“Are you sure about this?” Del asked as we found our way back to the yellow hallway.
“I’m sure,” I said, knowing I probably wouldn’t even sleep again until Poppa arrived with the moving truck and we were all on our way home. Home to Kansaska-Nebransas, where Grandma Pat could have Grandpa Bomba’s bed, and Grandpa Bomba’s rocker. Where she could fill Grandpa Bomba’s room with her smells and live out the rest of her days in safety, surrounded by her family.
“What’s happening? Where am I?” Grandma jolted awake, grasping the handles of her wheelchair with a start. Dropping both her daisy and her water bottle, she twisted to look back at Tucker, Del, and me. “Who are you people? Are you kidnapping me?”
“No, Grandma,” Tucker said, patting her arm reassuringly. “We’re here to rescue you, and to introduce you to my new kitten.” Tucker seized Captain Stormalong Fuzzypants from Del and held her high, her tiny paws flailing. The only thing Grandma said when she saw the cat was, “Humph.” But to Tucker, she said, “I know you. You’re the loud, sticky one. The one who’s a whole lot bigger than you look.”
Tucker beamed, standing tall. “You remember!”
Grandma gave another “Humph.” But something about her face made me think she looked relieved, as though she might actually be glad to see us.
“Don’t worry, Grandma,” I said. “We’ve come to bring you home.”
“Well, it’s about time.” Grandma pursed her lips.
Del laughed and swooped up Grandma’s fallen flower. “Hey there, Mrs. Beaumont. I’m your granddaughter’s friend Antwon Delacroix.” He tucked the daisy behind Grandma’s ear and straightened her tiara. Then he made a show of jumping backward, saying, “Whoa, step back! I didn’t know Gypsy’s gran was a bona fide beauty queen!”
Grandma snorted once and waved dismissively at Del. But pink bloomed in her cheeks, and her eyes lit with a bashful, girlish sparkle. Del’s grandmother had been right; when it came to sugar, Antwon Delacroix was a double spoonful.
“Flattery will get you nowhere, young man,” Grandma said, but Del’s charm had enlivened her. She gripped the blanket on her lap and scooted forward in her wheelchair, trying to make the wheels turn with the power of her skinny rump alone. “Can’t you kids drive this thing any faster? You and this young sweet-talker are going to have to be speedier, Gypsy, if you’re going to get me home in time to watch my shows.”
I stood dumbstruck. Had Grandma really just called me Gypsy? A laugh welled up from someplace deep inside me and bubbled over. For the first time in three days, Grandma Pat had called me by my real name—like she remembered me.
“Don’t worry, Grandma, we can go faster. Hang on!” Unable to keep from grinning, I grabbed the handles of Grandma’s wheelchair and ran up the hallway, heading for the place we’d last seen Samson and Nola. When Grandma let out an enthusiastic yeeeeeehaw! I smiled wider yet.
“That’s more like it, Nettie,” she said. “Now we’re cooking with gas. Faster, faster! We’ll be at the winter dance in no time.” And just like that, the moment passed and I was Nettie Arbuckle again.
I didn’t try to correct Grandma this time. She had remembered me once. That meant that somewhere in the maze of her mind, a girl named Gypsy Beaumont still existed. Maybe that was all I needed to know.
IF NOLA AND SAMSON hadn’t been arguing, we might not have found them. They were in an empty X-ray room, and they were in the middle of a standoff.
As soon as they both got over their initial shock and relief at seeing Grandma Pat, their argument began again.
“I can’t fix your shoulder if you won’t let me touch you.”
“I thought you wanted to be a singer, not a doctor. Why don’t you sing me a song instead? I have a feeling it’ll hurt less.”
“Gypsy? Will you please tell your brother that he needs to stop being such a—?”
“Samson is not a baby,” I butted in, defending my older brother. Then I turned on Samson, raising one finger. “You! Stop being such a . . . such a clodpate and let Nola try to help you. She seems to know a thing or two about patching people up.”
“Have you ever done this before?” Samson asked Nola, reluctantly giving in.
“Um.” Nola hesitated before answering. “No . . . not exactly.” When Samson’s eyes widened in dismay, Nola quickly reassured him. “But my dad had me watch him do it during the talent show last fall, after Bo Peters pedaled off the stage on his unicycle. I may not have gotten to sing that night, but I did learn how to fix a dislocated shoulder.”
“Just get it over with.” Samson closed his eyes.
When we emerged from the X-ray room five minutes later, Samson’s right arm was secured in a sling made from Nola’s leopard-print scarf. His face was as pale and gray as ashes, making the dark, plum-colored lipstick mark on his cheek stand out like a bruise.
Nola had counted one . . . two . . . three and jammed his shoulder back in place. Then, while Samson was still busy howling and cursing, she had kissed him on the cheek.
I was nervous about trying to wheel Grandma Pat past the desk attendant in the crowded waiting room, but our escape went off without a hitch. There had been a pileup on the highway, and some of the accident victims were being brought in from an ambulance, boosting the bedlam inside Mercy Medical another notch. A St. Patrick’s Day parade could have marched through every hallway, and the overburdened doctors and nurses would’ve remained fixated on the patients who needed their attention most.
With Del at my side, I pushed Grandma Pat’s wheelchair through the waiting area and out into the parking lot. The cars in the lot looked like giant marshmallows. It was still snowing, but the winds that had deviled us throughout the night were beginning to die down.
“Oh, no! No, no, no!” Nola cried as we approached her mother’s car, which was still parked where we’d abandoned it upon arrival. We had all been distracted when we’d first arrived; but now, as we neared the SUV, an entire inventory of automotive injuries came into focus. A small snowdrift had built up inside the car, because nobody had thought to close the sun roof. One headlamp was broken, where it had collided with the concrete pylon, and the front bumper had a crumple. But the damage to the bumper and the headlight was small compared to the blackened circle of cracked and peeling paint that marred the roof. We could clearly see where Samson had sat, firing his savvy-powered flame throwers. His butt-print was scorched into the steel.
“How am I ever going to explain this to my parents?” Nola looked devastated.
“We’ll think of something,” Samson said, trying to sound positive. “But we need to go now, Nola. Gypsy thinks Grandma will be in danger as long as we’re in Denver. This night’s not over yet.”
Nola raised an eyebrow. “Are you going to clear the roads for us again? All the way to Evergreen?” Samson canted his head back in the direction of the medical center, wincing from the pain in his shoulder.
“I won’t need to,” he said. “The TV reports say the city’s got plows out and the snow is supposed to stop earlier than predicted. That’s good. Because, right now, I don’t think I could melt enough snow to give Grandma a drink of water. But if I drive carefully enough, I think I can get us back to Evergreen in one piece.”
“Oh, no you won’t!” Nola wagged her finger at Samson as they both grabbed for the driver’s-side door handle at the same time. “There’s no way you can drive safely through this snow with your arm in a sling. We need someone who can keep both hands on the wheel.”
Samson frowned, but he let go of the door handle. “Who’s going to drive then? You?”
“Yes,” said Nola. “I may not have my license yet, but I do have a learner’s permit. I’ve been practicing for months. My driver’s test is only three weeks away. We’ll bring Del home—carefully—and then the rest of us will make our way back to Evergreen—extra-carefully. Like you said, with snowplows on the roads, how
bad can it be?”
Del and I brushed the drift of snow out of the car as best we could, then we helped Grandma Pat out of her wheelchair and into the backseat, buckling her in tight. Tucker and Cap’n Stormy got comfy in the cargo area. As soon as Grandma was situated, Del and I both looked at the empty wheelchair, then at each other, thinking the same thing:
We needed to take it.
We both remembered how useful the grocery cart had been to us earlier. Without saying anything to Nola and Samson, we quietly folded up the wheelchair and loaded it in the back of the car, alongside Tucker and Nola’s shopping bags.
Tuck was happy to be in the back of the SUV again, where he could curl up like a momma cat around his kitten. For the first time since Grandma went out the window, I felt like everything was going to be all right. I knew we were going to have plenty of explaining to do to my parents, and to Nola’s parents too. But the important thing was that Grandma Pat would soon be safe.
As Nola put the car in reverse and backed away from the concrete pylon, I racked my brain for ways to help pay for the damage to Mrs. Kim’s car. Maybe I could go to work for the government—I could get a job as a spy. My ability to stop time could be quite handy in that line of work. If ever there were a time bomb that needed defusing, the president could call me up and tell me to say stop. I’d halt the ticking countdown in its tracks. Then maybe there would be someone else, someone just as impervious to my savvy time-stops as Del was, who could defuse the bomb, while the rest of the world remained safely frozen. Or maybe I could learn to do that too.
I glanced at Del where he sat on the other side of Grandma, and wondered again why time never stopped for him—or for those twins we’d seen earlier. What could we all have in common? What could possibly connect us?
Now that Samson wasn’t a hundred and ten degrees, it was frigid inside the car, even with the heater set to high. Beyond the windshield, everything was blanketed in white. Even the traffic signals wore white top hats, and their flashing red and yellow lights were coated in icy frosting. Except for the occasional crash-a-rattle-whoosh of a passing snowplow, the streets of Denver were deserted. Nola could drive as slowly and as carefully as she needed to.
Even so, Nola’s knuckles were white as she gripped the steering wheel. She piloted her mother’s SUV around slippery corners at a pace that would have made snails yawn.
“I could’ve walked to my uncle’s house and gotten there faster,” Del murmured, too low for Nola to hear. But I suspected Del didn’t really mind the pace. Maybe he didn’t feel ready to say good-bye any more than I did.
“Toughen up, Patrice,” Grandma mumbled next to me, caught in the monstrous brain cloud that was gobbling up her memories.
“What did you say, Grandma?”
“That’s what Daddy is always telling me to do, Nettie,” she went on, sounding blue. “‘Toughen up,’ Daddy says. ‘Follow the rules, Patrice. Know your place in this world, and don’t embarrass the family by trying to stand out or be different. Don’t ever let me catch you dallying with a boy like Cleavon Dorsey again, either! Nothing good can come from hobnobbing with those who aren’t like us.’
“You know what, Nettie?” Grandma hooked her arm through mine and leaned her white curls against my golden brown ones. “I think Daddy might be right. Maybe I have been acting like a dumb-cluck fool. Maybe it’s time for me to grow up and get my head on straight.”
“He isn’t right,” I said softly. “You didn’t need to worry so much about standing out, or about liking people who were different from you. Your daddy was wrong.”
It made me sad to realize that Grandma may have once been open-minded and full of pluck. At some point she must have decided to start believing the hidebound things her father preached. When had his fears begun to change her?
Tucker pulled himself to his knees and leaned against the back of Grandma’s seat, as if he too wanted to assure her that she’d never needed to toughen up. He stroked the shoulder of Grandma’s fur coat, and said:
“Wanna hear a story, Grandma?” Then, without waiting for a yes or no, he began telling Grandma Pat the tale of our first savvy ancestor—the pioneer girl who had attracted gold the way some people attract mosquitos. To my surprise, Grandma Pat sat up a little straighter, listening with interest.
I looked at my watch. It was 9:15.
Tucker was already up to the part of the story where young Eva Mae climbed out of the Missouri River covered in gold dust, when Nola made a sharp turn and the SUV spun out into the middle of an intersection.
“Watch out!” cried Samson. “There’s a car coming, Nola.”
“I see it. I’m trying!”
The other car, a rusty Jeep, honked its horn as it sped around us.
“How rude,” Nola spat. Then she started forward again, the windshield wipers clunk-thunking to the same rhythm as our pounding hearts.
“I think you need to turn around,” said Samson. “Or get off this road as fast as you can.” Wincing in pain, he craned his neck, trying to get a look at the snow-covered street signs. “I’m pretty sure we’re on a one-way street—going the wrong way.”
“Everything’s fine,” said Nola, brushing off Samson’s concern. “We’re on Welton, and Welton is a one-way street going west.”
“East,” Del quickly corrected her. “Welton Street is one-way going east.”
“Well, that can’t be right, because I’m driving west.” Nola tapped the compass reading on the SUV’s dashboard, then she shifted her gaze away from the road and looked over her shoulder at Del. “Are you sure Welton runs east, Del?”
“Pretty sure!” Del’s voice jumped three octaves. He braced one hand against the back of Samson’s seat, pointing toward the enormous snowplow headed straight for us.
Just when I thought I’d been wrong about every future vision I’d ever had—when I thought I might have no future at all—Nola careened around the snowplow and turned off Welton.
The new boulevard we slid onto was bisected by a small ravine. A creek and a snow-covered bike path ran along the bottom of the gorge, fifteen feet down. We all lurched and bounced in our seats, holding on tight as the SUV bumped up and over the buried curb, onto the buried sidewalk at the top of the ravine. Nola’s cosmetics case ricocheted around like a piece of popcorn in a popper. Sitting unsecured in the cargo area, Tucker bounced into the air. So did Cap’n Stormy.
“Find something to hang on to, Tucker!” I cried, wishing I’d been more diligent about making sure my little brother was safely buckled in. I glanced at Grandma; she was fully awake now, but her eyes were wide and unfocused.
“Try to get the car back on the road, Nola,” Samson said, working hard to keep his voice low and calm.
“I am trying,” Nola said as she plowed through a series of low-hanging tree branches. The branches slapped thwap-thwap-thwap against the windshield, and scraped along the side of the car like fingernails on a chalkboard.
“Hit the brakes,” Samson, Del, and I all shouted at the same time as we caught sight of a safety railing looming large in front of us.
“Okay, okay!” Nola shouted back. She slammed her foot down hard, missing the brake. Flooring the gas pedal instead.
THE SAFETY RAIL SHOULD have stopped us, but it didn’t. Nola was driving too fast. I didn’t need my old savvy to see what was going to happen next—to see that the SUV was going to take a flying leap into the gulch that divided the two sides of the boulevard. We were going to plunge straight down into the creek.
“Everyone hold on!” Nola cried as all four of our tires left the ground. Like a ride at the county fair, the car began to rotate wrong side up, and its front end lurched down into the ravine below.
My heart bump-thumped, as if preparing to explode. Had I created an unhappy ending for us all, by trying to change Grandma’s fate?
I squeezed my eyes closed and screamed stop-stop
-STOP—if only for good measure. I may not have needed the words to trigger my savvy, but saying them couldn’t hurt. Nor was I the only one screaming.
My head spun and my stomach writhed as though we were still falling. But the car had stopped. The shrieking had stopped. Everything had stopped, just like I’d willed it to.
The SUV hung suspended sideways in midair. The nose of the car pointed down at a crazy angle, two feet from the creek, where ice-fringed waters sloshed and churned.
I heard Del whistle one low note, then say, “That was close, Specs. Maybe next time, you could pause things a little sooner?”
All I managed to answer was, “Uh-huh . . . yeah . . . okay.”
Del and I leaned hard against our seat belts, gasping for breath. The others were all frozen in place. Most of them, anyway. I nearly had a heart attack when Grandma Pat elbowed me in the ribs and said:
“I don’t like the way the sandwich-girl drives. I’m getting out!”
“Grandma!” I cried. “You’re still moving!”
“Of course I’m still moving, girly. I’m not dead yet.” Before Del or I could stop her, Grandma Pat unfastened her seat belt and fell sideways. She tumbled tuchus over teacup against Del’s door and window, smothering Del in a silvery cloud of lace and netting. I’d stopped time to save us, but Grandma Pat was still finding her way into trouble.
“It looks like we can add your gran to the ranks of The Timeless Crusaders,” Del said through the muffle of fabric around him.
Patrice Beaumont may have been a senior citizen, she may have looked thin and brittle, but she still had plenty of moxie left in her old bones, even if her mind was growing slushy. Grandma had braved her bedroom window . . . the bus . . . the night . . . the snow . . . the cold . . . and the big city, in hopes of reaching her old high school. Just so that she could go to a dance—the ghost of a dance—that her father had forbidden her to attend sixty years ago.