Page 9 of The Fixer and the Fugitive

“Really?” Celeste asked.

“No, but it definitely helps to have something nice to look at during the long winters.”

Celeste snorted a laugh, causing Avery to smile and several people to turn their heads and gawk again. She smoothed her expression and picked up her straw wrapper as Avery wandered away, retrieving dirty dishes from the table next door.

She finished her meal in surprising silence. No one accosted her and, if her senses were to be believed, no one gawked at her. Avery stopped by a few times to check on her and refill her water. She was friendly, but not in a prying way. Celeste left her a good tip and began the long drive home.

It would be easy to zone out here, to become too comfortable with the long silent drive. Celeste smacked her cheek a couple of times to stay with it, to remain alert. In her previous line of work, complacency ended in disaster and often death. Situational awareness was something she could never lose touch with, even here in the middle of nowhere. Safety was an illusion. It was something her childhood taught her early and her career confirmed again and again. Nowhere was ever completely safe. She had to remain alert and on guard, even here in the boonies.

To help with brain fatigue she turned on the radio, grimacing when a country song blared. So far the only music she’d been able to find was country. It wasn’t that Celeste had particular tastes in music. Maybe she enjoyed country, she had no idea. She’d never been in one place long enough to listen to any one thing. But so far the twang grated on her nerves. She knew enough about the genre to understand not everyone who sang it hailed from Nashville, nor even the south. Wasn’t it sort of hypocritical to sing about the woes of rural American life whenyou were from Australia? Nonetheless it was country or nothing so she left it on, using it as a diversion against brain fog.

She arrived home, took out her gun, and swept the house. Everything felt normal when she opened the door, but she had learned not to ignore her routine in favor of her gut. Her life worked best when the two things went together, a balance between training and instinct. Things might feel okay, but she couldn’t be certain until she performed her nightly inspection, checking each room and closet for intruders.

Once that was completed, she sat on the couch and picked up her pen. So far the evenings had been the biggest source of angst in her new life. She had never watched television. When she was a child, it had belonged to whichever grownup was currently in charge. She had found other things to do in order to avoid said grownup. As an adult, she’d been too busy traveling the world, doing her job, to indulge in mindless entertainment. She had never been a reader, either. She’d actually tried, the first week of her retirement. She went to a store and bought an assortment of fiction books from the recommended display. She got as far as the first three pages with each. For some reason her brain wouldn’t calm down and engage. She’d found her mind wandering to places it didn’t want it to go. Somehow, in an effort to avoid all the things she didn’t want to remember, she had decided to consciously make herself remember. And so she started to journal.

At first she’d felt like an idiot, like one of those self-involved twenty somethings on social media who believed the entire world should be treated to their untested grand insights. The difference in this case was that she knew for certain she had zero grand insights. And she would rather die than have anyone read what she wrote. This was, to her, a way to try to understand all the ways her life had gone wrong, from the very beginning. Though only a few months in, she was already nearing the endof her third journal. Coincidentally she had reached third grade. She paused, pen held aloft.

Third grade was the year she met Sasha. They sat across from each other at the lunch table on day one. Celeste prepared to eat whatever free meal the school provided for kids like her. Up to that moment she believed everyone ate the same thing. And then Sasha opened her Minnie Mouse lunch box, removed a little metal tin, and began unearthing an assortment of the most beautiful food Celeste had ever seen. Fruit cut into the shape of stars. Cheese cut into little crescents. Homemade crackers cut into circles. On top of the food was a note.I love you to the moon and stars! Mom.Celeste knew what the note said because she stole it, stuffed it into her pocket, and took it out that night when she went to bed. She had stared at the note seemingly for hours, pondering. Had Sasha’s mother really made her that food? Was that a thing mothers did? She found no answers that night, but she tucked the note under her pillow, feeling a strange mix of yearning and anger. She wanted what Sasha had and felt angry over the lack.

That was the first inkling Celeste had that she was different from other kids. And it was the first time she began to resent them for the difference. In the beginning she and Sasha were friends. The girl was a source of fascination for Celeste in all the ways, from the clean, good smelling, and matching clothes to her hair that was always properly combed and arranged into some interesting updo. Heart braids for Valentine’s Day. Shamrock braids for St. Patrick’s. Their friendship was a glimpse into another world, one that felt like a fantasy. Sasha had her over a few times and Celeste couldn’t get over her awe. They ate supper together at a kitchen table. And her mothercooked.The family held hands and prayed before the meal began. Sasha had her own room with her own toys. Her clothes were in her closet. She had sheets on a bed with no bugs. Trash went into the trashcan.Their car didn’t make a rumbling noise, had no apparent rust. It always felt a bit like she’d stumbled onto the set of some movie and was merely paid to stand in the background and observe.

The friendship lasted until fifth grade. By that time anger had overtaken the awe. Celeste started her period when she was nine and enjoyed her status as the first of her friends to do so. She held it over them, she who had so little to uphold. That was around the time when boys began to take notice of her. She began to tease Sasha for her flat chest, for her continued love of playing baby dolls, for the fact that boys didn’t notice her at all. These encounters usually ended with Sasha in tears and Celeste in the hallway getting a lecture from the teacher. She remained smug, however, because smugness was all she had.

Eventually Sasha stopped eating lunch with her, stopped talking to her entirely. And then Celeste’s ninth grade “boyfriend” found out she’d been telling people about him and beat her up, insisting he would never have a girlfriend in fifth grade, that he’d been merely using her because she “put out.” All in all it had been a confusing time. But instead of seeking help, she leaned into the confusion, found another boyfriend, learned more ways to torment the other girls with her newfound notoriety.

Celeste stared into space a long time, pen aloft, thinking. Laying it all out this way made her see key moments where her life flew off the tracks. She saw all the ways someone might have intervened and saved her. What if a grownup had stepped in to protect her that summer before fifth grade? What if someone kept predatory boys away, informed Celeste that ten was way too soon to lose her virginity? Would she have listened? Would it have altered the course of her life in better ways? Or was she already too far gone at that point, too long without care, affection, and direction?

As ever when she finished writing, she was exhausted. Weary now, she tucked the pen and book back on the shelf, climbed the stairs, and fell into bed.

Chapter 7

The best part about the painful process of journaling her meager life was that it helped her sleep. Each night when she was finished, she practically fell into a coma, drained of all energy and thoughts. She slept hard, barely moving until morning when she woke feeling, if not optimistic, at least refreshed. The drawback was that she often woke disoriented with no idea where she was or whether it was day or night.

She did so on the night she wrote about third grade, woke with heart thumping, palms sweating, head pounding.

You are in Montana,she coached herself.It’s the middle of the night. Everything is fine.

Usually the reassurances were enough to make her take a few deep breaths and calm down. Sometimes, if she verified it was the middle of the night, she went back to sleep. But this time something was different. In Celeste’s world, different was always bad.

Cautiously, silently, she reached to the nightstand for her gun, palming it as she closed her eyes and attuned her sensesto the house around her. Something was off but she couldn’t yet discern what.

Squeak.

There. That. It was faint, but there was a tiny squeak downstairs. If she had a cat, she could easily attribute it to that. But since she was still too frightened to take on the responsibility of trying to nurture another life—especially when she was failing to nurture her own—it was definitely not an animal. Unless a bear broke in. When she started researching her future home, she read that bears sometimes broke into buildings or cars in search of food. A bear would make a lot of noise, wouldn’t it? They would scratch, paw, snort, sniff, growl, and stomp. Not faintly squeak, as if trying not to make any noise.

Satisfied that the noise went beyond mere paranoia, Celeste slipped out of bed and headed for the stairs, pausing every ten feet or so to reassess. The first thing she did when she moved in was walk up and down the stairs a few times to memorize which boards made noise. She avoided those now, tiptoeing her way down the stairs. Once at the base she paused again, cocking her head to listen. Someone was breathing. The sound should have been alarming because absolutely no one should be breathing inside her house. But it was instead reassuring. No professional would allow themselves to breathe so loud or noticeably. Maybe it was a wayward local who had a bit too much to drink and decided to allow curiosity to overcome common sense in their quest to glimpse the “new girl” as everyone in town called her. It had been so long since anyone referred to her as a girl, she decided to let it stand, secretly delighting in the fact that they clearly thought she was younger than she was. Ever since she turned thirty a few years ago, she’d started to feel her age a bit more.I’m still young,she assured herself, gripping her gun to her chest. Young enough to take on an intruder and win, for certain.

“You might as well show yourself. I know you’re here,” she announced, trying to sound stern in case it was a teenage local. That should be enough to flush them out or make them run away.

Instead nothing happened. The breathing remained in the same spot, not increasing or decreasing. No feet shuffled. No one leapt at her or fled in panic. And now she was getting annoyed. Journaling helped her fall asleep, but if she woke up like this, all hope was lost for regaining her rest. She would be awake all night, and then she’d be a grumpy mess tomorrow. And it was the intruder’s fault. Time to make them pay.

“You have about five seconds to make an appearance before I put a bullet in your brain,” she said, each word firing out of her like the threatened weapon.

“Don’t shoot,” a male voice said. It was at once smooth and mellow and raspy and that pinged on her radar for reasons she couldn’t yet discern.

“Give me one good reason,” she demanded.

He stepped into her line of view then, hands aloft in surrender. “Because I’ve already been shot,” he said, and then dropped into an unconscious heap on her floor.

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