Sway (19 page)

I
thought it would be half past never when Dad quit tossing and turning on the couch that night, so I sat on my bed, super still and quiet, in order to avoid hindering his sleep. It was ridiculously late, an hour of the night I'd hardly ever seen, but I was too stirred up to be tired. I peeked from behind the left side of my curtain to make sure Dad was asleep, and saw him sprawled across the sofa bed with his mouth hanging open, the
Popular Mechanics
covering his eyes, and one leg thrown over the back of the couch. The empty headache powder packet lay on the pillow next to him.

From the pink beauty box, I got both the cell phone and the refill card and held the card up to the light of the cantern to read the instructions on the back. They were easy enough to follow, and before I knew it, I was ready to press the MOM button. And when I did, it felt as promising and exciting as flipping the switch to launch a spaceship.

For the longest time there was no sound at all, and then a muffled ringing. And another ring. And then a man's voice.

“Hello?”

My spirits sank even as my heart raced.
Could this be Ken?
The connection had a crackle to it, like I was talking to someone on the spaceship I'd just launched.

“May I please speak to Toodi?” I said.

The man didn't say a word. I didn't know much about Ken or what Ken sounded like, but being rude sure did seem like a Ken thing to do.

“Toodi Bleu Nordenhauer,” I said a little louder, stirring Dad a bit in his sleep. My heart beat even faster.

“She's not available,” the man said. “Can I take a message?”

“Um, yeah, please tell her Cass called, and I have something really huge to tell her about.”

“Sure thing, Cass,” he said. His voice sounded almost smug, like he knew good and well what he'd stolen from me, and had no intention of giving it back.

“Something really magic,” I said. I sure wasn't going to share anything more about this magic with Ken.

“Okay,” he said, like it didn't even occur to him to ask about it.

“And that I'm going to mail her a present.”

“Huge and magic and present,” he said. “Will do.”

Then he hung up. And it was a good thing for him. He probably sensed that the next words out of my mouth would be
I know exactly who you are and what you've done, and you better give back my mom soon.

While I waited for Mom to call, I found the rhubarb man postcard, tore two pieces of tape from off the lint roller, and stuck the
M T
sliver good and tight on there. In the small bit of space left behind, I wrote:

Dear Mom,


Dad and I both really, really miss you. Here's a little present from our trip.


Love, Cass


I fancified the space around the soap with as much teensy noodling as would fit, making a squiggly frame all around. Then I dug the gum wrapper from the can it! box and copied Ken's address on the card. Ambrette's stamp was the final addition.

If I hadn't become so exhausted from our roller coaster of a day, it might have bothered me more that Mom never did call back that night.
Cell phones are like bricks with buttons
, she had once told me when I asked why she didn't call more often from rescue sites. She said they were as unreliable as the weather report.

I tucked the phone back into the beauty box for the night, my only regret being that I'd blown one of my minutes on Ken, who probably didn't even bother to write down my message, anyway. Resolving to call again the next day, I blew out the candle in my cantern and traced my finger along the word HOPE on the side of it until I drifted off to sleep.

W
hen morning came, most of my toes were hopelessly tangled in my afghan, which made it tough to lift my poster and see if my supremo noodling had all been a dream. But the noodling was there, better than I even remembered, and looking at that word
SWAY
, in all its permanent vibrance, was like my own little private sunrise.

My phone call had so distracted me the night before that I'd slept in all my clothes, so I shuffled my way straight to the passenger seat, dragging the afghan behind me. Dad was already driving, somewhat slumpy and gazing baggy-eyed at the traffic in front of us.

“The headache medicine was full of caffeine,” he said. “Kicked in at about two a.m. So I just thought I'd do some driving.”

“Driving and thinking?” I said, hoping that thought might be
Sway plus Nordenhauers equals family reunion
.

“Driving and thinking,” said Dad.

In a snitty tone that on any other day would have gotten me in trouble, I said, “Well then, while you drive
and
think, I'll look for a shoe, okay?”

I grabbed the remains of a candy bar from the console and took a bite. Shoe-searching was a great excuse for not talking.

“All right,” Dad said, but his pinched scowl made him look all wrong.

The breaks in the highway made rhythmic
da-dunks
under The Roast, and Dad looked frighteningly close to falling asleep. He cranked the air conditioner so high, I had to bunch the afghan around me all the way up to my nose.

It seemed every billboard we passed was an ad for cave-exploring or discount fudge.

“Are we still in Arkansas?” I asked.

“Not anymore. We've crossed over into the Missouri Bootheel.”

The Roast groaned its way up a steep mountainside.

“Mom's Missouri?” I asked.

But of course Dad didn't answer.

I left him to his grump and got back to enjoying the sights, which included a muddy mountainside with old white appliances stuck down in it like marshmallows in hot chocolate, goats eating out of an old bathtub, and a coon dog cemetery sign that I thought said corn dog cemetery. I tried to memorize it all, wondering if Ken had left enough minutes on the phone for me to tell everything to Mom and still give her time to say how much she'd missed me.

“Just what I was hunting for,” Dad said as we passed a giant fake moose with giant fake wings on his back, on the lot of a tractor dealership.

“You were hunting for a moose with wings?” I asked.

Dad put on his blinker.

“No,” he said. “This town. I was so tired, I almost passed it right up.”

“But we didn't find a shoe,” I reminded him. “And the Missouri Bootheel doesn't count.”

“We're not working here,” said Dad. “I just want us to drive through.”

“How come?”

“Look where we are,” said Dad, as we passed a big welcome to gwynette sign.

“Hey! Is this where Mom was?” I said. “Where they had the big flood?”

Dad didn't seem a tenth as excited about the discovery as me. “And the soggy houses? And the boat rescues? And the steeple lady?” I added. Each and every detail I remembered made me feel tingly, like Mom was close by.

“Take a good look around,” said Dad, driving us slowly through the town square like we were a one-vehicle parade. The city looked old, but surprisingly well preserved and clean. I immediately felt connected with it, wondering if any of the people going in and out of the hardware store or the library or the grocery still remembered Toodi Bleu. Was somebody talking about her over lunch at that Main Street Café? Maybe already planning a statue in her honor?

As Dad pulled us into the parking lot of a big white church at the top of a hill, I hoped that all that thinking he'd done the night before might have kindled some Toodi-forgiveness inside him. Before he could even stop, I was unbuckling myself. He parked The Roast far from the church building, in a spot where we could see most of Gwynette laid out before us.

“So how do you feel about it?” he said.

“The town?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I feel proud,” I said. “Of Mom. It makes me want to talk to some of the people. To see if they remember her.”

“That's the thing, Cass. I'm afraid none of these people will remember her.”

“But this is where she was, right?”

“This is where she
said
she was,” he said.

With that, my happy thoughts skidded to a stop. “What do you mean?”

“Cass, do you see any signs of flood damage?”

“Um, I don't know what flood damage looks like.”

“Like water stains on buildings, muddied yards, flooded-out cars.”

I scanned and rescanned, but the wettest thing I saw was a birdbath on the lawn.

“No, not really.”

“How about anything being rebuilt or repaired?”

“No, sir.”

“Do you see any church missing a steeple because it had to be cut off when a rescue team couldn't get a lady to let go of it?”

I looked out my side window and saw that the only steeple in town was firmly intact.

“Maybe she just remembered that part wrong,” I said.

Dad closed his eyes for a few seconds and lightly bumped his forehead against the steering wheel. “Cass, I'm sorry, but I can't stand to drag this out any longer.” He opened the lid on the center console between us. There on top of a pile of paper towels rested a shiny gold crammed-f charm bracelet.
Mom's charm bracelet.

Dad motioned for me to pick it up.

“I heard you make that call last night,” he said. “And I decided it's time for you to hear the truth about some things.”

I began to take inventory of the charms. Palm tree, beach ball, seashell.

“There's been no flood in Gwynette,” Dad said. “And there's been no Toodi in Gwynette either.”

Dad turned toward me and breathed in like he was trying to suck the courage from all the corners of the earth. “Cass, your mom hasn't been a Response Team volunteer for over a year now.”

I squeezed the bracelet so hard it hurt.

“She wasn't even in Missouri these last few months,” he said. “She was in Florida. The family she said she was helping was really some rich guy who lost his wife.”

It felt like Dad had turned over a beautiful rock just to show me all the wriggly grub-worms underneath.

“In the storm?” I said.

“No, in an accident. Years ago.”

Uncle Clay says, on the day he was paralyzed, it felt like he was floating above himself watching all the terrible news being given below, and he was trying desperately to wake himself from the nightmare. For the first time ever, I knew just what he meant.

“Mom's been a total fake?” My words came out all shrunken.

“Not always, but for a while now,” he said. “I'll be the last one to make excuses for what she's done, Cass, but when that hurricane hit Florida last year, something bad happened to your mom. During a rescue attempt, there was an old man she simply wasn't able to save. He died right there in her arms.”

“She never told me that story,” I said.

Dad draped his arm across the back of my seat.

“I think because she was afraid it would ruin the way you see her,” he said. “She had a hard enough time telling
me
about it. It was like she fell right off this high pedestal we had her on and couldn't get back up.

“I'm pretty sure that's when her life went into a tailspin,” Dad went on. “She quit rescuing altogether and went back to Florida to try to face her pain. That's when she met Ken. I guess she must have found it easier to start fresh with a stranger.”

“And his kids?”

Dad let his hand fall to my shoulder.

“Just a son who's grown and gone,” he said.

“But she came back home,” I said.

“Only to get her things and say some sort of goodbye. To ease her conscience, I guess.”

I instantly felt like I could be sick all over the whole dry town at the bottom of that hill.

“How did you even know something was wrong?” I asked.

“Two-three-nine,” said Dad. “She called me just a few weeks before she came home, and the caller ID showed two-three-nine. It's a Florida area code.

“I confronted her about it that night she came home,” he continued. “She spilled her whole story, and then she went nuts when I got upset. She threw the bracelet at my feet just before she left.”

I opened my palm and saw a jillion tiny dents from the charms. My hand smelled all metallic and foul, like somebody had shoved a nickel up my nose.

“Dad,” I said. “This isn't an in-between, is it?”

“This isn't an in-between,” he said. “Honestly, Cass, I'm at a loss for what to call this.”

“I know exactly what to call it,” I said.
“Wrength.”

“Wrength?”

“Wrongness.”

In fact, the way I saw it, Mom had invented a whole new level of wrongness. A bad so bad that
wrength
might not even be capable of describing it. Like maybe I'd be needing a fresh word from Syd to describe what Mom had done.

“Dad, why didn't you tell me all this sooner?” I asked.

“Because I knew how you dreamed of going with her someday and reaching out and helping people like she did,” he said. “And I couldn't stand to crush that.”

“You knew?”

“Of course I knew,” he said. “Why wouldn't you want to do something so noble and exciting?

“Now you see why I wanted to go ahead and tell you about the Sway,” he said. “To let you know there was still a good bit of sparkle to be shared by our family.”

“Here you go,” I said, handing Dad the bracelet, which was suddenly as shineless as our day.

“I didn't want you to have to find out about your mom like this, Cass. I truly didn't. But I just wanted you to understand me not wanting to chase after her. And especially wasting something as special as our Sway to do it.”

Dad put the charm bracelet back into the center console and closed it tight. I felt like an idiot for being relieved that I hadn't found the Cass charm on there, as if there was a molecule of hope that Mom had it tucked away in a secret place because it was the most important thing in the world to her.

“For what it's worth,” he said, “this will be the last bad news on our trip. If you'll bear with me for a stretch of road, I've got somewhere special I want to take you next. I know we've both had enough Misery for one day.”

On the way out of town, we passed a sign that said, do come back! Just beyond it in the grass on the side of the road, there sat a baby's shoe, smooth and purple as an Easter egg. A little Mary Jane, not yet scuffed or faded, and certainly not flood-damaged. It was ripe for the hooking, but Dad and I both pretended not to see it. It seemed neither of us wanted to slow our escape from the disaster scene that had just unfolded before us in that town. As we merged onto the freeway, between trucks so fast they nearly blew us off the road, it took everything I had in me to keep my eyes from making the first flood ever to hit Gwynette, Missouri.