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Eddie had left behind his childhood self. His birth mother had had him young, and had rarely been home, usually leaving him with neighbors. (“There was something wrong with her,” Eddie said. “No one would ever tell me what.”) When he was six, she abandoned him completely. He went into the system, and his parents adopted him.
He vaguely remembered his birth mother through the haze of fear and rejection, the stress-induced fog of waiting for her to come home, then going to live with strangers. He didn’t even have a photo of her. The little boy he had been had disappeared.
And then he’d left his old self behind once again when he was deployed overseas.
I hadn’t planned to keep running forever. For a long time, I didn’t plan anything at all. People with normal lives didn’t understand how you could live from day to day, from meal to meal, without ever thinking about what was ahead. People like me didn’t think about career trajectories, property values, or retirement plans. I didn’t even think about children, except to feel choking panic at the idea of getting pregnant by mistake. It was part of the reason I only dated forgettable men who didn’t want anything from me and were easy to repel.
I would have killed April Delray, too, if I had to. If it was the only way forward, I would have left April by the side of the road, alongside the identities I’d used in the past. But after I met Eddie, I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to be her, this girl who was with a man she had just met and yet somehow knew so well.
When I met Eddie Carter, I saw someone who was so different from me, yet whose darkness mirrored my own.
Reader, I married him. Because it should be me or no one.
—
By the time we got on the road to Midland early the next morning, Eddie was feeling better. He cracked a joke as we took one of the roads out of town that wasn’t Atticus Line, heading for the interstate by the main roads instead of Atticus Line’s deserted emptiness. “If we actually get there, should we just make a run for it?”
I rolled down my window and shouted into the wind. “We’re just going to check out Midland, Lost Girl! See if there’s anything there! We’ll be back before dark, I promise!”
Eddie shook his head as I rolled my window back up. “We’ve got a three-hour drive,” he said. “Find some good music, would you?”
I turned on the radio. When I didn’t hear static like I had that first night, I relaxed a little. We found a country station, then switched to classic rock, changing stations as we moved out of range of one and into that of another. We talked about music as we watched the countryside go by, green and monotonous. We listened to radio ads for businesses we didn’t know, located on strange streets we would never go to. We snacked on bologna sandwiches and Yoplait kept in a small disposable cooler Rose had dug out from under her kitchen sink, explaining that Robbie used to carry it to keep his lunch cool at work.
Despite everything—our ripped-up back seat and our hijacked honeymoon—I felt strangely buoyant for the first time, like I was bobbing on the surface of a lake. Eddie and I compared how many states we’d been to. He told me about going to the local water park when he was a kid, scraping his knees on the concrete on the side of the pool because there were no ladders to get out and how he still remembered the feeling of the chlorine stinging his skin. I told him about my first kiss at fourteen, when I realized too late that the boy hadn’t spit out the gum in his mouth. My reenactment of my reaction made him laugh hard, his eyes squinting closed and his hands going tight on the wheel.
We didn’t see any ghosts on the road. Maybe we should have kept going, all the way home to Ann Arbor. But neither of us suggested it.
Midland was mostly suburb. We passed a Denny’s, a movie theater, and a cream-brick mall with a gold-and-glass centerpiece and an arched entryway announcing midland mall. The neighborhood surrounding the mall was only half-built, new houses and spindly trees rising out of weedy heaps of construction dirt. Past that was an older neighborhood of bungalows with increasingly unkept lawns, and past that were streets lined with trailers.
Eventually, we found a few streets that were what passed for a downtown. There was a run-down pub, a used-record store, a tiny bookstore. The mall had sucked the life out of this area, draining it steadily, and there were few people here at this time of day. Eddie parked in a streetside spot and we got out to feed the parking meter.
We’d agreed that the police station was the best place to start. It was a long shot, but if we were charming enough, we might find a local cop who was willing to talk about missing person’s reports from the seventies. We’d also passed the high school on the way to downtown—if the police wouldn’t help us, we’d try the high school principal. The Lost Girl had possibly been wearing a Midland High jacket. Maybe, at the high school, someone knew of a student who had disappeared.
But as we stood on the downtown street, looking up and down, both of us were distracted by different things.
“There’s a library,” Eddie said. His gaze was on a surprisingly pretty brick building with a green lawn and garden and a sign that said midland library above the doors.
I was staring in the other direction, at the bank on the corner. It was a branch of the same bank we used in Ann Arbor. I turned and followed Eddie’s gaze. “You want to go to the library?”
Eddie was squinting behind his sunglasses, frowning. The heat wasn’t so bad today, and a warm breeze moved over us. “Librarians know everything,” he mused. “Let’s try there first.”
“Libraries are boring.”
He shrugged. He had a lot more patience than I did. “What do you suggest?”
I pointed to the bank. “We need money, right? I’ll go do a withdrawal.”
My voice was steady. Casual. And Eddie was already distracted. “Good idea,” he said. “We need to get through the next few days. You go, and I’ll try the library.”
I nodded, my throat suddenly so thick I didn’t trust myself to speak. We split up, and I gave myself only a few seconds to watch him walk toward the library with his long, easy stride. Then I turned and walked to the bank.
Pushing my sunglasses to the top of my head, I filled out a withdrawal form and waited in line for the teller. I kept the withdrawal amount small—two hundred dollars, even though the account I was withdrawing from had a lot more in it than that. Eddie thought I was withdrawing from the account my paycheck went into, and I didn’t want him to get suspicious.
The teller took my slip and walked into a back room, then came out again as the printer buzzed. “I’m sorry, I can’t fill this,” she said, handing the form back to me. “The account doesn’t have any funds in it.”
I stared at her in shock. “Pardon?”
She shrugged. “There are no funds.” The printer finished and she tore off a sheet, handing it to me. “Looks like there was a withdrawal a week ago.”
