No One Knows Us Here(85)

And without Leo there was only Sam. We were naked, our bodies still wrapped up in each other. Holding on to each other in a way I didn’t remember from before, like we were keeping each other from falling off a too-small life raft.

“You have to tell me what happened,” he said into my hair.

“It’s better if you don’t know.”

By the light of the moon streaming through the skylight, I could make out the features of Sam’s face. His eyes were narrowed, his mouth set in a firm line. A determined look.

“What?” I asked. It seemed like he had something he wanted to tell me.

“I’ve been thinking,” he said carefully. “You need to get out of here. We need to get out of here.”

“Out of the cabin?”

“Out of the country.”

“They aren’t going to let me out of the country.”

“They will if we do it now,” Sam said. His eyes held mine, and I studied them, tried to memorize them. He pulled my body in closer to his, so every part of us touched, so I could feel his skin against mine. He kissed me hard on the mouth, cupping the back of my head with his hand.

When we broke apart, we were both gasping for air. “They will what?” I asked.

“Let you leave the country,” he said. “We’ll leave first thing in the morning. You, me, Wendy. I have our passports.”

“They’ll stop us. They won’t let us out.”

“It will work. And they won’t stop us at the border because no one knows—whatever you did, no one knows. Not yet. I’ve been paying attention to the news, listening to police reports. Trust me: there’s still time.”

Sam told me he had worked it all out. We would drive to Redmond and take the first flight out—it didn’t matter where. Then we’d make our way over to Europe. He knew people in Europe. He could get a symphony job. He had studied under Magdalene Heiss. That meant something. She was a friend of the family, she would help. We could go to a nonextradition country. Even if the police did find me, they couldn’t arrest me. It would be too late.

“A nonextradition country?”

“Russia, maybe,” Sam said. “Or Iceland.”

“Russia? What would I do there? What about Wendy? She hasn’t even graduated from high school.”

Sam had thought about that, too. He had worked it all out. Wendy could get help. “I’m not saying it would be easy,” he said. “I’m saying we could be together.”

For a moment neither of us said anything. The silence rang out, demanding my response. All I had to do was say yes.

“I don’t get it,” I said at last, my voice so soft he had to press his ear to my mouth to hear the words. “Give up everything—your whole life. Live in Russia. And that’s if we didn’t get caught. You could go to jail. Aiding and abetting—what is that, a felony? How many years would they lock you up for that? You’d risk everything, and for what? For me? Why would you do it?”

Sam kissed me on the forehead and then worked his way down my face. The bridge of my nose. My cheeks. My lips. “You know why.”

I wanted to tell him that I felt the same way, that I loved him, but I couldn’t make myself say those words, and I wondered if saying those words so many times to the wrong person had altered me forever, cursed me somehow. Like some old fairy tale or Greek myth, saying the words to the wrong person could haunt me for life, unleash a box of evil spirits. Saying it to the right person, then, would have the potential to fix everything. My mouth opened and closed again, but the words didn’t come.

We lay in silence, just looking at each other, for what must have been an entire minute before he spoke again. “Promise me you’ll let me help you now,” he said. “You have to promise me.”

I thought about this new life he talked about, living in some snowy tundra. Wendy getting better by summiting mountains and lying on analysts’ couches and soaking in geothermal mineral pools. Me and Sam, together. We’d live in an attic garret at first, with skylights. I was picturing the attic where Sara lived in A Little Princess, after she lost her fortune and Miss Minchin banished her upstairs to be the scullery maid. We’d start out somewhere like that, but Sam would rise up the ranks in the symphony and I—I didn’t know what I would do. I couldn’t envision it. I’d paint, maybe. I’d never painted before, but it seemed like something I could do, in my new life.

“I promise,” I said.

I believed it when I said it. I remember it, that feeling. That feeling that he was going to save me and we’d run off together and everything would turn out all right.



I waited until Sam’s eyelids dropped and his breathing slowed down before I untangled our limbs, pulled on my clothes, and crept back downstairs to the kitchen.

I pulled out pots and pans from the cupboards and food from the fridge. It was stocked full of food, as if they planned to hide out here for several weeks. Walnuts and spinach and tomatoes and kalamata olives and garlic and onions. I wasn’t sure what I was doing at first. Mincing onions and boiling water and rinsing greens. A half hour later I’d created some sort of vegan pasta casserole I hoped Wendy would eat.

Next, a pie. Apple with a lattice top. I made the pastry from memory, unsure of how it would turn out with vegan butter. Everything came together in a trance. Sliced apples tossed with cinnamon and sugar and a squeeze of lemon. A lattice crust woven across the top. Pastry edges perfectly crimped. I covered everything with foil and wrote down some vague baking instructions. I couldn’t remember how hot to bake a pie, or for how long.