Perfect Escape (26 page)

And I told her that all mothers make mistakes sometimes and that nobody’s perfect and now she knows to take Bo to the doctor right away in the future. And I told her about my mother, about how she was all about my brother most of the time and I felt so ignored and alone, but that I never once, not in my entire life, doubted that she loved me as much as she loved him. That the love was different, but it was inescapably there, and that’s what makes a mother
good. And I told her that I knew she had that love for Bo because I could hear it when she sang. And all of that was true, even if I wasn’t sure Rena would ever really get it.

And by the time I was done talking, I was crying, too, because I missed my mom so much. Grayson got all of the attention, but he never got all of the love. There was enough of that for both of us. I never could have doubted it. I should have counted on it, leaned on it, rather than run away from it.

Rena smiled and wiped her eyes and kissed me on the cheek and said, “I called my mom.”

I stared. “What’d she say?”

A couple more tears slipped out, and for a second I thought she was going to break down again. “She cried. She said she’d been looking for me. She divorced that jerk she was married to. She can’t wait to meet Bo. She’s coming here.”

“Omigod, that’s great!” I cried, and hugged her. “I told you!”

“Yeah,” she said, looking flushed and smiling sadly. “I guess.”

And then we went and got Grayson, and when he saw Rena, he stuffed the rocks he was holding back into his pocket, and the Kleenex fell off the armrest of his chair and he didn’t even notice.

Instead of going to a dark corner in the lobby, we followed Rena up to Bo’s room, and Grayson ate his sandwich
wearing rubber gloves and poking the pieces up under a surgical mask, and we laughed at him softly so as not to wake up the baby, and then we laughed about that, because just hours before all we wanted was for the baby to wake up.

After a while, Rena stretched out on a cushioned bench next to Bo’s crib, and Grayson pushed together two chairs for himself. I found a pillow in a drawer and curled up with it on the floor. A nurse came in and glared at us, but we must have looked really tired because she left without saying anything and then came back with a blanket for me. I was just happy to finally see Grayson lying down, even if he did seem tense, as if he were lying on a bed of broken glass.

The whir and hum and beeps of Bo’s machines began to lull us all to sleep, and pretty soon the spaces between our hushed conversations were getting longer and longer. The last thing I remember hearing was Grayson whispering, “I have a tough one for you. As I was going to St. Ives, I met a man with seven wives. Every wife had seven sacks, every sack had seven cats, every cat had seven kittens. Sacks, cats, kittens, wives. How many were going to St. Ives?”

And Rena giggling, then whispering back, “That’s Mother Goose, you dork.”

And then drifting and drifting into a world where brick walls were falling and opening up to the sun, which bore down on my face and made me smile.

I awoke to the sounds of a baby crying and lots of rustling going on. At first I was really confused. I was lying on a cold tile floor with a flimsy blanket wrapped around me. But it didn’t take long for my brain to catch up, and I realized the crying baby was Bo, and the rustling going on was a nurse and Rena changing his diaper and chatting happily about how much better he looked already.

I sat up and blinked, looking around for a clock. But when I turned my face, I found my nose practically touching-distance from my brother’s, which was poking out from under the arm of a chair. He was sleeping with his mouth open, acrid breath drifting out at me. I grimaced but inwardly smiled. I was glad he was finally getting some real sleep.

“Hey,” I whispered to Rena, pulling myself upright. “Bo’s awake.”

She nodded, smiling. “And his fever’s down. He woke
up wanting to nurse.” She finished changing his diaper and snuggled him until his cries died down.

“What time is it?”

She looked over my head and I turned. There was the wall clock. “Almost ten,” she answered. “I guess we were all pretty tired.”

“I guess so,” I said.

I pulled myself up off the floor and stretched, then walked over to Bo and tickled the side of his cheek with my finger. Grayson snorted and began stirring.

“I’m so glad he’s better.”

“Yeah,” Rena said, caressing the back of his head. “Nurse said he’ll probably need to stay here today, but if he keeps improving, maybe I can take him home tomorrow.” She was silent for a minute, then shrugged. “Wherever home is.”

“Won’t your mom take you home with her?”

She shrugged again. “Maybe. We’ll see.”

And we were both silent then, because we both understood what this meant for us. Wherever home was, it wasn’t going to be in Hunka anymore, sucking down granola bars and warm chocolate milk and challenging one another with riddles. Even though I hadn’t planned on Rena, I sure was going to miss her.

“You want us to wait for you?”

She shook her head. “You guys go on ahead. I’ll figure something out.”

As if on cue, Grayson sat up and wrung his hands, looking worriedly toward the bathroom. He didn’t even need to open his mouth for me to know what he was thinking. I leaned over and rummaged through one of the bags I’d brought in last night and pulled out the tub of antibacterial wipes. Wordlessly, my brother took it and headed to the bathroom.

Rena watched the door close behind him. “He’s a good guy,” she said.

I stuffed my hands in my pockets and stared at the door, too, as though we would find some great truth about my brother there. Behind the door I could hear muffled
uh-uh
s.

“A little quirky sometimes, but… good,” she said, and when I looked back at her she was staring at Bo, tracing his ear with the tip of her finger. “It’s good to know that good guys still exist out there somewhere, you know? They’re not all like Archie or my mother’s jerk husbands or Sal.”

I sank into one of the chairs Grayson had slept on the night before, and stuck my finger under Bo’s curled hand, wiggling it so he’d make a fist. It sure sounded like Rena had known a lot of bad guys over the course of her life. Grayson, who seemed like a real pain to me, must have looked like a dream to her.

“You’re really lucky to have him,” she added.

I glanced back over my shoulder at the bathroom door. I could hear water running and Grayson muttering rhythmically. I swallowed. “Yeah,” I whispered, “I guess.”

We both touched and jiggled the baby for a while, soaking up his contentedness, and after what seemed like a really long time, Grayson came out of the bathroom, his hands so washed he looked like he was wearing pink gloves. He stepped over the door’s threshold several times counting. Great. A new compulsion. Well, a new
old
compulsion. He’d done the doorway thing before but had kicked it in treatment two years ago. That was the thing about Grayson—you never knew when a new compulsion would crop up or an old one would reappear. You never quite knew what to expect. It wasn’t even worth commenting on.

I untangled my finger from Bo’s hand and stood up. “Listen, why don’t I get us some breakfast?” I said. “I saw cinnamon rolls in the cafeteria last night. Can’t get ’em out of my head.”

“Sure,” Rena said.

I turned to leave, tugging on Grayson’s filthy T-shirt as I passed him, forcing him to stop. “Come with, Grayson. I’ll need extra hands if we want coffee.” I wasn’t really sure I would need extra hands, but for some reason I really needed him to stop going through that doorway. I really needed him to be Rena’s “good guy” for a while longer. Especially since I had a feeling it wouldn’t last.

He stepped through the doorway another nine times (great, he had me counting now, too), and then into the hallway and back into Rena’s room another thirty-six times, and then, reluctantly, as if this number wasn’t high enough and he wasn’t sure it would do, followed me.

“Why thirty-six?” I asked while we waited for the elevator.

“Huh?”

“You went in and out of that door thirty-six times. Why thirty-six?”

The elevator door opened, and I stepped in next to a nurse in pastel purple scrubs with lambs on them, but Grayson looked inside with wide eyes, panicked. I sighed, stepped back out, pulled his shirt again, and said, “Stairs.”

By the time we got into the stairwell (thirty-six ins and thirty-six outs) and down the stairs (thirty-six ups and thirty-six downs), I was beginning to think we’d be buying dinner instead of breakfast. He never did answer my question, which told me he pretty much had no idea why thirty-six. I let it drop.

Grayson stayed out in the hallway while I went in and ordered. Three cinnamon rolls, two coffees, and a bottle of chocolate milk for Rena.

We were heading toward the stairs when a nurse came out of the ER doors, jacket on and car keys in hand.

“Oh, there you are,” she said, and at first I thought she was talking to someone behind us or something. But she kept coming straight at us. “I’ve been looking for you.”

“Oh,” I said awkwardly, but she was heading for Grayson instead. She put a hand on his shoulder and leaned down to talk to him.

“We were able to get a hold of your mother last night. She gave us the prescription and insurance information we
needed, and as soon as the pharmacist gets the okay from insurance, you’ll be good to go. Do you know where our pharmacy is?”

Grayson shook his head, stepping away from me and clearing his throat so softly it almost sounded like the beginning of a word.
Uh
.

She pointed down the hallway, but I honestly didn’t hear anything she said. I was still trying to process what I’d just heard:
We were able to get hold of your mother last night
…. I gripped the bag holding our cinnamon rolls so tightly my fingernails turned pink. The hospital had called Mom.

Which meant…

Our parents knew where we were.

After the nurse left, Grayson wouldn’t look me in the eye. Instead, he stared at his bare toes, white from hospital chill, poking out the bottom of his jeans. I turned on him, trying to keep my voice level.

“You had them call Mom? What…” For a minute I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to speak at all. The lump in my throat had swollen, and I feared air wouldn’t get past it. That maybe I’d end up in the ER, gasping for breath, having a tube shoved down my throat. But confusion welled up in me so great my vision started to get grainy, and I clutched at that paper bag with everything I had. “What the hell, Grayson?” I hissed.

And I started walking because that was the only command my brain could take in at the moment. Walk. Burn
energy. Burn it off before you burn up. I pounded through the stairwell doorway, not even bothering to wait for my brother, but somehow knowing that he was coming behind me anyway.

It was over.

So close—so close!—and he’d ruined it all. Mom would be coming. She’d probably already booked a flight to Nevada. She’d probably already called the cops. I was this close to seeing Zoe again, and everything had come crashing to a halt because of my brother. Of course. As always.

He’d been looking so good. So changed. I was a fool. He would never change. I was stupid to think he ever would.

“I can’t believe…” I said, stomping up the stairs, my mind racing. I turned back after reaching the top of the first flight, and gazed down at him. He was stepping through the doorway again—in, out, in, out. I couldn’t deal with it. If I tried, I was going to blow up on him. I turned and walked up the second flight of stairs, leaving him to follow me.

At the top of the second flight, I paced and waited for him. When he finally appeared at the top of the steps, he looked behind him as if he wanted to go back down and up again, but seemed to think better of it.

I whirled on him. “Why?” I asked. “Why would you do that? What were you thinking?”

And it was then that I saw the tears. Big ones, rolling down his face. His mouth was wet, too, and super red, like he’d been chewing on his bottom lip.

“I need my medicine,” he said in this helpless little voice,
gesturing weakly with the coffees, as if even he was disappointed with himself. “You were gone forever getting those sandwiches, and I started to worry that something had happened to you, so I started counting and… and the nurse could see that something was…” He swallowed, his throat clicking. “… wrong. So I asked her to call Mom so I could get my medicine.”

“You’ve been fine without it,” I countered. “We were almost there. We were almost…” I trailed off when I realized how not almost-there we were, at least in terms of Grayson being cured. Or my situation being any better. The only “there” we were almost was almost there to Zoe, but I couldn’t tell him that, and I especially couldn’t tell him, or maybe even tell myself, that my faith in what Zoe could do for us was waning. I paced over to the wall and pressed my forehead into the cool brick, my mind reeling over what options were left for us.

We had to leave. As fast as we could. Tell Rena and Bo good-bye and go. If we weren’t too late already. That was our only option.

“You don’t understand, Kendra. You can’t… force someone to be who you want them to be.”

“We’re so close,” I said, squeezing my eyes shut and feeling the breath of my words puff back into my face.

“You don’t understand,” he repeated.

“No,” I said miserably, and turned and pressed my back to the wall, then sank to the floor, letting my head flop forward between my bent knees. “You don’t understand.”

“What?” he said exasperatedly. “What is it that I don’t understand? That your life is oh-so-hard? That you really wanted to take a road trip and who cares what anyone else needs? That… what, Kendra? That you cheated and you’re scared of not being perfect?”

My head snapped up. “How about that I didn’t just cheat?” I cried, then rubbed my forehead with my hand, willing the headache that was starting to go away. “Okay?” I mumbled. “I didn’t just cheat.”

He was silent for a minute, his flip-flops swishing against the concrete floor as he shifted his weight. “What do you mean?” he asked quietly.