By the time he finished the story he was lying down beside her. A distant train whistle flew up the moon-silver river like a long last good-bye. He squirmed backward, fitting himself into the spoon of her body. He reached back for her arm and pulled it over and around himself. He closed his eyes, and then there was nothing but the sound of her breathing in his ear.
38
“David, wake up.”
Mom?
“Wake up!”
She was shaking him.
He opened one eye. “Huh?”
“C’mon, I want to show you something. Come on.” She pulled him to his feet. “It’s neat. You gotta see.” She dragged him by the hand, chattering. “I woke up really early. I wasn’t even tired. You were out like a light. I figured I’d go do some exploring. Watch your step here.”
All was gray, like before. The river was gray, still and flat and gray. He did not want to watch his step. He wanted to sleep. He stepped in water.
“See that,” she growled. “You never listen.” She stopped and sat him down and pulled off his sneaks and socks and rolled up his pant legs to his knees. “Leave your stuff here. We’ll get it on the way back. C’mon.”
He staggered on, hand-dragged, almost awake now. “Where are we going?” he whined.
“You’ll see. We’re almost there. Around this bend.”
The river turned left. As they came out of the turn David could once again see the pair of skyscrapers beyond the trees. But it was the river that caught his attention. It was even wider here and very straight. In fact, in the distance, he could see the river meet the sky, which was blushing at that point. Several bridges spanned the river, framing the rosy horizon. Closer to them something else crossed the water.
Primrose pointed. “There it is.”
“What is it?” David said. It was long and narrow and flat, barely higher than the water, the color of concrete. It looked like a sidewalk from one riverbank to the other.
“A dam,” she said. “C’mon.”
Across the river a lightbulb winked out.
David said, “What time is it?”
She grabbed her wrist. “What do I look like, a clock? Come on.” She was running, pulling him along, his bare feet slapping water. The blush in the sky was getting brighter by the second.
They stopped at the edge of the dam. She threw out her arms. “Neat, huh?” She looked pleased and proud enough to have discovered America.
“Usually, see, the water runs over it. But the river’s low.” She reached down and ran her hand over the pitted surface of the dam. “Dry as a bone.” She stepped onto it. “We can walk across!” She pulled David on.
The surface was rough and cool on his bare feet. The sky at the end of the river was no longer blushing, it was glowing from the fire below. He wrenched free. “No!” he yelled. “I can’t! You know I can’t! I told you!”
She looked at the horizon, looked at him. She snatched his wrist. “Listen, you little mouse nipple, I’m walking across this river and you’re coming with me. If you don’t want to look, fine, don’t look.”
She yanked him forward. There was no escaping her grip. He closed his eyes, squeezed them shut, and remembered walking down the dark hallway behind his mother the night the electricity went out. As on that night, fears he could not name blew chills upon him from a window left open to his soul. But there was no fear in his feet, for they trusted utterly the hand that led him.
In time she stopped.
Were they across?
“Primrose?” he said.
She jerked his hand. “Shh.”
He could tell that she had turned. She was facing downriver. They were still on the dam. When her voice finally came, it was hardly a whisper, hardly hers: “Oh wow . . . oh my God . . . oh man . . .”
Her hands cupped his shoulders, gently turned him. At once he felt it on his face: the warmth, the newborn day.
“Okay,” she said, her voice sweet as Mango Madness. “You don’t have to look. I won’t make you.”
Her hands fell away. He was alone. Untouched. A voice deep inside, a David-voice from long ago, cried out to the Other Side: “Mommy!” But he knew the time had come. He opened his eyes and followed the river to the crown of the rising sun. It was crisp and sharp and beautiful and smooth as a painted egg. And changing by the moment. Orange at first, then butterscotch, then yellow, a plump breakfast yellow of egg yolk; and then, as if poked with a fork, it suddenly broke, spilling, flooding the river and the city and the trees and the sky and every dark corner of the world.
He had been tricked again. But this time it was different, this time it was okay. He clung to her, sobbing, his tears damp on her shirt, nearly squeezing the breath out of her.
She folded him in her arms. “I’m not her, you know,” she whispered hoarsely. “I’m only me. Primrose.”
He nodded against her. “I know.”
39
They were still there, sitting cross-legged in the middle of the dam, when the policeman came. He stood on the river bank and called: “David Limpert? Primrose Dufee?”
“Yes!” they called.
“Time to go home!”
The policeman let them sit up front in the patrol car. He gave them a bag of pretzels to eat. He let them drink iced tea from a Thermos bottle under his seat. He showed them the buttons for the overhead flashers and the siren.
Though it was hard to do sitting down, David showed him a Spitfire quick-draw. The policeman nodded. “Very impressive.” He said maybe he would trade in his gun for a yo-yo. David laughed.
“How long were you looking for us?” David said.
“Since last night,” said the policeman. “Where were you all this time?”
“Walking the tracks. We were going to Philadelphia.”
“That’s a long way to walk.”
David crunched a pretzel. “Yeah, I know. And we made a camp in the bushes and we went to sleep on the ground. And all we had to eat was malt balls and a cupcake and about two sips of Mango Madness. Two sips!”
“It’s a wonder you survived.”
David nodded. “It’s a wonder.”
Primrose said, “Who called the police?”
“Don’t know,” said the policeman. “The call came in at Perkiomen, where you live. They sent it out to the other stations.”
David’s eyes boggled. “An all points bulletin?”
“More or less.”
“All right!”
The policeman glanced over David’s head at Primrose. “I’m sure whoever called will be waiting for you there.”
They were still a block away when the crowd of people came into view. “Your welcoming committee,” said the policeman. “Shall we let them know you’re coming?” He pointed to the flasher button.
David punched it, but something else was on his mind. He reached deep into his pocket. “Primrose,” he said.
She looked down and saw in his hand a little plastic purple turtle. He was holding it between himself and her so no one else could see.
She whispered, “The memento?”
He nodded.
A gentle bump, a swerve: they were in the parking lot.
“You’re not allowed to wear it,” he said. “But I’ll let you hold it for a day.”
She cleared her throat. She smiled into his wide eyes. “You keep it.” She folded his fingers over it. “I’ll always remember I saw it.”
He put it away. He looked up at her. “I read you to sleep.”
She closed her eyes, she nodded. “You read me to sleep.”
Click! Lock buttons sprang up. The doors opened to a burst of applause and cheers. Running toward them were David’s grandmother and Refrigerator John and a man Primrose assumed was David’s father. All wore faces wild with joy, celebrating faces, crying and laughing faces. Primrose had expected no less. What she had not expected was her mother, out in front of them all, lunging clumsily toward them, her eyes every bit as wild as the others’, her zany blonde wig falli
ng over her ear.
40
“Primrose.”
“Of course. Primrose.”
“Refrigerator John.”
“Refrigerator John.”
They were sitting at the kitchen table, David and his grandmother. David’s birthday was coming up in fourteen days, and there was going to be a party. Between munches on a carrot, David was saying who should be invited. His grandmother was writing down the names.
“Adam Tuggle.”
“Adam Tuggle? Who’s that?”
“The policeman who found us. He let me work the cop-car lights.”
“Adam Tuggle it is.” She wrote down the name.
“How about me? Do I get invited?”
It was David’s father, coming into the kitchen. He plopped himself down on David’s lap. It didn’t really hurt, because his father was holding himself up, but David knew his part was to cry out in pain, so that’s what he did. “Oww!” His dad gasped in mock shock — “Oh, sorry” — got up, reversed the arrangement, and now David was sitting on his dad’s lap.
Almost-ten David knew he was getting too old to sit on laps, but he didn’t care. He was still swooning in amazement: his father was home and it wasn’t even the weekend! He had driven straight from Connecticut the minute he heard David was missing. He said they were going to spend more time together now. In fact, they were going to a ball game in the city tonight.
His grandmother was giving them her smile across the kitchen table. For some reason, David didn’t find it annoying anymore. “How about Tim?” she said.
David was stumped. “Who’s Tim?”
“The boy with the yo-yo. We met him that day on the street, remember?”
“He stunk,” said David. “He couldn’t even walk the dog. He’s a geek.”
“He’s a nice boy,” said his grandmother. “He was very impressed with you. I’ve seen him around the neighborhood. I’m sure he would like to be your friend.”
His father tickled him, made him laugh. “Hey, then I’m a geek too. I stink with a yo-yo.”
“You don’t judge a person on how good they are with a yo-yo,” said his grandmother. “He might turn out to be the coolest kid you ever knew, but you’re not giving him a chance.”
This was a shock, hearing his grandmother say “coolest.” She was surprising him a lot lately. And he had to admit they both made good points about the kid named Tim. Plus, he was already out of names to invite. Since moving to Perkiomen from Minnesota, he had made no new friends except for Primrose and Refrigerator. Of course he could have, but he just hadn’t felt like it.
He gave a sigh. “Okay. Put him down.”
Then he thought of one more. “And Madame Dufee.”
His grandmother looked up. “Primrose’s mother?”
“Yeah.”
She gave him the smile. “That’s nice. She’ll be happy.”
“She’s goofy.”
“David. Don’t be unkind.”
“I mean in a funny way,” he said. And she loves her Primrose Periwinkle, he thought. He said to his dad, “She’s a fortune-teller. She can read your hand. Even your foot! She’ll tell you —” He caught himself. Let Madame Dufee be the one to tell his dad he’d have a long and happy life.
“Tell me what?” said his dad.
“Never mind,” he said, smiling secretly. “You’ll see.”
After the game that night, seat-belted into the passenger side for the ride home, David felt the drowsies overtaking him. Time too. In two weeks he would leave nine behind for good. Something in him did not want to move on, wanted to go back to eight, stay eight forever with his mother. But time was like that freight train, carrying him onward to ten and eleven, carrying him down the tracks and around the bend whether he liked it or not.
He felt the tiny turtle in his pocket. He still heard his mother’s voice — “Davey” — rise like whisperdust from unseen corners in the house, but it was no longer the only voice he heard. His ears were also filled with the voices of others — his father and Primrose and Refrigerator John and his grandmother. Of course, all of their words for a thousand years could not fill the hole left by his mother, but they could raise a loving fence around it so he didn’t keep falling in.
41
The question came to him three nights later as he was lying down to sleep. Earlier in the summer he would have simply put on his clothes and snuck out the back window. Now, he waited till morning.
As he pulled his bike up to her place, he saw a bulge of black-on-white polka dots — the beanbag chair — pop from the side door and onto the ground. Primrose, puffing, stepped out after it. “You’re just in time,” she said. “You can help me lug this monstrosity into the house.”
David looked inside the van. He was stunned. “It’s empty!”
She flicked sweat from her eye. “I’m moving back.” She bent over the chair. “Get the other side.”
David went to the other side. “There’s something I forgot to ask you, and I just remembered.”
She stood, hands on hips. “Make it fast. I can’t move unless I’m in the mood, and this mood’s got about ten seconds to go.”
David spoke quickly. “We never got to Philadelphia to ask the waving man why he waves. Are we still going?”
“No need to.”
“No?”
“Nope. I figured it out myself. I know why he waves to people.”
“You do? Why?”
She bent over. “You’re stalling.” She grabbed the bottom of the chair. “Lift and I’ll tell you. On three.”
David snapped off a chunk of the carrot he was carrying, stuck the rest in his pocket, and grabbed hold of the chair.
“One, two, three.” The chair rose unsteadily from the ground. “Because,” she grunted, “they wave back.”
The great, lumpy black-and-white polka-dotted beanbag wobbled toward the house.
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