Chapter Text
He’d found the picture in Smurf’s safe, in a raft of other papers. A printed-out sheet from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette website, a cut-off story about a mass shooting and a photo of some doctors posed in a hospital. The headline underneath says ‘PTMC team saves lives after PittFest tragedy’ and in the caption, the name Jack Abbot was circled in red pen. Neat, feminine writing – not Smurf's – across part of the story says Is this the one you put up? Looks like him.
The photo was small, but Andrew had stared at it in shock. The doctor, third from the left, could be Andrew in ten years. He scanned the story – there’s a lot about Robinavitch, whichever that one is, and Santos but his eyes only catch on Abbot. There aren’t details, just Abbot, an Army combat veteran, and then back to how the team kept people alive after a mass shooting. Smurf had never mentioned another son, except.
Once, drunk and high at the tail end of a party when he was about 17, she’d curled behind him in bed, reeking of vodka-cranberry.
There was one before you, you know, baby.
One what?
Up for adoption…
One what, Smurf?
But she was out.
He’d asked the next morning and she looked at him like he was losing his mind, your brain is making things up like it does, baby, insisted Julia was her firstborn, and he’d never gotten anything out of her again.
He’d made sure to destroy all the papers in the safe after she died. Tried putting it out of his mind. But in the panic and pain after he fled, after the house went up in flames around him and some atavistic part of his brain got him moving away from the pool, his side flayed open and feeling only the desire to den up somewhere safe and lick his wounds as far as he could get from California, the information became a talisman. Abbot. Pittsburgh. Medical, trauma. Hospital.
Trauma he had, medical he needed.
He wired the first reasonable-looking unlocked car he found, bought an atlas at a truck stop in Phoenix, swapped the Volvo’s California plates for an Arizona set, and kept heading east.
By Gallup, he realized the idea was insane – you can’t show up and surprise someone as a new brother. The doctor would slam the door in his face. The way Amy’s brother had yelled at her – that was how real people were, people who didn’t grow up the way the Codys had. He pulled off in the furthest corner of a Love’s Travel Stop, sated the grumbling in his belly with one of the bottles of tepid water from the case in the back seat of the Volvo, and drowsed for a few hours.
New Mexico was full of color. Brown, copper, sage, terracotta, teal, and the deepest violet at twilight. He drove with both hands on the wheel and his eyes fixed to the horizon until after the dazzling sunset when the first blinking stars emerged. He had to pull over, then, and scream loud enough into his palms to drown out the noises in his head. They sounded like promises to take Lena stargazing and the crunch of a shovel into sand as he dug a desert grave.
By Amarillo, the pain in his side was changing. Deeper, less insistent, but more unsettling. He needed a doctor. Too late to go back to Tijuana. He paused at another truck stop for gas. He was ravenous, and considered the sandwiches in their plastic triangles. The thought of someone making those – unwashed hands, dirty lettuce – turned his stomach. Hard-boiled eggs in a plastic bag of salt water? He reached for them, imagined the texture, and dropped his hand. He settled for a bag of tortilla chips, machine-made and clean. Got back in the Volvo.
He’s a doctor. He’s used to crazy, he told himself somewhere in Oklahoma. They’re not allowed to turn you away. They take an oath. He was struck by the scrambled memory of the doctor walking him slowly, gently through a health work-up after they found him wandering Cath's neighborhood. He knew he scared them. He scared people, naturally and intentionally. But they helped him anyway.
After thirteen hours, he realized he had to stop again for longer than a fuel-up; the white road lines glowing in the dark were hypnotic, and the shocks of cold A/C and burnt coffee weren’t helping anymore. He stopped outside Springfield, ass numb, at a truck stop, and walked stiffly inside. The two Wendy’s employees were still there despite the hour. They made his burger while he watched, and he ate it standing beside the car in the corner of the mostly empty EV-charging area.
He saw her then, a woman of about twenty, maybe twenty-five, pacing near a car across the lot with its hood popped. He chewed mechanically as she stared at her cell phone, frowned at the screen and then held it up to the sky as if eighteen inches would be the difference between no bars and one. Her shoulders dropped and then her head, and Andrew swallowed the last of the burger.
His hands were grubby and his shirt sticky with blood. He glanced in the rearview mirror; there were streaks on his face, soot or blood, and well, he wasn't stupid; he knew he looked more threatening in the half-light.
Andrew imagined approaching her. Hey, he'd say. You out here by yourself? You need a hand? No. Don't point out she's alone.
Can I help you out? I'm good with cars. No, just passing through. Ha, yeah, long drive. The good smile with the easy shoulders and the comfortable laugh. Hands low and loose.
Andrew hooked another bottle of water from the backseat and looked over again. She had her head tipped back, feathered earrings dusting her neck while she glowered at the sky.
Goddamn, you look like Frankenstein in the dark, he could hear Baz say. He didn’t need to scare the hell out of her.
He turned away, laid the driver’s seat as far back as it would go and failed to find sleep.
No one was around to give him shit for helping. No Smurf to viciously yank him away, spitting about loyalty and family. No J to comment in that smug just-making-observations tone. The only voice he heard sounded like Deran, which was good. Deran he could trust. He rolled to the side – sitting up hurt like a son of a bitch – and saw a man in a green ball cap had joined her, circling her car like a buzzard, hands jammed into the pockets of his jean jacket, making his elbows denim wings. He landed beside the woman.
She cringed away and retreated. He followed.
Andrew had seen this documentary before. One has to die so the other can live, baby.
Not if I’m here, he thought, and got out of the car.
“Everything okay?” he called, a few jogging steps helping him cover the distance between his car and hers. "Car trouble?"
There was back-and-forth; Ball Cap thought he had his prey. Andrew got between them. Should’ve grabbed the tire iron from the trunk.
“Don’t call me baby,” she snapped at Ball Cap. “I don’t know you. Triple A will be here in twenty minutes.”
“I’ll wait with you,” Ball Cap said. “Lotta fuckin’ weirdos around, y’know.”
Andrew stepped forward, chin tucked in case the man wanted to throw a punch. Don’t make me fight. The thought of it was exhausting, but he'd do it. He always did.
“She doesn’t seem to want you around.”
Ball Cap postured for a moment, then seemed to reconsider.
“I’ll be inside, baby,” he said, walking backward. “Let me know if this creep bothers you.”
She heaved a sigh once he was out of earshot.
“Thanks.”
Her phone was dead, car was dead, money running out as she made her way home for a weekend home from college. Didn’t want to go inside where the vultures were congregating.
“I don’t have a phone,” he said. “But I can take a look, if you want. You could charge it in my car. I’ll ...stay out here.”
She sat in the Volvo. He gave her battered Chevy a once-over in the bad glare of the parking-lot lights; the alternator was shot, at a minimum. He leaned against the door and eased carefully to the ground where he could see her, silhouetted in his driver’s seat by the light of her phone, and didn’t move until the tow truck arrived.
He didn't speak out loud again until Bumfuck, Oklahoma, where he paid seventeen dollars for a shower.
He handed over a $50 and the cashier slid him a ticket.
“Shower three, punch in the code.” The kid went back to his phone.
Andrew looked down at his shirt, then at the racks of St. Louis Cardinals and Royals T-shirts. He was too dusty and oily to touch them, but could tell by looking they were cheap fabric, the kind that would make his skin crawl. He needed to save his cash, anyway.
He went where the cashier had pointed, down the hall past the restrooms. Keyed in the code. It was a small room, but clean. A toilet, hooks for clothes, a sink. A towel and washcloth, soap, a thin motel-type bathmat folded on a bench. Sterile, sanitary, safe. He double-checked the lock and turned on the shower before he stripped. It was hot immediately, steaming before he could even get his jeans hung up, and he stepped under the water.
What sluiced off was black. Soot, blood, engine grease, three days trapped in a car. It swirled down the drain like ink, like motor oil.
Like ash.
The pressure drummed against his back and scalp, and he soaped his hair, felt grit in his ears he had to keep scooping out, tried to let the hundreds of miles go down the drain with the pulverized remnants of home. Was the ash burnt plastic and wood, or burnt Smurf?
When the water at his feet was clear, he sank down, fists against his eyebrows. All dead. Gone. J gone to somewhere in South America. Craig dead. Smurf dead. Baz dead. Cath dead. Deran, probably dead.
Just him, the last one.
There was enough scotch tape left to tape a fresh layer of brown paper towels to the gash in his side before shrugging his shirt back on.
The kid at the counter grimaced when Andrew finally left, scrubbed raw and pink but layered back in the grime of his own clothing. "Hey, man." He nudged a box out from behind the counter. "Lost and found. Haven't been washed, but it doesn't seem like you care. Help yourself."
It sounded better than the way his own shirt was flaking dried blood, until the thoughts came: dead skin flakes. Mites. Scabies. Sweat and body oil.
“Thanks,” he said, and shook his head. At least the blood was his own.
Back in the car, he catnapped. A faceless dream Jack Abbot answered the door of a shapeless house and greeted him like he’d known him forever and said he’d been waiting, and then welcomed him into the house that melted into a police station; Andrew broke and ran, throwing himself through a window, glass slicing his belly.
He woke with a jump; the pain in his side was real, and it took a moment for the dream to dissolve. The car was chilly, the first rays of sun just shining into his eyes. Time to move. Another 12 hours, and he could be there.
He had to stop again in Columbus; the fever was undeniable now, and he could feel the heat of the cut radiating. Peeling off the tape and bloody paper towels made it bleed again. He tugged his shirt back down over it and scanned the parking lot. It was far too busy to go inside. He drank another bottle of water to quiet his belly and moved the car to a place where it would be shaded, cracked the windows, and slept again.
How did you find me? this dream Jack Abbot asked, soft and worried. The question woke him up.
Pittsburgh was big, and he couldn't just go to the hospital and ask. He needed a phone, Internet, probably pay for the information.
He’d been burning through cash for fuel; half of one of the two bundles already gone. Should've got the ammo can. He pocketed three hundred, then steeled himself to step inside the truck stop. A few people glanced at him, and one eyed his side, but no one looked interested in him as he bought Tylenol and a set of Hostess cupcakes. The cashier loaded a Visa card with the $300 and handed it over.
“Do you sell phones?” he asked. “Mine broke.”
“No, but Wal-Mart does. Go west, to Valleyview,” she told him. “Not far off the highway.”
Cheap Samsung in hand, he could get online. There were dozens of find-an-address services; he had no idea which one was good. He searched for “Jack Abbot Pittsburgh” instead, and the website he picked made a tedious show of searching records, building suspense. The cheap chocolate frosting stuck to the roof of his mouth, sugary and just as he remembered. Julia wasn't around to share, so he ate both.
Just when he thought it would finally cough up an address, it told him he needed to pay $19.95 to un-blur the results. There were sixteen of them.
Fuck. He can’t show up at sixteen houses.
He cracked his knuckles absently, then realized the numbers beside the names were ages. There were only two good ones – Jack Abbot, 48, and Jack Abbott, 53.
Was it one t, or two?
He stared, thinking. The man in the photograph had looked older than Andrew, but Smurf would have been pretty young to have a baby. The one t looked correct.
Grudgingly, he typed in the numbers on the back of the Visa card, and the address unblurred. Relatives: Quincy Abbot. Maryanne Abbot. A. Abbot. M. Robinavitch.
Definitely the one.
Pittsburgh was still three hours and change away. He wouldn’t get there until after noon, and the burn in his side told him he was running on borrowed time.