We head down a little ladder. She gives me a puzzle and asks me to stay here a minute. She’ll be right back.
But something in her tone worries me. I feel funny inside, a little buzz in my belly like something is wrong.
She heads back up and through the door. I start on the puzzle, but the boat makes a turn and we must be speeding up, because the pieces slide off the table.
The motor roars. My anxiety rises, wondering why we’re in a hurry. I creep up the ladder and push on the door, peering out to see if I can spot Mom.
Nobody is on deck. I lift it a little more and look around toward the front cabin. My dad and my mom are gesturing at each other. They look upset. My dad is holding something. I can’t make out what it is. Mom takes it from him, and then I know.
It’s a gun.
A gun!
I drop the hatch and scramble back down the ladder.
I never remember feeling more afraid than at that moment.
I crawl onto a beanbag chair and curl up in a ball, shaking and trying not to cry.
Eventually my mom comes down again. The boat slows down. She calmly picks up the puzzle pieces and starts arranging them. She asks me if I’m tired.
I tell her I’m not and get up to help with the puzzle. I don’t ask about the gun, because then she’ll know I disobeyed her and went up the ladder. But the fear remains.
Lying in bed next to Jax, I swallow hard. I know the incident doesn’t have to mean anything. It could point to them being Vigilantes, and that’s why I ended up at a safe house. Or it could just be an element of who they were, a part I didn’t get a chance to know. Maybe they were just afraid of a boat coming at them too suddenly.
But in my heart, I start to believe something I’ve held so tightly that I haven’t faced it until now. Jax’s world is where I came from. I didn’t get old enough to be told. And my aunt — if she really was my aunt — didn’t want me involved.
I mentally flip through the photo albums from my house. Were there pictures of my mother and my aunt together?
Yes, I can remember one standing next to each other by a boat. A few others at parties.
But I have nothing of the two of them together as children. And nothing of my grandparents. I never knew them. We didn’t have pictures.
Suddenly I find it hard to believe that all four of my grandparents are dead. I saw my parents in their coffins. I know they are gone.
But I never knew any of my grandparents. They died before I was born, or so I was told.
Something isn’t right here. That’s too much death. This doesn’t happen to normal families.
I want to wake Jax up, get him to look up my parents’ parents. I don’t know if he feels the rising tension in me, but his eyes open. He’s awake instantly, sitting up, scanning the room. “What is it?” he asks. “Did you hear something?”
I put my hand on his arm. “No. I was just thinking.”
He relaxes back down. “What about?”
“I remembered something about my parents. On our boat. With a gun.”
He draws me in close. “So you’re starting to think they weren’t as ordinary as you have always believed?”
“Can we look them up? Or my grandparents? Why don’t I have any grandparents? Or pictures of my family when they were children? I never really thought about it, assuming the images were lost when my parents died and I moved to my aunt’s. But now, I wonder.”
“Your information is locked up tight,” he says. “But I can try.”
I lay my head on his shoulder. “Thank you,” I tell him. Emotioncourses through me. I know we’re in terrible danger and that sometime later today, we’ll have to go to Washington and face everything. We might not survive it. Or we might get separated and I won’t even know if Jax is killed.
I might never see him again, nor be told what happened.
Like with my family.
