Nobody but Us (21 page)

“Zoe?”

I try to answer, but my mouth is full of tears and I feel ridiculous and childish.

Will he think I’m betraying him? Am I? Is it possible, anymore, to do the right thing? As though I know what that could be. Why can’t being happy, being free, be the right thing? Why can’t we go back to when Will and I believed we could have the right thing?

“We can’t do this. We can’t go on like this, running and scared and criminal.” My chest heaves against him, erratic and unstable. I have to stop this sobbing. I have to be strong for us, as strong as he is. He doesn’t know what’s wrong with me, what he’s supposed to do. My fists flail in the desert air. I stamp my feet in the rock and sand. “I don’t want to do this anymore,” I scream.

Will pulls me against him, and that doesn’t help at all.

I scream again. Something unintelligible. I know it’s a tantrum, but it feels so good.

His hands tremble against my back.

“It’s not okay. It’s not. But it’s gonna be. I didn’t know it would—you got every right to feel like I screwed up your life. But I’m gonna take care of you. I’ll protect you, I promise. Nothing can happen to you now. We’re almost there. It will be okay, Zoe, I promise.”

I bury my face in his shirt, grip his upper arms as hard as I can.

“Will!”

“Shhh.”

I breathe. Shake my head. Raise my face to his so he can see the agony I feel when I speak.

“I want to go home.”

I watch his chest seize at my words, and it’s a horrible sight, then a horrible sound.

“Where you are is home to me. Why can’t I be that—” He chokes on the pain I’ve caused, the disappointment I am. I want to tell him he is home, he is the place I feel safest, but my tongue’s in knots over the best way to make him believe that. Especially when I’m starting to realize that the home I want, the Will I want, is the one who doesn’t have to run from things anymore.

He clears his throat. “I won’t let you go home and die like your mom. I won’t let him do that to you.”

“No, don’t say that, not like that.”

“He killed her, Zoe. He killed your mom and he’d have killed you, too. Maybe not your body, but your inside. … He was already killing you. I love you. More than that. I’ll take care of you. Believe me. I promise.”

“Stop it, Will. Stop it! Stop promising me things you can’t deliver. No more promises! We can’t go on like this. We can’t do this, this life of running, running, always hiding from everyone. That’s not a life!”

“My life is where you are.” How can his voice be so calm when I can’t stop yelling? “If they take you from me, I ain’t got a life.”

With a fistful of his shirt, I pull him close and search his face. How can I change this path when it means we’ll be torn apart?

“Listen to me,” I whisper. “We can fix all of this. I’ll tell them I came with you, because I did. Tell them it was self-defense with my dad, because it was. You’re not a bad person. We’re not bad people!”

“I killed a man.”

“Will.” Our bodies feel like one, my legs glued to his, my stomach flattened against his, our breath intermingled. How will we survive if we are ripped from each other? How will we survive if our spirits die for what we’ve done? “It was an accident. They’ll see that. They have to see that!”

“They ain’t gonna see that, dammit! They’re gonna see what they wanna see.”

“Will,” I choke, my resolve fading as my words echo across the desert. “We have to do the right thing.”

“I ain’t gonna let them take you. I ain’t gonna let them take you back to your dad.”

“I can handle him now. Don’t you believe me? I’m stronger now.”

“You are stronger. Are you strong enough? And what about me? I ain’t so smart as you, so quick to figure it all out.” He’s a child, a boy with hair in his eyes and pleading in his mouth. “I still need you.”

He presses his face and his hands into my hair and squeezes me to him, as though he could form us into one creature, as though he could form us into a rock structure, unbreakable and unremarkable, that no one would notice out here in the desert.

IT AIN’T THAT SHE’S FALTERING ON US. ON ME. I KNOW that ain’t it. Zoe loves me. She’s just never known what it’s like to not be scared of something. Like, maybe she
needs
to be scared of something, even. It’s normal for her. It’s her way.

I slam my hand against the steering wheel, and Zoe jumps. She stares at me, but I shake my head at her and she goes back to slumping against the passenger door.

I’m a fucking prick for thinking that about her.

No one should live afraid like that. We just gotta get through this so she can feel how it is to not be scared all the time.

I sneak a glance at her. She punishes herself for her mom’s death, I know that. Anyone could see that. It’s like those crazy monks who whip themselves. She’s always punishing herself, thinking she deserved to be smacked around by her dad. But she was just a kid who wrongly blamed herself for the way things were, even though none of it was her fault. A girl doing what she could to get by.

I know about that. About forgetting things on purpose. But me and Zoe, the scars don’t let us forget for long. Those ghosts are gonna haunt us forever.

That’s why we gotta think about the future. As much as we can. I take her elbow, slide my fingers down her forearm, grasp her hand.

“How many kids you want?”

Her mouth twitches and I want to laugh like I ain’t never laughed before. Live the moments while we have them, like there ain’t nobody following us and we’re free as wild animals.

It feels like a long time ago we talked about it, on a night after I’d asked her to escape with me. She climbed out of her window, falling into my arms. The full moon lit our quarter-mile run to my car, parked far enough away so her dad couldn’t hear it.

We sat in the backseat, ’cause it was too cold outside. She laid her head on my shoulder.

“I’ve never felt this way before, like I could make arrangements, look forward to something. Is this what planning for the future feels like? Like windows wide open to the wind?”

“Sure. We can do anything,” I said. “Make any old plans.”

We threaded our fingers together. She never held my hand unless I grabbed hers first. But she never let go first, neither.

“What kinds of things do you want to do? Where do you see yourself in ten years?”

I let out a low whistle and rubbed the stubble along my jaw. “Ten years is a long time. Gotta have a job. And a place to live. A nice one. Big-screen TV.” She laughed softly. “My car, but fixed up. You. A family.”

“You want a family.”

“Don’t everyone want one?”

“They don’t always act like it.”

“Yeah,” I said, detaching my hand from hers. I ran my thumb over her palm. “But we ain’t like those people, are we? We got shown the wrong way. We know pretty good how to do it right. Just do the opposite.”

“Two little ones,” she said. “I would treat them so well, love them so much. It’s not fair how some people who don’t deserve kids get lots of healthy ones while others who desperately want bunches can’t even have one.”

“Life ain’t fair.”

“Such a cliché.” She sighed.

She breathes heavily again now. “We’ve talked about this before.”

“I know. Tell me again.”

“Two. A girl first, then a boy.”

“I want nine.”

“I know! Insane. You don’t have to have them, that’s why you want that many.”

“I want that many ’cause it’s a baseball team.”

She sits up a little and a slow smile spreads across her face.

“That’s why!” she exclaims. I laugh at her. Damn, it feels so good to laugh again. I feel all hopeful suddenly. “But you wouldn’t get nine boys, probably. Not that I’d
have
nine.”

“So? Girls can play baseball.”

“Better believe it. But I’m still not having nine kids.”

“We’ll adopt. Take care of some kids who need it.”

She moves closer to me and I can feel the pity growing in her and I want to put a stop to that. I look away, out the window, see the shadows of a roadrunner standing guard on a boulder.

“I’ll build a big house.”

“What, out of cardboard?”

“You think that’s all I’m good for?”

“The way things are go—” She shakes her head, changes her mind. “You’ve never built a house.”

“So?”

“So, yeah, that’s all you’re good for, then.”

Please don’t stop teasing me. Not ever. No matter what happens, tease me, Zoe.

“All right, then I’ll invent something to make us rich and I’ll pay someone else to build us a big house.”

“What are you going to invent?”

I’ve never thought about inventing something before.

“Mind-reading devices.”

She snorts, closes her eyes, presses her fingers against her temple.

“All right, tell me what I think about that idea.”

“I ain’t invented it yet!”

“I can tell what you’re thinking.”

“Oh yeah? What am I thinking?”

She opens her eyes and gives me a look I ain’t never seen from her before. It’s wide eyes like she can see through me and her lips barely open like she’s getting ready to say the most important thing in the world. I don’t care what she says, I’m agreeing with it.

“You’re thinking you’re really going to do it. Go after your dreams. Figure things out. Get your big house. Your kids. And, uh, a nanny.”

“You’re good.” And she is.

“You’ll do it. You’re such a hard worker.”

“We’ll do it, babe. We will.”

She smiles to herself, a little sad. She’s like that for a while, not talking or nothing, but thinking. About good things, I hope. Stuff about me. About how we’ve got all these hours together in this car, more hours alone together than we’ve ever had before. It ain’t never been like that, just time that we could spend doing nothing. Real time. Our life together was built during lunch breaks and walks down the hallways and every second we could squeeze out before and after school.

Sometimes, once or twice, she would tell her dad she had to stay after to tutor some kid in science. He’d get mad thinking the school was using her for free labor, but it was better than him knowing how we’d hide away, talking for hours ’cause we had these whole lives to tell each other about and we were dying to know everything.

But now I get to learn the things she wouldn’t think to tell me ’cause she never realized them. Like the way her smiles fade into a land of her own making when she stops thinking about happiness and thinks about other stuff. Stuff I don’t know about and a place I can’t follow her to.

I touch her hand, but she’s in that place now and I’m lonely in this desert.

MY MOM. THE BIG PICTURE IS HAZY. IT’S THE DETAILS I remember best. Warm hands that smelled like lotion. Thin wisps of hair that fell in her eyes as she bent over her work. Clandestine whispers urging me to stay in my room, where I sat behind my closed door and just listened, listened, and the shadows and tears on her face when she finally opened the door to say it was okay, I could come out now.

I remember thinking I was in trouble when she sent me to my room like that. I don’t think I ever figured it out that trouble wasn’t the reason she wanted me to hide. Not until the day I saw her bruises staring back at me in the mirror. Then I knew.

Then I loved her more than I thought possible for protecting me and also hated her for never taking us away from him.

My mom didn’t have any family. Her own parents had long given up on having children when my mom came along unexpectedly. They were old, she’d told me, and didn’t live long enough to see their only grandchild.

When they died, she married the first man who promised to take care of her.

He sure did.

I look at Will. His face is a study in concentration as he grips the steering wheel, but I don’t think he’s focused on his driving. I can only imagine the thoughts running through his mind. He must be so afraid, so angry, so frustrated. He helped me walk away from my dad, from blame, from being like the woman who couldn’t, wouldn’t, survive, not even for me.

He’s the first to promise to take care of me.

I flick the ceiling light on and pull the ID he gave me out of my jeans pocket, studying the face, the birthdate that makes me three years older than I really am. I think again, stupidly, about why he did this for me. Why I needed to be eighteen as we ran across state borders together. I want to tug my hair out for not seeing it, for being so caught up in the thrill of flying that I never considered what this meant for Will, how much trouble he could get into. How could I have been so dumb, so selfish?

All this time I’ve been fleeing the problems in my life while Will adds more troubles to his. How can I give him what he needs when I’m bringing him down even more? How can he be mine if he can’t get out of the dark place he’s in? If the FBI tracks us down, decides we did things on purpose, decides we had other choices, when we didn’t, Will and I will never be together again.