Whether it was the compulsion to discover the secrets of my past, or the misbegotten sense of finally taking back control of my own life, I felt at first like rolling down the windows and bursting into song. “My Way,” or something of the like, seemed appropriate.
Oddly enough, it was the closing in of rush-hour traffic that derailed my euphoria, scrambling the impulses in my mind like one of the Russian trawlers hacking our radio signals, attempting to send a perfectly good launch and all the hopes attached to it plunging into the sea. I felt the chill of the water, cold, unavoidable, abrupt. I couldn’t abscond with someone’s child, a minor, without permission. A teenage girl, no less. If this boy, this DeRon, were to continue with these ridiculous accusations of his, this trip would only add fuel to the fire, proof that I was up to something inappropriate with a young girl. Leaving at this time of day, we’d have no choice but to stay overnight. Overnight in a strange town, the two of us.
The idea was appalling. Appallingly improper.
“It’s time to go back,” I said, after considering the words for a moment. Even so, they tasted bitter, a disappointment. “We cannot just leave on a trip without permission, especially with your mother and . . . what’s-his-name in the hospital.” While I’d packed my bag, Epiphany had called the hospital and spoken with her mother’s boyfriend or husband, Ross or Russ, something like that. Epiphany’s mother was sleeping off a dose of pain medication, her companion being in somewhat better shape. Epiphany had told him nothing of our trip, of course, but she had managed to ascertain that it would be early next week before arrangements could be made for the wrecked vehicle and trailer. They hoped to return home on Tuesday. Nonetheless, this trip was a foolish idea, and the only responsible thing would be to end it before it went any further.
“I knew you’d say that.” Epiphany’s voice was infused with frustration and disappointment. “I knew you’d try to chicken out.”
I was insulted at first, but then I pointed out to myself that she was only a child. It was easy to forget that fact, as she was intelligent and resourceful. She was, however, a sixteen-year-old girl. I should have reminded myself of that fact at the outset. To her, this was a grand adventure. She could not possibly anticipate all the potential repercussions. “I am not chickening out. I’m being practical.” Practicality was my strong suit, after all. Had I not spent my life considering projects analytically, developing contingency plans, calculating everything that could go wrong? Careful forethought was the difference between success and failure, in terms of engineering. A lack of forethought could produce disaster.
“Turn the car around.” I scouted for an off-ramp as we limped along in traffic. “Take this next exit and make a U-turn under the highway.”
Epiphany’s neck stiffened, her head angling away from me. That posture I knew well by now. The next words from her mouth would not be,
Yes, sir.
“Huh-uh.”
“Epiphany, now, you listen here.” This would be war, of course. The girl was nothing if not stubborn.
“No. We’re going. We’re already gone.” In truth, we weren’t. We were stuck in traffic less than twenty miles from home. The highway was moving well in the opposite direction. We could be back at my house in less than half an hour.
The thought was heavy, confining, a rubber raincoat on a sunny day. “Turn around, I said.”
“No.”
“This is
my
car.” I smacked a palm against the dash, but she only gripped the steering wheel more tightly, her reaction minimal.
“Well, then, you’re getting kidnapped.” Her chin bobbed back and forth, lending punctuation to the words, defying my challenge. “If we get caught later, that’s what I’ll tell everybody. It was my idea. I made you do it.”
“Nobody would believe it.” I considered reaching for the steering wheel, but in the middle of rush-hour traffic, with an inexperienced driver, it seemed a bad idea. A fine sheen of sweat had broken over her skin as semitrucks squeezed close on either side of us, walling us in. Her gaze held fast to the window, her eyes twitching from one lane to another, as if at any moment she expected us to be obliterated. She was frightened half out of her mind, yet she wouldn’t give in.
In truth, I shouldn’t have been stirring her up. I might stir the two of us right into an accident, and then our problems would go from bad to worse. I imagined the police coming to the scene, discovering me with a young girl to whom I was not related, with computer equipment and suitcases in the back. They’d think I was some sort of deviant, a child pornographer like the ones reported about on television. “Epiphany,” I said more gently, “this is madness. It’s insanity.”
She lifted a hand from the steering wheel long enough to swipe the back of a wrist across her brow and tuck spirals of thick, dark hair behind her ear. For a moment, I thought she wouldn’t answer at all. Perhaps this was to be a silent kidnapping now. Then she gripped the steering wheel again, the set of her jaw hard, resolute. “They said the
Surveyor
would sink under the moon dust, but it didn’t, did it?”
Her point dawned in my mind like the earth rising slowly, large and blue, over the lunar surface. Only impossible journeys achieve the impossible.
I felt myself acquiescing, giving in, against all good sense. “True enough.” Caution began to fall away as we worked a path through the traffic, creeping toward the unknown like a rocket moving toward the launchpad on crawlers, the progress so slow it could barely be seen with the naked eye. But beneath what could be seen, there was an anticipation of fire, speed, discovery. One last journey into the unknown. One last mission impossible in my life.
Beside me, my copilot allowed a self-satisfied smirk. She’d won, of course, and she was delighted. “Don’t worry, J. Norm. I’ll take care of you.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.” I rested my head against the seat back. “Kidnapping is illegal, you know.” My eyes fell closed just as her smirk became a genuine smile.
My mind drifted away to visions of Camelot, but slowly Camelot became another place, a space deeper within me, the memories in light and shadow, like a forest floor with sunbeams filtering through here and there, burning off the murk. I was on a wide front porch with tall white pillars. Cecile sat on the porch swing, balancing the baby on her knee as she helped Emma, the quiet one, to weave a chain of dandelions and daisies. Nearby, Erin created a rhythmic
tap
,
tap
,
tap
with her skipping rope at the top of the steps, while Johnny rode a squatty metal baby scooter to the gate and back along the front walk. Seeds with feathery white sails tumbled from Emma’s gathering of flowers and slid across the porch, swirling in the whip of air from Erin’s rope, then sailing away. I watched the lacy parachutes travel, rising slowly at first, then launching toward faraway places, at the mercy of wind and water. I yearned to follow those seeds, to fly away from that house and the terrible things that were happening there. Watching the girls run and play, I felt envy, then sadness.
They’ll be next
, I thought.
Their time will come.
My body ached in so many places, but the bruises on my soul yielded a deeper pain.
There were burns of some sort on my wrists, red and angry and new. Even though it was summer, I wore long sleeves to cover them. Rubbing the fabric that hid the wounds, I glared through the screen door, hated the woman upstairs in her gauzy white nightgown. I hated her because she didn’t stop it from happening.
I hated her, and yet I wanted her love. . . .
When I woke, a breeze was sliding softly over my skin, cooling the perspiration on the back of my neck. The car clicked steadily over joints in the concrete, so that I knew before coming fully to consciousness that we had left the traffic behind. Outside the car, there were no sounds of the city—just the occasional hum and swish of a car passing in the other direction, and the gentle rocking of an old two-lane highway.
A thought troubled my mind, a leftover corollary to the dream, I supposed. Given the bit of text we’d seen on the Internet, it was likely this trip would prove that the twin girls in my dream, the toddler boy, the baby, and Cecile, were all dead. The victims of a tragedy of such a monumental proportion that it lived for years hidden inside me, and found light only in the memoirs of some person who’d published a book about the history of a little timber town in the Piney Woods.
How much time had passed after that day on the porch, when I’d stood stiff and sore, hiding my bruises as the girls blithely skipped rope and gathered flowers? How much time before the fire? It couldn’t have been long. The legs I’d seen when I looked down at my feet were the wiry, suntanned legs of a boy, narrow cords of muscle winding into knobby knees. I must have been at least five, perhaps even six. I was seven or eight when my mother argued with Frances about sending me to the first grade at St. Clare’s school, and by then I’d been with her long enough that she’d taught me my letters and numbers at home. We’d moved from Houston to Dallas, and I knew my way around the house. It was my home. I felt settled there.
Was the memory of the dandelion chain, of that quiet day on the porch, my last memory in the house with the seven chairs?
Was I prepared to discover that it was the last day or week or month that those children, with their wide blue eyes and deep red hair, or Cecile, with her large, kind hands and her patient smile, lived upon this earth? Was a memory like that worth regaining? Would I be allowing those ghosts into my life only so that they could haunt me?
The mother who’d raised me to adulthood,
my
mother, had loved me, as had my father in his own stoic way. What they’d done to hide the past, they’d undoubtedly done for my benefit. What they’d kept hidden was perhaps better left in the dark.
Yet I felt compelled to find the truth. I felt the questions calling to me.
Yawning and stretching, I straightened in my seat, looking out the open window, watching stands of spring clover and primrose sway in the muted evening light. In a pasture, a lone white horse grazed, unperturbed by our passing. Nearby, tall pines towered above a farmhouse with green asbestos siding. We’d come quite a ways already. We were into the pines.
Behind the wheel, Epiphany appeared relaxed, one hand resting in her lap, as if she’d become fully accustomed to the pilot’s chair while I slept in suspended animation. My body was stiff, the bones in my spine popping like the pods on the purple hull peas Mother’s Polish cook had shelled on the back porch when I was a boy.
“You done complaining?” Epiphany asked. “Because if you’re not, you can just go on back to sleep.”
“Where are we?” I surveyed the passing territory, looking for road signs or landmarks. Did Epiphany have any idea where we were? Before leaving my house, I’d briefly shown her the map, told her we would take I-20 east, but I’d given her no instructions after that. We weren’t on I-20 anymore.
She didn’t appear the least bit worried that we might be lost. “We been out of Dallas a couple hours, at least. I think it’s about fifty miles more to Groveland.”
“Fifty miles?” Good gumption, I’d slept almost the entire trip! “Are you certain? You should have awakened me so that I could help you with the route.”
She cast a sideways glance and held it a bit too long, actually. We drifted onto the shoulder, then veered back to the road. Fortunately, there weren’t any lumber trucks coming. “You were getting kidnapped, remember? Besides, I can read a map.” She patted the atlas lying open on the console between us. “My mama liked to hit the road a lot. Sometimes she took me with her.”
I studied her for a moment, wondering at the meaning of those words. “Where did you stay the rest of the time?” I was almost afraid to ask.
“Wherever, kind of.” She didn’t offer any further information, and I felt the need to pry.
“And you lived where, before this?”
She shrugged. “Oh, lots of places, but right before Dallas, I was in a little town out by Abilene. You wouldn’t know it. I told you about Mrs. Lora, my teacher from seventh grade, didn’t I? I stayed on with her after Mama ran across Russ and moved to Dallas. They wanted, like, time alone, and anyway, Mrs. Lora needed somebody to help around the house and the garden and stuff.”
“So you just lived with this woman while your mother moved away?” The concept was appalling. What sort of parent would leave a child behind that way?
Epiphany shrugged. “Yeah, sure. It worked out. I would’ve stayed there through high school, but Mrs. Lora’s diabetes got her and she was really sick, and then she died. So I had to come here. I liked the school there a lot. I mean, I was like a little brown bug in a bucket of milk, but at least you didn’t have to worry about getting jumped in the bathroom. I hate the school here. I’m not going back. I’ll get a GED or something, if I have to.” Swallowing hard, she tipped her face away, as if she hadn’t meant to reveal that much information. Clearly, though, it had been on her mind.
“You’re far too smart to be settling for your GED,” I pointed out. “There are your college exams to think about, scholarships and applications. Your future. I’ve seen you whip through your algebra homework. Few students have that ability. If this school administration won’t see to it that you have the opportunities you deserve, then there are other schools.”