Black and Blue

The Wild Goose Chase

Five little fingers wrapped around the locked car door. Again and again, they tugged as the engine roared to life.

"No! Mama, please! Open it! Open it, Mama!"

The window rolled down slowly and an ashy cigarette butt poked out.

Tap

Tap

Tap

The cinders fluttered down onto Ava's shoulders. The top of her head hardly reached the car window. Ava couldn't see her mother's face, only that damned cigarette butt with its smoke reaching sickly fingers toward the clouds.

"Get off that Ava," her mother's voice oozed slowly. The sound was sluggish. She was higher than the smoke from her cigarette already, and she still had to drive all the way to Florida, or Main, or New York, or any of the other places she always deemed as better than the place where Ava was.

"When're you comin' back?" Ava squeaked. The cigarette stopped tapping. The smoke was all that moved now, and boy did it dance in that autumn breeze. Without a word, the old burnt up cigarette retreated back into the car and the window rolled back up with a soft hmmm sound.

The air stopped charging in and out of Ava's lungs. Oxygen wasn't her priority anymore. Her hand was still on the door handle when the car lurched away. She stumbled and fell to her knees on the tough, gravely driveway. Dust clouded up behind her mother's beat-up car as it drove away from their North Carolina home.

She's not coming back, Ava thought. It's just Dad and me now. The screen door opened behind her and heavy boot steps strode across the porch.

"Where she gone?" He asked, voice husky from a bad combination of smoke and beer.

Ava didn't say anything. The ground around her knees was red.

The boot steps quickened as realization struck Ava's father. A guttural sound from deep in his throat sparked to life.

"Bitch!" He threw a half-full beer bottle down the empty driveway as Mama's car turned out of the neighborhood. It crashed into a thousand little pieces.

"And what, you let her go? You let her go and you didn't come get me?" He was screaming now. Screaming right in Ava's ear. Her eyes were wide, but she kept them on the ground. Usually he'd do this to Mama, not her. A boot caught her right in the stomach and threw her off her knees into the grass. There was no air. None at all. She couldn't breathe. Ava lay there like a fish out of water as her father raged back into the house.

She woke with a start on the bus still gasping for air. A few of the other passengers were looking at her very strangely. There was fire in her chest now. 

A panic attack? Now?

Ava's fingers found the bracelet on her wrist and methodically twisted the beads until her breathing slowed. It took a long while, but eventually, Ava found a rhythm in the beat of her heart and the draw of her lungs. 

I'm safe. I'm safe. I'm safe.

Over and over she repeated until the muscles in her shoulders loosened. Her hands would tremor for hours, but there was nothing she could do about that. She rolled her shoulders and stretched her legs in an effort to melt the tension away. She had to focus. It was hard to make plans during and immediately after a panic attack, but Ava didn't have the luxury of time on her hands. She had to cover her tracks and find a safe way to move forward. 

There had been a Best Buy in North Carolina. Ava had used a stolen credit card to buy an iPhone and a laptop before making a break for it. She pulled out her laptop and searched for cheap hotels in New York City. The bus was nice enough to have wifi. She had spent the last month before leaving North Carolina taking every opportunity to talk about how much she wanted to visit New York. She had even mentioned having friends there that she had met online. 

Perfect. A smile crept onto her face. There was a nice motel that looked like there might be lice in the pillowcases.

The credit card number that she punched in belonged to her father, and Ava was pretty sure that he was tracking her every purchase. He couldn't call the police because he knew that Ava would report him for child abuse. She had the scars to prove it. He couldn't cancel the credit card or else he would lose all trace of Ava. All he could do was watch the purchases and try to catch Ava when she found a place to settle. 

Ava had no intention of going to New York City. After using the credit card to reserve a room in New York, she closed the tab and opened another searching for homeless shelters in Pheonix, Arizona.