Only she came back, p.20
Only She Came Back, page 20
“I don’t know, though,” she says. “It’s hard pretending.” She smiles—a horrible, blatantly fake smile that turns into a grimace. “I know who you are now, and I’ll never be fooled again.”
24
AUGUST 14, 12:01 AM
I need the Legacy,” I told Owen, bent over my phone in the dark kitchen.
“Why? What’s going on?” He sounded bleary; the day must have worn him out, too.
I couldn’t whip up an excuse. My brain was a snarl of bare, sparking wires. “I need something, but I don’t want to bike this time of night.”
“I could drive you. Are you sick or something?” Then things must have snapped together in his head, because he said, “Is it her? Is this about Kiri?”
I didn’t answer.
Owen took a breath so deep I heard it. “This isn’t good, Sam. This isn’t good for you.”
“She wants to take a drive in the country, that’s all. To see the stars.” It was a terrible lie, but I didn’t have the patience to flesh it out. “It’s just one night, Owen. You owe me.”
It took him a moment to answer, and then he sounded cold and formal. “Do you know what they’re saying about her now? Do you know what kind of danger you could be putting yourself in?”
“Owen, do you actually believe the criminal justice system protects the innocent?” I closed my eyes tight and crossed the fingers on both hands because I was pretty sure I was about to tell a lie. “And she is innocent. I know that.”
“You know, huh?” After a long moment, he asked, “Have you thought about what we talked about before? About how she might be using you?”
I know she is. I don’t care. “Please,” I said. “I… I can’t let her go by herself.” And then the part I didn’t want to admit, the words that felt ripped from inside me: “I care about her.”
Owen was silent for a long moment. While I could have said those words to manipulate him, I had a feeling he would know how deeply I meant them.
Finally he said, “You met this girl what, a week ago? Ten days?”
“It’s been a long ten days,” I said.
When he spoke again, his voice was shaking. “Wherever you’re going, you gotta come back, Sam. You and my ride both, promise me you’ll come back without a scratch.”
I promised.
I chose the remotest, most rural border crossing I knew. There would be no lines, no fancy duty-free shops, just a shack in the woods and an agent or two guarding the gate across the road.
Driving felt weird after nearly eight months of being stuck on my bike. I kept hitting the brakes too hard, and I waited for Kiri to react—Lore would have giggled or rolled their eyes—but she just sank into her seat and gazed straight ahead. With a hood hiding her hair and shadowing her face, she barely seemed there.
Soon there were no more stoplights, just pastures and woods and a sky blazing with stars. The car had smelled a little skunky when we got in, so I had the windows wide open to air it out.
As I drove, I thought of Mickey and Mallory in Natural Born Killers, the terrible role models that Drea Flint and her boyfriend had chosen for themselves. Whenever you tried to separate that pair, they snapped back together like magnets, leaving a bloody trail in their wake. But the point of the story (as far as there was any point) was that society was even sicker than they were. Everybody tried to use them for clout—cops, courts, and a tabloid reporter who became their accomplice so he could get the scoop. Everybody regretted it.
Would I end up like the reporter, pleading for my life? It wasn’t that I was afraid of Kiri, but a dark, quiet place will put those thoughts in your head.
I thought of Kiri all alone in the desert, making her videos. I know who you are now, and I’ll never be fooled again, she’d said—talking to the viewers, to Callum, or to someone else?
On our first night in the den, she’d told me that some part of her was still out there in the desert. I’d assumed she was talking about the trauma of losing Callum, but now I knew it was more. There’s a loneliness that gets inside you and changes you, and she’d been in that dark place even with Callum by her side.
He hadn’t helped her, because he couldn’t love those parts of her. If anything, he’d made it worse.
When we were about a mile from the border, deep in the woods, I pulled over at the base of someone’s driveway. It was just after two. “If you want to get in the trunk, now’s the time.”
Kiri didn’t hesitate. She got out, slinging a black backpack over her shoulder.
Bushes shielded us from the road. No cars passed while I popped the trunk and we moved Owen’s junk into the back seat. Kiri tossed her pack into the trunk and climbed in after it.
She laughed when she realized she would have to lie down and fold her knees to her chest—a nervous laugh that reminded me of our earlier meetings, back when I believed she was innocent. “Lucky I’m not claustrophobic.”
“Are you sure about this?” I asked.
Spruce and fir trees loomed on either side of the road, cutting sharp points in a creamy river of stars. It was a forest with no undergrowth to hide busy insects, none of the usual late-summer buzzing and trilling, just silence.
Kiri curled up in the trunk. Pale strands of hair escaped from under her hood. “I’m fine,” she said, voice muffled against her shoulder.
“Sometimes they search the car. If that happens, what do we tell them?”
Her eyes were shut tight, and I didn’t think she’d answer, but then she said, “Tell them we’re star-crossed lovers. We can’t be together in a place with as much prejudice as America.”
“Ha. We’re from Vermont.”
“Say we’re from Alabama.”
“Car’s registered here.” But the words stuck in my throat.
Kiri uncurled enough to look up at me. “If they find me, I’ll tell them the truth,” she said. “All of it. Promise. I just want this one chance.”
“Okay.” I sounded gruff even to myself.
Her gaze didn’t falter. “Thank you, Sam.”
So I slammed the trunk and went through with it.
When I spotted the lights of the tiny border station on the horizon, I started inhaling for a count of four and exhaling for a count of four. Five more minutes and it would all be over.
I lowered my speed to the required fifteen miles per hour, foot nice and steady on the pedal, and drove up to the booth. Breathe. I came to a smooth stop, getting the hang of that again. Put the car in park, trying not to think about Kiri huddled in the trunk.
The agent leaned out of the booth. He was working alone—a young man with a soul patch and long eyelashes, wearing a dark blue uniform.
“Hi!” I gave him a big smile. The Canadian agents tend to look a little more chill than ours, like they might be fun to hang out with when they’re off work.
This one was an exception—he didn’t smile back. “Where are you coming from?” His name tag said Marc Doucette, and his French accent was so subtle that it was more like a careful frame he put around each word.
“Burlington.” I held out my enhanced license, which gets you across the border without having to pay for a passport. “Hey, we practically have the same last name! Mine’s Duquette.”
He took it. Still no smile. “And your destination, Samara?”
“Montreal. This friend of mine went clubbing on Sainte-Catherine, and the guy she was with turned out to be a total jerk, so now she needs a ride home.”
Marc Doucette handed back my ID. The corner of his mouth twitched. I couldn’t tell whether he wanted to smile or was just fed up with American kids coming into his country so they could party without fake IDs. “What is your friend’s name?”
“Reggie—uh, I mean Regina. Regina Chen.”
Marc Doucette nodded. His shoulders relaxed. His gaze wandered away from me. “And when will you and Regina be returning to the United States?”
“As soon as I pick her up.” Would he put me on some list, so the US agents would expect two people back at the hour I’d specified? With a sinking feeling, I realized that someone who was rescuing her friend from clubland had no good reason to use this Podunk crossing in the dead of night. “Unless Reggie’s, uh, really sick. Maybe then we’ll find a room for the night.” Then I shut my mouth tight, because there’s no more reliable sign of guilt than overexplaining.
My eyes locked on Marc’s. His showed no expression, and my throat pinched tight.
At last, he blinked. Reached for something below my sight line. For an instant, nothing happened—and then the metal gate rose silently and inexorably to make way for me. For us.
“You two girls should be careful,” Marc Doucette said. For a millisecond I could have sworn that he meant Kiri and me, that he knew everything and was letting us go anyway. But then he added, “Montreal is a big city, not like Burlington. Don’t sleep in your car on the street, okay?”
“Okay.” I nodded hard. “Don’t worry. We’ll get home safely.”
I waved and smiled a last time and released the car from park.
A tap on the accelerator, and we were in Canada.
The forest vanished almost the instant we crossed the border. Now I could see the whole flat landscape in every direction: fields and fences and barns and houses, each in its pool of light. Mom always says this part of Quebec reminds her of Iowa, where she grew up.
It didn’t seem like a good idea to stop too close to the border. I let two miles tick by on the odometer—driving right at the fifty-kilometer-per-hour speed limit—before I pulled over just past a gigantic dairy farm, its metal silos glinting in the starlight.
I got out and popped the trunk. “Hey. We’re good.”
Kiri didn’t spring up and bounce out of there; she lay so still. I leaned close to make sure she was breathing. But then her lashes fluttered, and she stretched and sat up.
I offered my hand to help her out, and she took it, her skin warm and a little damp, as if she’d been sleeping in the grass. Her hood came off, hair spilling down her back, as she landed lightly on the asphalt.
“That was weird.” She sounded woozy. “I felt like Snow White in the glass coffin.”
“I sure hope there isn’t a CO leak in the trunk.” I headed back to the cab. “Do you have a headache?”
“No.” Suddenly she was standing in my way. “Let me drive.”
I shook my head, but she said, “You haven’t had any sleep, Sam.” She knotted her hair and pulled up the hood again. “I’m a good driver. I won’t get stopped. I know the way to the cottage.”
I did desperately want to close my eyes, but I wasn’t sure about letting her take control. “You didn’t sleep last night any more than I did.”
“I slept today while you were at work. Anyway, I want you to finish the diary.” Her voice was low and a little hoarse; each syllable itched as it entered my eardrums, sending vibrations down my spine. “I need you to know everything I know.”
“Why do you need that?” I didn’t say what I was thinking: that all she really needed now was for me to take her to West so that he could help her vanish. Getting over the border was probably the hardest part.
She looked at me as if I weren’t making sense. “I’ve always wanted that, ever since I came back, Sam. To tell the truth. When I got in those people’s RV—the ones who gave me a ride out of the National Monument—I was just gonna let it all spill out of me. That was my plan.”
Maybe it was the rural silence that made me conscious of the whooshing of my own pulse. “But you didn’t do that.”
A headshake. “Being in Cal’s videos, smiling when I didn’t want to—I guess I got into the habit of lying. ‘Creative fictioning.’ I opened my mouth, there in the desert, and a story came out that wasn’t true. But I wasn’t entirely sure which parts weren’t true, so I just kept telling it—to the cops, my parents, everybody.”
The air seemed to congeal; it was an effort to suck it in.
If Kiri saw my dread, she didn’t show it. “I even believed the story myself, some of the time,” she said. “Other times, though, when I was alone, I would read the diary and pieces of the truth came back. And then I wanted to tell someone so badly. I wanted to tell you.”
Maybe, if only I knew the truth, I would be ready to let her go.
“Okay,” I said. “You drive, and I’ll finish.”
FROM KIRI DUNSMORE’S DIARY
JULY 21
The pit opened today.
I slept through the afternoon as usual, and when I woke up and heard the crackle of the fire and smelled food, everything seemed fine. Then I went out and saw that it was beans again, just beans, beans, beans, and the mesa was glowing on the horizon, which meant it was almost the magic hour and time to shoot our segment, and I went ballistic. Like all of me was one big, gaping stomach.
I don’t want to be this person. I don’t want this person ever to have existed.
But she did exist, and she was me, and I have to write this down or I’ll never get better. I have to remember every time I’ve slipped, every monstrous thing I’ve done, because every slip could be the difference between doom and survival.
I remember it in flashes like stop-motion. I screamed at him to open the safe and give me a stick of beef jerky. He said we ate the last two sticks last night.
Screaming. Hair tossing. I don’t know. I may have shrieked in his face; I may have grabbed him and shaken him. And the whole time he was so calm, so beautifully reasonable.
Beautiful. Horrible.
I do remember that the sun was sliding off the side of the mesa when he said, “You could go over there.” Pointing to the bikers’ campsite, hidden beyond a rise covered with juniper and creosote. “I bet they’re barbecuing,” he said, and when he smiled, his teeth were so white. “Wouldn’t you like that?”
I walked a few steps that way, just bluffing. He said, “They might want something in return, you know.”
I stopped dead. “Like what?”
He said, “Don’t be naive. It’s up to you, Kiri. Your life. Your survival skill set. Do what you need to.”
I started walking again. Honestly, at that point I was ready to do anything, no matter how filthy or degrading, just to have the taste of meat in my mouth and the fullness in my stomach. I had no thoughts in my head, just the pit saying, “Fill me, fill me, fill me.”
Then I remembered him telling me, “You’re beautiful.” I remembered him saying, “You glow.” If I kept walking, I might survive, but my glow would fade and I would be nothing again.
I stopped. I turned around.
And he was standing there, a foot from me, with a stick of beef jerky in his hand. When I saw it, my body turned to water. I could barely hold myself upright.
“I saved a few,” he said, “for emergencies.”
I don’t even remember eating it.
I got another stick, but only after we finished our shoot. An incentive. I pasted a smile on my face and told the camera and everyone out there (no one, no one’s left alive) how clean and rejuvenated the desert makes me feel every single day.
And the pit is full again. For now.
He’s over at the bikers’ campsite now, “checking in” and getting water from the spring. I wonder if that girl—Nat or Natalie, her name is—has to do things for her food, too. I shouldn’t judge her. You do what you must to survive. Last time I saw her she was wearing a faded T-shirt that said CIMARRON COUNTY 4-H, so I guess she once had a home, too.
She always glares at me when I see her, and I wonder if she wishes she were in my place, with Callum to protect her.
Maybe we should ask her to join us, but I don’t think I can trust her. I think she knows I don’t deserve C, because deep down I’m just a regular person like her, and I don’t glow except when he’s looking at me.
We’re all alone and there’s no one to help us, and I can’t afford to be this weak shell of a person. This person is not me. I need to find the light inside.
25
AUGUST 14, 5:22 AM
Daylight. Green leaves. Raindrops. Blinking up at the windshield, I tried to remember where I was. Then I heard her breathing beside me in the driver’s seat.
“We’re close, but we need gas,” she said. “I don’t have any Canadian cash, but if you use your credit card, I’ll pay you back.”
We were parked in the far corner of a nearly empty lot surrounded by trees. Behind us, cars swooshed through light rain on a two-lane road. At the other end of the lot stood gas pumps and a low building with a snazzy sign that said DÉPANNEUR.
“That looks like it has clean bathrooms.” I unbuckled myself and opened the door. “You haven’t been in yet, have you?”
Kiri shook her head. Her hood was already cinched up tight, and now she pulled out a pair of shades. “If you buy something, I’ll slip in behind you. Or, uh, use the woods.” She pointed at the wet foliage that grazed our windshield.
“No worries,” I said. “I’ll cover you.”
The mini-mart was clean and shiny, probably part of a chain. The woman at the counter smiled and said, “Bonjour” with a twang, and I said it back. There were gerbera daisies in a vase in the restroom.
As I returned to the counter and asked for a tank of gas and two breakfast sandwiches and two coffees (large, please!), I imagined that we were taking a normal, innocent road trip together. Hitting Montreal, furnishing our dorm rooms at IKEA (in this version of our lives, I had a dorm room), and checking out the mountains beyond the city. Later today, we would take a hike. Kiri would laugh at my panting out-of-shapeness but wait for me to catch up, every time, because she wasn’t Callum. She was a kind person.
A person who hated herself. A person who had done something terrible in the desert and lied about it to everyone. A person who needed to disappear.
My stomach lurched as it all came flooding back. I had transported someone across an international border who might soon be classified as a fugitive. When they made podcasts about her, I wouldn’t be the narrator. I would be cast as her accomplice, or maybe her hapless dupe.
