Page 5 of The Wrong Track

“Of course, I’m sorry. I heard that he was, um…”

“Shanked,” I put in. “Murdered.” Yes, praise the holies, he was dead.

“It’s terrible of me to admit, but I’m very relieved for you,” she said. “I’m so glad that you won’t have to testify or even have to see him again.”

As was I, so I nodded and tried to go faster. But just like her daughter, Monica didn’t exactly respond to the cues I was trying to throw her, the ones saying that I didn’t want to talk and would prefer to be left alone. Instead, she followed me and started discussing real estate. She was an agent and that was not only her area of expertise but also, as Hazel explained, her true passion. I let the words about the market, about multiple offers, about pricing, about determining rent, and about everything else roll over me as I mostly answered with “uh-huh” and “yeah” and “sounds interesting.”

But my ears perked up when I finally understood what she was telling me.

“So that’s why Hazel and I have been thinking that you should move in with one of us,” she was saying, “because as I just explained, with the market so hot and with the scarcity of rentals in the lower end of the price bracket—”

“I can’t do that,” I interrupted. “I won’t move in with you or Hazel.”

“It could just be temporary, until we find you a place of your own.” She smiled at me encouragingly.

All I did was suck help out of them, like a nasty leech hiding in the mud. “No, I don’t need it. I mean, I don’t need help, but thank you.” She waited, now expectant, and I had to fill in more information. “I’m actually leaving Michigan soon.”

“Oh.” Despite the glacial gusts buffering us on the pathway, she stopped dead. “I didn’t know that, Remy. Where are you going to go?” Her lips pinched in worry. “Are you sure you’re ready to do that? After everything that’s happened?”

“I’m fine and I’m going to Arizona,” I said. “First I’ll give back the car to Hazel, I promise. Then I’ll leave.”

“Oh,” she repeated. “I’m so sorry to hear that. We’ll miss you.”

“Thanks.” I couldn’t think that her statement was true, but it was certainly nice if it were. Of course, Hazel and her mom probably would have made friends with a rock if it had moved in next door because that was just the kind of people they were, generous and giving.

And me? I was actually more like that rock: something to step over and avoid, and best left unturned.

Chapter 2

The desert is hot and dry, but there’s no one around for miles. I’m alone, totally alone. I can spot if someone’s coming, anyway, because the land is so flat. I spin in a circle but as far as my eyes can reach, there’s nothing except for sand, a few low cactuses, and air shimmering in the heat.

It’s like a paradise. I walk across the burning sand but it doesn’t seem to bother my feet, nor does the sun…and then I wonder why it isn’t blazing down on me, and that’s when I realize that something is blocking it: a dark shape hangs above me in the sky. And I know—

“She’s asleep again.”

I heard those words clearly and I picked up my head. “No,” I answered immediately. “No, I’m not asleep. I was resting my eyes.” I remembered my grandma saying those same words and how I’d sniggered behind my hands at her as she smacked her lips together and yawned herself awake. I almost smiled, thinking about it, except that it occurred to me that I was already turning into my grandmother.

My supervisor at the gift shop peered down at me. “You were dreaming. You were talking in your sleep.”

“I really wasn’t,” I told her and her friend, who worked in the herbarium. It was just that no one had come into the gift shop all day. A botanical garden wasn’t really the place that visitors wanted to be in January in northern Michigan. They put on a big Christmas and New Year’s show that had attracted people even to the gift shop, but the holidays were over. At the end of this month, they would close down everything until the spring. My job would go on hiatus, a permanent one for me since I was leaving.

“I understand that it’s not the most fascinating thing you could do with your time,” Selma told me. “But you are at the register.” Her eyes moved to it. The drawer was just as it had been when I’d clocked in, because we hadn’t had one, single customer.

“I’m sorry,” I told her, which was as good as admitting that I had been asleep on duty. And yes, I had been asleep on duty, but it was only because no, I hadn’t been able to sleep at all the night before. Hazel was totally moved out now and her former unit was up for sale. She hadn’t been spending much time there anyway, because of her new boyfriend and because at the end of December, her mom had left. They had shared the townhouse before but on the twenty-sixth of last month, the day after Christmas, they’d all gone to Hawaii and her mom had married her boyfriend. Now Miss Monica lived with her new husband in the house they’d bought together.

But even if Hazel hadn’t actually been at home, she’d still had a presence there. I’d thought that I would be glad to see her go, that I would be happy that she wasn’t close enough to meddle in my business, but I wasn’t. Now her townhouse was just a gaping space with echoing white walls, as was the unit on the other side of mine and the one on the other side of that (“They have really misjudged the market values of these townhomes in their rent calculations,” Miss Monica had explained as to why there were so many units available, although I hadn’t asked). It did feel like I lived in a ghost town but I didn’t mind the lack of company, besides that I seemed to miss Hazel.

My supervisor, Selma, was still standing there like she was waiting for something and I wasn’t sure what it was. I straightened my hair, running my hand over the dark strands that went down my back in loose curls, and I wiped my fingers under my eyes in case I’d been crying in my sleep again.

“Your shift is over and you can go home,” she prompted me, and she and her friend smiled. “Did you have a big night last night?”

“Big night,” I agreed, and eased myself off the wood stool behind my counter, making sure that my work-issued polo shirt didn’t stretch over my stomach as I did. I still wasn’t showing very much, but I hadn’t told Selma or anyone else at the Willa Whitaker Botanical Gardens about my health problem and I wanted to make sure they couldn’t see it on their own. I always had on big clothes, which felt funny-strange, because before, Kilian had made me to wear—

“Remy?” my boss asked. “Are you all right?”

So many people had asked me that in the past two months, more than anyone had in all the years before, combined. It had started when I’d moved in and Hazel had gotten worried by the fights she’d heard through our shared wall, and then, when I’d had to go to the hospital—

“Remy?”

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