Dad scratched his head. “Just hold it a while longer. We’ll stop another place.”
He looked at himself in the mirror and messed his hair so it was standing up. Then he got out of the car and pulled the plaid shirt out of the Walmart bag. He put it on and lifted the collar and hunched over like something was wrong with his neck.
At the entrance to the store, I watched as the doors swallowed him up.
I jiggled my tooth. It was still holding on. I hung my arms out the window and felt the hot metal of the car against my skin. There wasn’t any breeze.
A woman pushed her stroller in front of Dad’s car. I watched her lift the baby out to put him in his car seat. The baby’s eyes were black and wobbly and his head was flat on top, like it never finished growing into a circle. He made a funny moaning sound as the woman strapped him in. She slammed the car door shut and climbed in front. Then she just sat there with her head on the wheel. Probably she was napping.
Dad was still gone.
“Maybe he’s leaving us behind,” Clemesta said. “Like running away.”
I shook my head. “He would never leave us. Never ever.” I yawned, but not from tired, from bored. The woman with the flat-head baby pulled away. Now it was only the Jeep and two other cars left.
“Hello, hello,” I called out into the empty parking lot. I wanted to see if it echoed. I sang the words from the song Mom loves best. A man pushed a shopping cart to his car, but he didn’t stop to listen.
“Pretend I’m on stage,” I said. “Pretend you’re the judge and you say, ‘Dolly Rust, you will be a sensation.’”
Clemesta shook her head. “I’m getting tired of pretending the whole time.”
Dad came back to the car with two bags in his hand. He scratched in one of them and pulled out a baseball cap. He put it on and turned to look at me.
“You like it?”
I gave him two thumbs up.
“I have one for you,” he said. “Here.”
“Not now,” I said. “My hair is lovely and shiny. It wants to stay loose.”
Dad took a pair of glasses out of the bag and snapped off the plastic tag before putting them on.
“You don’t wear glasses.”
“I need them for driving.”
“LIAR,” Clemesta said.
Dad passed a pack of crackers to me, and then a box of cereal and a couple of granola bars. “It’s a breakfast picnic,” he said.
“There’s no milk.”
“Are you kidding? Dry cereal is the best.”
“I said only healthy food. Like green smoothies and fruit.”
“There wasn’t any,” Dad said. “But granola bars are kinda healthy.”
“No. Mom says they’re packed with sugar, it just hides in there like a sneaky cat burglar.”
“Oh. Well.”
We drove through a long stretch of trailer homes and they howled at us to look away. All the trees had thorns and all the windows had eyes.
“Are you definitely and certainly sure we’re going in the right direction?”
Dad nodded.
“Because it doesn’t look right at all.”
I glared at Cap’n Crunch’s face on the box. “You aren’t nutritious,” I told him.
He cackled. “I know,” he said. “I’m full of sugar too.”
I opened up the box and took a handful anyway. I crunched a few bites and wiped my sticky hands on the seat. I stared at Dad’s head in the new cap, watching the road ahead. He turned on the radio and we listened to the voices crack and scratch.
ABDUCTION. ABDUCTION. I kept thinking of the clerk’s pimply face watching us drive away. DOLLY RUST, Shayna had yelled, but I never told her my last name.
“Exactly,” Clemesta said. Her eyes were shining.
“Have a nap,” I said. “You look like you have a fever.” I set her under the seat.
Dad slowed the car near a gas station. Behind it, there was a parking lot full of rows and rows of rusty old heaps parked out in the sun. They looked like they were in a car cemetery for dead cars that would never move again. Most of them were rusted brown. An old yellow school bus was sitting on bricks. Probably someone stole the tires. Maybe they took the schoolchildren too.
Dad pulled up. I opened the window because Clemesta had accidentally let out a fart that was stinking up the car.
A voice called out. “Can I help you, mister?”
Dad spun around. A woman was standing in the doorway of the store. She had a cigarette in her mouth and she didn’t even take it out to speak.
Dad gave her a wave. “Thank you,” he said. “Be over in a minute.”
“You look funny with your glasses,” I said.
He nodded. “I need you to put the cap on,” he said. “Tuck your hair up and put it on.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Dolly,” he said. “Do it.”
I pressed my fists into my stomach to feel the rock. “Are we in disguise?”
“Kinda.”
“Why? Are we in trouble?”
Dad wiped his forehead. “A little bit.”
“Because of skipping school?”
He nodded. I kicked my sneakers into the seat. “Well, it wasn’t even my idea,” I said. “And you never asked me, you just scooped me up and left.”
Dad looked back at the woman waiting for us at the store. “I know,” he said. “I’m sorry. And you aren’t in any trouble, only me. We just need to be careful for a couple of days.”
I looked at his brown eyes. “Until we get home?”
“Yeah.”
I threw off the seat belt and shoved the cap on my head. My hair was too thick and lustrous to stay hidden away for long, and it all popped back out. Dad didn’t notice, he had already grabbed his duffel bag and he was walking ahead.
The woman didn’t smile at us. She walked with a cane and one of her legs was bandaged up.
“You lost?” she said. Her words came out very stretchy, like in slow motion.
Dad pulled his new cap down low over his face. “No, ma’am,” he said. “Just interested in your cars.”
His words sounded funny too, like he was playing a game of pretend.
“You looking to buy?” the woman said.
“Looking to trade the Jeep.”
The woman narrowed her eyes. “That sounds to me like trouble. Are you in some kind of trouble?”
Dad tugged on his cap and I squeezed Clemesta. “No, ma’am,” he said. “And I mean none for you.” He was suddenly being very polite and using his best manners, and the woman didn’t even deserve them. She just scowled at us like we were fleas. Dad unzipped his duffel bag and pulled out two bills. “Would this help?”
The woman curled back her lips like she wanted to eat the money. Her teeth were pointy and brown at the edges. She started to cough, probably from LUNG CANCER. She pulled a handkerchief out of her bra like a magic trick and spat into it. She peered down at me and then back at Dad.
“Do I know you?” she said. “You look familiar.”
Dad shook his head. “We’re passing through.”
“Well,” she said. She reached for the money and slipped it inside her bra where the dirty handkerchief and probably twenty other things lived. “You seem like nice folks, don’t you? Wait here.” She disappeared inside the store and left Dad and me squinting our eyes in the sun.
As soon as she was gone, I turned to Dad. “What are you doing? Those cars are DISGUSTING and we have the best car already. It’s called the Jeep Renegade, in case you forgot!”
Dad click-cracked his jaw. “I know, Doll. Just trust me.”
“I don’t trust him,” Clemesta said. “He’s full of big fat lies.”
“Clemesta! Don’t say that.”
“But it’s true,” she said.
I looked at Dad. “And stop speaking in that voice. I don’t like it. It doesn’t sound like you.”
The woman came back outside. “Follow me.”
Dad took my hand and
we walked behind her. She hobbled on her cane and we had to stop twice so she could catch up her breath to her body.
Finally she pointed to a rusty blue car. “Take the Ford,” she said. “She’s a real solid ride.”
She started coughing again and I watched for the handkerchief trick but this time she just spat her goopy phlegm onto the ground.
Dad stared at the car and then turned to the woman. “You can’t be serious,” he said.
“All we have,” she said. “Without proper paperwork.” She lifted her cane and pointed it at Dad. “I’m guessing you don’t want any of that.”
Dad opened the car door and looked inside.
“Like I told you,” the woman said. “She’s a nice ride.”
We walked back to the Jeep and didn’t wait for the old woman to catch up. Dad popped the trunk and took out the Walmart bags, and then he climbed in front and scooped everything out of the glove compartment. He held onto his duffel bag very tightly and I kept my eyes on it too, to make sure it didn’t leak any money. The old woman would FOR SURE not put it into the Lost and Found box. She would steal it for herself and hide it in her bra.
Clemesta was in a RAGE.
“I don’t like this one bit,” she said.
“I know.”
“But think, Dolly, think!” she said. “Your advanced brain must be SOLVING it.”
The woman hobbled over, wheezing.
“You done?” She was sweating in the sun and there was a pool of wet under both of her arms.
Dad handed her the keys to the Jeep and she slipped them in her pocket like it was hers all along.
It stank inside the new-old car like something was rotting. The seats were sticky and scratchy and the stitching was coming apart. Only one of the seat belts in the back would buckle, and the fabric part was half-torn.
“It’s only for a few more days,” Dad said. He started the engine, and it made a chug-a-chug-chug noise. I secretly hoped it wouldn’t start, but it did and then we were back on the road, winding around in the rusty old Ford.
My shorts had cut two lines across my legs. They looked like sad faces.
“Why did you take me out of school for this dumb adventure?” I said. “We could have gone over Spring Break, or the holidays.”
Dad made a fist. “I wasn’t…I’m sorry. It was a mistake. I didn’t think it through.” He took a sip of water and splashed some over his face. It wet the seat but he didn’t care because the car was already in RUINS.
“Well, now we’re in trouble. Mom will be fuming at you. I’m a little fuming too.”
Dad swallowed. “It will be okay. We’ll be…home soon.”
I took a deep breath and tried to let out some of the fuming parts. I counted to five and then backward from five.
“Do we have to stay in disguise until we’re home?”
“Yeah.”
“Is it like a secret mission?”
Dad nodded. “Exactly.”
“I can keep secrets,” I told Dad.
“No, you can’t,” Clemesta said into my ear.
The rock in my stomach went spinning.
The car wouldn’t stop spluttering, like it also had a bad cough from smoking too many cigarettes. I bet the old woman was spitting up all over our Jeep. I thought of Mr. Abdul back home, who never made such disgusting coughing sounds even though he smoked too.
Probably he was missing me a bunch. Everyone from home was missing me, but most of all Mom. I bet she was crying a lot and looking at my photograph and kissing it and trying not to get it wet with her tears. Poor Mom. Probably it was the worst time in her whole life, and every day since I was gone was a CAN’T GET OUT OF BED DAY. I sent her a telepathy kiss, and one from Dad too.
There, I said, now we are all friends again and no one needs to be mad.
I opened the windows all the way down so I wouldn’t have to smell the car. Outside it smelled of fresh air and trees, and smoke when we passed by a house with a firepit burning trash in the yard.
“I still need to pee.”
“We’ll find somewhere,” Dad said. “We’ll stop soon.”
I lifted up Clemesta.
“I remember the word I was looking for in my brain. It’s METAMORPHOSIS. That’s when the caterpillar becomes a butterfly.”
Clemesta sighed. She stroked my cheek. “You don’t want to figure it out, do you?”
She kissed my eyelids and stayed close. Something popped into my head about another secret mission and a pinkie promise with Mom, but I shoved it inside the NOT NOW box in my brain. Then I locked it and threw away the key.
Dad mumbled something to himself and then he pulled the car over to the side of a field. He could have stopped it right in the middle of the road and no one would have noticed since there weren’t any other cars around. It was just us in the whole state.
Dad checked something on the map. I looked outside. There was grass and trees and a wooden cross painted white. A black bird was sitting on one of the arms.
“Do you see that bird?” I said to Dad. “That bird is a bad omen.”
“How do you know?”
“Clemesta told me.”
He marked something on the map with his finger and then folded the paper around that spot.
“It’s a black-hearted ravenator,” I said. “It means that someone is lying.”
We drove off and the bird pierced his dark eyes into my soul.
“Yes,” I told him. “I know.”
I shoved my hand into the cereal box and ate another sugary mouthful of Cap’n Crunch. “I hope I don’t get scurvy,” I said to Clemesta.
“It’s probably already too late,” she sniffed. “Thanks to this dumb adventure.”
“Yeah, and no one ever asks me what I want. They just make plans and drag me along.”
It’s for your own good, Dolly. That’s what Mom said about her plan. Or maybe it was YOU KNOW WHO.
Dad reached back to squeeze my knee. “Everything will be okay,” he said. His hand was clammy and hot.
ABDUCTION. Abduction rhymes with production. YOU KNOW WHO is a producer. Producers produce productions. Producers produce abductions. The best way to make someone cry is to steal something they love. I once stole a plastic turkey from Lina’s house when I went there for a playdate. I only wanted it so I could give my dolls a lovely Thanksgiving feast, but as soon as I got back home, Lina’s mom was on the phone saying I had to return it. I could hear Lina crying in the background, like she was being ripped apart with sadness. She had two different turkeys, but I still had to return the one I took the very next day.
We didn’t have any more playdates after that.
Dad took an exit and snaked around a road which had trees growing thick on either side. Actually it felt like the road was going to get squeezed and squeezed, maybe until everything went dark and it disappeared forever.
“What are we doing here?” Clemesta asked.
“I don’t have ONE CLUE. But we’re in the wilderness now for sure.”
Dad took another turn and parked the car at a small wooden cabin. NATIONAL PARK, it said on the sign. He pointed to my new cap, which was lying on the seat. “Can you put that back on?”
“My hair pushes it off.”
He frowned. “Yeah. Put it on anyway. And… we should pretend we have different names. If anyone asks.”
“I like my name.”
“I know. It’s only pretend. For the secret mission. I’m going to be Mike. You be?”
“Margot.”
“You should be a boy. So the disguise is really good.”
I stared at Dad with his cap and glasses. “Your disguise is excellent,” I said. “I don’t recognize you at all.”
Dad scrunched up his forehead. “Please, Doll.”
I opened the door. “I’ll be Joshua,” I said.
Inside, a man in a National Parks uniform was rapping and grabbing his jeans at his private parts. When he saw us he stopped and clicked something on his phone. “You
caught me,” he said. His eyes were very bright, and he seemed excited to have us inside his cabin.
“Welcome to the most beautiful place in the South,” he said.
He was very tall and thin like a pencil.
“We’d like to camp tonight,” Dad said.
“Well, sir, you came to the right place for that,” he said. He told us his name was Travis and he was a National Parks Ranger, and that meant he knew the park like the back of his hand. I looked at the back of his hand, which had a heart tattooed on it and the letters L-O-V-E written on his knuckles. He was moving his hands a lot as he talked.
“You coming with a trailer or fixing to pitch a tent in one of the campsites?”
“Do you rent tents?” Dad asked.
Travis shook his head.
“No, sir, afraid we do not. The cabins are real nice, though. Costs more but you got a kitchen and a bathroom and no need to mess with setting up a tent. I prefer that way myself,” he said. “For the convenience. Anyhow, park’s near empty tonight. You can take your pick.”
I held Clemesta behind my back because she was frightened of Travis’s wild eyes.
Dad walked around the store picking up wood and matches and candles and marshmallows.
“You don’t have any vegetables,” I said.
Travis shook his head. “Vegetables aren’t camping food,” he said. “If you ask me, they aren’t anytime food.”
He laughed, and I thought he probably had scurvy with that attitude.
Dad took two tins of beans and sausage and added it to the pile at the checkout.
I caught him looking at the beers all piled up on the shelf. I watched him LIKE A HAWK with DAGGER EYES that could slice him in a second.
“I won’t,” he said. “I swear.”
“That’s good,” I said, even though that’s his favorite promise to break.
Travis gave us a map that showed you where to find the camping cabin, and then he marked some hiking trails with a red pen.
“But you can just drive up there,” he said. “Save yourselves all the walking. Lot of folks do that.”
All the Lost Things Page 15