CHAPTER 35
‘They were probably for us,’ Simone says dully.
‘Yes,’ Lucy agrees tightly.
‘We’ve got to leave the car,’ Simone says, sitting there in deafening silence. She knew it was a risk to take it, but what other choice did they have? They couldn’t simply walk out into hundreds of miles of desert.
Only, of course, now, they’ll have to.
The Terlingua dream dies a death, there in an abandoned garage, like everything. The net is closing in. Simone doesn’t know how long they can keep running for.
All they can hope for is some time: time for the car to be discovered, time for them to get somewhere, to do something, to gather evidence, to make a plan, whatever that might be. To talk to the police in another municipality. To find a lawyer. To findhelp.
‘We should have left the car and got a cab,’ Lucy says flatly, and her voice contains some blame within it. Simone knows where this is heading, but she doesn’t try to divert it this time. Lucy’s anger, today, is fair enough, even though Simone has spent the last four years trying to teach Lucy to control her hot-headed tendencies or at the very least use them for good. But only recently, after Lucy told a cat-calling bricklayer to suck his own dick, Simone had found herself thinking,OK, is a female temper so bad, these days?
‘Our faces are on the news,’ she tells her daughter.
‘Only just now, and only local. No jaded Uber driver would’ve noticed or cared,’ Lucy says, her tone acerbic, and Simone wonders if she truly believes this, or whether she’s just arguing the toss because they’re stressed and tired and running.
Beyond the garage is highway, stars and desert. They are in the real, true wilderness. With no car – this is … this is mad. They might as well just sit here and wait for their arrest, or their capture by a criminal kidnapper.
‘This is,’ Lucy says, her voice rising as she speaks exactly what Simone’s been thinking, ‘this is mad!’ And here it comes: the explosion. Today’s arrives in the form of a single punch to the dashboard. ‘Fucking fucked up.’
‘I know,’ Simone says.
‘What the fuck are we going to do?’ Lucy says. Simone doesn’t bother to admonish the swearing. ‘We’re – just … they’re after us.’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know,’ Simone says.
‘This is an actual nightmare.’
‘I know. Let me think.’ Simone puts her head into her hands.
But she’s out of ideas. She ought to gun the engine, just drive, drive to the police station and go down for life, worse, but she doesn’t.
When she opens her eyes, and looks at her daughter, there’s an enigmatic expression on her face.
‘What?’ Simone asks her.
‘Terlingua is a few days away on foot. It’s a straight line, south. I’ve seen it on maps when people from camp went hiking.’
‘Right …?’
‘And we have the tent. We were going to camp anyway,’ Lucy says feebly, her voice imbued with the sad and specific tone people get when they try to make the best of a bad situation.
‘I mean, I don’t know, Luce. We weren’t going to camp by the side of a road.’
‘Desert’s desert.’
They were going to go shopping for everything. They were going to go to a proper campsite, hike every day. Make s’mores, Lucy said, and Simone had said, ‘What exactly are they?’ and Lucy had said, ‘A cultural rite of passage. Don’t worry about theingredients, nor theMichelin Guidepresentation.’
She locks eyes with Lucy now. ‘OK. We need to leave the car. So. OK. We have no choice.’
They get out. Their footsteps echo in the garage. The floor is pristine but hastily painted, the edges grey and bubbling. Simone wonders whose this is, who pays the rent on it, why they leave it open, but there isn’t any time to think. They have to get as far as possible on foot.
‘They might know we’re heading to Terlingua now,’ Simone says. ‘If that police car was for us.’
‘We can’t get anywhere else,’ Lucy says. ‘Everywhere is so far apart. We have, like, what, a few days’ worth of food?’
