Episode 83: Camping (Mim)

Mim Whitaker wasn’t the kind of girl that was rattled by the comings and goings of life, but this time there was a bit too much going for her to  feel anything but trapped inside an science fiction movie.

When she had pulled up to her family’s land after work she expected to go inside and have a nice big bowl of soup before going out to the yard to water and feed the animals.

Their family owned a farm of big cats. A black leopard, two tigers, and two cheetahs. Aside from the leopard, they were breeding pairs rescued from a circus gone wrong. Her dad had made sure they had a home with plenty of land.

Today when she arrived home, there was nothing but a few seedling trees and a field of overgrown weeds that hadn’t been there when she left in the morning.

Her mind felt solid and she didn’t have the shakes. It was just gone, erased.  

Then Liam Tilly had shown up and had remembered her. It was one of the butterflies consume you moments, and it had only built over the afternoon while they tried to sort the mess out.

She assumed mistakes in movies were a good place to anchor her behavior. That meant she had to be suspicious of everyone, except Liam. If she hadn’t known him all her life she would have been suspicious of him, but he was real and genuine.

She tried to assess it on a level that wasn’t attracted to him. She’d had it bad for him for years but he’d gone off and had a kid, gotten married, and then lost them both.

She had the sort of feelings you kept to yourself, but he was helping her out and she wasn’t going to turn him away when she was in need.

Selmy, the cop down in Finleyville, had said she was a wanted person, after saying he didn’t know who she was.

It gave her chills thinking Selmy was doing wrong by her family. Liam had agreed to run away with her, for the time, and hide until they had a plan.

They were going to end up in a mental hospital at the rate they were going. She didn’t believe in conspiracy theories or any of that government stuff, but here she was running from.the police because her house had up and decided it didn’t exist after all.

“I can’t thank you enough for staying with me,” Mim said to Liam.

“Not a problem, and my mom’s happy too,” he said. She loved the way he talked, not as scrappy as most of the boys in town. There was a melody to his voice that made her melt when she caught him singing.

Her dad always hired him for jobs he needed done around the farm – everyone else was too afraid of the cats. She’d spent the past few years sneaking peeks at him working on fences and buildings in the sun, with his short, wavy, brown hair and foggy blue eyes and amazing biceps that wanted him to take his shirt off as much as she did.

And here he was, camping with a single tent so they could pretend to date.

She wanted to ask him why they couldn’t just get rid of the pretend and date, but if she had gone crazy there wasn’t much of a difference anyway.

“What did she say about the girl.thing?” Mim asked.

He had used her name, just to see if his mom remembered. She didn’t.

Even texting Jigsby, Clarence, Rose, Ember, and Raelyn had been useless. No one knew who she was, except Liam. He  knew because he had come up to the house and watched it vanish.

“The phrase ‘about time’ came up,” he told her.

She had no idea how to joke about it when he had been single for over a year now, since his wife and baby boy died in a bombing.

At least catastrophes were good for Liam’s bank account – something that still existed for Mim. After the.bombing, some rock band had given him money, because they thought money would ease the pain or something. it didn’t make any sense to her. What he needed was hard work, good food, and time.

Now that it was her facing some sort of guilt over what she might be doing to his life, she had given him most of her family’s money, in case Selmy tried to take the account over. She wanted to thank him and to make sure it was safe and to make sure she could pay her own way.

It was almost the same, in some ways, except it wasn’t his living that he seemed to be losing, just every other element of his life.

Dwelling wasn’t doing them any good. If her house had vanished – no bombing or anything like that, her parents, two sisters, brother, and the cats were just somewhere else.

Things didn’t just cease to exist. there was a balance to their energy output and she was standing there so that balance had to have been kept.

She looked over at Liam, and she tried to say something, but she didn’t know what to say.

He had suggested the beach, even though he had said he loved rocks. She would have thought if he loved rocks so much he would have wanted to go to the Grand Canyon.

They finished the tent, and she went to the trunk to get out the sleeping bags and pillows.

“So you secretly like geology?” she asked. “I knew you liked being outdoors.”

“And you secretly like chemistry,” he replied.

Her stomach did one of those flips it did all the time around him, and she tried not to get too lost in his eyes or his jawline covered in the day’s stubble.

“I like working at your mom’s shop,” she replied. “And making new creams and stuff up. I’ve only made a couple, but if I went to school…”

She didn’t even exist anymore, except as a criminal a town over.

“Not that it matters, since I don’t exist,” she finished.

“Can’t arrest someone who doesn’t exist,” he said.

“Unless you’re Selmy,” she replied. He would do whatever he wanted and she bet was involved in this mess.

“What are we going to do after this? I can’t camp forever.”

“Well, last time I needed a fake identity it was pretty easy so we should be good.”

She laughed, “When you were seventeen and wanted to get a drink?”

He laughed too, his smile spread in the sort of grin that made one side of his mouth stretch a little higher and her wish she knew how to come off as desirable instead of like a girl pinning away.

“When I was seventeen and wanted to get a drink, Evan Dix and I would steal your dad’s beer and go drink behind your barn,” he joked.

“You know he knew about it right? he used to say to my mom, ‘let me just leave these beers out so they won’t go crawling in my liquor cabinet,’ and she just shook her head and made sure you had some food to go with it.”

He laughed again, and she busied herself with making sure the car was locked, even though it seemed like a useless thing to do when they would be sleeping outside.

“Your dad’s decent. Your mom too. We’ll figure out where they are,” he promised.

Mim looked up at the sky. There were thousands of stars visible from her farm, but here there were far fewer. still, she liked thinking that with so much space there was a reasonable explanation. She was dangling by the thread of that hope, worried she’d never see them again.

“They’re out there,” she said, for herself. “If there’s a way they got there – we’ll get there, too.”

Liam nodded his head.

Then they were both quiet.

“Walk on the beach at sunset?” he asked. “Pretty sure people like doing that.”

Mim looked at him. She was spending the night with Liam and going on a walk on the beach with Liam and sharing a tent… with Liam.

Her family was missing. She couldn’t even begin to think of that and what it meant. They weren’t exactly in danger that she knew of. Her dad was an honest man that hadn’t ever done anything suspicious.

She offered her hand to Liam, “Pretty sure people like doing this too.”

Her cheeks felt prickly and her stomach tossed itself. His offer was innocent, she was just thinking of all the together things and had made an assumption.“If we’re going to sell the couples idea,” she added.

Liam took her hand, and their fingers fell into a laced pattern. They set off down toward the sandy shoreline. No one was there, walking with them. It was the middle of the week and schools were just getting out.

Liam led them to the edge of the water, where they both took their shoes off and carried them in their free hands. “My dad loved the ocean,” he said.

“What about you?” Mim asked.

He stopped walking and they both faced the water, their hands still laced together. The sun was low on the horizon behind them. The sky was pinks and greys and the waves lapped at their feet.

“Seems nice. You like it?”

“I do,” Mim replied. “Even with everything else going on, it’s nice. Better than driving for two days.”

Between his geology confession and the way the day was going, she had expected the trip to turn into a cross country expedition out to the Grand Canyon. She told him so.

“Want to go there next?” he asked.

“If you have time,” she replied. She didn’t want him to give up his entire life for her; he was already at risk of losing his job. Selmy might even get him in trouble as it was.

She didn’t know how to get herself situated without him. She didn’t exist as far as anyone else knew. He was her only connection to anything.

“You do owe me a few thousand dollars worth of your time,” she joked.

It was an old trick her dad did – joking about hard things. If she joked, Liam might not realise how vulnerable and scared she felt. She didn’t want to need him, but she did.

She also worried that if he didn’t stick around and remind her that she wasn’t going crazy, she would end up checking herself into a mental hospital for an evaluation.

“Yeah?” he replied. He was looking at her, and she tried to meet his eyes. It took a moment, but he seemed to know to wait.

“And what do you want me to do with that time?” he finished.

“I think we should drive,” Mim said. “Anywhere and everywhere.”

“Grand canyon, the jungle, the moon. Anywhere else?” he asked.

She laughed.

They were walking again, and they talked about everywhere within a week’s drive they both wanted to go. By the time they made it back to their campsite, they had a whole list of places they were going to go to.

“So we’re going to do all that, and use the money you gave me to hire someone to figure this out. There’s this guy, he lost people in the bombing too. I bet he could find them.”

She wanted to ask him what he was thinking, and why it sounded an awful lot like he was reshaping his entire life around her crisis.

They were in it together though, so she didn’t ask. Instead, she just suggested the find the guy first.

He was out west, living in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, so they would go down through the Grand Canyon – and everything else along the way – and then they would head back up to find the guy – Greg.

“No hotels,” Liam insisted.

Mim smiled; she wasn’t the only one succumbing to the conspiracy fears.

“I can sleep outside if you want,” he added.

Mim looked at the tent. There were only a few people in the whole world she trusted to sleep next to her, plus she didn’t even have a lock for the tent. She wanted him nearby, not because she felt warm toward him, but because if they were going to be a team they were going to have to be comfortable with each other. They were family now, the kind of family that pulled together when things went wrong.

Mim insisted he stay with her, then she got changed into some clothes they had picked up and brought out the bag of marshmallows and graham crackers and chocolate. It wasn’t the healthiest dinner, but it was comforting on a night like that.

They talked for hours, just the two of them and the stars and the campsite.

Finally, she looked at him, her chest aching from laughing so much, and her mind almost void of the worry that had brought them there.

“You staying up?” she asked.

“Are you going to bed?”

“I am.”

Liam stood and tossed some water onto the fire, “I should sleep too, if we’re driving across the country tomorrow.”

Mim smiled; they were doing this. They were going to run from Selmy and see the country and find the guy that might be able to help them.

Her family was out there – she knew they had to be, somewhere. They would find her family; but in the meantime, her family was tough like her.

They both crawled into the tent, which was new for Mim. She trusted Liam, though.

“At least you don’t have to worry about me using any cheap ‘keeping warm’ lines on you,” he said as he got comfortable on top of his sleeping bag.

He was thinking of pick-up lines?

“No?” she replied. On the one hand it was hot, on the other hand he was hot.

On the other hand she wanted to know why was thinking of pick-up lines.

“I think if you got any hotter you’d catch fire,” he joked.

“Thats a good one,” she replied as she tamed the storm of hope inside her.

“You got any?” he asked.

Her heart skipped several beats as it fluttered away with her mind. Lines… she didn’t have any lines.

She had a joke, about the farm.

“It’s too bad you never got around to making that fence,” she said, hoping he would take the bait.

“Why’s that?”

She blushed as she talked, “Because I can’t contain myself around you.”

He laughed, then his eyes met hers, “Maybe I did it on purpose.”

She laughed, and then she got caught in his eyes and his eyebrows that softened the ridges that jutted out beneath them. Everything about his face was a balance between edges and soft and she could imagine the taste of his lips.

Mim turned to her back and focused on the pitch of the tent. There were urges – to touch his arm or hand or waist, to kiss him, but this was Liam. Liam, the man who had lost his wife and son, Liam the man she knew deserved to be given the opportunity to take the lead, to set the pace.

“Good night, Liam,” she said. Then, because she couldn’t help it, she added, “Don’t lose your Mim-ories in your sleep.”

He laughed, which faded into a smile, “Good night.”

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