Chapter 6 #3
“Saoirse, we’re leaving,” he announced, ignoring me. “Remember that call Mom had with Ashley earlier, confirming that we’d be leaving when Aoife got off work?”
They looked at each other. Saoirse nodded. “Yeah,” she rasped. “Road trip for your birthday.”
“The two of you are a little scary,” I mumbled, kissing the top of Saoirse’s head. “Go get packed, yeah? We need to hurry.”
Saoirse left the room, but Cian stayed as I started pulling clothes out of my dresser. I didn’t have a lot of them, but I had to be strategic because I only had so much room in the car.
“You gonna try to bail before Richie gets back?” Cian asked.
I looked at him in surprise.
“You guys weren’t exactly quiet.”
“He’s got responsibilities here, bud,” I said, stuffing a pair of sandals in my bag. “He can’t uproot everything to follow us to another state.”
“Don’t you think he should choose?”
“He’s a good guy,” I replied, pausing to look at him. “Do you think his conscience would let us drive across the state by ourselves? His life is here. It’s not fair to let him go, okay?”
“Okay,” he said slowly. “I’m packed. Want me to get Ronan’s shit together?”
“Yeah, thanks.”
He started across the bedroom.
“Wait!” I tossed him my full bag. “Take that downstairs and grab the file of important papers out of Mom’s closet, yeah?”
“The blue one?”
“That’s the one. Make sure it has everyone’s birth certificates and social security cards. Leave Mom’s in the closet but bring Dad’s.”
“Got it.”
When I got back to Ailing and Saoirse’s room, Aisling had fallen asleep.
“Don’t forget her Barbies and Funky Frog,” Saoirse said as she stuffed clothes into her bag. “Can I bring books?” She was close to tears, staring at her bookshelf.
For as long as she’d been in love with reading, we hadn’t had a whole lot of extra cash.
Every year I brought her to the library’s end-of-the-year sale and every garage sale we saw that had books for sale.
She’d spent hours upon hours searching for specific books and assembling her collection.
Sometimes it took her a year or more to find the book she wanted.
“Five,” I choked out. “Your favorites, yeah? We might come back at some point.”
I packed up Aisling’s clothes and stuffed her Barbies in around them. “Don’t forget an extra pair of shoes and a jacket, Sersh,” I reminded her as I carried Aisling’s bag over to Saoirse’s bed. “I’m going to run down and find Ronan and start packing up.”
“Are we telling them?” Saoirse asked quietly, glancing at Aisling.
“Not yet. For now, it’s just a surprise trip to see Aunt Ashley.”
“Got it,” she muttered.
I hurried downstairs to find that Cian had already started loading the car.
“Ronan just came out here. I sent him back inside,” he informed me, leaning back out of the back seat. “Papers are in the trunk in my schoolbag, and I put our keepsake boxes in there too. Put the small coolers on the floorboards for now, so we have dinner.”
“What about the birthday card that was on the table?”
“What card?”
“There was a card on the table with Aunt Ashley’s address.”
“I didn’t see a card,” Cian argued.
“Okay, just—” I gestured toward the trunk. “Look through the boxes and find one with her address so we know where we’re going. Okay? Did you pack Ronan’s bag?”
“Not yet. When I got down here, I figured I’d do this first.”
“I’ve got Ronan’s bag. I’ll have him carry it down once I’m done packing it.”
Cian nodded, but I was already jogging back into the house.
We were running out of time. Richie was going to come back, and I knew that I wouldn’t be able to keep him from following us.
I would’ve given anything to have him with me, the thought of separating made a ball of dread sit heavy in my belly, but I couldn’t let him burn down his entire life.
I may be selfish when it came to Richie, but I’d never be that selfish.
The kids were my responsibility to keep safe, not his.
Ronan was practically bouncing off the walls when I got to his room, his clothes in neatly set-out piles on his bed.
“We’re going on a road trip?” he asked excitedly. “To see Aunt Ashley, right? In Oregon?”
“Right,” I said, giving him a gentle shove in the shoulder. “You started packing?”
“I knew you’d want to do it,” he frowned. “But I got my clothes out.”
“Perfect,” I said with a nod. “You still have that little blue suitcase?”
“It has cartoon dogs on it,” he replied flatly.
“It’s a bag that will hold your crap,” I replied. “Grab it.”
“It’s embarrassing,” he called as he scrambled under his bed, grunting as he pushed shit out of the way.
“No one will see it.”
“Cian will.”
“Cian knows you have it,” I pointed out. “You share a room.”
“Still.” He yanked the little suitcase out and handed it to me.
I started filling it up. “Grab your flip-flops,” I ordered. “And your Legos.”
“The whole tub?” he asked dubiously.
“Whole tub,” I confirmed. “Put the lid on it.”
“Can I bring my blanket?”
“Of course.”
We met Saoirse in the hall, and I handed her Ronan’s bag. “Carry these down and help Cian load the car. I’ll grab Ash.”
“We have to get Aisling’s medicine from the pharmacy,” she reminded me.
“We’ll get it on the way.”
I left them and took a deep breath, pausing only for a moment to calm my racing heartbeat. Then I walked quietly into Aisling’s room.
“Come on, baby,” I murmured, putting Funky Frog against her chest before lifting her from the bed.
“Where we going?” she mumbled against my neck.
“On an adventure,” I replied. She was already asleep.
I was sweating and breathing heavy by the time I put Aisling into her booster seat. She slept the entire time, listing to the side before I’d even closed the door.
“You’re in the middle,” Saoirse ordered, pushing Ronan toward the other side of the car. “Get in.”
“This is so awesome,” he said, practically hopping as he climbed in.
Saoirse met my eyes over the top of the car. “Got everything?”
“I’m going to do one more run-through,” I told her. “Wait with the littles.”
She nodded.
“I’m going to grab everyone’s pillows,” Cian said as we headed back into the house. “I grabbed Aisling’s ibuprofen—you forgot it on the banister. I grabbed our toiletries, too. I wasn’t sure whose was whose, so I just threw all the makeup and shit in a grocery bag.”
“Fuck,” I mumbled. What else had I forgotten about?
“Be right back.”
“Grab the crocheted blankets off our beds, too,” I called out as he jogged up the stairs. Mom had made them when each of us were born. They weren’t big enough to cover a bed, but all of us had kept them folded on the ends of our beds for as long as I could remember.
I walked around the house, looking at everything we were leaving behind. We’d moved in while Mom was pregnant with Cian. All the kids except me had come home from the hospital to this house. It held every memory, every treasure, every piece of our lives.
I paused at Saoirse’s school bag and pulled out a spiral notebook and pen then brought them over to the kitchen table. My stomach churned with nausea as I started to write.
Mom,
Call you when we get there.
Love you!
Aoife
I left the note on the table in case anyone came into the house looking for us.
“A little help here?” Cian called, stumbling down the stairs.
I grabbed a couple of the blankets. “You couldn’t have folded these?”
“In a hurry, right?”
“You have your phone?”
“Yeah.”
“Still have minutes?”
“I’ve barely turned it on.”
“Good. Go get in the car,” I ordered. “I’ll lock up.”
I followed him out of the house, pausing only once to pull a family photo off the wall. Carefully, I pulled the nail out, too, and scrubbed my finger over the tiny hole to hide that it had ever been there.
We were driving down our street less than a minute later, the neighborhood passing outside our windows as if nothing was different, even though we knew everything was.
“Just let me fold these,” Saoirse bitched in the back seat.
“Why is mine in the trunk?” Ronan argued. “Why do you get yours?”
“They won’t all fit up here,” Saoirse snapped. “We already have the coolers up here. I can’t even put my feet down.”
“Didn’t think that through,” Cian said, glancing at the back seat.
“When we stop at my work we can rearrange it. Can one of the coolers fit in the trunk?”
“It’s gettin’ tight back there, but I’ll make it work.”
“Leave the one by Aisling’s feet. She won’t care.”
“Yeah.”
Ronan kept up a stream of excited chatter, but the rest of us were silent as we passed the scene of Mom’s accident.
Everything had already been cleared away except a spray of glass that littered the highway from one side to the other.
I tried to block it out, but the memory of the smashed car lingered until we got to the store.
“You want me to run in?” Cian asked, jerking his head toward the front doors.
“No, you move the cooler. I’ll be right back.”
It felt like there was a neon sign above my head telling everyone I was on the run from the state as I walked nonchalantly into the store.
The bank inside wasn’t open anymore, but I stopped at the ATM and emptied my bank account.
There wasn’t much in there, but between that and the cash I’d taken out to grocery shop earlier, we’d easily make it to Oregon.
I made it to the pharmacy ten minutes before they closed, and the man who rang me up was frazzled from trying to close everything up, so he barely paid any attention to me.
With Aisling’s antibiotics safely in hand, I strode down the row of check stands and breathed a sigh of relief as I saw Jasmine stepping out from behind hers.
“Fifteen minutes,” she told Gary.
“Have fun,” he joked.
I met her at the end of the row.
“What the heck are you doing here?” she asked, smiling. “Miss me?”
“Jas—” Now that she was in front of me, I wasn’t sure what to say.
“Honey, what’s wrong?” she asked, grabbing my hand to tug me partially behind a flower display.
It all poured out of me, from social services showing up at our house to Aisling’s ear infection, leaving before Richie got back, and Cian moving the cooler into the trunk.
“Shit,” she murmured, pulling me into a hug. “What do you need me to do?”
“If someone comes looking,” I said shakily.
“I think you went to your auntie’s in Oregon. Or was it Ohio? Wait…Arizona? Something like that,” she said easily. “Been planned for a while.”
“Thank you,” I breathed, deflating a little.
“Let me know when you get there safe, yeah?”
“I will.”
“What do you want me to tell that boyfriend if he shows up here?” she asked kindly.
“That I love him,” I choked out. “And this is for the best.”
“The boy’s gonna be pissed.”
“I’d rather he was mad than giving up everything he’s worked for.”
“Alright,” she replied, unconvinced. “You drive careful.”
“I will.”
I kept my steps slow and steady as I left the store. Outside, I strode past the garbage can and dropped my phone inside as I headed toward the car.