a round in their chest.'
When the whistle blew, I followed him out to his truck. He never turned around, but he unlocked the passenger side first, left the door standing open. I got in.
I said, 'I don't want to be at the mercy of anyone ever again.'
We drove out to the nowhere tundra and sat on his hood, draining a six-pack and squinting into the white. He pulled a pistol from his parka pocket and aimed it at my face. His head was crooked, his black curls hanging down like a curtain fringe. He was smiling, and it wasn't a pretty smile.
I said, 'Liffman.'
'Wanna learn how to shoot?'
'Yeah.'
He walked off twenty paces and crunched the bottles into the snow. We shot. He drank the next six-pack himself. We shot some more. When I turned to reload, I heard a flicking sound, and he had a knife out, low and mean at his side. He faked a swing at my head, the blade whistling by so close I could feel the air move.
'Knife fight?'
I said, 'That, too.'
Every six months I sent Callie a card at work telling her I was alive and okay, delivered through a remailing service in Utah so it would bear a different postmark. Another lesson from the school of Liffman. The service would alert me if the letter bounced back as undeliverable, so I'd know if she quit or moved. I was terrified she'd get sick and wouldn't be able to contact me, or that she'd die scared and alone. Those sporadic cards served as my lifeline to her.
I moved to Washington and snagged a job driving a delivery truck for a bakery. And then, two years later, to Oregon, where I worked mornings on a road crew and earned a night-school B.A.
I felt like a hermit crab trying out new shells, looking for a fit. I didn't realize it consciously at first, but I was inching my way toward Los Angeles.
Nine years after that first flight, I finally came home. When the plane touched down at LAX, I was so ashen that the kindly schoolteacher next to me offered his airsickness bag. The first weeks were awful. Some nights I lay awake, wrapped around a pillow, eyes on the door, until sunlight fell through the dusty motel drapes. Other times I prayed they would come just to get it over with. But, slowly, perspective returned. They had to know that if I hadn't talked all this time, I had nothing to say. Surely they had moved on.
I waited a month to track down Callie. She was living in a big white house in Pasadena. Frank's hefty life- insurance policy had bought her a nice piece of property. Coming up the walk, I almost puked in the tulips. When Callie opened the door, she stood perfectly erect, her face motionless except for the tears streaming down her cheeks. We hugged and sat and talked, and I told her some of where I'd been. I lied, too-those lies of omission that had become part of who I was, blank spaces at the center of me. I said I'd fled because of guilt alone, and given what I'd done, that was plausible enough.
She gave me Frank's steamer trunk, which she'd filled with some of my personal things and held on to all these years. But after six months, we hardly saw each other. I still didn't want to risk telling her the whole truth, so there were buried land mines everywhere. And Callie had a whole other life that I didn't fit into, no matter how hard she tried to let me. I drove by her house a few times, sat in my car, and watched the impassive face of the large white house. And I heard an echo of the big guy's voice, just after he flipped me the envelope filled with traveler's checks. You don't talk about this to anyone. Ever. Or we '11 know. And we 7/ know who you talked to also. We won't be nearly as accommodating next go-round. To you or her I could no longer bring myself to stroll up that nice suburban walk and ring the doorbell. On my third or fourth trip, as night fell and the lights began clicking on upstairs, a neighbor slowed in passing to cast a suspicious glance at my crappy little Honda. The drawn reflection I saw in my rearview was alarming even to me. I had become that troubling watcher in the night. That dark, idling car at the curb, beyond the curtains. The thought of someone outside my mother's house, scaring her, finally drove me off for good.
I tried to resume my old life. But I quickly learned it wasn't there waiting for me. My friends, too, had moved or moved on. Seeing them brought home just how much I'd lost. How bad the damage was, burned into my character like a convict's brand. One day I'd been a seventeen-year-old with a Nintendo and a decent life forecast. The next I was a grown-up on the run. Secretive, itinerant, alone with my guilt and those dwindling traveler's checks. And then just my guilt.
I drove to Bob's Big Boy one night. I didn't get past the parking lot. The huge picture windows were lit up like a Norman Rockwell. All those kids eating and drinking, talking about movies and lying about getting laid. I was brought up short there outside, like a bum contemplating a lavish window display. I didn't think about everything I didn't have, but everything those kids did. Envy flared, of course, but when it burned away, I said a silent prayer for them, that their lives would stay blissfully uncomplicated, that for many more years they would be able to take everything for granted.
Hurwitz, Gregg
We Know (aka Trust no One) (2008)
I had to start over. And I gave it my best shot. Make new friends. Build a different life. Cut my bitterness with gratitude for what I still had. I tried to live up to Callie's hopes for me by not spending my life looking over my shoulder. Now and then, when I'd see a dark sedan or hear a voice of a certain timbre, I'd feel a flicker of the old fear, a snake's tongue moving along my spine. At any moment they could pounce on me and throw me in a cell, charge me with a murder I didn't commit.
But they didn't. I got a job helping people who were homeless. I managed to become a part of society, so if I did get hauled off, I could feel like my life had been worth something.
I had finally found calm, or at least my version of it.
And then I awoke one night to see the end of a black rope coiled on my balcony.
Chapter 14
The silence was what told me I had finished talking. I emerged from the stupor of my thoughts as if rousing from a deep sleep, pressed into the present tense by the couch arm in my lower back, the floor beneath my feet, the sensation of nearly unbearable vulnerability, as if I'd been skinned and dangled above salt water.
Induma glanced away, her dark eyes darker than usual. Then she slid down the torn-up couch and embraced me, pressing my cheek to her chest. I couldn't move. We stayed like that a few minutes, and then I raised my hand and put it on her forearm.
She set her other hand on top of mine and said, 'I will help you.'
She stood and straightened out her clothes. With effort she produced a smile for me. The door thumped to the carpet, and she was gone.
I jolted awake at 2:18. Experience had taught me to lie flat and draw deep breaths, to picture the soothing roll of the ocean. Soon the panic lifted and I came back to my body, safe in the darkness.
Clever, the tricks our minds play on us. The mean-spirited reminders they think we require. Given the past twenty-four hours, it was no surprise that the habit had reasserted itself, but still, the thought of it stung. I'd convinced myself it was behind me. The return to the old pattern seemed proof that I'd failed. My deficiencies had been waiting there all along, hibernating just beneath the surface like a bad memory.
It was ungodly hot, my pillow drenched. My air conditioner was awful. It made a lot of noise and didn't put out much, like a sitcom wife. It didn't help that I kept the windows and sliding glass door closed and locked even on muggy summer nights. I lay on my slashed mattress, restless and miserable.
But comfort doesn't matter. Security matters.
I spoke Frank's name to the darkness as I sometimes did. I knew it was weird-embarrassing, even-but I did it because it was the only thing I had left of him, really. I did it to keep him alive. Now I was doing it out of habit. For years it was the one thing I was sure of. Tonight it didn't feel quite that way.
How were Frank and an old war buddy linked to a rucksack of cash? The bills were new, dated last year, but even so, it didn't mean they weren't merely the latest move in a ploy stretching back to Frank's last months. Frank was a man with secrets, but I'd known him well, better than I'd known anyone except Callie. Whatever his
