare. Had she regretted keeping me? Had I been the mistake that ruined her life?

AUNT GINGER FIDDLES WITH THE fringe of a burnt-orange colored afghan and continues her story. I pull myself from the memory of my mysterious mother and listen. I am calm now. Riveted really. I know that Aunt Ginger is in the middle of a set of memories charged with emotion and fear. It shows plainly on her face, in the quick movements of her fidgety fingers. I wonder how many times she’s told this story. I suspect not many. I suspect no one but her, my mother and my biological father know the truth about how I started life.

“SHE LOOKS LIKE YOU, COURTNEY. She looks like you!”

Courtney removed a cool compress from her brow and looked down as her sister placed her baby next to her. Her breasts had nearly tumbled out of the sheet, and though she was modest, she didn’t care. Her eyes were transfixed by the slightly pinched, pink face of the creature that had just emerged from her tattered womb in one slippery final push.

“Hello, little girl,” she said.

“She’s your baby. Not his,” Ginger whispered next to her.

But a nurse caught the remark and shook her head.

“None of my business,” she said, “but sometimes it’s good to have a man around. At least for child support, if nothing else.”

Ginger almost sneered at the nurse. “That’ll never happen. Not with this man.”

“Just trying to be helpful. None of my business.”

“You’re right. None.”

Courtney wasn’t paying attention to the conversation between her sister and the nurse. She was off somewhere else. She was holding her baby, looking down into the unfocused eyes that now latched on to hers with tentative uncertainty.

“I love you, baby of mine,” she said. “I’ll never let you go. I’ll never let anyone hurt you. Never.”

AUNT GINGER STOPS HER STORY. She’s folded the afghan and she’s stiffening her body in a way that indicates she’s about to get up. Like the story is over. But it isn’t. It didn’t get to the part that I want to know about. I don’t want, don’t need, to know that she almost gave me up. I need to know how it was that my biological father, this Alex Rader, staked a claim for me.

“You can’t stop now,” I say, too forcefully, and I see her bristle slightly. I try to backpedal to soften my words. “That didn’t come out right, Aunt Ginger. What I meant to say, is I really need to know and you’re the only one who can tell me. I’ve spent my life with Mom—alone at first, then with Dad, and then Hayden—but now only Hayden remains. I need to know everything. I need to find my mom.”

My words are like grenades to Aunt Ginger’s heart. I feel bad about that but what can I do? I don’t know her at all. I don’t know if she’s a liar like my mom. I sense that she’s holding back because she cares about me.

“Look,” she finally says, blinking back my words. “It happened at the hospital. A security guard, a policeman, I’m not really sure who or what he was. He told your mom. I was there.”

“What did he tell her?” I ask.

She starts talking.

THE LAST VISITORS HAD LEFT for the night. They weren’t there for Courtney, but for a Mexican woman named Celina who’d had a son the previous afternoon. In marked contrast to Courtney, who had not had a single visitor outside of Ginger, Celina had a steady stream of well-wishers. All were boisterous, joyful. All came with gifts, flowers, and the best intentions for the newest member of her family.

Courtney had not a single tulip on her side of the room.

As Ginger stood to leave, she bent down and kissed her sister.

“We’ll get through this,” she said.

“I know  …  for her.” Courtney indicated the still-unnamed baby in a clear Lucite incubator next to Courtney’s bed.

The door pushed open and a man in a dark blue and gray uniform poked his head into the room. In his arms, a bouquet of red roses, sixteen in all.

“Special delivery,” he said without a smile.

“Ms. Morales is sleeping,” Ginger answered.

The guy was handsome and he was wearing a uniform. Ginger brushed back her shoulder-length hair and approached him.

“They’re for Courtney.” He looked over at her.

“From Mom and Dad?” she said hopefully.

With all the tubes attached to her and the raised side rails of the hospital bed, Courtney couldn’t really accept the bouquet. Ginger, who wanted to make an impression, reached for them.

“They’re stunning,” she said.

The officer nodded and then turned to leave.

“Thank you, officer
—
?” Ginger says, angling for his name. She was trying anything that would get her noticed. She was young, pretty, but single. And, she could never, ever admit it, but there was something about that uniform that melted her like a scoop of vanilla gelato on an August blacktop.

She set the flowers on a tray and handed the card to her sister.

Courtney teared up, maybe a little because of her parents finally accepting her,
but mostly because her hormones had joined forces to take over her body, and everything seemed emotional.

She opened the card and her face turned ashen. Her eyes wide. Her hand moved to the incubator unit.

“We need to get the hell out of here,” she whispered, her voice raspy, afraid.

“What?” said Ginger. “We can’t leave. You just had a baby.”

“We need to go now. Right now. Not five minutes from now.”

Courtney swung her legs over the edge of the bed. She tore out the tubes in her arms and she let out a soft cry. Not because it hurt like hell, but because in that moment Courtney knew that calling attention to herself was akin to a flashing billboard that said:

Take me. Come and get me. I’m right here.

She pressed the card into Ginger’s hands and then she put on her maternity jeans and a top.

“We have to get out of here,” she repeated.

Ginger tried to stop her. “You can’t,” she said. “You just had a baby. You’ve lost blood. You’re not well enough.”

Courtney stared at her sister. “He can’t have her.”

“Who can’t, Courtney?”

By then, Courtney had moved to the other side of the room. Her eyes caught those of Ms. Morales, but the woman closed hers without saying anything.

Ginger was beside herself. Her sister had gone insane and she was confused. She wondered if she should call the doctors or the nurses. Her eyes fell on the call button next to the bed.

“Don’t,” Courtney pleaded.

Ginger looked at the little card. It was the kind that came from the florist. This one didn’t come from the florist. A police officer brought it in.