I pushed away from the door and walked back down the hall. I didn’t want to hear it. Not any of it. Mimmy’d lost control of the conversation. She was on the retreat, and Mrs. Fleming hadn’t listened to a word she’d said about Hilde.
I went back to the den and helped Natty pick books and a couple of toys to take to Blue Moon until Mimmy reappeared.
“Let’s go!” she said, her smile a little too wide to be quite genuine.
All talk of the Flemings was tabled while we ate. Natty stuffed himself on fried chicken and southern green beans and two whole huge biscuits. Ten minutes into the drive home, he fell into a food coma in his car seat.
Once I was sure he was truly out, not just possuming, I said, “You never told me the bad news. When I got home, you said that you had good news and bad, but you only told me half.”
Mimmy kept her eyes on the narrow, winding road leading us home. “I think you and Natty should go down to Atlanta and stay in your father’s house. Just until the Flemings’ rental is up.”
I blinked, surprised. For Mimmy, saying the words “your father” without adding a “be” verb and an insult was unprecedented. “You really think Hilde is that dangerous?”
“I don’t know,” Mimmy said. “But her mother is dangerously stupid.”
“What aren’t you telling me?” If she was willingly sending me off to Dad’s house, even with him out of the country, it had to be very bad. It wasn’t that my parents didn’t get along. Technically speaking, you had to have contact with someone in order to not get along. I was close with both of them, but I was an unlikely sunny oasis in the otherwise unbroken, silent tundra that had stretched between them the second I got old enough to drive myself to visitation.
“That girl was at the house today,” Mimmy said. “I saw her in our yard about an hour before you came home.”
I boggled at her. “Hilde was at our house?”
“I think so. Unless there is some other emaciated, pale, black-haired teenager with a reason to be standing in my pansy bed, peering in my window with her big, old buggy eyes.”
The pansy bed was in the backyard, and somehow that felt more invasive than a person looking in from the front. “What did you do?”
“Well, it upset me, Shandi, I won’t lie. I ran out there to shoo her off, but by the time I got outside, she was gone. Poof. Unless she’s faster than a rabbit, she couldn’t have gotten back into the woods. I knew she had to go around the house. I almost lit out after her. But then I thought, what if she went the other way? I was scared I might pick wrong, and she’d double back and slip inside the door.”
I shuddered at the thought of that: Hilde hiding out in Natty’s big closet, the real-life version of the under-bridge troll he was sure had moved in after we read Three Billy Goats Gruff. She could tuck herself under our old sleeping bags or crouch behind the toy bins, and then creep out once until we were all asleep. No wonder Mimmy was ready to send us to Dad’s.
Mimmy turned onto the curvy, gravel road that wound its slow way up to home. Beyond our place, it went to the B and B, and then on to some gorgeous hiking trails with waterfall views. We were going maybe twenty miles an hour; it was all hairpins from here.
Mimmy said, “I wish we could—”
Then she interrupted herself with a short bark of scream, and I cried out, too, because as we came around the second sharp curve, a man was standing in the middle of the road. I only had time to catch a glimpse of him: short, fat, round faced, grinning. But I knew him. I recognized him from somewhere. Mimmy slammed her foot down on the brake. Not fast enough. The man disappeared, yanked down under the front of the car even as we jolted to a halt.
“Oh, Jesus, please,” Mimmy said, half scream, half prayer.
Natty muttered in the back, disturbed but not awake.
Mimmy was already throwing her door open, leaping out and running forward, but I sat frozen. It had happened so fast. The man and his pale, grinning face. I knew him, and now he was under our front tires.
I craned up to peer into the swath of light created by our headlights, desperate, trying to see if the man was all right, and I didn’t realize Hilde Fleming was climbing into the driver’s seat beside me until she shut the door. She threw the car into reverse. As she backed away, Mimmy rose up, her mouth opening in another scream. Beside her, the man popped up again, too, his whole body swinging back and forth like a Weeble.
For a moment, I didn’t understand. I stared from him to Hilde, her pink tongue stuck out between her lips again as she concentrated. I looked to the man, still swaying back and forth, so crazy. He had no legs. He had a round base and no legs, so he couldn’t be a man at all.
Then I knew him. He was Mr. Bang, Walcott’s old blow-up boxing toy. He was a heavy-duty plastic punching bag painted like a person. Walcott and I used to beat on him, and he would bob down and roll back up, grinning and obliging, ready to be hit again. I’d seen Mr. Bang earlier today, standing in the corner of the screened-in porch by Walcott’s other old toys; now Hilde had stolen him, and set him in the road to stop our car. Dear God, she had been at the B and B today, too, watching us.
Mimmy came running toward us, awkward on her strappy sandals.
Natty muttered in his sleep, as Hilde accelerated forward, careening around Mimmy, the driver’s-side tires sliding on the steep shoulder. I thought we would go over. I thought we would tip and fall right down the mountain, me and Natty, but Hilde accelerated and dragged the wheel right and we got around Mimmy and went up.
In the rear window, I could only see the vague shape of Mimmy in the darkness, tottering on her heels in the gravel, trying to run after us.
The car took the next curve, and even that shadow Mimmy disappeared. There was only Hilde, revving the engine, taking me and Natty up the mountain, taking us all up into the black.
Chapter 5
Natty, sacked out in his car seat, was the only thing that kept me from screaming and just screaming and just screaming on and on.
Hilde peeped her big eyes sideways at me and then crooned, “My own! My own miraculous!” and I didn’t know if she meant me, or Natty, or whatever this was that she was doing with the car. Her own miraculous crime?
“What?” I said, because it was the only word I had.
“We are miraculous, me and him,” said Hilde, facing forward and creeping up, up, up, talking faster than the car was going. “Him with me, it will work. This time it will work. You’ll see, you’ll see.” And then she said three words that made all my blood stop running and chill into sludge inside my every vein. She said, “We’re gonna fly.”
Natty was buckled in, or else I would have snatched him and simply opened the door and rolled out and let her go. But I wouldn’t leave my son. I knew what she meant to do. We were going all the way up, to one of the spectacular waterfall views. We were going to drive right over it. She meant for us to Thelma and Louise the whole long way down, spattering ourselves across my very own mountain.
In the faint light from the dashboard she looked over at me and she grinned, wildly delighted, like she expected me to grin back. Like I was her co-conspirator. Grinned! With her good hand and her bandaged one both clenching and unclenching at the Impala’s wheel.
“Hilde,” I said. “My God, Hilde, you can’t drive us—” I stopped. The only possible next words were, off the mountain. I was so scared of the very words, I couldn’t say them out loud.
“Sure, I can,” she said, in an oddly reassuring tone. “I have my learner’s permit. As long as you’re in the car with me, it’s completely legal.”
She kept right on driving, and my heart kept right on pounding, but in my head, where it mattered, all my panic stopped. Click. It just turned off. My body was still full of adrenaline from when I thought that Mimmy’d run over a person, but I was calm inside now and I could think for the first time since I’d seen Mr. Bang go down under the car.
I thought, This child has a learner’s permit.
She was crazy, but she was a crazy fifteen-year-old girl. A sick one, with arms as skinny as pipe cleaners. She was six years younger, three inches shorter, thirty-five pounds lighter, and I wasn’t going to fly today.
I unbuckled myself, scooted fast across the long seat, grabbed the keys and turned the Impala’s engine off. We guttered to a stop, and I jammed the gear shift up into park before we could start rolling backward.
“Oh, no! Oh, no!” Hilde said, turning to me with the dismayed eyes of a child who finds its goldfish floating very still at the top of the bowl. “What are you doing?”
“I’m declining to be murdered,” I told her. I pulled out the keys. The dashboard lights went out, leaving us in moonlight.
“Oh, but no, you don’t understand,” Hilde said. Her voice was a fervent whisper. “Look! Look, the man in the grocery store, he gave me this!”
She reached up to turn on the ceiling light, then scrabbled in the side pocket of her purse to find a square of paper. She thrust it at me. It was a religious tract, the front cover showing heaping piles of hand-drawn people on fire, their mouths open in screams. They were naked, but the artist had them all writhing strategically so that their genitals didn’t show. She flipped it open, and inside, she’d gone to work with her black pen again. Whatever the tract had said initially was wiped away by all her curling, smoky symbols and connected letters. “He gave it to me. Don’t you understand?”
I shook my head and said to her, very calm and soothy, “The little market in town? That was just Mr. Beardley. He gives those tracts to everyone, because they started selling beer there.”
“No, but you see the message? It’s all about me and him,” she said, her voice rising as she jerked her thumb at Natty in the backseat. He slept on, out for the night, his little chin sagged against the buckle. “You can stay here, but we have to go up. Please, please, let me take him up. I’ll show you what we can do. It’s all in here!” She pointed desperately at the tract.
I’d kept her talking long enough. The driver’s-side door swung open, making Hilde startle and twitch. Mimmy had caught up to us, and immediately, Hilde slipped the tract out of sight beneath her thigh.
“What on earth?” Mimmy said, taking in the whole scene: Hilde abashed in the driver’s seat, Natty sleeping. I held up the jingling keys to show her.
“Good girl,” she said. “Oh, you good, smart girl.”
“Hello, Mrs. Pierce,” Hilde said to Mimmy, so polite. Like we’d all met up here for tea.
“Ms. Madison,” Mimmy snapped. She’d long gone back to her maiden name. “Good grief, I’ve torn my feet up, running in these shoes.”
Hilde looked down, hangdog sorry; the stern-voiced-mother presence of Mimmy had instantly diminished her. She looked like any kid caught out after curfew. At the same time, she had that tract hidden beneath her leg, and from where I sat, I could see her peeping up sideways toward my corner of the dashboard. She tilted her head, the way she might to listen if someone on my side of the car was whispering to her. Probably, someone was.
It was so ridiculous that I started laughing, quiet, so as not to not wake my boy, and I couldn’t stop. My whole body shook and shook with it.
“Where is your mother?” Mimmy said to Hilde, still very stern.
Hilde shrugged. “She went antiquing. And then to eat. I didn’t want to go.”
“Where on earth does she think you are?”
“She thought I was at home, earlier. Now she thinks I’ve gone to that teen movie night they’re having at the coffee house. We saw the poster.” Hilde said, and added, almost abashed. “I’ve been texting her so that she wouldn’t fret. She’s such a fretter.”
I gaped at her, trying to get my breath back from the laughing. It was such a normal teenager thing to say. It reminded me of Walcott, right after he got his license, calling Darla Worrsy-Wartsy as he sped us fast over the railroad tracks to make the car go airborne. It was so easy to forget that Hilde, possible daughter of God and definite Flight Risk, was, in her mother’s eyes, a regular teenager who could walk herself downtown to have a sugared-up iced coffee drink and watch a PG-13 movie.
Mimmy said, “Scoot your little butt right over, young lady. We’re taking you home.”
Hilde palmed her tract and then slid to the middle of the Impala’s old school bench seat as I shuffled back to my place. We both buckled ourselves in. Her frail knees spiked up as she rested her feet obediently on the hump.
I reached across her to hand Mimmy the keys. She turned off the overhead light and said, “Call Walcott, please, Shandi. I want to drop off Natty with him before we go. We’re going to have a good, hard talk with Hilde’s mother.” She started the car and began driving, forward and up, toward our house and the B and B.
I called Walcott, trying to come up with a super-short, expurgated version as it rang. Hilde hunched down even deeper, sinking to a little miserable bow shape. In the small slice of seat between the two of us, she still clutched her tract out of Mimmy’s sight, her thumb petting sorrowfully at the naked burning people as Walcott picked up.
I said, “Hey! We’re almost to your place. Hilde tried to carjack me. She isn’t good at it. We’ve kinda reverse carjacked her and now we need to drive her home and have a Come to Jesus with her mother. Can you help me?”
There was a three-second silence and then Walcott said, “That is a lot of information. Whatcha need?”
“When we pull in, can you run out and get Nat? He’s crashed and I don’t want to drag him along on this particular field trip.”
“Absolutely,” he said, no pause this time. “I was about to leave for Atlanta to hang with CeeCee, but no big, I’ll go tomorrow. Still, this means you owe me the whole story. With harrowing details and dramatic hand gestures.”
“Check,” I said.
I could hear Darla in the room with him saying, “Harrowing details of what?” I let him go so he could get his momses up to speed.
We pulled into the B and B’s circle drive not three minutes later. Walcott did not come out alone. Both his momses were with him, Aimee carrying her socks and shoes and Darla brushing at her hair with her fingers.
Aimee opened the back door and started unbuckling Natty, saying to us, “We think we should come with you. This woman, she didn’t listen to Charlotte on the phone, so why would she listen now? We need to go in there like an army.”
Mimmy said, “Thank you, that would be so appreciated,” with such immediate sincerity that it surprised me.
Mimmy and Walcott’s momses didn’t socialize. Oh, they’d always been neighborly toward each other: keeping an eye out for each other’s kids, pet sitting, getting each other’s mail during vacations. Last year Darla had to have an emergency appendectomy, and Mimmy was the first person to drop a casserole and homemade bread off at their home. But Aimee and Darla’s couplehood made Mimmy uncomfortable, and she compensated by being hyper polite. Mimmy was a conservative and a Southern Baptist, which made the momses equally wary and over-mannered. The three of them had never completed a transaction as simple as a borrowed cup of sugar with less than three rounds of please and thank you.
Aimee passed Natty’s sleeping body up to Walcott. Natty stirred and his eyes cracked open.
“Hey, Natty Bumppo,” Walcott said. Natty nestled into his shoulder, reaching up a sleepy hand to pat at Walcott’s cheek.
“My Ucka,” he said, using the old, old, baby form of Walcott, and then Nat was back asleep. Walcott carried him off toward the cottage as Darla got into the back on the other side.
We left with Hilde buckled in between me and Mimmy, Aimee and Darla like guards posted in the back, as if we were transporting a particularly dangerous prisoner. A ninety-pound prisoner with spindly arms. It was amazing to me how inert and silent and undangerous she had become, once she had fallen into the hands of
all these mothers.
We drove up to the Jerome house with Hilde barely present. She didn’t speak again at all until we’d parked. We all got out, and I held the door for her. Hilde scooched down the seat, and as she climbed out, she fixed me with her big, lamplit eyes and whispered, “We could have flown. We could have, if you hadn’t been afraid.” She spat the last word like it was the worst thing in the world.
I didn’t answer. My Lord, what on earth was there to say?
We walked her to the door in a phalanx, Mimmy on point, me and Hilde guarded in the center, with Aimee and Darla bringing up the rear. Mimmy rang the bell. I don’t know what Mrs. Fleming thought, seeing the crowd on her porch. She crossed her arms defensively, looking at us all, but the person she addressed was Hilde.
“Sugar? What’s going on?”
“Well, she wasn’t at the movie, I can tell you that,” Mimmy said.
Hilde slithered around Mimmy. As Mrs. Fleming stepped back, widening the door to let her child in, Mimmy and tall Aimee crowded in, too. We all did, spilling over the threshold into the Jerome house’s vaulted foyer, so brightly lit, with its butter-cream walls and marble floors. The Jeromes had entirely avoided the cabin look.
“She was at my house,” Mimmy continued, as Hilde went to the stairs and climbed four of them, then turned and sat down on her butt to watch us. “She was at my house stamping down my pansies to peer into my window. Tonight, she was out stealing my car.”
Mrs. Fleming’s eyes widened. “Hilde would not steal a car.”
“Sure, she would,” Aimee said. “Your kid is a mess.”
“We would have minded the car theft much less if Charlotte’s three-year-old grandson hadn’t been asleep inside it at the time,” Darla chimed in, her voice harder than I had ever heard it in my whole life.
Mrs. Fleming shot a look at Hilde, but Hilde was no help. She sat on the stairs, fiddling with the zipper of her purse.