Gus slips out of the bathroom. Pulls on her jeans, T-shirt, jacket, and ball cap. Lars is still snoring. She quietly packs her duffel bag, grabs her purse, and heads for the door. On her way out, she glances at Lars, his mouth hanging slack. She takes four hundred bucks from his wallet and eases out of the door of their motel room.
Hilda, the night clerk, stands in the small portico near the front office. Smoking a menthol.
“Where you off to, middle of the good God night, missy?”
Gus smiles.
“Can’t sleep. Thought I’d hit the all-night gym down the road.”
She lifts her duffel bag to back up her lie. Before Hilda can blink, Gus turns and strides down the street.
Two blocks over she hops in a cab at the taxi stand.
Twenty minutes later, she’s inside the bus terminal buying a ticket to Montreal.
Three hours later, she’s on a Greyhound due west.
And two hours after that, she’s standing in front of Central Station as the sun rises over downtown Ottawa.
* * *
The last time Augusta was headed to her hometown was when she was seventeen. She stood in the school office as papers were signed. Her bags next to her. She’d graduated. Miss Quinte, the assistant to the headmistress, drove her across town and dropped her at the St. Catharines train station. Gus felt like an inmate being released from prison. She’d served her sentence and now she was being shipped back to Ottawa. Back home. To Rose and Miss Santos. Gus was pretty sure the school had neglected to warn either of them of her imminent arrival, so after an hour and thirty-three minutes on the train, Gus stepped onto the busy platform. She was supposed to transfer to an eastbound train to Ottawa. But instead, Gus chucked her ticket in the nearest garbage bin and walked through the station’s great hall, out the front doors, and into the glaring glass towers of Toronto. Anywhere seemed better than going backward.
Toronto turned out to be a whole lot bigger than St. Catharines and Ottawa put together. It smelled like seaweed and tar. The sky was packed so tight with high-rises Gus couldn’t see the clouds. Intersections were a din of honking horns and crowds hurrying across. It was a river. A rushing river of people bent over their phones floating past toothless hags curled in sleeping bags on the sidewalk.
Gus was young and naïve. She made eye contact with one bearded lady who chased her two city blocks before getting distracted by something in a sewer grate. She bought convenience store sandwiches and placed them in open palms. She tossed coins into cardboard houses and smiled at hobos squatting in doorways. One hobo threw the tuna sandwich back at her and spit in her direction.
She didn’t know the rules yet, but she was about to learn them.
2
Lars
SHE MET LARS IN A LAUNDROMAT OFF DANFORTH. GUS HAD found a job as a dishwasher at Lola Eata, a greasy spoon one block north of the room she rented for $60 a week. Dirt cheap because it was right above a fishmonger. The day she met him, she reeked of french fry grease and cod. The smell clung to her long red hair, her jean jacket, her bedsheets, no matter how much she washed them.
Lars said he liked how she smelled. Told her she was beautiful. Touched her hair. Said it was the color of apricots. He had a flat nose, like it had been broken a few times. Dark blue eyes and a brown mop of hair that he slicked back. Reminded her of James Dean from those old movies she used to watch with her mom.
Lars was the first person to give her the time of day since she stepped onto the platform at Union Station. He offered her a job and she quit the dish pit.
He was in imports and exports. The sales and distribution end of things, he told her. He seemed worldly, but not worldly like her history teacher at boarding school. Not book worldly. Not nose-in-the-air worldly. Lars was street worldly. He taught Gus which guy in a street-corner huddle was the runner and how to spot a pickpocket about to skin the poke. There was shady stuff going on under the upper crust of life and Lars peeled back the layers and showed her what was underneath.
Gus didn’t ask what he was distributing. She caught on pretty quick. Black-market painkillers, tobacco, cell phones, drugs. She told herself she didn’t care. Lars taught her how to drive and how to hold a gun. He put his hand on the small of her back like he was showing her off when his buddies were around. He introduced her as his girlfriend and he looked her in the eye when she spoke.
At least he did in the beginning.
Augusta moved into his apartment two weeks after they met. Four days later he got into a fight with the super, busted the guy’s nose, and they got evicted. She shoved everything she owned back into her duffel bag, and a long stretch of crashing in motel after motel began. Together, they worked the east to west corridor of the 401 from Cornwall to Brockville to Trenton. Cornwall was close to the border and the bridge to the Mohawk casino. The perfect spot for his drive-through business. Lars moved trunkloads of contraband tobacco and black-market phones in and out of the States by way of the casino.
Easy money. Just how Lars liked it.
He was Gus’s first boyfriend. Sometimes he surprised her with chocolate rose bouquets. Other times he slapped her face. He was mean and handsome, sweet and selfish. But mostly Lars was methodical. He obsessed over being organized. He timetabled her days down to the minute. Picked out her clothes and ordered her meals when waitresses asked what she wanted.
Gus never told Lars about her parents or that they were both dead. Said they lived in Vancouver and she hadn’t spoken to them in years. It was the one piece of herself she kept all to herself. The rest he could have. Her days. Her hair. Her diet. Her body.
Most mornings before they got out of bed he’d slide on top of her. Same clammy skin, same stale breath, same feeling of homesickness washing over her. Only she had no home to feel sick for, so it felt worse. Like he was opening a wound that nothing could fill. Gus clung to him. He was all she had. He made her feel like she was a part of something. And the adrenaline rush of breaking the law made her feel alive.
This world was the furthest thing from prep school she could imagine and Lars was a sharp edge. The more she leaned on him, the more deeply he cut her. And the pain kept Gus fully on alert. Fully with him. Fully in the present.
Fuck the past.
Gus turned eighteen that first summer with Lars. And as much as she tried to shut out the past, she couldn’t help glimpsing the future in the rainy car windshield. A not-so-distant future where she was still running and stealing and dealing at twenty-five. Losing herself in booze and pills at thirty. Jail at forty. Mere inches from sitting in a gutter tossing tuna sandwiches back at do-gooders at fifty.
Shannon would have hated Lars. Been ashamed of her little girl for jumping into a fucked-up life with a fucked-up guy in the driver’s seat. One year spilled into two. And over the course of those two years, Gus grew less careful. Did less shoulder checking and more pedal-to-the-metal risk-taking. Almost daring the cops to come after her. She got stupid and lazy about her freedom and her future. One time she was pulled over for speeding and almost popped the trunk so the cop would find the cases of contraband cigarettes and arrest her. Almost. But she couldn’t do it. Not to her parents. Couldn’t bring herself to tarnish their good names. Their deep disappointment lurked in her DNA. An ache so profound, she felt it pulsing through her marrow. Always there. Throbbing. Never letting her forget who they were. That they were good. That they were law-abiding. That they were police officers. So she simply smiled and got a slap on the wrist. The highway patrolman liked her red hair.