Part II
TWO FUGITIVES
CHAPTER 27
It’s four o’clock in the morning and Simone is once again awake, this time doing ninety miles per hour on a freeway while Lucy shivers next to her. She keeps checking she’s really there. That her limbs are solid.
She doesn’t have any shoes on, and something about this is bothering Simone. She rummages around on the back seats, finds Lucy’s Crocs she hastily threw in the car, and hands them to her.
Either they have got away, or the Buick is lagging strategically behind them.
The road is empty up ahead, pierced with white-hot street lights but nothing else. No vehicles anywhere.
‘It’s four hours to Del Rio Airport,’ Lucy says in a low voice.
Simone can’t yet respond. There is too much, a vast desert of things to decide and discuss. They need to call Damien. They need to talk about everything that’s happened. What Simone truly had to do. What Lucy endured.
They need to decide if they’re really running.
Simone pushes her foot all the way to the floor.
‘We can’t drive so madly we get pulled over.’ Lucy darts a glance at Simone, who concedes she’s right, and takes her foot off the accelerator just slightly.
‘We need to call Dad.’
‘I know.’
Simone gestures to her phone. ‘Call him.’ And, among everything, this is the most important: to tell her husband his daughter is safe.
‘What do I tell him?’
‘That you’re fine and to meet us at the airport now,’ Simone says, eyes on the horizon.
Lucy presses Call and she hears Damien bark out a ‘Hello?’
‘It’s me,’ Lucy says to him, and Simone could relive that shocked, stunned, happy silence forever.
‘You’re OK,’ Damien says to her, his voice shaking, high with relief.
‘I’m OK,’ Lucy answers, then relays the instructions to him. And, the whole time, Damien is interrupting, saying, ‘You’re really here? You’re really OK?’ and Simone can’t bear to tell him the rest of it. That somebody is dead. That they’re fleeing.Arethey fleeing?
She will, but not yet, not yet – just let them have this moment, a bright star in an otherwise dark sky: just one.
Lucy lapses into silence, and Simone feels the panic and adrenaline burning through her body. She tries to breathe. She’s killed a man. She’s left the scene. This will be the truth forever, no matter what happens next. She blinks, her eyes wet.
‘I can still smell him on me,’ Lucy says. And this – this is what Simone needs to hear. She needs to hear and hold her daughter’s trauma for her.
Everything else can wait. She needs to hear this, hear Lucy out, and make sure that she is safe. ‘What did he do to you?’ Simone says, thinking,Please nothing awful, please.
‘Just him,’ Lucy continues, a monologue that must have been waiting for release for two straight days. ‘He smelled of aftershave. Really distinctive smell. Lemony. When he grabbed me and took me.’
‘I …’
‘Gloved hand. Leather. Couldn’t even make a noise. He wassostrong.’
And something, against all instincts, relaxes in Simone – there was no noise. What woke her that morning might have been maternal instinct, still in good and working order. ‘I woke,’ Simone says. ‘At four o’clock in the morning.’ They both glance at the clock now. ‘I wish I had woken properly. I stirred. If only I …’
‘I don’t know what time it was,’ Lucy says. ‘Didn’t have timetoknow; his hand across my mouth woke me. Then he dragged me out of bed.’
