Driving Songs, part 1b
* * * * *
When motivated, it turned out that Mr. J could indeed talk; and so could his wife, and so could Hank (not his sons, though, apparently); it all made a cacaphony in the kitchen, Mr. J's short, angry questions, Mrs. J's almost emotionless explanations, Hank's exasperated alarm... and Davey, furious and defensive and defiant. Through it all, Serenity just sat there, hands full of letters while the words spilled around her like rain and ashes, soiling everything.
Talking was useless; it all came back to the same thing, and that was what circled around and around in her mind-- I was here so Steven came here and if I hadn't been here this would never have happened, but I was here so Steven came here and-- She was aware, distantly, that this was only logical to a certain extent, but it made enough sense that it wouldn't go away.
--if I hadn't been here this would never have happened but I was here so Steven came here and if I hadn't b--
"--renity? Serenity, c'd I see those please?" Fingers drew the notes out of her hands, and she blinked; what? oh... Davey bit off something angry and sharp that Serenity didn't quite catch as Jacob Jotteson placed one letter after another on the table in a sort of jigsaw-puzzle of correspondence, lining them up against the remaining piece from the bag. A little shuffling around and they all matched, brown edges together: more of a puzzle than they had been before, now that some of the answers were available.
Mrs. J was talking quietly. "--saw the jagged bits along the right edges, you see; that old typewriter always did that every time you hit return, remember? Chewed the paper up, just a little; that was why we retired it to the basement in the first place." The older woman looked exhausted; and more, she had a tight, stretched look about her eyes, stress and fatigue adding lines that age had neglected to show. She touched one of the letters briefly, then pulled back and looked at her youngest child. "That was what made me search downstairs, after that night we talked about a month ago; Serenity, do you remember? You showed me the notes for the first time then; I knew right away, as soon as I saw the marks on the paper. Finding what Davey had hidden just confirmed it." Her hands knotted together unconsciously. "Why, Davey?"
The boy said nothing; seated unwillingly at the table now he crossed his arms, stubbornly, doggedly silent.
"I don't mean 'why did you do it', that's all too obvious; you wanted Serenity to leave. Did you think your sister would come back if she left? Things just-- aren't that simple, and I thought better of you than that." Mrs. J shook her head, a faint tremor in her voice; that made her son look at her for a brief flash of a second, eyes wide. "What I want to know is why you didn't tell someone? Why didn't you talk to me, or your father, or your sister when she visited? Davey, we--"
"You LIKE her," the twelve-year-old muttered, staring at the worn wood again. "You wouldn't listen to me. Nobody ever did, 'cept Kath." He looked up, and this time his gaze fixed straight on Serenity, shockingly vicious and all the more so coming from such a young face. "I hate you! Why didn't you just go away?" Across the table, his mother slid a hand over her eyes while the focus of Davey's attack stared back, wordless.
It's true. If I'd just gone away, if I had left, this would never have happened. It was like hearing her own thoughts echoing back at her, whip-sharp, thorned and drawing blood.
Oddly, it was 'Kai Warner who broke the silence following the outburst. "You like making people cry, boy?" he asked abruptly in his dark, smoke-roughened voice, speaking for the first time in hours. "You like making your mama cry? Think it's worth it, think you're right'n everybody else's wrong? You think burning down buildings's okay, just because you don't want to deal with--"
"That's enough, 'Kai, let it go. --I said, that's enough." Hank Warner gave his son a warning glance while 'Kai's younger brother just looked confused. "We don't even know f'r sure that he did it. The police, they said somethin' about a phone? --yeah, there was this setup with a cellphone, somebody had to call a number to trigger that fire. Just because Davey here's been sendin' letters he shouldn't've been sending--" and Hank Warner gave his employer's son, a child who he had known quite literally from the first day of his short life (and who had gone very still at the word cellphone) a Look from beneath his brows "--that don't mean he had anything to do with the fire. Don't go blaming him for things you can't pin down; he's got enough on his plate. Right, boy?"
"He-- made the call," said Davey's mother quietly, her hand still over her eyes. "I found the phone where he dropped it on his bedroom floor." At that, her husband stepped up behind her and rested his hands on his wife's shoulders, never looking away from their youngest son.
And still, Davey said nothing. But the look on his face, dazed with dawning horror and the desperate, chidish wish for things to have not happened, please, said everything for him.
* * * * *
It took another hour before everything was out; the family streak of stubbornness ran true enough Davey Jotteson that he refused to speak at all until his mother at last gave up her own steadiness to tears. That did it; it's easy, or relatively so, to be defiant in the face of opposition... but not when you're twelve years old and your mother breaks down in front of you.
The whole sordid story-- Steven's visits to Ash Springs, the way he had persuaded Davey to do his damned dirty work for him, everything right up to the last visit when he had told the boy exactly when and what to do with the cellphone-- it was appalling. And it was clever; not one real scrap of anything physical existed to tie Steven Gant to the campaign of harrassment, nothing except for a particularly cheap cellphone and the slagged remains of a second which would almost certainly prove to belong to a nonexistent owner. You could buy them easily enough with the minutes already programmed in, after all; nothing to it.
"We'll have to tell th' cops about this," said Hank, staring at the items on the table rather blankly, his third cup of cocoa cooling beside him. The clock on the wall read 10:02 p.m.; he had sent one of his two sons home to explain the bare details to his wife and was planning on staying the night along with 'Kai, 'just in case that bastard's still around'.
Because one thing was certain: Steven had been there that day, or at least recently. The small firebomb had to have been planted some time relatively close to when it was ignited, and that, at least, was one thing that Davey was not guilty of.
The Jottesons had talked quietly with him, both together and separately; he was still huddled at the table, arms folded tightly and with a raw look on his face. Serenity had caught the word 'counseling' from Mrs. J, and something inside her had shivered and cracked.
She wanted her brothers. She wanted for the day to have never happened. She wanted to be anywhere, anywhere but Ash Springs, anywhere at all--
And that thought (anywhere, anywhere) was the one that made her stand up and simply walk away, climbing the stairs towards her room and leaving a confused space behind her.
Clothes, my laptop, my-- I can't leave Bear, I just can't. The kitten sat on her bed and watched as, wholly distracted and not really thinking clearly, his adoptive mother moved about the room in fits and starts. I'll need my heavier coat, maybe-- is it colder in New York? Oh God, I'm going home. I'm going home. I have to call Joey-- Two nonconnections later had her swearing mentally and stuffing the phone into her jacket pocket; she'd have to try again later. I should call Mom and Dad, but I... no. I can let them know when I get there, 'cause Mom'll freak out and Dad'll start bitching about how I-- just No. Joey'll put me up on his and Tristan's couch until I figure things out, but I--
--I can't stay here anymore. Can't let my life slop over on anybody else. I don't have that right.
For the first time all evening, at least something was clear in her mind, even if the clarity resembled what you got when you looked through a set of binoculars the wrong way around.
Shoes and jeans and sweaters, a handful of clean underwear (Thank God I did my laundry), food for Bear, a couple of old t-shirts and a towel for his carrier, his water-and-food dishes; everything packed more or less neatly into a single suitcase. It was appalling, really, just how little space her life could fold into. I'll have to come back for the rest; maybe they can store it in one of the empty bedrooms for a bit while I-- Home. I'm really going home.
"You're doing exactly what he wants you to do, you do know that, don't you?"
Mrs. J stood just inside the door. Serenity had been so caught up in what she had been doing that she hadn't even heard it open. "I know," she answered miserably, "but I can't... If I leave now, he won't have a, a reason to hurt anybody here anymore." Fistful of sweaters in hand, she sank down onto the couch and caught up Bear when he meowed insistently at her feet; the kitten squirmed a little but remained in the young woman's arms as she buried her face in his fur. "I don't know what else I can do," she whispered numbly, muffled.
The couch creaked; Serenity opened smoke-burning eyes that strangely still refused to release any tears and looked up at her landlady-- expecting arguments, expecting recriminations, reasons she should stay, warnings, blame-- There was no way she could explain the absolute drive to just go, put everybody else at least as far out of danger as possible; it was a staggeringly stupid move, being driven like a sheep, and it probably wouldn't help much. But it wasn't like she had anything else to offer; and... she couldn't stay around Davey anymore, not after that. Nobody'd want her around anyway, would they? So now, looking up, Serenity quivered inside, expecting--
"You're sure?"
--anything except understanding, exhausted sympathy and agreement. "I'm sure," she answered back, throat tight, and let the tears out at last in a ragged, painful flood as Mrs. J held her as close as she would have her own daughter.
* * * * *
"I'll think've something t'tell the sheriff," said Mr. J gruffly as his former tenant closed the trunk of her car. "You be careful, right? Still think you should wait 'til morning..." Mute, Serenity shook her head; stopping at this point would be like dropping tenpenny-nails into the carburetor of her car. "You get tired, you stop someplace and call us, okay?"
It was an odd thing, she reflected, that she had heard more words from him tonight than probably the entire year-and-something that she had lived in Ash Springs. "Promise," Serenity answered with a ghost of a watery smile; he deserved that, at the very least. God, she was going to miss everybody--
Funny, you don't think about that when you're trying to leave; you aren't supposed to miss the people from the place you don't want to be at, just the ones you're trying to go home to. But she would; and she'd miss Ash Springs, too, narrow streets and fields and the river... Later. She'd think about that later.
--and then it was time for last-minute settlings and goodbyes and... "I understand why you're going, but-- don't be afraid to come back, you hear me?" Mrs. J hugged Serenity hard enough to make her ribs creak. "I still can't believe we're letting you even do this, scurrying off like a-- you don't have to, you know." And yet, she had been the one who had helped her boarder pack up the last of her things less than a half-hour earlier.
Yes I do. But Serenity said nothing, just shook her head and hugged back.
The car had been running for several minutes, the defroster rattling in that way Hondas had; but the seat was still iron-cold and made its owner shiver as she slid in. Securely belted in the front seat, Bear's carrier (wrapped in no less than two blankets) showed nothing but an extremely wide pair of eyes peering from the very back. The leggy kitten had been remarkably good about the whole matter; he had only bitten his caretaker once in a kind of token Just-So-You-Realize-I'm-Not-Happy-About-This way as he had been put into his conveyance. This had better not be another trip to the vet, said the eyes. "Shhh," whispered his adoptive mother, checking the seatbelt-straps before turning the key with a sense of leaden finality.
It was raining just a little, a dismal sprinkle; As Serenity backed out, the small group of figures-- Hank, the Jottesons, two of the family dogs-- and Hank's son, 'Kai, silent as ever-- were sharply delineated for a bare second in the sideglow of her headlights; but as the Honda's tires threw a spray of muddy gravel and the beams shifted, detail slid from color to a line-drawng of edges, and then to darkness: a silhouette against the lights of the farmhouse doorway. The rest of the building stood dark behind them, except for one window at the far end; and in that one, another silhouette watched as she drove away.
Davey.
I should have told him, Serenity thought to herself, heartsick (and, underneath it all, just now feeling the very beginnings of anger;) she turned to follow the long drive down to the road, dirt crunching beneath the car. I should have told him-- he didn't win this, not by making me leave. He lost; Steven's the only one who won. Not Davey, not me... just Steven.
But it's not over yet.
Every foot of road feeling like retreat, she pulled onto wet asphalt and began the long drive-- home?
No. I've been coming home for more than a year now; this time, though, I'm not driving... I'm being driven. That's got to stop.
* * * * *
Thursday morning again, October 18th; 1:36 a.m., five minutes prior to crossing into New York state
Road-hypnosis was beginning to be a problem, exhausted as she was; briefly Serenity considered pulling over as she rubbed at her stinging eyes, but dropped the idea until the need should become crucial. Tired, she was so tired... Little scraps of conversation kept floating to the surface of her mind, buoyed up by fatigue and an overflow of emotion... The firemen's shouts, anguished questions in the Jotteson's kitchen, bits and pieces of her own words; it all mingled like flotsom on the sea, weariness pooling around everything in a slick of oil.
Her own words-- where did that come from? Oh, right, when Joey was visiting-- were suddenly in her mind, and she scrubbed at her face again as she considered them: 'Back when we were kids... I always kind of took it for granted, being happy. People had a right to be happy, it was something you were born having, something you were entitled to. And then, later on, guess I kind of changed my mind about that. You have to work for it... nobody just gives you that kind of thing... Nothing else's worth as much; nothing else.'
Nothing else.
She tasted salt; when had she started crying? Angrily Serenity wiped the few tears that had made it out away with the back of one hand. Anger, that's better than tears, dammit; I have a right to be mad. This is twice, twice he's driven me away from my-- my home? Home; I may not've wanted to end up in Ash Springs at first, but I damn well learned to be happy there. He--Steven's cost me TWO homes. God damn him, God damn him. What right does he have to do that to me, to anybody?
I'm so fucking tired of being a victim.
It was strange. Sorrow, grief: they were thick, cold pools in the pit of a person's stomach. But the anger that was welling up, it warmed her and made her fingers tighten on the steering-wheel until it creaked. "And I'd rather be warm," she whispered out loud. Her own voice was a shock, contrasting harshly against the white-noise of wet road and tires.
Green interstate signs flashed; there was a rest-stop at the state line just ahead, and Serenity blinked away the sting of salt as the took the exit, slowing. Flickering lights (why were rest-stops always so despondent looking?), bathrooms, plexiglassed-over maps of New York marked YOU ARE HERE and places to let your dog pee over to one side; gratefully she pulled into a parking-place, turned off the car, and simply put her head down on the steering wheel.
A little while later-- ten minutes? half hour? who cared? --Serenity slowly opened her eyes, turning her head so her cheek no longer rested against the Honda's center logo. That... had been kind of strange, like pushing the reset button or cleaning a window; she felt oddly clear-headed, tired almost to the point of dizziness but far less full of the leaden, crushing numbness than she had earlier. Shit; I could almost feel grateful to Steven for motivating me to-- no; no, I couldn't, not after involving Davey. But... it's good that I've left. I'm not sorry anymore.
Now I've just got to figure out some way to keep him from finding me again until I can finish this for good. Joey and Tristan, I need to call them again--
Three calls, no answer; was their line out or what? A nervous trip to the restrooms (ugh) a can of soda, a mixed batch of candybars that she couldn't manage to choke down and a fill-up at the nearby Mobil station later, and she was pulling back onto the road again. Traffic at this hour was mostly trucks, trucks, buses and more trucks; her small car was nearly lost among the larger vehicles. There, behind that 18-wheeler, quick-- got it. Cruise-control, I love you.
And now she was across the state line and heading home, like a compass-needle pointing true North. She'd make it before 2 a.m., if everything went right.
* * * * *
Chh-chghk-- Chh-chghkCLACKclunk--
It wasn't until sometime later, when the intersection of I495 and FDR Drive had dropped her off onto First in the middle of a rain-sodden tangle of construction barriers that the trouble started. She had missed her exit back near New Rochelle; the irritation of having to take a longer route had made her ignore the hitch she'd heard in the engine then, setting it aside as background noise/gravel from the roadway/nothing to worry about. Now, though--
Ch-ch-ch-CLACK!CLACK!CLACK!--
Oh NO. Don't you dare, don't you dare, don't you-- I. Don't. Need. This.
The construction barriers weren't helping; staying with the detours meant going south on First instead of west towards Joey and Tristan's, but this wasn't sounding good at ALL and getting stranded on the upper East Side in the middle of a rainstorm was... Biting her lip, Serenity let her already-slow velocity drop to a crawl and began hunting for a good place to pull over.
New York stubbornly refused to oblige. Blinking orange lights and traffic cones ruled the street, and soggy maintenance crews were hard at work doing something indistinguishable that probably involved gas mains or plumbing, who knew? Another racheting noise from her engine made her wince; oh, that was it, she couldn't goddamn cope, enough was enough-- The street dragged her on southward past familiar turnoffs, the sign for Grand Central, places she would have turned except for the barricades, and there was a smell beginning to seep in through the heater and Oh Shit, Serenity was hitting the pedal but the frigging thing just wasn't responding... Rain made the roof shiver; her windows were streaming, Goddammit, Goddammit, I need a-- THERE!
Bellevue Hospital off to her left had a public parking garage; it didn't take long to find a slot - fortunate, because by then the ominous sounds coming from the engine had worked their way up to something that sounded like it needed a formal exorcism. That done, the redhead sat back in the sudden silence of concrete and empty space and tried hard to think.
I could... maybe hoof it a few blocks down to First and Fourteenth, pick up the subway there, go west... take the line up to Joey and Tristan's, something like that. Or find a cab. Serenity dug the palms of her hands into her eye-sockets. If she just wasn't so unbelievably fricking tired-- Two more attempts to reach Joey ended in failure, and resignedly she she gathered what she needed, wrapped Bear's small pet-carrier in a spare jacket, fished in vain around for an umbrella, shrugged... and staggered out into the October air.
*
The rain had moved beyond 'downpour' and into 'torrential deluge' by the time she reached the parking-lot exit. Mother Nature hates me.
And three blocks later, it had increased to the point that visibility was a real problem. The cabbies were, for once, far and few between and failing to cooperate; head down, Serenity hunched into her coat and trudged on. It occurred to her dimly that if things had been different she would have been beyond overjoyed, she was-- okay, not precisely home yet, but closer than she'd been in over a year. Everything felt, looked, even smelled familiar in a weird, cold-medicine-dream kind of way: what you got when you wanted to go someplace but your body wasn't up to taking you there, that sort of thing... and beyond the leaden exhaustion Serenity felt vaguely cheated.
Never mind. Keep walking.
So she did. For a while.
It was around Seventeenth and First that she realized that she had simply stumbled to a stop in the middle of the downpour, had been standing there with her hands in her pockets and her head down for a couple of minutes. It wasn't so much weariness as it was running into a wall, the sort your body sets up and announces I Have Had Enough. Even Bear's protesting meows had dwindled to silence; wobbling back a step or two to the relative shelter of an awning, Serenity fumbled with her phone yet again. Joey. Tristan. Please, please, please be home this time-- Redial; and redial again, and again and...
It wasn't until the phone's screen flashed 2:23 AM that she finally gave up.
Shoving aside muddled thoughts of Joey/TristanI’mgoingtoMURDERyouboth,GodIhopeyou’reokay, Serenity took a deep breath and clicked the speed-dial for her parents’ line. Might as well; they’ll find out I’m here when Mrs. J calls anyway. And she waited for her mother’s sleep-muzzy, irritable voice to answer.
That number, she only called three times before she stopped.
Where is everybody? Fine, I’ll call Vicky-no, shitshitshit, she’s staying with her cousin, they were going to see that Magnetic Fields concert. Her cousin’s name is… uh, something Chinese. Yeah, right, gonna find that in a New York phone book, ‘something Chinese’ Li. So no luck there. The rain was coming down harder now, and Serenity edged deeper under the awning, biting her lip and fighting back the sudden rush of panicky tears stinging her eyes. This was stupid; it was just bad luck, not any kind of betrayal (nobody home/nobody wants me/noplace to go) and there had to be somebody she could reach-- Téa? No, she’d slipped off the radar; any other old friends? Most of them she hadn’t kept in touch with, and she couldn’t think of any numbers for the ones she had kept up with. God, talk about falling off the radar, I’vefallen off the radar. Fine; fine. What about a hotel?
She looked around. Water dripping from her bangs blurred details, made them fuzzy around the edges, but the area wasn't a great place to loiter-- brownstones, businesses, some industrial... lots of tagging, too. The corner of Sixteenth and First was over there, and the nearest subway entrance was-
Wait. Wait a minute. Duke.
Shoving her last vestiges of pride somewhere into the bottom of her pockets, Serenity paged through her cellphone’s list of contacts until she found the right one, DDCELL. “Please be home, please be home, please be home,” she whispered. Beepbeepbeepbeep-
Dukes voice, even thinned and made oddly small by distance and a recording was like a momentary letup in the rain; Maybe he's there, maybe he's just asleep, maybe he's-- “Duke, this is Serenity,” she said in a rush of misery. “I’m calling ‘cause I’m stuck-I know it’s late, early, whatever, but if you get this, pl-“
There was a click on the other end, a fumbling, muffled sound, and a sleepy voice. “Red?”
(To be continued in Part 2)
When motivated, it turned out that Mr. J could indeed talk; and so could his wife, and so could Hank (not his sons, though, apparently); it all made a cacaphony in the kitchen, Mr. J's short, angry questions, Mrs. J's almost emotionless explanations, Hank's exasperated alarm... and Davey, furious and defensive and defiant. Through it all, Serenity just sat there, hands full of letters while the words spilled around her like rain and ashes, soiling everything.
Talking was useless; it all came back to the same thing, and that was what circled around and around in her mind-- I was here so Steven came here and if I hadn't been here this would never have happened, but I was here so Steven came here and-- She was aware, distantly, that this was only logical to a certain extent, but it made enough sense that it wouldn't go away.
--if I hadn't been here this would never have happened but I was here so Steven came here and if I hadn't b--
"--renity? Serenity, c'd I see those please?" Fingers drew the notes out of her hands, and she blinked; what? oh... Davey bit off something angry and sharp that Serenity didn't quite catch as Jacob Jotteson placed one letter after another on the table in a sort of jigsaw-puzzle of correspondence, lining them up against the remaining piece from the bag. A little shuffling around and they all matched, brown edges together: more of a puzzle than they had been before, now that some of the answers were available.
Mrs. J was talking quietly. "--saw the jagged bits along the right edges, you see; that old typewriter always did that every time you hit return, remember? Chewed the paper up, just a little; that was why we retired it to the basement in the first place." The older woman looked exhausted; and more, she had a tight, stretched look about her eyes, stress and fatigue adding lines that age had neglected to show. She touched one of the letters briefly, then pulled back and looked at her youngest child. "That was what made me search downstairs, after that night we talked about a month ago; Serenity, do you remember? You showed me the notes for the first time then; I knew right away, as soon as I saw the marks on the paper. Finding what Davey had hidden just confirmed it." Her hands knotted together unconsciously. "Why, Davey?"
The boy said nothing; seated unwillingly at the table now he crossed his arms, stubbornly, doggedly silent.
"I don't mean 'why did you do it', that's all too obvious; you wanted Serenity to leave. Did you think your sister would come back if she left? Things just-- aren't that simple, and I thought better of you than that." Mrs. J shook her head, a faint tremor in her voice; that made her son look at her for a brief flash of a second, eyes wide. "What I want to know is why you didn't tell someone? Why didn't you talk to me, or your father, or your sister when she visited? Davey, we--"
"You LIKE her," the twelve-year-old muttered, staring at the worn wood again. "You wouldn't listen to me. Nobody ever did, 'cept Kath." He looked up, and this time his gaze fixed straight on Serenity, shockingly vicious and all the more so coming from such a young face. "I hate you! Why didn't you just go away?" Across the table, his mother slid a hand over her eyes while the focus of Davey's attack stared back, wordless.
It's true. If I'd just gone away, if I had left, this would never have happened. It was like hearing her own thoughts echoing back at her, whip-sharp, thorned and drawing blood.
Oddly, it was 'Kai Warner who broke the silence following the outburst. "You like making people cry, boy?" he asked abruptly in his dark, smoke-roughened voice, speaking for the first time in hours. "You like making your mama cry? Think it's worth it, think you're right'n everybody else's wrong? You think burning down buildings's okay, just because you don't want to deal with--"
"That's enough, 'Kai, let it go. --I said, that's enough." Hank Warner gave his son a warning glance while 'Kai's younger brother just looked confused. "We don't even know f'r sure that he did it. The police, they said somethin' about a phone? --yeah, there was this setup with a cellphone, somebody had to call a number to trigger that fire. Just because Davey here's been sendin' letters he shouldn't've been sending--" and Hank Warner gave his employer's son, a child who he had known quite literally from the first day of his short life (and who had gone very still at the word cellphone) a Look from beneath his brows "--that don't mean he had anything to do with the fire. Don't go blaming him for things you can't pin down; he's got enough on his plate. Right, boy?"
"He-- made the call," said Davey's mother quietly, her hand still over her eyes. "I found the phone where he dropped it on his bedroom floor." At that, her husband stepped up behind her and rested his hands on his wife's shoulders, never looking away from their youngest son.
And still, Davey said nothing. But the look on his face, dazed with dawning horror and the desperate, chidish wish for things to have not happened, please, said everything for him.
* * * * *
It took another hour before everything was out; the family streak of stubbornness ran true enough Davey Jotteson that he refused to speak at all until his mother at last gave up her own steadiness to tears. That did it; it's easy, or relatively so, to be defiant in the face of opposition... but not when you're twelve years old and your mother breaks down in front of you.
The whole sordid story-- Steven's visits to Ash Springs, the way he had persuaded Davey to do his damned dirty work for him, everything right up to the last visit when he had told the boy exactly when and what to do with the cellphone-- it was appalling. And it was clever; not one real scrap of anything physical existed to tie Steven Gant to the campaign of harrassment, nothing except for a particularly cheap cellphone and the slagged remains of a second which would almost certainly prove to belong to a nonexistent owner. You could buy them easily enough with the minutes already programmed in, after all; nothing to it.
"We'll have to tell th' cops about this," said Hank, staring at the items on the table rather blankly, his third cup of cocoa cooling beside him. The clock on the wall read 10:02 p.m.; he had sent one of his two sons home to explain the bare details to his wife and was planning on staying the night along with 'Kai, 'just in case that bastard's still around'.
Because one thing was certain: Steven had been there that day, or at least recently. The small firebomb had to have been planted some time relatively close to when it was ignited, and that, at least, was one thing that Davey was not guilty of.
The Jottesons had talked quietly with him, both together and separately; he was still huddled at the table, arms folded tightly and with a raw look on his face. Serenity had caught the word 'counseling' from Mrs. J, and something inside her had shivered and cracked.
She wanted her brothers. She wanted for the day to have never happened. She wanted to be anywhere, anywhere but Ash Springs, anywhere at all--
And that thought (anywhere, anywhere) was the one that made her stand up and simply walk away, climbing the stairs towards her room and leaving a confused space behind her.
Clothes, my laptop, my-- I can't leave Bear, I just can't. The kitten sat on her bed and watched as, wholly distracted and not really thinking clearly, his adoptive mother moved about the room in fits and starts. I'll need my heavier coat, maybe-- is it colder in New York? Oh God, I'm going home. I'm going home. I have to call Joey-- Two nonconnections later had her swearing mentally and stuffing the phone into her jacket pocket; she'd have to try again later. I should call Mom and Dad, but I... no. I can let them know when I get there, 'cause Mom'll freak out and Dad'll start bitching about how I-- just No. Joey'll put me up on his and Tristan's couch until I figure things out, but I--
--I can't stay here anymore. Can't let my life slop over on anybody else. I don't have that right.
For the first time all evening, at least something was clear in her mind, even if the clarity resembled what you got when you looked through a set of binoculars the wrong way around.
Shoes and jeans and sweaters, a handful of clean underwear (Thank God I did my laundry), food for Bear, a couple of old t-shirts and a towel for his carrier, his water-and-food dishes; everything packed more or less neatly into a single suitcase. It was appalling, really, just how little space her life could fold into. I'll have to come back for the rest; maybe they can store it in one of the empty bedrooms for a bit while I-- Home. I'm really going home.
"You're doing exactly what he wants you to do, you do know that, don't you?"
Mrs. J stood just inside the door. Serenity had been so caught up in what she had been doing that she hadn't even heard it open. "I know," she answered miserably, "but I can't... If I leave now, he won't have a, a reason to hurt anybody here anymore." Fistful of sweaters in hand, she sank down onto the couch and caught up Bear when he meowed insistently at her feet; the kitten squirmed a little but remained in the young woman's arms as she buried her face in his fur. "I don't know what else I can do," she whispered numbly, muffled.
The couch creaked; Serenity opened smoke-burning eyes that strangely still refused to release any tears and looked up at her landlady-- expecting arguments, expecting recriminations, reasons she should stay, warnings, blame-- There was no way she could explain the absolute drive to just go, put everybody else at least as far out of danger as possible; it was a staggeringly stupid move, being driven like a sheep, and it probably wouldn't help much. But it wasn't like she had anything else to offer; and... she couldn't stay around Davey anymore, not after that. Nobody'd want her around anyway, would they? So now, looking up, Serenity quivered inside, expecting--
"You're sure?"
--anything except understanding, exhausted sympathy and agreement. "I'm sure," she answered back, throat tight, and let the tears out at last in a ragged, painful flood as Mrs. J held her as close as she would have her own daughter.
* * * * *
"I'll think've something t'tell the sheriff," said Mr. J gruffly as his former tenant closed the trunk of her car. "You be careful, right? Still think you should wait 'til morning..." Mute, Serenity shook her head; stopping at this point would be like dropping tenpenny-nails into the carburetor of her car. "You get tired, you stop someplace and call us, okay?"
It was an odd thing, she reflected, that she had heard more words from him tonight than probably the entire year-and-something that she had lived in Ash Springs. "Promise," Serenity answered with a ghost of a watery smile; he deserved that, at the very least. God, she was going to miss everybody--
Funny, you don't think about that when you're trying to leave; you aren't supposed to miss the people from the place you don't want to be at, just the ones you're trying to go home to. But she would; and she'd miss Ash Springs, too, narrow streets and fields and the river... Later. She'd think about that later.
--and then it was time for last-minute settlings and goodbyes and... "I understand why you're going, but-- don't be afraid to come back, you hear me?" Mrs. J hugged Serenity hard enough to make her ribs creak. "I still can't believe we're letting you even do this, scurrying off like a-- you don't have to, you know." And yet, she had been the one who had helped her boarder pack up the last of her things less than a half-hour earlier.
Yes I do. But Serenity said nothing, just shook her head and hugged back.
The car had been running for several minutes, the defroster rattling in that way Hondas had; but the seat was still iron-cold and made its owner shiver as she slid in. Securely belted in the front seat, Bear's carrier (wrapped in no less than two blankets) showed nothing but an extremely wide pair of eyes peering from the very back. The leggy kitten had been remarkably good about the whole matter; he had only bitten his caretaker once in a kind of token Just-So-You-Realize-I'm-Not-Happy-About-This way as he had been put into his conveyance. This had better not be another trip to the vet, said the eyes. "Shhh," whispered his adoptive mother, checking the seatbelt-straps before turning the key with a sense of leaden finality.
It was raining just a little, a dismal sprinkle; As Serenity backed out, the small group of figures-- Hank, the Jottesons, two of the family dogs-- and Hank's son, 'Kai, silent as ever-- were sharply delineated for a bare second in the sideglow of her headlights; but as the Honda's tires threw a spray of muddy gravel and the beams shifted, detail slid from color to a line-drawng of edges, and then to darkness: a silhouette against the lights of the farmhouse doorway. The rest of the building stood dark behind them, except for one window at the far end; and in that one, another silhouette watched as she drove away.
Davey.
I should have told him, Serenity thought to herself, heartsick (and, underneath it all, just now feeling the very beginnings of anger;) she turned to follow the long drive down to the road, dirt crunching beneath the car. I should have told him-- he didn't win this, not by making me leave. He lost; Steven's the only one who won. Not Davey, not me... just Steven.
But it's not over yet.
Every foot of road feeling like retreat, she pulled onto wet asphalt and began the long drive-- home?
No. I've been coming home for more than a year now; this time, though, I'm not driving... I'm being driven. That's got to stop.
* * * * *
Thursday morning again, October 18th; 1:36 a.m., five minutes prior to crossing into New York state
Road-hypnosis was beginning to be a problem, exhausted as she was; briefly Serenity considered pulling over as she rubbed at her stinging eyes, but dropped the idea until the need should become crucial. Tired, she was so tired... Little scraps of conversation kept floating to the surface of her mind, buoyed up by fatigue and an overflow of emotion... The firemen's shouts, anguished questions in the Jotteson's kitchen, bits and pieces of her own words; it all mingled like flotsom on the sea, weariness pooling around everything in a slick of oil.
Her own words-- where did that come from? Oh, right, when Joey was visiting-- were suddenly in her mind, and she scrubbed at her face again as she considered them: 'Back when we were kids... I always kind of took it for granted, being happy. People had a right to be happy, it was something you were born having, something you were entitled to. And then, later on, guess I kind of changed my mind about that. You have to work for it... nobody just gives you that kind of thing... Nothing else's worth as much; nothing else.'
Nothing else.
She tasted salt; when had she started crying? Angrily Serenity wiped the few tears that had made it out away with the back of one hand. Anger, that's better than tears, dammit; I have a right to be mad. This is twice, twice he's driven me away from my-- my home? Home; I may not've wanted to end up in Ash Springs at first, but I damn well learned to be happy there. He--Steven's cost me TWO homes. God damn him, God damn him. What right does he have to do that to me, to anybody?
I'm so fucking tired of being a victim.
It was strange. Sorrow, grief: they were thick, cold pools in the pit of a person's stomach. But the anger that was welling up, it warmed her and made her fingers tighten on the steering-wheel until it creaked. "And I'd rather be warm," she whispered out loud. Her own voice was a shock, contrasting harshly against the white-noise of wet road and tires.
Green interstate signs flashed; there was a rest-stop at the state line just ahead, and Serenity blinked away the sting of salt as the took the exit, slowing. Flickering lights (why were rest-stops always so despondent looking?), bathrooms, plexiglassed-over maps of New York marked YOU ARE HERE and places to let your dog pee over to one side; gratefully she pulled into a parking-place, turned off the car, and simply put her head down on the steering wheel.
A little while later-- ten minutes? half hour? who cared? --Serenity slowly opened her eyes, turning her head so her cheek no longer rested against the Honda's center logo. That... had been kind of strange, like pushing the reset button or cleaning a window; she felt oddly clear-headed, tired almost to the point of dizziness but far less full of the leaden, crushing numbness than she had earlier. Shit; I could almost feel grateful to Steven for motivating me to-- no; no, I couldn't, not after involving Davey. But... it's good that I've left. I'm not sorry anymore.
Now I've just got to figure out some way to keep him from finding me again until I can finish this for good. Joey and Tristan, I need to call them again--
Three calls, no answer; was their line out or what? A nervous trip to the restrooms (ugh) a can of soda, a mixed batch of candybars that she couldn't manage to choke down and a fill-up at the nearby Mobil station later, and she was pulling back onto the road again. Traffic at this hour was mostly trucks, trucks, buses and more trucks; her small car was nearly lost among the larger vehicles. There, behind that 18-wheeler, quick-- got it. Cruise-control, I love you.
And now she was across the state line and heading home, like a compass-needle pointing true North. She'd make it before 2 a.m., if everything went right.
* * * * *
Chh-chghk-- Chh-chghkCLACKclunk--
It wasn't until sometime later, when the intersection of I495 and FDR Drive had dropped her off onto First in the middle of a rain-sodden tangle of construction barriers that the trouble started. She had missed her exit back near New Rochelle; the irritation of having to take a longer route had made her ignore the hitch she'd heard in the engine then, setting it aside as background noise/gravel from the roadway/nothing to worry about. Now, though--
Ch-ch-ch-CLACK!CLACK!CLACK!--
Oh NO. Don't you dare, don't you dare, don't you-- I. Don't. Need. This.
The construction barriers weren't helping; staying with the detours meant going south on First instead of west towards Joey and Tristan's, but this wasn't sounding good at ALL and getting stranded on the upper East Side in the middle of a rainstorm was... Biting her lip, Serenity let her already-slow velocity drop to a crawl and began hunting for a good place to pull over.
New York stubbornly refused to oblige. Blinking orange lights and traffic cones ruled the street, and soggy maintenance crews were hard at work doing something indistinguishable that probably involved gas mains or plumbing, who knew? Another racheting noise from her engine made her wince; oh, that was it, she couldn't goddamn cope, enough was enough-- The street dragged her on southward past familiar turnoffs, the sign for Grand Central, places she would have turned except for the barricades, and there was a smell beginning to seep in through the heater and Oh Shit, Serenity was hitting the pedal but the frigging thing just wasn't responding... Rain made the roof shiver; her windows were streaming, Goddammit, Goddammit, I need a-- THERE!
Bellevue Hospital off to her left had a public parking garage; it didn't take long to find a slot - fortunate, because by then the ominous sounds coming from the engine had worked their way up to something that sounded like it needed a formal exorcism. That done, the redhead sat back in the sudden silence of concrete and empty space and tried hard to think.
I could... maybe hoof it a few blocks down to First and Fourteenth, pick up the subway there, go west... take the line up to Joey and Tristan's, something like that. Or find a cab. Serenity dug the palms of her hands into her eye-sockets. If she just wasn't so unbelievably fricking tired-- Two more attempts to reach Joey ended in failure, and resignedly she she gathered what she needed, wrapped Bear's small pet-carrier in a spare jacket, fished in vain around for an umbrella, shrugged... and staggered out into the October air.
*
The rain had moved beyond 'downpour' and into 'torrential deluge' by the time she reached the parking-lot exit. Mother Nature hates me.
And three blocks later, it had increased to the point that visibility was a real problem. The cabbies were, for once, far and few between and failing to cooperate; head down, Serenity hunched into her coat and trudged on. It occurred to her dimly that if things had been different she would have been beyond overjoyed, she was-- okay, not precisely home yet, but closer than she'd been in over a year. Everything felt, looked, even smelled familiar in a weird, cold-medicine-dream kind of way: what you got when you wanted to go someplace but your body wasn't up to taking you there, that sort of thing... and beyond the leaden exhaustion Serenity felt vaguely cheated.
Never mind. Keep walking.
So she did. For a while.
It was around Seventeenth and First that she realized that she had simply stumbled to a stop in the middle of the downpour, had been standing there with her hands in her pockets and her head down for a couple of minutes. It wasn't so much weariness as it was running into a wall, the sort your body sets up and announces I Have Had Enough. Even Bear's protesting meows had dwindled to silence; wobbling back a step or two to the relative shelter of an awning, Serenity fumbled with her phone yet again. Joey. Tristan. Please, please, please be home this time-- Redial; and redial again, and again and...
It wasn't until the phone's screen flashed 2:23 AM that she finally gave up.
Shoving aside muddled thoughts of Joey/TristanI’mgoingtoMURDERyouboth,GodIhopeyou’reokay, Serenity took a deep breath and clicked the speed-dial for her parents’ line. Might as well; they’ll find out I’m here when Mrs. J calls anyway. And she waited for her mother’s sleep-muzzy, irritable voice to answer.
That number, she only called three times before she stopped.
Where is everybody? Fine, I’ll call Vicky-no, shitshitshit, she’s staying with her cousin, they were going to see that Magnetic Fields concert. Her cousin’s name is… uh, something Chinese. Yeah, right, gonna find that in a New York phone book, ‘something Chinese’ Li. So no luck there. The rain was coming down harder now, and Serenity edged deeper under the awning, biting her lip and fighting back the sudden rush of panicky tears stinging her eyes. This was stupid; it was just bad luck, not any kind of betrayal (nobody home/nobody wants me/noplace to go) and there had to be somebody she could reach-- Téa? No, she’d slipped off the radar; any other old friends? Most of them she hadn’t kept in touch with, and she couldn’t think of any numbers for the ones she had kept up with. God, talk about falling off the radar, I’vefallen off the radar. Fine; fine. What about a hotel?
She looked around. Water dripping from her bangs blurred details, made them fuzzy around the edges, but the area wasn't a great place to loiter-- brownstones, businesses, some industrial... lots of tagging, too. The corner of Sixteenth and First was over there, and the nearest subway entrance was-
Wait. Wait a minute. Duke.
Shoving her last vestiges of pride somewhere into the bottom of her pockets, Serenity paged through her cellphone’s list of contacts until she found the right one, DDCELL. “Please be home, please be home, please be home,” she whispered. Beepbeepbeepbeep-
Dukes voice, even thinned and made oddly small by distance and a recording was like a momentary letup in the rain; Maybe he's there, maybe he's just asleep, maybe he's-- “Duke, this is Serenity,” she said in a rush of misery. “I’m calling ‘cause I’m stuck-I know it’s late, early, whatever, but if you get this, pl-“
There was a click on the other end, a fumbling, muffled sound, and a sleepy voice. “Red?”
(To be continued in Part 2)