Alice Dunbar’s Jefferson Square loft apartment lacked a view of the St. Louis arch or the Mississippi. Instead, it looked out onto what only a few years earlier had been a needle park. Gentrification had relocated the drugs and dealers a few blocks south and east. Now the park offered Penny a place to play on the jungle gym or to swing on the swings during the steamy, sultry afternoons.
But Penny wasn’t in the mood for playing. She stared at her mother, tears pooled in oversized blue eyes, poisoned by betrayal. “But we just got here…”
Alice packed furiously, a maternal storm leaving debris in its wake. She’d been through this before, she reminded herself, wanting to stay calm. Only months ago, in fact.
She felt bad for uprooting Penny for the third time in her five short years. This time Penny had found a set of kids at day care to call her friends, and her mother hated to lose that.
Until this most recent move Penny had pretty much kept to herself. She liked American Girl dolls and to be read the accompanying stories. McDonald’s Happy Meals, her hamburgers with onions, mustard, and ketchup. She’d outgrown a macaroni-and-cheese phase. Now it was frozen Gogurts, pancakes, and flank steak when Mommy could afford it.
She liked for her mom to read to her before bed, her baths hot, and her pillowcase cold.
She’d learned to watch her mother for signals when on the bus or the street. With little in the way of discussion, instruction, or explanation, she’d intuited that they lived a secret life, a different life from others.
“It’s not forever,” Alice lied. In fact, Alice had no idea when they might stop running. “We’re not moving, we’re just leaving for a while. Like vacation.”
“Not me! I’m not going anywhere! I’ll run away! I will.”
“That’s the point: We’re running away together, sweetheart,” Alice said in as loving a voice as she could muster. “We’ll be back.”
Despite this outburst, Penny was significantly more mature, more worldly and sophisticated than her peers. It no doubt stemmed from their nomadic, secluded life. Whether those qualities would benefit her remained to be seen. She acted like a five-year-old, but she read at a sixth-grade level and spoke with an adult vocabulary. Though adults were impressed, Alice wasn’t thrilled with what she saw developing: a precocious, challenging, willful child who acted as if she were entitled.
Garage-sale furniture had failed to adequately fill the loft space that had once housed a printing press and been home to a citywide giveaway newspaper. Alice had left the yellowed front pages of past editions stapled to the rough wood walls as artwork.
She checked the TV, tuned to CNN, wondering how often they would run the ad for the ID bracelets. She’d seen it only once, about an hour earlier, but that had been enough to make her leave St. Louis today. Possibly forever. The WITSEC deputies had drummed into her the need for her to keep up her daily watch of USA TODAY and CNN. And even though she’d fled WITSEC years before, she’d never stopped looking for the warning signal. If she ever saw an ad for a silver-plated ID bracelet, with the name “Johnny Anyone” on the bracelet, and the address on the mail-in form “ PO Box 911, Washington, DC,” she was to take immediate action. Sight of the ad today had knocked her sideways: one moment struggling through life on its typically difficult track, the next, pure panic.
Something drastic, something radical had happened within WITSEC that must have jeopardized all protected witnesses. Sadly for Alice it was just more of the same-the endless dance of reinventing herself.
She packed while containing an anxiety she hadn’t experienced since fleeing St. Luke’s. The unsettling existence of living with the knowledge that someone was after her, wanted to kill her, preoccupied her every thought, every movement. WITSEC tried to explain such feelings in its orientation literature, but had no idea what they were talking about.
She knew that given this unexpected move, she would not sleep for days, worried sick about Penny being a part of this, and what might become of her daughter if her enemies were ever successful. She glimpsed her immediate future. Their survival depended upon her own random, unpredictable behavior. They would live on what she’d saved until she found new work. She did not maintain a bank account; instead, she converted paychecks to cash for a fee and bought U.S. Postal Service money orders. She would keep moving, would contact no one. They would return to an isolated, unpredictable life for the next few days or weeks, however long it took for WITSEC to run a nearly identical ad to read: “Mr. Johnny Citizen, PO Box 411, Washington, DC.” That combination would alert her that whatever the problem, it had been resolved. It would be safe for protected witnesses to call the memorized phone number and check on their individual status. For Alice, long since out of the program, it would likely mean choosing someplace else to resettle with Penny. St. Louis had not worked out as planned anyway.
Self-pity crept in and she pushed it away. She would not cry in front of her daughter, would not resent their situation. She was alive. She had a beautiful daughter. She would not fantasize some life other than that she’d been handed. She would not give them that. She would not succumb.
She and Penny were a team like no other. Best friends. Mother and daughter. Rivals. Survivors.
She looked up from the clutter of clothes, sorted first by necessity, given that she’d elected to try for a warmer climate this time. Fewer clothes, less baggage.
She turned.
Penny was not in the room.
She called out, the first tendrils of fear wrapping around her heart.
“Pen?”
No answer.
Her daughter had been standing there only seconds-minutes?-earlier.
Her feet moved independently of her. First at a walk, then a run, she hurried around the few rooms offered by the loft’s layout. She checked under both beds, in all three closets, behind the couch… all of those places Penny sought during hide-and-seek.
Then she arrived at the front door only to find it hanging open.
Her daughter-her headstrong, precocious, adorable, frightened little girl-had run off.
Alice hurried within the building, neighbor to neighbor. Not many of them knew her particularly well-she’d made a point of not getting close. But most knew Penny just from hellos in the hall and at the mail slots.
With each successive failed attempt, her desperation increased. She was lightheaded and sick to her stomach. She steadied her balance and attempted to predict where Penny might go.
She ran three blocks to a church playground, grateful that Mrs. Kiyak, a neighbor who didn’t know her well but recognized a mother’s fear when she saw it, agreed to guard the apartment building’s stoop in case Penny returned. Alice ’s deeper concern was that the elderly Mrs. Kiyak might forget why she was sitting there, for whom she was waiting, and might return to her own apartment unaware she was in fact deserting her post. Mrs. Kiyak had delivered Christmas cookies to her friends in the building, not a month too early, but on the twenty-fifth of September.
The playground stood empty, a blanket of fall leaves at its feet. They stirred in a light breeze. One of the swings moved pendulously on its chains. The more Alice shouted, the more anxiety flooded her.
She fought to calm herself again. If she’d covered her tracks well, and she believed she had, then no one from her past knew about Penny’s existence, no one could connect either of them to St. Louis. If she’d made any mistake, it had been using her Alice Frizen social security number at St. Luke’s, a mistake she had not repeated here in St. Louis. Able to manipulate computer data with ease, she’d covered her tracks within her employment records at Baines Jewish Hospital by way of a small sin she felt was forgivable, adopting the Social Security number of a woman her age and roughly her description who had passed away from cancer up in Minnesota. By the time the IRS figured that one out, Penny would have her own grandchildren.
The sounds of city traffic hummed like swarming bees. She inhaled the improbable mixture of rich fall smells: wet, loamy earth; the dry dust of brittle leaves.
She couldn’t imagine Penny leaving the building without her, much less the neighborhood. But then Alice realized that if Penny had left, there was probably only one place she would go.
Remembering she’d left some cash by the phone in the apartment, and now not remembering if she’d seen the money during her search, Alice hurried back home. If the cash was gone, then she thought she knew exactly where to find her. Candy was Penny’s first and only real weakness.
Discovering the cash missing from where she’d left it, Alice tried three neighborhood stores, two that sold candy and one that offered ice cream. Drawing blank looks and offers to help from each establishment, she wandered back out onto the sidewalks.
She rarely shopped the same grocery store twice in a row. The nearest lay eight blocks away-the opposite direction from the hospital. Sometimes they walked to the market, sometimes they took the bus. She spun in circles, tears now threatening as the hopelessness, anger, and frustration competed within her.
She thought of the toy store and broke into a run, slaloming through pedestrians, avoiding collisions. Then, halfway to the toy store, she skidded to a stop. Across the street she spotted Little Annie’s Bookshoppe, Penny’s favorite store after Crown Candy.
Torn between the two, she willed her feet to move but they wouldn’t budge.
“Penny!” She screamed in such a shrill voice that she turned heads, then quickly reminded herself that she was the one the Romeros sought.