slide past her window. Here and there a tree—or what passed for a tree in this part of the country—jutted upward in the distance. Jane drove her into the city, then south on the big highway toward the interstate.
“Why are you doing this?” asked Rita. “Why do you want to ditch me?”
Jane considered for a moment, trying to find the way that she could say it that would mean anything to this girl, a person who knew so little but had seen so much so young. “It’s the only thing I know how to accomplish that makes any sense. A person like you—someone who hasn’t done anything to deserve it—is in danger. I know how to take her to a place where nobody wants to hurt her.”
“You’re just dumping me,” said Rita. “You want to get back to Bernie and his money.”
Jane let the jab go past her, then diverted it a little. “That’s not precisely what’s happening,” she said. “When you came to me you asked for something reasonable. You wanted to stay alive. It’s something I thought I could give you, so I agreed. But you have to stick with what you asked for.”
“Things have changed since then. Bernie being alive changed everything. You act like I’m a child. People my age have kids, fight wars.”
“Sorry,” said Jane. “I’m not much in favor of them doing either.”
“I’m not afraid, you know.”
“I noticed that, and it worries me. A little bit of the self-preservation instinct wouldn’t be out of place in a girl your age.”
“I can help. I can shop and do whatever else has to be done outside, so you and Bernie can be invisible. I can cook and clean and do chores, so you and Bernie don’t have to. I’m really good at not being noticed.”
“Good,” said Jane. “Then you’ll be even safer in San Diego, where nobody’s even looking.”
“San Diego?” asked Rita in distaste. “I don’t know anything about San Diego.”
“It’s pleasant, and it’s big. It’s one of the fastest-growing cities in the country, so there are lots of newcomers, particularly young ones. It has no winter, which is something you’ve never experienced and would certainly hate, and it’s on the ocean, which is what you’re used to.”
“Please,” said Rita. “Don’t do this to me again.”
Jane watched her eyes fill with tears. “Again?”
Rita said, “It’s what people always do to me. For as long as I can remember, my mother was always doing this. She would get me into the car by telling me we were going someplace nice. Then, when we got there, I’d find out it was just me that was going there. She would stop just long enough to go into some other room alone with the woman who lived there—some friend of hers—and talk her into keeping me for a day, and she would leave. Sometimes she would be gone longer than she’d expected, or at least longer than she’d told the woman, and I could tell. The woman would start to look at me funny, like it was me that lied to her. When I got older, my mother couldn’t do that anymore. I would just get home from school and find that she was gone. Usually a couple of days later she would be back. On the good times, she would just be nervous and depressed and nasty. But about once a year, she’d bring home a new boyfriend. I would come home and see the front door open and the windows, and I’d be so happy. But then I’d come up the walk and I’d hear her voice inside, and I would know that she couldn’t be talking to herself.”
“That’s … I’m sorry,” said Jane. “But this isn’t the same. That’s over.”
“No,” said Rita. “It’s not over. It’s always like this. The world just goes on, and everybody’s so busy, doing things together, and I’m always the one that’s alone on the outside, wondering about it. I can’t ever get in, and I can’t do anything to get included. I used to look at the people my mother spent her time with—laughing at what they said—and I’d think, ‘I’m funnier than that.’ I’d watch her look at them and smile, and I’d think, ‘But they’re all ugly, and this one’s mean, and that one stole from you. Why don’t you want to be with me?’ ”
Jane said carefully, “I’m sure she did want to. Your mother had a drug problem, and that seems to be a full- time occupation. It doesn’t leave much time or energy for things like raising children. But you’ve made it this far, and you’ve done some difficult things since then, and that proves to me that you survived it. There’s no reason you can’t have a terrific life from now on, if you’ll just let it happen.”
“It’s not going to happen,” said Rita. “There’s something about me—something missing. I didn’t tell you everything, because I wanted to make myself sound better than I was. When I went to Tampa, it wasn’t some brave new start. I went because I knew a boy from school who was there. I didn’t find myself a job. He asked them to hire me. I didn’t even find my own place to live. He just took me in, because he had an old couch in his apartment.”
“I take it he wasn’t a boyfriend?”
Rita looked down at her lap. “I thought it meant something, like he wanted to be with me. I kind of worked myself up and got all nervous wondering when something was going to happen. But he never felt that way at all. It was just that he was a busboy, and the rent cost so much that he couldn’t afford a car, so he needed a roommate to help pay. After a couple of months he had enough for a down payment on an old car, and he found a girlfriend. I came home from the hotel one day, and he had already moved her in. Her stuff was all over the place so you could barely walk, and she was in the bathroom, using my hair dryer.”
“Did you get annoyed?” Jane realized that Rita wasn’t interested in indirection. “Jealous?”
“I just felt lost. I didn’t know what to do, or where to go. I didn’t want to be alone. I didn’t leave. It was awful. I knew they wanted me to go, but I didn’t know how. It was like being a ghost. They were alive, but I wasn’t. They would look at each other, talk to each other, but hardly ever to me. It wasn’t even like they were being mean. It was like I wasn’t even there. It started to affect me. Every day, I felt a little weaker, a little less real. They were always … touching each other, and I hated that the most, because they wouldn’t do that in front of anyone.”
“How did it end?”
“Danny offered me the job in the Keys.”
Jane’s mind was jerked back into practical matters. “Did you tell them where you were going?”
“Sort of, but not exactly,” said Rita. Then she added, “I lied. What I did was, I bought some stuff from the grocery store while they were at work. It took most of the money I had left from my paycheck. I made this really nice dinner, with a cake. I bought a card—a blank one with a picture of a red Lamborghini on it, because I knew he liked cars. Inside I wrote this thank-you note, you know, for letting me stay here, and helping me get a job and everything? Then I left and met Danny at the parking garage near the hotel.”
“Good,” said Jane. “Then there are no extra people who know more than they should. What exactly did the note say?”
“I said in the note that I had met an older guy who was taking me to live with him in the Keys.”
Jane said, “I think you can be forgiven.”
“It was a lie.”
“You may be confessing to the wrong priest,” said Jane. “I’ve told a few myself.”
“I said a little bit more.”
“What was it?”
Rita said, “I left the note right by the cake where they’d both see it at the same time. He used to get off work at the hotel and then pick her up from her job, so they came in together. I knew he would read it first, because he always went straight to the refrigerator, but she would see him read it. The way I said it was that I was sorry to dump him, but I had met somebody else. I did it so that he would be stuck. He wouldn’t want her to read that. He couldn’t throw it in the garbage, because if he did, she would dig in and find it as soon as he turned his back. He couldn’t hide it, because then she would think he was trying to save it. If he tore it up, she would know he didn’t want her to read it, so she’d really be sure to dig out the pieces and put them together. See what I mean?”
Jane gazed at Rita with new interest. “I wonder what he decided. Do you suppose he ate it?”
Rita frowned at her, then abruptly giggled. “I don’t know.” Then she frowned again. “It was a mean thing to do. It was just pure meanness.”
Jane smiled. “What made you do it?”
“I didn’t start out to. I guess it was being in the store buying their dinner. I just kept thinking about how all they would ever buy was beer and pizza, or they’d eat out on the way home from work, and I would eat alone. I would buy regular food at the grocery store, and when I went to look for it in the refrigerator it was gone, or at least opened and partly eaten. Then I thought about how I was still paying half the rent even though there were two of them now. And they got the bed, while I was out on this couch with broken springs, and I couldn’t even go to sleep sometimes because they worked in the evening and sat on it to watch television. And a lot of other times it would be worse, because they would be in the bed and I could hear them until it was just about time for me to get
