THE BANDIT QUEEN - Chapter 2 continued

After a few judicious inquiries, Eden decided she would never hear the whole story of Deakin’s trip to California and his search for his “real” parents. The most he let slip were a few references to names and places in Los Angeles. He’d evidently spent the last eighteen months trying to stay alive while he searched for the two unknown people named on his birth certificate.
Eden pulled into a small hotel on the outskirts of Phoenix and rented a room for the two of them. She ushered Deakin inside the room and straight into the shower. Then she yelled through the door that she’d be back soon with pizza. When she stepped through the door with the pizza box in her hand, she stepped into total darkness. There were no sounds inside the room, just the tinny echoes of a cheap television from the room next door. She let the door close behind her and reached her hand back to click the lock. Then she stood still and let the silence settle around her. Her breathing sounded loud in her ears so she quietened it to a lower level. Then the sound of another human being drew her attention to the far side of the room.
“May I turn on the light, Deakin? This pizza is pretty hot.”
The boy standing in the darkest corner of the room took in a shaky breath and flipped on the light next to the bed. Eden pretended she hadn’t seen the tracks of tears on his cheeks and set the food on the small desk. Then she set a sack down next to it. Within seconds Deakin had moved around the bed and was peering into the brown paper sack. He pulled out several bottles of orange juice, a sack of cookies, granola bars, a toothbrush, and a newspaper. He quickly twisted the top off a bottle of juice and drank half the contents. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and asked,
“What kind of pizza did you get? Please tell me you didn’t get one with anchovies on it!”
“Calm down, calm down. Anchovies are not very high on my list of favorites. I picked pepperoni and cheese as the safest choice.” She picked up a slice of pizza and leaned against the head of the bed to eat. Deakin sat in the one chair and stuffed pizza in his mouth almost faster than he could chew. Eden snagged two more slices before it all disappeared and opened a bottle of juice to drink.
“I was afraid you wouldn’t come back.” Deakin smiled through a mouth full of pepperoni. “I thought you might have called the police or the milk carton people.” He tipped his head to the side and considered his last statement. Then he smiled again at Eden and said, fairly, “I didn’t really, deep down, think you’d called the police but you’d been gone so long I began worrying. That’s when the bad thoughts come in, you know.”
Eden watched him in the mirror over the desk and felt the weight of her years. She had no idea how this boy had stayed so innocent. In the two years she’d been living alone and going to college, she’d found herself becoming cynical and sarcastic. Deakin had lived through much worse and still could smile at himself and trust other people. She began her questioning again.
“Why are we going to Dallas? Who are we going to see there? Do you want to see your pretend family?”
Deakin smiled at her choice of words and swallowed his mouthful of pizza. The farther they drove from Los Angeles, the lighter his mood became. “I got some leads from the Internet. I traced some of my father’s family to a small town outside of Dallas. I’m going to see them and find out what they know about my father. My mother came from Russia, I think. I’ve sent out several probes for information about her but it’s pretty hard to get information out of Eastern Europe. It’s not that there aren’t people who will help. It’s more like the breakup of the Soviet Union left big gaps in governments.”
Eden smiled at his knowledge of Eastern European politics but then immediately gave him the benefit of the doubt. She wiped the grease from the pizza off her hands and reached under the bed for her backpack. She pulled out her laptop and turned it on. Then she slid in her cell phone card and logged on to the Internet. She raised her eyes and met Deakin’s stare in the mirror. He quickly turned in his chair and almost jumped onto the foot of the bed.
“You didn’t tell me you had a laptop. Are you logging on?” Then he looked around the room and said, “We should have stayed at a motel with online connections. I really need to check my mail and let some people know I’m still alive. All that is going to lay some pretty heavy charges on your cell phone bill.”
He reached for the laptop but Eden kept it on her lap until she’d checked her own mail and then sent some reassuring messages to some of her friends: a sorta boyfriend who was supposed to take her to a concert the next night, her supervisor at the bookstore, her best friend at college, and one of her professors who’d taken an interest in her. Actually, he’d taken entirely too much interest but Eden thought she ought to tell him why she was skipping his class. At the very last, she sent a message to her younger brother and asked him to pass it on to her parents. Duty done, she handed the computer to Deakin and watched his fingers fly over the keyboard. He would type for several minutes and then stare at the screen while he snapped his fingers, faster and faster until it was time to type some more. Eden decided his mind moved so fast his fingers were always minutes behind and the download time for his answers seemed to drive him crazy. The slower the download time, the faster his fingers snapped. Eden finally had enough and pushed him slowly off the bed onto the floor. Then she crawled under the covers and fell into a deep sleep.
When the morning sun peeked through an opening in the curtains, Eden stretched her arms above her head and threw the covers off her body. She looked quickly around the room as she ran to the bathroom. When she reentered the room, she stepped quietly to the other side of the bed and found Deakin curled up on the floor sound asleep. He’d used the bedspread as a sleeping bag and her backpack as a pillow. Her laptop sat on the small table, open and waiting for Deakin’s next assault on the world of information. She exchanged a pillow for her backpack and took it to the bathroom with her. Deakin was still sleeping after her shower and she quietly left the room to scout for breakfast. She checked out at the same time and paid with cash. An hour later, the two of them were heading east towards Texas.