‘We cannot hand ourselves in,’ Lucy says, once again speaking Simone’s mind. ‘It’s Texas,’ she says. ‘It’s drugs. It’s murder.’ Her hands are shaking.
Their eyes meet. ‘I …’ Simone says, thinking of everything Lucy’s endured.
‘It’s – it’sTexas,’ Lucy says again, with a meaning Simone is missing. Until Lucy spells it out for her. ‘They have the death penalty.’
Simone closes her eyes.
Lucy makes a panicked grab for the phone and starts looking at the articles, showing one after another after another to Simone. ‘Look,’ she is saying. ‘Look at how their minds are made up about us. I didn’t even …’ she chokes out. ‘I shot at thecar, not him.’
‘I know,’ Simone says. Theusis correct. Simone has committed the more serious crimes, but only just. Lucy would get time for shooting at a police officer and then leaving thescene. Probably almost as much as Simone. Or Simone might get no time at all, instead put to her death.
They are both wanted.
‘We don’t need to hand ourselves inorgo on the run,’ Lucy says, and Simone’s head snaps up, looking at her daughter. In the glare of the forecourt, her eyes look strange, wild and impassioned. ‘We could just – lie low, get our case together,’ she says, and Simone latches on to this in the way one does when a situation is hopeless. ‘Get everything straight. What happened, find what evidence we can, what we can prove, to demonstrate to the police what happened to us. Then, when we’ve got all that, tell different police. A few towns away. Just in case,’ she says.
‘His DNA will be on you now,’ Simone tells her. ‘If we leave, we lose that.’
‘They’ll say it doesn’t prove anything. Could be from anywhere. Could have been in the taxi before me.’
‘I know.’
And that’s all it takes: a nod from Lucy, and then Simone nods, too, their heads bobbing in unison, one the parent, one the child, out there in the tiniest patch of civilization in the vast, vast desert. One believing absolutely that they will figure this out, one pretending, or maybe that’s both of them, Simone can’t tell.
CHAPTER 32
‘There’s a town, Terlingua. It’s far enough away to have different police, in case any are in business with the kidnapper, but near enough to get to. There were day trips there from camp all the time. People came back with all sorts,’ Lucy tells her, once they’re back in the car. ‘We ought to head for there. I think it’s pretty big. We’ll be able to hide in plain sight. I’m pretty sure there are motels there that would take us without ID.’ She pauses. ‘We need to get rid of our phones,’ she says.
‘Yes. They’re tied to us.’
‘They know we’re in this car.’
‘I know,’ Simone says. She has been thinking about this, wondering what to do, but now she has a plan. Some survivalist tendency from her adolescence is rearing up within her, bringing with it memories. She got ahead of the dot-com boom by leaning into technology, something she’s never once regretted – every job uses it, even cooking: the precision of vacuum-sealing vegetables, then cooking them in a water bath – and now she knows what their vulnerabilities will be: the phones and the hire car. Lucy’s come to the same conclusion by virtue only of being young and raised on a diet of smartphones and YouTube.
‘I think we get as far as we can get, then ditch it,’ Simone tells her. ‘We can’t now, in the desert.’
‘No. OK.’ Lucy fiddles with the glovebox.
And neither of them is talking timescales. Maybe they can’t, maybe they don’t know, or maybe they simply can’t bearto. Simone’s never done denial, but perhaps she is, tonight. And what eighteen-year-old would be able to unpick feelings and decisions this complex?
‘It wasn’t much of a holiday,’ Lucy tells her in the quiet car, and the sentiment is so darkly funny that Simone can’t help but let out a little bark of laughter.
‘No.’
‘I have had better.’ A pause, then she adds, ‘God – I’m sorry. It’s easier to joke than to cry.’ And Simone’s heart flips over in sadness.
‘We will have better,’ Simone says, and she’s shocked to find it feels like a platitude. The things they may be missing out on seem to play out in front of them. Holidays, Lucy going to RADA, going home? Simone cannot bear to look at them, can’t yet face reality. She can’t be thinking that none of this will happen, that their lives as they knew them are over. It’s too painful, too raw and too shocking. They will get home. They will. And if they don’t, she wants to look when it isn’t a gaping, bleeding wound but instead a scar. Maybe she can spare herself from the pain that way; she did so with her parents.
She never cried about them. Not when social services made the order and she went to live with the foster family. Not when she had her first stilted and supervised contact with her parents in the Costa with automatic doors that blew the rain inside every few minutes. Weekly meetings soon became monthly, and the reason became clear: her parents perceived it was her fault. She had embarrassed them, a relative once said, by being taken into care; it was so dramatic. They stopped speaking eventually. They lost touch. Then, years later, her father got ill, and it was Damien who opened the wound for her, sitting on a little rope swing at a National Trust property two hours after her father’s funeral.
‘If you were an addict and you had to apologize to Lucy,what would you say?’ he asked plainly. They’d walked and walked afterwards, ended up there without plans.
Simone closed her eyes. ‘I can’t …’
‘Just one sentence.’
She looked at him, then, at his open face. They should have been back at the restaurant, she’d said. It had been back in the time when it was a resounding failure and they were needed at all times to keep it afloat. But, there in the little clearing, it felt like it had never existed.
Simone expected to speak a cliché, to say she was sorry, but she didn’t.
