Unexpectedly, Milo - Matthew Dicks [125]
Twenty-three days after leaving Blackstone, Massachusetts, she arrived on the doorstep of Aunt Kaleigh and Uncle Owen. “I was tired and dirty and I had lost about fifteen pounds, but I remember seeing my aunt’s face in that doorway and knowing that she knew exactly why I was there. I didn’t have to say a word. She just took me in her arms and I cried and cried and cried. I cried for my mother, because I knew that I would probably never see her again, but mostly I cried out of happiness. I knew I would finally be safe.”
“You must have been one tough kid,” Milo said with genuine awe.
“You’d be surprised at how tough a father like mine can make someone. After fighting him off for four or five years, locking yourself in the bathroom and hiding under your bed and running away, you’d be tough too.”
Milo continued to be stunned at Emma’s willingness to confide in him about her relationship with her father. Though she knew that Milo was aware of her father’s criminal history and had accurately surmised the reason for her disappearance, she was willing and able to talk about him without hesitation or emotion, rather than leaving the dynamics of the relationship like some unmentioned elephant in the room, as he thought most would.
“So you remember Cassidy well?”
“Absolutely,” Emma said. “We were great friends back then. It was hard for me to be close to anyone with everything that was going on at home, but I was as close to Cassidy as I could be to anyone at that time. I don’t think I could’ve made it to Chisholm without her. Her and those maps. I’m surprised she didn’t end up becoming a geographer. Or a travel agent. It breaks my heart to think that she’s blamed herself for all these years.”
“She’ll be happy to see you,” Milo said, shamelessly envisioning himself as the hero of the reunion, the one who brought them together.
“I hope so.”
Karaoke struck Milo about an hour south of the nation’s capital. On top of bowling, the pressure seals, and the need to deflate the Honda’s tires, this demand hit him like a freight train. The impossibility to satisfy it (what were the chances of him finding a karaoke bar in Virginia or Maryland?), combined with its sheer intensity, made it almost too much for Milo to bear. He knew that once he arrived at the hotel, the demands of the jelly jars could be satisfied with ease, and even the tires could be deflated without much trouble (though inflating them would be another story entirely). But the bowling, he knew, would be problematic, and the karaoke would likely prove impossible. If so, that meant that these two dueling demands would continue to ring out in his head for the remainder of the trip, increasing his level of tension, elevating the pressure, and strengthening the vise on his mind, which would likely lead to still more demands on him. He was trapped in a vicious circle that would only become worse with each mile.
Fifteen minutes later, Emma told Milo that she needed to pee. Considering that it had become exceedingly difficult to drive with the physical pain that his demands were now causing, he was thrilled with the opportunity to exit the highway and attempt to satisfy at least one of them.
And that’s when—in the throes of opening his fifth jar under the sodium glow of a parking lot florescent at a Burger King just south of Washington, D.C., along Interstate 95—the unthinkable happened, the moment that Milo had been avoiding for almost his entire life: Emma had come back to the car, and he had been discovered. In the midst of satisfying a demand, one in a pile of demands that were beginning to tear him apart, Milo could not stop. As she opened the passenger door, Emma paused for a moment, staring at the four opened jars of Smucker’s grape jelly on her seat and the one currently clutched in Milo’s