I HITCHHIKED A whole bunch as a teenager. It was often the fastest way to get out of town if I had decided to leave a foster home to go find my brother. I realized pretty quickly that the first place my foster family would look for me was at the local bus and train stations. They figured I wasn’t stupid enough to get in a car with a stranger. I was plenty stupid enough.
A couple of cars passed me in the first five minutes after I rejoined the highway heading south. It was still raining and had been all night while I tried to sleep, fighting off memories of Bonnie Risdale’s house. Not wanting to risk showing my face at a hotel in the area, I’d lain down in the loading dock behind a closed service station, using my backpack as a pillow. I’d awakened with the expected aches and pains, renewed sensation in the bumps and scrapes I’d acquired jumping from the train.
I wasn’t sure the passing vehicles could see me in the deluge, but I pressed on along the highway with my thumb out for a couple of kilometers. When a big truck put on his brakes after I’d spent fifteen minutes in the rain, I felt my whole body swell with relief and gratitude. I climbed up into the warm, dark cabin and threw my backpack on the floor.
“You must be nuts, walkin’ around in this,” the driver said. He was a typical trucker. Potbellied, weary eyes under a dusty cap. I took the offered towel and wiped my face and neck as he started the vehicle back up.
“As close as you can get to Narooma, if you don’t mind,” I said.
He merely shrugged. Ten minutes passed in which I watched the trucker’s face out of the corner of my eye to see if he was taking any interest in my body or belongings. I casually passed my backpack into the tiny room behind our seat that held cupboards and a small camp bed for the long haul, and took a quick glance around the darkened space for knives, rope, guns, anything threatening. There was nothing but chip packets, empty pie trays, beer cans and water bottles, piles of clothes reeking of sweat, and a change of boots. On the floor, I spied a map of Alice Springs. If this guy had come from as far away as Alice, maybe he was out of the loop with the search for Regan and me. In any case, I kept my cap low and my profile to the man in the driver’s seat.
I thought about Regan. He’d said he’d always been bad, that the “layers” he’d built up over his life had just been hiding something evil lurking at his core. Had he been born bad, or had whatever his parents did to him when he was seven years old broken him? Changed the very essence of his being? Turned him dark? After Regan had entered the foster-care system, a judge had decided that the public should never know what had happened to him and had sealed the file. It was a move I’d heard of before. A report that detailed my friend Tox Barnes’s involvement in the accidental killing of a mother and child had been sealed to protect him from ever suffering persecution in his adult life over the incident. I knew that some of the worst child-abuse cases were sealed so that the victims would never have to fear a friend or loved one discovering what had happened to them. They could begin anew, leave their secret traumas locked safely away. If Regan’s parents had made him the monster that he really was, whatever they had done must have been horrendous.
In time, I tried to shut Regan out of my mind. When the trucker failed to offer any attempt at conversation, I fell asleep.
It was a big mistake.