Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(18)
Maybe the answer was in the letter.
When they parked at the travel plaza in Frazee, Minnesota, Elwood left his hand on the gearshift and said, “End of the road.” He lifted his eyebrows expectantly. “Unless you want to head back to Twin Cities?”
She did not.
“Didn’t think so.”
She had been using his jacket as a blanket, and when she tried to hand it back, he shook his head, told her to keep it. “Somebody looking for you?” he asked, and when she did not respond he blew out a sigh and said, “You be careful. And you stay off the interstate if you don’t want to get found.”
It isn’t until he drives away—the gray exhaust rising from the truck’s bullhorn pipes—that she realizes she forgot to thank him. She lifts a hand as the truck departs, growing smaller in the distance, and she hopes he sees the gesture in his mirror. Then she turns around in a circle and feels lost and utterly alone, realizing she has no one to trust, nowhere to go.
The gas station is part of a larger travel plaza. There is a Subway attached to it and a video-game parlor she can see flashing through the windows. The parking lot is busy with cars and trucks, people pumping gas, cracking open sodas, sipping from steaming mugs of coffee. An SUV beeps its horn and the driver irritably lifts his hand off the wheel and she realizes she is in the way, standing in the middle of the lot, in the middle of all this traffic.
She starts toward the store, her wrist pulsing with every step, and when she pushes through the door, a bell chimes. One thing at a time, her mother always said. She tries to wrap her head around a plan. She needs a bathroom, a map, some ibuprofen and food. She can manage that at least. The rest can wait.
Behind the register stands a heavy woman with black roots showing through her bleached-blond hair. She stares a beat too long and Claire feels a surge of panic, wondering if her face has appeared on television, if the woman recognizes her. It seems impossible, but so does everything that has happened to her.
Once in the bathroom, she feels encouraged by her reflection in the mirror. She looks like hell. Her hair—which has always been a problem, a wavy blond tangle she conditions and straightens every morning—is snarled up in every direction. Her face looks like a piece of old, darkened fruit. And then there is the gash across her forehead, a second mouth. Who wouldn’t stare?
The daisy-patterned linoleum, peeling up at the corners, is littered with cigarette butts and toilet paper confetti. It is a four-stall bathroom, and as women walk in and out, their voices chattering, their eyes lingering on her, she tries to pay them no mind, draping her jacket over the paper-towel dispenser, tearing off a long sheet, dampening it, frothing it up with soap. She cleans up as best she can.
The travel mart has bins of five-dollar DVDs, open-air coolers full of cheese and sausage, racks of T-shirts with eagles and wolves silk-screened across them, display cases full of lacquered log clocks, and several grocery aisles crowded mostly with chips, pretzels, cookies, and candy. She selects an off-brand backpack from a rack, unzips its mouth, braces its strap in the crook of her elbow, and begins to stock up. A Rand McNally road atlas, ibuprofen, tampons, a blister pack of pens, a notebook with a cartoon football on its cover, two wolf T-shirts, duct tape, a bag of jerky, a box of granola bars, a bottle of Coke. And a newspaper, its headlines concerning the terrorist attacks.
She tries to smile at the woman behind the register—tries not to wince when she jars her wrist with the backpack, lifting it onto the counter—and when she has finished paying, nearly a third of her money spent, she says thank you in a voice that needs a glass of water.
She heads toward town, the cluster of buildings and trees a half mile down the road, the only variation in a landscape otherwise sprawling with corn and soybeans. This is the kind of country, her father used to say, where you could watch your dog run away for three days. Used to say. Because he wouldn’t say again. He wouldn’t say anything ever again. Neither would her mother. The dead didn’t speak. She knows she will never see them again.
The day is warming up and she is thankful when she steps into the shade thrown by the knuckly oak trees lining this main street, the older Victorian and Colonial homes set back on browning lawns. The occasional car whooshes by, but otherwise, it seems like a quiet place, where nothing horrible could ever happen. The houses are soon replaced by small businesses. Next to a steepled church sits a small park with paths running through it and a play structure in its center. The trees are big here, some of their gnarled branches as wide as a man’s middle. She circles them, collecting several smaller branches knocked down by the wind. Two girls in bright floral dresses play on the swings while their mother watches. At a nearby picnic table, an older woman, dressed in black rags, rocks back and forth, the town crazy. Claire finds a bench and scares off a squirrel before taking a seat. Out of her bag she pulls the ibuprofen. She pinches the bottle between her thighs and clumsily pulls off the cap, then punches through the foil and washes down three pills with a gulp of Coke.
Next she withdraws a wolf T-shirt and duct tape. She takes off her jacket and slides back her shirtsleeve to the elbow. Over her arm she pulls the T-shirt, a child’s small, running her thumb through a sleeve and her fingers through the neck, flopping the shirt over several times, wrapping the material tight around her arm.
She then lays the sticks across her forearm, two of them pressed tightly together, hoping to make a splint. But when she reaches for the duct tape, her arm wobbles and the sticks fall out of place. And when she tries the duct tape, using her fingers, and then her teeth, to unpeel a long strip of tape, she only ends up tearing and twisting it. “Damn it,” she says and almost hurls the tape away to strike a squirrel or robin. It’s heavy in her hand, as though made of metal, and she bets it could do some damage. That might make her feel better.