Gone

Janie looks at the floor, giving him the answer.

“Oh.” Cabel measures his words, stung. “I’m sorry, Janers. I didn’t pick up on that.” He gets up quickly. Walks to the door. Janie follows him to the hallway by the elevators. “I’ll . . . I’ll see you around, I guess,” he says. “Call me when—whenever.”

“I will,” Janie says, staring at the big CELL PHONES MUST BE TURNED OFF sign on the wall. “I’ll text you later. This is just really something I’d rather handle alone at the moment, okay? I love you.”

“Yeah. Okay. Love you, too.” Cabel swivels on his flips and waves an uncertain hand at her. He looks over his shoulder. “Hey? Bus doesn’t run between two and five a.m., you know that, right?”

Janie smiles. “I know.”

“Don’t get sucked into any dreams, okay?”

“Okay. Shh.” Janie says, hoping no one else heard that.

Before he can think of anything else, Janie slips back inside the waiting room to sit and think.

Alone.

1:12 a.m.

She dozes in the waiting room chair.

Suddenly feels someone watching her. Startles and sits up, awake.

At least her mother is wearing clothes and not the nightgown Carrie mentioned.

“Hey,” Janie says. She stands. Walks over to her mother and stops, feeling awkward. Not sure what to do. Hug? That’s what they do on TV. Weirdness.

Dorothea Hannagan is sweating profusely. Shaking. Janie doesn’t want to touch her. This whole scene is so foreign it’s almost otherworldly.

And then.

Madness.

“Where were you?” Janie’s mother crumples and she starts crying. Yelling too loud. “You don’t tell me nothing about where you are, you just disappear. That strange girl from next door has to drive me here—” Her hands are shaking and her shifty eyes dart from the floor back up to Janie’s, accusing, angry. “You don’t care about your mother now, is that it? You just running around wild with that boy?”

Janie steps back, stunned, not just at the sheer record number of words uttered by her mother in one day, but even more by the tone. “Oh, my God.”

“Don’t you talk back to me.” Dorothea’s shaking hands rip open her ragged vinyl purse and she rifles through it, dumping wrappers and papers onto the waiting room chairs. It becomes painfully obvious that what she’s looking for is not there. Dorothea gives up and slumps in a chair.

Janie, standing, watches.

She’s shaking a little bit too.

Wondering how to handle this. And why she has to. Haven’t you given me enough shit to deal with already? she says to no one. Or maybe to God. She doesn’t know. But she does know one thing. She’ll be glad to be away from this mess.

Janie picks up the scattered objects from the waiting room, shoves them into the purse, and takes her mother by the arm. “Come on. You’ve got some at the house, right?”

Janie tugs Dorothea to her feet. “I said, come on. We have to catch the bus.”

“What about your car?” Dorothea asks. “That girl was driving it.”

Janie blinks and looks at her mother, dragging her along to the elevator. “Yeah, Ma. I sold it to her months ago, remember?”

“You never tell me—”

“Just . . .” Janie burns. I don’t tell you anything? Or you’re too drunk to remember? She takes a breath, lets it out slowly. “Just come on. And don’t embarrass me.”

“Yeah, well don’t you embarrass me, either.”

“Whatever.”

Janie gives a fleeting glance over her shoulder down the hallway where presumably her father lies, dead or alive, Janie doesn’t know.

Doesn’t really care.

Hopes he hurries up and dies so she doesn’t ever have to deal with him. Because from all Janie knows, parents are nothing but trouble.

2:10 a.m.

Dorothea fidgets like a junkie the entire way home on the bus. Janie, frustrated, wards off the dream of a homeless passenger and is just glad it’s a short ride.

When they get home, there on the front step is Janie’s suitcase. “Damn, Cabe,” she mutters. “Why do you always have to be so fucking thoughtful?”

Janie’s mother makes a beeline to the kitchen, grabs a bottle of vodka from under the sink, and retreats to her bedroom without a word. Janie lets her go. There will be time tomorrow to figure out what’s going on with this Henry person once Dorothea is good and sloshed and halfway reasonable again.

Janie texts Cabel.

Home.

Cabe responds without delay, despite the hour.

Thx baby. Love. See you tomorrow?

Turns off her phone. “Yeah, about that,” Janie whispers. She sighs and sets the phone on her bedside table and her suitcase next to it, and falls into bed.

4:24 a.m.

Janie dreams.

There are rocks covering her bedroom floor and a suitcase on her bed. Each rock has something scribbled on it, but Janie can only read the rocks when she picks them up.

She picks one. “HELP ME,” it reads. “CABE,” reads another.

“DOROTHEA. CRIPPLED. SECRET. BLIND.”

When she puts them back on the floor, they grow bigger, heavier. Soon, she knows, she will run out of room on the floor to put the rocks, but she can’t stop picking them up, reading them. The floor is crowded, and Janie’s having trouble breathing. The rocks are sucking the air from the room.