Scared To Death (Live to Tell #2)(43)
“Here…do you want to sit in the aisle?” Elsa had given her the window, thinking she’d feel less trapped if she could look out. But maybe it only makes her feel boxed in.
She stands to let Renny slide over into the aisle seat…but Renny keeps right on sliding.
“Renny!”
Elsa chases after her, catching up at the end of the car.
“There’s no doorknob!” Panicking, Renny claws at the closed door that leads to the next compartment. By chance, her hand hits the flat panel that unlatches the door. It slides open and she lurches forward into the vestibule between the cars, nearly crashing into an older woman carrying a cardboard tray from the snack bar.
Elsa grabs onto flailing Renny and apologizes to the woman, who stands back against the bathroom door, raised on her tiptoes like there’s a rodent on the loose.
“Mommy, open the door and let me off,” Renny begs, pointing to the exit where they boarded less than five minutes ago.
“I can’t do that, the conductor has to open it when the train stops.”
“I want it to stop now!”
Elsa pulls her back, worried this door, too, might open somehow and Renny would be thrown from the speeding train.
Beside them, the older woman purses her dry, pink-lipsticked lips, probably thinking that Renny is an out-of-control brat who needs a good spanking.
Oh, lady, Elsa thinks, helplessly holding her frightened daughter fast against her. If you only knew.
The moment she walks into Starbucks, Caroline wishes she hadn’t come.
She’d been thinking she could just get lost in the crowd, but there is no crowd today. As she steps up to the counter, she realizes she’s already been recognized by the baristas. Not as Garvey Quinn’s daughter, but as the girl who had the rat in her purse.
After a brief, whispered consultation with her coworkers, a pale, fashionably ugly goth girl approaches the register. “Do you want to talk to the manager?”
“What?” Caroline frowns. “No, I wanted to order something.”
The girl’s pierced eyebrows shoot toward her squared-off, too-short black bangs. “Really?”
“Umm…yee-aahh,” she says in an isn’t-it-obvious? tone, and asks for a tall coffee.
“Just coffee?”
“Right. Make it black.” She’s never had black coffee—or any coffee—in her life, but when Jake shows up, she doesn’t want to be drinking one of those milk shake drinks again. She may not be in college yet, but she’s not a little kid.
There are plenty of empty tables to choose from today. Caroline sits at one closest to the door, facing it, then decides that makes her look too expectant. She moves to a more distant table, sits with her back to the door, and realizes that Jake could very easily come and go without either of them seeing each other. She switches to the opposite chair, facing the door, so that she’ll spot him when he walks in.
If he walks in.
Something tells her that he will.
For a long time after he landed in California, Jeremy saw no one but Papa. It wasn’t so bad, other than at night, or when Papa had to punish him for something. When things were going well, he got to eat candy all the time, and watch as many movies and cartoons as he wanted—only on video, though, and later, on DVD.
It took him years to even comprehend that there was such a thing as live television—let alone to speculate why Papa might refuse to let him watch it.
Maybe it was, like everything else the man did, about control.
Or maybe Papa was afraid he’d catch a glimpse of himself on the news.
Or maybe he worried that Jeremy would stumble across some crime drama—an episode about pedophiles or missing kids—and it might trigger something in him.
Who knows?
All Jeremy cared about back in the early days was that he could watch movies and cartoons to his heart’s content. Immersing himself in familiar fictional characters was an escape from his frightening new reality.
After a few weeks—months?—Papa started to take him out shopping, or to get something to eat. The first time, he told Jeremy that if he said a word—one single word—while they were out in public, he would be sorry.
A nice man at the Chinese restaurant at the food court in the mall was handing out chunks of chicken on toothpicks. He put one into Jeremy’s hand as he and Papa walked by, and Jeremy thanked him.
Not one word, two words: “Thank you.” Jeremy spoke them automatically—and paid dearly for them later.
It was the last time he ever spoke to anyone in public when Papa was around.
Papa always introduced Jeremy as his son, said he was painfully shy. No one ever questioned the relationship.
After a while, Jeremy himself started to believe it. In an enormous world filled with strangers, Papa was all he had. He stopped asking questions, and his old life faded away at last.
The rain has stopped by the time Brett turns onto his block after dropping Elsa and Renny at the station. He groans as he turns into the driveway and spots his next-door neighbor walking through her side yard with a shovel. Meg Warren isn’t the type to simply wave and retreat.
Sure enough, by the time he’s parked the car, she’s coming across the wet grass, dragging her feet a little, as always. He learned the hard way never, ever, ever to ask about her limp.