“Your namesake,” Rodeo whispered.
She was only, like, fifteen feet away, just standing there among the sagebrush. Her bushy tail held low, ribs rising and falling with her breathing, ears twitching and turning. Just standing there looking at me and Rodeo.
“Whoa,” I said, smiling.
Rodeo was smiling, too, his eyes crinkled up with it.
“Good morning,” he murmured, either to me or to the coyote, or maybe to both of us.
Then the coyote’s head turned back toward the desert behind her. She lowered her head and yipped, one little bark.
And out of the shadows of the sagebrush tumbled two little brown bodies.
Pups.
They scampered up to her and stopped, one between her legs and one by her chest. They were all ears and legs, just as clumsy and cute as could be. They sniffed at her quick and then stopped, looking to where she was looking. Looking at us.
A mama. A mama and two babies. Daughters, maybe. Appearing out of a sunrise dream to visit us.
I looked up at Rodeo, excited.
But Rodeo’s smile faded. He raised a hand, slow and kinda shaky, and pressed his fingers to the window, reaching out toward that mom and her two little ones. His eyes were full and wet.
I didn’t say nothing. I looked at them coyotes, too. And I was trying my best to breathe and swallow.
I don’t know how long we all stayed like that, us and the coyotes. Looking at each other, sitting quiet. Whether it was a few minutes or a few seconds, though, that time felt full, stuffed thick with life and feeling, splitting at the threads with breathing and thinking.
The sun finally poked its head over that mesa, and its sharp white light pierced the dawn’s softness.
The mama coyote raised her nose, sniffing at the sky. Then she lowered her head and looked at us and whined, just once. It wasn’t a sad whine, or a hurt whine, or a scared whine. I don’t know what it was. But I know it was for us.
Rodeo took a trembly breath.
“Once upon a time,” he said, his voice hoarse and quiet. “Once upon a time.”
And then, just like that, they were gone. The mama gave us one last look and then trotted off, as quick and graceful as you can imagine. Her babies followed, jogging along behind her. In a heartbeat they were gone, melted back into the desert or whatever dream they’d come out of.
Me and Rodeo sat looking at where they’d been, looking at the emptiness of the desert the mama and her babies had left behind. Rodeo’s hand was still on the window, his eyes still full.
He sighed.
He leaned his head against the cool glass. I heard him sniff, once.
And then he went back to sleep. I heard his breathing get slow and regular.
I think maybe he was hoping that if he fell back asleep fast enough, he could catch up to that mama and her babies. That he could dream about them. Get a little more time with them. It’s a nice thought.
I don’t know if he did or not.
So there’s that. I ain’t never leaving that one behind, that memory.
It’s a good one, I think.
I think.
CHAPTER
TWENTY
It was only, like, twenty minutes after the Dine ’n’ Dip, as we were rolling down the road again and I had a belly full of breakfast, when the call came in.
I was sitting at one end of the couch, and Salvador was sitting on a box in front of me. Me and him were in the middle of a fairly epic match of Uno, piling up the ratty cards on a suitcase on the floor between us. Ivan was lying half on my lap, nudging my hand any time I had the nerve to stop scratching him.
I’d just hit Salvador with a vicious Draw Four when the moment was interrupted by a jarring, urgent ringtone.
Our heads snapped up, but no one moved for a second until Salvador came to his senses and jumped up and tugged the phone out of his pocket and looked at the display.
“It’s my tía!” He punched the “Answer” button and dove right into an excited, rapid-fire conversation in Spanish. His eyes were shining, and he was wiggling like a puppy as he nodded and answered and questioned. The sun was coming in sideways through the bus windows, warming up his skin to a bright richness and sparkling his eager eyes. That kid was lit up, inside and out.
A weird, lumpy sick feeling settled down in my stomach as I sat there watching Salvador talk to his aunt. It was a strange, sad kind of nervous and I didn’t like it, and I looked away from Salvador and down at the cat purring in my lap, the cat that was happy and mine and not going anywhere.
Salvador ran up to his mom at the front of the bus and handed her the phone and then bounced back my way, swaying with the motion of the bus and standing there like he was too excited to sit down.
I slid Ivan off me, ignoring his surly side-eye, and stood up next to Salvador.
“So what’s up?” I asked in a whisper.
“We’re back in business,” he said. “She lost her phone and our number was in her phone, which is why she wasn’t answering or calling back. But she got a new phone and finally got our number through my tío who lives in Houston.”
“Okay,” I said. “Awesome. So … now we have an address to drop you off at?”
“Uh … I don’t know yet. She was … kinda weird about that. She’s talking to my mom about it now.” His face clouded over and I followed him back up to the front to listen to his mom’s half of the conversation, which was all a Spanish mystery to me. Salvador’s scowl deepened as he listened, though. Lester, sitting in the seat behind Rodeo, was watching Ms. Vega close. Rodeo was tossing glances Ms. Vega’s way, too. We could all tell something was up.
Finally, Ms. Vega hung up the phone. She looked out the window and said something to herself under her breath. She closed her eyes and shook her head.
“Mamá?” Salvador murmured.
She looked at him, but didn’t say anything.
“Everything all right there, Ms. Vega?” Rodeo asked, his voice soft.
Ms. Vega swallowed. She lifted her chin. I saw her do it, saw her reach down inside herself and find strength. She was all kinds of strong, that Ms. Esperanza Vega.
When she spoke, there was no quiver to her voice.
“No,” she said, soft but clear. “Everything is not all right.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-ONE
Salvador sat down beside his mom. The bus rumbled along, no one talking, everyone waiting for Ms. Vega’s news.
“Your tía doesn’t have jobs for us,” she said to Salvador. “And she’s not in St. Louis.”
“What?” Salvador asked.
Ms. Vega shook her head and her eyes narrowed.
“It’s that Chris.” She said the name like a curse word. “I told her he was no good.” Then she spat another word, this time in Spanish, and I’m not gonna repeat it here because I’m not sure what it means, but based on how she said it and how Salvador’s eyebrows went up when she said it, I’m, like, a hundred percent sure it is a curse word.
Salvador looked over at the rest of us.
“Chris is, uh, my aunt’s boyfriend. He was the one who said he knew someone who’d hire her and Mom.”
“So … where is she?” I asked.
Ms. Vega took a deep breath, then said, “Petoskey,” and for a second I thought it was another Spanish curse word, but then she added, “She’s in Petoskey, Michigan.”
“Michigan?” Salvador blurted.
Ms. Vega nodded.
“Sí. That’s where Chris says he can find us jobs now.” She rolled her eyes. Then she closed them and shook her head, her lips pursed tight. Salvador put an arm around her shoulders.
“Ms. Vega,” Rodeo said, “don’t you worry one second about this. Michigan’s a beautiful state. One of my favorites. It’s no big deal at all for us to swing up and drop you off up there.”
My mouth went dry.
“What?” I exclaimed. “We can’t go to Michigan!”
All the heads turned to me. I hadn’t tot
ally planned on shouting that out. It just kinda flew out of me in the moment. I stammered for something to say to fill the silence left by my words.
“Um. I mean. Isn’t that, like, um, out of our way?” Yeah. Yikes. That was even worse. I knew I sounded like a total jerk. Even Lester was looking at me with a girl-are-you-serious-right-now look. But I was desperately trying to picture a map of our straight-shot route across the U.S. and desperately trying to figure how a zigzag detour to Michigan would look on it and desperately trying to remember how many hours I had left before I lost that memory box forever.
“Out of our way?” Rodeo said. “Coyote.” Ouch. He said my name in a way I’m not sure I’d ever heard before, or at least not in a long, long time. Surprised. Disappointed. Sad. My face burned red. I was glad he was driving, glad I didn’t have to look into his eyes when he said my name that way.
Salvador was looking at me. I could see his mind racing. He knew my secret.
“No,” he said quick. “You guys don’t have to take us. It’s too far. We can take a bus, like we were gonna do.”
That Salvador. He’s a good one.
But Rodeo shook his head.
“No way, brother. You’re already on a bus, remember? We ain’t gonna abandon you folks in some dirty ol’ bus station when you’re already on a perfectly good bus right here. A little side trip okay with you, Lester?”
“Fine by me, man.”
Rodeo made eye contact with me in the rearview mirror.
“Coyote?” he asked, his voice careful and testing. “Any reason we shouldn’t take our friends here to where they need to be?”
I don’t know how long it took me to answer. Honestly, it was probably, like, three seconds. It felt like a heckuva lot more, though. ’Cause in those three seconds, about a thousand thoughts shot through my mind. The memory box, sure. And the map and the ticking hands of the clock, yeah. And the fact that I had a secret to keep, and that if I said, “Well, actually we do need to abandon these folks in a dirty ol’ bus station because I’ve been lying to you the whole time and we’re actually heading back to the one place in the world where you don’t want to go,” my whole quest would be dead in the water anyway. But I also remembered Ms. Vega unlocking her car in a gas station parking lot to let me in to hide before she even knew me. And Salvador, with his listening eyes and his secret sharing and his first-thing-in-the-morning apologies.
Keeping my secret and getting that box was something I had to do. But maybe so was helping Salvador and his mom. Come on, Coyote—there wasn’t no “maybe” about it.
“Of course not,” I answered. I stretched a big grin onto my face and hoped it was big enough to hide the butterflies that were flat-out rioting in my stomach. I pointed with both hands out the windshield toward the horizon. “Michigan it is!”
Rodeo looked at me a second in the mirror, then smiled and nodded.
“Chart us a new course, Lester!” he called. “We got a family to reunite.”
I could only fake a smile for about another four or five seconds, so when Lester started tapping on his phone, I got up quick and headed back to my room. I was all sweaty and nauseous and I needed to see a map ASAP.
I’d just flopped down onto my bed and opened the atlas when Salvador hissed, “Coyote! Can I come in?” through my curtain door.
“Yeah,” I answered, and before his body was through the curtain he was already talking a couple miles a minute.
“Coyote I’m so sorry listen you don’t have to take us there I know you need to get home and if I tell my mom what’s going on I know she’ll make Rodeo drop us off and—”
“Shut up a sec,” I interrupted, not looking up from the map under my fingers. I traced the line from where we were in Tennessee up through Michigan and over to Washington, comparing it with my eyes to the straight line we had been traveling. “I think we can do this.” I started to measure the distance with my fingers when something dropped onto the map, making me jump.
“Here. Use this.” It was Salvador’s phone. He already had the little map thing open and everything. “Just punch in where you wanna go.”
I snatched it up and got to tapping.
“Okay,” I narrated while I worked. “So, we’re almost to Chattanooga, Tennessee, right now. From here to Poplin Springs—that’s home—is … thirty-seven hours. If we add Petoskey into the middle of it, the drive time goes up to … huh.” I blinked. Checked it again. Then I beamed up at Salvador.
“What?” he demanded. “How long?”
“Just forty-five hours. That’s only eight hours longer. We can totally do this.” Relief washed over me like a sunrise. Lord. I’d almost blown my secret, endangered my mission, and abandoned my friend—for nothing.
“Are you sure? I thought your timeline was, like, pretty tight.” Salvador’s forehead was all crinkled up in concern.
“It is. But we had a few hours of wiggle room.”
Salvador still looked doubtful. I stood up to look him in the eye.
“This is important. You and your mom getting to your aunt safe, I mean. It’s worth it, man. More than worth it. We’ll get you there.” I held my fist out toward him. He looked at it a second, eyes unsure, then back up at me.
“You’re a good friend, Coyote,” he said quietly. Then he bumped my fist and flashed me a shy kinda smile and turned and walked out of my room.
I let his words tingle in my heart for just a second. “Friend” wasn’t a word I’d heard all that often. It is one of those words that once you hear it, you wanna hear it a lot more.
But I didn’t have much time for tingling. I chewed on my lip, thinking.
I hadn’t had many extra hours to start with, and I’d just given away eight of ’em. For this whole thing to work, we were gonna have to do a lot more driving and a little less sleeping.
Which meant it was time for me to have a heart-to-heart with Lester Washington.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-TWO
“You want me to what?” Lester’s voice was flat, his face set in a distinctly are-you-kidding-me kind of expression.
We were stopped for gas somewhere in Kentucky later that same afternoon. Rodeo had gone inside to use the bathroom and Lester was out pumping the fuel, and I knew it was my chance, so I took it.
“I want you to drive all night. Oh, and don’t tell my dad that I asked you to. That’s it.”
“That’s it, huh?” Lester cocked an eyebrow. “I’m gonna need a little more information, if you don’t mind.”
I eyed the convenience store door, checking for Rodeo. I’d noticed that Rodeo grabbed his book before he went in, so I figured I had a few minutes.
“I’m, uh … Well, I’m just kind of in a hurry. An important hurry. So I wanna cover as many miles as fast as we can.”
“Uh-huh,” Lester said. He crossed his arms and leaned against the bus. “Lay it on me, kid. This isn’t about some pork chop sandwich, is it?”
I sucked on my teeth for a second. Squinted one eye against the afternoon glare and looked at Lester. He was good people, no doubt about it. And I needed his help—no doubt about that, either. But if I took a risk and told him everything and then he blabbed it to Rodeo, I’d be sunk.
I blew a strand of my hair out of my face.
“You promise not to tell Rodeo?” I asked, and without a pause Lester shook his head and said, “Nope,” but when he saw my look of dismayed betrayal, he lightened up a bit.
“Okay, okay,” he said. “Is whatever’s going on illegal?”
“No, sir.”
“Is it dangerous? You gonna get hurt?”
“No, sir.”
It was Lester’s turn to suck on his teeth. He considered me for a few seconds, an eyebrow arched.
“Ticktock, ticktock, Lester,” I said.
“Okay. If I decide it’s not illegal and if I decide it’s not dangerous and if I decide I’m not worried about you, I promise not to tell your daddy. That’s the best I can do.”
I clicked
my tongue. That was about three more ifs than I was comfortable with, but I didn’t have a ton of options. I took a lung-filling breath and spat it all out at once, starting with “You know how I told you about my mom and my sisters?” and ending thirty seconds later near the bottom of my lungs with “And so I gotta get back there by Wednesday morning, otherwise it’s gone forever and I just couldn’t live with that. The end.”
During my spiel Lester’s face had gone from an amused what-is-this-weirdo-girl-up-to expression to something more serious. When I was done, he just looked at me a second. Then he nodded a small sort of nod, more to himself than to me.
“And you really can’t tell your daddy all that?”
“Not yet,” I said with a shake of my head. “We haven’t been back in five years, and if he had his way, we’d never go back. It’s just too sad for him. And I get that. But losing that box is too sad for me. So I gotta get as close as I can before he finds out.”
“And then?”
I shrugged.
“I’ll blow up that bridge when I come to it, I guess.”
Lester stepped in closer so I could see the little brown flecks in his green eyes.
“Coyote, I will not lie to your daddy. If he asks me, I’m telling him the truth.” I waited, breathless, for what he was gonna say next. “But other than that, I’ll do everything I can to get you home in time.”
I couldn’t help it. I threw my arms around ol’ Lester in a big hug.
“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” I said, and he kinda laughed and patted my back awkwardly and said, “All right, all right,” and then the gas pump clunked off and I let him go and he screwed the gas cap back on Yager.
“I better go take a nap,” he said. “I got a long night ahead of me.”
I grinned at him.
“Darn right you do.” I felt a million pounds lighter, with Lester and Salvador helping me carry that secret around instead of having to do it all by myself.
Sometimes trusting someone is about the scariest thing you can do. But you know what? It’s a lot less scary than being all alone.
The Remarkable Journey of Coyote Sunrise Page 12