Chapter Twenty-Four

SOMETHING WAS GOING on in the house, Clay knew. There was tension and turmoil in the air. He felt it as soon as he stepped up onto the porch late in the afternoon. Bill was pacing the beach beyond the pine trees, which was something Clay had only seen him do in the months after his wife died. His hair was windswept and his face was hard, the way it had been back in those dark days. And then there was Nick, who Clay spotted sitting at the edge of the porch farthest from the beach, slumped in a rocking chair drinking a beer. That wasn’t right, either. If someone was looking for Nick, they would search the running trails in the woods, or find him using the stairs behind the kitchen to do pushups. The tension in the household seemed to have infected everyone. Clay passed Vinny in the sitting room and found him reading a battered copy of Little House on the Prairie. Effie was standing in front of the refrigerator, eating ice cream from the tub. Upside-down world. Any minute now, Clay expected to run into the reclusive Neddy Ives, who barely anyone had ever seen, since the man stayed confined to his room on the third floor at all hours of the day and night.

But when Clay noticed the new arrival, April Leeler, in the dining room, he felt that same light, calming warmth that seemed to surround her. With his fingertips tingling weirdly—as they had whenever his thoughts turned to this beautiful, mysterious woman who had arrived in his life yesterday—he went to the kitchen and poured two glasses of red wine. He brought them back to the edge of the dining room and paused to ease a long, slow, confidence-invoking breath into his big lungs. April’s back was to the door where he stood. Joe was lying on the carpet; Clay could just see the child’s legs beyond the edge of the table.

“Hello!” Clay bellowed with all the breath he had mustered. April jolted hard in her chair at the sound.

“Oh, I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” Clay swept to her side. “I didn’t mean to startle you. Here! Take this!”

Clay shoved the wineglass into April’s hand, sloshing wine on her wrist. He was sinking desperately into a chair near hers, cringing at his bungled entrance, when he heard a laugh.

“This’ll calm my nerves.” April sipped the wine and smiled.

“I’m really sorry,” Clay said. “I was just glad to see you.”

“It’s OK.” She reached over and touched his hand in a way that made his stomach clench. “Did you just get home from work?”

“Yes. Two auto break-ins, a couple of drug overdoses, and a barroom brawl. Not a bad shift, all things considered.” Clay looked down at the floor, where Joe was stretched out on his belly with his iPad, playing a game that involved choosing clothes for a series of colorful monsters. “How are you two settling in?”

“We’re OK. At least one of us has been soaking up all the natural scenery,” April said, glancing down at the child, who was putting a blue blazer on a green alien-like creature. “You know. Prancing in the woods. Climbing trees. Talking to squirrels. Collecting beautiful seashells for his loving mother.”

“I did all that stuff this morning before you woke up,” Joe said.

“Yes, but you’ve been on your iPad ever since.”

“I need to play the iPad.”

“You need to?”

“Yes, otherwise it gets lonely.”

The adults laughed. Clay could feel the wine warming his cheeks already. He quietly indulged in a momentary fantasy: this same scene repositioned in a home of their own. April urging Joe to go out to play in their garden and make the most of those hours before bedtime. Clay and April falling exhausted onto their couch to debrief on the day, bare feet touching, maybe under a knee blanket, while a TV played, ignored, in the corner. The safety and security of mundane family routines, the fuel that ran Clay’s heart.

With a little more nudging from April, Joe set down the iPad and leaped to his feet, running out to gather more seashells from the beach in the fading light.

“So where are you two headed?” Clay asked after a minute or two of mental rehearsing. “Joe says you’re on vacation.”

“Look, Joe says things,” April said. “He’s a talker. A lot of it is made up. You shouldn’t pay much attention to it.”

“Sounds like every kid I’ve ever met.”

“Yes, it’s just”—April gave an uncomfortable laugh—“you never know what Joe’s going to say next, you know?”

“So you’re not on vacation.”

“We are! Uh. He’s got that bit right, at least.” April took a long draft of wine. “This is day three of our adventure.”

“Where to next?”

“Oh. I don’t know. We’re just sort of winging it,” April said as she smoothed down a lock of her dark silken hair and tucked it behind her perfect ear. “I like to pull into a town, get a feel for it. See what the motels are like. It’s risky business, booking accommodation online. You can’t capture the smell of a place in a photograph.”

“You sure can’t. Can’t tell how noisy it is, either.”

“In my dreams I’d do a vacation like this in an RV,” April sighed. “Take our home with us. See the country one town at a time, just trundling along.”

“Sounds nice,” Clay said and smiled. “The open road. Just going where the winds take you.”

“That’s the plan.” April nodded, smiling, looking just past him at the door to the yard into which Joe had disappeared.

“How long will you be away, all up?”

“Ah, a few weeks. Three? Three weeks?”

“So where’s home?”

“Omaha.”

“You came all the way from Omaha?” Clay frowned. April’s wineglass was almost empty.

“Yeah.”

“But you said this was only day three.”

“Uh…” April set down her glass slowly. “Yes. It is. Day three.”

“And you got here yesterday? From Omaha? That must have been one hell of a drive,” Clay said. “It’s got to be—what? Fifteen hundred miles? Not much of a trundle. Sounds like you were hauling ass day and night.”

April’s mouth turned into a thin line. Her eyes traced the wood grain in the tabletop before her. “I must be confused,” she said quietly.

“That, or you’re lying,” Clay said. April froze. Clay saw the muscles in the back of her hands tighten on the tabletop. He reached over and put a hand carefully on her forearm. It was warm and taut beneath his palm.

“Listen,” Clay said. “I think I know what’s going on.”

“It’s that obvious, is it?”

“Maybe not to everyone,” Clay said. “But to me, yeah. I deal with this stuff all the time at work. A beautiful woman and her son, traveling alone for an indeterminate amount of time, during the school term, without enough baggage to last them a week. No mention of his father. Mom’s got her eyes on the exits in every room, warning anyone who bothers to talk to her that the kid’s untrustworthy and shouldn’t be listened to. And this vague tale about a vacation to nowhere in particular. None of it makes any sense.”

April’s heartbeat was ticking through the muscle under Clay’s hand.

“Unless, of course, someone’s after you,” Clay said.

April exhaled. She wouldn’t look at him.

“Joe’s dad, right?” Clay pressed. “You’ve fled. You’re in hiding. Joe said something yesterday about being worried about being followed.”

“I can’t talk about it,” April said, shrinking away from Clay’s touch. “I’m… I’m… I can’t get into it.”

“You don’t have to.” Clay put his hands up. “I don’t need to know the details. But you need to know something.”

“What?” April chanced a look at him.

“You’re safe here,” Clay said. “I’m not going to tell any of the others what’s going on. But you can’t keep running. You’ve got no plan, and no direction. And that’s going to lead you down the wrong road. Maybe tomorrow, maybe the day after. I’ve seen this before, women running off from their abusive husbands and ending up someplace bad, where that phone call—the one you make to him, saying sorry, begging for forgiveness, asking him to come pick you up—is the only option you have left.”

April chewed her lips.

“You’re safe here,” he said again. Then he took a chance. “With me.”

April looked at him and he tried to get a read on those eyes. She was calculating. Weighing. Clay hadn’t felt the desperation to measure up so acutely in years. Joe banged on the glass doors beside them, startling them both. He was holding a hermit crab in his palm.

“Look!” he bellowed. “It’s alive! See?”

They nodded and grinned until the kid went back to his exploring.

“Why don’t you let me help you?” Clay asked April. He braced himself, expecting her to pull away again. But instead, she slid her hand up into his.

“OK,” she said. “I think I will.”