Chapter Twenty-two
She stands across the street from the Armstrong Diner and watches them through a window.
Fifteen years ago, after the gunfire shattered the still night, she ran and hid for two hours. When she ventured out and saw the parked cars with the men in them, she knew for sure. She made her way toward the bus stop. It didn’t matter which bus she got on. She just wanted distance. All the buses leaving Westbridge ended up in either Newark or New York City. From there, she could find friends and support. But it was late. Very few buses were still operating at that hour. Even worse, when she started up near the station by Karim Square, she again noticed men nearby in parked cars. For the next two nights, she stayed with Ellie. The three days after that, she hid in the Livingston basement / art studio of Hugh Warner, her art teacher. Mr. Warner was single, wore a ponytail, and always smelled like a bong. Then she started moving. Mr. Warner had a friend in Alphabet City. She stayed there for two days. She cut her hair and dyed it blond. For a few weeks, she followed groups of foreign tourists in Central Park and stole cash, but when she nearly got caught by an off-duty cop from Connecticut, she knew that had to end. A panhandler told her about a guy in Brooklyn who did fake IDs. She bought four new names. The IDs weren’t perfect, but they were good enough to get her temporary employment. For the next three years, she moved around. A lot. In Cincinnati, she waitressed at a luncheonette. In Birmingham, she worked the cash register at Piggly Wiggly. In Daytona Beach, she donned a bikini and sold time-shares, which felt grimier than robbing the tourists. She slept on streets, in public parks, in chain motels (they were always clean), in the homes of strange men. She knew that if she just kept moving, she would be safe. They couldn’t put out an APB on her. There were no Wanted posters. They were looking, but they were limited. The public couldn’t help them. She joined various religious groups, feigning a reverence for whatever egomaniac served as minister, and used that to find housing, nourishment, protection. She danced at remote “gentlemen’s clubs”—the strangest of euphemisms because they are neither—where the money was good but the attention too great. She was robbed twice, beaten, and one night she got in way over her head. She blocked on that and moved on. She started carrying a knife. In a parking lot outside of Denver, two men attacked her. She stabbed one deep in the gut. Blood poured from his mouth. She ran. He may have died. She never knew. She sometimes hung around community colleges, where the security wasn’t too tight, and even attended classes. Near Milwaukee, she tried to settle down for a bit, even getting her real estate license, but an attorney noticed something wrong with her ID during a closing. In Dallas, she prepared taxes at a storefront accounting chain—they pretended to hire real accountants, but her training was a three-week seminar at a Courtyard Marriott—and for the first time, perhaps because the loneliness was getting overwhelming, she made a real friend in a coworker named Ann Hannon. Ann was great fun and warm, and they became roommates. They double-dated and went to movies and even took a vacation together to San Antonio. Ann Hannon was the first person she trusted enough to tell the truth, but of course, for both their protection, she never did. One day as she approached the storefront, she noticed two men in suits sitting in the waiting area reading newspapers. There were often people in the waiting area. But these guys looked wrong. She could see Ann through the window. Her always-smiling friend was not smiling. So she ran again. Just like that. Never called Ann to say good-bye. That summer she worked in a cannery in Alaska. She then did a three-month stint selling excursions on a cruise ship running from Skagway to Seattle. There were a few kind men along the way. But most were not kind. Most were anything but kind. As the years passed, she twice ran into people who recognized her as Maura Wells—one in Los Angeles, one in Indianapolis. That was bound to happen when she looked back on it now. You spend your life on streets or in public places, someone is going to see you. It was no big deal. She didn’t pretend that they were mistaken or claim that she was someone else. She had stories ready, usually involving doing a graduate program. As soon as the person was out of sight, she would be gone. She always had a backup plan, always knew where the nearest truck stop was, because that was the easiest way to get a ride when you looked like she did. A guy was bound to give her a lift. Sometimes, if she got to the stop early enough, she would watch them eat and converse and interact, trying to decide which driver looked the least predatory. You could tell. Or you could be wrong. She didn’t ask the women drivers for lifts, even the seemingly friendly ones, because women on the road had learned to be suspicious, and she was afraid that they might call her in. She had a series of wigs now and various glasses with no prescription. That was enough of a disguise in the event that anyone said anything.
There are various theories about why the years seem to pass faster as you get older. The most popular is also the most obvious. As you get older, each year is a smaller percentage of your life. If you are ten years old, a year is ten percent. If you are fifty years old, a year is two percent. But she had read a theory that spurned that explanation. The theory states that time passes faster when we are in a set routine, when we aren’t learning anything new, when we stay stuck in a life pattern. The key to making time slow down is to have new experiences. You may joke that the week you went on vacation flew by far too quickly, but if you stop and think about it, that week actually seemed to last much longer than one involving the drudgery of your day job. You are complaining about it going away so fast because you loved it, not because it felt as though time was passing faster. If you want to slow down time, this theory holds: If you want to make the days last, do something different. Travel to exotic locales. Take a class.
In a sense, this was her life.
Until Rex. Until more gunfire. Until Hank.
Through the window, she can see the devastation on Nap’s face. It is the first time she has seen him in fifteen years. Her life’s greatest what-if. The road not taken. She lets the emotions ricochet through her. She doesn’t fight them.
At one point, she even steps out from the shadows.
She stands under a light in the parking lot, in plain view now, not moving, letting fate take the chance that Nap might turn and look out the diner window and see her and then . . .
She gives him ten seconds to look. Nothing. She gives him another ten.
But Nap never looks out the window.
Maura turns and disappears back into the night.