Chapter 2 - Eliana
ELIANA
ONE WEEK LATER
brine /brīn/: noun
I only know that a week has passed when I hear the church bells. So it’s Sunday, then. Seven days and eight nights since we ran.
The sounds of the motels—we go to a different one every night, so that no one can find us—have become reassuring in an uncanny sort of way.
An ice machine rattles down the hall. A couple bicker and have sex and bicker some more in the room above us.
The empty-belly growl of traffic on the highway that never, ever stops—these things let me know that we’re still alive.
For now, at least.
Yasmin thinks I’m sleeping. I can hear her pacing, another sound I’ve come to rely on.
In this cramped room, it’s six steps to the window, pivot, and six steps back to the bathroom door.
She’s been doing this for hours, ever since the sun came up.
Or at least, I assume the sun came up. I can’t see it anymore.
I can’t see anything anymore.
It happened three days ago: I woke up and the pinhole was gone. Simply gone, without so much as a goodbye or a see ya later. Like someone had finally closed the aperture all the way, locked it shut, and thrown away the key.
I haven’t told Yasmin. I don’t know how to tell her that, while we’ve been hiding in this cash-only dump off Route 41, while she’s been squinting through the curtains at the parking lot every twenty minutes for black sedans or Range Rovers, while she’s been keeping us fed on gas station sandwiches and one bag of Cheetos after the next—I’ve been going blind.
Past tense. Went blind.
I’m already there.
The bed wheezes as Yasmin sits down beside me. I keep my breathing even and my eyes closed. It’s easier this way. If I keep them closed, she won’t notice that they don’t track movement anymore. Won’t notice that I don’t flinch when she waves her hand in front of my face to see if I’m really asleep.
“El,” she whispers, “I know you’re awake.”
I don’t move.
“Your breathing changes when you’re faking it. Always has.”
Dammit. Busted.
I open my eyes, though only because that’s what she expects.
It’s a stupid charade, because it simply cannot last much longer.
But whether it’s fear or pride steering the wheel of Eliana Hunter these days, the outcome is the same: I’m going to keep on pretending for as long as I can.
So I stare in the direction of her voice and hope I’m looking close enough to where her face actually is.
“Can’t sleep,” I mumble.
“Me neither.” Her hand finds mine in the dark. Well, dark by her standards. For Yas, there’s probably still the glow of the digital clock, the sliver of light under the door, the red exit sign bleeding through the thin curtains.
For me, it’s all the same. All nothing.
“We should probably talk about what happens next,” Yasmin starts.
“Let’s talk about it tomorrow.”
“You’ve been saying that for a week.”
“Then one more day won’t hurt, will it?”
She sighs but doesn’t push. That’s the thing about Yasmin—she knows when to fight and when to let things be. And we’ve both had enough of fighting for a long, long time.
She releases my hand and grabs something.
The TV clicks on. It’s a violent assault of canned laughter and manufactured dialogue that crashes rudely into the suffocating silence we’ve been drowning in for days.
On the other hand, it does fill the void with something that isn’t the sound of my own ragged breathing or the grim, relentless thunder of my pulse in my ears.
It’s a nice change. I’ll take it.
“Cheer up,” she says in a half-hearted attempt at a playful voice. “There’s a Sex and The City marathon.”
I feel her settle under the covers beside me.
She sighs again, then lays her head on my shoulder.
Samantha says something about the size of a guy’s yacht, though she’s not talking about boats.
Charlotte gasps. Miranda rolls her eyes and snarks, and Carrie muses in voiceover about whether any of us ever really know what we want.
I don’t watch. I can’t. But I listen.
Yasmin laughs. “Remember when we binged this whole series sophomore year?”
“You made me watch it,” I correct. “I wanted to watch Breaking Bad.”
“And I saved you from becoming insufferable about prestige television. You should be thanking me for keeping you grounded.”
I almost smile, but it dies before it can quite make it to my lips. Smiles are getting harder and harder to come by these days. The episode continues. We sit together in our shitty motel room, and for just a moment, the white noise fades.
Yasmin wriggles in place, trying to get comfortable. I hear a plastic crunch, an “Oops,” and then the laugh track cuts off mid-guffaw. She must’ve sat on the remote.
The channel flips and a new voice fills the room.
It’s serious and male, the kind of voice that delivers bad news for a living.
“—police have confirmed that they have a suspect in custody following a violent assault in River North last week. Brandon Michael Torres, twenty-nine, faces multiple charges including assault, battery, and breaking and entering—”
My entire body goes cold.
“Yas—”
“Shh.” Her hand finds mine again and squeezes. Hard.
The news anchor continues. “Torres is being held without bail. A victim, Ezekiel Bautista, remains hospitalized at Northwestern Memorial with a severe concussion and is listed in stable condition—”
Zeke’s alive. The relief hits me so hard I can’t breathe for a second. I’ve been trying not to think about him lying on that rug, the blood pooling beneath his head. We left him there. I left him there. All because—because—
“He’s okay,” Yasmin whispers. “El, he’s okay.”
I just nod, because if I start talking, I’ll start crying.
“Two women were reported leaving the scene, including the apartment resident, Yasmin Kaur. Police are asking for help in finding these women to ensure their safety. All leads can be reported to the CPD hotline at…”
The news anchor moves on to something about traffic on the Kennedy, and Yasmin quickly changes the channel back to Sex and the City.
But the white noise doesn’t work anymore. It no longer stops the thoughts.
We go back to sleep for a while. I wake to the sound of Yasmin zipping her duffel bag. The metallic sound cuts through the steady hum of the highway outside.
“We need to move,” she says. “I checked us out for noon, but we should leave earlier. Just in case.”
Just in case Bastian finds us. Just in case Brandon makes bail. Just in case the black sedan pulls into the parking lot.
We’ve been living just in case for a week now.
I sit up and swing my legs over the side of the bed. My bare feet find the scratchy carpet. “Okay. I’ll pack.”
“You want help?” she asks.
“No. I’m good.”
“El, it’s no biggie, I can—”
“I said I’m good, Yas.”
I hear her hesitate, then move toward the bathroom.
The water runs. She’s giving me space, pretending she doesn’t notice how I fumble for things, how my hands search empty air before finding what I’m looking for.
I know she thinks she’s doing me a service by trying to take as much as possible off my plate, but I need to fill my time and thoughts with something or else I’ll go insane.
I locate my backpack by the nightstand where I left it and start gathering my things.
Not that there’s much to gather—we left Yasmin’s apartment with nothing but the clothes on our backs and whatever cash she had in her purse.
Everything I own now fits in one bag: three pairs of underwear from the Target two miles down the road, two shirts, one pair of jeans, assorted toiletries.
And Bastian’s pullover.
My fingers find it wadded at the foot of the bed where I left it this morning. I’ve been sleeping in it every night, though I haven’t let myself linger on the reasons why. It still smells like him—or maybe I’m imagining that. Maybe I’ve imagined it so hard that my brain has made it real.
The right thing to do, the only thing to do, is to throw it away. Shove it in the trash can by the door and leave it behind with everything else from that life. Hell, I should probably set it on fire just to make sure I don’t have any second thoughts.
Instead, I fold it. Carefully, the way my mother taught me to fold clothes when I was little, before the Dereks and the wine and the slow erosion of everything good in our lives. I do as she showed me. I smooth out the wrinkles, match the sleeves, create neat creases.
Then I stow it at the bottom of my bag.
As I zip the bag closed, I find myself humming. It takes me a moment to recognize the melody—that lullaby Bastian sang to me in the shower. Spi, mladenets moy prekrasny. I don’t know what the words mean, but I know how they sounded in his voice. Like he was singing to someone he’d already lost.
The humming stops as soon as I realize what I’m doing.
“El, you ready?” Yasmin calls from the bathroom.
I sling my bag over my shoulder. “Yeah. I’m ready. Let’s go.”