Chapter 12 - The Interstate South
The Logan County sub-station smelled of industrial floor stripper, stale instant coffee, and wet wool. It was two in the morning before the preliminary statements were signed, before the county prosecutor on call had authorized a forty-eight-hour hold on Brooke Mercer for grand larceny and attempted custodial obstruction, pending the arrival of the federal documentation from the bank.
Dad hadn't sat down once. He stood by the vending machines at the end of the linoleum corridor, his hands jammed into the pockets of his down jacket, his eyes red-rimmed and sunken. Every time an officer walked past with a clipboard, Dad flinched as if expecting a physical blow.
Wyatt sat next to me on a vinyl bench that had its foam padding bursting through cracks repaired with duct tape. Between us sat two lukewarm cups of hot chocolate from the machine, a thin skin of powdered cocoa forming over the top.
"Wyatt," I whispered.
He didn't turn his head. He had his elbows on his knees, his chin resting in his palms. "She’s going to prison, isn't she?"
"I don't know," I said.
"She is," he said, his voice flat, devoid of the tears he had wept three hours earlier in the back of the cruiser. "I saw the numbers on those statements, Lucy. It wasn't just your four hundred dollars from Grandma. It was eighty-four thousand dollars. She took the second mortgage out on the house in July. She used Dad’s digital signature."
I looked at his hands. They were trembling slightly, but he kept them clamped tight against his jaw.
"Why did you ask about Cincinnati?" I asked. "Back at the cabin. Why did you ask if there was room for two?"
Wyatt finally turned his head. His eyes were wide, dark, and hollowed out by exhaustion. "Because if I stay with her sister in Sarasota, I’m just like her. Everyone’s going to look at me and see the kid who got twelve presents while his sister got gray socks. I’m the kid whose shoes were bought with stolen money." He pulled violently at the tongue of his brand-new high-tops, the ones Brooke had handed him with such pride at seven-thirty that morning. "I don't want these. I don't want any of it."
"They're just shoes, Wyatt," I said gently.
"They aren't," he choked out, his throat working convulsively. "They're yours. Every single box under that tree was yours."
The swinging double doors at the end of the hall pushed open. Grandma June walked through, her heavy wool coat buttoned up to her chin, carrying an accordion folder packed with documents that Miller had retrieved from the glove compartment of Brooke’s abandoned SUV.
"Mark," June called out, her voice cutting through the hum of the fluorescent lights. "Get the children. We’re leaving."
Dad looked up, blinking. "Mom... the state trooper said we might have to wait for the morning magistrate—"
"The magistrate isn't coming until ten, and Harlan Miller has enough probable cause on the financial identity theft to hold her through the weekend," June said crisply, not slowing her stride. "The roads south are being cleared by the state highway trucks right now. If we don't get through the Columbus bypass before the morning ice storm hits, we’ll be stuck in Delaware County until Monday."
"Where are we going?" Dad asked, his voice trembling like a child’s.
June stopped right in front of him. She reached up, took his chin in her leathery hand, and forced him to look directly into her eyes. It was the same gesture she used on me when I had fallen out of the apple tree three summers ago and couldn't catch my breath.
"You are going to take your daughter to her mother," June said, each syllable hard as river rock. "And you are going to take that boy, too, because as of midnight, his mother has surrendered her right to make decisions for him, and you are the legal stepparent listed on his school and medical records. You are going to face Elena Vaughn, Mark. You are going to stand on Grandin Road, look your ex-wife in the face, and tell her what you allowed to happen under your roof."
Dad swallowed. He looked over June’s shoulder at Wyatt and me sitting on the vinyl bench. His shoulders dropped four inches as the last shred of his denial collapsed into the linoleum.
"Yes, ma'am," Dad whispered.
Ten minutes later, we were back in Dad’s truck. The smell of Brooke’s fake vanilla perfume still lingered faintly in the upholstery, but the passenger door window was cracked two inches, letting in the sharp, clean, bitterly cold Ohio night air to scour it away.
June drove. She wouldn't let Dad touch the keys. Dad sat in the front passenger seat, staring out through the windshield at the rhythmic sweep of the wipers clearing the road salt and sleet. Wyatt and I were crammed into the small extended cab in the back, our knees touching, sharing an old wool stadium blanket June had pulled from behind the spare tire.
We hit Interstate 71 South just outside Bellefontaine. The highway was a desolate, monochromatic ribbon of black asphalt bordered by towering walls of plowed gray snow. Every few miles, an eighteen-wheeler would roar past in the opposite lane, throwing up a blinding curtain of frozen slush that hammered against the windshield like buckshot.
Wyatt didn't sleep. He kept his forehead pressed against the cold glass of the side window, watching the green mileage signs flicker past in the headlights: *Columbus 45. Washington Court House 82. Cincinnati 118.*
In his lap, he held the cardboard box that had contained my socks. He had picked it up off the floorboards of the truck before we left the cabin. Inside it now wasn't the socks—I was wearing them inside my boots, their thin acrylic weave offering very little protection against the floorboard draft—but the photographs he had pulled from the manila envelope.
Photographs Brooke had intercepted over three years. Elena at my third-grade violin recital, sitting four rows behind Dad because Brooke had threatened to make a scene if she sat in the family section. Elena standing outside our old house on Maple Street, holding a birthday cake in a bakery box that she had never been allowed to deliver because Brooke had called the police and claimed Elena was violating a civil protection order that had never actually been granted.
"Look at this one," Wyatt whispered, leaning his shoulder against mine under the blanket so Dad wouldn't hear.
He held up a 4x6 print. It was dated August of that year. It showed Elena standing on the porch of a small, narrow brick house with ivy climbing the chimney. She was wearing her old canvas gardening apron, holding up a painted wooden sign that said: *Lucy’s Room.*
"She was painting it for you," Wyatt said, his breath hot against my ear. "Brooke told Dad that Elena had turned the spare bedroom into an office for her graphic design clients and that there wasn't any space for you to stay overnight. But she didn't. She was waiting for you."
I took the photograph from his fingers. The glossy paper was creased across the corner where Brooke had crumpled it before throwing it into the bottom of her vanity drawer. Elena looked tired—there were dark circles under her eyes, and her hair was pulled back in the messy bun she always wore when she was working late on illustrations—but she was smiling. Not the tight, brittle smile Brooke gave the church choir, but the loose, wide-open smile I remembered from before the divorce, when we used to eat strawberry popsicles on the back stoop until our tongues turned red.
"Wyatt," I said, "do you think she’ll hate us?"
Wyatt looked down at his lap, his fingers tracing the silver edge of the shoe box. "She won't hate you, Lu. You’re her little girl."
"What about you?"
May you like
He didn't answer. He just pulled the wool blanket tighter over his knees and closed his eyes as the truck rolled past the dark, dormant fields of Fayette County, heading deeper into the river valley where the hills began to rise like sleeping giants from the snow.
***
