“How so?”
“He didn’t tell me right away. He told me to get down on the floor of the backseat, to duck down and hide my head. He said he didn’t want anyone to see me in the car. This was 1975, and cars were big. There was plenty of room. He took off his sport coat and draped it over me. I guess he really wanted to make sure I was hidden.”
“I would have been terrified,” I said.
“I was. My heart was pounding. I still thought I might die. It was dark, and I was shaking. I told myself he wasn’t going to hurt me, that he was my dad and he wouldn’t. But I didn’t know what was going to happen. I didn’t fully trust him. Not really. Pretty soon, I heard someone else come walking up. I heard the footsteps on the driveway. Dad told the other person to drive. Then he got into the backseat with me. He put his hand on my head to keep it down and out of sight. I thought for a moment about trying to jump up and run. But then what would I do? He’d find me, right? I was his daughter. And then the car started and drove off. I couldn’t do anything then.”
“Jesus.”
“We drove a long time. It felt to me like hours. Just hours. Dad didn’t say much. He gave the driver a few directions. ‘Turn here.’ ‘Up here.’ But otherwise nothing else was said. The driver must have turned on the radio. It was classical music, of all things. Dad never listened to that. I heard that and the beating of the windshield wipers. Back and forth, back and forth. Anyway, we just drove on and on. I felt a little carsick, riding like that. In the dark, not seeing anything outside the car. I wished I could have fallen asleep. We were going fast for most of the time, so I figured we were on the highway, but eventually the car slowed down. We made a few turns with Dad giving the directions again. Finally we stopped.”
She shivered a little bit.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
Beth nodded. “Dad told the driver to get out of the car and wait. He told him—I assume it was a him—to go get a cup of coffee or something. Before the person left, Dad said, ‘Do you have it?’ Something rustled around, something like paper, and then I guess the other guy was gone. It was just me and Dad. He leaned down close to me and asked me if I knew where we were. I said no. He told me we were in Columbus at the bus station.
“He said, ‘I’m going to take this jacket off you, and you can sit up if you’d like. No one’s around right now. It’s the middle of the night.’ I sat up. It was dark, and we were next to some run-down building. The streetlight glowed through the front windshield. I remember the big drops of rain beading on the glass. They looked like clear marbles. And I saw the bus station up the street. A few people stood around outside, smoking and talking. Otherwise, we were the only ones there. Dad held out his hand. He had money, a wad of bills. I couldn’t tell how much, but it was more than I had ever seen at one time.
“‘This is five hundred bucks,’ he said. ‘It’s yours. I want you to go into that bus station and buy yourself a ticket.’ ‘Where?’ I asked. ‘Far away,’ he said. ‘It won’t cost that much. You’ll have enough left over when you get where you’re going to start up a new life. Isn’t that what you really want? To be away from here, from shitty, small-town Ohio?’”
Beth looked around the little room. She seemed to be taking stock of her surroundings in the dim light from the lamp behind her. I tried to see what she saw—a lower-middle-class home that had seen better days. An old TV, a worn carpet. Ugly curtains.
“I wonder how many people can look at one night—one moment really—and clearly see their life pivot from one place to another. What if I hadn’t gone to that party? What if I hadn’t opened that garage door? What if I’d had the courage to say no to my dad and just run away? Where would I be?”
“You were afraid, though,” I said. “You can’t blame yourself.”
“That’s nice of you to say. But I can blame myself in a lot of ways. I was a snot of a kid.”
“All kids are.”
“But Dad was right,” Beth said. “I did want to get away from little Haxton, Ohio. I’d been counting the days until my eighteenth birthday for a long time.”
“All kids do that too. I did.”
“He knew which button to push,” Beth said. “He knew just what I wanted. I took that money and I walked into that bus station with only the clothes on my back. I bought a ticket to Houston, and I left. I thought I was off on some great adventure. I thought I was being a rebel, some kind of wild and crazy free spirit who managed to leave all the limits of my family and town behind. I didn’t even think about Mom and how it would affect her.”
She leaned forward and buried her face in her hands. I couldn’t tell whether she was crying or not, but I did move forward on the couch and reach out to her. I placed my hand on her shoulder. My own grief over Mom’s death was too real for me not to share the experience with her in some way. The idea of leaving Mom—or Mom leaving us—and never seeing each other again was just too real. I held back against my own emotion for fear it would all pour out.
“Thanks,” Beth said, lifting her head again. She wasn’t crying, but her eyes were full and on the brink of spilling over. “As you can guess, I’ve been reliving a lot of this over the last week or so.”
“I get it,” I said. “We can stop. We can talk about this another day.”
“It’s okay,” she said. She rubbed at her eyes, then tried to force a smile. “I bet you’re thinking some things are better left unsaid, huh?”
“No,” I said. “I’m really not. But your dad’s plan doesn’t sound like a foolproof one. How did he know you wouldn’t just leave the station without getting a ticket? And how did he know you wouldn’t just come back and tell what you knew?”
Beth nodded. “He told me that he and his associate would be watching the station. He said I’d never seen his friend before, and that friend was inside the station watching me, so if I didn’t get on a bus and leave, they’d know. The rain was still falling, but not as hard. The street was wet, and I had to jump around the puddles. I went inside the bus station and looked around. I didn’t recognize anyone, but the station was full of skeevy-looking types. Have you ever been in a bus station?”
I nodded.
“Then you know. As for the other thing… I think he was gambling. Like I said, he knew I wanted to leave town. He knew I was going at it with Mom every chance I got. I think he just hoped I’d stay away long enough for there to be no evidence of what he was mixed up in. If I came back and made some wild accusation, he’d just throw up his hands and say, ‘What evidence is there of this? The kid’s probably on drugs and telling wild stories.’”
“And that was it?” I asked. “You never came back?”
Beth shook her head. “No, I didn’t. I did a whole lot of things in a whole lot of places. It certainly wasn’t pretty, but it was mine. It was my life.”
Chapter Fifty
My phone buzzed again. I looked down and saw Neal’s name on the display. I held up my hand.
“I have to take this one too,” I said to Beth. “This is my friend outside.”
I answered the phone, but no one was there. It didn’t sound like a dropped call. It sounded like someone was on the other end of the line but wasn’t saying anything.
“Neal?” I said. “Neal?”
The call cut out.
I called right back, expecting Neal to answer. Knowing him, I figured he had grown antsy during the long period of time I’d been inside the house with Beth listening to her story. I should have checked in with him sooner to let him know what was going on, but I’d been so involved with Beth’s story, I hadn’t thought of it.
Neal was probably ready to go home. Or else he had something else to do.