34

Just a day in this cheap little room, one day to hide and plan, one day to let the Constabulary ransack their home and waste manpower scouring the streets for the Jeep. Clay could handle one day in a hotel room, even with a wife whose moods pitched like the sea. Still, the thought of his bike impounded by the Constabulary made him want to hit someone, preferably someone dressed in gray.

They’d both slept in as if on purpose, to slog through time with the least interaction possible. Then they’d had a breakfast of vending machine trail mix and odd-tasting tap water, the combination of which triggered Clay’s gag reflex. Natalia washed their shirts and undergarments in the sink while they wore nothing but white bath towels and avoided touching each other. She spread the light cotton articles side by side over the old AC unit under the window, and everything dried faster than Clay expected.

They didn’t talk. Natalia turned on the TV shortly after she woke up, and Clay read every word of the Reader’s Digest someone had left behind. Then he paced the perimeter of the room until he could close his eyes and not bump the walls. Every time he attempted a conversation, Natalia’s back stiffened, and she stared at the TV as if soap operas engrossed her.

Well before 5:00, Clay progressed from cabin fever to claustrophobia. He found one shoe by the door, the other under the bed, and tugged them on.

“You can’t go anywhere,” Natalia said to the TV.

Oh, now she’d talk. He’d have put his shoes on five hours ago, if he’d known. “Maybe you haven’t heard my stomach growling. It’s getting obnoxious.”

“You just wore socks down the hall before.”

“If I try to swallow any more trail mix or Snickers bars, I’m going to throw up.” He grabbed the keys from the TV stand and crossed the room in six steps. The lock clicked too loudly, misaligned, when he turned the bolt.

“Clay.” Her hand seized his, the one holding the keys. “We have to stay here.”

“Hey.” Her shoulder trembled beneath the brush of his fingers. “There’s fast food literally across the street. I saw a Taco Bell. I’ll get us some tacos, fresco with the tomatoes. Chips and mild salsa.”

“We have to talk. Make a plan.”

“We will, Nat. Over dinner.”

She dropped her hand to her side and nodded. She blinked away the momentary glitter in her eyes. Fear?

“I want a chicken taco. And chips and salsa.”

“Coming right up.”

“And a burrito, the one with rice and that sauce.”

She was so beautiful. More so because she didn’t know. He ran his thumb down her cheek, stopped on an oversized freckle at her jawline that she always covered with makeup. As much of herself as she’d taken back over the years, sometimes he forgot all that she’d given. Still gave. Before he could say the wrong thing, before he could sweep her into his arms and feel her push against his chest, Clay jingled the keys and smiled and slipped out the door.

By the time he returned to the hotel, he’d convinced himself twice that he was about to be arrested. A Constabulary squad car in the parking lot—no, wait, just a gray sedan. An agent in an unmarked car, behind him in the drive-through—no, a layman wearing a blue suit, hollering on his cell phone. Clay let himself into their room and slid the bolt on the door, and his body caved onto the bed.

“Thanks for not locking me out,” he said.

Natalia grabbed the cardboard tray of drinks and one of the food bags. “Cherry coke?” She punched a straw through its wrapper and took a sip. “You do love me.”

She was blurting a cliché to avoid deep conversation, didn’t mean it literally, but the words still hit Clay in the gut. He lay back on the bed.

Natalia attacked her taco like a teenage boy and spoke around bites. “We won’t be off their radar unless we cross the border.”

“Canada? Khloe doesn’t have a passport.”

“The state line, I mean. Ohio would do the job. That House resolution about making their jurisdiction national still hasn’t passed.”

“Not yet, but the federal-audit thing did.”

“I didn’t hear about that.”

“It was on the news. A few nights ago.” Clay propped up on one elbow and pulled the second bag of food closer. “And apparently they don’t need warrants anymore, either. Who knows what else was in that bill.”

Natalia sat across the bed, holding her pop steady on one knee. “We can relocate in three months. Maybe less, even. Anyone who interviews Khloe will figure out pretty fast that she’s no Christian.”

“Three months is still protocol.” Clay shoved a warm bite of quesadilla into his mouth. A whole portion of his head had stepped back from this conversation and watched it with the interest of a psychologist diagnosing his patients. Way too calm in the face of disaster. Delude themselves into making a “plan.”

This was his Natalia, though. She hadn’t been able to pound his chest hard enough to pulverize the situation, and shutting down for a day hadn’t erased it. Time to stand to her full five-foot-three and face it down.

“Fine, three months, then. We can survive three months. When she gets out, she’ll call me.”

“At which point we drive over to pick her up?”

Natalia hurled her balled-up taco wrapper. It bounced off the TV screen and fell to the carpet.

“We might have to cross that bridge when we come to it,” he said. Now who was hiding behind a cliché?

She crunched down on a chip and stared at her bare feet.

“In the meantime, we’ll have to dodge them. Maybe between now and then, we’ll be able to—”

Her head whipped up. “I am not leaving the state without her.”

No matter what else transpired between them, always back to this. Clay pushed the half-eaten quesadilla off his lap and shoved to his feet. “And I’m chomping at the bit to abandon her, of course.”

“Clay—”

“Don’t try to take it back, Nat.”

She leaned over to set her pop on the nightstand. “I don’t know why I said it.”

“Obviously, you thought it was necessary to say.”

“I need her here.”

And he didn’t? He walked the perimeter of the room, and the old hiss started in the back of his head. Nothing to offer here.

“That girl in the park.” Natalia folded the Taco Bell napkin into ever-smaller squares. “I’m seeing Khloe everywhere. As if she’s dead.”

Clay’s knees liquefied. He wobbled to the stuffed chair in the corner, its dark blue tweed worn down on the arms. The room that narrowed around him, the catastrophe he couldn’t fix, faded as memory flashed. Each curve of his baby’s face the first time he held her, the swelling understanding that he was no longer going to be a father—he was a father. He’d wanted in that first minute to hold her for the rest of her life and his, to let her grow up in his arms. He’d looked down at her mother whose petite body had labored fourteen hours to give her breath, and Natalia had reached a hand toward them both. “Clay, look what we did.”

Her voice drew him back to the present, quiet and a little lost. “You’ll think I’m crazy, but it was her nose. She had Khloe’s nose.”

Clay shook his head. Not crazy. Nine months plus fourteen hours plus seventeen years. Khloe had molded them across a timeline they’d never considered could end. Her absence—a three-month anomaly? More? Less? But they had to live those three months. Had to ache through each day without verbally knifing each other, without escaping.

“You’re right,” he said. “It curved up at the end.”

The slow motion hours didn’t click back into normal speed after their pseudo-Mexican dinner. They still didn’t talk, not really. Clay was sprawled, Khloe-style, in the shabby blue chair, rereading the book excerpt feature of the Reader’s Digest—a true account of one man’s rodeo adventures complete with silver buckles and bull gorings—when Natalia switched off the TV and started making the bed. She’d run out of brown paper napkins to fold. He set down the magazine.

What’s wrong? qualified as the stupidest question he could ask. Do you want to talk? ranked a close second.

“Nat?”

“I need to know something. I’ve been trying not to go there, but I can’t help it, I have to know.” She tugged the flat sheet up to the edge of the mattress and smoothed it down.

“It might help to look at me.”

“Have you prayed today?”

His gut filled with cement. “You probably have too.”

“Don’t do that, Clay.”

“Do what?”

“I’m not talking about legal praying. I’m talking about the kind of praying that made this situation in the first place.”

“What if I’m doing that right now?”

She hopped up on the bed and reached to pull the sheet forward. He’d never understood why she knelt on the sheet to do this, but she always made it work. She didn’t face him, but the petite stretch of her body tugged at something visceral that made him want to shield her, hold her, touch her.

“Nat.”

“No hypotheticals. Just answer the question.”

“I don’t know the answer.”

She glared at him over her shoulder. “You don’t know if you’ve prayed today.”

“I’ve talked to God, yeah. I think the last thing I said was, ‘Why are You letting this happen?’”

“And what did He tell you?”

“Nothing.”

The word wasn’t supposed to come out like that, a sharpened knife, a crushing weight. Natalia swung to her feet and stepped toward him as if the floor could collapse beneath her. His pulse pounded. He didn’t move, even when the caution dropped from her face.

“Clay, are you still waiting for God to fix this?”

Faith did that. Waited. Believed. He wanted to know, to trust, with the same unquestioning fervor that had lilted in his chest the day Khloe’s final test results were in. Healthy. Healed. But trust was born of a track record, and God had been on a cold streak for the last four days.

Natalia caressed the back of his hand, and a tremor zipped up his arm.

“They weren’t supposed to get to Khloe,” he whispered. “God wasn’t supposed to let them.”

“You believe sometimes He lets things happen.” Accusation, barely veiled, layered the words.

“Not this.” He withdrew his hand. “He wants devotion? Exclusivity? He wants me to—to take up my cross? Well, I did. And look what happened.”

Natalia searched his eyes for something. She wasn’t shielding herself now. No preemptive strike of verbal darts. She stood close and tilted her face to him.

“Clay.” Her breath ghosted along his neck. “Tell me what you’re saying.”

He clasped his hands together until they stopped trembling. Outside the room, the icemaker clanked and clattered, and clomping footsteps faded. He stared down at the stain-absorbing brown carpet.

Lord, we’re falling apart. Please make things right.

“I don’t know what I’m saying.”

“When we go home,” Natalia said, “do you know where we go from here?”

“Not yet.”

“Clay, I need you to know. Pick anything and just know it.”

“I know I’m not going to say what you want me to say if it isn’t true.”

Her eyes flickered, then closed. Her hand hovered between them, rested on his chest, then moved under his arm and pressed each fingertip against his back and drew her against him, close, close, closer. She tipped her face and parted her lips.

Silken hair in his hands. The curve of her back. Then layers of cotton stripped off by his hands and hers until skin and skin made heat. Until they breathed the air from each other’s lungs. Until this moment boiled in his body and erased all the things he didn’t know.