Black and Blue Read Free Page B

face.
    “You’ll know when you get there,” Patty Bancroft said.
    “I’m not going away without knowing where I’m going,” I said.
    “Then you’ll have to stay where you are,” she’d replied. “This is the way it works.” My hand had crept to my nose, pressed on the bridge as though testing my resolve. I felt the pain in my molars, the back of my head, the length of my spine. I felt the blood still seeping from between my legs, like a memory of something I’d already made myself forget. “The bleeding will stop in a week or so,” they’d said at the clinic. Pack plenty of clean underpants, I thought to myself. That’s what it comes down to, finally, no matter how terrifying your life has become. A toothbrush. Batteries. Clean underpants. The small things keep you from thinking about the big ones. Concealer stick. Tylenol. My face had faded to a faint yellow-green in the time it had taken me to plan my getaway. Bobby had been working a lot of nights. We’d scarcely seen one another.
    “What will happen if you leave and then your husband finds you?” Patty Bancroft had said.
    “He’ll kill me,” I answered.
    “He won’t find you if you do what we say.” And she’d hung up the phone.
    The station public-address system bleated and blared. “Mom, can I have a Coke?” Robert said, in that idle way in which childrenmake requests, as though it’s expected of them. The video game and his hands lay in his lap, and he’d tilted his head back to look up at the ceiling.
    “Not now,” I said.
    A line of people in business suits had formed at the head of one of the stairways leading to the tracks. Two of them talked on cellular phones. A woman with a handsome leather suitcase on a wheeled stand left the line and walked toward the coffee kiosk. Her heels made a percussive noise on the stone floor. “Café au lait, please,” the woman said to the girl behind the counter.
    She looked at her watch, then turned and smiled at me, looked down at the floor, looked up again. “You dropped your tickets,” she said. She handed me an envelope she stooped to pick up from the floor.
    “Oh, no, I—”
    “You dropped your tickets,” she said again, smiling, her voice firm, and I could feel the corner of the envelope, a sharp point against my wet palm.
    “Metroliner!” called a uniformed man at the head of the stairs, and the woman picked up her coffee and wheeled her suitcase to the stairway without looking back. I sat down heavily on the bench and opened the envelope.
    “God!” groaned Robert, hunched back over his game.
    “What?”
    “Nothing,” he said.
    Inside the envelope were two tickets to Baltimore on the 4:00 PM Metroliner. I looked at the big digital clock and the wall timetable. 3:12, and the next Metroliner was ON TIME. There were other things in the envelope, too: bus tickets, a driver’s license,Social Security cards. For a moment I was blind with confusion, and then I found the names: Crenshaw, Elizabeth. Crenshaw, Robert.
    I had not liked it when Patty Bancroft gave me orders on the phone, but now I felt a powerful sense of gratitude. She had let me have my way in at least one thing: Robert had gotten to keep his own first name.
    And I was to be Elizabeth. Liz. Beth. Libby. Elizabeth Crenshaw. Seeing myself reflected in the glass of the coffee kiosk, I could almost believe it. There she was, Elizabeth Crenshaw. She had short blond hair, a pixie crop that I’d created with kitchen scissors and hair dye in the bathroom just before sun-up, just after I heard the door shut behind Bobby as he left for work. She wore a pair of gold-rimmed glasses bought from a rack at the pharmacy, clear glass with the kind of cheap sheen to the lenses that turned the eyes behind them into twin slicks of impenetrable glare. Elizabeth Crenshaw was thin, all long bones and taut muscles, because Fran Benedetto had been running for more than a decade and because terror had made it hard for her, these last few years,