Lily
The naughty, teenager feeling lasts until we get back to our booth. I am aching, sore and contented. I don’t even care when the waitress whispers something to another waitress and both of them glare at us. Nobody comes over, nobody tries to make us leave. They would be mad to try and make Roman leave anyplace. But when we sit down, my world teeters on its axis. No sooner have I warmed myself to the idea of becoming close to Roman than he is going to be wrenched away from me.
He says: “I need to leave you for a while, Lily. The only reason anyone would ever come after you is me. Trouble is going to keep knocking as long as I’m around. But if we keep you hidden, and if we give you a fake name and a new life, you will be safe.”
“What . . .” I shake my head, wondering if I’m hearing him right. “You want to abandon me? I thought you said I shouldn’t go back to Vegas.”
“You shouldn’t,” he says. “No until it’s safe.”
“Then . . .” I let the question linger.
Roman nods toward Carson, at the mountains which stand like frozen waves of rock over the city, a city which is like most of the cities in Nevada, a manmade construct clinging to astounding nature. “You’ll make your home there, for a while.”
“I don’t understand.” I massage my temples. My head aches with the madness of it all. Sam, I remember a man called Sam, a smiling man who told me his friends called him Roman. I remember a night of carefree lust. And now this? I press down on my temples, trying to work out the throbbing, but it remains, growing. “Won’t I be in more danger alone?”
“No,” Roman says, in a professional tone of voice, the assassin’s voice, the voice of a man who knows the varying degrees of danger based upon situation. He’s clearly given this some thought. “You’re in way more danger with me. Think about it. The cops wanted to kill me, not you. They tracked me, not you. If we split up—and it’s not like we’re going to tell the world we’re splitting up—they’ll assume you’re still with me. So they won’t even think to look for you. It’s better if we’re not seen together anymore.”
“I don’t . . .” Too many questions vie for attention in my head. “What will you do?”
“Finish this.” His face, full of emotion back in the bathroom, is emotionless now. “Then it will be safe for you to return to your old life.”
“You said you’d protect us,” I whisper. “You said you wouldn’t let anything happen to us.”
Roman flinches. “I know, and this is the best way to do that.”
“By leaving us to fend for ourselves!” I exclaim. Several heads in the diner snap around. A family is seated a few booths behind us, ordering their drinks. I feel their eyes on me as their conversation suddenly stops, hear the kid ask, “Mommy, why is she shouting?” I swallow down another exclamation, and say quietly, “How are you going to protect your family if you’re not with your family?”
“They won’t know that. They’ll think we’re still together. Everything will be okay.”
“Excuse me if I don’t just believe that,” I say. “But you’ve been hunting this guy for what—a few months? And you mentioned you’d chased him once before and failed? Darius is outpacing you at every step, Roman. How the hell is ditching me at a diner going to help you catch him?”
“Because I won’t be weighed down!” Now it’s Roman’s turn to make the family’s gazes snap around. He lowers his eyes, and goes on in a softer tone: “Listen, Lily, this is the best all round. You’ll be safer, I’ll be free to work. Once everything is taken care of, you can go back to Vegas. You can go back to your life.”
“I understand what you’re saying,” I mutter, “but what if you’re wrong, Roman? What if you leave us and Darius finds out? What if he comes and gets us, uses us against you? What if he—” I choke back a sob. “What if he does to us what he did to Carol?”
“I would never let that happen.”
“But you might not be around to stop it.” Taking a chance, I reach across the table and place my hand on top of his. “Like I said back there, Roman, you don’t have to choose this life. I love my job back in Vegas, but I have a child to think of now, so if you said to me right this moment that you wanted to hit the road and keep going east until we hit until we hit New York, I’d do it. I swear I would. You want to create new identities? Fine, create two new identities, one for me and one for you. We’ll go east and make a life for ourselves and our child. We’ll be safe, and we’ll be together.”
I mean it, I really mean it. I want my life back in Vegas, but I want my child to be safe even more. And I’m scared for Roman. Something shifted back there, in the bathroom. Lust and affection replaced weariness. It wasn’t just the lipstick which was smeared away.
Roman’s face has the same expression again: conflicted, unsure. But then he pulls his hand away from mine and reaches into his shirt pocket, taking out a folded-up envelope. “This man has dealt with North Korea,” Roman says. “This isn’t some dime-store thief we’re talking about, some biker gangster. This is an international fuckin’ criminal. He’ll get to us in New York. He’d get to us in France. Hell, he’d get to us in Bangkok. Anywhere we go, Lily. I don’t want to do this. It’s for the best, though. That’s the only reason I’d even consider it.” He unfolds the envelope and slides it across the table. “Inside is a driver’s license, social security, bank details . . . all the stuff you need to make a new life for yourself.”
I don’t open the envelope, just keep staring at Roman. After everything—being wrenched from my safe, if busy, life; losing my best friend; being witness to murder and violence; finding out I have a life inside me to protect—the idea of being parted from Roman turns my mind to dark places. Even if Roman is arguably the cause of everything that happened (except our baby, that was both of us), even if it is Roman’s violent life which is putting me in danger, I’d much rather stay with him. The devil you know . . .
“You’re serious,” I say, “aren’t you?”
He nods. “I am.”
“Is there anything I can do to change your mind?”
Roman shakes his head. “I wouldn’t even be suggesting this if I hadn’t thought it through. I’m not making this decision lightly, Lily. It fuckin’ kills me to have to do it, but it’s the way we survive, it’s the way you can reclaim your old life. When the job is done, you can become Lily Fields again.”
“What’s my name now?” I ask.
“Betty Baker.”
“Better Baker . . .” I meet his eye, and then begin to laugh. It’s a forced laugh at first, but then I keep saying it in my head: “Betty Baker, Betty Baker, Betty Baker.” And the laughter becomes real. I lean over and giggle madly, not caring when I feel the outraged gazes of the family on my back.
“Did you have to pick an alliterative name?”
“I was going to pick Gloria Gilbert, but I thought it sounded too fake.”
I narrow my eyes at him. “You’re full of surprises,” I say. Gloria Gilbert is a character from The Beautiful and Damned, one of the novels I was reading back at the house.
“Can’t a man like me know the name of a character from an old book?” he shoots back, allowing himself a grin. The grin disappears when he reaches into his pocket and takes out the car keys. “I’m leaving you the car.” He sides them across the table, where they come to rest beside the envelope. It’s not an envelope though, is it? It’s a new life, Betty Baker, a new woman. Betty Baker, not the daughter of a knight in blue, not the daughter of a woman who died of brain cancer, not a devoted nurse. Betty Baker, jobless, pregnant, with a hazy past fleeing into a city she does not know. “The car’s registered in your name,” Roman adds.
“How long have you had this contingency plan?” I mutter, hovering my hand over the envelope and the keys. If I take them, everything changes, I know. If I take them, I am immutably a part of Roman’s mad life. If I take them, I can no longer claim to be a captive, to be along for the ride; I am part of the ride at that point. What I should do—what countless people would advise me to do—is to find the nearest police officer and confess everything. But then I remember the bullet-ridden house, and I pick up the envelope and keys.
“Contingency plan?” Roman laughs, but it’s a dark laugh. “Sorry, but it’s damn strange hearing words like that come from your mouth, Lily. Like we’re brothers-in-arms or somethin’.”
“Well, maybe we are.” I smile, but just like his laugh, it’s dark.
“I’ve had it since the hotel room,” he says. “I always like to have a backup plan.”
He stands up. I have no choice but to stand up, too, and follow him outside. The sun has fully risen now, lighting the rolling bumps of Kit Carson and making the city look very small.
“Okay,” Roman says, as we stare at each other over a meter of asphalt. “This is it.”
“For how long?” I say, hating the way my voice chokes, trembles. I need to be strong now. For our baby. But if I can be strong in the hospital, it’s because I have learned the horrors of the hospital. I have learned its bloody corners and its bloody valleys, I have swam in its bloody seas and I have bathed in its bloody showers; horrors there may have been, in my old life, countless horrors on certain unlucky days, but the horror which rises up before me at Roman’s parting is the horror of the unknown. What will happen to us? What will happen to my baby?
Roman shrugs. “I honestly don’t know, Lily.”
“What’s to stop me driving back to Vegas?” I ask.
“Nothing,” he says. “Just my word. You won’t be safe there. But I won’t stop you. I’m done keeping you captive. But I know you believe me, I know you trust me, and I know you’ll do the right thing.”
He puts his hands in his pockets, and makes to turn away.
“Wait,” I say, walking toward him. “You weren’t going to leave me like that, were you?”
I lean up, standing on my tiptoes, and kiss him. I kiss him on the lips, breathing in the scent of him, tasting him, trying to remember every tiny detail. Then the kiss breaks off; I don’t know who does it.
“I’ll be seeing you, Betty,” Roman says.
“I’ll be seeing you, Sam,” I reply.
He grins, and I try and grin back. But I can’t.
When I’m sitting behind the wheel of the Prius, I glance in the rear-view to wave one last time at Roman, but he’s not there. I turn back to the road. I have a choice to make, now. I can turn back to Vegas, or I can go on to Carson. I can stay Lily, or I can become Betty. The smart thing to do, the proper thing, the thing which would be advised to me if I asked any reasonable person, would be to return to Vegas as quickly as possible and report my kidnapping.
But Roman is right. I trust him now, and I believe him. And even if I didn’t, a bullet-ridden house is not something you can ignore. Bracing myself for a new life, I turn toward Carson, a tiny car on a tiny road in the shadow of the mountain.