The Hiding Place Page 16

  Again, I listened for the sound of voices, for the rustling tramp of feet through the woods. There was nothing, only the indignant shriek of a blue jay from its perch on a branch above. The relative silence made me nervous. I rose to my feet, moved downstream to the point where the water grew shallow and a series of stones protruded through its surface. The bird screeched once more, a flutter of wings behind me as it moved from one branch to the next. I picked my way across the stones. When I’d reached the other side, I started upward along the far side of the ravine. Getting myself to a hospital, keeping a low profile, making contact with Linder and Remy—these were my goals.

  The ache in my arm was blossoming once again, the skin stretched tight from the swelling beneath. You can do this, I told myself. You can find him. Just take one step at a time. And I did, concentrating on each step as I made my way up the hill. Before long, I was thinking of Uncle Jim—which was no surprise. The woods were our special place that summer. And even now it was hard to be here without searching for him in the shadows.

  “WHATCHA LISTENIN’ TO, honey dew?” Uncle Jim asked as he walked into my room and plopped down on the bed next to me. I was sitting on the mattress, legs crossed Indian style, my back against the wall.

  “‘Step by Step,’” I told him, surprised he didn’t recognize it. It had been at the Billboard #1 spot for the past three weeks, and was playing on the radio, like, all the time. The cassette had come from the record store a week ago, bought with money I’d earned helping Mom around the house.

  “Who sings it?” Uncle Jim asked, nudging me lightly with his elbow, then settling back against the wall.

  “New Kids on the Block,” I said. My fingers fiddled with the scrunchie I’d pulled from my hair, twisting it this way and that, my body moving in time with the music. I offered him the case and he studied the picture on the front.

  “Oh yeah, I’ve heard of these guys,” he said, although his tone wasn’t convincing.

  “Donnie Wahlberg is pretty cute.” I pointed him out on the cover.

  “I’ll take your word for it.”

  “He has a younger brother, Mark, who was part of the band for a little while, but then quit.”

  “Why?”

  I shrugged. “Guess he didn’t wanna be famous like his brother.”

  He nodded.

  We sat together for a while as the song finished and the next one began. Outside, I could hear the plastic tires of my brother’s Big Wheel rolling down the driveway, the machine-gun spray of the sprinkler firing away in the front yard.

  “What kind of music do you listen to?” I asked—not that I had a wide selection to choose from: Madonna, Bon Jovi, Duran Duran, some Cyndi Lauper …

  “Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “I grew up in the sixties and seventies, listening to stuff from The Beatles, The Doors, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan …” He motioned to the small collection of cassettes I had in the tape rack next to my bed. “I don’t suppose you’ve got any Dylan in there.”

  “I don’t even know who that is,” I admitted. “What kind of stuff does he sing?”

  Uncle Jim ran a hand along the stubble on the side of his face. He didn’t shave every day like my father did. Some of the whiskers were gray.

  “Well, he’s not a new kid on the block, I’ll tell you that,” he said. “Kind of an old kid, I guess. Like me. Been around for a while.”

  I opened my mouth to tell him that he wasn’t that old—not ancient, anyway, like Grandpa—but my eyes fell once again to the gray in his beard and all at once it occurred to me that there are different kinds of old, that sometimes it’s not the years but the stuff you’ve been through that makes you old. I had the feeling that Uncle Jim had been through a lot.

  “He’s sort of a poet, Bob Dylan,” he continued. “Uses his songs to talk about human nature, about the way we live—the way people treat one another—things that aren’t right and ought to be changed. He … he sings about a lot of things.”

  “I don’t understand most poems.” I’d gone across the room to turn down the volume on my stereo, and now I climbed back onto the bed and sat beside him, our feet dangling off the side.

  “Yeah, I know what you mean,” he agreed. “But sometimes it’s not important to understand everything about a poem. Sometimes a good poem is like a fun-house mirror: it shows you the same world but in a different way. It offers you a different perspective.”

  “And you get to see how you look.”

  “To other people, maybe. Or you get to see how their world looks to them. You can learn a lot by seeing things through other people’s eyes.”

  A car pulled up outside at the end of our street. For a moment I thought it was my father, returning home from wherever he’d been this morning, and I could feel my body tense, draw in on itself as it often did when he was around. I hopped off the bed again, went to the window, and looked out in time to see the neighbors’ car pulling into their driveway across the street.

  “Sometimes I wish people weren’t so different,” I said, turning from the window. “In school, the kids tease you if you don’t act like everyone else, if you’re interested in different things. And I think: maybe it would be easier if we were all the same.”

  “Wouldn’t be any fun that way.”

  “I know, but …” I went to my dresser, took the loose knob on the top right drawer in my fingers and gave it a spin. “I mean, you’re different, right? You know what that’s like.”

  “Yeah. I guess I do.” He turned his eyes from me and looked across the room and through the window at the oak parked in the front yard just outside. “Your parents told you about me, I guess, how I’m a little off my rocker.”

  I shrugged.

  “Well, it’s true.” He sighed, the fingertips of his right hand drumming lightly on his blue jeans. “The doctors call it schizophrenia.”

  “What’s it like?” I asked, my ears turning red like I was asking him something that maybe I shouldn’t. His face looked tired now, the eyes cast downward at the rug between us.

  For a long time neither of us spoke, and I thought that maybe I’d gone too far, that it was something he didn’t want to talk about. Through the thin walls of my bedroom I could hear the springs on the front screen door squeal as it opened and slapped shut again, the sound of my brother’s footsteps making their way down the hall into the living room.

  “The first time I was admitted to a psych hospital the doctor asked me if my mind sometimes played tricks on me. And I remember thinking, Yes, that’s it exactly. Sometimes my mind plays tricks on me.” His eyes flicked up toward my face, then down again at the floor. “I hear things, mostly. People talking to me who aren’t there. They say …” His face contorted a bit, grimacing. “They say horrible things.”

  “Do you hear them now?”

  He shook his head. “They’re not always there. They come and go—like headaches, Lise. Or sometimes I get so used to them that I can tune them out, ignore them for a while. But there are other things, too. I’ll get an idea in my head that I can’t shake, something that isn’t right but seems right at the time. That’s the hell of it, you know: separating out what’s real from what’s not real. Trying to keep things straight. Knowing when your mind is playing tricks on you.”

  “Can they fix it? The doctors?” I asked.

  “No,” he responded. “I mean … they can’t take it away. Some of the medicines make things better for a while, but … it will always be there. I’ll always be fighting it.”

  “Are you scared?”

  “No, not scared,” he answered. “I’ve been living with it a long time. It’s just … part of who I am now.”

  “It sounds lonely.”

  He nodded. “It can be.”

  The last song on the cassette had ended. From the living room, the television was playing the opening song for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a show my father had proclaimed idiotic.

  “Hey, Lise,” Uncle Jim said, brightening. “How about you and I take
a walk down to the record store. We’ll see if they have any Bob Dylan albums. Or The Doors—I think you’d like them. If they do, I’ll buy something for you, let you take a listen and see what you think.”

  “Okay,” I said, stooping to gather my shoes. “We should tell Mom we’re going.”

  “Maybe she’d like to come with us.”

  “She’s lying down in her room,” I told him. “I don’t think she feels well.”

  I followed him into the hallway, waited while he rapped lightly on the bedroom door, then poked his head in to check on her and tell her where we were heading. She wouldn’t come with us, said she had a headache and needed to rest with the lights off and the shades closed for a while longer, but to have a good time, and we did end up finding that Bob Dylan album on sale. Also Strange Days by The Doors—“You’re going to love this,” Uncle Jim told me—and Madonna’s new single, “Vogue.” When we got home Mom was up and out of her room—feeling a little better, she said—and that made me happy because tomorrow was her birthday, and everyone should feel good on their birthday.

  Chapter 35

  I stood near the edge of the woods, still concealed within the protective cloak of the trees, peering out at the empty stretch of roadway in front of me. Now that I’d gotten here, I was hesitant to leave the safety of the forest, afraid to step out onto the shoulder and allow myself to be seen by the next passing motorist. Would the men who’d come for Jason be driving the streets looking for me? I didn’t know—couldn’t know—but I could imagine flagging down a car that would roll smoothly to a stop, the front passenger door opening and a man in a dark suit stepping out. There you are, Dr. Shields, he would say. We’ve been looking for you.

  I could hear the heavy drone of tires now. Instead of stepping away from the woods I stepped deeper into them. A semi rounded the corner, the vertical slats of its front grille glistening like narrow rows of teeth, its driver only a hulking shadow behind the glinting glass of the windshield. Crouching low, I made myself even less visible from the roadway, holding my breath as the tractor trailer blasted by me, its brake lights winking for just a moment before it disappeared around the next bend.

  I can’t do this, I thought, but there were no other reasonable options. I’d already tried the phone—still no reception and the battery getting low—and decided to shut it off for the time being. The closest hospital was Anne Arundel Medical Center in Annapolis, about six miles away. It was within walking distance, but there was no shoulder or pedestrian walkway across the heavily traveled Severn River Bridge into Annapolis, and I’d have to catch a ride anyway if I wanted to head in that direction. But going to the closest hospital seemed unwise for another reason: it was too obvious. Instead, I decided to head toward Baltimore Washington Medical Center at the north end of the county. I wasn’t certain of the distance. The phone Linder and Remy had given me was a basic model and didn’t have access to the Internet or a GPS mapping program. I estimated the hospital to be about ten to twelve miles from here. I could walk the distance if I had to, following Route 2—a major thoroughfare—for most of the way, but I’d be conspicuously visible to hundreds of passing motorists, and this seemed even more risky than flagging down a random car.

  So it came down to this, waiting here, concealed by trees, until something nonthreatening came along—something benevolent and nurturing. A Prius, maybe. Then I’d step out toward the roadway where I could be seen, wave a hand for them to stop, and hope for the best.

  I mustered my nerve, readied myself, focusing my attention to the left, on the far stretch of asphalt that disappeared around the curve. A deep breath slid out of my body through pursed lips. The front sole of my right shoe dug into the earth: a sprinter settling into the blocks. The deformed, swollen mess of my forearm pounded with the quickening wallop of my pulse, and the forest itself grew quiet, as if sensing the intensity of the moment and pausing in its persistent subtle murmurings to watch.

  We spend so much time in the midst of others, navigating our way through the seven billion people with whom we share this planet, that it is often a shock—an outrage—to find ourselves alone and in need of help, and for no help to come. For ten minutes I stood and waited, my heart gradually slowing, the adrenaline spent and tapering into nothing. Even the forest began to chirp and twitter again with the call of birds, the tree limbs awakening to a soft breeze and swaying impatiently, irritated with the time they had wasted in pausing to watch. I wasn’t even looking at the road anymore—was, in fact, studying the faint blush of reddish purple beneath the taut skin of my forearm—when I heard the sound of tires approaching from the left. I looked up, and for a moment was too surprised to move. “Son of a gun,” I whispered, as a sky-blue Prius materialized from around the bend in the road. It covered half the distance to where I stood before I realized it was going to shoot right by me if I didn’t get a move on. I lurched forward, the front of my left shoe snagging on something—a root, maybe—that held me midstride for a second, then broke loose and almost sent me sprawling out into the roadway. Instead of stepping out calmly to where the driver could see me, I stumbled onto the shoulder, my upper body bent forward at the waist and too far out in front of my feet. The grass was high here, the terrain uneven, and I stepped on the edge of what might have been a gopher hole, twisting my right ankle in the process. For a panic-stricken moment, I thought I was going to fall directly into the path of the Prius with no time for the driver to react or even slow. I had a clear vision of the car slamming into me at the knees, my body rolling up onto the hood, my head smashing into the windshield, starring it, leaving behind a small wet patch of blood and hair on the safety glass—and then the brief, curious span of weightlessness as the driver slammed on the brakes and I was flung twenty feet through the air, my body rotating a quarter turn before landing in a bone-splintering heap on the asphalt and sliding another six feet before it finally came to rest. The image was so clear, my conviction that it was going to happen so certain, that the blast of the horn and the whoosh of the car speeding past me—the passenger-side mirror snapping the fabric of my pants but missing my right hip beneath by less than a centimeter—seemed incongruous with the moment. I had difficulty merging the two—what I thought was going to happen and what had actually happened—but then the car was beyond me and I was somehow still alive. I stood there, shaking uncontrollably, with one foot on the roadway and the other in the overgrown grass of the shoulder.

  She will stop, I thought. She nearly hit me, and she’ll want to make sure I’m not hurt. I will show her my arm, tell her I fell and injured it in the woods, and ask her to take me to the hospital. Given what had just happened, I couldn’t imagine her refusing such a request. She’d feel compelled to help me.

  I was still thinking these things when the car vanished around the next curve and drove out of my life forever.

  One of my faults, I will admit, is that I cling to the premise that human beings are endowed with a tendency toward basic goodness and decency. History is, of course, replete with irrefutable evidence to the contrary, and yet time and again I am shocked when people do not behave as I expect. This may sound odd coming from a person who narrowly escaped being kidnapped and possibly murdered less than two hours before, but I stood there flabbergasted, puzzling over how the woman in the Prius could possibly have driven away without stopping. I stood there with my mouth hanging partially open, everything else temporarily forgotten, and listened for the sound of her returning vehicle. It would come around the bend any second now. She would flip on her hazards and bring the car to a gradual stop along the side of the road, check her mirrors for other cars before stepping out of the driver’s door and approaching me with a distressed look of concern on her face. Are you okay? she would ask. Are you hurt? Should I call an ambulance?

  That was going to happen, and I stood there waiting for it—believing in it—until at last I registered the growling, gutteral idle of a diesel engine behind me. Turning, I saw a mammoth red pickup truck had stop
ped on my side of the road five yards from where I stood. It was a ridiculous, obnoxious, fossil-fuel-gulping contraption straight out of a country music song. The front wheels cut to the left and the driver began to ease the truck around me, but then he stopped as the cab of the pickup pulled even with where I stood. Looking through the open window at the man sitting behind the wheel, I could see the tanned flesh of his heavily muscled right arm resting on the steering wheel. He wore a sweat-stained olive baseball cap with a John Deere logo planted on the front, and there was at least two days of thick black stubble on his face and neck. But his eyes—his eyes were a deep cobalt that reminded me of the blueberry patch on my grandfather’s farm in Vermont—and there was kindness in his expression. He asked me if I needed a ride. I reached out with my good hand and opened the door without hesitating, grasped an interior handhold, and hoisted myself into the cab. He glanced at my swollen right arm held protectively against my stomach, then back at my face.

  “Can you take me to the hospital north of here,” I asked, “to the one in Glen Burnie off Route 100?”

  “Sure,” he said, and dropped the truck into gear and accelerated smoothly. We drove on in silence for a while. I looked out the window mostly, watched the world—one I barely recognized anymore—slipping by around us. He didn’t ask any questions, and although part of me wanted to confide in him, to tell him what happened and to maybe ask for his help, in the end I decided it wouldn’t be fair. He’d shown me kindness, after all, and I didn’t want to reward an act of altruism by placing him in danger. I’d placed enough people in danger as it was.

  The trip was not a long one, and when it became clear that I wasn’t up for conversation, he flipped on the radio, and sure enough, the music was country—something sweet and earnest and a little lonesome. It made me think of Jason—and, of course, Uncle Jim. And for the next eight miles I sat with my face turned toward the window and tended to the ache in my heart without ever making a sound.