He signed a short sequence. Miss Parker stared, her mind refusing to parse the signs. She understood, as well as if he'd shouted, but it was too ridiculous. Even for Jarod.
"We need to jump."
Miss Parker blinked at him.
"Are you insane?" she said, without bothering to lift a finger to sign. She wasn't going to play along if 'playing along' meant jumping out of an airplane. "Don't answer that. Thirty years in a basement will do that to a man, I understand. You go ahead, Jarod. Have fun. You're the one who wanted to take me to —" your mother. She broke off, considering at the last moment what would happen if one of the passengers passed that information along to an inquiring Centre agent. She'd said too much already.
Christiane and Yves glanced between the two of them like spectators at a ping pong tournament. Alex sniffled loudly and raised his head.
"What are you talking about?" he asked, voice thick with mucus.
"What about the kid?" said Miss Parker, when Jarod didn't answer. "You gonna take him with us when we jump? You got another parachute sans sabotage crammed up that omniscient ass of yours? We can't leave him, Jarod. He'll —" She glanced at Alex. "He'll kill Chabot, or get hurt himself. Or both."
Chabot groaned and pulled at the handcuff around her wrist.
"You can't leave me," Alex agreed. He pushed himself onto his elbows. "You can't leave her like this, and just wait for the police! How do you not understand this? How old are you? I am only ten and I know it is stupid to think this way, that if you tell the police about a crime, the bad people will go to jail. You can't give the police proof and think they will see it as proof. It doesn't work like that — you must know that, Miss Parker. You are — what is naïve in English?"
"Naïve," said Miss Parker.
"You are naïve!"
"If we land in Portland, we will be arrested," signed Jarod.
There was no point in Miss Parker signing, as Chabot could see her from her awkwardly contorted position on the floor.
"Somewhere else, then," she suggested.
Jarod pinched his index and middle fingers to his thumb: no.
"Why not?"
"The airport — Portland — the control people —" Jarod gave up, faced with the limitations of his grasp on sign language. "This close to Portland, we're on radar, being tracked on more than a couple different tracking systems at once. The pilot will have notified them of the unresponsiveness of the controls mid-flight so they're already on high alert. They'll notice a divergence from our flight path if we try to land elsewhere, and will be right on our heels when we land, regardless. We'd have to hit the ground running, and keep running. Do you want that?"
She didn't. He knew she didn't. The only thing keeping her at Jarod's side for the time being, besides the promise of meeting Margaret, was the vague, unexpressed thought that maybe she could escape the Centre without being perpetually on the run. To 'run on her own terms', as Jarod was apparently doing these days.
"If we land elsewhere, if we're discovered on the plane when it lands, Chabot could complicate her arrest by redirecting the blame to us," Jarod continued. "If we're not here, there's nobody to blame. Her word against those of Alex, Yves and Christiane."
Miss Parker swore, a long tirade of filth, not caring for a second that there were little ears listening. Damn you, Jarod. God damn you for being so fucking logical.
"Give — give me time to think," she said. She pushed herself from the floor, finally freeing Alex. Counter to all her worst fears, he didn't immediately pull a shank from his back pocket and lunge for Chabot. He, too, seemed a little off-kilter at the idea of his new friends jumping out of an airplane.
Jarod grimaced.
"Of course, but…"
"But what." The 'you bastard' was unvoiced but implicit.
"In eight minutes, our jump's default landing position will be on very dangerous terrain. At the very least we'd get some superficial tears, some pretty bad bruises on the landing."
Landing was the last thing on Miss Parker's mind. It had pressed 'pause' on the image of tumbling out of the doorway into open sky, and couldn't progress past it. She'd always hated roller-coasters. The bit where they went upside down, that was fine. But the part where they pause at the top, the inevitable tug at the bellybutton when gravity kicked in… horrible. She imagined jumping out of an airplane would be orders of magnitude worse.
"What happens if we jump now?" she asked, hating the answer before Jarod even opened his mouth.
"Wheat fields," he said. "Not exactly a golf course, but it should be relatively comfortable. We'll just get mildly poked."
He was being optimistic, she knew that. They didn't even know if the two seemingly untouched parachutes were functional. Maybe they were sabotaged in different, subtler ways. They wouldn't know any exact heights, wouldn't know the optimal time to deploy parachutes. And once they landed, what then? They'd be stranded in the middle of nowhere.
"You're not actually considering this, are you? Jumping out of the plane?" It was Yves. There was the phantom of a smirk behind his expression, like he was preparing to laugh at the joke but wanted to be sure he understood it first. "We'll tell them at the airport that you saved us. Yes, OK, they might arrest you for a while, but surely it will count for something that you saved Christiane and I from dying in a plane crash? Plus the man who was killed in Pennsylvania — you said he was a criminal, yes?"
"I don't think we said 'thank you' for saving us, by the way," Christiane chimed in.
"Oh! Yes, very true. Thank you!" said Yves.
If anything, Yves's contributed optimism made the situation look more dire from Miss Parker's point of view. Being arrested "for a while" would mean there'd be plenty of time for the Centre to catch up with them. And it would be (as the French say) naïve to suppose the cops would give them a pat on the back for averting a crime-that-wasn't.
"Yves, tell the pilot about Marc and Chabot's attempt to crash the plane," Miss Parker ordered. "You'll need Portland International to be ready when you get there."
When you get there. She heard herself saying it and realized she'd made her decision. Others noticed it, too.
"You're doing it?!" said Alex. "No, no, you can't! You can't leave me on this plane without you." He ran aground on Miss Parker's implacable face, and turned to Jarod. "Don't do this. You said you would help! Do you think this is helping? You helped her and not me." He jerked his head over his shoulder at Yves and Christiane. "Stay, please. You don't know everything."
Miss Parker snorted.
"You don't know everything. You need to hear that more often, Jarod."
It didn't even get an eye-roll out of Jarod.
"So?" he said to Miss Parker. "Jump now or run forever?"
If there'd been time, she would have had something to say about false dichotomies. As it was, she wordlessly strode back to the parachute cabinet, pulled out the only other sabotage-free chute, and joined Jarod at the hatch. His smile was tentative and un-reciprocated.
Many straps and buckles later, Miss Parker felt like a wrapped present. She had the mother of all wedgies and too much dignity to pick it out. Worst of all, she had an open hatch in front of her with the dawn-lit world spread out in miniature: sleepy little farms she could cover with an outstretched thumb, winding rivers and roads the width of a single hair, hills which looked more like slight irregularities on a bowling ball. She turned to Jarod, rage twisting itself around fear.
"I meet Margaret, then we part ways," she promised. Jarod winced, and nodded reluctantly.
"One thing at a time," he shouted over the wind. "Keep me in view as much as you can during the free-fall. I'll give you a signal when we need to deploy, then you follow me to the landing zone. Landing is going to be the diciest part, since generally during a sky-dive there's an established landing zone, where here we're just picking out a likely-looking spot." He demonstrated the signal she'd have to look out for.
"Careful, Jarod, you're filling me with far too much confidence."
He stretched his lips in a humourless smile and put up three fingers. They'd decided she would have to go first, so she wouldn't lose her nerve and end up stuck on the plane. Three, two, one —
Miss Parker gripped the top edge of the hatch, spun around, and before she could think about it further, hopped back into nothingness.
Whereas standing inside the plane with the hatch open had been sound and wind, free-fall was wind and sound. She'd been completely wrong about the roller-coaster analogy. No belly-button tug, no real sensation of falling at all. The absurd thought blinked through her head that maybe she'd done it wrong, and wasn't falling after all — but no, there was the Earth below her, gradually looming in her field of vision, and there was the sky around her, and there was the shrinking shape of the plane above. She groaned internally at the cliché, but it felt like flying, it really did. She suspected true flying didn't push your cheeks into your eyeballs, nor did it make your eyes stream like faucets. It was cold and loud and… dammit, pretty wonderful. Chabot might be a horrible murdering bitch but she was right about her life wish.
Jarod flew (… fell) off to her left, several yards higher up. He waved and mimed spreading his arms and legs, then pointed at her. She copied his form and watched as he tumbled around in the air into a kind of diving posture. Once their relative altitudes leveled out, Jarod flattened himself into the same spread-out position as she'd adopted. He looked like nothing so much as a flying squirrel.
All too soon, the ground looked worryingly close. She'd spotted what looked like a small town off to the north-east, and the buildings were looking distinctly building-like instead of like dirt specks or legos. She looked over to Jarod, and within seconds, he gave the signal. For the first time since tumbling out of the hatch, her heart hammered with anxiety rather than exhilaration. Moment of truth, when they would discover whether Chabot's head of security had truly left two parachutes whole and functional. Her fingers closed over the rip cord and she tugged. The parachute unfurled. Briefly, it made an almighty flapping like a flag trailed from an open car window on the highway, and Miss Parker saw in her mind's eye the image of Marc tearing great holes in the canvas with a wicked-looking knife.
Then the canopy ballooned above her and, as if gravity had slammed on the breaks, a jarring tug brought her up short. She'd feel that in her thighs tomorrow, if she survived the landing. The wind all but vanished, the sound along with it, and just like that everything was still and clear. Jarod's peacefully floating form drifted into her field of view and gave her an obnoxious thumb's up coupled with the smile of a delighted child. She refused the thumb's up, but couldn't help the returned smile, much as she'd deny it later. They were still about a mile up, according to Jarod's pre-fall lecture.
"How was that? Not too bad, right?" Jarod hollered across to her.
Miss Parker tried to re-arrange her face into something more severe, the muscles of her smile protesting against the unnatural strain.
"I'm not going to rate the film before the credits roll," she shot back. Jarod laughed and beckoned to her as he steered his parachute towards the town Miss Parker had seen earlier. She grabbed her steering pulleys and followed behind.
Despite Jarod floating alongside her, silhouetted against the dawn light, Miss Parker had never felt more physically alone in her life. Even stranded on a back road on the way to Jarod's lair-of-the-week, encountering another person was a matter of lateral movement along man-made roads. Dangling from a parachute above a mile of empty air, she felt like she might as well be in outer space.
A matter of minutes later, the ground looked close enough to touch; seconds later, Miss Parker ground to a halt with blades of wheat crammed in every available hole in her outfit — up her pant legs, through the spaces between buttons on her blouse, etcetera. Her shoes were full of soil. And she felt so, so alive.
She looked up. Off to the east, she spotted the minute speck that could only be Sylvie Chabot's private jet, bound for Portland International Airport.
Jarod waded towards her through the wheat, still grinning.
"Film's over, Miss Parker," he said.
"Oh, shut up, don't gloat," she returned, which was as good as a glowing review from Roger Ebert. She hadn't forgotten to be angry with him, but it was hard to be angry at the decision to bail on the plane. She hated that it would get back to Jarod when she inevitably dove out of another plane, and another, as soon as she could get around to it. And she would, if she had anything to say about it. She would need to feel that again. A pity he'd be so damn smug about it.
"Road's this way," said Jarod, beckoning her towards a horizon visually identical to every other horizon on the compass rose. They set off towards civilization.
The post-dive euphoria lasted up until about twenty paces from the main road, when the halo of mud encrusted around the base of Miss Parker's boots finally became too heavy to lift for another step.
"Give me a gun," she gasped at Jarod's back. It was the first thing she'd said since leaving the landing zone. She'd intended a tentative silent treatment, but Jarod had appeared unbothered by the quiet. Here, he gave her a quizzical look.
"Are you planning on shooting the mud off?" he said, only half-joking.
"Scraping it off with the butt. Just give it here."
They stopped for long enough for Miss Parker to scrape her boots clean. The task took long enough that it revealed a new problem: the road was deserted. Throughout the boot-cleaning process, not a single vehicle passed by. They'd need wheels if they were going to make their way to civilization in decent time. They could see the horizon in both directions, thanks to the eerie flatness of the terrain, and neither direction looked particularly urban. Jarod set off decisively, however, and Miss Parker made the nth decision that day to follow his lead despite overwhelming rationale to do otherwise.
There was little to no shoulder to speak of, which made it a mixed blessing when the road stayed all but empty for long minutes at a time. A semi blared by a half-hour later, by which time the sun had fully risen and Miss Parker's face had started to thaw. So used to the near-absolute quiet — nothing but the sound of their heels dragging against concrete — neither of them thought of jutting out a hitchhiker's thumb until the truck shrank to a fuzzy dot in their vision. When the next vehicle came, a light blue pick-up, they managed to be quick enough on the draw to flag the driver down.
Jarod chatted with the driver the entire way into town. Miss Parker looked out the window in silence, letting the conversation turn to gibberish in her ears. Her thoughts were still fifteen thousand feet up — or would they have landed by now? Would the cops have arrested Chabot and Marc already? Would they tell the authorities about the two people who had locked up their would-be murderers and parachuted out over the boundary between Oregon and Idaho? Most importantly: was Alex OK?
The kid had got under her skin. People, whenever they had occasion to watch Miss Parker interact with children, assumed she must hate kids. She didn't. As far as she was concerned they were just younger humans with poorly-informed opinions. Exploring her mother's work had given her a new, constantly developing soft spot for kids, but the real issue generally was that she didn't know what to do with them. She didn't know how to talk to them, didn't know how to make them happy. Alex, though. She looked at him, and it brought her right back to being a child. She could see what drives a child, and how it isn't all that different from what drives an adult, just without experience and a sense of proportion. As a little girl, just as now, she had only ever wanted to be taken at her word and validated in what was dear to her. She knew objectively that her attachment to the kid from the airport waiting room was a transparent case of trauma projection: the little girl with the murdered mother growing up to latch onto the little… kid with the murdered mother. Textbook case. That didn't make her worry any less.
A voice cut through her thoughts.
"A motel? It's not even check-out time yet, is it?" said the driver.
Jarod glanced over at Miss Parker.
"We need to get cleaned up," he said.
The motel was one storey of brick. The woman behind the desk was tired but friendly, and after looking between the two of them, offered them a key to a single room for the night. Jarod's hand jerked in an aborted attempt to take the key, then he froze, glanced at Miss Parker, and shook his head.
"Double room, please."
A slight raise of the eyebrows from the receptionist, before retrieving another key from the rack behind the desk. Jarod paid cash out of his carry-on, and the woman didn't even blink.
The requested two beds were covered with slippery comforters decorated with a paisley pattern. A small TV sat on top of a spindly TV stand which looked like it had been there since the late 60s. The bathroom was narrow. The room had the cloying scent of air freshener over human sweat. And after the day (and night, and day) she'd had, Miss Parker thought it looked a little like heaven.
First on the docket was a long, hot shower, of course. The water pressure was pathetic. Miss Parker didn't have it in her to care, as long as the water was hot. She wrinkled her nose as, afterwards, she pulled on the same ripe pants and blouse she'd been wearing since Sunday morning — a stairwell scrap, a rooftop escape, a helicopter crash, an interminable terminal wait, a sky-dive, a highway trek, a hitchhiked truck ride ago. Jarod gave her a sympathetic look as she exited the bathroom, steam pouring out around her like she was debuting at the WWE.
"I'd give you a spare change of clothes, but they'd fall off you," he said.
"Why offer, then?" she said, snappish and tired.
She only meant to shut her eyes for a moment, while she waited for Jarod to shower. They'd need to go out and find a way to get the information about the Yalient servers to the authorities. She couldn't fall asleep, not with wet hair soaking through the pillow under her head. She needed to get up, right… now. She blinked.
Miss Parker woke up sixteen hours later with the sensation of cotton filling her skull and crawling up her throat. She lifted her head and scowled at the dark sky through the blinds. The digital clock perched on a nightstand between the beds blinked 11:00PM, despite her insistence that she could not have lain her head down for more than fifteen minutes. Jarod sat on the other bed, hidden by the evening paper.
"Anything in there about Chabot?" she asked. Jarod bent one corner of the newspaper down, to meet her eye. "… Or about Alex?"
"Good morning. No, nothing yet," he said. "Sorry. You really care about him, don't you?"
Miss Parker grunted. "Good kid."
"Yeah, he is."
She listened without interest as Jarod detailed his tip call reporting the access details to the dirt on Chabot's servers. Mind wandering, she thought back to one of Alex's final pleas to Jarod not to leave. You don't know everything. At the time, she'd been annoyed enough at Jarod's wobbly Pretend performance that she'd only heard a validation of her own opinion, i.e. the know-it-all prick wasn't so omniscient after all. But with the benefit of a long night's sleep, she heard the words with a new perspective.
"What do you think the kid meant, you don't know everything?" she mused aloud, half to Jarod, half to test the words in the open air.
"I don't know what I don't know," said Jarod. "That's true of most of us."
Miss Parker snorted.
"Very Zen."
Bright and early the next morning, they headed to a nearby library to check the news once more before setting off, two birds eastward. Jarod had been dropping hints since landing in the wheat field that they were heading into wilderness, which was hardly surprising. All Miss Parker really knew about Wyoming was that it was national park territory.
Jarod rented an old Windows computer over by the kids' section. Miss Parker flipped through the morning paper without much hope — it was mostly local news.
They met back at the front entrance. Miss Parker knew from the moment she clapped eyes on Jarod's face that something was wrong. He looked… what was it? Tired?
No. Ashamed.
"What is it," she demanded without preamble. Jarod ushered her wordlessly out the door.
Under the beating sun outside, she wheeled on her travel companion.
"Jarod, what is it," she said again. Still, Jarod didn't speak. He pressed his lips together. "Jarod —"
"They arrested Yves," he said finally, running a hand down his face. Miss Parker blinked. The words didn't make sense.
"Yves?" she repeated. "That — what? No, he was one of the victims, Chabot was trying to silence him. What about Chabot? How the hell —"
"Christiane backed up Chabot and Marc's story that Yves was the one who had attempted to hijack the flight. Miss Parker, I'm sorry, it looks like Chabot is going to get away without a mark on her."
Chabot's half-inebriated, condescending smirk flashed through her mind's eye. She wanted to punch something, and as the only person in punching range, Jarod was looking eminently punchable.
"It's worse than that," said Miss Parker. "She'll look like the victim, no — she'll look like a survivor. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if the Yalient stock shoots up. She averted a plane crash, as far as the public knows. Why, why would Christiane do this? Chabot tried to murder her!"
Jarod looked everywhere but at Miss Parker.
"I may have an idea about that," he said.
"Spit it out."
The words left him reluctantly.
"The news item mentioned that 'loyal employee' Christiane Desbiens is a hard-working information technology specialist who, and I quote, 'brought to light a malicious hacking attempt to the Yalient servers late last year'."
It didn't have to mean anything. It could be referring to another, separate hacking attempt. It didn't have to have anything to do with Annick St-Denis. But it did, and it wasn't, and it did. Christiane had sold out her friend Annick, the most wonderful person in the world (according to her only child, which was the only opinion that mattered), to her mercurial boss. Said mercurial boss had had the culprit murdered for it. Miss Parker summoned an image of Christiane to her mind's eye: flyaway red hair, too-thin blouse overgrown with flowers, not altogether comfortable in heels but trying her best. Sycophant. Shoe-licker. Coward. Traitor.
"That's not all."
Miss Parker closed her eyes.
"What."
"Christiane has Alex. They gave her temporary custody, as she was a family friend."
Alex's plea to Jarod returned.
"You don't know everything," she whispered. "Damn it. Damn it. He knew. He knew his mother's friend sold her out. Could we —" She hardly dared to suggest it, but the thought of leaving the thing undone was painful. "We could catch up with them. I could catch up with them."
Jarod just looked at her. He didn't need to say it. No, they couldn't, she couldn't. She wouldn't be surprised if the Centre had already been in touch with all the key players. They wouldn't be able to con their way into Chabot's life, since she already knew their faces. Their word against hers wouldn't carry any weight, since they were fugitives and couldn't even prove they'd been on the plane at all.
She bit the inside of her cheek. She opened her mouth, stopped, opened again. A family of library patrons navigated around them, glaring passive-aggressively at the two people blocking the entrance. Jarod looked like a puppy being left home alone for the day, sad to the point of comedy. She wanted to smack the look off his face.
"Tell me, Jarod, have you ever messed a Pretend up this badly? I'm starting to wonder whether I just get to hear about the highlights because you brag about them louder."
"I —"
"You failed!" Her pitch broke from holding herself back from shouting. "You shat all over it from start to finish! We made it worse, that kid is worse off than when he met us, and he met us homeless and hanging out in an airport terminal, so that's saying a lot. It had to be this one, did it? The one I actually cared about?"
Jarod miscalculated and reached out with the intent to comfort. Miss Parker spun out of his reach and stalked off towards the street.
"Don't touch me," she spat, voice thick with disgust. "Christ, I need to get away from you. I'll — we leave for Margaret's, today. Can I count on you, at least, to get us some transport to Wyoming?"
"Yes," Jarod answered. A rationalization, an apology, a word of comfort flitted behind his eyes, but he appeared to think better of voicing each one.
"Good," said Miss Parker. She was quickly running of steam, her energy sapped by the grief of their failure. "Margaret's. I find out what she knows. Then we go our separate ways."
The car was a used Westfalia. Jarod paid in cash. The trip eastwards across Idaho was long and quiet and angry. Jarod said 'sorry' six times. Miss Parker thought of her promise of revenge to the kid in the bedazzled t-shirt and salmon-coloured sandals. Every time she did, she put off forgiveness for another day.
"I'm sorry, Miss Parker."
You failed Alex.
"… what he meant to you and I'm sorry…"
You failed Alex.
"Miss Parker?"
You failed Alex.
"I'm sorry."
I failed Alex.
