“…but what am I?  An infant crying in the night:  An ...

The motel was somewhere in western Massachusetts. Jenny couldn’t have given any better information. She’d seen the sign just as her eyes threatened to close and no amount of cold air, will-power, or loud music could revive her. The room was plain. Brown carpet. Brown upholstery. Brown and yellow bedspread. Ugly painting of unnatural ducks on an unnatural pond. It smelled of cigarettes, stale air, and sweet air-freshener. She’d never stayed in a motel by herself.

Not that decor mattered. Since she’d left Portland, imaginary bad guys had lurked in her back seat, in other cars, and all the roadside stops. Fear had driven her on, refusing to let her stop except for a dash to the bathroom and a snatched cup of coffee, until she could go no farther. She was bone weary. Her body ached. Her heart ached. All she cared about was a shower and a bed. Her face in the mirror looked like one of those magazine ads: All she has ever known is poverty and sorrow. For just pennies a day, you can help little Jenny.

Damn! She was going to cry again. She’d cried her way home from Ohio to Maine, and found disaster rather than refuge, and cried back through Maine, New Hampshire and most of Massachusetts while she tried to keep Dandy’s puke-green Plymouth Fury on the road. After her own little car, it was like piloting the Queen Mary. Her mother had said, “Run, Jenny, run. Burn diary and run.” Someone had tried to kill her mother. Someone had killed Uncle Billy. So she was running. But she wouldn’t burn the diary until she read it and understood what this was about.

Her escape had been plotted by a bunch of amateurs while she had huddled in stunned silence, processing her father’s shattering news. She still hadn’t. It sat in her brain like a sharp pebble. She couldn’t coat it with soothing layers and turn it into a pearl. The ugly bit of information about Senator Buxton shook loose a piece of her life.

On Friday, she’d been a happy college student, in love, coming home to discuss her future with her parents. Now so much had been torn away. Her lover had betrayed her. Her mother had gone into a place where she couldn’t be reached. Her apartment was trashed. Her Uncle Billy was dead. Her father had revealed she was someone else’s child. She was used to defining herself in relation to others. Lila Friedman’s daughter. Drew’s girlfriend. Dr. Horner’s best student. It had been easy to be strong and competent in the relative safety of a college campus, her parents only a phone call away.

Now she felt a profound sense of dislocation, walking a tightrope for the first time without a net.

In her wallet, and, because she was cautious, in the key pocket of her bra and in her shoe, were wads of cash gathered from her father, Dandy, Adele, Rose, and Charlie, with a supplement from her father’s ATM. She also had Dandy’s bank card, along with the information that his password was “Skunk.” She was on her way to a farm near Elmira, New York, to stay with one of Rose’s cousins. Their hastily concocted story was she’d had a fight with her father, borrowed Andy’s car keys, and disappeared.

Buying into their panic, she’d left before her mother got back from surgery, letting them make plans for her without reflection. Bundled out, still in a daze, the package from Charlie in her pack. She let Dandy walk her to her car so she could get her suitcase and give him her keys. It was only when she was on the road that she’d begun to be afraid. Someone was killing her family, one by one.

She shook her head at the drawn, tired woman in the mirror who’d stolen her face and wasn’t taking care of it. “We are something from a bad novel.”

She got clean clothes from her suitcase and went into the bathroom, pulling off the clothes she’d worn so long. They smelled. She smelled. Her hair was greasy. Undressed, she looked skinnier than ever. The original ninety-eight-pound weakling, or, in her case, the 108-pound weakling. Maybe less after all the meals she’d missed.

She stepped in the shower, scrubbing as though she could wash the last few days away. Then she closed her eyes, giving herself up to the soothing heat. She loved her mother. She loved her father who was not her father. She wanted to be home in her old room, eating buttery cinnamon toast and reading in bed.

Thinking of home dragged her back to her reality, to a self awash with scary, out-of-control feelings. Drying with a towel big enough for a small dwarf on a dry day, she started getting angry. She’d been a good person. A loving girlfriend to Drew, a loving daughter to her parents. She didn’t deserve this. Eventually, her anger focused on those it was hardest for her to be mad at: her parents. She felt betrayed. Why wait twenty-one years to tell her this? Or, since for twenty-one years it hadn’t been something they wanted to share, why tell her now?

Of course, she knew why. Because she might become a pawn in a nasty political game. Because whoever wanted Lila Friedman silenced might want Jenny silenced, too.

She hated being so scared and anxious, which got her mad at the real culprits here—the candidates. Mad at people who put ambition above humanity, who had deemed her mother, her uncle, perhaps herself, expendable. Who else wanted to hurt any of them? Something bad happening to her mother and her uncle the same night was no coincidence.

Anger was energizing. Alfonso beat his wife. Buxton had had an extramarital affair. Neither man was decent enough to be president.

Cursing Buxton for his fateful infidelity provided the energy to get dressed and plan her next steps. She put on a shapeless T-shirt, a big black sweatshirt she’d appropriated from her father, and baggy black sweatpants from the Salvation Army. A small label in the pants declared she was Jon Blakely. It was six o’clock. In half an hour, she’d call the hospital for news. There was a public phone near the motel office she could use—a dinosaur in this cell phone era. But Jenny’d been educated by movies and TV—use a pay phone if you don’t want to be caught, and keep it short. Then she’d eat something. An army marches on its stomach, even an army of one.

She turned on the news for company and was rewarded with a couple of fires, a murder, and two accidents, one involving a fiery crash at a toll booth, cheering fare under the circumstances, then commercials for fast food and antacids to combat the effects of fast food, followed by the national news. The lead story featured Presidential candidate James Buxton, shown racing from one primary to another, as the commentators announced he’d made a major speech decrying tax cuts when the country still had a huge deficit, when there wasn’t enough money for health care, when there was a desperate shortage of affordable housing. When DACA hadn’t been renewed.

Despite growing up near the capital, and her parents’ sometimes heated political debates, she’d ignored the campaign. Tonight she couldn’t take her eyes off the screen, viewing Buxton not as a presidential candidate but as a parental candidate. She peered at the face on the screen not for sincerity but resemblance. She watched the way he spoke, the way he moved, studied the details of his face. In the end, it was his eyes. Intense blue eyes with thick brows and ample lashes. She turned off the TV, went and stared in the mirror. Jenny thought she saw Buxton’s blue eyes staring back from her own face.

How dare he leave his mark on her, this hit and run man who’d loved her mother and abandoned them both? She kicked the tub in fury. Her eyes, her very own eyes, eyes she lined in blue and widened with mascara, suddenly felt like a taint she couldn’t scrub away.

At 6:25, she grabbed her purse, put on her coat, and headed out. At the door she paused and got the package Charlie had given her, which she assumed was the diary. Something important enough to burn, maybe important enough to kill for, shouldn’t be left unguarded.

The night was brisk and windy, the outside phone just a small Plexiglas shell on a post. She pulled her jacket tight, readied a handful of change and dialed the number. Her father answered on the first ring, breathless with anxiety. “Jenny? Honey? Are you all right?”

“Just tired, Daddy. I’m going to eat and go right to sleep. How’s Mom?”

An ominous silence.

“Daddy?” Even to her own ears, her voice seemed frantic.

“The surgery seems to have relieved the pressure on her brain, but then her heart stopped… what do they call it? Cardiac arrest. They’ve revived her twice. She seems stable now but they’re urging us to be realistic.”

She searched for encouraging words. “They don’t know her like we do. They look at her and see a delicate, middle-aged woman. We see a fighter. Next time they let you in, you bend down and whisper that she’d better not wimp out. Tell her we’re counting on her.”

“You bet, honey.” He was crying, muffled sobs traveling like piercing arrows down the wire. She stretched a hand into the darkness, longing to touch him. Damn! She’d meant to buck him up. The phone was a crappy medium for transmitting the nuances of communication. A blunt instrument.

“I’ll call in the morning, okay? Around six?”

He made an affirmative sound.

“Get some rest if you can, Daddy. I love you.”

She was alone with a cold black receiver in her hand, standing in the March wind in a place she didn’t want to be. Bits of trash scuttled by like windblown crabs. On the highway, cars and trucks passed in a blaze of sound and light. Life going busily on while they were all frozen in a tableau of waiting. Numbly, she walked to the coffee shop, picturing her mother’s still body, the wall of machines and monitors, life measured in multicolored charts and graphs.

The hostess glanced at her incuriously. “One?” she said.

Jenny nodded and followed the woman to a table by the window. She slid onto the red plastic bench and opened her menu. The place was quiet.

“Can I bring you something from the bar while you’re deciding?”

Jenny looked up, startled. A drink. Did she want a drink? She thought she did. She couldn’t get more muddled and it might help her sleep. “A glass of white wine,” she said.

The waitress nodded. “May I see your license, please?”

Jenny handed it over, not used to being carded. At school, she mostly drank at parties and at home. At the restaurants they went to, the waitresses knew her. Most were younger than she was. The waitress read it and handed it back. “Sorry,” she said. “Rules, you know.”

“I know.” When she brought the wine, Jenny ordered chicken potpie and salad. Potpie sounded homey and comforting, and salad nutritious. She couldn’t recall the last time she’d eaten anything green. The word green reminded her of the spot on her toe, the one she’d stared at while trying not to look at Drew. She checked her shoe. It was still there.

Everyone else was eating in groups of twos, threes, and fours. She’d never eaten alone in a real restaurant before, just in fast-food places. She stared at the tablecloth and out the window, concentrating on her wine, wishing she’d brought a book—she wasn’t about to open the diaries in public—and feeling her aloneness. Pretending everything didn’t seem more threatening as it grew dark.

A few minutes later, the hostess seated another single woman at a table across from her. She looked like she might be a young mother or an aerobics instructor—blonde pony-tail clipped back with a flowered barrette, tight jeans and a baggy U-Mass sweatshirt under a barn jacket. She took off the jacket and studied the menu. When the waitress came, she ordered a glass of wine and got carded just like Jenny had. She smiled over at Jenny. “I suppose when we’re forty, we’ll find this flattering, right?”

Jenny nodded. “I know they have to but it makes me feel foolish,” she said. “Are you alone?”

The woman nodded. “I had to make a delivery. I make stained-glass windows and they said they needed the window today. I ran late, rushing to get it done. You know how things always go wrong when you rush. Then they were late showing up at the house. I’m sitting there in the van cooling my heels and thinking some pretty ugly thoughts. You know how it goes, hurry up and wait. And then they haggled about price. I hate that. Next time I’m getting the money up front. I always ask for half, but it’s a lot of work and…” She paused as the hostess walked between them to seat a couple. “…and then a lot of times they hem and haw about paying.” The waitress hurried past again.

“Look, what if I move over there,” the woman said. “So we can talk. Except, I wouldn’t want to be a nuisance or anything,” she hesitated, “if you wanted to be alone.”

“No. I mean, come ahead,” Jenny said. “I’ve been driving all day and it would be fun to talk to someone besides the radio.”

The woman slid onto the bench across from her. “Jeannina Barnes,” she said, “Nina for short. I’m going home to Becket, you ever heard of it?”

Jenny shook her head.

“Cute little place, out in the middle of nowhere, just the way I like it. But we’ve got dance and rolling hills and interesting people. I teach at a school there. I was delivering the window to Newton. Someone’s big mansion. Nouveau mansion. Bad taste nouveau mansion. Normally I’d go straight home, it’s not so much farther, but when I’m working, I forget to eat, and I was so hungry my stomach was rattling. Where are you coming from that’s had you driving all day?” Her wine came and she sipped it eagerly.

“Maine,” Jenny said, adding, “I’m Jenny.”

The waitress came to take Nina’s order. “What are you having, Jenny?” she asked.

“Potpie and salad.”

Nina folded her menu. “I’ll have the same,” she said. “And bring us each another glass of wine.”

When the waitress was gone, she said, “And where are you headed?”

Jenny was a bad liar, so she fell back on advice she’d read in books—stay as close to the truth as possible. “Ohio. Back to school.”

“End of spring break, huh? Yours was early.” She finished her wine and set the glass on the table with a satisfied thump. “You were at home?”

Jenny nodded.

“How was that? I used to avoid going home. My folks were always on my case about something. How I dressed or whether I had a boyfriend and was I keeping up my grades because I had to think about my future, and was I looking for a summer job. All that stuff. I’m so glad to be grown-up and on my own. But not everyone feels that way.”

“I guess I’m lucky,” Jenny said. “I like being at home.” Her dinner arrived, the potpie steaming hot and smelling like home-cooked food.

“That looks great,” Nina said. “Good choice. I always think of stuff like that as comfort food.”

“Me, too,” Jenny said. She poked tentatively at the crust with her fork, wondering, since they weren’t really together, whether it was rude to go ahead and eat.

“Go ahead,” Nina urged. “Don’t wait for me.” Jenny broke the crust to let it cool. “You must be a senior, if you’re old enough to drink?”

“That’s right. Almost done. Now I have to figure out what to do with my life. How did you ever get into stained glass?”

Nina laughed. “It was the furthest thing from the law I could think of. My parents are lawyers and they wanted me to be one, too. Guess I took the teenage rebellion thing too seriously, because I deliberately went looking for something creative, something that would keep me in abject poverty all my life. What about you? Following in your parents’ footsteps?”

“Maybe.” Jenny had just shoved a forkful of salad in her mouth. She finished chewing. “Mom’s a lawyer and Dad’s a teacher. I’m an English major… one of those useless things… so I’m getting my teacher certification, too. I’ve been doing practice teaching with seventh graders. I thought it would be awful but I love it.”

The waitress brought Nina’s food and two more glasses of wine. Nina broke the crust on her potpie, just like Jenny had, smiled at the rising steam, and started on her salad. “What kind of law does your mom practice? Mine’s a litigator. All business and tough as nails.”

“A little of everything.”

Jenny didn’t want to talk about her mother. She stared out at the parking lot, searching for a new subject. Small talk was not her thing. Drew teased her about it. She’d even read books on how to improve her social skills. That was Jenny in a nutshell—when in doubt, ask a book. Generally the advice was get people talking about themselves. She was about to ask Nina about stained glass when a movement in the lot caught her eye. Someone standing by her car. As she watched, he tried the doors.

“Excuse me.” She dropped her fork. “I think someone’s trying to break into my car.”

She hurried into the parking lot, rushing straight toward the man who was using some kind of tool to unlock her car. She passed a man getting out of his car. “Go to the office,” she yelled. “Tell them to call the police. There’s a man breaking into my car!”

She rushed at the man by her car. “Hey, you! Get away from my car.” It wasn’t her car. It was Dandy’s, and ugly as it was, he loved it. From the corner of her eye, she saw the guy hurrying toward the office. The car thief raised the bar he’d been using to try and charged toward her.

Behind her, Nina screamed. “No! Stop! Don’t hurt her!”

The man shoved roughly past Jenny, knocking her to the ground, and ran off into the darkness. Jenny got up slowly, using the hand Nina held out. Her hip was bruised from the fall, her clean pants were smeared with mud, her hands crusty with gravel. So much for clean clothes. Figuring the harm was already done, she wiped her hands on her pants and picked up her fallen purse. “What a crazy thing to do,” she said. “It’s not like this is a deserted lot or the car’s worth stealing.”

“I don’t know.” Nina studied the puke-green car. “Maybe it’s a classic. Or he has a passion for ugly green cars.” She tucked a hand under Jenny’s elbow. “I doubt he’ll be back. He’s probably still running. Let’s finish dinner.”

The man who’d gone to the office arrived with the manager, who looked around and said, querulously, “Where’s this so-called car thief?”

“We saw him through the window, while we were eating,” Jenny said, “and we ran out and…”

“We scared him away,” Nina interrupted. “He had a pry bar. He was trying to open her car.”

“Is that right?” the manager asked the man.

The man nodded.

“Shoot, that’s the third time this month. I keep askin’ the police to keep an eye on things but do they? You bet they don’t. Well, I’m sorry, girls. I’ll call this in, ask the cops to drive through a few times tonight, but I doubt he’ll be back. Most of ’em are just kids. More looking to make mischief than anything else.”

He considered Jenny, standing small, subdued and muddy beside the more glamorous Nina. “Tell you what, girls. To apologize for the inconvenience, your dinners are on the house. All right?”

He patted her shoulder, like a child or a pet. Jenny wanted to bite the pudgy, condescending hand even though he was trying to be kind. “Thanks,” she said. “And thanks to you, too,” she said to the man who’d gone for help. “Most people wouldn’t have bothered.” That raised a smile and a polite bob of the head. Jenny was afraid he was going to pat her, too. She was grateful when he didn’t.

“Let’s go,” Nina said. “Our food’s getting cold. If he comes back, you’ll see him through the window.”

Jenny wanted to stay and guard the car, but it was cold without her coat. Too bad she didn’t have Adele’s shotgun. A few encouraging blasts and that car thief would be running ’til dawn. Reluctantly, she let herself be led back inside, checking for her car keys in her coat pocket. The potpie was still warm.

Nina picked up her glass. “Here’s to quick thinking and happy endings,” she said.

Jenny touched glasses and drank. Her hand was shaking. She didn’t want to think about endings. “Tell me about stained glass. What was it like, this window you just delivered?”

“It was a fixed panel to go above the stairs in a two-story entranceway,” Nina said. “About four feet wide by about three feet high. A family portrait, if you can believe it, of this guy and his wife and their two dogs. A six-bedroom house and no kids.” She signaled for the waitress and pointed at their glasses.

Jenny shook her head and the waitress hurried away. “So when they have kids, you’ll get another commission,” Jenny said. Nina seemed nice but how was she going to drive home on back roads after three quick glasses of wine? “That’s a pretty big window. How much does something like that weigh?”

“A lot,” Nina said. “Look, it’s sweet of you to be interested, but after the day I’ve had, I’m sick of glass. Could we talk about something else? Tell me about your family. Got any brothers or sisters?”

Nina didn’t want to talk glass and Jenny didn’t want to talk family. “Nope,” she said. “Just me.”

The waitress brought Nina’s drink and asked if she could clear. “You ladies interested in any coffee or dessert?”

Nina tapped the wine glass with a finger. “This will be my dessert,” she said. “Aren’t you going to drink yours?”

“I’m not much of a drinker.” Jenny studied the menu. There was apple crisp, her favorite dessert. More comfort food. “Can you serve the apple crisp warm with vanilla ice cream?”

“Of course,” the waitress said. “Is that what you want?”

Jenny’s dessert came just as Nina finished her wine. “Guess I’ll call it a night,” Nina said. “Maybe you’d like to come back to my…” Her words were lost in a sudden spasm of coughs, her eyes watering, her face blotched red. “I think,” she gasped, “I’m the only person in the world who can choke on air.” She patted her heaving chest. Her nails were long and neatly polished. “Time to hit the road.” She opened her wallet and pulled out a five. “Might as well tip the woman, I suppose, even if the meal is on the house.”

“Oh, right,” Jenny agreed. “I’m glad you reminded me.”

Nina shrugged on her coat. “Nice having dinner with you. Have a safe trip back to Ohio.”

Jenny waved as Nina walked away, a tall woman taking big strides with those nice long legs. Jenny could easily lose herself in a crowd but Nina would have a hard time. Jenny hoped she’d drive carefully the rest of the way home. She watched the blonde head pass all the motel rooms to the far end of the parking lot. An odd place for someone to park who’d only stopped to eat. Maybe she needed more space for a van. As she watched, she saw someone step out of the darkness. Nina paused, as if she was speaking to the stranger, then they both disappeared from view.

She left her own five beside her plate and returned to her room, feeling better after warm food and friendly conversation. She wasn’t two steps into the room when she stopped, fear tightening her scalp. Her suitcase, which she had left open, was closed. Her hairbrush, which she always left face down, was face up. And the bathroom door, which she knew she had left open, was half-closed. Someone must have followed her. Even now, they were either waiting for her in the bathroom, or outside watching. A wave of fear went through her. She held her breath and listened.