“Home.” Hard to explain. Nobody had ever known anything about this. “There’s something in Lichen Bridge that I have to resolve.”
She waited for Charlie’s boiling questions, his accusations. Those didn’t come.
“I don’t know how long I’ll be gone. Maybe a week.”
“I’m sorry, Miss Porter. Your visiting time is over.”
Lydia jerked her face toward the clock. The wardens had appeared out of nowhere. They were standing over Charlie, waiting with keys and chains. Another guard appeared at her side to usher her out.
“No, wait.”
“I’m sorry, Miss Porter. You knew from the beginning how much time you had.”
No seconds wasted as they stood him up sideways. His ear was still cocked to the phone.
“Listen to me,” he said quietly. “Just listen to me.” The first thing he’d said for fifteen minutes that carried any urgency, as if this one statement he wanted to make carried the weight of the world for him.
“You have to give us time to talk about one more thing,” she begged the guard while, with a frightening economy of motion, the warden secured Charlie’s wrists in cuffs. “Please give us just a little more time.”
“I give you more time, lady, I have to give it to everybody.”
“I’m leaving town tomorrow,” she pleaded. “He’s telling me about a lie-detector test.”
“Honey, you don’t understand. Everybody in this place has important things to talk about. You don’t just take a turn at the window and talk about the mashed potatoes or the weather. You’ve got to make it count.”
“Please.”
A deep sigh from the guard, shaking his head, a signal with raised fingers to the others through the glass. “One more minute,” he said. “Just one more minute.” Then shook his head and shrugged as if to say, We’ve got another one of those.
The wardens pivoted Charlie back toward her, each of them taking one step aside. This had to be it. No words wasted. There wasn’t time.
“That lie-detector test…” He bit his lips. His nose turned red. His brows narrowed, a man staring into the face of a storm.
“What?”
He cleared his throat and started over.
“I couldn’t understand why you couldn’t just stand beside me and shake your fist at the world with me and say, ‘Yes Charlie, I believe you.’ I couldn’t understand why you couldn’t say, ‘I believe in you.’ I wanted to risk that stupid lie-detector test for you, Lydia. Forget the courts. Forget what Tuck or anybody else said. Forget if it would hurt my case in the long run and send me off to the Missouri Pen. I wanted to do it because the only thing that mattered to me was what you were thinking about me.”
A numbing surge of adrenaline rushed through her head, her ears. She held up her left hand, palm out. Stop.
“If I’ve asked too much of you, Lydia, just take it as a rough compliment.” Staring hard at her outstretched hand. “Take it as a compliment that I thought you’d be able to give me that much. The next time I see you—”
The wardens moved in on him.
“Minute’s up, Mr. Stains. We’ll escort you to your cell.”
They tried to wrestle the receiver away from him. For this one more sentence, he lodged the receiver down under his chin and wouldn’t let go.
“I want you to bring my ring back. I can’t make choices because of you anymore, Lydia.”
“Charlie.”
“It’s the wrong thing for you. It’s the wrong thing for me. Let’s just—”
“I don’t want you to make choices for me. I never asked you to—”
The wardens wrenched the phone away from him mid-sentence. They linked their arms through his elbows, jerking him away.
The chair stood empty and desolate on the other side of the glass.
The dead phone hung heavy in her hand.
No matter the astonishing day, the way the missing little girl had been found above the Brownbranch. Watching Charlie’s shoulders roll forward away from her, carrying the weight of the chained cuffs, she felt as if she were the one who had just been slammed in jail.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
By the time the rain had stopped again sometime just after daybreak, Lydia and Shelby had already driven past the lake. This stretch of road between Warsaw and Sedalia didn’t have much scenery. Just a distant mirage of harvest-land dipping like a calm sea, the road edged by an old stake-and-rider fence, a pleasing smattering of trees, a small yellow arrow pointing east that read YOU HAVE JUST MISSED THE TURN-OFF TO KNOB NOSTER.
Shelby had fallen asleep with her mouth hanging open, her head tilted against the headrest at an angle that made Lydia’s neck ache. In the air from the open window, feathery tendrils of the girl’s blonde hair lifted like living things, whirling around her pale cheeks.
Lydia’s silent tears had dried in the soft morning, in the cool strong rush of dry wind. As the miles coursed past beneath the tires, her thoughts rocketed between Jolena Criggin’s letter—in-depth questions about Beowulf… if this holds any significance to you… Buckholtz’s class… Advance Placement English—to Charlie.
As a Kansas City radio station played Sweet Home, Alabama, a great song that wouldn’t die, she stared out through the windshield and thought, He’s gone, isn’t he, Lord? And all because you finally let him see what I couldn’t be.
When they hit the Interstate and turned east on I-70 toward St. Louis, she realized that something had shifted inside of her about Charlie. Not the human nature shift, where the one who decides to break something finds himself broken instead. No, this was something else entirely. Like a weathervane oiled and gently left turning, she felt like she was wavering into the wind.
As St. Louis towered over their heads with its miles of skyscrapers and fashion billboards and roads dispersing in every direction like tangled cables, Shelby moaned and lifted her head. She smacked her lips and swallowed, stared out through the windshield with narrowed eyes. “Where are we?”
“Guess.”
“I don’t know.”
Thousands of trucks and cars shot past them, racing at what seemed like ridiculous speeds. “Ah!” Shelby jumped, twisting toward the steering wheel even though she was belted in. An SUV merged halfway into their lane and then swerved back when Lydia wouldn’t move over.
“How long have I been asleep?”
“A long time.”
“This isn’t St. Louis. It can’t be St. Louis already.”
“Time flies when you’re sound asleep.” Lydia rolled the window down again to greet the acrid rubber and carbon smells of heavy traffic. “Ah, the smell of the city.” She felt they needed it—the pleasure of the music cranked up, their hair tugging in the wind, strands tossed by the air in front of their faces.
Shelby pivoted sideways in the seat again and tried to give Lydia a high-five.
A grin. “You think I can do that while I’m driving in this city traffic, you’ve got more confidence than I do.” Her elbows had unclenched a little bit, but Lydia was still driving with both hands.
“You saved that little girl, Miss P. We have to celebrate.”
“We aren’t going to celebrate while we’re moving sixty-five miles an hour.”
“But we’ve gotten away from Shadrach, Miss P.” Shelby picked up a package of wintergreen Lifesavers and sliced a seam in the paper. She lifted the next candy with the flick of one peeling peach fingernail. “Here.”
Lydia opened her mouth sideways and Shelby slid it in.
“We’re just us. You and me.” Then, like a song. “Me and Miss P.”
An hour later, they had stopped for a snack and were heading into Illinois. With sandwich foil blooming like lilies in their laps, picking lettuce off their legs where it had fluttered free, arguing over who got the one cup holder in the Buick’s fold-out armrest, they soared along the open road, searching new territory with no one to stop them. And Lydia did her best to concentrate on Shelby, not on the stunning moments when she remembe
red that Charlie had been arrested, or that he wanted his ring back, or that she’d found a lost little girl in the woods. She focused on the girl beside her, not on the sorrow that lay behind her. She focused on someone she knew she needed to care for, not on the questions that lay before her. She didn’t think about her life tilting. She didn’t think about there being nothing stable beneath her feet.
The harvested cornfield to the south of the interstate looked like a child who’d been forced into a bad haircut for the first day of school.
“Did you know—” She talked about nothing around a hunk of hamburger bun, trying to bring herself back for the girl beside her. “—that you should always get your hair cut in the new of the moon?”
Shelby stared out of the window at the cornfield. She took a sip of soda.
“Or else your hair will get stringy. Like that cornfield over there.”
“That can’t be true.”
“It’s true. At least that’s what they say in Missouri. It’s an old Ozark tale.”
“Yeah, but we aren’t in Missouri anymore.”
Lydia smiled toward the windshield. “Things can’t be true in one place and not be true in another.”
“No?”
“No.”
Lydia drove on for miles after that, with Shelby drawing curlicues with fries in the ketchup on a napkin.
“Why did you bring me, Miss P?” the girl asked finally.
Lydia’s hands playing over the steering wheel as she teased. “Maybe just because I wanted someone to help me unwrap my hamburger while I was driving.”
Shelby didn’t fall for it. “No. I’m really serious. I want to know.”
“Do you?”
A nod.
“I felt like I should,” Lydia said. “That’s it. It made me peaceful, thinking of having you with me. What do you think?”
“I think that sounds nice.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
Lydia grinned, “Did you bring your driver’s permit with you? Do you feel sure enough of yourself to spell me?”
“You want me to drive?”
“Sure. What do you think?”
“Oh, yes.” Shelby bonked her head on the roof, she bounced so high.
“Don’t hurt yourself.” A sideways glance and a little grin. “You sure?”
Another bounce of joy. “Yes, I’m sure. I’ve practiced a lot with Tom.”
“Okay. If you think you’re ready. It’s fine with me.”
“I’m ready!” She unzipped her purse, scrabbled around in it until she brought out the much-prized scrap of paper. With a vast amount of confidence, she waggled her permit in the air. “Tom told me I was doing really well. He said he thought I’d be okay on a highway if I ever wanted to try.” She surveyed the horizon that seemed to curve off of the edge of sky. “When you live in Shadrach, you have to drive a long way to find a wide road.”
There wasn’t much else that needed to be said.
The city park they found when they exited at Vandalia suited their every purpose. The fast-food trappings, which had seemed to mushroom in the sack on the front seat, were tossed into a rusty metal drum. The swings swayed lazily in the breeze, moving as if some child had just run away from them. A shredded soccer goal, its cords billowing and falling like cobwebs, squatted sideways beside an open patch of grass.
Shelby made a wary circle around the goal. For the first time Lydia realized that, since the dance, she hadn’t even talked about replacing her soccer ball. Lydia made a mental note to stop somewhere and get her a new one. A big sporting-goods shop in a city, where they could find something colorful from The World Cup. Or maybe one endorsed by Mia Hamm.
For now, though, it didn’t seem to matter. Shelby played air-soccer, sidestepping, zigzagging nothing between her feet, shooting masterfully for a score.
“Very good!” Lydia applauded.
“Thank you.”
For Lydia there were leaves in this place, plenty of maple leaves to wade through. Hundreds of leaves, thousands of leaves, deep enough to pick up armfuls and fling overhead. Then the teeter-totter, which Shelby straddled like a seven-year-old, lifting it with the handle.
“Come do this with me!”
“Oh, good grief. It’s been years.”
Teeter-tottering does come back. The heavy rivets in the middle, the chain that dangled and locked it down. The handlebars, which seemed much lower and smaller than they ever used to seem. The broad seat that had to be straddled like a fat Shetland pony. Oh, yes, and the splinters. Both of them were screaming, trying not to scoot.
“When I was a little kid,” Lydia said as she soared up and Shelby went down, “Uncle Cy used to gather all the leaves from the whole place for my Christmas present. He’d rake for weeks, getting that skirt of land clear beside the marina. He’d bag them up with the idea that, when we all came in for the holidays, he’d burn them.” Shelby went up and Lydia went down. “But he’d dump them out the first day we got there and we’d turn cartwheels and hide in them. We pulverized them, running through them. He had to gather driftwood from the lakeshore if he wanted a bonfire.”
Up and down they went. Up. Down.
“Once, when I was a little girl?” and Lydia loved the way the girl’s voice lilted up at the end of her sentences. “My real dad, not Tom, but my real dad? Before he and my mom split up, he built me a tree house and we spent the night there. It was really fun. After he left, it fell apart, though. My mom wouldn’t let me climb in it anymore. It made me really sad.”
“You ought to see if your dad would come build it again. When I was little, I got a unicycle for Christmas.”
“When I was little I wanted a drum…”
“. . . and I wanted a monkey…”
And on and on they went, until the sky and the earth and the world had gone up and down so many times that they both felt silly and dizzy.
. . .
SHELBY TOOK FINE to the driving. It had been smart, coming off into town so she could get a feel for the LeSabre on slower roads. She leaned forward with her foot plastered to the brake, shifted plunk-thump into drive.
Her first mash of the gas pedal surged them forward.
Lydia fought to keep from saying it aloud. Okay, Shelb, turn on your blinker and signal. Keep your speed on the entrance ramp, you’ll do fine. Don’t worry about that truck; ease on out into your lane. There you go.
After ten minutes of sitting a little too forward in the seat, keeping her forearms a little too stiff, glancing a few times too often over her shoulder toward her blind spot, Shelby leaned into the seat, relaxed her elbows, and found the rearview mirror again. Lydia offered her a piece of Dentyne. Another half hour and she was still chomping on the same piece of gum, humming to the radio, flipping her hair out of her eyes, as if she’d been driving on an interstate every day of her life.
Then she kept her eyes straight on the dotted center line and started to giggle.
“What are you laughing at?”
“That thing in your yearbook.”
“What thing?”
Shelby rolled her eyes. “‘I know you will go far in life, especially with the rhino noise.’”
“Oh.” Lydia rolled her eyes. “That.”
Driving along, both of them staring straight ahead and grinning.
“Well?”
“Well, what?”
“You going to do it?”
Lydia left her arms crossed over her thighs and stared at the headliner in the Buick. “Let’s see.” She was thinking.
“Come on, please.”
Lydia took a deep breath through her nose that went clear down to her pelvis. Let the breath out. Pursed her lips and shook her head again. “Naw.”
“Okay. Never mind. Don’t do it. Don’t—”
It came from beneath Lydia’s throat, her mouth closed and set in a firm line, a guttural bubbling moan that vibrated the whole car.
“Oh, my word.”
“Watch your lane.”
“Oh, my word.”
“You’re going to get us killed. You’re weaving all over the road.”
LYDIA TOOK OVER the wheel again late in the night. She drove while Shelby drifted off to sleep. A few headlights pinpointed the darkness; she had no sense of distance, couldn’t figure out how far ahead of her they were. Every now and then, an eighteen-wheeler would burst past from behind, barreling along in the fast lane, wheels whining at ear level, yellow watery streams of light that your eyes could still see after they had gone.
When she grew sleepy herself, she pulled off onto the shoulder. The night was endless around her; it felt like the roof had disappeared off the sky.
She leaned her seat back and turned her head sideways, taking one private, long look at the girl.
Shelby slept with her cheekbone propped in one hand, her other hand cupped slightly over the saddle of her hipbone.
Her breath came in silent belly-rises the way the young always breathe. Only once or twice did Lydia hear an audible sigh.
There was nothing to keep Lydia company on this empty stretch of highway, nothing except for the stars. She thought of the first time she had really looked at Shelby’s birdlike hands, the fingernails chewed to the nubs. She thought of Sam’s proud little chip of a diamond blinking in the sun, a symbol, NO TRESPASSING. She thought of how she’d looked at Shelby’s hands that day in her office, had heard the things Shelby was saying, had cried out for Charlie, had thought how those teenager hands could have once been her own hands, too.
A slight breeze, the song of the trees, an intuition speaking within her that, even though she had cried out for it, she had almost forgotten how to hear.
Oh, Father. Show me. Please let me see and know what you want from this.
Maybe they should have spent the night somewhere. Lydia closed her eyes and stretched her neck against the backrest. This was a long drive to be making alone. Or with a teenaged girl, for that matter. When people on one end knew you’d left but people on the other end didn’t know you were on the way.
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