As they turned and resumed their hike toward her, she ducked away from the window. Exhaled in the quietest breath of her life. Here it was. Her eyes went to her backpack and duffel and shopping bag, sitting in a tidy bundle by the front door. Complete, ready to go.
The moment is now, Ammalie.
She turned to face the sliding glass door, all that green lush behind, the beach and ocean and path to freedom. Her escape route clear, rehearsed. But she’d made one mistake—she’d assumed access to the front door. They’d be there too soon. She bit her lip and considered her options.
The sliding glass door? The jump from the deck to the ground seemed so far. It was possible, even, that bones could be broken.
The living room window? Probably just on the verge of too small.
The bathroom? No, what good would locking herself inside do?
Hide in a closet? It had worked in Colorado! After all, people couldn’t just break into people’s homes, though, true, there was no working lock, there had never been a working lock. It was rusted away.
Fight, flight, freeze, or fawn?
Or face it?
Her eyes went again to the sliding glass door and the deck outside, hanging over the forest. Yes, that was best. A loud rapping sounded from the front door. She stood equidistant between the two doors and wondered in which direction her body would instinctually move. She even looked down at her hips, waiting for them to start some initial movement. Which is when the thought struck her: I am a person of interest. I am. a. person. of. interest.
An exhale of giddy delight escaped her lips. She had come so far. So very far. At the same time, the gravity of the situation registered. After this moment, everything would be different, no matter what she did next. So she closed her eyes to focus on her breath and to make a decision. She heard the crashing waves of the Tasman Sea, she heard the wind shift, the rain smack windows.
She picked up her bags. Put the backpack on her shoulders, a duffel in one hand, a shopping bag in the other. Then she put them back down. Right where they’d been, by the door.
She felt her resolve in her spine, and stood straight and strong. She felt the resolve in her gaze, steady and ready. She could still feel the play of a smile at the corner of her mouth. She knew now what she’d do. “Just a moment, please,” she yelled in the direction of the front door. “I need a drink of water.”
When she opened the door with one hand, holding the glass of water with the other, they looked nearly as surprised as she was. As she had suspected, it was not Richard and some friend, though she’d held out hope. It was the police, a man and a woman. The man looked past her, as if to ascertain that she was alone, sitting in the dark, and then, after some rustling and flipping of raincoats, they each produced a badge. “We’re trying to clear something up. Can you tell us your name, please?”
The question seemed to ricochet back and forth between them for several seconds, and meanwhile, the officers stepped, uninvited, into the home to get out of the rain. They stood just inside the door, drenched and dripping, the wind and rain whipping in until the woman turned around and, with some effort, shut the door, then leaned against it with a sigh of relief that reminded Ammalie of her own struggle to shut the door in the snowstorm of Arizona.
“Oh, hullo, cheers,” Ammalie said, and then in a quiet, trailing-off voice added, “I’m an artist. And I assume you are the police!” She took a long drink of water. Swallowed. Stood even straighter. “Ammalie Brinks.”
“And where are you from?”
“Chicago.”
“And you’re here on a visitor visa?”
“Yes.”
“May we see that visa and your passport?”
“Of course.” She went to her bags. So packed. So ready. Something she’d done every night, whether or not she’d wanted to, because that was called discipline. To be ready to go. She started unzipping and zipping things, pretended to look, though she knew exactly where her papers were. Zip, unzip, zip. She needed time to think, and they needed time to pant and recover themselves. Her eyes went to the back deck—the rickety dick, she could still hear Aroha calling it—but no. She probably could manage to rush past the police—they wouldn’t be expecting it—and run into the bush, but evading the police was a whole different matter altogether. Plus, they knew the bush and tracks much better than she ever could—this was their home. Their real home.
Finally, because she was out of time, she stood. Though the man had his dripping arm outstretched and was reaching for the papers, she handed them to the woman. Her fingers wouldn’t let go of them—of their own accord, they clutched, until the woman gave a sharp tug.
“Shackleton,” she said.
“Excuse me?” The woman huffed at her.
“You win,” Ammalie said, but not to the woman. To the universe. To her life. To herself. Then she added, “I did it,” and she meant it.
Yes, she had taken over someone else’s identity. But it was to form one of her own!
Yes, she had believed the best thing to do was to run from her life, but it was to find a place to stop.
She wanted to explain it all, but that was too complicated, so she stood quietly in the very long silence as the police examined her passport and the man went into the bedroom and was presumably looking around as he called something in. The woman stood in front of her, blocking the front door, arms crossed.
Now it strangely seemed as if Ammalie had all of time to think. Her last few months had been filled with lies, but it was so she could discover some truths. She had found freedom, and now she was about to go to jail. Out of nervousness or release or giddy joy, she didn’t know, she started to laugh. She turned to get her things, which now both officers were indicating she should do with nods of their heads. The laughter bloomed out of her mouth, like butterflies. She was not invisible after all.
She’d done it. Lived a life full of adventure. Explored the most interior regions of her heart, like any good explorer. She’d found passion and saved trees and creatures and herself. She could now die in peace. Not that she wanted to die anytime soon. But she was content—if that time came. And that was an excellent way to live.
The two officers looked worried now, and shared a glance which she knew meant We might be dealing with a crazy here. She thought they might handcuff her, but they only asked that she walk between them to their vehicle, parked down by the community center. They seemed disappointed in her, and cautious, and a bit sad, and resigned to the fact that Americans were strange. So as she walked in the cold rain, still hiccupping from her laughter, she felt the play of a smile at the corner of her lips as she turned to look at the gray shack one last time.
Refugia.
—
The station was a rectangular cinder-block building with just one main room, though she assumed there were some smaller rooms and holding areas farther back, because she heard a door clang and saw one man come out alongside an officer who walked him down a hallway. The man was joking with the officer—clearly they knew each other—and clearly, the officer was annoyed in such a way that Ammalie could tell these two had a long history. This was nothing like what she imagined America’s hustling-bustling police stations to be.
She was politely asked to sit in a chair, given a towel to dry off, and then a cup of hot tea. She put one hand on her necklace, running her fingertips over the greenstone. She watched an officer doing paperwork at a desk, the two that had arrested her conferring over in a corner, the rain sheeting down outside a window, and then her gaze repeated the same circle. She was left alone for a long time, apparently as the officers attended to some other business—the rain was causing some flooding and she overheard that a car had gone into the stream with the eels. Or perhaps they were doing a search on her. She stared at a photo of a family on a desk and tried to think of who had turned her in. Aroha? Richard? Was it the photos? Or had she simply been seen?
She put her hands on her head. Glory, glory. Her brain. Her breath. Her heart. If only they could slow down.
Eventually, the same two officers sat in front her, put a folder on a nearby desk, and sighed. They’d changed clothes but still had the look of people who had recently been swimming. “You’re not the jeweler that Nan was expecting,” the woman said. “That jeweler comes later and is not American. So. The question is, why are you here, living in Nan’s house? Nan who says she does not know you, by the way?”
Ammalie opened her mouth, closed it, and opened it, and then decided to…just tell the truth. She took a big breath in. She told of Vincent’s death, her son moving out, her loss of her job—the three main keys of her life gone!—and then of her need to move, to prove she could find new keys to a new life. Ticking them off on her fingers, she explained that she wanted to visit three places, one a place that she and her husband had been to together, and two—Arizona and here—that he had been to but she had not. She told them that he’d been here as a wwoofer in his early twenties, and she knew it had been the greatest trip of his life, and they’d meant to come back here together.
She left out the part about breaking in and the keys, but the rest of the story was true.
