Wrapped in Rain(25)
Seeing the boy with his guns and the woman without hers, I stepped toward the hole in the driver's side window. The boy looked sleepy and frightened out of his mind. The woman was about my age, and her eyes were sunk back in her head and surrounded by dark shadows. Her face was hidden because her hat was pulled down low and her collar was turned up. Her clothes were too big, too new, and looked like she'd been in them a few days. Khaki shorts and a sweatshirt that looked like she had bought them at a truck stop.
I shined the light but still couldn't get a good look at her face. Fast-food bags, used ketchup packets, and cold French fries littered the floorboards. Having just crawled out of the ditch, mud-soaked, wild-eyed, and draped in clay-smeared hair, I probably looked like what she thought she was shooting at-a crazed lunatic. I'm not sure Miss Ella would have recognized me. With this in mind, I tried to speak calmly. "Lady, I don't know you, you don't know me, and right now, I'm not sure I want to know you or what you're doing out here in the middle of the night, but if you need help, I'm offering. If you don't, I'm leaving." I grabbed the revolver and opened the cylinder, emptying the spent shells. I laid the pistol back down on the front seat and looked at her.
She pointed in front of the car, "We were ... going ... my ... my ... the car." She was shaking, incoherent.
"This storm will be around awhile, and you're nowhere near a gas station. You want to tell me what you two are doing out here"-I pointed at the pistol-"carrying that thing?"
She didn't say a word. Something behind her, either on the highway or beyond, had her scared. Scared badly. The boy too. She shifted, and when the flashlight lit up her eyes, I saw a flash of something familiar. It caught me off guard. "I live just down the road. You two can dry out and even sleep awhile. I have a guesthouse, but you're going to have to trust me more than you did when you started pulling that trigger."
She looked at the boy, at the hood of the car, then out at the rain. Garnering strength, which I imagined she had done a lot lately, she nodded.
"Lady," I said, speaking more softly now, "I need you to talk. Not nod. I'm not taking a nodding stranger with a revolver to my house. Can you speak?"
She swallowed, and determination replaced the terror in her eyes. "Yes," she whispered, "I can speak."
I reached in, grabbed the revolver, and placed it in my waistband. "For now, I'll keep this. We're all a little safer if you're not holding it." She eyed the revolver and unlocked the back door. She slid across the backseat and I held the umbrella over the door opening, although it did little good to shed the sideways rain. She scooped up her son, hung him on her right hip, and made sure to keep herself between him and me. Halfway to the truck, she began sobbing. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry .. ." We sloshed through the mud to the Dodge, where I put them in the backseat, and the boy said, "Don't cry, Mommy. Don't cry." I shut the door and returned to the Volvo.
I reached into their car through the broken window, pulled the trunk latch, grabbed a few bags, snatched the keys from the ignition, and returned to my truck. When I shut the front door, I turned and was about to say something, but I heard muffled sobs. I watched her hands shake as she pulled the hood of her gray sweatshirt up over her head. I handed her a towel, put the stick in first, and noticed that the boy was looking through the rear window back at the car. One look and I realized why.
Cold and chilled to the bone, I ran back to the car, unlocked the chrome dirt bike from the bike rack, and laid it carefully in the bed of my truck. When I finally got back in the driver's seat for the last time, the boy was tucked snugly under his mom's arm and studying me. She stared straight ahead, her face shaded by her hat and hood, and pressed her body firmly against the seat, as far away from me as possible.
Chapter 7
AFTER RUNNING FOR WEEKS, SCARED AND FAR FROM home or anything familiar, the woman's nerves were shot. She sat in the backseat, braced for the worst, and the questions grew: Who is this man? What if he's not what he pretends to be? What if we're now trapped? What if we've been found? What if ... She squeezed her hands into fists; her knuckles whitened, and her legs trembled.
She watched the man steer-his slow, confident, almost reassuring way, his kind expression smeared by residue from the ditch. It was dark in the cab. Her small son pressed his shoulders to her chest; he too was scared. She felt him tremble and breathe short, shallow breaths. The man turned off the highway and drove through an old bricked-up entrance, long run-down, decrepit, and leaning to one side. Vines covered most everything. Flashes of something familiar flooded over her, but she dared not trust anything-especially the past. The rain fell harder now. The man slowed, leaning forward, straining his eyes to see the road. She clutched her son tighter and checked the door to make sure it was unlocked, allowing them to escape quickly if need be. It was. The man drove down a long drive and around a large unlit house, which again shook the foundations of her remembrance, but she kept her focus on him, his hands, and where he was taking them.
She studied this man, his shoulders, his hands, his measured breathing. Who was he? A local farmer? Someone hired by her ex-husband? A good Samaritan? He caught her looking at him in the mirror, and for a second their eyes locked. There, too, something familiar lurked, but she shied away. Too many men had tricked her, and-she reached up and felt the remaining puffiness beneath her eye-she had promised herself and her son it would not happen again.