Unforsaken

Three police cars had been parked hastily in front of the building. A cop stood next to one, leaning on the open door and talking into his pager. Another cop stood in the door of the preschool, holding the arm of an agitated woman-the young woman I’d talked to. She was trying to break away from him, crying and pointing down the street in my direction.

I slipped behind the tree, heart thudding.

She was telling them about me, the crazy girl who had come in half an hour earlier. She was telling them that I had taken Chub.

If only she knew. If I could get Chub back, I’d walk right up to the cops with my hands up. They could throw me in jail and I’d go gladly if only I could save Chub.

If there was anything in the world I could trade for Chub’s and Prairie’s safety, I would give it.

But I had nothing. And now I had to save myself before I could help them.

I slipped back down the street, trying to blend into the early lunchtime crowd, groups of people out enjoying the sunshine. When a bus pulled to the curb in front of me, I got on and picked an empty seat near the back.

I slumped down in my seat and tried to be invisible, and as the bus pulled away from the curb, I closed my eyes and pretended that if I couldn’t see anyone else, then they couldn’t see me, either. It was a game from when I was a little girl, a time that seemed so far away it might as well have happened to somebody else.

The bus made its slow, exhaust-emitting way downtown, toward the heart of the city, where Prairie and I often went to shop or try new restaurants. I eventually opened my eyes, half expecting to find a gun pointed at my face. But there were only a dozen or so bored-looking passengers, staring at the ads that ringed the bus, or at the floor, or at folded newspapers.

No one was looking at me.

I was trying to calm down and figure out what to do next when my phone rang. Not my cell phone, but the other one, the one that had never rung before.

I scrambled to fold back the hidden pocket at the bottom of my purse, my shaking fingers making it difficult. I dropped the phone on the floor and it skittered forward under the seats, and a heavyset woman with a lined face picked it up and handed it to me with a look of distaste.

I was too anxious to thank her. I grabbed it and hit the answer key.

“Hello?”

“Hailey, it’s me.”

Kaz. “Where are you? Are you safe?”

“On my honor.”

Relief washed over me. On my honor was our safety phrase, something Kaz’s dad used to say to him long ago, before he left to fight in a war and never came back. When Anna and Prairie had given us the phones, we had all settled on the phrase as a way to communicate that we were safe and alone, that there was no one with a knife at our throat or a gun at our temple.

“Oh my God, Kaz.” I wanted to let the story rush out-They have Chub and Prairie and I’m on a bus and the cops are after me-but I knew I had to be careful. I moved to the back of the bus, where there were no other passengers who might overhear, and then I forced myself to take a deep breath before I told him everything: how I’d seen Prairie’s jacket on the hanger, as if she was going to be back any moment; how the cop cars had pulled up in front of the preschool; and how I had heard the children’s laughter but I hadn’t been able to see Chub.

“Where are you now?”

“I’m on a bus. A city bus. I took the first one that came. I don’t think anyone saw me. It’s… we just passed the U.S. Bank building.”

“Hailey.” Kaz’s voice was gentle. “I don’t even know what city you’re in, remember?”

That was right-I had never told. “I’m in Milwaukee,” I said, and with that one revelation, I knew that everything had changed. We were a team again, me and Kaz, with an impossible challenge ahead of us. But I had learned to focus on the first step, and then the one after that, and then the one after that. We had a chance if we just put one foot in front of the other.

In my heart I knew that it was a fantasy, that our odds were nearly impossible. But for the moment I chose to pretend. After we settled on a plan, I hung up and looked out at the streets of downtown Milwaukee, at all the people going about their business. Nice, ordinary folks who’d never had to discover a terrible secret that changed their lives forever.

I managed to keep the denial going for a while.

When the city bus came within a few blocks of the Amtrak station, I got off and bought a ticket and a sandwich and a magazine I didn’t read, and waited in the station with all the other passengers until it was time to depart.

A year earlier I wouldn’t have known how to buy a ticket, where to wait, what to eat. Every decision would have frightened me. I had never left Missouri, and I could count on one hand the number of times I’d left Gypsum. I had never shopped in a department store, had a real haircut, eaten in a nice restaurant, gone to a concert, or kissed a boy.

Now I’d done all those things, and more. Prairie had been there for me every step of the way. She knew when I was afraid and she always made time for me, whether it was to take me on my first visit to a real doctor, to teach me how to ride public transportation, or to help me balance my checkbook. She’d created our new lives with great care, making my safety her foremost concern. And she’d been right to worry, even as I chafed under her rules, even as I broke them, even as I resented her for loving me enough to keep me safe. She’d given me everything, and I’d thrown it away.

As the Chicago skyline came into view outside the train window, I picked out the Sears Tower, the Hancock building, all the landmarks I’d come to love in the brief time that Prairie and I had lived with Anna and Kaz, and wondered if I was a city girl now.

But deep down I knew that despite my new confidence, my new look, I still didn’t know who or what I was.

I got off the train hoping Kaz would be waiting for me-and knowing that he wouldn’t. We had learned to be a lot more careful than that. I kept my sunglasses on, an expensive pair that had been a recent splurge on a shopping trip with Prairie, and walked purposefully in the direction of the shops lining the edges of the train station. I pretended to windowshop, pausing in front of a little store jammed with racks of costume jewelry.

I lost track of how long I’d been standing there. A minute, two, five. I watched the reflection in the polished glass, a thousand people with a thousand different destinations.

“Hailey.”

I had been waiting for his voice, but I still jumped; my thoughts fell away and I blinked and spun around and there he was, right in front of me, and for a moment I forgot everything else.

“Kaz,” I managed to whisper, and then I was lost in his arms.

7

“GIT UP,” RATTLER SIKES muttered, his lips inches away from Derek Pollitt’s freckled ear. It had been no problem letting himself in through a poorly secured ground-level window at Derek’s place, which was really just the basement of his mother’s crumbling ranch house on the west end of town, not far from the old Pack’n’Save they’d shut down when they built the Walmart Supercenter over in Casey. Kids took potshots at the sides of the Pack’n’Save building now, and spun donuts in the parking lot on days when slate skies left a slick layer of ice on the pavement.

Rattler himself had let out some of his extra energy there a few times on days when all that power inside him felt like it wanted to itch its way out and leave him twitching and empty, days when he felt like it controlled him rather than the other way around. He didn’t like that feeling, no, not one bit. Days like that he split wood for hours, working in the freezing cold with no shirt on, feeling the splinters bounce off his torso, smug in the knowledge that they’d leave no mark on him. Or he shot a