CHAPTER 38 #2
‘I know. But a lawyer – we could build a case with him –’
‘Or her,’ Simone is unable to stop herself adding.
‘Or her. He or she would be truly on our side. So that if we …’ Lucy can’t even speak the words. Her hands are shaking as she messes with her hair. ‘So that we have the evidence we need if we do go to – to more sympathetic police.’
‘Get a lawyer to help us find him, then take our case to the police,’ Simone clarifies.
‘Yes.’
Simone nods slowly. Her daughter is so smart. And she is right: they do know some things about him. The information they have is not insignificant. Perhaps they could find him. But then what?
‘But what would you do if you found him? How would we prove it, even if we did get to him?’
Lucy raises her head, meets Simone’s eyes in the bright sunlight, and Simone thinks again about how this must have changed her daughter. Lucy shrugs, saying nothing, but it’s loaded, an exercising of her right to silence rather than an I don’t know.
Simone shivers.
Now that Lucy is up, she can at least cook.
She wants something to do while this conversation plays out, while she thinks.
They have mackerel in oil in a tin. Simone deliberately got Lucy to buy things that could hold their own, flavour-wise.
She places a small double-folded square of kitchen towel that she brought specially on top.
She uses the matches to set fire to the towel, then puts it down on the desert ground and watches it carefully in the white morning light.
The towel catches light fully, curling black and grey at the edges.
The flames whip upwards, air shimmering around them, and then as the towel begins to smoulder, she knows that the oil will start to smoke and heat the fish.
They will have it in ten minutes on dry bread, and it’ll be delicious. No salt needed.
‘Let’s say we do find someone willing to help us, and they also find him.
How do we …?’ Simone asks softly, and she isn’t being difficult, and it isn’t rhetorical.
Nevertheless, something flashes across Lucy’s features, as quick as light flickering.
You might miss it if you weren’t looking closely.
Something about the eyes. It’s more than defiance.
Simone stands and looks at the mackerel. It’s almost done. The ground underneath is scorched black with it. The sky around them is wide, clouds thin and golden, their edges scalloped.
‘That person could investigate him,’ Lucy answers. She’s perfectly rational. ‘After all, if he’s done it once, he will probably do it again.’
‘I agree.’ Simone breathes. ‘That’s so smart.’
‘It’s the only option. There are no other good ones,’ Lucy says darkly. ‘We can’t hand ourselves in now. Go to trial.’
‘No.’
‘Although you might get proper cups of tea in prison.’
Simone lets out a laugh. She pokes the mackerel.
The oil sizzles; it’s almost done. ‘Cons: prison,’ she says, and her tone is deliberately light-hearted, but internally she is thinking that she’d take this if it were only her.
But it isn’t, it’s Lucy, too, and Lucy shot a police officer. They would throw the book at her.
‘Agree,’ Lucy says. ‘Possibility two, we are never found and we become feral desert animals. Pros: no prison.’
‘Cons: no hairbrushes, either. Can you get the bread?’
‘Where is it?’ Lucy says, turning around.
‘We don’t exactly have a pantry. It’s in the tent, obviously.’
Simone empties half the tin into a plastic bowl. She dabs a finger in, tastes the oil: perfection. Hot, salty, a kick at the back of the tongue.
Lucy is still on the rock. ‘Possibility three. We explain what happened. Exonerate ourselves. Find evidence. Pros: no prison. Cons: impossible.’
‘Seems it.’ Lucy still hasn’t moved. ‘Shall I get the bread?’
‘No, no, sorry,’ Lucy says, and heads into the tent. ‘I’m sorry, I am trying to solve wider problems than bread, but I know I’m not helping.’
Simone hands her the bowl once she has emerged. Lucy tries it, tips her head back, and lets out a small sigh of pleasure. ‘Perfect. Perfect sardines.’
‘It’s mackerel!’
‘Oh.’
They have no more options to discuss. Therefore, Lucy has spoken the truth, predicted the future. She has said what is going to happen, only they don’t know which.
They lapse into silence, eating and watching the desert gilded with light. The flat horizon, miles away. The white dust, grey wrinkled trees and their sharp shadows. The clarity of the sun and the ombre blue sky.
Simone knows that in an hour or two she will be too hot, but, for now, after a cold desert night, she is looking forward to the molten, fierce sun heating up in that way that you do on the first day of spring.
‘I’d love a tea,’ Lucy says.
‘Builder’s,’ Simone answers. ‘Strong. No sugar.’
‘Teardrop of milk,’ Lucy finishes. ‘That feeling of the tannin on your tongue.’
‘Are you sure you’re not a foodie?’ Simone says lightly.
‘Very.’ She looks directly at Simone, then, the morning haze blushing her skin.
The sun warms Simone’s shoulders, and she is a stack of pancakes with a knob of yellow butter running down her.
She closes her eyes and tilts her face to it.
It feels delicious, and she momentarily forgets everything, but as she begins to sweat, she realizes it: the bottles of water they have are not going to be enough in the heat, which is already beginning.
The campsites have water fountains, but they’re far from one of those, alone out here.
She wilfully forgets this and pretends, instead, that she is on holiday. Somewhere all-inclusive, somewhere hot. Somewhere with unlimited food and drink, even the cheap kind, with scalding, steaming showers. With a paperback by her side, with Damien …
She thinks of him and how they work. Of his neat booking notebook, of her kitchen chaos.
The way the three of them often eat leftovers together and Damien never finishes his because he’s tired and wants to go to bed.
She misses him now, misses sliding into bed next to already-sleeping him.
Misses the way he disarms both Lucy and Simone, tells whichever of them is angry he is happy to talk but in quiet voices.
She opens her eyes and Lucy is looking at her. Lucy tilts her chin up. ‘He needs to be brought to justice.’
And maybe it’s just the weird morning, the cold night wasteland, waking up to a pink-lemonade dawn with no future.
Maybe it’s shock, trauma, sleep deprivation.
Maybe it’s just that there’s no distractions, but Simone begins to feel a prescient sort of stirring in her body.
That something will change and soon. That they have just set in motion something larger than only themselves, mother and daughter against the desert sky.
They set off after finishing the mackerel, the tent packed up. They might do ten miles today, maybe more, close in on Terlingua, on safety.
‘In the room was this low noise, like a fan next door,’ Lucy says.
Her voice, trained by acting classes, carries easily even on the winds of the desert.
‘I spent so long listening to it with these thoughts going around my head like, I’ve been kidnapped.
For the rest of my life, I will be able to say that I have been kidnapped. ’
‘How did you pass the time?’
‘I didn’t. It went so slowly. Contextless. No time. Just the air-con noise and me. I recited Samuel Beckett plays in my head. It was scary, but mostly it was actually lonely. The world felt too bright after … after you got me, no blindfold.’
‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.’
‘I could only tell if it was night or day by meals. You just can’t keep track of time with no marker at all. And he was so quiet. No speaking, but also light on his feet, like a dancer. He brought me things and I didn’t hear the door open.’
‘You did all the right things,’ Simone says. ‘You got out.’
‘Yeah. Guess so.’
‘Do you ever think it might be someone we know? Someone who thinks we have money from the restaurant, or the means to ship drugs, or … I don’t know, someone from my past?
’ Simone asks, thinking that her parents had problems with addiction but they were not bad.
They did not make nefarious connections.
‘But why would anybody … I mean, someone from the restaurant, like, why would they ever think you’d be a good target for drugs shipping?’
‘I mean, in a way, I was. I did it. And so many people knew about the trip,’ Simone says. She’d spent the whole summer telling punters about Lucy, and when Simone was going. ‘It’s impossible to narrow down.’
‘Maybe it’s the lodge. I don’t know,’ Lucy says. ‘Maybe someone was watching it.’
‘Can you think of any reason why we might have become a target?’
‘No,’ Lucy says.
‘You’ve been to Texas twice this year … anyone you confided in? Ask you strange things?’
‘Honestly, the Easter camp was full of do-gooders. Singing camp was just – just singers. I can’t think of a single strange moment,’ Lucy says, in such a way that Simone knows the topic, temporarily open, is now closed.
By noon, it’s so hot that Simone wishes it were freezing again. They would never otherwise have spent an entire morning walking with no break, and they’re two bottles of water down. Of ten.
All around them is a flat vista. Mountains in the very distance. Nothing left and right except blinding sun, dried shrubs and dust. She can see the horizon in every single direction.
There is nowhere to hide from the sun in the desert.
No shade, morning clouds burned off quickly and easily, only the occasional large tree or boulder to duck behind, but it’s hardly any cooler when they do.
They have one tube of sunscreen. It’ll run out within days, the water sooner.
They need to walk further and drink less, but the thirst is insatiable, a physical sensation at the back of Simone’s throat.
As she lets Lucy drink but tries to limit her own consumption, she begins to fantasize about the cold and the wet.
Sticking her tongue out to taste sleety cold rain or snow.
A perfectly chilled lemonade from the back of the fridge …
The sun is almost vertical above them when the flip phone makes a sound in Simone’s pocket. She startles, not used to noise in the deathly quiet desert, thinking everything is threats that might come from anywhere: storms, wild animals, kidnappers, police. Lucy is up ahead; she hasn’t heard it.
Network Connected.
They’ve been in the desert for less than twenty-four hours, but it feels like days. But now the world sits once more at her fingertips – Network Connected – and Simone begins typing immediately.
She sends the Airbnb enquiry. The next thing she does is google the Shafter waste management schedule, even though it would be so dangerous and stupid to return there.
Nevertheless, her heart seems to deflate when she sees that it’s every week, and today.
Those other burner phones will have been taken off this morning to some landfill.
And now to the news. Their names. She is walking as she types, stumbling over larger rocks that she doesn’t see.
Simone Seaborn. Lucy Seaborn. She knows before she finishes writing their names that she will find information she doesn’t currently have.
She presses Enter. Google takes a while to process and load, the signal sketchy, and then, suddenly, there it is, the first headline:
HUSBAND OF FUGITIVE WIFE SPEAKS OUT.