One cold night in December, when I was not yet four years old, my mother woke me while it was still dark, pressing her face against my cheek and whispering, “We have to leave. Right away.”
I rolled off my mattress, stumbled blindly across our tiny apartment to pee, pulled on my jeans and sneakers, and followed her down the five flights of stairs without a word, walking on tiptoes so I didn’t wake the neighbors.
We stopped in the foyer. Outside, my father was already working under the streetlights, breath steaming through his beard as he chipped ice off the windshield and loaded our bags and boxes into the hatchback of a rusted blue station wagon.
I glanced up at my mom again. Under the bare bulb she looked pale, though her skin was still much darker than mine. Her hair, which she’d kept short and dyed red as part of her disguise, was finally starting to grow out, straight and dark, nearly black, down to her shoulders.
She stood still in the doorway, cradling my baby brother in one arm and holding my hand with the other, but her eyes kept flickering to the intersection—following each car that passed, tracing the shadows of the men outside the bodega by the corner, keeping a close eye on anything that moved.
My father whistled twice, and my mom led me out through the glass door into the cold air of the street and into the back seat of our car, arranging the baby on her lap, turning to see that I was settled, and then cranking the heat up as high as it could go to coax us both back to sleep.
You grow up and you start to see how much you don’t know about your own family….You begin to see your parents’ flaws and contradictions. You understand that not everything they told you could be true.
She nodded that we were ready. My father glanced back to see if anyone was following, winked at me in the rearview mirror, and swung our car onto Broadway, toward Interstate 80, heading west.
I was used to this routine. It wasn’t the first time we’d had to pack up all our things in the middle of the night and take off on another long cross-country drive. We ditched cars and apartments constantly, kept everything we owned in a few plastic milk crates by the door, and I carried my prized possessions in a backpack: a stack of comics, some crayons and paper, a couple of Star Wars action figures.
I liked to read comics while we drove—I couldn’t understand all the words yet, but I could at least look at the pictures—but that night, for some reason, my dad said it was too early to turn on the overhead lights; he couldn’t see through the glare on the windshield and had to watch for deer and hitchhikers by the side of the road. So the lights stayed off.
I lay back and looked out the window instead, the yellow lane markers swallowed up behind us, the tree line blurring over by the edge of the road, while my parents whispered to each other across the dark front seat of our car:
“Who should we call? Who’s going to meet us there?”
“They know where we’re headed now.”
“They don’t know where we are.”
The hum of the engine, the hiss of tires on asphalt, the warm air inside, and the constant sense of forward momentum made me feel like we were our own little world, sealed off from the outside—and if we just kept going, kept driving, no one would ever catch us.
It was the closest I ever came to feeling totally safe in my family.
But we had to stop eventually, for food and gas, to use the bathroom and to stretch our legs. So, the next morning, I found myself standing in a long line with my dad at a rest-stop Burger King, watching a group of kids my age roughhouse on the indoor playground of a Kids Club Fun Center, when a nice elderly couple started talking to me, just making conversation.
“Hey sweetheart,” the old man smiled down at me—I had shoulder-length blond hair at the time, and everyone always assumed I was a girl—“you all on a road trip?”
I nodded. I knew enough not to talk to strangers.
“Chicago?”
I nodded again.
“Visiting family? Or just on vacation?”
I looked up at my dad. He wasn’t paying attention now; he was busy ordering our food, and I felt like I had to say something, just to put an end to this awkward conversation.
“We’re going to Chicago,” I told them, “for my mom to turn herself in.”
I was half-distracted, watching the other kids in their gold paper crowns running around the Kid’s Club gym, hanging from the bright plastic monkey bars. But I noticed the woman was looking at me now more closely, a bit confused.
“How do you mean, hon?”
“We made a deal,” I tried again. “With the FBI. So I can go to school.”
This was so.mething I’d been told in passing, or overheard, without ever fully understanding what it meant, but as soon as I said it I knew—from the way the couple glanced at each other, and then over at my father’s back—that I’d made a terrible mistake.
