Run (2 page)

“What happened?” I say out loud, to myself more than Hayden, this time no longer in a whisper. Whispering is getting me nowhere. I’m scared and frustrated and I know that talking loudly is foolish, but I somehow feel certain that whoever did this to our father is gone. Long gone.

Then it dawns on me. Our mother is gone too.

In that moment, in the space in which I want to tell off my brother, cry about my father, and search for my mother, I see it as my eyes follow the length of my father’s shirt to the tip of his right index finger.

On that travertine that our mother went crazy over when we first moved in there were three letters written in blood. Dad’s blood.

RUN

RUN is our family’s code word. It tells me everything Hayden and I need to know. There’s no calling paramedics; no 911 dispatcher to notify. There’s no going through the house and pulling up family photos and squirreled-away scrapbooks. We never had those kinds of things anyway. Mom used to joke that if our house was burning down we’d have no reason to linger. We just didn’t have anything worth saving.

“We’re leaving now, Hayden,” I say. I get up and he stays there, his eyes fixed on our father.

“What about Dad?” he asks.

I shake my head. In my heart I knew this day would come. Dad said it could. Mom promised that it would. “Nothing,” I say. “We’re going.”

I reach into my father’s jacket pocket and take his cell phone and wallet. He feels warm, but he is dead. I know that. His car keys are on the table. I take those too.

I yank Hayden to his feet.

“Now,” I say. My tone surprises me. It is an order. Not a request. Not pretty please. An out-and-out demand. “We’re leaving,” I say with the same newfound intensity. “What part of getting out of here don’t you understand?”

He wipes blood on his shirt.

I get behind him and shove him.

“I’m scared,” he says.

“It’ll be all right,” I say, the first of many lies I will tell my brother in the days to come. I am in a strangely calm and frenzied state. Calm because in some peculiarly innate way I know what I must do, and yet my heart is racing and I’m frantically trying to coordinate my uncooperative brother and find my backpack by the door where I unceremoniously dumped it.

Before any of this happened. Before our world shifted to black.

“How come we’re going out the back door?” Hayden asks, finally able to say something other than a whine about our predicament or tears for our dead father and our missing mother.

“We don’t want anyone to see us. We’ll cut through the woods, follow the creek to the road.”

“And then what?”

I don’t know the answer. I’m moving as fast as I can. Thinking as fast as I can. I grab a clean T-shirt from the pile on the table, an indication of what my mother might have been doing before our father’s killer came into our house.

“Then we’ll figure out the rest.”

He looks at me with those dopey scared eyes. Thankfully, he doesn’t say anything else as we bolt from our back door toward the ravine. Questions can only slow us down. And we need to get out of there fast.

Or we could end up with knives in our chests too.

Chapter Two

Cash: $88.00.

Food: None.

Shelter: None.

Weapons: None.

Plan: Don’t have one.

A GRAY AND WHITE SEAGULL tussles with another smaller, nondescript shorebird over a French fry on the bench beside us. We are facing the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in Bremerton. My money—if I had any to spare—would be on the scrappier little bird. Little birds can be formidable. Their fight is occupying Hayden’s attention, which is good. The walk from our house was long and I’m tired. I’ve told my brother over and over that we are going to survive this and that we will find our mother.

“Where are we going to go?” he asks.

“I don’t know,” I say, immediately knowing that was the wrong answer. He looks up at me with eyes that tell me everything he’s feeling.

Fear. Sadness. Shock.

I’m feeling all of those things too. I wonder if Hayden sees any of that in my eyes.

“We’ll get through this,” I say.

We need to pause.
Think.
We can deal with our grief later. I put my arm around Hayden’s shoulder, feeling his bones underneath his dark blue hoodie and the clean T-shirt we exchanged for the bloody one I buried in the woods. He was always small for his age, but he feels like a toddler just now. I don’t nuzzle him, because we’re not the touchy-feely kind of brother and sister, but even so, I want him to know—to
feel
—my concern for him.

Even my love.

A big green and white Washington State ferry chugs through the choppy blue waters of Rich Passage to the dock in Bremerton. From our bench facing Sinclair Inlet, we sit in silence as the cars unload. I feel scared and empty inside, but I don’t show it. I’m good that way. I once saw a girl get hit by a car and I didn’t even yelp. I was ten then and my name was Jessica. I loved that name. I remember watching that green Honda Civic smack into that girl in jeans and a pretty pink top. I didn’t even flinch. I didn’t go to her. A lady standing next to me by the side of the street where it happened must have thought that my nonresponse was a result of shock, but it wasn’t anything like that. When you have to pretend that you’re someone or something that you’re not you get pretty good at concealing emotions. Reactions, Dad says—used to say—are for amateurs.

“Maybe Dad wasn’t really dead,” Hayden says, the first of many stupid things that will pass from his lips as we sit there under a darkening sky.

Even though it might seem fake to him, I truly mean it when I pat him on the knee to offer some comfort.

“We’ll be fine,” I say, again nearly choking on the lie. I’ve counted the money in Dad’s wallet. Yes, there are credit cards. But I know better than to use them. Credit cards can be traced. There is also a duplicate of Mom’s latest driver’s license—which seems weird, but I think I know why it’s there.

An elderly woman with candy-corn orange and yellow hair approaches with a bag of stale bread and starts to feed the seabirds. The commotion seems to distract my brother and once again I’m grateful for the diversion. Ever since we left the woods behind our house on Salmonberry, he’s offered up a mix of tears, sobs, and questions. None of which I really want to deal with.

I watch the woman and remember when Mom and I did that very thing, not far from here. I remember how the number of birds grew, one by one, until they encircled us. I remember how we worried they’d attack us like some old horror movie I’d seen and couldn’t quite forget.

Hayden tugs at me and I’m snapped out of the memory. “Are we going to call the police so they can get Dad? We can’t leave him there like he’s garbage.”

I am about to answer but then the woman smiles at us and I nod in her direction as though my little brother and I are just sitting watching the birds. I don’t know why anyone would want to feed those nasty birds.

“We can’t,” I whisper loudly into my brother’s ear. “You know the rules.”

“We’re alone,” he says. “We can have new rules.”

Hayden is young. Dumb.
Homeschooled
. He can’t know what he’s saying. I have to remember that in order for us to survive we have to remember my mother’s number one rule: “Trust no one.”

“We need to go to the drug store,” I say, getting up and leading Hayden past the woman with the bag of stale bread. In a day or two, we might be eating that bread ourselves. Eighty-eight dollars won’t last long.

“Can I get some gum?” he says.

I nod. “Sure. But only one package. We’re on a budget.”

Port Orchard isn’t really such a bad town. The waterfront is pretty and the boats tucked into the marina make it resemble what I imagine New England might look like. That’s one part of the country we’ve never visited or lived in.
Visited
seems like a better word. Our family never stayed anywhere very long. We walk past the library and I eye it as a place that we might be able to stay for the night, but I let it pass. It is small and the librarian there is one of those command-and-control types that lets nothing slip by her. She’d never close up for the night with two bookworm stowaways inside.

The drugstore clerk at Rite Aid watches me and my brother as we go inside. I’m going nowhere near the birth control section—the place where kids my age do most of their shoplifting. I’m heading toward the cosmetics section.

“You go pick out your gum and meet me at the counter,” I say loudly to Hayden. I want the clerk to hear. I don’t know why exactly, but when you feel you are being watched you almost want to give in to it instead of fighting it. I saw someone on the news the other day say something about how she now assumes she’s being filmed by some hidden camera and acts accordingly. She said something about how she’s not paranoid, just resigned. That’s kind of how I feel right now.

Hayden allows a tiny smile to cross his face. I wonder for a second if he’s a good mimic or he really is happy to get that gum. Our dad was just gutted like a deer and Hayden’s getting Bubble Yum as though nothing happened. At least, he’s acting that way. The members of our family have always been pretty good at acting, so I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised.

The cosmetic section is all pink and purple. I haven’t put on much make-up at South Kitsap, my high school. I was going for a more natural look. Besides, I liked the idea of at least looking like myself, instead of a cartoon version of what a teenage girl would look like. I don’t have any real close girlfriends to trade make-up tips. Sure, I can watch them on YouTube, but it isn’t the same as being told what shade works best for you by someone who actually knows you.

I pick out a box of Nice ’n Easy hair dye, Summer Blonde. I feel the weight of it and compare it to other boxes. It seems the heaviest. That’s good. It means there is more product inside. I’ve never had to do it myself, so I might need extra. I pick up another box, a darker color for Hayden. When reaching for a pair of scissors—I’ll need those too—I notice blood droplets still on my hand. I don’t care if I’m being watched on camera. I spit on my hand and rub the red off onto my jeans.
My jeans.
I realize right now that I have no other clothes. No underwear. Nothing. Everything I have is on my body now. I am an idiot. I should have grabbed more clothes for myself when I took that clean T-shirt for Hayden.

The scissors are twelve dollars and the two boxes of hair dye come to twenty-two dollars. That’s thirty-four dollars. Add Hayden’s treat and I’ve depleted my cash by nearly half.

I take the scissors and the hair dye to the counter and set them next to a box of hard-as-rocks Swedish Fish candy—
reduced
for quick sale
. Right now it feels like I’m reduced for quick sale. I mean, I don’t know how much time I have. Or if I’m even right about what happened to our father or where our mother is. I take a breath. Hayden’s still deciding on gum. I know that he’ll buy the sour green apple because he always does, but I say nothing to hurry him.

“Do you have any scissors on sale?” I ask the clerk.

She’s a pretty woman about my mother’s age. She has dark hair and the whitest skin that I’ve ever seen. Living in Washington, that’s saying a lot. Her eyes are so blue I’m almost certain she’s wearing colored contacts. I even tilt my head to see if I can get to see the edge of the lens against her iris for that telltale ring. They really are that blue.

“Over in crafts we have some that are on special,” she says in a fluting voice. “Not as good as those Fiskars, but how much cutting do you have to do anyway? School project?”

“Yeah,” I say. Another lie. I lie to everyone all the time. I have since I can remember.

“Here,” the clerk chirps. Her name tag indicates she’s called Christy. “Follow me.”

We walk down the aisle past Hayden and I give him a little nudge. “We need to get going soon.”

“Hard to decide.”

Christy winks at Hayden. “The watermelon is our best seller,” she says.

He nods.

“These are on special,” she continues, pointing to some scissors, “practically a door-buster price.”

“Practically,” I say.

They aren’t as nice as the Fiskars, that’s for sure. But they are the right price—$4.95. I know I’ll regret it later, but when you only have $88, you have to make the tough call.

Hayden meets me by the counter with his sour green apple gum and an Almond Joy candy bar.

“I got something for you,” he says. His eyes meet mine and I see something in him that I haven’t since I pulled that knife out of our father’s chest. It’s a kind of anxiousness. A kind of dependency, a neediness, to just go along with me. He’s got no one else and he doesn’t want to lose me.

Almond Joys are my favorite candy bar and he knows it. I don’t think we can afford it, but our father is dead, our mother is missing, and I could use a little joy.

Even if it is only a candy bar.