Hank shrugged. “You never know who or what you might need to protect yourself from.”
“Like strangers?”
Hank rubbed his chin. “Not just strangers. Sometimes people you know. The world can turn upside down pretty quick.”
“And then what happens?”
“Then it’s real good to be prepared.”
I sat on the bed. It was only big enough for one person. “Won’t you be lonely,” I said, “if it’s just you down here?”
Hank smiled. “I don’t mind lonely so much. I mind it less than I mind people, to tell you the truth.”
“Why do you mind people?”
Hank made a face. “They have a way of disappointing you.”
“Yeah,” I said. “And they do stupid things.”
“They sure do,” Hank said.
The bunker smelled of fresh paint and cement. There was an empty glass on the floor beside the bed, and a book lying open next to it.
“You slept here last night.”
Hank nodded. “I test it out sometimes.”
“To see if you like it?”
“To see if I have everything I need.”
I looked around. There was a birdcage hanging from a hook in the ceiling that I hadn’t noticed yet. Inside, a teeny tiny bird perched on a swing.
“That’s Lester,” Hank said.
“Why is he here?” I walked over to get a better look.
“I think he likes it,” Hank said. “I got called out to remove him from a building site but he wouldn’t go anywhere. Wouldn’t fly away. I keep him as a pet now. He seems to like the quiet down here.”
“How do you know his name is Lester?”
Hank held a finger out and the bird pecked it with kisses.
“I knew a Lester once,” he said. “He wouldn’t leave my side either.”
I watched Hank stroke Lester’s bird beak. Probably they had unconditional love between them. That’s the love which never stops no matter what bad stuff you do or how many secrets you spill from the secret-secret box. I bet Hank would do anything to keep Lester safe. Probably die for him. Or kill for him.
I looked at Hank. “My name isn’t really Joshua,” I said. “I’m really a girl. I’m sorry I told a lie.”
He shrugged. “You’re all right.”
I bit my lip. “Hank, is Dad in big trouble?” He looked at me and puffed out his lips. Then he let out a long sigh.
“What I know is that your daddy loves you very much,” he said. “More than anything. More than life itself.” He shook his head. “I also know that life isn’t always black and white. Things get messy sometimes. Good people do bad things by mistake. We have to remember that. Life is complicated. Love is complicated.”
“Why does it have to be complicated?”
“It just is.”
“I wish it wasn’t complicated. I wish it was just love.” My throat went tight and I swallowed down as hard as I could.
Hank cracked his knuckles, first one hand and then the other. We stood watching Lester in his cage, pecking his beak at the metal bars. Maybe he didn’t want to be there anymore. Maybe he wanted to get out and fly away home but he wouldn’t ever be able to tell that to Hank. He’d just stay trapped forever.
“Come on,” Hank said. “I think your daddy will want to get on the road.”
“Can’t I stay down here? Where it’s safe.”
Hank ran his hand over his bald head. “Stay a few minutes more,” he said. “But mind those guns.”
I listened to him climb back up the creaky stairs. I went over to the armchair and sat down. Hank had a gas mask hanging on the wall, and two guns and something else that was probably a cannon or a zombie-destroyer.
I moved to the kitchen part of the bunker and looked at all the cans lined up on the shelf.
“Spaghetti and meatballs,” I said to Clemesta. “That’s what we would have on Monday nights. Corn on Tuesday, chili con carne for Wednesday, macaroni Thursday, Friday back to spaghetti. Soda on weekends only.”
I ran my hand over the rows of toilet paper and paper towels and the big tubs of salt and sugar and coffee. Everything was very neat and tidy and stacked in perfect lines.
I touched the knight on the chessboard but I didn’t move him in case Hank was in the middle of a game.
“We’ll learn chess,” I told Clemesta, “and bring books and craft paper and puzzles, and we can watch TV and go to sleep at regular bedtime so we aren’t too tired. Survival probably isn’t that hard.”
“Mm,” Clemesta said.
A black spider was spinning its web in the corner of one of the floorboards. I stomped it dead with my shoe so it couldn’t make a web and hatch lots of spider babies that would bite Hank and Birney one night while they slept.
I sat back down in the armchair. “It’s nice down here,” I said.
Clemesta shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
“It is. You’re safe from the whole world and nothing bad can happen to you. It’s like our hurricane storm shelter at home.”
“You know that isn’t true,” Clemesta said.
“It is.”
She shook her head. “No, it really isn’t. You remember.”
“I don’t remember. It’s all fuzzy up there. Like someone is making scrambled eggs with my brain.”
Clemesta stroked my head. “But if you try and make it clear it won’t be fuzzy anymore. You’ll solve it, like a detective mystery.”
“I don’t want to be a detective. I want to be a bird trapper. I will go and rescue them from trees and buildings and I’ll bring them home and they will sing happy songs and eat seeds from my hand and they will come to me when I call them with a special whistle.”
“Time to go!” I heard Dad’s voice from upstairs.
Clemesta pierced me with her eyes. “Dolly, I know you worked it out. I know you’re afraid, too.”
I closed my eyes. I covered my ears. The capital of Denmark is Copenhagen. The capital of France is Paris. Two times four is eight. Foods high in vitamin C include bell peppers, dark leafy greens, kiwi fruit, broccoli, berries, oranges, and tomatoes.
“Dolly,” Clemesta said. “We can’t go with Dad. We need to tell someone where we are so they can come and get us.”
“But I don’t know how,” I said. My voice whimpered like a scaredy-cat even though I was meant to be brave.
“Well,” Clemesta said. Her eyes were wide. “I saw a telephone. It’s right in Hank’s basement. And you remember Mom’s number, don’t you? It’s in your sponge brain.”
I nodded slowly. “Yeah, it’s in there.”
“Good. So we just have to go over there to the other side of this wall and dial the number and…and that’s what we’ll do.”
I swallowed my scared. “Okay,” I said. We went creeping quietly out of the bunker and over to the phone. It felt like stealing even though it was just one phone call and Hank probably wouldn’t mind. I lifted the phone and closed my eyes to remember Mom’s number. I dialed and it started to ring. Once, twice, three times and then suddenly there was someone on the other side and I whispered, “Mom! Mom!” but it wasn’t her. It was another woman and I thought I had mixed up the numbers, but then she said, “Dolly, Dolly, is that you?”
“Yes,” I said. “It’s Dolly and I want to talk to Mom.”
The woman said, “Yes, Dolly, just a second, okay? Honey, can you tell me where you—”
“Come on!” Dad’s voice was coming closer and Hank’s boots were pounding down the stairs.
I dropped the phone and ran up to meet him. My heart was racing and I begged it to stay quiet.
“Come on up,” Hank said. “You have a long drive ahead.”
He looked over my shoulder. I couldn’t tell if he saw the phone hanging from its cord. He didn’t say anything. He just led me back up the stairs to Dad with his enormous hand on my arm.
We said goodbye at the back door. Birney jumped up to give me a dog-hug, and Hank shook my hand.
Dad and I walked across the lawn to the car. He tried to take my hand but I didn’t want to hold his. I jerked away and pretended that I needed to scratch my arm instead.
I waved to Hank and Birney one last time. Hank threw a stick and Birney chased after it. As we pulled away, I saw Hank’s flag waving us off. The blue X looked like a bird trying to fly away.
Hank’s Chevy was a much better car than the PILE OF JUNK from before. It didn’t smell bad, and there weren’t any cigarette burns in the seat and it wasn’t beeping and spluttering the whole time like it was dying.
Dad was wearing his baseball cap and his glasses. Hank had loaned him a new map, which he folded out on the seat.
We drove without talking. I pressed the loose tooth with my tongue. I pushed it back as far as it would go, till it lifted almost all the way off the gum. The part underneath felt cold and smooth. The new one wasn’t pushing to get out yet, like when my front tooth fell out last year and the replacement tooth was already waiting. I pressed my tongue against it, harder and harder even though it was hurting.
“Stop,” Clemesta said, “you’ll make it come out before it’s ready.”
“Who cares?”
“You’ll bleed.”
“I don’t care if I bleed. I’m not afraid of blood.”
Actually when I thought about blood, my stomach made a flip-flop. I tasted my breakfast, sitting upstairs in my throat.
I watched Dad in front of me, his hands stiff on the wheel and his eyes staring ahead at the road. He didn’t even notice that the back of his head was crawling with snakes.
We passed green fields and farms and two signs for plantations. That was a new word but I didn’t collect it. We passed two trailer homes. One was getting crushed by a big tree that had fallen over it. Maybe the people were still inside. They would be trapped for one hundred years and no one would stop to let them out.
I looked down at my clothes. They were covered with Birney’s muddy paw-prints. All of me felt dirty and tired and wrong, like that stuffed toy in the mud nobody cared to scoop up and take home.
I pressed my tongue harder against the tooth.
A billboard said WELCOME TO MISSISSIPPI. IT’S LIKE COMING HOME.
No it isn’t, I said inside my head.
“Mississippi is another state,” I said. “You’re going the wrong way. This is the wrong road for home.”
Dad shook his head. “It’s not far now,” he said. Clemesta shoved me with her hoof.
“LIES,” she hissed.
I kept pressing the tooth. “Who picked up Mom’s phone?” I said.
“Probably the police,” Clemesta said.
“Because they want to help Mom find us.”
Clemesta held her breath.
“What?” I said.
“I don’t know, Dolly.”
Dad looked at me in the mirror. “You know, Joshua and I came to Mississippi every summer,” he said. “We’d come for shrimp season. We had an uncle out here who ran some boats. He paid us well. That’s how we saved up for college.”
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to hear any more stories about Dad when he was a kid, or about dead Uncle Joshua who would have liked to meet me if Dad hadn’t made him want to die.
I stared out the window. Mississippi was flat and swampy, full of marshes and thick trees and places to get sucked into forever with no way out. It looked just like on the nature documentary about alligators that I watched. Alligators like to live in the rivers, bayous, and swamps of the southeastern United States, and they have lived on earth for millions of years and their blood is cold, which is because they are mean.
I watched the show with Mom that afternoon when I had the flu. She made me a mug of soup from the packets that have tiny baby alphabet noodles inside, and tucked the orange striped blanket around me on the sofa, and then we sat together and watched anything on TV that I wanted to watch, and she never got bored and she never said she had to go and paint her nails or check her emails for callbacks or do her exercises or rehearse lines, she just sat there beside me and stroked my hair and it was a very lovely day even with being sick and having a temperature of 103 degrees.
That was before we bumped into YOU KNOW WHO in Manhattan. Everything that came after that was THE WORST because he is THE WORST.
“He isn’t, Dolly,” Clemesta said. “He wanted to help Mom get away.”
“From what?”
“From Dad,” Clemesta said. “So we’d be safe.”
I still had my tongue pressing at the tooth and suddenly I felt it pop all the way out. The tooth dropped to the bottom of my mouth like a stone. I tasted my blood that was half of Mom and half of Dad and all of me. I swallowed it down.
I didn’t tell Dad. I just kept the tooth under my tongue like another secret.
“Spit that out,” Clemesta said. “It’s a CHOKING HAZARD.”
I didn’t want to and I didn’t.
We drove and drove, and the roads were very flat and everything around was flat too. Concrete strip malls and drive-throughs and gas stations and swamps and then the same things all over again.
Dad reached his arm back to squeeze my leg.
“You’re very quiet back there. Do you have any stories for me today?”
I shook my head.
“Should we play the signs game? There’s one. ELITE GUNS. DIAL 555-GOD’S TRUTH.”
“Don’t,” I said. “I don’t want to play.”
“WAFFLE HOUSE,” Dad said.
“I said STOP.”
“Okay.” Dad switched on the radio and the music filled the car.
“Turn it off,” I said, after a while. The song was called Mercy and mercy means forgiveness and I didn’t want to think about that or anything like it.
“Turn it off,” I said again, and Dad switched the station. It was the news, and he switched that off too.
I sipped some water. My head was jumpy, with too many pictures bouncing around inside. The NOT NOW box was open, and everything was tumbling out.
I closed my eyes. There was my bedroom, with all my things inside. Dollhouse, dinosaur collection, rescued baby animals. The bed was unmade and clothes were lying on the floor. That meant it wasn’t going to be a gold-star day.
The kitchen table was still covered with dishes from the last dinner we ate before we left, grilled fish and steamed vegetables. Mom hardly touched her food because she was VERY DISTRACTED with other things. She must have been too distracted to clean up afterward, or maybe that was something else.
My Exotic Birds coloring book was on the coffee table with all my markers. My school bag was waiting in the hallway for Monday with the class dictionary packed inside to give back to Miss Ellis. Mom’s bedroom door was shut and I didn’t peek inside.
I put my tongue in the empty space in my mouth. It was strange how something could be there and then be gone, just like that. There and gone, there and gone. The empty space hurt, but it wasn’t from being sore. It was from missing something.
I watched Dad’s head. I slipped the tooth out of my mouth and into the pocket of my shorts.
Clemesta was being very quiet. “Say something,” I told her.
She shook her head. “I can’t. It feels like all my energy is used up.”
In the car next to ours, a girl made a face at me as they passed. I gave her THE FINGER and her eyes went wide from shock at my DISGRACEFUL RUDENESS. Too bad, I thought. Her mom was driving the car. They would have a lovely afternoon together and I would be stuck all day driving with Dad.
I looked at his hand on the wheel, the dark hairs sprouting out of his fingers like someone had planted them there. The gold from his wedding ring wasn’t shiny, it was dull and worn out. It didn’t look like anything precious anymore.
I wanted it to be precious. I wanted it to be beautiful in the light and shining, and Mom’s too. She had put hers inside a little box on the top shelf of the bedroom closet. “I want a better life
for you, Dolly,” she’d said.
Better wasn’t in Queens, and it wasn’t a gold circle on her finger.
I pulled Clemesta into my lap and stroked her stubbly mane. She could hardly lift her head. She was very weak. She looked like she wanted to sleep for ONE HUNDRED YEARS. Probably she wanted to empty out her head and not think about anything or remember any memories. She just wanted to be an ordinary regular horse, not a magical horse queen with special gifts and ALL THE SECRETS TO KEEP.
She opened her mouth and licked her dry lips. “I think we’re in danger,” she said quietly. “I think we’re running out of chances to get back home.”
I nodded. I laid my head back. I kicked Dad’s seat with my feet. One, two, like punches. He looked back at me. “I know you’re bored,” he said. “I swear this is the last—this is the final day.”
“Good,” I said. “I hate this adventure.”
Dad nodded. His eyes were shining and he wiped them.
“What’s the matter with you?” I said. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
“I’m sorry—I’m so sorry. I wish it had all been something better. Everything in your life. Everything we did together.”
I crossed my arms against me and looked away. “Well,” I said. “Life is complicated.”
We passed a billboard with an alligator head poking out, ready to gobble someone up in his huge jaws. I remembered on the show when the enormous alligator had the smaller one locked in his mouth. He was holding her between his teeth while she thrashed her tail trying to get away. Her tail cracked like a gunshot every time it hit the water. His teeth were gripping her harder and harder, and the more she tried to get away, the more he locked her in his grip.
Mom had held her hand over my heart and pulled me close. “Don’t worry,” she said. “No alligators here.”
The alligator held on, and after a few minutes the other one stopped moving.
“Anna, you know I can’t exist without you.” That’s what Dad said to Mom and she was crying and he was yelling.
All the Lost Things Page 20