it. I wiped the soles of my house shoes on the thorny welcome mat in front of my apartment door.
“We don’t have time to worry about that now. We need to get inside and figure out what we are going to do.” Desiree opened my purse and rooted around in it. She let out a short, muffled scream when she pulled the bloody weight halfway out. She dropped it back into my purse immediately. With her eyes closed, she found my keys at the bottom of my purse. I slid off my house shoe and clutched it, standing on one foot against the building while Desiree fumbled with the key to unlock the door.
Even though I lived in a quiet and crime-free neighborhood, I usually left my lights on when I went out at night. As soon as we got inside, Desiree ran around clicking off lights. The only ones she left on were the lamp on the end table next to the telephone in my living room and a lamp in my bedroom.
“Carmen, did you mean what you said about going with me?” she asked, whirling around to face me as I stood rooted in my spot like a tree.
Finally, and with a great deal of effort, I sat down hard on my sofa and started rubbing the back of my head, unable to face the picture of Jesus on the wall looking down on me. The back of my head was aching more than any other part of my body. Chester had gripped my hair just that hard.
“I would not have said it if I didn’t mean it,” I told Desiree. I jumped up as fast as I had sat down, and headed toward my kitchen with Desiree behind me still holding my purse. I flipped on the light and fished the murder weapon out of my purse. I wrapped it in a handful of paper towels. Then I returned it to my purse. “We can throw it in some bushes or something. My shoe and that jacket you have on, too.”
Desiree stared at my purse, then my face, and then she jerked her head in a nodding motion. There was blood on the cuff of her windbreaker, but I didn’t know if it was hers or Chester’s.
She nodded again and frowned at the sleeve of her windbreaker as she spoke. “It’s not too late, you know. We can still call this in, tell them what really happened and pray they go easy on us. My aunt Nadine scalded my uncle to death when I was nine, and she got off by pleading self-defense,” Desiree told me, peeling off the windbreaker, then the one-sleeved blouse that Chester had ripped. Rolling them into a tight ball, she slid both into a plastic grocery bag she’d snatched off the counter.
“Is that the same aunt nobody would hire because of her past and she ended up working the streets turning ten-dollar tricks?”
“Yeah. Aunt Nadine,” she replied, staring grimly at the plastic bag dangling in her hand as she leaned her hip against the sink.
“And last year she jumped out of a window in Brooklyn and broke her neck?” I was way too jumpy to relax. I didn’t want to sit down, and I knew that if I stretched out on the sofa or on my bed, I might not be able to get back up. I stood in front of my stove, shifting my weight from one foot to the other.
“Well, Aunt Nadine had been depressed for years, you know,” Desiree muttered.
“So much for her getting off. Just think how much better her life would have been if nobody ever knew she killed your uncle.”
Desiree sighed and nodded. “You better hurry up and get your shit packed before we go on the lam.”
Trying to decide what to take with me was something I didn’t know how to approach. I’d never been “on the lam” before. Desiree had not taken anything from Chester’s house other than what she had on her back and in her purse. She had already packed what was important to her in the two suitcases she had stored in my bedroom closet on the floor below my color-coded designer suits.
“I can’t take both my suitcases,” she announced, moving toward me. “It’d be too much trouble. Where’s that travel bag you won at the church raffle last year?”
“That’s what I was planning to use,” I wailed.
“You got another small bag?”
“I don’t know. My sister left a lot of her stuff here when she got married and moved to Nigeria. I’ll look through it and see.”
Desiree followed me to my bedroom, where she dragged her two suitcases out of the closet and hauled them into the living room. I pulled the black-leather travel bag that I had won at church from the top shelf of my closet and placed it on the bed. I unzipped it and stood up looking around the room. I slid into the Nikes I had left on the floor by the side of my bed, but I planned to pack a second pair. Without thinking I bounced from drawer to drawer, pulling out jeans, comfortable blouses, sensible underwear. I had enough makeup in my purse, so a half-used container of Arid Extra Dry and a fresh bottle of Lubriderm lotion were the only things I took from the bathroom.
“There’s that commuter bus at five in the morning. Thank God we don’t know anybody who rides that bus. Not that many people ride it on a Saturday anyway. It’ll get us to Mobile, where we can connect with a Greyhound,” Desiree said, peeking into my room.
My mouth dropped open so wide, I could feel the night air coming in through my cracked window all the way to the back of my tongue. “Greyhound? How far do you think we’ll get on a Greyhound bus?”
“I know you hadn’t planned on hopping on a plane.” Desiree wailed like a wounded raccoon and looked like one with her blackened eyes and swollen lips.
“I hadn’t planned on any of this,” I said thoughtfully. Until now I had not even considered what mode of transportation we were going to use to leave the state. “We have enough money for a plane ticket.”
“We don’t have that much money between us. What we have is not enough for us to pay for two spur-of-the-moment tickets to California and have enough left over to last us until…until we get out of this mess. And if we fly we’ll be leaving a paper trail. You have to show a picture ID when you fly these days. Everything will go into their computers—shit. And don’t even think about driving your car.”
“I don’t have that many miles on it. It would make it to California,” I said.
Desiree shook her head and snapped, “Are you out of your mind? The highways are full of patrolmen lying in wait. Like spiders. If we go, we go by bus.” I could tell by Desiree’s tone of voice she was determined to do things her way, even though the heaviest part of our crime was on my shoulders. “We’re catching a bus,” she said with resignation.
“All the way to California from here?”
“We have to get to Mobile first. Didn’t I just tell you that? We don’t have a Greyhound station here. After we leave Mobile we’ll have to transfer left and right, and it will still take us three and a half days to get to California.” Desiree sighed and patted her chest before she fanned her face with her hand. There was so much sweat on her forehead, her hair was plastered to her flesh.
“Well…what about the train?”
“What about it?”
“Wouldn’t we get to California faster on a train?” I asked, blinking stupidly.
“It would be about the same as a bus. I know because that’s how my sister went to California.” Desiree blinked and managed a weak smile. “Since we have a little time to kill, we better get some rest because we’re going to need it.”
As soon as Desiree left my bedroom, I sat down hard on the bed and exhaled. A picture on my nightstand caught my attention. I had to blink hard to hold back my tears. It was a framed eight-by-ten glossy picture in color that had been taken at Rocco’s, our favorite local bar. In the picture, standing next to me, was Desiree grinning so hard her eyes looked like slits. Her mouth was stretched open so wide; she looked like she had twice as many teeth as me. She had on a red jumpsuit she had made herself. That was the happiest I had seen her in a long time. Standing behind Desiree was Chester, looking straight into the camera with a crooked sneer on his face. His long arm was wrapped around my shoulder when it should have been around Desiree’s. That Chester. He was one complicated man. Directly in front of me was Burl Tupper, another enigma, the man I had agreed to marry. Burl was almost as light