WITH THE CHANGE from the twenty, I bought an energy drink, a roll of clear tape, a spiral notebook, and a black hat with ear flaps on clearance because it was missing a button. I’d already spied a marker by the cash register, and when I asked the winged-eyeliner woman behind the counter if I could borrow it, she looked at me like I’d asked her to lend me a thousand dollars. But then she slid the marker across the counter and told me to be sure I brought it back. In the little eating area, I found an empty table tucked away from the front windows. But I still put on the black hat and pulled it low, on the off chance Aunt Jenny might stop for gas after coming out to pick up Caleb.
It didn’t seem likely that she would. It seemed more likely that there would be no further complications, and that soon, I’d be heading to St. Louis with a fugitive to break the law. It was hard to believe, sitting there with the truck stop’s stereo tuned to a basketball game, the sound of the referees’ whistles and the time buzzer making me even more jumpy. I tried to focus on making the sign. But even as I worked, it occurred to me that if I got caught with her, I’d have to think fast to make it seem like I’d had no idea she was Muslim. I’d have to play super dumb, and do a good job of it. If I didn’t, and I got caught in the lie, everyone would think I was really stupid anyway, helping a Muslim, when everyone knows they only pretend to be innocent until they do their damage.
Only Caleb wouldn’t think I was stupid.
A family with two little kids, the parents wearing matching blue windbreakers, sat at the table across from mine. When the dad caught my eye, he smiled, not in a creeper way, just friendly, like maybe he felt sorry for me sitting all by myself in a truck stop. The energy drink went warm in my mouth, and I looked down without smiling back. He thought I was a nice girl, a good American. His face would change if he knew.
The door dinged. I looked up to see the Muslim woman in her white coat. She was just inside, standing by a display of beef jerky packets like she wasn’t sure which way to go. She turned away from the lady at the counter, which was smart, and she had her hood pulled up over her blue knit hat. She carried a messenger bag like it was heavy, her right arm cradling it against her hip.
I gave a little wave. She put her head down and started walking toward me.
“Hello,” she whispered, sliding in across from me. She looked at the sign I’d been working on, and the two lines between her eyebrows went deep above the frames of her glasses.
“What is this?” she asked.
I picked up my handiwork to give her a better view. I was kind of proud about how well it had turned out.
NEEDING RIDE
TO ST. LOUIS FROM A WOMAN.
HELP A SISTER OUT! :)
I’d added the smiley face to keep it friendly, and then I’d gone over the whole thing with the clear tape to give it some structure. It wasn’t exactly laminated, but it was the same idea.
She didn’t look impressed.
“You said you could get me there!” She was whispering, but you could tell by her eyes she was mad. “You said you had a way!”
I put the sign in my lap. Geez, I thought. So much for beggars not being choosers. So much for gratitude. Maybe she’d like to go back out to the woods and sit in her car with her radioactive license plate.
“I do have a way. We’re gonna hitch.”
She touched her glove to her ear and winced. “Hitchhike? To St. Louis?”
“Sure. I do it all the time.” It wouldn’t do her any good if I showed a lack of confidence. I rolled my eyes. “Listen. You can’t believe all that stuff you hear about how dangerous it is. That’s just the media trying to scare you. It’s perfectly safe if you do it right. And that’s how we’ll be doing it.” I held up my hand to count on my fingers. “One, there’ll be two of us. Two, we’ll only get rides from women. And three, we’re not going to be standing out on the highway. We’ll get rides from places like this, where we have a chance to size somebody up. And I’ll take a picture of the license plate before we get in, and say I’m texting it to someone as a precaution. That’s about as safe as it gets.”
She stared at me for a good long while. Then she squinted. “You have a phone? I thought you didn’t have a phone.”
Good for her. She was paying attention. I took my phone out of my backpack.
“Just the camera part works,” I said, showing it to her. “It doesn’t have service. Nobody would know that, though.” I held up my hands. “That’s just an extra precaution anyway. If we just get rides with women, we’ll be fine.”
She pursed her lips, then leaned back. With the fluorescent light over the table, I could see she had freckles, very faint, along her cheekbones.
“Oh,” I said, remembering. “I got ahold of the guy in St. Louis, so he knows you’re coming. He says he can do it. You sure you have the cash to give him?”
She nodded.
“And enough left over to give me bus fare back to Hannibal?”
She nodded again.
“Why don’t you give it to me now, then?” I said. “Probably a hundred dollars should do it.” I wasn’t trying to rip her off. If a ticket home was less than that, I’d give her back the change at the station. What I was doing would be even worse if I made any profit doing it.
She got a leather wallet out of her messenger bag, and she looked around to make sure no one was watching before she slid five twenties across the table. I guess she wasn’t in any position to hold back.
“But who will give us rides?” she asked. “It’s dangerous for them. They don’t know us.”
She was right. That was the bigger problem. That was the part I didn’t get about hitchhiking. I mean, why take the risk if you were the one with the car?
“Well,” I said. “I’ve never had any trouble. But we’ve got to make up a story about you. Do you speak anything else besides English and, you know”—the basketball fans were cheering too loud for the family across from us to hear, but I lowered my voice anyway—“Arabic?”
“I don’t speak Arabic.” Her voice was even quieter than mine. I had to lean across the table to hear her. “I speak Farsi. Farsi and English.”
“Nothing else?”
She shook her head.
“Okay,” I said. “I was thinking I could say you’re Italian, and that you don’t speak any English. I’ll say you’re my mother’s cousin, visiting from Verona. That way you won’t have to talk.” I sat back and waited for her to be impressed. I thought it was a pretty good story. I’d gotten Verona from Romeo and Juliet. Most people wouldn’t have thought of it.
She frowned, looking at my empty energy drink can, then back up at my eyes. I don’t know what she was trying to imply. I’d only had one.
“What if someone knows Italian?” she asked. “And they try to speak to me?”
“You’re in Northeast Missouri. No one’s gonna know Italian.” I tried to say it just reassuring, not like she was being dumb.
She looked past me, out through the windows. It was full-on night now, but the lights over the pumps were bright, making rainbows out of puddles of oil. There were cars lined up, waiting, and that seemed like a good sign. We were already south of Hannibal, so maybe an hour and a half from St. Louis. We would only need one person to say yes.
“Portuguese. It’s even less likely.” She said it like she was in charge all of a sudden. “Say I’m visiting from Lisbon.” She waited. “It’s the capital.”
“I know that, thanks.” I probably did know it. I’d just forgotten. It’s not like I’d recently had a reason to walk around thinking about the capital of Portugal. “Fine. Now we’ve got to come up with a name for you, something that sounds Portuguese.”
She shrugged. “Maria.”
I shook my head. That sounded kind of Mexican. That was the last thing we needed. Actually, I wasn’t sure even her saying she was Portuguese would go over so well with everybody. But it would probably be fine. “Let’s go with . . . Chloe,” I said.
She tilted her head. “Chloe? From Portugal?”
“Yeah. Say your mom heard it in a movie and thought it was pretty. It’ll be fine. And we need a last name. What’s a Portuguese last name?”
I rolled my lips in like I was thinking. I didn’t know if a Portuguese last name would sound like a Mexican last name. But I didn’t want her to know I didn’t know.
Her gaze moved up to the fluorescent light. “Da Gama.” She half smiled. “Like the explorer.”
I thought about saying, “Oh yeah, good ol’ Vasco,” just to prove I knew something. But I didn’t really care what she thought. “All right,” I said. “You’re Chloe da Gama, my mother’s cousin visiting from Lisbon. But you don’t say any of that, okay? Don’t talk at all. Act like you don’t know any English.”
She nodded. She put her glove to her ear again.
“Why you keep doing that? Why you keep rubbing your ear like that?”
“It’s clogged,” she said. “I got some water in it a few days ago, and I couldn’t shake it out. Now it feels as if a soaked cotton ball is stuck inside.”
“Did you try putting hydrogen peroxide in it?” My mom used to do that for me and Caleb when we got water in our ears.
She nodded. “I did try this. It still feels clogged.” She waved her hand. “It’s not so bad, though. I’ll get drops for it when I can.”
“Okay.” I unzipped my backpack and started squishing stuff down to make room for the tape and the notebook. “Hey. I got your umbrella in here. You want it back?”
She shook her head.
“Okay. I’m going to use the bathroom and then we’ll head out with the sign.”
She stared down at the table like she was either thinking hard or getting ready to throw up.
“You’ll be all right, Chloe,” I said, part for a joke, and part for practice. And also because I didn’t feel so bad about what I was doing when I thought of her as Chloe, a nice Portuguese woman. I still didn’t want to know her real name.
On the way to the bathroom, I stopped at the register to give the clerk her marker back. I asked if they had any ear drops, just to see. They didn’t have any, though.
We stood outside the truck stop’s door, staying under the roof because of the rain. I held the sign, and Chloe kept her head down and her hood pulled up. I understood she was worried about being recognized, but to make up for her looking kind of depressed and weird, I smiled at everyone walking by and tried to look as normal and as American as I could.
It didn’t work. An hour went by and nobody stopped. It was mostly men getting gas or coming into the store, or sometimes a man and a woman together, or a man and a woman with kids, and when anyone in these categories looked at the sign, they seemed relieved we were only looking for a ride with a woman, as then they didn’t have to feel bad about not wanting to help a sister out. One man on his way in even smiled and said, “Sorry. I’m a dude,” and held up his palms like, What are you going to do?
Sometimes just women walked by, by themselves or with kids, but they all lowered their eyes and hurried past us. I didn’t want to call out to any of them because it would be embarrassing, and also because I was nervous someone would complain at the counter. I was pretty sure it was legal to hitchhike in Missouri—Tess had acted like it was, and I remembered I’d seen people with their thumbs out on the side of the highway. Still, the clerk could probably throw us off the property if she wanted to. So there was nothing to do but keep standing there, looking pathetic. Chloe and I didn’t say one word to each other, as she was already in character.
After a while, my cheeks started to hurt from forcing a smile for so long. It was getting colder out, and I wished I’d taken the toe warmers from her when we were back in her car.
It was almost nine when a black woman wearing a pink pea coat and a matching beret gave us and our sign a dirty look as she was walking into the store. That about did me in. It was hard enough standing out there and shivering and feeling more and more worried that we might not make it to St. Louis before Matt turned out his light and closed up shop—I didn’t need someone walking by and giving me a look that made me feel even worse. I didn’t even want to look at Chloe. I felt dumb, like I’d been caught in a lie. I’d made it sound like I knew what I was doing.
A few minutes later, the black woman came out with two sodas with straws in the lids. She’d only got a few steps past us when she stopped and turned around.
“I have one question,” she said, emphasizing the one. “Are you two out of your minds?”
I shook my head, in case she was really asking. “No ma’am,” I said. “We’re just trying to get to St. Louis.”
“Hmm.” She looked me up and down like she didn’t quite like what she saw. Right then I knew why I’d called her ma’am. She reminded me, so much, of a teacher I’d had back in Joplin who used to hand out lunch detentions like they were nothing, and I’d quickly found it was a good idea to be as polite to her as possible. This woman standing before us now was even wearing slacks with low heels, just like that teacher wore—I remember they used to click on the linoleum, and it was always scary. You could hear her coming.
She took a sip from the one of the sodas and shook her head. “Well, that’s a good way to get yourself killed,” she said. “I see your sign says women only, but it’s still not smart, what you’re doing. Not in this day and age.”
I shrugged. There wasn’t a lot I could say in response. Apparently it wasn’t that smart, but not because someone would murder us—we would just freeze to death waiting for a ride. But I wished she would go away, and take her stupid beret and her sodas with her, and not keep calling me out in front of Chloe.
“Why do you have to get to St. Louis?” She took another sip from the straw. “What’s in St. Louis?”
“My sister works at a pancake house there. She’s got the night shift. We’re supposed to meet her.”
“Hmm-hmm. What pancake house? What’s it called?”
I couldn’t remember the name of it, but I gave her the exit number, and I told her it was just to the right of the exit. She said she knew the exit I meant. Still, I saw the look she was giving me. She was one of those people who could spot a lie, even a good one. Her gaze moved to Chloe.
“She’s Portuguese,” I said. “She doesn’t speak English.”
She narrowed her eyes, still looking at Chloe, so I went right into the whole deal, how this was my aunt Chloe, who was really my mom’s cousin, visiting us from Portugal. I said she wanted to meet my sister before she went home to Lisbon, so my mom asked me to take her down to St. Louis, since my sister couldn’t get off work. I was ready with more details if she required them. I knew my sister’s name, and how long she’d worked at the pancake house, and I knew that she’d promised us a free meal when we arrived. If needed, I could tell her what I was going to order.
But I didn’t have to go into all that. Judging by the look on the woman’s face, she no longer seemed suspicious, just horrified, or maybe disgusted.
“Your mother? You’re telling me your mother told you to hitchhike to St. Louis with this poor woman who doesn’t speak any English? At night?”
“Yes ma’am,” I said. “We don’t have a car. And the bus is expensive.”
She looked over at Chloe again, and I could guess what she was thinking. I looked like someone who maybe couldn’t afford a bus ticket, but Chloe’s white coat was pretty nice, and so were her boots.
The woman looked back at me. “How old are you?”
“I’m eighteen.”
She frowned, but didn’t say anything. And then she just turned around and walked away. She got into the driver’s side of a dark blue van parked at one of the pumps. I gave it a hateful stare, thinking about her sitting inside it, all warm and self-righteous, leaving us here with just her opinions and her rudeness.
I was still staring at the van when she got out again, and started walking fast toward us. She didn’t have the sodas anymore, and she looked like she had something on her mind, like maybe she’d heard my thoughts. Her shoes clicked on the pavement. Right before she reached us, I took a few steps back.
“Okay,” she said. “We can give you a ride. Now, my husband and my son are with me. If you don’t feel comfortable with that, we can’t help you. But if you want to come meet them, come on over and have a look in.”
I had to make a decision fast. She didn’t seem like the kind of person who would take well to ingratitude, and even worse, she might think my hesitation was a race thing, which it wasn’t. The problem was I’d told Chloe we would only get a ride with a woman, and technically, that’s not what this was anymore. Then again, it seemed pretty unlikely that we were going to get robbed, raped, or murdered by an entire family, and I was freezing, so I said, “Oh, thank you so much!” and touched Chloe’s arm. I pointed at the van and the woman, nodding my head, and if Chloe was mad about me breaking the rules, she didn’t show it. She pressed her gloved hand over the strap of the messenger bag, and gave the woman a grateful smile.
When we were about halfway to the van, the woman turned back to me. “And I just want to let you know my husband spent seven years in the service. He’s a trained soldier.”
That gave me a jolt. I had no idea what she meant by that, and I worried she meant something having to do with Chloe. But then I realized she was saying that we shouldn’t plan to try anything funny once we got on the road. She was thinking we were thieves.
“I’m Gayle, by the way. And just to save us all trouble, I want you to know we don’t have any cash. I’m not exaggerating. I had to dig around in the console to get enough change for those sodas. We’ve got credit cards, but they’re all about maxed out. You don’t want them.” When we got to the far side of the van, she took off her glove and showed me one of her hands. “And this is my wedding ring, okay? No stone. Just a band. It means a lot to me, but you could not get ten dollars for it.”
“Oh,” I said. “Don’t worry, ma’am. We’re not . . .” But then I stopped, because what was the point? That’s exactly what someone who wanted to rob them would say. And anyway, Gayle wasn’t listening. She opened the van’s sliding door, and instead of a long seat, there was a boy in a big wheelchair who might have been anywhere between six and ten years old, with a plaid blanket over his legs. His head was sort of leaned back and tilted to one side in a headrest, but you could see by his eyes he was looking at us. On the other side of him was the man I guessed was the dad, the trained soldier, who looked friendly enough. He wore a Cardinals jacket, and he held a soda in one hand; in the other, he held a water bottle with a long straw that had an unusual bend in the middle, which I guessed was for his son.
“This is my husband, Reggie, and this is our son, Aaron. They have terrible taste in music, but they’re generally good people.”
The boy made a groaning sound that might have just been a hello. The man waved. I waved back at both of them.
“Reggie and Aaron, this is Chloe. She’s visiting our country from Portugal, and with her is . . .”
“Amy,” I said.
Gayle gave me a look. I don’t know how she would know I was lying about that. But she gave me a look.
The man smiled, leaning around his son to see Chloe better. “I never made it to Portugal,” he said. “Wanted to. I was stationed in Italy for a few years. Vicenza. But I didn’t get to travel much.”
Chloe stayed quiet.
“She doesn’t speak English,” I said, very aware that Chloe had heard and understood every word he just said, and was probably feeling pretty good that we’d gone with her Portuguese plan and not my Italian one. Two points for her. Fine.
Gayle leaned into the van to fix the blanket so it covered her son’s feet. Then she straightened back up and looked at me.
“Amy, I want you to know we don’t normally pick up strangers at truck stops.”
I swallowed. She was looking right at me, and she’d said “Amy” like we both knew it was fake.
“We’re doing this because we try to walk with Jesus through this life, and back there I felt very strongly, very clearly, that Jesus was telling me to help you.”
I nodded. That was about all I could do. I wasn’t going to lie to her and be all Oh yeah, Jesus told me I could trust you too, so it all works out! I was feeling bad enough. These people had their own problems, with their maxed-out credit cards and their boy who was watching us, taking us in, but who couldn’t walk or talk. I didn’t know how they would feel if they knew that Jesus was telling them to help an atheist and a Muslim who were breaking the law.
“Thank you,” I said. My teeth were chattering again. I worried that maybe she was going to spend the drive trying to save our souls, or at least mine. Lucky Chloe would just get to sit there and act like she couldn’t understand.
“Okay,” Gayle said. “I was thinking your aunt could sit in the very back. There’s a little seat next to the lift. And you could ride up in the passenger seat next to me.”
I was about to nudge Chloe and point to the back of the van when I remembered I was supposed to get a picture of the license plate. But the words wouldn’t come out of my mouth. It’d seemed like such an easy rule when I was making it, but now, in front of actual people who were giving us a ride, I felt bad. I mean, they were trusting us. And now I was going to act like we had to worry about them. Still, I’d told Chloe we were going to take a picture of the plate, and I’d already gone back on one rule. It didn’t seem fair to keep switching rules around on her when she wasn’t allowed to talk.
“I’m really so appreciative,” I said. “But before we get in, I need to take a picture of your license plate and send it to my dad. He made me promise.”
Gayle tilted her head so that her pink beret, which sat on her head at an angle, looked level with the ground. Her eyebrows went up, but the rest of her face didn’t move. It seemed like she might be offended, or maybe thinking that I obviously didn’t hear Jesus the way she did and maybe didn’t deserve her help after all. But then she smiled.
“That,” she said, “is the first sensible thing that’s come out of your mouth.” She held one arm out to the back of the van, as if she were a waiter showing me to my table. “Please. Be my guest.”
I ended up being wrong about Gayle wanting to save my soul. The whole way to St. Louis, she barely talked. She played gospel music on the stereo, and she sang along with the chorus to one of the songs, “everything’s gonna be all right,” over and over, but that was kind of nice, actually. She had a good voice—it was deeper than her talking voice, and she could still go up high without sounding like she was straining. When her husband told her Aaron was asleep, she turned off the music, and we were all quiet the rest of the way. I put on my headphones and clicked through Tess’s music until I got to a slow, pretty song by Gallatin Sky. I was in the mood for something soft like that, now that I was warm and cozy, and looking at the red taillights in front of us.
Tess told me once that she loved the feeling of being driven on the highway at night. She said when she was little, her parents would wrap her up in blankets in the backseat so she would sleep, and she’d open her eyes sometimes and see just a strip of white from the roadside lights reflected on their faces, the rest of the car still dark, and it didn’t matter if it was raining out, or even snowing. She felt safe, she said, like they were all together in a little egg. I’d nodded like I knew what she meant, but I didn’t. I’ve probably been in the backseat at night while my mom was driving, maybe even back when she was still with Tom. I suppose I might have had a blanket over me at some point. But I’d never felt like I was in an egg, nestled in and safe. So it was pretty weird that just now, sitting in a van that belonged to people I didn’t even know, with Chloe quiet in the far back, I kind of understood what she meant. I could hear the tires shushing over the wet road, and the hum of the engine, and Aaron snoring softly behind me. His mom was wide awake and driving steady, so all I had to do was sit back and be whisked along. I had this feeling, true or not, that for now, at least, we were one of them. Part of their egg.
I thought of Caleb, and hoped he was safe and tucked in his bed, though I knew he probably wouldn’t be asleep. He’d be too worried about me, and about Chloe. He couldn’t know we were both safe in this van, on our way to St. Louis. I even had warm air blowing on my feet.
We were just outside the city, coming up on the suburbs, when I looked up and saw a digital billboard maybe a quarter of a mile ahead. I’d been keeping watch for them the whole trip, hoping we wouldn’t pass any. Highway digitals usually just showed the forecast, or traffic warnings, or a picture of some smiling real estate agent going back and forth with the featured Home of the Month. But sometimes they showed photos of fugitives, and I could see that’s what this one was doing, showing a picture of a bearded man. But as we got closer, it switched to the picture of Chloe in her headscarf, her face bigger than any moon, her eyes gazing out over the highway. My whole body tensed, and I waited for Gayle to slow the car and look at me like, What the heck?, or for her to just make big eyes at her husband in the rearview. But she didn’t do any of that. She just kept on driving, humming some Jesus song to herself.
I thought, thank you Jesus for the distraction. Ha ha.
When we got to the pancake house, I was nervous someone from the family would need to use the bathroom, and that they’d all come in, maybe expecting to be introduced to my waitress sister. But the son was still sleeping, and after Gayle pulled the van in front of the door, she didn’t even cut off the engine.
“It’s open?” she asked, squinting at the entrance. The parking lot was empty, and though the windows were lit, all the tables I could see were empty. But I pointed to the Open 24/7 neon sign, and she nodded and pushed a button that made the side door roll open. She must have forgotten that Chloe didn’t know any English, because she told her in a quiet voice to be careful not to trip on the brace for the wheelchair on her way up.
I got out with my backpack, but before I shut my door, I said thank you again, looking back at the man to show I meant to thank him, too. They both nodded and smiled, but that was it. They didn’t want anything else.
“Good luck,” I said, which was sort of weird, because it wasn’t like they were getting ready to do something. I meant good luck in general, like with their lives, and their son. I meant they’d been nice when they didn’t have to be, and I felt it.
“Good luck to you,” the man said. He nodded at me, and then at Chloe.
I shut the door, and the side door hummed and clicked back into place. Dry and delivered, and holding our bags, we watched the van roll away.