“What did you say to my father?”
“Oh. Ms. Diamond. I didn’t... I didn’t recognize... Listen, I’m so sorry for your loss.”
“You talked to my father on the day he died. He wrote down your number and your mother’s name.”
“I’m sorry.”
“What is my mother’s connection to April Cooper? What did you tell my father about it?”
“This isn’t a good time.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?”
“Can we meet? Maybe in an hour?” His voice cracked. “Please. I’ll meet you anywhere you’d like.”
Robin thought for a few moments, listening to Quentin Garrison’s trembling breath, louder than it should be. She heard noises in the background. Children shouting.A park?
“Okay,” she said. “I can meet.” Robin directed him to the same place she’d eaten nearly all her meals in the past few days: the cafeteria at St. Catherine’s, two floors down from the ICU, where her mother still lay fighting for her life.
Eighteen
June 16, 1976
9:00P.M.
Dear Aurora Grace,
We’ve moved motels. We’re now in Pico Rivera, in a place called the Drop Inn that makes the Motel 6 in West Covina seem like the Beverly Hills Hotel. Papa Pete would have called the Drop Inn a fleabag, though “roachbag” would be more accurate. Every time you go in the bathroom and turn the lights on, hundreds of them scurry under the cabinets, into cracks in the walls, behind the toilet, down the drain. It’s the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen.
“Live with it.” Gabriel keeps saying that to me. And I suppose I have to. We both have to. Someone saw us walking up to Ed Hart’s door and told the police—so now there’s a composite sketch of us that’s all over the nightly news and probably in the papers. I don’t know if anybody has connected Papa Pete’s murder with Ed Hart’s, but I do know that even more people are searching for me and Jenny. There are search parties. Gabriel and I heard that in the car. (That name. Search parties. Like they’re making a big celebration out of looking for my sister and me.) As soon as the reportfinished, Gabriel turned off the radio and punched the steering wheel so hard it made my insides jump.
We’re both fugitives now, Gabriel says, so we have to live like fugitives. We’re at the roach motel because the guy at the front desk didn’t ask for ID. We’re eating food from drive-throughs so no one behind any counter will see us in full. We wear baseball caps and sunglasses when we go out, and we’re driving a pickup truck that Gabriel stole out of the parking lot of a strip mall because it has a different license plate than the one on Papa Pete’s car. And Gabriel keeps his gun loaded all the time, because if the cops do come for us, we’re not going to go willingly.
I feel so strange—as though I got dragged into someone else’s bad dream, and since I wasn’t able to fight my way out of it, it’s my dream now too.
I don’t hate Gabriel anymore. I’m not even that scared of him—not unless I see the lava, and I haven’t seen that in days. I can’t get myself to leave him, though. And that’s the thing that DOES scare me. Gabriel LeRoy is all I have in the world. Well, him and Jenny, but I’m not allowed to talk to her. Gabriel says for all we know, the police could have tapped the phones of the people watching Jenny, so we have to lie low until we can sneak back and steal her away.
Aurora Grace, my school’s senior prom is tomorrow night. Back when I was getting ready to break up with Gabriel, I was secretly hoping that this one senior boy would ask me to go with him. He’s tall and quiet. Blond curls like Peter Frampton. Blue eyes like David Soul. He isn’t like the other boys at my school, tripping me when I walk past, wolf-whistling and snickering or whispering stuff like “slut” or“white trash,” just loud enough for me to hear. When this boy passes me in the hallway, he says, “Hey, April, how’s it going?” Sometimes, he even carries my books.
He has a girlfriend. She’s rich and beautiful and mean. I think if she ever saw him carrying my books, she would pitch a fit. But then again, so would Gabriel. “Love makes you crazy,” Gabriel says. “I think of someone else touching you, my heart crumbles into dust.”
What’s strange about that is, Gabriel never touches me. He never even kisses me anymore. He says that if we were to kiss, he might not be able to stop himself from going further. But we used to kiss a lot, so I don’t think that’s the reason. I think it’s because of Ed Hart. I think that when Gabriel looked him in the eyes again after all this time, it was like stirring up a hornet’s nest. Those ugly memories that he’d put to sleep got woken up—and they’ve been buzzing around in his head ever since, stinging him and stinging him, making him confused and weak. I know he’s done some bad things, but I’m not sure that even Gabriel deserves to be in this much pain.
Anyway... Like I was saying, prom is coming up soon. That boy will buy his mean, rich girlfriend a corsage. Wrist, so she won’t poke holes in her fancy dress. Orchids or red roses, because they are the two most romantic flowers in the world. He will wear a tie to match her dress, and she’ll stash little airplane bottles of booze in her beaded purse. The two of them will sneak out of the gym and drink those bottles so quickly they won’t even taste them. And then he will take her face in his hands, and he will gaze into her eyes. He will tell her she’s the most beautiful girl he’s ever seen. And she won’t even say thank you.
I believe that if you think about someone hard enough, they can feel it. My mom used to say that when she was at work and I was missing her, she always knew. And these days, I feel Jenny thinking about me all the time—it’s how I know she’s still alive. So here is what I’m going to do: After Gabriel falls asleep tonight, I will lie on my back in bed. I will stare up at the ceiling of our motel room as though it were a sky full of stars. And I will think about that boy. I will think about him so hard that he will appear to me in three dimensions and in my mind, I will call out his name: Brian Griggs.
He will feel my thoughts, and that will make him think of me. And no one else will ever know.
Love, Future Mom April
June 17, 1976
8:00A.M.
Dear Aurora Grace,
This morning, Gabriel woke me up with a glazed donut from Winchell’s and a Styrofoam cup full of coffee with cream and lots of sugar, the way I like it. Then he got down on one knee and asked me to be his prom date.
