I shake my head, slow my breathing while I decipher what he means. It hits me: my journals.
He was the one who read them, who left them out of order.
Sean holds the steering wheel steady with his knee, grabs more fries with his right hand and puts up the divider between us with his left hand. I reach forward to try to hold it down but it reaches the top before I can leverage my weight, closing the space between us.
“Why are you doing this?” I yell, then punch the divider with the side of my fist, crack the knuckles of my pinky and forefinger. I shake off the pain as he picks up speed.
We drive through the darkest hours of night, see no light other than passing streetlamps that drift by us like shooting stars. Through the smoky glass of my window I can barely make out the well-lit sign that reads WELCOME TO GEORGIA as we cruise by it at close to seventy miles per hour, realize we passed I-10, the connector to Jacksonville that would have returned us back to I-95, back to the Washington, DC, area. As bungling as Sean has appeared, I’ve been fooled every time, realize he always has some other plan in mind, acting the part of the marplot to fulfill an ulterior motive. And what else could I assume now: He’s gone rogue. His rage-filled partial confession in the conference room in Baltimore echoes in my head. “You will never take them down unless you break the rules,” he said. “You’ve got to do whatever it takes to make it stop,” he said. The only thing I don’t understand is the angle. I rest in knowing—trusting—that Sean’s tale of the old man playing a practical joke on me means Melody is still free, still safe. I’m just not sure what all of this means for me. One-in-five chance he’s driving me far away to make good on another of his comments from the conference room gathering: “How about we just take you out to a field and put a bullet in you.” But three years is a long time to hold that kind of anger, not to mention that even Sean would see the Everglades as the obvious choice for dumping someone—which would’ve been in the opposite direction.
I spend an hour trying to determine how many pages Sean could’ve read while I was in the shower my final morning at Safesite, what he might have determined by reading nothing but my handwritten adoration for the woman described in the text, the woman who can so easily be identified even though she is never mentioned by name, how the details and words she spoke just before her escape had seemingly replaced the dark ending I claimed to have dealt her.
Worse yet, the journals are now gone forever. My past and all of its documentation will never again be within reach.
FOUR
I wake up when Sean takes an exit ramp too fast and I tip over and my head smacks the window of my door. The morning sun barely illuminates the dark glass that encircles me. I slowly sit up, attempt to get my bearings, can smell the sour remainders of his fast food, even with the divider still closed between us.
I try to catch a glimpse of my surroundings through the window. Over my shoulder I see a sign for the highway we just exited: I-85. Even with all my cross-country travels, I can’t remember where this interstate is on the map, have no idea where we are or where we’re going.
As I rub my eyes and try to make out anything that gives me an idea of my locale, I finally glimpse a sign for the road we’re on: South Carolina Route 187. Another two-lane road lined with more farms. More middle of nowhere. With a half stretch and a yawn, my conclusion is drawn: Sean is taking me directly to my next home; he’s relocating me, bypassing Safesite and all of its comprehensiveness. This is what rural America has come to mean to me, its only possible purpose.
As we merge onto a wider road, we wind around the edge of a small town marked as Pendleton, South Carolina, which looks like a first cousin to all the other country towns I’ve come to know over the course of my life, barely different from those in Kentucky and Virginia, right