An Honest Lie(38)

Ursa and Mac hopped down from the bar to dance where people were passing clear plastic balls over their heads in a weirdly chill mosh pit while Rainy, Braithe and Tara stayed at the bar. Rainy wished Tara had gone with them; she was making everything exceptionally tense. Tara knew...something. Rainy could see it in the way Tara looked at her, the wary eyes, the way she sucked in her cheeks whenever Rainy said something, like she was holding back an eye roll. Tara drank her champagne facing the dance floor so she could watch Ursa and Mac, while Braithe angled her seat toward Rainy.

“Steve’s not texting me back. Have you heard anything from Grant?”

Rainy shook her head. Her hair was heavy on her shoulders and she reached behind herself to gather it together and pull it over her shoulder.

“I think it’s going to be like this for the next three weeks,” she admitted, looking at Braithe’s crestfallen face. It was weird: Braithe and Stephen had been together for ten years. Shouldn’t she be comforting Rainy, who was new to these extended work trips? It was sweet how cute Braithe and Stephen were together. She always brought it up to Grant, who said they’d been like that from the beginning.

“You’re right, I’m being silly. I always get anxious when they leave.”

Rainy smiled at her. Maybe that’s why Grant had been so insistent she come with; he’d known how lonely Braithe was when Stephen left and figured they could do the whole lean-on-each-other thing.

“We’re in a club of two now, I guess,” Braithe said, and Rainy saw Tara flinch. In that moment she wanted to hurt Tara for how unnecessarily cruel she was being, for the games she was playing that Rainy didn’t understand.

“Yes, we are,” Rainy said with enthusiasm. She held up her glass and Braithe knocked her own against it.

“Let’s dance,” Braithe said, hopping down from her stool. She was looking at Rainy, avoiding Tara’s eyes. She allowed herself to be led to the dance floor, swallowing the last gulps of her drink as she clutched Braithe’s hand.

She began to wind her hips to the music, all thoughts gone from her head.



13


Then


They waited until everyone was in church to leave, putting most of what they wanted to take into two backpacks and walking up the long road to the guard shed. There they had to pass through the gate, where one of the sisters was on duty.

“Mama...?” Summer looked at Lorraine, her eyes wide. There was no way either one of the sisters would let them pass without alerting Taured. Lorraine’s eyes were set, her jaw up and out like she meant business. Summer glanced over her shoulder every few minutes, expecting to see the compound’s occupants pouring outside to stop them, but there was no movement, not even a breeze. Up ahead, she could see the black gates looming, the fence alongside them running endlessly to their left.

“Stop doing that,” her mother snapped the next time she looked over her shoulder. “You’re making me jittery.”

“Sorry.”

When they reached the gate, Lorraine walked to the box on the right-hand side of the road. She flipped up the grate to the keypad and typed something in. They both looked expectantly toward the gate; nothing happened. She touched her necklace as her face pinched in worry.

“I put it in wrong, that’s all...” Lorraine tried again, and this time the gate groaned and swung open. Lorraine grabbed her daughter’s hand and walked her across the threshold. Dawn was waiting for them on the other side.

“Where ya going?” Her voice was deceptively cheerful as she squinted at them. She wasn’t wearing her knockoff Ray-Bans, which were a fixture on her face most days. Lorraine let go of Summer’s hand and went right up to Dawn, her back to Summer.

“Lose your sunglasses? Why don’t you go look for them and mind your business?”

Summer did a double take; had it been her mother who’d said that? But as Lorraine stepped backward, Summer saw that Dawn didn’t look mad; she looked afraid actually. She nodded once, plucking the toothpick from the corner of her mouth and tossing it away before retreating to the guard shed. She was about to ask her mother what that was about when Lorraine’s attention diverted left.

“There it is—hurry!”

A cab gently crested the horizon, the sun seeming to melt the air around it. Summer could feel the sweat on her back and running down her legs. She was too afraid to look back now. She imagined Dawn walked directly into the shed and calling down the wrath of the whole compound.

The cab seemed to take an extraordinarily long amount of time to get there, the air feeling hotter with each second. When it stopped next to them, due to her mother waving her arms, Lorraine shoved her daughter inside the car and slid in beside her. Summer scooted all the way across the seat, taking her mother’s bag with her.

“The airport,” she said. “If you could drive quickly, we’d appreciate it.”

The cabbie seemed to understand their urgency and he turned the car around, the cab’s tires squealing as he shot forward. Summer twisted around to look out the back window. The dust spun up behind them, like a curtain. She thought she saw Dawn come out of the shed, but then her mother pulled her down.

“Don’t look back, Summer.”

She sank into the seat, the smell of cigarette smoke rising to meet her. It was then, as her hand accidentally slipped inside her mother’s bag, that she felt the hard metal. Pulling one side of the bag toward her, she looked inside to see a gun. It was small and cold to the touch. When she looked up, her mother’s eyes were large in warning. She was not to react, she understood. Turning to look out the window, she pretended she hadn’t seen anything at all, but it made sense now, the way Dawn had behaved. Her mother must have shown her the gun to scare her. But where had she gotten the gun? She must have snuck off to buy one while she was on a mission trip and hidden it, waiting for this day.