I wish we had that in common. I make the promise to myself, again, to borrow some from him.
We’re in the car and navigating traffic on a foggy highway half an hour from the moment Mom sets the doughnuts down.
I doze, mostly, with my headphones blocking out the nonconversation. Mom and Sam are being very quiet. Connor’s turning pages. I amuse myself by making a new playlist: SONGS TO KICK ASS AND TAKE NAMES. It’s a boring drive, and the pounding rhythm of the music makes me want to go for a run. Maybe Mr. Esparza will let me do that when we get to his cabin, though I kind of doubt it; we’re under house arrest, again, hiding from all the boogeymen in the shadows—not just of the real world of Dad and his friends, but all the amped-up Internet trolls. One pic, and somebody will paste me all over Reddit and 4chan again, and things will get very, very bad, very fast.
So probably no run.
We drive for a couple of hours, then stop at a big-box store, where Sam buys four new disposable phones; I’m temporarily thrilled to discover he had to buy real smartphones, even though they’re still kind of clunky. No flip phones available. These are plain black, nothing special. We unshell them in the car and trade numbers. We’re all used to this by now. Mom liked to buy me and Connor different colors of phones, just so we wouldn’t get them mixed up, but Sam didn’t think of that; all four phones are the same. Mom confiscates mine and Connor’s and does her Mom thing, which locks off all the Internet functions before she gives them back and disables as much as she can. Normal course of business. She’s never wanted us to see the flood of ugliness out there about Dad, and about us.
I slide the phone into my pocket, plug my headphones into my iPod, and crank up the music. I am jamming to Florence + The Machine when I realize that Sam hasn’t started the car. He’s got a slip of paper out, and he’s entering a phone number into his own device, then making a call.
I move my headphones out of my ear and pause the music in midwail to listen.
“Yes, hi, is Agent Lustig available?” Sam listens for a few seconds. “Okay. Can I leave a message for him? Ask him to call Sam Cade. He’ll know the name. Here’s my number . . .” He reads it off to her from the package. “Ask him to call me soon as he’s able. He’ll know what it’s regarding. Thanks.”
He hangs up and starts the car, and as we pull out onto the road and drive on, I realize he’s not planning to share with the class. So I take one for the team. “Who’s Agent Lustig?”
“Friend of mine,” Sam tells me. He’s honest with us, or at least, as honest as he thinks he can be. That’s something I really like about him.
“Why are you talking to the FBI? He is FBI, right?”
“Because they’re tracking your dad,” he says. “And also, we need to understand something about Absalom. I’m hoping that the FBI might have more information.”
I know about Absalom, and I frown. “Why?”
“Because Absalom might have someone else besides Graham to send after us,” he says, after a glance at Mom to confirm it’s okay to tell me about that. “And they might have traced us this far. Which is why we’re using new phones now.”
Mom finally chimes in. “Absalom could be a group, not just a person. If so, they could be helping your dad stay hidden, while also working to find us for him.”
“If there’s danger, why are you taking us back to Norton? Why can’t we just stay with you?” Connor asks. He lowers his book but keeps the place with a finger between the pages.
“Seriously?” Mom is trying to sound amused, but she just sounds grim. “You know the last thing I’m going to do is take you anywhere near trouble. My job is to keep you away from it. Besides, this has been hard enough on you already. You both need to be somewhere safe, and you need rest.”
And you don’t? I think it, but I don’t say it, which is weird for me. Instead, I say, “You don’t have to go, you know. The cops are chasing him. So is the FBI. Why can’t you just stay with us?”
Mom takes her time with the answer. I wonder if she even understands it herself.
“Sweetheart, I know your father,” Mom says. “If I’m out in the open, it means he might do something stupid and expose himself to come after me. And that means he gets caught faster, and fewer people get hurt. But I can’t take that risk if you’re with me. Understand?”
Sam again says nothing. I’m watching his hands on the steering wheel. He’s pretty good at covering up what he thinks and feels, but not that good, because I see the slight whitening of his knuckles.
“Yeah,” I say softly. “I get it. You’re bait.” I fiddle with my iPod but don’t put the headphones back in. “Are you going to kill him?” I don’t know what I want to hear.
“No, sweetie,” Mom says. But I don’t hear any conviction behind it. I know that Sam wants to put a bullet in Dad’s head. Maybe more than one. And I get it. I get that Dad is a monster who needs to be slayed.
But Dad is also a memory to me. A strong, warm figure tucking me into bed and placing a kiss on my forehead. A laughing man whirling me around in the sun. A father kissing my boo-boo finger and making it better. A giant shadow scooping me up off that soft braided rug and folding me in warm, protective arms.
I look away, out the window, and I don’t argue with any of it. Thinking about my father, both as the monster and the man, makes me feel short of breath and sick, and I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel. No, that’s a lie: I know I’m supposed to hate him. Mom does. Sam does. Everybody does, and they’re right.
But he’s my dad.
Connor and I don’t talk about this—not ever—but I know he feels this, too . . . the way it pulls and rips inside to try to match up these two very different things. I think about that colorful old rug again, a piece of home inside a monster’s den. I can’t decide if that was him trying to still be Dad, or if the monster was all there ever was, and Dad was a mask he wore to mock us.
Maybe it’s both. Or neither. It’s exhausting, and I put the music back on and try to drown it all out.
I sleep for a while. When I wake up, we’re close. Sam turns the car off the main freeway and onto smaller state highways, and we glide through a dozen small towns before the turnoff comes for Norton, and Stillhouse Lake. I watch that buckshot-riddled old sign glide by with a pain deep in my stomach. I want to jump out of the car and run down that road, run straight for home and throw myself into my bed and pull the covers over my head.