The Canadian passport looked a lot like her American passports—dark blue with gold writing and a seal on the outside. This one said CANADA, of course. The gold symbol was a fancy crown design, and along with PASSPORT below it there was PASSEPORT. The photograph and identity data were on the same page as they were in the American passports.
She read the name again. Marie Angelica Spencer. She said it aloud. It was okay. Probably his … Anna had thought of the name. She had caught herself thinking: First wife. He would have let Anna choose something she could imagine living with, and the name sounded compatible with the way Anna—and she—both looked, northern European, probably of Irish, English, or French descent or all three.
Changing—even being a person who was amenable to change—was confusing. She supposed that it wasn’t as big a deal to her now as it would have been before she took her husband’s name, McDonald. She had taken that wholeheartedly and without reservation, and then nineteen years later had learned it wasn’t her name after all, not really.
She had very quickly gotten comfortable being Marcia Dixon. It was a common and familiar name, like putting her feet in a worn-in pair of slippers. And being Marie Spencer was not going to be any less comfortable for her. Marie Spencer was another good name for a person who didn’t want to be noticed or wondered about.
But being Canadian was going to take some thought and some research. She remembered they had a parliamentary government with ministers, they had provinces instead of states, and they had the Queen of England. They had two official languages. She had studied French in school and wasn’t bad. She could still read pretty well, and the fluency would come back.
As she thought about the change she didn’t mind so much. If you had to change your nationality, Canadian wasn’t a bad choice. Years ago, she remembered, some friends of hers—really her husband’s—had gone to Europe and always told people they were Canadian to avoid political hatred. Everybody liked Canadians.
The Pacific Ocean appeared on the left side of the train. Now that she was on her way out of her own country she regretted not learning much about California. She didn’t know the names of any of the other mountain ranges besides the San Bernardino Mountains where she and Hank had been hiding. Yes she did—the Sierras. But this life, her new one, was full of quick escapes and things found and relinquished before she could really examine them.
Although she had not realized it then, the day Peter Caldwell had arrived at her door in Chicago her new life had begun, and time had sped up. Now she burned through sights, places, and names.
She knew she had lost some things as the old life ended. Her son, her firstborn, seemed to be one of them. She remembered how much she had loved him when he was born, and then more and more as she devoted all of her attention to him. He had been intelligent. She had been pleased with his intelligence at first, and secretly relieved that he would have an easier time than people who didn’t have that. And she had, even more secretly, been proud. But as he got older he reminded her sometimes of the terribly precocious children in horror movies, with their soft, sweet faces and penetrating, pitiless eyes.
In recent years she had realized that his father, Darryl, must have been like that too—very alert, very intense about things like winning and being the one who was right, and also free of any inclination toward humility. As Brian grew older he became more unaffectedly calculating, like his father. Darryl was a person to whom the odds, the risks, and advantages were instantly apparent, and who could conceive of no reason to resist them.
She turned a little and looked beside her at Hank. No, at her husband, Alan Spencer. She loved him so much that as she inhaled she felt her chest expand and the air rush in. She had never felt as strongly about any man in her life before. She could see he was asleep and she wanted to touch him, not in spite of the risk of waking him, but because he might wake. She wanted to hear his voice again because his calm voice made her feel warm and safe.
Feeling that way was important to her, because although Alan didn’t know it, Marie had no way of returning to her old life as Zoe McDonald, even if she had wanted it. That was over forever. Big Bear had been terrifying, and then the ride with those two awful boys had been something out of an old nightmare, but being with him had saved her.
The monotonous clackety-clack of the train going along the level tracks beside the shore made her tiredness return. She wriggled closer to her pretend husband, Alan, feeling his body touching hers, his chest moving in slow, restful breaths behind her. Like this, she thought. When we have to die, let it be like this.