“Yes, well, I saw the necklace and?—”
“His brain left his body,” Nash cuts in and covers his mouth to muffle a yawn.
Makhi glares at him. “Yes, I get it. Makhi is a brainless idiot.”
“But not all the time,” Nash says to me. “I believe he thought he was protecting us from you.”
“Is that why Vonn punched you?” I ask Makhi, relieved he’s not asking if I forgive him for what he did, because I don’t know if I have. I’m glad he came after me—glad they all did—but it doesn’t hurt any less when I remember him slamming a door in my face.
Nash shakes his head. “That came later. When we couldn’t find you, guilt was eating him alive.”
I glance from Nash to Makhi, who doesn’t look like he’s feeling all that guilty to me. With his bleary eyes and slumped pose, he looks like he’s trying to stay awake. A product of all that whiskey that has him smelling like he got lost in a brewery.
“How did you find me?” I ask.
“We spoke to an old woman who was on the same bus as you,” Vonn explains. “She’s staying with her son, whose wife just had their third baby. She remembered getting on the same bus as you at Deming, New Mexico. So we had a place to start.”
I remember Alice, the old lady who would have thrown a cheese and ham sandwich at my head if I hadn’t accepted her generosity, and I smile. “She was… pushy. But in the best way. She gave me a sandwich and water, then lectured me on how too many people are pretending to be gluten-intolerant. I thought she was going to throw a bottle of water at my head.”
Makhi eyes me like I’m crazy. “You’re smiling like that’s a good thing.”
“Not the throwing part. The fussing over part. It felt nice.”
“So we got in the car and made the drive to Deming, and then wandered around until we found someone who’d seen you before,” Vonn says, surprising me by not asking why I was so grateful to be fussed over. Even if that fussing over might have included being taken out by a bottle of water from a pushy old lady.
We cling to the kindness that comes when we least expect it.Especiallywhen we’re not expecting it.
“That sounds like a needle in a haystack.” I pull my comforter up to my ears.
“It was, but we knew you’d gotten on a bus,” Nash explains. “If you’d had a car, you’d have been driving it, so we just asked around. An old homeless lady told us where she saw you and gave us our next big clue.”
I struggle to believe anyone would go to all that trouble to find me.
“I remember her,” I say quietly. “She was so rude to me at first, and then she was kinder than I thought she would be. She took me to the women’s shelter when someone stole my food.”
“Someone stole yourfood?” Nash’s eyes flash with barely suppressed rage.
“That feels like a lifetime ago.”Like it had happened to someone else.
I’d run from the homeless man, hidden behind a car, and then eventually walked back to the church where a woman had given me a package of food. The food was gone. I’d been relieved that the man had gotten my food instead of me, but how long would I have lasted on the street?
He wasn’t even the scariest person I’d run into. That had been the first homeless man whose stinky cardboard house I’d crawled in to escape from the rain and been chased out with a roar and a can of food flung at my back.
I was naïve and stupid. I would not have survived long on the street.
When I blink to refocus, they’re not pushing to know how I wound up on the street. Just watching me, waiting for me to climb out of my memories.
Vonn says, “She said you were in an Amish dress, and you seemed lost and had bare feet, like it had been your first time in a city. We guessed you’d escaped from a cult or something close to it, and the rest was research on the internet and guesswork.”
“My mom took us to the compound when I was seventeen,” I explain. “Even though I was there for a year, it felt like a different world when I was back in a city. Everything felt strange. People were in jeans and had cell phones. It was loud and dirty, and everyone stared at me.”
“You didn’t have any other family you could have gone to?” Vonn asks quietly.
I tuck my hand under my pillow, wanting to hug it for comfort. “It was only ever Mom and me. Well… she had boyfriends before, but they wouldn’t have taken me in.”
They dumped her, and they never had much interest in me. I stayed away from the ones who stared at me too long, and things never worked out between them and Mom. So we moved to another town. Another city. Another place where she hoped she’d find someone who would love her the way my dad had.
A pause fills the room, and none of the three men quietly watching me asks about a past they must all be itching to know.
