Page 5 of Jessica, Not Her Real Name
When she’d discovered that Florida was to be her new home, she hadn’t exactly been thrilled. Her perception of the place had been of killer storms, dog-eating pythons, and gators on golf courses. That impression hadn’t improved after a few months of living there, during what had been one of the hottest and wettest summers on record. God, she’d missed snow. And sleet. And freezing westerlies.
Slowly, though, the place had grown on her. First, she’d stopped hating it so much. Then she’d begun to like it.
Now, it was in her rearview mirror, just as Illinois had been. And soon, Jessica Meeks would be erased, just like Julia Mikkelsen had been.
Jessica rested her head against the cool glass of the car window and wondered how many times a person could do that before they erased themselves entirely.
* * *
Florida became Alabama, night fell, and the heat rose.
With her head lying back against the seat and the cool draft of air conditioning against her face, Jessica slipped into a light doze. Images that weren’t quite dreams, weren’t quite memories shimmered before her eyes. A big white stone house that overlooked a lake. The faces of her parents and sister, frozen as if trapped in a photo. Pointe shoes on her feet. The sensation she used to get when she danced. Like she was liberated from the laws of gravity, like she might never land from the next leap.
A man’s voice, soft in her ear.“Nunca tienes que tener miedo de mí.”
You never have to be afraid of me.
With a jerk, she awoke, her heart beating fast and her back damp with sweat. She hadn’t heard Daniel’s voice in her head in years.
She blinked the images away. It took a few seconds to remember where she was. In a car, with a deputy U.S. marshal, heading for Baton Rouge. It took another second for her to realize that the car had stopped.
She looked up and saw the marshal twisted around in his seat, staring at her. He must have said something to wake her.
Glancing out the window, she saw they’d pulled in a truck stop off the interstate and were now parked at the pumps of a Shell station. Across a wide concrete lot was the illuminated sign of an all-night diner.
“Where are we?”
Inglis unfastened his seat belt. “Mississippi, ma’am. Just outta Biloxi.”
He had a nice voice. Low, a little husky. Permanently slurred with that thick Southern drawl.
She glanced down at her watch. It was nearly two in the morning. It felt like she’d only closed her eyes for a moment, but it had been hours.
Having gotten out of the car, the marshal leaned back in. “You hungry?”
She shook her head. But she needed to use the bathroom, so she unfastened her seatbelt and got out too.
A fat yellow moon was beating down like a sun. She looked around the forecourt, illuminated by the harsh overhead lights. There were public restrooms in a small concrete building to the left, but from the look of the overflowing rubbish bins out front, they received little in the way of servicing. She hitched her bag strap over her shoulder and headed for the diner instead.
It was almost empty, with just a guy in a trucker cap seated alone at a table and a couple of teenagers at a booth by the door. Cold air blasted down from a HVAC unit in the ceiling, strong enough to lift strands of hair from her face. There was a TV fixed to the far wall, tuned to a local news channel.
She paused for a moment to watch it. A reporter was standing on a pier, her back to the darkened sea. She was wearing a thick PVC parka, even though it wasn’t raining. The audio was inaudible, but the report was clearly focused on the approaching storm.
Hurricane Petra had been occupying all the media channels for a week. Meteorologists had been tracking its progress since it began life hundreds of miles away, off the Ivory Coast. It was now a Category Three storm and had already left a trail of destruction across the Yucatán Peninsula. A screen graphic depicted its swirling eyewall around the deep low-pressure system at its center. It was a deadly spinning Catherine wheel of reds, oranges, and greens. Arrows illustrated its path toward Louisiana and Mississippi in the coming hours.
Hugging her bag to her side, she headed for the restrooms at the rear of the diner. Either the place lacked a no walk-in bathroom policy, or the waitress chose not to enforce it. She just leaned against the counter and eyeballed Jessica from afar.
As she walked past the trucker, she could feel his eyes following her every step of the way.
She used the toilet, then washed her hands. Her reflection in the mirror gave her a jolt. She was still wearing her work makeup: heavy winged eyeliner, fake eyelashes and far too much bronzer. Her pink hair was pulled up into a high ponytail. She looked like Fuck Me Barbie. No wonder people were staring.
She found a pack of makeup remover wipes in her bag and took off what she could. Then, for a long moment, she studied her reflection, examining the face that remained behind. It was the face of the girl she could never outrun.
Every time she looked in the mirror, she was reminded of that fact. Reminded that no matter how many times she changed her name or her address, she could never change what she’d done. Could never fix what she’d destroyed.
The marshals had told her long ago not to dwell on the past. That everything and everyone in it was gone. And that the sooner she made peace with that, the better.
But it was impossible not to dwell. The memories felt magnetized. They tugged her mind back of their own accord.
