The catalog came, she said after a yawn. Good. We can go through it—
I told you I won’t go to college, I said.
You don’t mean that, Jazz. You’re so bright, you—
I won’t go, no matter how good my chances might be of getting in, I said. I don’t want to go.
She nudged her body upright, rubbed the back of her neck with one hand. But you don’t mean that. Of course you want to go. Who wouldn’t? It’s a wonderful opportunity, and you should—
You’re so high on it, why don’t you go back? I said. You’re one semester short of your English degree, right?
She looked down at her dirty fingers. That was a long time ago.
Who cares how long ago it was? I said. Why don’t you just go back and finish, be a teacher, or whatever it was you wanted to be? Is it because of money?
Money doesn’t have to stand in your way, if that’s what you’re worried about, she said, her eyes on me again. You can get a scholarship, and loans. You’re a smart girl.
So I go to college, and then what? Come back to work as the most overqualified baker in Tramp?
She sat straighter. No. You can do better.
Why would I want to?
Why wouldn’t you?
I shook my head, angry because my grandmother had built something our whole family relied upon, and it seemed like my mother was almost ashamed of it. Angry, too, because I could not forget the letters I’d read, what my mother had written about Tramp, about me, about her father.
Is the reason you won’t finish your degree because you’re trapped here with Dad and us anyway? I said. And you’d never be able to use it because there isn’t anything to use it for around here and you can’t drive to get to anything away from here, so why bother—
Jazz. Her warning voice.
But I can, can’t I? I said. I can try to do what you couldn’t bring yourself to do. Finish the degree. Have at least the slimmest possibility of making something of myself.
This was the meanest thing I’d ever said to my mother, and left no doubt that I’d crossed a line into no-rules-here territory. My muscles tautened, and I half expected the air between us to rumble with tension, for words that would be worse, that would roll out like cannons, for all-out war. Instead, my mother slid back down in her chair, a visible sign of defeat.
My mother is weak, I thought. She is the weakest person I know.
Resentment flourished in me like wild weeds, and I used it, sure that I’d never find a more ideal moment to end all this.
Stop shoving your dreams on me, I said. I’m not going to do what you want just because you want it. I’m not going to live my life so someone else can live theirs through me. I’m not going to be molded into the family savior, or the feather in the family cap, or whatever it is you want me to be. This is my life. Mine alone.
I turned and walked away from her, refusing to be shaped like dough according to another person’s appetite.
I prowled the crushed stone lot outside, my eyes stumbling around in the dark.
No Olivia.
I couldn’t comprehend this. I’d been gone for less than five minutes. She and Hobbs couldn’t have gone far, but I had no idea which direction they’d taken. If I chose wrong, I could lose her, maybe forever. Raging streams, wild animals, cliffs, cars, even Hobbs himself. I tried not to think of the many ways Olivia might fall into a bad situation out there in the wild. Even die.
What would I do? What could I do?
Overwhelmed, I leaned against the doorjamb at Outlanders. Moths flew near the bulb beside me, some already caught in the rangy spiderwebs decorating the exterior, the others sure to meet the same end.
Red Grass came through the door and stopped when he saw me there. “ ‘One moment of carelessness can cause a lifetime of sorrow.’ You know who said that?” When I didn’t reply, he answered himself. “Duffy Littlejohn, a train hopper. That man saved my life, and I mean that literally.”
He reached behind him, and a moment later dragged all our bags outside. Including my sister’s.
The bag with our mother’s ashes inside it.
This was worse. This was far worse than I’d imagined.
I took the bag, too overcome with dread even to chew him a new one for his duplicity, his role in this mess. Besides, my role was bigger. I’d told Hobbs I was about to turn him in. I’d birthed this new chaos; I was its creator. Red Grass hadn’t once stuck my nose in that truth, which is more than I would’ve done if it had been my foot in that particular shoe. I’d been stupid. So, so stupid.
“I know what it’s like to lose family,” he said, “and I won’t let it happen here if I can help it. We’ll find them.” He pulled a thin black flashlight out of his bag of tricks. It was the sort of flashlight cops used, he explained, and would help us travel in the dark as we searched.
Questions toppled out of me.
Where did you get that flashlight? Are you a cop?
Why did you let me believe you were after a reward when that wasn’t the case? What is the case?
Did you really make that poster yourself? Scatter it across the state and all the way to Kentucky, even though you knew where Hobbs was well enough? Why?
What do you want with him?
What’s the big deal with those coins?
It seemed obvious that the coins were at the root of everything, as Red Grass was always fixated on them. But it had also seemed obvious that Red Grass was nothing more than a dirt-poor, train-hopping scamp looking to make a quick buck, and not someone who would have a fancy cell phone in his pocket, or a state-of-the-art flashlight, so I wasn’t sure what to believe anymore.
He didn’t answer any of my questions, though, and what he did say failed to ease my nerves.
“I told you I needed more time to verify some things. My friend tonight, he took some of those coins and he plans to do some research. The next phase happens after that.”
“Phase? You’re not seriously asking me to believe this is still on? That you’re still planning to take care of Hobbs?”
“Yes. Yes, I am asking you to believe it.” He looked from the dark sky, back to me, pierced me through with the sort of look I’d usually attribute to Hobbs. “You can’t always read a thing on the surface and understand it all the way through, missy, and you’re driving everyone away because you think you can, with your snap judgments and all that heat.”
Hadn’t Olivia said this same thing to me minutes ago? And now she was gone. Gone like my mother was gone. Had I done something to drive my mother away, too? Could I have prevented … everything somehow? I hugged the suitcase to my chest, couldn’t help a slight tremble.
Red Grass must’ve read the pain on my face, because he patted my shoulder. “I’ll tell you this so you don’t worry overmuch about finding them again.” He glanced away as a truck in the lot pulled out, beams flashing in his eyes, and then he looked straight at me. “I’ve got a tracking device on that boy.”
I followed Red Grass, as he walked back into the thick of trees and weeds and dark and quiet, and away from Outlanders and all its smoke and light and noise. I would never have left at all, would’ve sat in the lot hoping Olivia would come to her senses and return. But when he showed me the tracking device—about the size of a cell phone but with a map schematic and red flashing light—and how far Hobbs already was from us, I understood the safer bet. He wouldn’t, of course, tell me why he had the device, and was as evasive as ever.
“You want me to bring you to them or not?” he asked—a choice that was no choice at all.
“Of course I do.”
“Then stop pummeling me with questions I’m not about to answer and let’s go.”
I wish you a night
full of leg cramps and flea bites,
you pushy old man.
And so we went, marching through the woods with a single spotlight beam to guide us, which isn’t anything I’d recommend if you’re not the one carrying the flashlight, even if it is Quality.
I cursed Hobbs when I tripped over something that felt like a vine; it didn’t matter that he wasn’t around to hear me.
“Doesn’t take much to get on your bad side, does it?” Red Grass said.
“Oh, right, because stealing my sister away from me twice isn’t reason enough to be pissed at Hobbs. I’m just a hotheaded, overreacting—”
“I told you already, you can’t always trust your eyes.”
“No? Well, I can’t replace the ones I have.” To our left, something scurried in the brush. With my free hand, I found the knife in my pocket and held tight.
“That’s where you’re wrong. You can replace them, in a fashion. See that there?” He stopped so fast that I nearly ran into him.
“What?”
He flashed his light into the brush.
“Bushes?” I asked, not bothering to hide my annoyance.
“There are berries on them bushes,” he said, and I honed in on them, red and round.
“I don’t think now’s the time for berry picking.”
“You can’t eat them, girly,” he said. “Those are smilax berries. Horrid things to eat, nothing at all to smile about—unless you’re a deer or bird or what have you. Seems one thing, is another—you get me?”
“Smilax berries?” I brushed a hand across my cheek. “Smilax berries are real?”
“Of course they’re real. Open your eyes.”
I’d assumed that my mother had invented smilax. Certainly, I’d never heard of it outside of her story. In her story, a particular patch of berries marked a gateway of sorts—a keyhole into the land of the will-o’-the-wisps. The land of hope.
“Wait,” I said, shifting Olivia’s bag to my other hand when Red Grass continued on the path. “Hold up, old man.”
“Hmmph?”
He turned the light on me, and enough of it bled over so that I could see the fruit again. I pushed a branch out of the way, stepped far enough into a thicket that I could reach the bush, then plucked off a berry with my free hand. Rolled it—chill and firm—between my fingers. Real.
“I’m not going to eat it. Never mind,” I said, when he wanted to know why I’d taken one. “I didn’t harangue you over your devices, did I?”
“As a matter of fact, you did.”
He shined the light in my eyes, and I slammed my lids shut, raised my arm to block my face. “Watch where you’re pointing that thing!”
“You’re a negative Nellie, is what you are,” he said. “You don’t do something with all that anger it’ll eat you up, and don’t think I don’t know what I’m talking about. You didn’t see me after that fire killed my boy, after the cops said they couldn’t find the one who set it. I let anger take me like slack action. You know what that is?”
“No, and I don’t care.”
“Slack action,” he said, ignoring me, “is the give between cars and can bring a hell ton of trouble when a train’s in crisis. Give means no real support, no way to stop one car from crashing into its neighbor. That was how I lived for a while, crashing around, every part of me off the rails. It’s not the way, I’m telling you. But when you push away from that anger, stretch yourself like train cars set to rights, you can see things you might not notice otherwise.”
“I’m not going to see anything at all unless you get that damned light out of my face.” He didn’t respond. I moved my arm, saw the light had moved to target my midriff.
“You have to fling all that anger away,” he said.
“Fling?”
“Fling it away.” Red Grass jerked his hand to the right, and the flashlight he’d been holding somersaulted through the air and landed beside a tree. “I’m just saying.”
And, for the first time since the disaster began, I smiled.
I pushed Red Grass a few times more about Hobbs, about why he was following him, about what he knew. He gave little, next to nothing.
“Sometimes,” he said, “you just have to follow your gut, even if you don’t understand it all the way through. That’s why I’m doing it, and that’s all you need to know, young thing miss.”
“Stretching with those nicknames, Red.”
“Young missy,” he grumbled.
My thoughts jumped to the job at the funeral home—how I’d wanted it, taken it even though it didn’t make much sense to my family or even to me, how I felt almost desperate to start work. When would I begin? Was it in three days now, or four? I’d lost my sense of time.
“Well, shiiit,” Red Grass said, and stopped just ahead of me.
“They must’ve hitched a ride.”
“What?” I skirted around him to peer down at the tracking device in his hands, though I had no idea what I was looking at. “How can you tell?”
“Because here’s where we are”—he pointed at a red light—“and here’s where they are”—and another—“and there ain’t no way they walked to where they are now in the time they’ve had. Good news is—”
“There’s good news?”
“Good news is the dot’s not moving anymore. They’re somewhere, at least for now, and three or so miles out. We’ll be able to walk it in an hour or so. But, oh, shiiit,” he said again. “This is bad.”
“Why? What?” How could things become worse?
“Can’t track a car by foot,” he said. “Not even Aragorn could’ve tracked a damned car driving on a damned road at night in the rain.”
“Rain?”
The sky rumbled with thunder.
“Perfect.”
“You aren’t a talent at noticing things around you, are you?” he said, then barreled on before I could voice offense. “And this is the opposite of perfect. Hobbs is gonna know something’s wrong. He’s gonna know I’ve been tracking him, and not without technology.”
“So what?” I said. “We have to keep going. We can’t give up now.”
“What a leaker you are. I didn’t say anything about giving up, did I? But we find them the way I say we find them, because this ain’t your neck on the line.”
“It’s my sister on the line.”
“Just hush. Let me think a minute.” He pulled off his bulky pack and sat right there on the ground.
Sat, while time ticked on. While the sky lit with the storm and the beam from his jostled flashlight.
“We need to keep moving,” I said when my patience wore out. “We need to do something, right now.”
“All right,” he said, sliding me a complicated look. “But you’ve got to say and do what I tell you to, you got me?”
“Why should I—”
“Because you want her back, that’s why. I have an idea—a crazy fool’s idea.” His face was half in shadow, the dark dancing over his stubbled chin, and I wondered if I should be afraid.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
A Hollow Heart
OLIVIA
Mama wasn’t the best cook in the world, but she sure did try. One of my earliest memories was of her taking me and Jazz to a big store in Kennaton to look for “kitchen gear,” as she called it, when I was about four or so. Mama still had her license at that point, and drove a small orange car that was nearly as loud as the biscuit bus. She’d been working in Honeybee Hill, which was a bigger town than Tramp but not as far off as Kennaton, in a plant shop called Begonia’s, and had saved up some of her money. It was a good job for her to have at the time, because there was a room in the back that the owner let us sit in for play during Mama’s shift.
We’re going to buy some kitchen knives today, she told us, as we arrived at the store. Your father deserves a proper dinner now and then, and I’ll have better luck at that if I have a proper set of knives.
It was my first time in Kennaton. Later, I’d be big enough to see out the windows and realize how different that city was from Tramp, but even then walking into the store felt like entering another world altogether. Four floors of stuff in one building—two of them just for clothes, and appliances and kitchen gear on a floor of their own. We walked past mannequins garbed in swingy dresses
, jackets with ties, and polka-dot bikinis. And when we stepped inside an elevator and started to rise, the lavender- and yellow-circle shapes I’d seen from the music all around us began to spin like a tunnel, a pastel tornado I felt in the pit of my stomach.
The appliances and kitchen-gadgets floor seemed boring, filled with tall things I couldn’t see well, even though my interest spiked when Mama stopped to open a refrigerator door or admire the stoves—but only because I wanted to crawl inside. (Another few years at the flower shop, and we’ll buy a whole new kitchen, she said.) Ladles, whisks, funnels, toasters, kettles, cutting boards, gravy boats, blenders, and coffeemakers; there were rows and rows of kitchen things. To combat my boredom, I picked a red colander off a reachable shelf and stuck it on my head. Playing with kitchen stuff was one of my favorite things to do at home—taking pots and pans and plastic bowls out of the two low cupboards, pretending to make sauce with a wooden spoon. But at the store I wasn’t able to play. Mama took the bowl off my head, asked Jazz to take me out of the gadgets section for a while until she’d finished looking for her knives. If we were quiet and polite, we might play a game of hide-and-seek, she suggested.
In those days, Jazz took the job of big sister to heart, and so she laced her fingers with mine and we walked back the way we’d come. But I wasn’t good at playing hide-and-seek with my sister. She found me every time. I was halfway inside a refrigerator, with one leg left to pull in behind me, when a woman with a badge opened the door all the way and scowled.
I couldn’t do things like that, she told me, just before Jazz grabbed my hand and walked me to the end of the row, where we leaned against a washing machine. She wore a printed dress with multicolored stripes that my mother had made. The stripes didn’t line up well, and one of the black buttons hung by a thread. I reached for the thread, but Jazz said I couldn’t play with her dress, either.
There was too much I couldn’t do. I couldn’t wear the colander and I couldn’t hide in the refrigerator and I couldn’t touch a black shiny button that didn’t want to be on that dress anyhow. But I could win at hide-and-seek; I was determined. So the next time Jazz started to count to twenty, I went to the elevator and waited. And when an older couple stepped into it once the doors opened, I followed. They didn’t bother looking at me, didn’t even seem to notice, which made me glad. I had a big smile on my face as I watched the lavender and yellow circles turn into a tornado from the music again, and we went down and down, and then the doors opened.
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