Chapter twenty

Morning took a long time to come. I hadn’t slept at all, and I was exhausted from constantly looking over my shoulder, waiting for Clay or Harold or a cop to jump out at me.

I’d spent the night wandering around the main strip of Caster City. At first I’d hung around the back door of a boutique, sitting on smashed shipping boxes, playing cards until the stench from the Dumpster behind the Chinese restaurant next door overpowered me. I’d moved to a tiny grove of evergreens behind a fast-food place and stretched out on my back, studying Mom’s face in the photo on my phone and softly singing Marin’s bubble song until the mosquitoes drove me away.

I spent some time texting Jane, who was up watching movies with her cousin.

How’s life in Hickville? she’d asked.

I’m running away, I’d responded.

To where?

I don’t know yet.

I’d waited around, half-hoping she would extend an invitation to run to her, but she never did. Instead, she replied, I’ll keep you company.

While Jane and I texted, the passing cars got sparser and sparser, and soon there were none, and the stoplights began blinking yellow and even the gas station closed for the night. I felt alone, stranded, and somehow that felt right. I moved around to the front of the strip mall and window-shopped, as if this were something I often did at three o’clock in the morning.

But it was a long time before the sun came up, and I’d found myself wedged into the back doorway of a furniture store, using my backpack for a pillow, my eyes heavy and grainy from lack of sleep, my butt numb from the concrete.

I turned my hands over in my lap and studied them in the daylight. Somehow, the blood had been rubbed away from the skin, but there was still a ruddy brown color under my fingernails. I wanted to wash them—wash Meg off me forever—and ended up tucking my fingers under my thighs so I wouldn’t have to look at them.

In time, I heard the sounds of the world waking up. Truck brakes hissing and car doors slamming and the occasional horn or voice. I packed up my things and started walking again, pulling my cell phone out of my pocket. I dialed Kolby’s number first. I could confide in him. I could tell him how terrible it was down here. I could tell him I was running away and he would help me.

“Hello? ” a hushed voice asked.

I paused. This was the second time Kolby wasn’t answering his own phone. “Um, hi? Is Kolby there? ”

“Who is this? ”

“This is Jersey. I was… I was hoping he could give me a ride somewhere? ”

There was a sigh on the other end of the phone. “Oh, Jersey. This is his mom. How are you? I heard you’re living down south with your dad now.”

“Um, I was, but I’m not anymore. That’s kind of why I need a ride up to Elizabeth. Can Kolby come get me? ”

“Honey, Kolby’s in the hospital.”

“Still? For the cut on his arm? ”

A pause. Then, “Well, yes and no. The cut got infected. He’s got to… he’s going to be here awhile. I’m afraid he won’t be up to driving for a bit.”

I stopped walking, trying to make sense of it all. I’d never had a cut get infected but figured it was just a matter of getting some antibiotics and going home. Why was this taking so long? “Oh. Okay, ” I said. “Just tell him I called.”

“I will, honey. It will mean a lot to him to hear from you.”

“I’ll come see him when I get back to Elizabeth.”

“Honey, maybe you should stay down there. Stay with your dad. I hate to see you get in a bad situation.”

“My dad’s house was a bad situation, ” I said sourly. “I’ve got to go. I’ll see Kolby later, okay? ”

I hung up before she could say any more. I understood why she would think it was best for me not to run away. But she had no idea what I was running away from. I resumed walking, scrolling through my address book and selecting Dani’s name.

“Hey, ” she answered, sounding groggy, like she’d been asleep. “How’s it going? ”

“Terrible. I ran away. Can you ask your mom to come get me? ” I already knew the answer, but it was worth a shot to try again. Maybe when her mom saw how desperate I was, she would change her mind. She was the only hope I had at this point.

“Whoa. Wait. Slow down. You ran away? ”

I proceeded to dump everything on Dani—what Clay had said about my mom keeping him away from me and how he’d given up on me long ago. I told her about finding Meg and Lexi with Marin’s purse, and about the fight that had ensued, all the way up to me gouging Meg’s face last night.

“I need someone to come get me, ” I said. “I need to get home. Please ask your mom.”

“I already did. She said no.”

“Tell her I’ll get Ronnie to take me back. She can drop me off at the motel. Just… anything. Come on, Dani, please? I need to get out of here.”

“But you’re, like, three hours away.”

“I’ll wait.”

“Yeah, but my mom isn’t going to want to drive six hours today, especially since she’s already said she didn’t want to get involved. She’s going to say you need to give it more time. She’s going to say this is between you and Ronnie. Maybe you should go to the police or something.”

“Oh, right, the police. Since I’m a runaway and all.” I leaned against the scratchy wall. Suddenly the Chinese restaurant smelled really delicious. My stomach growled, and I was thirsty. “Please? Just ask. Please, Dani? ”

Dani sighed, then said, “Hang on.” I could hear her cover the mouthpiece of her phone, and then some hushed mumbling as she talked to her mom. Their conversation seemed to go on forever and I prayed she was going to come back with good news. “My mom wants to know where you’re going to be waiting, ” she said at last. Her voice sounded funny, monotone and flat.

I tipped my head back into the sun and smiled. “Thank you. Thank you thank you thank you. There’s a bench outside the bookstore in the strip mall on Water Street. I’ll be waiting for you there. I love you, Dani, you know that? ”

“I love you, too, Jers, ” she said, and again her voice sounded dull. “See you soon.”

I had to keep myself from running to the bookstore. I didn’t want to get too tired or thirsty and I definitely didn’t want to wait outside in the open for too long, just in case Clay and Tonette were looking for me. It would be hours before Dani and her mom got here. Long enough for me to figure out what I was going to do once I got back to Elizabeth. I recognized that if Dani’s mom didn’t want me there, and Ronnie didn’t want me with him, I was going to be just as homeless up there as I was down here, but at least I’d be homeless in a familiar place. I had far more options in Elizabeth.

I was pretty thirsty by the time I got to the bookstore, so I made a beeline for the water fountain. When Dani’s mom arrived, I hoped she’d get me something cold to drink. Maybe stop by a gas station for a slushy. And something to eat. And maybe I’d ask her to let me use her washer and dryer, take a shower, maybe take a nap on a real bed.

But as I straightened up, swallowing the cold water, I heard a deep voice behind me.

“Jersey.”

I froze. It was a voice I recognized.

I turned around.

“Ronnie? What are you doing here? ”

“Come on, ” he said, turning and stalking off toward the door, not even bothering to wait to see if I was following him.

We walked to the parking lot, where his truck sat filthy and ragtag right up front. I wondered if I had walked past it going into the bookstore, my mind so far away I hadn’t even noticed that the truck that had been parked in my driveway for six years was sitting right there in the parking lot.

We climbed in, and I pushed my backpack and purse onto the floorboard between my feet.

“What are you doing here? ” I repeated as he pointed his truck toward the highway. I watched the lane turn into two lanes, and then four, my spirit soaring higher with each growing lane, with every mile between me and that awful house.

“Harold called me last night, ” he said. “Told me you beat up one of their girls and I needed to come get you. Then your friend Dani’s mom called, said you’d run away and would be at the bookstore, in case I wanted to call the police to pick you up and send you back to the Camerons’ house.”

I was stunned into silence. All that low mumbling and the funny tone in Dani’s voice… her mom had told me yes just so I would be sitting somewhere long enough to let the cops come get me.

“I sent you down here to stay with Clay, ” Ronnie grumbled, looking straight ahead, his dashboard rattling on the road. “But I know how headstrong you can be, and your mother would not want you being a runaway.” His mouth straightened into a tight line at the mention of my mom.

“Thank you, ” I practically whispered. Something about being with Ronnie didn’t feel right, but it felt so much better than being with my father. I didn’t mention the things I’d wanted to say to him all this time. Why didn’t you ever call me back? Why didn’t you let me come home for the funerals? Why did you make me leave in the first place? I wanted to ask him if he had himself under control now, if his grief was still consuming him. Have you brushed your teeth? I wanted to ask him. Have you changed your clothes? Is the motel room a rotting mess of empty food containers and filthy sheets?

But instead I asked, “Can I get a Coke? ”

He pulled over at the next fast-food restaurant we saw and bought me one, handing it across the seat, our fingers brushing. His fingernails were dirty. His hands were dry. Meg’s blood was still under my nails, but I didn’t care.

“Have you cleared out the house? ” I asked when we got back on the road.

“Some, ” he said, and I could tell he didn’t want to talk about it, but I pressed. It was my house, too, and I had a right to know.

“Did you find any of our stuff? ”

“Some, ” he said again.

“Anything worth keeping? ”

He shook his head, took a deep breath. “Total loss.”

“You didn’t keep anything? ”

Annoyance crept into his voice. “No, Jersey, it’s trash.”

I pondered that. Our whole lives, the lives of four people, tossed in a landfill with all the other garbage. Why do we spend so much time collecting stuff, anyway, if that’s what it comes down to in the end?

“So are you still living at the motel? ” I asked.

“If you call it living, sure, ” he answered.

“Is there power in Elizabeth yet? ”

“Yes.”

I sipped my soda, feeling the cold sink down into my fingers and toes, the sugar and carbonation rushing to my head. I kicked off my shoes and held my feet under the floor vent, letting the air-conditioning dry my sweaty toes. I’d run out of things to ask him. He wasn’t going to give me answers—not real ones, anyway—so what was the point? We both slipped into silence. I leaned my head against the window and watched the lines being eaten up by the front of the truck, until my eyes were too heavy from watching and I fell asleep.

I awoke when my body sensed that we had stopped moving. I sat up straight, stretching my stiff neck, and looked around. We were in a parking lot, but not one I recognized. I peered out the window. We weren’t in Elizabeth, I could see that much. Ronnie had put the truck into park and was staring straight ahead through the windshield, his hands resting on the bottom loop of the steering wheel.

“Where are we? ” I asked on a yawn. I grabbed my soda and took another sip. It had gotten warm and watery, but it still tasted like heaven. A sign on the side of a nearby building said WAVERLY PUBLIC LIBRARY.

“Waverly, ” he said, as I made the connection. His voice was rough and scratchy. He was born in Waverly, Grandfather Harold had said of Clay. About an hour thataway.

“Waverly? Why? ”

Waverly was about an hour southeast of Elizabeth. We’d driven through it once or twice on road trips, and Mom had always pointed out that she’d grown up there.

“Godforsaken hellhole, ” she’d always say. “Hold your breath. You don’t want to breathe in judgment. Oppression is contagious.” And even though we had no idea what she was talking about, we’d always make a game of it—see who could hold their breath the longest. See if we could make it all the way through the town without taking a breath.

Ronnie picked at the steering wheel with his dirty thumbnails. “At the funeral…” he said, and then he paused so long, I wasn’t sure he’d ever finish. He reached up and wiped his jaw with his hand a few times, then went back to picking. “Some people showed up, Jersey.”

“I wanted to be there. I should have been.”

“I was trying to keep you from being hurt.”

“My mother died. It’s too late to keep me from being hurt. I should have been there.”

“Your mom’s parents came, ” he said, leveling his eyes at me at last.

I sat back, stunned. I had never met my mom’s parents. Mom hadn’t seen or talked to her parents since before I was born. They’d told her that if she wanted to run off with that drunk troublemaker Clay Cameron, she no longer had a family to come home to, and Mom had taken them at their word. She had been glad to do so. She always talked about how they judged her, how she was never good enough for them, how they never understood her and forced her to be a perfect little princess when all she wanted was to be normal. When they disowned her, she was glad to be done with them. To hear her tell it, she had no idea where they lived, much less if they were alive or dead. I think in our hearts we all assumed they were dead.

But they were alive.

And she was the dead one.

Ronnie went back to picking, I think because it kept him from having to look at me. “They didn’t even know about Marin, ” he said. “They knew about you because your mom was pregnant when she ran away. But they didn’t even know Marin existed.”

“She didn’t run away. They disowned her, ” I said, not caring a bit. “That’s their own fault.”

“They live here in Waverly, ” he said, as if I hadn’t spoken at all, and my insides started to turn cold as all the pieces fell into place. Mom growing up here, telling us to hold our breaths so we didn’t catch the oppression and judgment alive and well in Waverly. Ronnie was driving me to the very town where my grandparents lived. “They’ve always been right here. They still live in the same house your mom grew up in.”

“But they didn’t bother to come by until now? ” I wanted to keep him talking, to turn the conversation around. Maybe I could stop what I knew was coming. Maybe if I made him understand how much Mom hated them, he wouldn’t do what he was about to do. Again. “They didn’t care enough to try to see us until after she was dead? ”

Ronnie shrugged. “They said they tried. When you were a baby. But according to them, your mom called the police to have them escorted off her property. She told them she never wanted to see them or speak to them again. Of course, this was when she was still with Clay. They… gave up.”

“You don’t do that, ” I said, and I realized that I wasn’t sure if I was talking about my grandparents or about Mom or about Ronnie himself. “You don’t give up on your family. You don’t just… leave… when your child… needs you.” My breath hitched every few words as tears and dread fell over me.

“I’m sorry, Jersey, ” Ronnie said, letting his hands rest limply in his lap. “I called them this morning. They’re willing to take you in.”

“No, ” I said. My nose dripped and soaked into my jeans. I clutched at his elbow. “Please, Ronnie. I want to go home. I’ll be good, I promise. I won’t cause any problems. Ever. I don’t know them, and Mom hated them. This isn’t fair. Why do you hate me so much? Why do you think it’s so bad to have me around? ”

He shook his head and put the truck into drive. My hand slipped off his arm and landed in my lap in defeat. “I don’t hate you, ” he said. “But I can’t take care of you. Every time I look at you, I see her. Every time I hear you talk, I think about how I let everyone down. I think about how I couldn’t save any of you. Not one.” He glanced at me as he turned down a side road, the street sign reading FLORA. The houses were tidy, landscaped, painted. Not big, but bigger than our old house. “What good am I to anyone if I can’t be there when it most matters? ”

“But I’m still alive. You can still save me. It matters now.”

He pulled into a driveway. My tears slowed as I took in the white-and-brown Tudor-style house, flowers blooming in orderly raised beds surrounding the swept sidewalk. More flowers blooming in quaint window boxes. A saintly-looking statue on the front porch. The door opened slowly. I wiped my face with my palms.

“I know you don’t understand, ” Ronnie said. “But you’ve got to make this work, Jersey. I’m selling the property, anyway. Going back east. I’ve already got the transfer okayed at work. You can’t come home. There’s not going to be one.”

I tore my eyes away from the pale hand that still clutched the door. The hand must have belonged to one of my grandparents, but the shadows kept me from seeing who.

“You’re not going to stay where they’re buried? ”

“Every time I look at that neighborhood, at the house, at every business and building I pass, I’m reminded of how I failed them. I can’t live a life that way. I’ve got to go.”

“So you’re abandoning all of us, ” I said, not a question, but a statement.

“I’m saving myself, ” he said very quietly.

It dawned on me that on some level I had expected Ronnie to change his mind. To get a little distance, heal, see his mistake, want me back. In some ways, I was more aghast at the realization that he would never change his mind than I was at seeing Mom’s lipstick smeared across Meg’s and Lexi’s faces. I was more insulted by this than I’d been by Clay and Tonette insulting me and saying I didn’t belong. I was more shocked by Ronnie’s selfishness than I had been by the tornado itself. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. Life wasn’t supposed to work this way. He wasn’t supposed to choose himself over us.

“You’re a coward.” But before I could say any more, a gray-haired man wearing a plaid shirt and a baseball cap knocked on Ronnie’s window. My mouth snapped shut. The man had a large, bulbous nose and huge eyebrows. But he also had wet, pouty lips that sort of reminded me of Marin’s, and out from his cap, several curly strands of hair snaked around his ears.

Ronnie rolled down the window.

“Thank you for this, ” he said to the old man, and the anger returned. I wanted to punch Ronnie. For casting me out, for abandoning Mom and Marin, for being so dry-eyed and cavalier about the whole thing.

The old man nodded. “Not a problem. She got any bags? ”

“Not really. Just a couple up here she can carry. We lost everything, as you saw.”

My jaw tensed. Ronnie had taken them to my house? To Mom’s house? How could he? Mom would have been furious. She’d kept them away on purpose.

“You get any word from FEMA yet? ” the old man asked, and as Ronnie answered, I tuned him out, turning my gaze to the woman standing in the front doorway, wringing her hands, a melon-colored sweater hanging over a lighter melon-colored tunic. Even from the truck, I could see that she shared my knock knees, my rounded shoulders, my thick waist. All this time I’d been wondering who exactly I looked like, when the person I resembled most was right here in Waverly.

“Ready? ” the old man said, and I realized he had been peering past Ronnie over to where I sat.

“Huh? ”

“You ready? ” Ronnie said.

I glared at him. “No. But I guess I don’t have a choice, ” I said.

“No, ” he said, “you don’t. You’ve got to make it work this time.”

He went back to his picking on the steering wheel, and the old man slowly maneuvered his way around to my side of the truck. I clutched the top handle of my backpack and pushed Marin’s purse tightly up my shoulder. My grandfather opened my door and I slid out.

“Have a nice life, ” I said to my stepdad.

I knew I would never see him again.