“What happened to your shoes?” was the first thing the sales clerk, a guy with a shiny, shellacked helmet of blond hair and the look of a choirboy, said to her.
“I was camping,” she lied quickly. “They got stolen.” She picked out a pair of sneakers and a whole bag of fluffy white socks. She felt a thousand times better once she was wearing shoes, like she’d graduated from freak runaway to normal human in less than five seconds. The store was bright and overheated, and even though she needed to get moving, she was hesitant to leave.
“It’s a little cold to be camping, isn’t it?” he said. His eyes went buggy when she pulled out a roll of cash, but he didn’t say anything.
“Not with the right equipment,” she said. It was another improvised line, a lie of convenience, but then an idea struck her. They’d crossed into Ohio last night. They couldn’t be very far from the border, and Ohio’s Largest Corn Maze. “How far are we from DeWitt?”
He shrugged. “Ten miles. Twelve, maybe.”
A woman with teased hair and lips painted baby pink was doing a very bad job of pretending she wasn’t paying Dea any attention. Had Dea been recognized? “Thanks,” Dea said. She half expected the woman to call out to her as she moved for the door, but the woman continued moving through the racks of athletic clothing, flipping tags, and Dea relaxed as she stepped out into the sunshine.
She found a Walmart. She was beginning to think that in America, you were never more than ten miles from a Walmart. Her mom had spent years railing against the destruction of the American landscape, comparing big-box stores to massive pimples exploding the pus of same-old, same-old all over the country. But they came in handy when you were a teenage runaway.
If she ever saw her mother again, she’d tell her.
Because of the holiday, the store was practically empty. Dea went directly to the section for sportsmen, people who were used to toughing it out. She bought a big backpack designed for hikers, a water bottle and a sleeping bag, a tent, a heavy jacket, a hat and gloves, a portable kerosene stove and a knife, hair dye and scissors, sunglasses, changes of underwear, a zip-up fleece, thermal underwear, a flashlight, and a can opener. She spent nearly four hundred dollars, but she wasn’t too worried. She still had enough, more than enough, to cross the country on a Greyhound or even book a flight. And there was nowhere she wanted to go, anyway. The answers were here, with Connor. With the monsters.
In the parking lot, she snapped the tags off her jacket, hat, and gloves. Once she was geared up, she could have been anyone. She was a faceless, shapeless girl, bloated with layers of winter clothing. She felt better about being on the roads now. She was floating in plain sight, just another drifter moving across the vast shiny scars of pavement. Still, she stopped at the next gas station she came to and asked to use the bathroom. She hacked off her hair before it dyeing it—ignoring the guy who started pounding five minutes in, demanding she open the door because he had to pee—fearing and hoping every time she looked in the mirror that she might see her mother looking back. Instead, she saw a girl’s face, drawn and haunted, underneath a messy shock of black hair. She barely recognized herself.
She was starving. She moved through the aisles of the gas station. She bought SpaghettiOs and Coke, candy and bags of chips, feeling an unexpected burst of joy, of richness, with her money still strapped comfortably in her waistband. She was too hungry to make it far, and ducked behind a Dumpster to set up her cookstove before realizing she’d forgotten to buy a pot. She heated the can directly over the stove until the paper label began to singe and curl, then ate the SpaghettiOs with her fingers, crouching in the thin, cold air, feeling at once exposed and totally anonymous. How many people disappeared every year? How many people dropped out of sight, wandering, forever scraping out a living? Probably thousands.
When she was satisfied, she washed her fingers with water carefully poured from the bottle, then repacked her backpack and shouldered it. She stopped a guy pumping fuel in an old Chevy truck and asked for directions. She set off in the direction he indicated—toward DeWitt, and the maze.
By the time she arrived, the sun was already setting, and the maze was lit a reddish gold. From a distance it looked as though it had been cast in bronze. She estimated it was four or five o’clock, and very quiet—the kind of stillness and silence that comes only in wintertime, in places abandoned or forgotten. All across the country, people would be gathering around dining room tables heaped with golden-skinned turkey and cranberries glimmering like crimson jewels. Or maybe they were already done eating, and were sitting in darkened rooms, pants unbuttoned, complaining about that last piece of pie; watching TV, washing dishes, brewing coffee, sobering up.
She was on the other side, now: the animal side, a place of shadow and slow time, a part of the world untouched by human intervention. She might as well be a gopher, an owl, or a rat.
She paused to get out her flashlight before entering the maze. She didn’t want to get caught in the dark before making camp, fumbling for supplies by touch. Though she had navigated the maze once already—she pushed aside the memory of that day, its warmth and sun, the lightness of Connor’s fingers and quickness of his smile—in the dark it looked grotesque and strange. After half an hour of fruitless wandering, she began to fear the maze was changing shape around her, penning her in. But that was the point: she would be hard to find, impossible to surprise. She would be safe in the middle of the maze.
At last she made it to the center, and the small metal sign that congratulated visitors for untangling the maze and reminded them that smoking and littering were forbidden. It was totally dark. She set up camp fumblingly, painstakingly, gripping her flashlight under her chin so she could have use of both hands. She had to take off her gloves, and her fingers were soon stiff with cold. Her breath made clouds in the air. Above her, the stars looked like flakes of snow that had gotten stuck in the black tar of the sky.
She had camped with her mom a few times, when money had run low, when they were between towns—and, Dea thought, probably between cons. Despite what she now knew of her mom, she couldn’t bring herself to feel angry. She couldn’t even resent all of those wrenching displacements, the sudden relocations, the nights eating shitty gas station sandwiches and sleeping in the car or in a tent set up hastily on the side of a no-name road.
Dea wanted Miriam back. She would take it all—she would live it all again—if she could just have her mom back.
Her earlier feelings of freedom had been replaced by a deep loneliness, a physical ache, as if someone had carved a space between her stomach and her chest. She was all alone. There was not a sound anywhere, no signs of life or movement, except for the rustle of small animals in the dark. It could have been a thousand years in the past, or a thousand in the future, after all humans were wiped out. She might be the only person left in all the world.
She knew it must still be early, but she was tired, and she didn’t want to think anymore. She crawled into her tent and shook out her sleeping bag. Eventually, she stopped shivering, and the hollow inside of her became a long pit, and she fell, and slept.
TWENTY-TWO
A day passed, and then another. Still, Connor didn’t come. It was stupid to think that he would remember a throwaway conversation they’d had nearly two months earlier, and even stupider to hope that he would come and find her.