Corinne’s Spare Room

Tucson has a different kind of light.

I had forgotten. I had been there once, nine years ago, for Corinne's thirtieth birthday, and what I remembered was the heat and a very large cactus. I had not remembered the light. It came down out of a hard white sky with nothing in it, no cloud, no haze, no soft gray lid of Lake Erie weather, and it fell on everything with the same flat, merciless honesty. The stucco walls looked chalky. The gravel yards glittered. Every shadow had a blade's edge. After four days of twilight and rain and diesel in Cleveland, it felt like stepping out of a cellar into the inside of a lamp.

We came off the bus at the downtown station at noon on the third day. I had slept maybe six hours the whole way, in pieces, sitting upright, my cheek against the window, and my body was a loose sack of aches. June had slept even less. She had sat beside me through Indiana and Missouri and the whole long yellow belly of Texas with her back straight and her new old shoe pressed to the floor, watching the door at every stop. At a rest station outside Amarillo, a man in a baseball cap had boarded and walked the length of the aisle slowly, looking at faces, and she had stopped breathing until he sat down in the third row and opened a newspaper.

"It's just a man," I had whispered.

"I know."

"He's not looking for us."

"I know," said June, in a voice with nothing left in it. "I know. I'm just checking."

Now we stood on the curb in the glare, blinking, and a small battered red pickup pulled into the loading zone, and a woman got out and stood with one hand on the door.

She was thirty-five. She had our mother's high cheekbones and our father's long upper lip, and she was thinner than I remembered, with a sun-browned face and her hair cut short and bleached nearly white at the tips. She wore cutoffs and a faded T-shirt that said Pima County Animal Care. She stood looking at me for a long moment, with her mouth working a little. Then she crossed the sidewalk in four steps and put her arms around me so hard that she knocked the breath out of my body.

"You idiot," said Corinne, into my shoulder. "You absolute idiot. You called me from a pay phone."

"I'm sorry."

"I haven't heard your voice in eight months. And then you call me at six in the morning from a pay phone in Albuquerque and say 'Can we stay with you' and hang up." She was laughing, and crying, and hitting my back with her fist. "Two words. 'Can we.' What am I supposed to do with that? I called every hospital in three states."

"I'm sorry. I couldn't explain."

"I know." She pulled back and held me at arm's length, looking me over: the borrowed sweater, the sunken eyes, the hair I had not washed in four days. Her face changed. "God, Maren. What happened to you?"

"I'll tell you. Not here."

"Okay." She wiped her cheek with her wrist. "Okay. Not here." And then she turned to the small figure standing at my side with a bag on her shoulder, and her whole face went soft. "Hi, June-bug."

June looked at her.

"Hi, Aunt Corinne."

"You got tall."

"Not really."

"Taller than the last time. Come here."

June let herself be hugged. She stood in the circle of her aunt's arms with her own arms at her sides, her eyes open, looking over Corinne's shoulder at the street, at the parked cars, the bus station doors, the sunburned men in the shade of the awning. And she looked at each of them in turn, one by one, the way a clerk checks off a list.

…

Corinne's house was a low flat-roofed adobe on a gravel lot at the edge of the city, where the streets gave up and the desert began. It had a tin roof over the porch and a swamp cooler on the roof that rattled all day like a loose washing machine. It had a yard with a dead lemon tree in a pot and three saguaros, which Corinne had not planted and could not remove, and a dog named Biscuit, mostly pit bull, with the sad dopey face of a creature convinced that every visitor is a long-lost friend. It smelled of dust, dog, and creosote. In the afternoon, when the sun stood over the roof, the walls gave off the heat they had stored up all day, and you could press your palm to the stucco and feel it breathing.

There was a spare room at the back. It was a narrow box, ten feet by eight, that had once been a sewing nook, with a single high window covered with a bamboo shade. Corinne had cleared the sewing machine and a stack of National Geographics out of it and set up a folding cot, a camp mattress, and an old oscillating fan with a cord that frayed at the plug. On a stool beside the cot she had placed a glass of water and a small vase with three cut flowers, bright pink, the color of bubble gum, from a bush by the fence.

"It's not much," she said.

"It's wonderful."

"It's a closet with a window."

"It has a door," said June.

We both looked at her. She stood in the doorway with her bag at her feet, examining the lock, a cheap brass hook-and-eye latch of the kind you screw into a shed.

"I can fix that," said Corinne, after a beat. "Gary has a drill."

"Thank you."

"It's okay, honey." She laughed a little uncertainly. "Nobody's going to come in. It's just us and the dog."

"Yes," said June. "I know."

She said it politely, and she did not smile.

…

I would like to tell you that the first weeks were hard. It would make a better story. In the stories, the fugitive wakes every night in a sweat and listens to the footsteps in the gravel, and every phone call is a bomb, and every stranger is a spy. But the truth, and I think this is something people who have never run don't understand, is that the first weeks were good. They were the best I had known in years.

I slept. I slept eleven hours the first night and ten the second, in the dry cool dark, to the sound of the fan and the dog's snoring through the wall. I woke with the sun in my eyes and my body full of a strange loose gladness, as if somebody had unstrung a wire in my back. I ate. Corinne cooked: green chile stew and huevos rancheros, fry bread on Sundays, a pitcher of lemonade sweating on the porch. She worked at the animal shelter from eight to four, and on those days I sat at her kitchen table with an old laptop she'd found for me in a closet, a heavy, scratched gray brick with a fan like a jet engine, and I did the one thing I knew how to do.

I opened a new email account, with a name that meant nothing, and I sent a note to an editor in New York who owed me a favor. Family emergency. Working remotely for the foreseeable future. Happy to take anything you have. Three days later, a manuscript arrived: a four-hundred-page legal thriller about a judge who disappears from a courthouse. It was not very good. It had sentences like the rain fell like regret. I could have wept for joy. I took out my blue pencil, or the digital version of it, and I started at the top of page one, and there were whole mornings when I forgot that I was anywhere at all.

It's a kind of grace, I thought, the way work takes the pain out of your hands.

On the fifth night, Corinne and I sat on the porch with a bottle of cheap red wine between us. The sky over the desert had gone from copper to violet to a deep clear black pricked with more stars than I had seen in my life. A coyote yipped somewhere beyond the wash. Biscuit lay across my feet like a hot water bottle.

"You never told me," said Corinne.

"No."

"You said 'not here.' We're not there. We're here." She had her bare feet up on the rail and her glass in both hands. "I'm not going to push. But she hasn't been to school in a week, Maren. She doesn't talk. She barely eats. She goes around checking the windows. She tried the back door twice before bed last night, I heard her. And she put a chair under the knob of the spare room. Every night. You knew that?"

"I knew."

"I thought it was a joke. I made a crack about it to Gary and he looked at me like I'd told him she'd shot a man." She turned her head. In the blue light her face looked suddenly young, and scared. "What happened?"

I looked at the stars for a long time.

I wanted to tell her. I wanted it badly, with a thirst that surprised me. I wanted to say our mother's box, a fire, a man in the dark. I wanted to hand over the whole terrible weight to someone who would hold it for me and let me sleep. But I looked at her sun-browned hands round the glass, and the dog, and the tidy little house she had built out of nothing, with its saguaros and its flowers on the stool, and I thought of a man on the phone who knew the number of a hotel room.

"There was a fire at the building," I said. "A bad one. A lot of people got hurt. We got out, but she saw things on the way down. She's having a hard time."

"A fire." Corinne let out a breath. "Oh, honey."

"She'll be all right. She just needs time."

"We'll give her time. As much as she wants." She reached over and squeezed my hand. "I'm glad you came here. I mean it. I've been rattling around in this place for six years with a dog and a man who thinks lawn furniture counts as décor. It's nice to hear a person breathing in the next room."

"Thank you."

"Don't thank me. You're family."

I held her hand in the dark. I did not tell her the rest, and I told myself I was protecting her, and part of that was even true.

…

By the third week, I had begun to think we might be safe.

It crept in on me the way warmth enters a room. First it was little things: the smell of Corinne's coffee, the sound of the swamp cooler, an afternoon when I realized I had gone four hours without looking at the door. I had a bank account in a name Corinne's friend had helped me set up. I had a job. I had a landline with a number that nobody knew. I walked down to the end of the gravel road at sunset, with the dog trotting ahead, to watch the mountains go from brown to rose to purple, and I thought, with a small private shock, I'm happy. I stopped on the road and said it out loud to the dog, who looked at me.

I was ashamed of it. It felt like stealing.

On a Saturday evening, as the sun went down, I stood in the doorway of the spare room and watched my daughter at the window, peering through a slit in the bamboo shade at the empty road. I said it as gently as I could.

"We're safe now, June."

She didn't turn.

"Nobody's followed us. It's been three weeks. Dunleavy didn't call. If anything had happened, Corinne would have heard, or the papers would have said. There's no black car. There's no one. It's over, baby. We did it. We got away."

June stood very still, with her fingers on the edge of the shade.

"You can go back to school," I said. "There's a middle school three blocks away. Corinne checked. They'd take you in a day. You could make a friend. You could sleep in a real bed with your shoes off."

"Mom."

"Yes?"

"Don't say that."

"Say what?"

"Safe," said June. She turned from the window. Her face in the last red light was pale as paper. "Please. It makes me feel like I'm going to be sick."

I stared at her.

She did not explain. She picked up her notebook from the cot, the blue one with the stickers, and turned to a page near the back, and held it out to me. At the top, in her neat small handwriting, was a column of dates, and beside each date, a single time, written in pencil. Night 1 — 3:07. Night 2 — 3:07. Night 3 — 3:07. More than twenty entries. Each one was a night.

"That's how long I've been awake," she said. "At three-oh-seven. Every night. The phone goes and I get up, and I sit by the door till it's light."

"You don't have a phone."

"I have Aunt Corinne's old one. The one in the drawer." She took a small battered flip phone from her pocket and opened it. The screen was cracked, a bright blue-green oblong in the dusk. It said ALARM — Word of the night. "I don't turn it off. I'm not going to."

"June."

"If I turn it off, I'll stop listening."

I wanted to take it from her. I wanted to throw it into the wash and put my arms around her and tell her it was a dream, that nothing was ever coming, that the world had no such men in it. I opened my mouth. And all that came out was my mother's voice, in a hospice bed, on a bright spring day, saying Don't open it unless you have to, and I closed it again.

I went out, and quietly shut the door.

…

The next Wednesday, in the middle of the afternoon, I walked into the kitchen to refill my water glass and saw her through the open door of the spare room.

She was kneeling on the cot with her back to me. On the wall above the pillow, where Corinne had tacked a free calendar from the animal shelter, a big colorful thing with a photograph of a three-legged beagle, she was holding a red felt-tip pen. She had her tongue between her teeth. She was drawing something on that month's page. She was drawing an X.

She drew it very slowly, one stroke and then the next, leaning her whole small weight on the pen. When she was done, she sat back on her heels and looked at it.

Then she counted. She touched each square with the tip of the pen. One. Two. Three. I stood in the doorway with the water glass in my hand and a feeling like cold fingers down my back, and watched her count all the way forward through the empty squares to the end of the page, and stop on one she had already circled.

It had been circled so many times that the paper had worn through.