Beth was sitting in a living room-hers, I guess, though I couldn’t remember ever having seen it. There was a reporter-maybe Alexander-sitting across from her. Now and then they would show his face and he would nod sympathetically as Beth spoke.
Beth’s eyes were filled with tears, but her voice was steady.
“Is there anything you’d like to tell Charlie right now?” Alexander said, in that syrupy voice reporters use when they want to sound like they care.
Beth nodded and took a deep breath. Then she looked straight at the camera-straight at me. “I’d like to tell him: Charlie, please, turn yourself in. I just don’t want you to get hurt or”-she had to swallow down her tears before she could go on-“or killed, you know? If you come back, we’ll keep fighting in the courts. I promise. We’ll make everyone see that you’re innocent, that you’d never murder anybody. And also, I just want you to know: I still believe in you. I still love you.”
The breath rushed out of me as if I’d been punched in the stomach. She loved me? Beth was my girlfriend and she loved me? How had that happened? When had it happened? How could I not remember? Had I held her hand? Had I kissed her? Had we taken walks together and told each other what we thought about and what we wanted to do with our lives? Was all that gone, gone out of my memory forever?
When they cut away from Beth to another picture, I wanted to reach out and grab the television and make it stop. I wanted to call to Beth’s image on the screen and beg it to stay there just a little longer so I could look at her. I wanted to say: “Don’t go. Don’t leave me here in this homeless shelter, hunted and alone. Say that you love me again.” But she was gone, and the story ended, and the newswoman behind the desk came back to talk about other things.
I felt so bad, so heartsick, I just rested my elbows on the table and put my hands over my face for a long time.
But after a while, I felt something. You ever do that trick, where you stare at the back of a guy’s head until he can feel it and it makes him turn around? Well, I felt that. I felt someone looking at me.
I lifted my eyes. I scanned the room. There he was: a man, watching me. He was one of the homeless guys, a white man in an old army jacket. He was bald and had a silver stubble of beard and a narrow face with sharp features. He was sitting at a table nearby, mopping up the last of his food with a piece of bread. But all the while he was swabbing the bread around on the plate, he wasn’t looking down at it. He was staring at me.
He recognized me. I could tell. He must’ve been watching the TV the same as me. He must’ve seen my picture. Then I guess he saw me and he knew who I was. At first, I tried to convince myself it didn’t matter. I tried to tell myself that he wouldn’t go to the police, wouldn’t try to collect any reward that might be on offer. I was so tired, see. Tired of running, tired of being afraid. I didn’t want to leave the church shelter. I didn’t want to leave the warmth or the light or the kindness of the people behind the counter with their smiling faces. I didn’t want to leave the television set. I wanted to sit there and wait until another news program came on in case they showed Beth again and my parents. I didn’t want to go out into those cold streets where Detective Rose and the other police were searching for me. So I tried to tell myself that it was all right, that I could stay.
But it was no good. The old man kept watching me. I could almost hear his brain working behind his dull, grayish eyes. I knew that as soon as he could, he’d tell one of the shelter people about me or even find a phone and call the police.
You know who I thought about then? I thought about Alex. Alex Hauser. I thought back to that night we sat together in my mom’s car and talked, that night they say I followed him into the park and killed him. He was so sad that night, so sad and angry. He had lost his faith and he had lost his way. I remembered the things I had told him then. Things I had learned from my dad and from church and from Sensei Mike. I told him he had to keep on trying, to trust in the good things and never give in. I told him he had to keep on believing that God was there and that God knew where he was and would help him keep his spirit strong. Alex got angry at me because he said I didn’t understand how hard it was. And you know what? He was right. I didn’t understand. Not then.
But I understood now. It can be crazy hard. To keep your faith, to keep going. It can be harder than I ever would have imagined. Sometimes things happen to you, really bad things that aren’t fair, things that make you feel so terrible you’re not even sure who you are anymore or whether you’re right or wrong, good or bad. Sometimes you feel like there’s no one to turn to, and you’re all alone and so scared you can hardly move and so tired you just want to curl up in a ball and go to sleep forever. I guess that’s kind of the way Alex felt that last night I saw him. And that’s the way I felt now.
But I guess I had one advantage over Alex. I guess in some way I’d been training for this time my whole life. I’d been training every day, even in simple things, little things. I trained to keep my mind sharp when I went to school. I trained in karate to keep my body and spirit strong. Even when I just went to church, or when I prayed by myself, it was a kind of training: I was training to remember that I was not alone. I was never alone.
Well, training was over now. This was the real deal. I didn’t want to get up. I didn’t want to leave the warmth of the shelter. I didn’t want to start running again in the night and in the cold.
But I had to. I had to.
I grabbed a roll off my plate and stuffed it in my pocket so I’d have something to eat later on. Then I got to my feet.
It was time to go.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
A Cry in the Night I walked and walked. I wanted to get lost in the city in the dark. I knew I needed to get out of here, as far away as possible, before the police hunted me down. But without any money, without any help, I couldn’t figure out what I could do or where I could go. I thought about finding a phone, calling one of my friends-Josh or Miler or Rick. It would be so good to hear their voices. Maybe I could even call Beth. Maybe she would say those things to me that she said on TV.
I still believe in you. I still love you.
But no. I was a fugitive, a convicted killer. If they helped me, they would get in trouble with the law themselves, they would become accessories to my crimes. I couldn’t do that to them. I had to figure this out on my own. I had to figure out another way to escape from here and clear my name and find Waterman and warn Secretary Yarrow about the Homelanders.
I had walked a long time, lost in my thoughts, when I finally stopped and looked around me. I had come into an open area, a street lined with huge, brick warehouses on one side and railroad tracks on the other. It was dark where I was, but there were streetlights not too far off. Under their glow, I could see some boxcars parked a little way down the tracks. I had this crazy thought about how I could sneak inside one of the cars and then, when the train started moving, I could ride it out of the city.
Luckily, before I could do anything that stupid, something distracted me: a short, sharp, high-pitched noise. A cry in the night.
I turned toward the sound, my muscles tensing. My first instinct was to run away. The last thing I needed was to get mixed up in any kind of trouble, anything that might attract the attention of the police.
But as I looked, I saw something I couldn’t run away from. Down the street, a figure moved out of the darkness into a circle of lamplight. I could tell it was a woman even though she was hunched over and kind of shapeless in an old black overcoat. She hurried through the glow, her hand out in front of her as if she was groping for something to hold on to. Then she was gone, swallowed in the shadows beyond the lamplight’s reach.