The Lauras: A Novel - Hardcover

Chapter 1

I could hear them arguing, the way they argued nearly every night now, their voices pitched low and rasping in that way that meant they thought they were being too quiet to wake me up. They were right in that their fights never did wake me up—but that was because I always stayed awake until they started. I could feel one coming like the promise of a storm thickening the air. When rain’s on the way I can’t sleep, either. Even though I always heard them, when morning rolled around I pretended that I’d slept through it all, because I didn’t know what else to do.

I listened to the rise and fall of their voices for hours some nights, for as long as it took for them to gradually calm. So on that last night, when they went from full pitch to silent in a moment, my stomach fizzed with swift fear: they never broke off in full flow. Then the sound of my mother’s boots on tile as she came down the hall. When my bedroom door squeaked open I went stiff and limp at once, hoping that she’d think I was asleep and go back to the fight.

“Get up, Alex. Now.”

Ma's hand on my back made me jump; her voice was urgent, hard-edged, and I guessed in that moment that something was really wrong. I sprang up, comforter bun­dled around and over me, and she pushed me toward my bedroom door. The mix of dark and light and the gumminess of my eyes made everything smeary so that I almost walked into the door frame. As she hurried me out with one hand gripping too tightly to my upper arm I dove for the mottle of shoes in the entryway, scrabbled, then clutched my muddy-soled hiking boots to my chest. Across the front porch, the splintered edges of the boards catching on but not quite sticking in the tough soles of my bare feet, then down the steps. The gravel of the driveway chewed them, and I jumped into the back seat when she opened the car door for me. I twisted up to look through the rear windshield, blinking to clear my eyes enough to see, searching for smoke, fire, anything that would explain the urgency, but she lifted a fold of my comforter over my head and pushed me down, so that the bump in the middle of the seat pressed against my hip.

I couldn't tell if Dad was still inside the house or if some of the footsteps were his, or if he'd gone out the back door while we went out the front. Then nylon rustled and something heavy landed in the footwell below my head: the backpack that Ma had kept by the shoes in the front hallway for so long that I’d stopped noticing it was there. Then the thunk of the car doors shutting and the grind and catch of the engine, the world dipping as we drove away.

It was a few moments before I realized that Dad wasn't in the car with us. I wanted to sit up, to ask why we'd left him behind, what had happened to make them stop fighting so suddenly, but I stayed where my mother had put me.

When she turned on the radio I pawed the cloth from my eyes, felt the chilly night air gusting through the fine opening of her window, watched the stars rotate over us as we turned under them, a right and a right, and a right, getting farther and farther away. I knew better than to ask questions, or to say anything-give her the slightest reason and all that cracking anger I'd heard her unleash­ing at Dad would be turned to me.

At some point my eyes closed on their own and the seat became comfortable beneath me, and I stopped pre­ tending to be asleep.

"Hey there, chickie pie," she said, and I felt her hand shaking my leg.

I realized that we were no longer moving.

"You awake?"

The clouds were pink. We were caught on the thin, hungry edge of the morning, before the sun sliced itself open on the horizon and bled out across the sky. In front of us, on the far side of a sorry strip of dirt and weeds, was a freeway, cars zipping by now and then with their windshields clewed and misted, some with their head­ lights on. We were parked up at a truck stop, the few people moving slow, the eighteen-wheelers looking like they were asleep. The air was greased with the smell of Southern-fried breakfast, stronger even than the smell of Ma's cigarettes.

"You hungry?"

Walking into the truck-stop diner I felt naked-!'d gone to bed in thin flannel pajama bottoms, one of my dad's old shirts-chilly with the breeze that made my clothes feel like tissue paper and made my skin go tight and prickly. It felt obscene being in public in my pajamas, but Ma said that thirteen is just young enough to still get away with it; I look younger. She hadn't thought to grab my jeans on the way out.

Elsewhere, my classmates were getting ready for school, and I wondered if Ma would call in to say I wouldn't be there. My school backpack had been left in the car the day before, so at least I'd be able to get my homework done.

The smell of old fryer oil turned my stomach, which was still tight with sleep, but I dutifully flipped through the menu full of laminated pictures of pancakes and waf­fles and ugly pucks of sausage doused in lumpy brown gravy. Breakfast was a normal thing to do, even a truck­ stop breakfast, even if I was wearing pajamas and boots without socks; it was like being on a road trip. Ma sat across from me and scanned the menu, and I imagined for a moment that we were on our way somewhere fun, taking a day off from life, and when evening rolled around we'd go back home and Dad and dinner would be waiting for us. Then she set down the menu and pulled out her wallet, slid the credit and debit cards out of their slots, then got up, went to the ATM near the door, and started withdrawing great wodges of bills.

While I chewed a biscuit and washed the pasty slurry down with chocolate milk she sat across from me, ig­noring her plate of eggs but sipping at her coffee, and I listened while trying to make it seem like I wasn't paying attention as she pulled out her cellphone, called the num­ber on the back of each card in turn and reported it lost, then carefully cut them all into pieces with scissors she'd borrowed from the waitress. The little phone had sat in the cup holder of her car, except when it was charging on the kitchen counter, for as long as I could remember, in case of flat tires or accidents that never happened; I had never seen her use it before.

Usually when a person looks back they have to recon­struct, invent, guess at what was said or felt or smelled. That twenty-four hours, starting with the moment we left home, was burned into my memory. Even now, years after, I can't forget the grease and smoke, the flannel on skin, the fear of realizing that my life was taking a ninety­ degree turn. Some part of me knew, as I listened to my mother's footsteps coming toward my bedroom door, that everything was about to change, wouldn't admit it to the rest of myself in the diner as I watched her turn her credit cards into confetti. The tipping feeling, of everything I knew and thought and trusted being pulled out from under me, has stayed with me for thirty-odd years, as if she branded it into my skin with her fingertips when she dragged me out of the house.

She dropped the card bits into three different garbage cans on our way across the parking lot, put the backpack in the trunk, tossed the cell into the passenger footwell as if it had outlived its usefulness, put the car in gear while I was still buckling my seat belt.

The phone began buzzing as we got onto the freeway. She'd let me sit in the front seat, to keep me from throw­ing up or to make things easier when I did throw up, and after a few seconds I reached for it.

"Leave it, kid."

"It's probably Dad." "I know."

The phone continued to buzz every little while, skit­tering on the floor like a giant insect. I wondered what she'd do if I picked it up and answered it myself, decided that, given the circumstance, that was a bad risk to take.

While we were stuck in rush-hour traffic halfway across a bridge Ma decided she'd had enough. She flicked her cigarette butt out the open window, ducked abruptly to the side, her hand flailing between my knees but eyes still on the road, and pitched the trembling phone off the side of the bridge and into the river.

I was too stunned to say anything.

"It was more than six years old," she said after a little. It sounded almost like an apology. "I should've thrown it away with the cards-cops can use them to track you down if they want to. I'll get a new one once we sort life out."

"Couldn't you have just talked to him?" I asked.

"Peanut, sometimes things go way beyond what talk­ing can fix."

I didn’t say anything, but she must have read my silence as expectant because, after a few minutes, she continued: "Maybe I'll give it a shot, in a while."

My mother had never been much of a storyteller. I knew the vagaries of her life-the foster homes and that she had a green card, the fact that she hadn't spoken to her parents since she was a teenager-but it wasn't until we left home that she began writing in the details. Maybe she began telling me then because she felt guilt, or whatever her version of guilt was, over leaving and taking me with her and not explaining anything. Maybe the stories had finally backed up in her and she had to let them out.

Around sundown on the day that she threw her phone out the window we pulled off the highway into one of those graveled roads that cross the tree-covered median where cops sometimes sit to watch for speeding drivers, and that's when she started telling me about her child­ hood. I wanted us to be stretched opposite each other on the cold, solid ground, with a wood fire between us casting shadows across her browned, unlined face, because that's how stories were supposed to be told. Instead, we were in the front seat of the Civic, my feet barely reach­ing the dash but propped up anyway, passing deli bags of salami and provolone and a can of Tab back and forth, the windshield dark with evening, the headlights rush­ing by on the highway on either side of us blocked out with spare clothes and the blanket from my bed, their edges caught between the windows and frames to make curtains. I sucked the flavor out of each slice of salami before swallowing it whole, kept my eyes wide and intent on her and nodded at intervals, trying to show how close I was listening.

When we'd stopped in the late afternoon for the salami and Tab and more cigarettes we also went to the Goodwill next door, found a few pairs of jeans that fit me, several men's flannel shirts that were too big for both of us so we could share them back and forth, plus odds and ends like socks that we couldn't do without. It was cold for May but the flannel would keep us warm enough, and I hoped that the fact that she'd not gotten jackets or coats or even sweatshirts meant that Ma wasn't planning on us being away from home long enough to need them, even though she'd pitched her phone rather than talk to my dad.

She ate six or seven pieces of salami and cheese rolled up together like a cigar, cracked open the soda, took a swig, handed it to me, then said, "When I was fourteen, just a few months older than you are now, I ran away from home to be a ranger," like she was talking to the steering wheel or the night on the other side of the windshield.

She wanted to be a caretaker of the wilderness, wandering the national parks counting birds and paring back mistletoe, carrying all that she needed with her and going days and weeks without seeing another person. She checked all of the survival books out of the library, read them under her bed because it felt more secret there, and took notes in a marble composition book that she'd shoplifted from the five and dime. When she had filled three of these with for making fires and building shelters and choosing drink­ing water, she set off, in her younger brother's boots-her parents said that girls didn't need boots-with as little as she couldn't spare crammed into a backpack fished from a dumpster. She made her first mistake then: the boots didn't fit properly and her socks were too thin. Her feet blistered, and they found her a day later.

"The first thing you do is take care of your feet," she told me. "Keep them dry and comfortable, stop when they tell you to stop. Good shoes aren't cheap, but you only ever have one pair of feet."

After that, she began to save her lunch money and the pennies she found in the sidewalk seams and the crumpled one- and five-dollar bills that her mother forgot crammed deep in the pockets of her jacket, and on the day that she had enough she dumped it into a one-gallon freezer bag, skipped school to go into town, bought a pair of size five-and-a-half putty-green walking boots with yel­low laces and space in the toes, and three pairs of cotton boot socks, because she's always had a weakness for good socks. They felt like sinking her feet into cake batter. She hid the boots under her bed until the days lengthened and warmed, then photocopied maps from library reference books and bought lightweight food. When they found her the second time she'd hiked nearly one hundred miles of the Appalachian Trail.

I was scared to ask where we were going, but even so I wasn't relieved when the cop knocked on our window at five the next morning and asked the question for me. "To my parents' house in Lexington," Ma said, not bothering to specify whether it was Lexington in Penn­sylvania, Kentucky, Virginia, or somewhere else.

"You realize your husband's called out a search for this car?"

"Domestic tiff. We didn't get violent, and the car is in my name. I can take my kid to visit my parents for a few days, can't I?"

I shuffled in the glove box for the registration, which was in fact in her name, and after some hemming and hawing and muttering into his radio he had to let us go. "I can't tell you how to run your marriage, lady, but I recommend you make up quick. Your kid or not, your husband can charge you with kidnapping."

"We aren't actually married," she said levelly as she took the registration back, but I could tell she was getting annoyed. "So there isn't, in fact, much he can do. As you undoubtedly know. Good day, officer."

"Are we really going to Lexington?" I asked as we pulled back onto the highway, and then when she didn't answer for a few minutes added, "Where do your parents live?"

 "We are going to find somewhere to get breakfast. Then we're going to get ourselves to the other side of the West Virginia border, just in case the state brass are still looking for us. And then we're seeing what we can do about this car."

We pulled off a while later in a one-horse, one-stoplight town, where the morning sun didn't touch yet because it had gotten caught on a spur of the mountains. It was nothing more than a strip of buildings along the highway-a diner with a Waitress needed sign in the window, a post office barely worthy of the name, and a gas station/ conve­nience store / mechanic's garage with out-of-date sodas and stickers on half the pumps that said they'd failed inspec­tion by a representative of the Bureau of Standards-with the barest promise of more buildings farther into the trees. Ma said she'd be right back, and as her boots crunched across the gra...