Mitch exhaled. Phil and I exchanged looks. J.Lo sat in the corner licking the glue off a Post-it.
“Michaels,” said Mitch, “bring me the file on Lucy Tucci?”
Michaels hesitated. “There’s bound to be more than one,” he said.
“She’s thirty,” I offered. “Dark hair. Daughter named Gratuity.”
“Black,” said Mitch.
I coughed. “Black?”
“I’m sorry,” said Mitch. “Do you prefer African American?”
“Uh, no, I prefer you call her white, actually, because that’s what she is.”
“The file says she’s black.”
“Are you really arguing with me about this?”
Mitch looked tired. “I wrote down ‘black,’” he said.
“I didn’t tell you to write that,” I answered, and then I could see the whole thing. “Have you been telling everyone to look for a black woman this whole time?”
He had. The bureau had been sending out what they thought was Mom’s description, while the Lost List had been asking for a Lucy Tucci with a daughter named Gratuity.
Mitch tried to brush past it, and turned to Phil. “Where did you say she was?”
“Word is she’s living with a group in some place called the Diamond Sun Casino.”
“Diamond Sun…” said Mitch as he trailed his finger down a list of place names. I could tell he was trying hard to seem official, but his list was written on the back of a RavioliOs label. “Diamond…Diamond…here! Here it is. Diamond Sun Casino. Well, it’s in Daniel Landry’s district! Lucky you.”
“Daniel Landry?” I said. “Is that the guy who gave the talk I didn’t go to?”
“Sure. He’s the overseer there.”
“Overseer.”
Mitch nodded. “Mmm-hmm. You know, like the governor. Or mayor. I don’t know what he likes to be called. The leader of Ajo insists everyone call him King Awesome.”
“So every place has some kind of leader?” I asked. It had all happened so fast.
“Sure. Most of them are former state governors, or senators, or whatever. The president runs a little town called Rye.”
“Just a little town?”
“Yes…” said Mitch. “He’s not very popular anymore, because of the invasion. People assume it was his fault somehow. But we have to have leaders. We have to have government.”
“I guess,” I said.
“Daniel Landry’s district is far south of here,” he said, “on some former Indian land.”
“Indian land? Like a reservation?”
“That’s right.”
“Is this Dan guy an Indian?”
“I don’t think so, no. I’m pretty sure he’s white. He wasn’t a governor or anything before, but he’s really rich, so I imagine he’s a good leader.”
“Uh-huh. But he’s white,” I said. “The Indians elected a white guy?”
“Well…I don’t know. I imagine all the other people elected him. It’s mostly white folks living on the reservation now.”
I frowned. “And the Indians are okay with this?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well…it was a reservation,” I said. “It was land we promised to the Native Americans. Forever.”
Mitch looked at me like I was speaking in tongues. “But…we needed it,” he said.
I ran to a wall map. I didn’t care. I couldn’t leave fast enough.
“Sooo,” I said, “I take this road…seventeen? And then change to ten in Phoenix?”
“Mmmm. I don’t think you want to go through there. Phoenix is a bit…rough.”
“Rough?”
“Lawless,” Mitch said, “with violence and looting and so on. The government there gets overthrown every few days.”
“Fine. We’ll go around. We’ll go through the desert, I don’t care,” I chirped. “Thanks, Phil! Thanks, Mitch! J.Lo! We’re going!”
“Coming!” said J.Lo, grabbing a bottle of Wite-Out for the road.
“J.Lo?” said Mitch. “Wait! You can’t go by yourself!”
Or at least that’s what I think he said. We were so gone.
“Am I happy to have that sheet off,” said J.Lo for the third time. “Yes I am.”
“You might want to try to get used to it,” I said. “I think you’re gonna have to wear it for a while.”
He was making me nervous. Anyone could see us on the road. And Mitch had been right about Phoenix.
Even on the outskirts I could tell it was trouble. Gunfire sounded off like popcorn. Tires screeched in the distance. Someone somewhere was listening to Foghat really loud. I was raised to believe that cities like this one got visits from angels with flaming swords, so I was glad to be avoiding it.
There wasn’t much south of Phoenix. There was a town called Casa Grande that looked to be mostly outlet stores and tents. Somewhere around Dirt Farm, Arizona, we could see ostriches wandering around the sides of the highway.
“Mah! Big bird!” shouted J.Lo.
“We are not stopping,” I said. “I don’t care if there are ostriches, I don’t care if I don’t understand why there are ostriches. Someone can explain it to me later, we are not stopping.”
We were near Tucson now, and my heart was buzzing in my chest. Two glowing Boov ships whizzed overhead, and somewhere in the desert to the west came a very loud and bright explosion. All this seemed totally appropriate to me—I was excited beyond words and my insides felt like that part in the 1812 Overture when all the cannons go off.
But this is what I also thought as I watched the waves of trash crash over the cracked and broken road: that for the rest of us, Arizona would always be one of our places now. It would be on the list of things we own in our heads. Don’t we all have this list? It’s like, everything that secretly belongs to us—a favorite color, or springtime, or a house we don’t live in anymore. We all gained Arizona by coming here, but for the people who already lived here, we could only take something away. I expected to return home to Pennsylvania one day as if I’d only stepped out for a fire drill. It would still be mine. But we’d turned Arizona into a motel room. It was our unmade bed.
“Look out!” J.Lo screeched.
I swerved just in time to avoid a line of Gorg on foot, carrying rifles. One of them barked something in his own language, and thumped his chest.
“SEG FOY S’XAFFEF, LU F’GUBIQ YAZWI!”
“What was that all about?” I whispered.
“He said, ‘Get some glasses, you stupid monkey.’”
“No, I mean, why so many Gorg around? In our own state. They’re everywhere.”
“Four miles to go,” said J.Lo, noting a sign. He knew his numbers now, at least, and his directions. “Lots of fighting outo the southwest. The last huzzah for the Boov.”
“You think so?”
“I know this is so. Is almost over now.”
I was barely listening. I was only talking to distract myself. I felt a chill as I suddenly saw a billboard for the Diamond Sun Casino, next exit, right two miles.
“What did that say?” asked J.Lo.
I took a breath.
The outside of the Diamond Sun Casino could not have looked more ordinary. Okay, it was pink, but I thought these kinds of places were supposed to be glitzy, and this one squatted down the road like a big cake box. And there was a white wedding cake next to it—a huge tent, really, that glowed faintly inside. The gaudy sign by the road was unlit. But there was one light down below, waving back and forth under the chin of a round-eyed girl. I pulled up alongside her.
“Are you Gratuity?” she asked. “You are, aren’t you?”
I tried to answer but she was well on to other subjects.
“Is this your car? Does it float? Did you drive yourself? How old are you? Is that a ghost?”
I saw my opening and pounced.
“Can you take me to my mom?”
The girl frowned. “Mimom?”
“My. Mom,” I said.
“Oh, yeah, bu
t they said not until after the meeting. The big meeting in the poker tent. Your mom’s kind of leading it.”
That couldn’t be right.
“Did you say my mom is—”
“Not till after the meeting. But you can go in if you want. Do you need someone to drive your car up for you?”
I was already on my way, pulling around a lot of other cars to the tent.
“I think someone made a mistake,” I said to J.Lo.
“Whyfor?”
“It must be a different Lucy Tucci. Mine wouldn’t be leading a meeting. She…just wouldn’t.”
J.Lo was silent.
“I can’t believe it,” I said, and I felt a sting in my eyes. “We’ve been trying so hard. Things are…God! Things are supposed to work out when you…when you’ve been…”
“I am thinking we should go insides,” said J.Lo. “I am thinking we should see what is and what isn’t.”
I bit my lip and nodded as Slushious shuddered to a halt.
At the entrance to the tent were two men with guns. Big, black guns like from action movies. One man had the wrong size neck for his head and was dressed completely in green army camouflage. If I’d been in a less jumpy mood I might’ve suggested he not stand in front of a glowing white tent in the desert if he was trying so hard not to be seen, but it never felt like the right moment. The other guy wore a black T-shirt that said “Bad Dog.” But they both smiled a little when we approached.
“Hey, you two,” said Camo Guy. “Is your mom or dad inside?”
There it was. That was the question, right? I tried to answer but I absolutely couldn’t. It was like I forgot how. Too many seconds passed.
“YES,” said J.Lo, in his announcer voice. “OUR MOMMY IS INSIDE OF THE GIANT SHEET. THANK YOU.”
I came back to my senses. “Can we go in?” I asked. “Please?”
The men exchanged looks.
“Hey, I know this is going to sound stupid,” Camo said to J.Lo, “but we should probably have you take your costume off. Just to check.”
After I hurriedly explained about JayJay and his condition with the barking and peeing on people’s legs, they stepped back. But that wasn’t really what got us inside.
“Please,” I said. “I’ve been trying to find my mom. Her name is Lucy Tucci.”
Both men were suddenly all smiles.
“She’s your mom?” said Bad Dog. “Aw, she’s wonderful. She helped us get the water turned on in our trailer park three days early.”
“She’s got Dan Landry’s ear, that’s for sure,” said Camo.
It took me a moment to realize this was just a figure of speech.
“I heard you were on your way,” Camo added. “I thought there was only one of you.”
“Nope,” I mumbled. “Two.” But who could say, really? The Lucy Tucci inside this tent might have six kids, for all I knew. She could have twelve and weigh three hundred pounds and be Chinese.
“Tell her ‘Hi’ from Bob Knowles,” Camo said. “And Peter Goldthwait!” said Bad Dog. Then the men lifted the tent flap for us, and we slipped inside.
“Next time,” hissed J.Lo, “I would like to decide what is my condition, thank you.”
The tent was strung with white Christmas lights and packed with people, all facing a stage on one end. And on the stage stood a redheaded man in a wifebeater with a Viking tattooed on his chest. People were booing him.
“I don’t know who that is leading the meeting,” I sighed, “but he doesn’t even look like my mother.”
“Shut up!” the redhead was saying. “I have the stage! All I’m saying is, now that we’ve all had to leave our real homes, we got a chance to get America right! There can be a place for the Saxon Americans, and a place for the coloreds, and a place for—shut up!”
The booing was getting louder, and thank goodness. I tried to look the audience over, but I’m short for my age, and the Christmas lights gave only a dull amber glow that made it hard to see.
I grabbed J.Lo’s arm and led him through the crowd toward the stage. It was slow going, and we got a lot of dirty looks. I scanned the faces and almost thought I saw Mom a couple times, but each time I was wrong.
For a while it seemed perfectly quiet. All I could hear was my own heart echoing in my ears. I guess the last two minutes of the redhead’s speech just turned into a stampede of swear words, so it’s just as well.
Then suddenly I found her.
Redhead left the podium and stepped down, and my mom took his place. She was holding up her hands and nodding at the people who still jeered him, and she glowed like an absolute candle in the stage lights.
“I know, I know,” she was saying. “You have every right. Just like he has the right, right? You don’t have to like what he says, but letting him say it makes us Americans, and treating people the way we’d like to be treated makes us human, doesn’t it? That’s how I was raised, anyway.”
I watched in awe as the boos stopped and people even started nodding their heads, shouting, “That’s right,” if you can believe it.
“Now, I think we should take this chance to talk about everything we’ve heard from our speakers tonight. Does anyone want to take the podium?” Mom said as her eyes swept the room. “Let’s see some hands,” she said, and hands went up. “Who wants to—good, a lot of us. Um…why don’t we star—”
Then her face shined right on me, and the word she’d been saying was cut short. She was beaming, and everyone turned to look at me. Some of the people in the crowd must have understood who I was, because they were beaming, too.
She looked so beautiful. And I was mad that my eyes were wet, because I wanted to see her perfectly, to remember little things. I tried to say “Hi,” but all I could get out was the H in a hot breath. Mom covered her nose and mouth with her hands, but you could see she was smiling.
“I…I still have your Christmas stocking,” she said.
I started pushing my way through the people, and I think they tried to move aside, but there wasn’t much of an aside to move to. Mom was coming down the stairs, and we met in front of the stage.
So what do you want to know? Do you want to know that she squeezed me and lifted me up so that only my toes touched the ground, and that I hugged her back? Do you want to know if I felt her wet eyelashes against my cheek, and if she stood back and held my face in her hands and laughed? And I laughed? You want to know how it felt?
None of your business.
The meeting let out a little early, as you might expect. People were so happy for Mom. They all applauded. When we left the tent, Mom held my hand, so J.Lo sidled up and took her other hand in his mitten.
“Oh, uh, hi,” Mom said. “Have you gotten away from your—”
“Hold his hand,” I whispered, smiling at everyone we passed, “until we get home. Please. I’ll explain everything, but it’s really important.”
“’Kay…” said Mom.
“Hey, who are these two?” asked a dark, curly-headed man with glasses.
“Hi, Joachim,” said Mom. “This is my daughter, Gratuity—”
“And her son and my brother, JayJay,” I finished.
“That’s a real cute ghost costume,” Joachim said, and while he turned his attention to J.Lo, Mom gave me this look like she was trying to see through my head.
“Doesn’t talk much, does he?” asked Joachim.
“He’s…shy,” said Mom. “And so the costume.”
“He’ll grow out of it. They all do. ’Night, now!”
Mom and I said our good nights.
“That was good,” I said as we continued home. “‘He’s shy.’ Much better than what I was going to say.”
We went into the pink cake-box building. It used to be the casino itself, and was mostly one big room full of slot machines and fake plants. Except now the slot machines were pushed together and stacked on one another to make walls. Other walls were made of folding tables or hanging sheets or just scrap wood and tin. It was dim. Only some of th
e overhead lights were working. When my eyes adjusted I could see that the carpet had a pattern of playing cards and poker chips.
There were more people in the casino who wanted to say hello, and introductions were made. Mom called J.Lo JoJo instead of JayJay once, but otherwise it went fine.
Eventually we made it to our new home—another room made from stacked tables and slot machines. Our door was a door, but it was just leaned up against a space in the wall.
“We’re…going to get real hinges soon,” Mom said as we stepped inside. “So…what do you think, Turtlebear?”
I thought it was great. Loads bigger than the car I’d been living in. There were two mattresses on the floor, and stacks of books next to an emergency exit. There was an old chrome dinette set with two chairs, and a tiny fridge underneath that wasn’t plugged into anything. There was a kitchen counter made from part of a restaurant buffet, sneezeguard and all. Under the guard were two clean metal buffet trays to serve as sinks. And in the middle of everything was my mom. And next to her a space alien in a sheet.
“You’re gonna want to sit down,” I told her.
“Is this about your friend?” said Mom, keeping an eye on J.Lo.
“I’ll tell you as soon as you’re sitting.”
She sat, and I stood at her shoulder. J.Lo stepped right in front of us.
“Okay,” I told him. “Go ahead.”
“He’s been a big, big help! I owe him! We sort of owe each other. When I tried to drive our car here, it broke and he fixed it! Oh! We should probably go get the car and put it somewhere safe. And Pig is still inside it!”
“P-Pig…Boov…” said Mom. “Wait. Pig? You have Pig?”
The way she said “Pig,” she might as well have said “rabies.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Pig. She’s fine. J.Lo here saved her life once.”
J.Lo’s head puffed up a little, but Mom didn’t even look at him.
“Oh, baby, I’ll be so glad to see Pig, but…”
“I know. The Gorg, right?”
“You know?”
“I know.”
We retrieved Slushious late that night when everyone was asleep, and parked it beside the fire exit next to our apartment. Mom was concerned someone might try to steal it, but I told her if any thief figured out how to drive Slushious away, he deserved to have it. Mom picked Pig up and kissed her purring face, and rubbed her nose in Pig’s tummy, and sneezed, and petted Pig’s head as she spoke.