It was a short train ride back to Bridgeport. The three of us had barely caught our breath when the stop was announced. We hovered inside the door until the last possible moment, craning our necks out like wary chipmunks, ensuring no one was waiting to waylay us.
And this time, there was nobody. No watchful loners poking at smart phones. No weird guys in fancy suits holding placards. No blonde girls with compact machine guns in their purses. A bunch of people got on the train, but once they did, the platform was clear. Nobody got off but us.
We huddled beside a vending machine while we waited for our connection, which arrived only a few minutes later. As we boarded, some of the stress that had been weighing me down just melted away. It felt strange but marvelous to worry a little bit less for a change. We had shaken both Sergei and the guy with the Cadillac. And now we were headed to some obscure town where we could further disappear. I mean, who had ever heard of Naugatuck and who would ever want to go there?
I plopped down into a fake leather seat and granted myself the luxury of calming down, letting my nervous perspiration dry for a change. I needed a shower badly and my clothes were ready for the trash bin. They reeked of swamp and sweat. Silt stains streaked my jeans, the cuffs were shredded. Clumps of debris remained in my pockets from all that bushwhacking we had done.
What was worse, I kept having this crawly sensation in my midriff that made me wonder if I had bugs in my underwear. Weirdly, the feeling vanished whenever I brought my hand towards the spot, before I could even touch it. I didn’t even need to scratch. I thought it was probably some kind of skin condition related to bad hygiene.
Ellen was positively giddy about seeing her Grams. “She makes a homemade mac and cheese to die for. Real Vermont cheddar. Bread crumbs sprinkled over the top. And she cans these homemade dill pickles that are way better than anything you can find in a store.”
I had no desire to visit Ellen’s grandmother. If I had my druthers I would have stayed in Bridgeport and slunk away on my own, blending in with the local homeless population, slurping soup at some charity feed trough, sleeping in a cardboard box under some highway overpass. That was the kind of lifestyle most conducive to me focusing my attention on the Deeps. Basic survival. No distractions.
I still had every intention of ditching the girls as soon as it became practical. I figured Ellen would be safe with her Grams. And Urszula would be fine on her own once she got over her weepiness. If she could handle the Deeps, she could figure out Connecticut. The time was coming for me to concentrate on my main mission—keeping my promise to Karla.
“She doesn’t know we’re coming,” said Ellen, babbling on. “But that’s no big deal with Grams. I used to drag my friends over to her place all hours out of the blue. She’d always find a way to feed them. That’s Grams for you?”
“I hope she doesn’t mind if I conk out at the dinner table,” I said, as my eyelids slipped to half-mast. “I’m getting pretty sleepy.”
Ellen chuckled. “Been there. Done that. In high school, Friday nights, me and my friends used to get totally sloshed, and we used to show up at her house after football games. And she would come downstairs in her jammies and feed us! I used to have a bit of a drinking problem.”
Urszula was snuffling silently again, her face buried in her drawn-up knees. She kept her gaze fixed out the window, watching the outskirts of a small industrial town slide by, with its weathered brick mills and concrete flood barriers and what seemed to be a helicopter factory.
I wondered how different this place looked from the world she left behind a hundred years ago. I knew nothing about Silesia, only that it was on the far side of Europe, halfway across the world. I pictured a greener place with farms, dirt roads and tidy villages. I’m sure they had trains, but not nearly as many cars.
