When you’re my age, it’s easy to look back and say I should have done this or shouldn’t have done that. It’s like the aerial view of a garden maze. From above it looks easy. The pathways are clear and it’s obvious which way you should go. When you’re on the ground, of course, it’s much easier to make a wrong turn.
If I’d had that nice clean aerial view when I was nineteen, I wouldn’t be walking through O’Hare Airport with two federal marshals, a barn jacket thrown over my handcuffed wrists, rushing to catch a flight to Detroit, back to the city and state I hadn’t even wanted to fly over for as long as I could remember.
I’d thought about this moment every day for the last-what is it-twenty years? Twenty-five? Who remembered? Early on, I jumped every time I heard a siren or if the front door open unexpectedly. Gradually, that feeling faded, like an old scar you forget you have until you look for it and see that it’s still there, right where it’s always been, and you were crazy to think that it had ever disappeared. Now it’s over. They know. And I can exhale.
That time and place, B.C., before Caroline, seemed like fiction, a novel I’d read or a movie I’d seen before my real life began. If only.
My friends and family were in shock when I was arrested at cheerleader practice, on the football field with the rest of the squad around me and Coach, who looked stricken. I sleepwalked through the trial and sentencing until I heard the words, twenty years. Only then did it become real for me. Twenty years was longer than I’d been on the planet. I’d be almost forty when I got out, older than my father. Way older than my mother was when she died. People kept saying thank God she wasn’t there to see me, but I didn’t thank him, I wanted her with me. To tell me what to do. Maybe if she’d been with me, I wouldn’t have been in such a mess.
In prison I spent months crying myself to sleep every night-afraid during the day and more afraid to let my defenses down and go to sleep at night. It was like that for eighteen months until one day a dozen of us were chosen for a work release program that was to last two weeks. After a few days I noticed cracks in security, the times when a guard could be distracted and frequently was. I stayed on my best behavior for twelve days. On the morning of the thirteenth day I simply didn’t get on the bus that took the others back to prison. Only one other inmate saw me slip away behind a delivery van and all she did was close her eyes, a slight curl to her lips. Maybe she was laughing to herself as the van pulled away with me hunkered down in the back. When the driver stopped for gas and a bathroom break I crept out of my hiding place.
I walked for miles, tearing off my work shirt and tying it around my waist. I turned my prison-issue T-shirt inside out, and in those days the look passed for grunge. Then I hid at a construction site where I knew my brother Luke would be at 6:30 that night. He’d gotten a summer job as a security guard making sure no building materials disappeared overnight. Once I was sure all the workers were gone, I scooted over to the hut where the blue light from a cheap portable television reflected off the window. I tapped on the glass. My brother scrambled out of his chair and opened the window.
“Sweet Jesus! What the-how did you get here?” He pulled me inside, closed the door, and hugged me. We both collapsed and started to cry.
I hid in the booth until 4:30A.M. By that time, I hoped it would be safe to go to a motel and steer clear of the construction workers who’d start arriving soon. Luke had thirty bucks in his pocket. He gave me twenty-five and I checked into a hot-sheet motel near the interstate highway until my brother returned with a bag of clothing and all the cash he could scrape together without arousing suspicion.
“They’re looking everywhere for you,” he’d said. “I didn’t even drive-I rode my bike because I was afraid of being followed. You can’t stay here.”
As if I wanted to-waiting for the cops to come banging on my door to drag me back to that place. Early the next morning, after saying good-bye to Luke, I sat fully dressed on the edge of the bed wondering what the hell I was going to do. Then I heard one of the truckers checking out. He was making a noisy exit, he and his vehicle belching and grunting. I ran outside and climbed on his running board before he left the long, narrow parking lot and turned onto the highway.
“Will you wait for me?”
In five minutes I was out the door, grabbing a motel washcloth and a sliver of soap and the bag my brother had brought.
“Not much in the way of amenities here,” the trucker said, looking at the pilfered items.
I stuffed the stolen goods into my bag. The guys who drove me from Ann Arbor to Dayton and from Dayton to Pittsburgh didn’t really want to know my name. The first one thought he might make out-teenage runaways were probably less discriminating and undoubtedly found themselves in situations where it was easier to just do the deed than to get beaten up and tossed out of a moving vehicle. But after a few feeble attempts to engage me in sexy chat, he dropped the idea and was just grateful to have a human to talk to on his long drive south, instead of simply singing along to oldies on the radio.
The next driver wanted to replay his own hitchhiking experiences or live vicariously through mine. He looked like an aging hippie, ten or so years past his Woodstock days, and he kept saying things were far-out, which I knew from an old boyfriend meant “good.” Up until that point my own travel anecdotes (the Upper Peninsula to visit grandparents and one class trip to Chicago) weren’t adventurous enough to keep him interested, so we soon fell into that silence that takes over on long drives when the rocking of the vehicle or the rhythm of the windshield wipers is all the sound you need and keeping quiet is more natural than saying anything. I rolled down my window to feel the nighttime breeze and to stay alert, just in case he tried anything.
In Pittsburgh I was picked up by a woman in a Volkswagen van. She said I looked like an Abigail, and I told her it was remarkable, but she’d guessed my name; so I was Abigail for a few days. I got shorter lifts across the endless state of Pennsylvania, and all the way I tried out various fictional autobiographies and names until I found the handful of story lines I was comfortable de livering. My parents were dead. I grew up with my grandmother, who was back home in Oregon. Oregon was a nice touch. I never met anyone who’d ever been there.
I had a lightweight nylon bag that contained everything my twenty-year- old brother thought I’d need: some clothes, dark glasses, one of the wigs our mother wore during her chemo sessions-I wasn’t sure I could wear it-a hat, my passport, and the entire contents of my brother’s college fund. Six hundred and forty dollars to start a new life.