Annie
Escape smelled like a thick layer of Febreze over stale cigarette smoke.
I dropped my duffle bag on the patch of linoleum in front of the trailer’s stove and closed the thin metal door behind me. It didn’t latch the first time and I had to slam it.
The whole trailer shook.
I’ll need better locks.
Not that locks had kept me safe before. Locks and sitting very still and being very small had not kept me safe at all.
Everyone minds their own here. They all keep to themselves. That’s what Kevin, the park manager, had said when I put down my cash for the trailer. It’s safe and it’s quiet and we don’t truck with no nonsense.
Safe, quiet, and no nonsense made this little scrap of swamp a perfect place to end my week of helter-skelter traveling. Doubling back, buying a ticket west only to go east. Buses. Trains.
Out in front of my trailer, there was a used car—a POS Toyota with bad brakes and a broken radio. I bought it in Virginia, from a high school football player with dreams the crappy car could not hold, and drove north before heading south again.
But I had to stop somewhere. I couldn’t drive forever.
So, seven days, hundreds of miles to here. To this place that didn’t even show up on a state map of North Carolina.
“Home sweet home,” I sighed, putting my hands on my hips and surveying my new kingdom.
Kevin called it a trailer, but really it was an old RV that had rolled to a stop at the Flowered Manor Trailer Park and Camp Ground and refused to keep going. Someone had taken off the wheels and put the RV up on blocks and maybe that same someone had carefully, lovingly planted the morning glory vines to hide those cement blocks.
The flowers were a nice touch, admirable really in their delusional quality, but didn’t much hide the fact that it was an RV.
A crappy one. In a crappy trailer park so off the beaten path it was practically impossible to find.
Perfect. So, so perfect.
My deep breath shuddered through me and I allowed some of the fear I lived with to lift away, like crows startled from a winter field. Usually I gathered the fear back because fear kept me safe.
Fear was familiar.
But in this crazy little trailer, there was no need.
We don’t truck with no nonsense.
Good, I thought, smiling for the first time in a long time. Bravado making me giddy. Neither do I.
I also didn’t truck with the smell of this place.
It was two steps from the kitchen to the dining area and I leaned over the Formica table and beige banquette seating to pull back the curtains and yank open the windows. A fetid breeze blew through, slipping across my neck and down the collar of my white cotton shirt.
I closed my eyes because I was tired down to my bones and . . . it felt good. The breeze, on my skin . . . it just felt good. Different.
And these days I was in the business of different.
My entire life I’d had long hair against my neck or pulled back in a ponytail so heavy it made my head hurt. My hair was naturally red and curly and thick. So thick.
Suffocatingly thick.
Mom used to say it was the prettiest thing about me. Which is one of those kinds of compliments that isn’t really a compliment at all, because it leaves so much room for awful to grow up around it. But it was the nicest thing she said about me, so I took it to heart, because she was my mom.
Chopping it off had been a weird relief. Not just from headaches and the heat, but this new butchered hair allowed me to feel the breeze like I never had before. The sun against the nape of my neck was a revelation.
When the wind blew, my short hair lifted and the feeling rippled down my back, like a domino fall of nerveendings.
I liked it. A lot.
The quiet was broken by the distant, muffled sound of a phone ringing.
It wasn’t mine. I’d left my cell in the bottom of a trash can in the Tulsa bus station. The other trailers were close, but not so close that I’d be able to hear a cell phone ringing in a purse. And that’s what it sounded like.
The counters of my small kitchen were empty. The driver and front-seat-passenger captain seats that had been turned to create a little sitting area were both bare.
There were no purses left forgotten by the previous tenant.
I glanced down at the fabric of the bench seats that made up the banquettes.
Am I really thinking about putting my hand in there? It looked clean enough, for all its shabbiness, but still . . . disgusting things fell between seat cushions. It was a fact.
The phone rang again and with it the instinct to answer a ringing phone kicked in, and I shoved my hand down into the crease between the top and bottom cushions and then wedged it along sideways, running into nothing, not even cracker crumbs or the odd toy car, until I hit the plastic case of a phone. I pulled it out and glanced at its face.
Dylan.
Accept. Decline.
With a small brush of my thumb, I touched accept.
So small a thing. Really. In the crazy mix of drastic shit I’d been doing this week—answering that phone seemed like nothing.
Just goes to show, I guess.
“Hello?”
“Jesus, Megan, where the hell have you been?” a guy said, his voice not angry so much as exasperated. Relieved, almost.
“I’m sorry.” I wedged my hand back into the cushions to see if anything else had slid in there. Money. Money would be nice. “This isn’t Megan.”
Ah ha! I pulled out three quarters and a nickel.
The guy sighed. The kind of sigh I was terribly used to. The put-out sigh. The angry sigh. The this is your fault sigh.
And I had this visceral reaction, screwed into the marrow of my bones over the last five years, to do everything in my power and some things incredibly outside of my power to appease the anger behind that sigh. To make it all okay.
But those days were officially over.
Sorry, Dylan. No one sighs like that at me. Not anymore. Not ever.
I pulled the phone away from my ear and lifted my thumb to turn it off, but his voice stopped me just before I disconnected the call.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I got no reason to treat you like that. Is Megan there?”
“No.” Okay, I was pulled back in by an apology. Because apologies were nice and they were rare. And this guy sounded sincerely worried. Megan might be his wife. Or girlfriend. His daughter. “She moved out a few days ago. She must have left the phone behind.”
His chuckle was deep and very masculine, and it made me think that I haven’t heard many guys laughing in my life. And that was too bad. It was a nice sound.
And there was something wry in his tone, something that indicated that chuckle wasn’t at all directed at me, but instead perhaps at the universe, which had turned on him with this Megan woman leaving.
“She must have,” he agreed. “Have you moved into the trailer?”
My protective instincts were new and fragile but they were working, and they rose on shaky legs to stop the unthinking answer that came to my lips.
I don’t know this man. I don’t know him at all.
“Just cleaning it,” I said. “I don’t live here.”
“I hope that’s not as bad a job as it sounds.”
“No. It’s fine. Megan must have kept it real clean.” I rolled my eyes at myself.
“What’s your name?”
Again, those protective instincts did their job.
This is a man, I thought, a little ridiculously. Not a boy. Not a guy. But a man. His voice had a low quality, a rumble and a rasp, like maybe he hadn’t done a lot of talking today. Or maybe he didn’t talk much at all. Or he smoked a pack of cigarettes a day—which shouldn’t sound so good. But it did. He had an accent—something Southern. And despite his apologies he sounded . . . rough.
Something weird was happening to my heartbeat.
“You know mine,” he said.
I nearly closed my eyes as that dark tone sent chills across my back like a cool breeze.
“Dylan,” I said. “It said your name on the phone.”
“Right. Well, I guess you don’t have to—”
“Layla.” The name came out of nowhere. Layla was my cousin, a wild girl I’d only met once but a name I’d heard over and over again in Mom’s warnings and stories of forbearance. “You don’t want to end up like Layla, do you?”
Which was hilarious, because last I’d heard Layla was an extremely popular makeup artist in Hollywood and happy.
So, Mom’s horror stories had worked and no, I didn’t end up at all like Layla.
But in this new life . . . maybe I’d endeavor to be more like Layla.
Layla had been bold. And confident. Embarrassingly sexy to utterly staid and uptight me. Annie McKay.
“Are you okay?” Dylan asked, pulling me away from thoughts of my cousin.
“What makes you think I’m not?”
“People don’t end up in the Flowered Manor Trailer Park and Camp Ground because everything’s going great in their lives.”
“Ha! Tell me about it,” I laughed. The relief of sitting still, letting go of some of that fear I lived with, and the . . . weirdness of this call made me giddy. I felt like a stone kicked downhill. Rolling faster and faster toward something.
This run-down trailer park seemed to have the market cornered on last-ditch efforts. Everything and everyone from Kevin to the morning glories out front seemed to be holding on with a white-knuckled intensity.
“You know the brochure did promise modern amenities, but I haven’t caught sight of the spa,” I joked. “And weedy watering holes don’t count.”
There was silence after my words. And I knew silence as well as I knew sighs. The variations, the cold undertones. The hot overtones.
The razor-edged silence that came before You got a smart mouth, girl.
The heavy echoing silence that came before a backhand.
Stupid joke. It was a stupid joke. I am made of stupid jokes.
“You just can’t trust advertising anymore, can you?” he asked.
“Especially when it’s on a bathroom wall in a truck stop.”
We both laughed, and this was officially more fun than I’d had in years.
“Are you safe?” he asked.
The question with its implied concern bit into me, sweeping away my laughter like someone taking his arm over a dinner table, sending plates crashing to the floor. Tears burned in my eyes.
No one had worried about me. Not in a very long time.
“Layla?”
“Yes.” My voice was gruff and thick. “I’m safe.”
“You sure?”
I got the sense that if I told him no, that I felt threatened or scared, he would do something about it. Arrive at that metal door to help me.
The temptation to trust him was not insignificant.
But that was not the point of having run so far.
I collapsed onto the seat, taking in my new home in all its glory. The fake wood cupboards of the kitchen, the narrow hallway with its curtain divider between the bedroom and this main area. I saw the edge of the bathroom’s accordion door.
Mine, I thought, and something wild and bitter rose in my chest.
“I am.” I was safe. Hundreds and hundreds of miles from my old life. “I really am.”
“Good,” Dylan said as if he knew what I wasn’t saying. And hell, maybe he did. Maybe the story of Annie McKay was a familiar one at the Flowered Manor.
“Do you know where Megan went?” I asked. “I’ll mail her phone.”
“No,” he said. “It’s not her phone; it’s mine. She worked for me.”
“Can I mail you the phone?”
His silence seemed loaded, but not dangerous. “Are you always this nice?”
I laughed, because this was nothing compared to the bending over backward to accommodate people I’d done my past. I’d been able to fold myself up into nothing.
But this man’s concern made me grateful.
“It’s your phone, isn’t it? Only seems right to get it back to you.”
“Most people don’t go out of their way for a stranger.”
“Would it make you feel better if you told me something about yourself?”
I’d said it flippantly, but the silence that followed my words was oddly heavy, as if I’d opened a door he hadn’t expected.
“I’ll tell you why Megan had the phone.”
There was something in his tone, the sudden lack of laughter, a new element of seriousness, that made me sit up straight.
This is when you hang up, I thought, sensing that we’d slipped past banalities. I was not in the practice of talking on the phone to strange men.
Hoyt would—The sudden thought of him and what he would and wouldn’t do about my behavior—like a cancer in this new Febreze-scented world of mine—galvanized me, sent new steel running down my back.
I’m not Annie. I’m Layla. And fuck Hoyt.
“Why?” I asked, noting there was a change in my voice, too. As if there were a sort of intimacy between me and this stranger who asked about my safety in a lifetime of people not caring.
“There’s a trailer, two away from you. To the north. You can see it out your window.”
I twisted and pushed aside the curtain on the north-facing window.
“Did you look?”
“I did.”
I heard him breathe into the phone and something electric pulsed over me. An animal instinct made all the hair on my neck stand up.
“An old man lives in that trailer,” he said. “Megan kept an eye on him for me.”
“Is he sick?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Does he need help of some kind?”
Again that rumbly dark laugh, again that weird reaction of my heart. “No. He doesn’t. In fact, I made it real clear to Megan that she shouldn’t get to know him at all.”
“So, she just spied on him?”
“She did. And I paid her well to do it.”
“Did she do anything else for you?” I asked. It hardly seemed a job a person could get paid for.
In his silence I realized what he might be thinking, and I felt blood pound through my body in horrified embarrassment.
“What are you asking me, Layla?”
Oh, his voice was suddenly thick with intimacy and now I could not pretend otherwise. Somehow this had gotten sexual. It was the Layla thing that had started it and it was a stupid thing to start. I did not play this kind of game. Didn’t understand it. Was completely embarrassed by it.
Suddenly restless, I stood up. My skin felt far too keenly the rub of my clothes against it.
“Nothing,” I said quickly. “Just seems like something a person should do without being paid.”
“Are you offering to look in on him for me?”
“Sure.” I picked up my bag and walked down the hallway to the tiny bedroom in the back. The double bed was stripped. A stack of clean sheets sat at the end of the faded flowered mattress.
“That easy?”
“That easy.”
“When’s the last time you said no to someone?” he asked.
“Why does it matter?”
“I have a sense, Layla, that you give away your yeses without thinking.”
Oh, he was right. So damn right.
“And you want my no’s?”
“I want something you don’t give away.”
My knees buckled and I leaned back against the wood-paneled wall, feeling light-headed. How . . . how did we get here? What has happened to me?
“Tell me no, Layla,” he murmured.
No was dangerous in my old life. A red flag in front of a murderous bull.
I wasn’t brave enough.
“No.” It was barely a whisper. A breath. A rebellion that screamed through me. It was like Les Misérables in my chest cavity.
“Do you remember my name?”
Inherently, somehow I knew what he was asking. Say my name.
“No, Dylan.”
The sound he made—half sigh, half groan—was easily the most erotic sound I’d ever heard, and suddenly there was no more wondering, no more innuendo. He wasn’t asking what I was wearing, but the effect was the same. The intent was the same.
This is . . . oh my God, this is phone sex. I’m having phone sex with a stranger in a shitty trailer in the middle of nowhere!
I pulled myself away from the wall. My hands in fists.
“Don’t call me again.” My voice sounded firmer than I’d expected. Firmer than I’d sounded my entire life, and I was proud of myself.
“I won’t,” he said.
“Promise.” Why I expected him to keep that promise I had no idea, but having acted so stupid I felt the need to at least attempt smart behavior. God, that lie about cleaning the trailer was so see-through. He knew where I lived. He could find me in the middle of the night, break through those flimsy locks—“I promise. You’re safe. Goodbye, Layla.” And he hung up.
I hung up a moment later, staring down at the phone as if I’d never seen its kind before.
It’s just a phone, I thought, despite its near pulsing heat in my hand. Its strange alive-ness. It echoed in me, a foreign nature that was not entirely my own. Something hot-blooded and impulsive.
Don’t be stupid. Or stop being stupid. Or . . . something.
I walked back into the kitchen. Turned off the phone and threw it up in a high cupboard. A phone would be a handy thing to have in case of an emergency and when he stopped paying for the service, I’d find a way to get my own.
My hands were shaking. My whole body quaked like an aspen leaf. I stepped sideways into the tiny bathroom and turned on the faucets. Cold water blasted out, ricocheted off the sink, and sprayed across my body, soaking through my white cotton blouse.
I sucked in a shocked breath.
“Damn it,” I muttered and cranked the water back off.
I pressed cold hands to my eyes and cheeks and then opened my eyes to stare right at the woman in the mirror. My shirt, thanks to the water, was see-through, and I could see the pink of my flesh beneath it. A white bra. My nipples . . . there. Painfully, obviously, there.
Slowly I unwound the sheer, floral scarf from around my neck.
The bruises under my chin and at the sides of my neck were turning yellow at the center. Green at the edges.
The one at the corner of my mouth was still dark and ugly and red.
This is my body. Those are my bruises.
The hands shaking on the sink, those are mine, too.
Those words I said to that man.
Dylan.
Those were mine. My words.
This is me.
I took a deep breath, feeling overwhelmed by the empty space around me, usually filled in with so much fear. Without that fear, without the rules—said and unsaid, implicit and explicit—I felt undone. Unmade. As if I’d been pruned, allowing—God, please, please allow—new growth.
My hair, the thick, pretty red curls replaced by a lopsided cut I’d given myself and then dyed black in the Tulsa bus station, made me unrecognizable to myself.
“So,” I said out loud to the reflection in the mirror. That stranger staring back at me. “Who are you?”