J. Norm’s attention came back to the table when the pizza got there, and I showed him what I’d found.
He picked a pepperoni off the top of his pizza and chewed it, slivers of evening light from the window blinds reflecting off his glasses while he thought about our problem. “It would probably be best to get a hotel before we reach the loop and hope for an e-mail by morning. If we don’t hear from them, perhaps we can start calling numbers.”
I didn’t argue with him, but calling all those Culps in the phone book didn’t sound too practical. I mean, what were the odds that we’d get the right number, they’d be at home, and they wouldn’t hang up on us, thinking we were a couple crackpots? Stopping overnight and waiting for an e-mail did seem like the best idea, for now. It’d been a long, weird day, and I was ready for a shower and a bed. My body felt rubbery, like my bones were dissolving one by one, especially after I pigged out on pizza. On our way out, we asked the waitress if there was a hotel nearby that wasn’t too expensive, and she pointed us down the road to one.
It turned out that the place wasn’t anything fancy, but it wasn’t bad. J. Norm didn’t have much cash on him, so I had to hand over a bunch of my stash to pay, which meant that something good needed to happen pretty soon. That was the end of my Florida plans, too, unless I wanted to take off with no money. But if we started using J. Norm’s credit card, Deborah would find us. Somehow, some way, we had to hunt down Clara and Amy Culp tomorrow.
We hauled our stuff up to a room that the desk clerk called the “family suite,” which was a bedroom, a little room with a pullout sofa and TV, and a minikitchen. Not bad digs, really. There was even a balcony outside. After showers, J. Norm and me took our leftover sodas from supper and sat on the balcony. It overlooked a drainage ditch, but with the sunset reflecting on it, it was actually kind of pretty. The breeze and the sun sinking behind the pines made it feel like we were in a Discovery Channel show about some river far away—the Nile or the Amazon. I even saw a log that looked like an alligator floating around in the water.
“Whoa, J. Norm, look at that,” I said, and pointed. The log started swimming, and I about freaked. “Holy mackerel, that thing’s real! You think we better tell the hotel people? What if it eats somebody?”
Like me
, I was thinking, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to stay outside anymore.
“I imagine he’s more afraid of you than you are of him.” J. Norm was kicked back in his chair, enjoying the sunset.
“I doubt it.” I sat up a little straighter, watching that gator come into shore. It was three feet long, at least. “So they just, like, let alligators live in their ditches here? I mean, can’t the police come get them or something?”
J. Norm chuckled, shaking his head at me. “I imagine that would take more police than they have on the force. In the bayous, alligators are too numerous to count. You don’t see most of them, but they see you.” He gave me a creepy look, like he was trying to scare me.
“Huh-uh,” I said, and laughed at him. “I saw people out swimming today when we crossed over one of those creeks. Would they be swimming if there were alligators all over the place? Pppfff! I don’t
think
so.”
He cocked back in his chair. “I’ll have you know that you are speaking to a man who once lived with alligators right out his back door. When—”
“Is this gonna be another ‘at the cape’ story?” I asked.
“Humor me.”
“All right.” Pulling my legs up in my chair, I rested my chin on my knees and got comfortable. Off in the distance over the pine trees, the sky was turning dark velvet blue. A long-legged white bird landed at the edge of the water. It didn’t seem worried about the gator.
J. Norm cleared his throat. “When we lived on Switch Grass Island,
near
the cape, the cabin included an old aluminum boat that stayed in the water. On the occasions when I was home early enough, I would slip into my fishing clothes and paddle out onto the lake for an hour or so while Annalee was cooking dinner. In the summer, of course, it was sticky and hot, even in the evenings. One of those times, I decided I’d take a swim off the boat. I dived into the water, and when I came up, I was face-to-face with an alligator. I don’t know who was more frightened, him or me.”
“Well, I could answer that question, if it was me in that water,” I said, and J. Norm laughed. “How in the world could somebody live with those things around?”
He shrugged, his eyes going back and forth between the gator and the bird. “You get used to them. Why, we even had alligators right by our launchpads at the cape. There was a pond at the end of pad thirty-six-A. One day we had to scrub a launch, and we were left with liquid oxygen to dispose of. So one of the guys says, ‘Hey, let’s roll the tank over and dump it in the pond.’ So, as young men will do, we jumped on the idea, and the LOX went into the little pond. Liquid oxygen stores at negative one hundred eighteen degrees Celsius, so it made quite a splash in that warm water. The next thing we knew, an alligator was hightailing it out the other end of the pond, running for cover. I imagine he didn’t know what had hit him. We never told our supervisors about our little lark with the LOX, of course.” He tipped his head back and laughed, and I thought about him being young and doing crazy things he probably wasn’t supposed to do. I guess you forget, when people are old, that once upon a time they were pretty much like you.
While J. Norm told some more cape stories, I watched the first stars come out. A lopsided moon rose and glittered through the tops of the pines, too shy to be up in the sky on its own. I remembered how Mrs. Lora used to sit outside with me on her old metal swing in the yard. Her house was on the edge of town, so we’d throw out food for the deer and watch them creep from the cedar brush, and we’d listen to the coyotes howling and yipping at the moon. I loved those times with Mrs. Lora. I loved the minutes when the last light of day was fading and a hush came over everything. I’d lay my head over on her shoulder and feel safe, even though my mama was someplace else—working, or out partying with her people from her job, or gone on a date with her latest guy. Sometimes I wasn’t even sure where she was, but I was okay knowing that Mrs. Lora and me would cook dinner and then sit in the swing together. Those were good nights. Safe nights.
Like this one.
I laid my head on J. Norm’s shoulder, and he didn’t seem to mind. He didn’t braid my hair like Mrs. Lora did—that would’ve been weird—but once he was finished with his story, we talked about the stars. He showed me how to find the constellations, and told me the Greek legends behind them, and how to measure distances by stretching out your arm and holding up your thumb. The moon rose with a big, bright star trailing from the tip. Venus, J. Norm said, and then he pointed out Saturn, and showed me how to find it in the constellation Virgo.
Venus and Saturn. I would’ve never known that, if it wasn’t for J. Norm.
Without Mrs. Lora, I’d never have learned how to snap a string bean or grow a tomato, or how good a batch of fresh purple hull peas tastes right after you shell them. Maybe that was the way things were supposed to be. Maybe not everyone got the mom who baked cupcakes and showed up at all the school parties. There weren’t enough of those to go around, so maybe God used other people, like Mrs. Lora and J. Norm, to make sure you learned how to shell a purple hull pea or find Saturn in the night sky.
It was all right for life not to be perfect. If you let it, if you didn’t close yourself off from the chance for it, life could still be good. Better than good.
Tonight was pretty close to perfect.
J. Norm’s voice turned into a soft hum, and after a while, I was only half listening. He was talking about the International Space Station and then something about living in Austria for a year while he was doing some kind of job over there. He lived in England, too, where he and his wife drove around on the wrong side of the road and visited castles.
“Someday, I want to have a job where I can go see castles on my day off,” I told him, and yawned. The day was starting to feel kind of long.
“I know you will.” The way he said it made me believe it. If J. Norm could come from a place like the house with the seven chairs and end up living all over the world and sending rockets to the moon, something amazing could happen in my life, too. Maybe something great was happening already, and this trip was only the beginning of it.
We went inside after that. J. Norm took the bedroom, and I took the sofa, because I wanted to watch TV.
I fell asleep sometime after midnight, and I dreamed about Cecile. I saw her in that big house, trapped behind a locked door when the smoke started coming in. She was smart, though. She plugged the bottom of the door with blankets, got the kids out of their beds, pushed them down low, and wrapped them in their quilts. I saw them huddled by the wall while she looked for a way out. Then she spotted the fireplace.
I smelled the ashes and the soot as she pulled the grate out of the way, opened the hatch door, whispered, “Come on. Come on, now, babies.”
In the dream, I was one of the children. She was saving me, too.
She handed the baby through last—bundled him tight in his blanket and gave him to his big brother, who cuddled the baby close inside the puppy-dog quilt, while all the other kids huddled around him.
And then I
was
Cecile. My face was her face. I was looking at the hatch, wondering if it was big enough for me to pass through. I was hoping, praying. I didn’t want to die there, so young still, never having a family of my own, never seeing much of the world. The smoke was thick, billowing toward the hole, clogging my nose and my mouth, choking me. The ash door was so small. I was afraid. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t think. I didn’t want the children to watch me die here. “You . . . go . . . on,” I coughed out. There was so much heat. So much smoke. I heard things falling overhead, glass breaking, dogs barking in the neighborhood. Someone would come soon. Surely someone would come.
“Come on, Cecile! Come on!” the children begged. The twins were crying, clutching their brother.
“Get . . . back. Get . . . away, now.” My heart pounded, filling every part of me with fear, with terror. I didn’t want to burn to death. I could feel the heat now. So much heat.
Oh, Lord
, I prayed.
Oh, Lord, Lord, help me. Make me strong enough, small enough. . . .
I started through the opening, pulling, pushing, wiggling, the rocks and the steel doorframe not giving way. I put my arms through, then my head, and a shoulder. I couldn’t make it. The door was too small. My feet were burning, flames licking into the room.
I couldn’t breathe. The children were crying. I screamed. . . .
Air filled my lungs as I sat up on the hide-a-bed, my heart hammering, my throat burning, just like in the dream.
A dream. It was only a dream.
Lying back on the pillow, I saw the fire and the ash door and the kids like a movie in replay. Outside the window, light was pouring in, and when my eyes cleared up, I noticed that the alarm clock was blinking seven forty-five. Almost eight o’clock? I shucked off the covers and swung my feet around. Why hadn’t J. Norm gotten me out of bed? He never slept past the crack of dawn, as far as I could tell.
An uneasy feeling circled inside me like leftover smoke from the dream as I got up and tiptoed toward the bedroom. The door swung open a little when I knocked on it. I tried to peek inside, to make sure J. Norm wasn’t, like, standing there in his underwear or anything, but I could only see the wall and the edge of the bed. It was dark inside the room. No lights on.
I heard him breathing, then—raspy, short breaths, like he couldn’t get enough air. Pushing the door open the rest of the way, I took a step into the room. J. Norm was in the middle of the big bed, flat on his back, cocooned in the covers. “J. Norm? J. Norm, you awake? You all right?” He didn’t answer or move around. The worry in me slithered a little higher, like a snake making its way up my spine. “Hello-o . . . J. Norm? It’s morning. We’ve gotta hit the road, Jack.”
He still didn’t answer, and so I crossed the room to the bed, leaned over, and gave the covers a yank, rocking him back and forth. Maybe it was my dream or the mood it left behind, but I wanted to get out of this place. Something wasn’t right this morning.
“J. Norm. Let’s go.”
He moved finally, moaned, and turned his head away. A hand slid from under the sheet, the long, bony fingers stretching toward the ceiling. “Annnna-leee, I’mmm not . . . not . . . I can’t sss-see. You there?” he mumbled, struggling against the sheet like a mummy trying to get free, his arm reaching, every muscle tight.
“J. Norm!” I leaned over the bed, shaking him. “J. Norm! Stop! Wake up.”
His breath came in a gush of air then, and he sat up, his chest rising first and his neck snapping up after. Blinking, he looked around the room, then at me, like he was trying to put everything together.
I backed away from the bed. “Time to get moving, okay? We’re gonna find the Culps today, right? We’re looking for your sister, remember?”
“Yes . . .” J. Norm whispered, his voice thin. “I’ll . . . I’ll be along. . . .”
“ ’Kay, well . . . ummm . . . I’ll put some clothes on and run down to the lobby and grab us some of the continental breakfast.” I started toward the door, the same uneasy feeling crackling over my skin.