What Have We Done (22)

“I don’t need to think. But I got two conditions.”

Reeves waits.

“One, you make me sound smarter than I am.”

Reeves hesitates. “I want to tell your real story, not some—”

“I’m just fuckin with you.” Donnie cackles. “Even a smart guy like you can only do so much.…”

Donnie holds up two fingers. Looking at them, he has a strange sensation of panic, but he shakes it off.

“Two, though, and I’m not kiddin’ on this.”

Reeves nods for him to continue.

“We start the story when I’m fifteen, after I was on my own and joined the band. I don’t want to get into stuff before then.”

Reeves ponders this. “I think we can make that work.”

“Good.” The last thing Donnie needs is for anyone to start digging into what happened at Savior House.





CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

JENNA

Jenna and Willow drive for a long while in silence. Unsatisfied with Jenna’s vague answers to her barrage of questions, Willow has resorted to an old standby: the silent treatment. Willow stares out the window as Jenna races through the questions playing in her mind on a loop: Why would someone want to kill Artemis Templeton? He’s famous, one of those tech billionaires people love to hate. But is that it? Why was I assigned for the hit? Is it because Arty and I were both wards of Savior House twenty-five years ago? Was it The Corporation? If not, how did they know I had been part of the organization? How did they know about my new life, my family?

Her head is spinning. She needs to get it together. Get Willow safe and then focus on the who, the why.

“Billy seems nice,” Jenna says, if only to distract herself, break the quiet. She’s not so sure he is nice. Rendezvous at the back of 7-Elevens might speak to the contrary. But he gave Willow his Jeep without question. And the way he looked at her in dopey awe.

Willow ignores her.

Jenna stares at red taillights and heavy traffic on I-81. Once they reach 42 South, it will open up.

“Look, I know this is a lot.…”

Willow glances at her with heavy lids, telling her off in a way that only a teenager can. She reaches for the radio, turns it up. She’s usually glued to her phone, so this is the best she can do to avoid communicating with Jenna.

Jenna decides to keep trying. She lowers the volume, says, “I know it was scary, what happened.

Once I get you safe to your dad, we can all talk about it.”

The radio’s volume goes up again, and Jenna decides to let it go for now.

Forty minutes later, she merges onto the Woodrow Wilson Parkway. At last, she sees it, mile marker 21, and she pulls to the shoulder. Willow’s head leans against the passenger window, her eyes closed.

Jenna checks the mirrors. Only a few stray cars, plenty of distance between the headlights. She searches the glove box, then the center console, but doesn’t find what she needs. She gets out and opens the Jeep’s back. There’s an ice scraper stored there from the winter. It will have to do.

She walks down a small ravine filled with weeds that borders the asphalt shoulder. On the other side of a steel highway guardrail is a handmade cross that has a teddy bear and streamers from balloons that have long since deflated. One of those grim markers. A spot where wayward teens

probably were driving too fast and lost control. Or where a drunk driver plowed into unsuspecting motorists. Like Jenna’s parents.

Jenna looks around and waits for a car to pass.

Then she falls to her knees and starts digging with the ice scraper.

It takes a minute or two before Willow notices. She comes out of the Jeep, standing a few feet away.

“What the hell are you doing?” Willow swivels her head back and forth as if she’s looking for someone to tell her this is all an awful joke. That she’s on one of those hidden-camera shows.

She watches as Jenna tugs out a lockbox from the hole, which she carries back to the vehicle like a giant lunch box.

Willow’s mouth is agape.

Jenna looks at her stepdaughter, exhales. “You’re just going to have to trust me.”

Fifteen minutes later, they sit in the Jeep at a Sunoco gas station. It’s dark now, and Willow has the lockbox on her lap. Dirt still cakes the box and it’s all over Willow’s legs and part of her skirt, but she doesn’t seem to notice. Willow keeps flipping through the items that came from a document pouch stored in the box. The two passports, one blue, one maroon, both with Jenna’s photo on them, both with different names. Then similar counterfeits for Simon, Lulu, and Willow herself. Jenna managed to slip the small handgun out of the box without Willow seeing.

Willow doesn’t touch the bundles of cash or the small stack of credit cards secured with a rubber band. She recoils, her hands jerking away as if touching a hot stove, when Jenna reaches over and slides a few twenties from one of the stacks.

Jenna looks around the lot. There’s a lone worker in the gas station’s convenience store, a pickup truck filling up in the other lane. Jenna opens the Jeep’s door but before climbing out says, “You want a water or something?”

Willow shakes her head.

Jenna heads inside, pays for the gas. After, she fills the tank, eyeing Willow in the front seat.

Willow has stopped gaping into the lockbox and is staring out the windshield at nothing. What is going through her teenage mind?