Full Ride (38 page)

Mom and I walk into the Panera Bread together. We're in a place called Smyrna, one of the northeast Atlanta suburbs, and that alone frightens Mom. She's glancing around like she still believes Excellerand has spy cameras watching for her all around the city. She has a scarf wrapped around her head, hiding her hair just like Jala. Except Jala in her hijab is always beautiful; with her hollow cheeks and terrified eyes, Mom looks like she has cancer or some other potentially fatal disease.

“He's not here yet,” she whispers to me.

“We're
supposed
to arrive first, remember?” I remind Mom.

We go to the counter. Mom orders coffee and I get a chai tea latte. I sip it, and it's too sweet and cloying, but I pretend to like it. I've had a lot of practice pretending over the past three years; it's going to be even more important in the near future.

I wait for Mom to add cream and sugar to her coffee, then by silent agreement we sit down at a four-person table in the most remote part of the restaurant, in a sea of empty tables.

Mom keeps toying with her scarf, tugging it forward, then back.

“Act natural,” I whisper.

“If he's got someone watching us, don't you think they'd expect us to act nervous?” Mom whispers back.

I glance around. That bearded twentysomething guy hunched over his laptop at the back of the room—is he a true midafternoon Panera customer? Or is it deliberate, how he won't glance my way as long as I'm looking at him? The two suburban-mom types over to the side—do their workout clothes actually look like disguises? Are they trying too hard to make it seem like they just came from a yoga class?

It's funny: A week ago on the bus going to Mr. Trumbull's, I felt like everyone around me might work for Excellerand. Now I'm watching for different spies.

“That's him!” Mom hisses through clenched teeth.

I see Mr. Trumbull walk in through the front door. I see him seeing us. He lifts his hand to wave.

Mom waves back.

“Don't!” I scold under my breath.

“Wouldn't it be weird
not
to wave at someone who's meeting us?” she whispers back.

She's right. We're so on edge, it's like we're taking turns not thinking straight.

We've both got to be sharp when he sits down,
I tell myself.
We can't make a single mistake.

Mr. Trumbull is ordering; now he's at the coffee dispenser; now he's walking toward us, steaming cup in hand. He's carrying a briefcase in his other hand, and I have to force myself not to stare at it. Has he brought everything he's supposed to?

Mr. Trumbull puts his coffee cup down on the table across from Mom.

“Hello, Mrs. Smith,” he says, a slightly bitter twist to his words. He turns to me. “And Sarah.”

I have to grit my teeth to hold back hysterical giggles, to hold back even the thought of hysterical giggles. It wasn't a good idea, after all, to choose those fake names for the new identities Mr. Trumbull is bringing us. I'd thought I'd get courage from using the same name I'd made up on Facebook when I was researching Whitney Court. I'd liked the irony of it, my little inside joke.

I hadn't expected it to panic me this much.

Mr. Trumbull doesn't notice. He's sitting down, then bending over to pull a thick manila envelope from his briefcase. He drops the envelope on the table.

“It's all there,” he says.

Mom and Mr. Trumbull both stare down at the envelope like it's a ticking time bomb. But I notice out of the corner of my eye that a couple in business attire have started putting down trays on the table behind Mr. Trumbull. I'm jealous of the very concept of this couple: people whose lives are so leisurely they're eating cinnamon rolls at three o'clock in the afternoon.

Can Mom and I ever live that peacefully, once we carry this off? Will we ever be able to stop glancing over our shoulders all the time?

Maybe I flick my eyes to the right a little too obviously; maybe the couple is too loud scraping out their chairs. Mr. Trumbull spins around and looks at them, then he turns back to glare at Mom and me. It's like the three of us are having an argument with our eyes. From Mom and me:
Hey, we followed the instructions! It's not our fault that couple chose to sit so close when they had thirty other tables to choose from!

From Mr. Trumbull:
Well, this is not acceptable! We have to move to another table! And we have to make it seem natural, not forced!

I'm about to say, loudly, “Is anybody else having a problem with the sun being in their eyes?” when the woman in the
couple behind Mr. Trumbull complains, “Oh, no! Didn't you see how dirty this table is? We can't sit here!”

They move one table back, and Mr. Trumbull looks satisfied. Mom picks up the envelope.

“I have to check to be sure,” she says, not even pretending she trusts him.

“Everything's in order. You'll see,” Mr. Trumbull says confidently. “I even gave you passports this time, like you asked. Though the pictures I had to use . . . you're not really the looker you used to be, are you?”

He's actually saying this to Mom. The man is just mean.

Mom blinks rapidly, as if the jab hit its target.

“I didn't mind losing my looks so much,” she says softly. She gazes pointedly at Mr. Trumbull. “That's not as bad as someone throwing away his morals.”

You go, Mom! Way to fight back!

Mr. Trumbull just rolls his eyes.

“Oh, please,” he says. “Spare me the sanctimonious bullcrap. You lived with a criminal for twenty years.”

“I didn't know,” Mom whispers.

“And what you're doing now?” Mr. Trumbull asks. “Blackmail is a crime, you know.”

“Shouldn't you have thought of that before you started blackmailing Excellerand?” I ask. My voice rings out a little too loudly. It makes Mr. Trumbull glance back toward the couple two tables behind him. They seem oblivious, hunched over something on an iPad. It could be baby pictures or a business report or architectural designs—ordinary things for people with ordinary lives. Unlike Mom and me.

Or Mr. Trumbull.

“What I want to know,” I tell him, “is how you could have done this to us. We trusted you! Did you ever think about how we'd
feel when we found out? Did you even think of us as human beings? Or were we just pawns to you?”

Mr. Trumbull glances at me in a way that makes my skin crawl. Something in my bra itches, but there's no way I'm touching my breast to scratch it. Not in front of Mr. Trumbull.

“I saw you both for what you were three years ago,” he says. He points at me. “You were a spoiled brat, whose daddy had always given you everything you wanted. He never told you the bill always comes due.”

“I found out,” I mutter. “Just like you're finding out now.”

“Touché,” Mr. Trumbull says, and he laughs as if I've truly amused him. He turns to Mom. “And you . . . you were stuck in that small-town mentality of being ashamed of what the neighbors would think. You were so pretty back then—you were magazine-cover ready! You stole millions from my firm, not letting us negotiate media deals for your story.”

“It was
my
story, not yours,” Mom says, with more feistiness than I've seen her show in three years. “Mine and Becca's. I had to protect my daughter.”

Mr. Trumbull smirks.

“You're going to have to remember to start calling her Sarah,” he reminds her. He spreads his hands wide, a courtroom gesture I remember him making whenever he pretended to be conciliatory. “Anyhow, didn't I give you exactly what you wanted three years ago? You wanted to run away and hide. It was win-win. I got the evidence I needed to convince Excellerand; you got to skulk away into exile.”

Mr. Trumbull reaches out and touches Mom's scarf.

“Look at you. Three years down the road, fifteen, twenty miles outside of downtown Atlanta—and you're still hiding,” he says. “You're still cowering in fear.”

Mom shoves his hand away.

“Three years isn't long enough for people to forget,” Mom says. “I could still be recognized.”

“But three years was long enough for us to change what we wanted,” I say. “
I
stopped caring about the secrets so much. I really did start feeling ready to tell people we could trust.”

In spite of everything, Mr. Court actually did fit in that category,
I think.
And of course Oscar, Jala, Rosa, and Stuart . . .

I'm hit with a pang of missing my friends. They all drove back to Ohio last weekend. In the end, they did go without me. It seemed like an eternity that I was here alone, waiting for Mom to drive down to meet me, to set Daddy's plan in motion.

“Three years was long enough for us to be ready to heal,” Mom says softly.

Mr. Trumbull narrows his eyes at us.

“You think you're going to be happier as Evelyn and Sarah Smith?” he asks. “When you have to keep even more secrets? You can't tell a soul now. You know that, don't you?”

We've talked ourselves into a trap. If Mr. Trumbull pursues this, our whole story could unravel. I've got to think of some sort of distraction, some . . .

“Lying on a beach in the Caymans
could
make up for that,” Mom says with a teasing grin.

Mr. Trumbull was starting to turn toward me, but now he jerks his attention back to Mom.

“What?” he erupts. “You mean, that husband of yours really does have an offshore account? And all this time he's been lying to me . . .”

He's incoherent in his rage at not being able to get his hands on any last remnant of Daddy's stolen funds.

Mom smiles angelically and says, “Gotcha.”

Wow, Mom,
I marvel.
Didn't know you had that in you. Well played!

But it's my turn now. I have to strike while Mr. Trumbull is still thrown off, still looking back and forth between us like he's not sure what to believe.

“What I want to know,” I say, “is why it even mattered to you what we did or where we went. Maybe I'm too stupid to see how it all fit together, but . . . you had all the evidence from Daddy. You had him believing you'd taken it to the FBI. That FBI ‘agent' he met with three years ago—who was that,
really
?”

Mr. Trumbull grins at me, and I realize I've struck the perfect tone. He's an egomaniac, and I've just invited him to brag.

“Oh, so you figured out that part of it?” Mr. Trumbull says. “Harlan is an actor friend of mine. I hire him every now and then. He thinks of it as improv.”

I squint the same way I do in calculus when the problems on the board seem unsolvable.

“But why didn't you just do what Daddy expected?” I ask. “Why didn't you bring in real FBI agents, do everything honest and aboveboard?”

Am I laying it on too thick?

“There would have been no advantage in that,” Mr. Trumbull says carelessly. “Your father's evidence wasn't enough. The FBI would have just patted him on the head and said, ‘Yeah, right. Come back when you have something real.' ”

“Excellerand must have thought the evidence was enough,” I say, the puzzled squint still on my face. “If they were willing to pay to keep it secret.”

“Excellerand thought it was
almost
enough,” Mr. Trumbull says. He's leaning in close, and I can tell he wants us to understand how a lesser strategist would have just given up at that point. But not him. Oh, no. Not him.

“I took the information to Excellerand in secret,” he says. “And I could tell they worried about it, but they were already
calculating who they could fire to make it seem like it'd just been an isolated incident, something that appalled the upstanding, morally righteous executives. Before I was halfway into my presentation, I could tell they'd already planned their damage control and their spin, and they thought they'd still come out smelling like roses. They'd look like the good guys for cracking down on government fraud.”

“So you changed your story,” Mom says.

Mr. Trumbull glances her way appreciatively.

“Oh, so you
did
learn something from living with Roger all those years,” he says. “Of course I changed my story. I made it up on the spot. I told Excellerand those were just some of the documents Roger had. I said there were more—more papers, more computer files, more incriminating evidence—but his wife was holding it hostage until he gave her access to his offshore accounts. There's nothing like the wrath of a trophy wife scorned and humiliated and cut off from any chance of ever buying another BMW—”

“I was never a trophy wife!” Mom protests. “Roger and I are the same age!”

I kick her under the table. How could she interrupt Mr. Trumbull now?

Mr. Trumbull doesn't seem to care. You can tell he's having a lot of fun telling his story. And, really, we're the only ones he can tell it to.

“All the Excellerand executives have trophy wives,” he says. “Very high-maintenance trophy wives. So they fell for my story hook, line, and sinker.”

I frown, like a serious student just wanting all the puzzle pieces to match up. I've had three years of experience plastering that expression on my face, so I'm sure it's convincing.

“I don't understand,” I say. “Did Excellerand think they were
paying you to keep Daddy quiet? Or to keep Mom from revealing the evidence she supposedly had, which would have set Daddy free?”

Mr. Trumbull positively beams.

“That's the beauty of it,” he says. “It was an all-of-the-above situation right from the start. They were paying me to keep your mother furious at your father, so she wouldn't just give in and help get his sentence reduced. They were paying me to convince your father his case was hopeless, and so he should keep all the money for himself, for ten years down the road when—once he's out of prison and living it up in the Caymans—why should he care about turning in Excellerand? And, to prevent your parents from ever comparing the stories I'd told them, Excellerand was indirectly paying me to keep you and your mother from visiting him, because your mother was too poor and terrified to come to Atlanta, er—California, should I say?”