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Working in the dim glow from a handheld flashlight, Jolie Jensen shoved the last of her ten-year-old daughter’s clothing into a black plastic trash bag. Tension squeezed her chest as tightly as a steel band. Her body was on alert, every nerve taut and close to the surface. She threw a glance at the plastic clock on top of a narrow bookcase. Two a.m.
Outside, a torrential rain pounded the thin walls and roof of the single-wide mobile home where she lived. Like the flash of a giant camera, lightning brightened the room for an instant. An earth-shaking thunderclap followed.
Ka-boom!
A shot of adrenaline burst through her and she almost dropped her armful of clothing. A wind gust slammed the walls of the trailer, rocking and rattling the whole flimsy structure. “Oh, God,” she mumbled, and planted her feet firmly, overcoming the sensation she was losing her balance.
She held her breath, listening for signs the racket had awakened her husband sleeping in the next room. No, she corrected herself. Her ex-husband. She had divorced him during his last six-month stay in jail.
She eased up the hallway to the back of the trailer and the larger bedroom she had shared with Billy Dean Jensen for ten years. She carefully opened the door and peeked inside. He was sprawled all over their double-bed on his back, broadcasting loud snorts and rumbles from his nose and throat. Out cold. Thank you, God for small favors.
After coming home at midnight from no telling where, drunk or drugged up or both, Billy had staggered to the bed and fallen onto it fully clothed. So that he would be comfortable enough not to wake up, Jolie had removed his boots, during which his rhythmic snore—loud enough to be heard above the roaring storm—faltered not a beat.
She returned to her packing, her mind scrambling, her hands moving in frantic jerks, stuffing the clothing into the bag. If Billy awoke for some reason and caught her, only God knew what would result. Jolie couldn’t let herself think of that. She couldn’t allow any thought that might prevent what she knew she had to do.
“Do we have tornado warnings, Mama?” Danni whispered.
Of course there were tornado warnings. There were always tornado warnings in East Texas in April. The day had been heavily humid and hotter than blazes for this time of year, bringing on the evening’s storm. TV news had earlier reported golf-ball-size hail up in Greenville to the north and six inches of rain. “I don’t think so,” she whispered back. “Be quiet now.”
Danni held thrust a faded stuffed dog in the flashlight’s spotlight. The toy had once been pink. Now it was natty and gray from years of being petted by Danni’s hands. “Can I take this?” she whispered.
Jolie hesitated. She had already told the ten-year-old they could take nothing they didn’t need, but she knew her daughter had sneaked some things into her book bag.
“Please, Mama.” Danni’s whispery voice quivered.
The tattered toy had been with Danni for longer than Jolie could remember. It was one of the few things in their lives that had always been there. Jolie relented and spread the gaping mouth of the bag. “Throw it in here. Hurry.”
She tamped the toy down on top of the clothing, then drew the bag’s plastic cord tight and tied it.
Ready.
She fanned the flashlight around the cramped room one last time, scanning for some irreplaceable item she or her daughter might later wish for.
For an instant, her emotions stumbled into her task. For so many years she had lamented the size and dreariness of this tiny room. When Danni was a baby, it had been barely large enough for a crib and a small chest of drawers. Now it was barely large enough for Danni’s twin-size bed, the same chest of drawers painted a different color and a narrow bookcase. Tonight, Jolie was glad it was too small to hold much, glad they owned so few material items that were worth keeping.
Picking up the bag, she motioned toward the laundry room, then switched off the flashlight. In the dark, carrying the bag and moving behind Danni, she eased up the short, narrow hallway into the space housing an ancient washing machine and dryer. It could hardly be called a “room.” It was so small she could cross it in two strides and be out the back door.
Two strides.
Two strides between this moment and the rest of her and her daughter’s lives.
She hesitated an instant, thinking through her plan one last time. Over the past few days, at opportune moments, she had been secreting pillowcases filled with necessities into the trunk of her old Ford Taurus. Today, after coming home from work, she had parked the sedan so that no more than six steps from the back door would take them to it. She had removed the lightbulb from the car’s overhead light and left the key in the ignition.
She had put a laundry basket full of her and Danni’s clothing in the backseat. If Billy noticed the plastic basket, he wouldn’t have been suspicious. He knew that when she had the money, she sometimes did their laundry at the coin-op in town where the washing machines and dryers were newer and cleaner and she could finish the chore faster using multiple machines all at one time.
Another thunderclap and a wind gust shook them and the pounding rain escalated. Jolie shuddered and clenched her jaw. After so much rain, some creek between her and freedom was bound to be out of its banks. Bad weather or flash floods were horrors her escape plan hadn’t included.
She placed the bag at the back door. This was it. The moment of truth.
For a few seconds she stood in the doorway, staring at the exit as if it were the entrance to a cave where a monster lived. In the windowless room, she could see only faint outlines of the washing machine and dryer and Danni’s form, but she could hear her daughter’s breathing. Danni was so scared. For the first time Jolie noticed her own heart hammering.
Well, whatever demon might lie in wait on the other side of that back door, it couldn’t be much worse than the one passed out in the bedroom.
She had already schooled Danni on what she had to do: run to the passenger side and climb into the car. Period. She was not to hesitate, not to slam the car door. It could be closed securely later. She bent, placing her mouth close to her daughter’s ear. “Okay, now. Remember what you have to do?
“I think so,” Dannie whispered.
“Everything’s okay. Don’t be scared.”
Jolie carefully opened the trailer’s door, being cautious to avoid the metallic clack that accompanied the opening and closing of the mobile home’s metal doors. She gripped the edge of it tightly to keep a wind gust from catching it and slamming it back against the side of the trailer.
Outside, the night was black as pitch. Rain sluiced off the trailer’s roof in wide sheets. Even before she left the protection of the doorway, horizontal rain stabbed at her arm and face with cold, needlelike pricks.
Jolie held the mobile home’s door with one hand and the flashlight with the other while Danni sprinted through the mud of the so-called yard, around the rear end of the car. As soon as the ten-year-old reached the passenger door and scooted in, Jolie herself grabbed the overstuffed plastic bag and made the short dash. She yanked open the car’s back door, threw the bag into the backseat and only half closed the door. Then she climbed behind the wheel and fired the ignition. The Ford started with no more than a cough. Yes!
Then, without headlights, she herded the sedan through the raging storm and the dark pine growth that hid their mobile home from the county road, up the two-mile-long dirt driveway that had now turned into a tire-grabbing soup.
Like water dumped from buckets, rain poured over the windshield, blinding her.
Whap-screek! Whap-screek!
The windshield wipers, even set to the max, couldn’t keep the windshield clear. When she’d had the car serviced earlier in the week, it hadn’t occurred to her to have the windshield wipers checked.
At the end of their driveway, almost by instinct, she turned onto the paved county road and switched on the headlights. They were almost useless, but they struggled to make a dim impression on the overpowering wall of rain that showed like silver shards in the headlight’s golden deltas. Jolie clenched the steering wheel at ten and two and crawled along, her neck craned, her eyes squinted and straining to see.
Five miles later, she reached Bob’s, a convenience store that closed at midnight every night. She stopped in the dark parking lot, got out and shut all the car doors tightly, then scooted back into the driver’s seat, drenched and shivering.
She glanced across to the passenger seat. Danni’s hands were tucked between her knees, her narrow shoulders huddled and shaking. Jolie wiped her own soaked hair off her damp face, turned the heater to full blast and without looking back, pulled back onto the county highway.
“It’s dark, Mama,” Danni murmured in her quivery little girl voice.
“It’s the rain, honey. Can you go to sleep?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“You could try. The heater’s getting warm now. I know you’re tired. Just close your eyes and you’ll be asleep before you know it.”
Jolie returned her attention to the road and the weather. She no longer knew exactly where they were. She could see nothing to the sides of the car, could see nothing ahead of her but black night and the pathetic weak fan of the headlights against the downpour.
She wished she had been so fearful of driving the shorter route straight through Dallas where there were at least streetlights, but she hadn’t wanted to risk a breakdown on one of the freeways in her eleven-year-old car.
More than that, she hadn’t wanted to chance an encounter with the Dallas police in case Billy awoke and reported the car missing. That possibility was why she had replaced the Ford’s license plates with a set she had stolen. With stolen license plates, being stopped for even a minor traffic violation might result in a trip to jail. She believed this because that very thing had happened to Billy.
Until the last few weeks, she had never imagined herself doing something like stealing license plates, but yesterday she had exchanged the license plates from her Ford with those on a car parked in an out-of-the-way space in the parking lot of the restaurant where twenty-four hours ago she had been employed. The car belonged to another restaurant employee who Jolie was sure had no warrants or history that would cause police to stop her.
The extra miles added to her trip by arcing Dallas and Fort Worth didn’t matter anyway, she told herself now. She had filled the gas tank after work and she would get well past Abilene before she would need to stop for gas again.
Cocooned inside the car by the deafening storm and lulled by the hum of the engine, Jolie’s nerves started to calm. A weird out-of-body sensation had overtaken her. She attributed it to swallowing some No-Doz and now having been awake almost twenty-four hours.
She had worked a full shift as a waitress at the Cactus Café today, or actually, yesterday now. She had held that job for several years. She felt guilty abandoning the café owners without giving notice. Donna and Mike Harmon had treated her with fairness and compassion, helping her during the various times she had kicked Billy out in the past. Still, she couldn’t have risked telling them her plans. Once her husband sobered up and figured out she had fled, the Cactus Café would be the first place he would go for information.
The next place would be her mother’s trailer in Terrell, but her mother knew nothing of Jolie’s escape plan. The fewer people who had information, the better, Jolie had figured. She wasn’t worried about her mother being confronted by Billy. As the manager of a blue-collar bar, Evelyn Kramer was as tough as Billy was mean.
Almost an hour later, in spite of the blinding rain, Jolie recognized the deserted streets of the small town of Ennis, a bedroom community southeast of Dallas. Just ahead, the red of a traffic light at a state highway intersection shone like a lighthouse beacon.
She stopped and waited for a green light, then made a right turn and headed west.
An hour and a half later, the rain began to dissipate and signs became readable in the black night. She soon spotted one that directed traffic to I-20. Despite being exhausted, despite her frazzled nerves, a feeling of freedom filled her heart. She could think of nothing that would make her turn back.
