“Well,” Tully said as he added some wood to the smoker, “depends on the season and where you’re fishin’. If I had my boat, I could get to the river and I could get us some bigger fish. But there’s plenty of good fishin’ here. Catfish, shad, striped bass. Herring, though Simmee don’t like it.” He smiled to himself. “She ain’t fussy about much, but herring ain’t her cup of tea. The black crappie you can get fishin’ off the bank. They’re dumb as twigs. They’ll latch on to your hook even if you ain’t got nothin’ on it.”
We’d eaten crappie the other night, and I’d been relieved the fish tasted better than its name suggested.
I watched him work with the smoker, wondering how to bring up my latest idea for getting off Last Run Shelter without riling him. He’d made it clear at supper the other night that he didn’t want to talk about it, but I’d thought of a new plan and it was burning inside me.
Leaving Last Run wasn’t the only thing I thought about, though. While I spent much of my time worrying about myself—was anyone still looking for me or had they given me up for dead?—I found myself increasingly thinking about Simmee. I thought of what it would be like to raise a child out here in stifling isolation. I’d long known that I would be an overprotective mother, never letting my children out of my sight, and with good reason. I knew how rebellious kids could be. How gullible, vulnerable and downright stupid. I knew the things Rebecca had done. The things I had done. I knew only too well how quickly normal teenage rebellion could slip way out of control. I pictured Simmee’s son or daughter going to the mainland, craving the taste of freedom. Going wild with it. I shuddered at the thought.
Not only did I worry about Simmee’s future and how she would raise a child at Last Run, I worried about things that hadn’t happened to her. What if Tully’d never come along when he did? What would have happened to her after her grandmother died? Would she have moved in with Lady Alice? Then I started thinking about Lady Alice’s son, Jackson. If Tully hadn’t found his body, would Lady Alice ever have known what happened to him? Would she still be wandering these woods looking for him? The thought of the two women struggling without Tully was painful, and I knew that in a very short time, I’d come to care about them. I was so different from them. My upbringing. My education. My life experiences. But a woman could know another woman’s heart without having one other single thing in common.
Tully, though, was pure male. As male as a male could be, and he was a challenge for me to talk to.
This is ridiculous, I thought, as I sat on the stoop watching him fiddle with the smoker. I had to tell him what I was thinking or I would burst.
“I’m really grateful to you, Tully,” I began.
“Oh, yeah?” He glanced up. “Why’s that?”
“For bringing me here and feeding me and giving me a roof over my head,” I said. “I don’t want you to think I’m not grateful, but I can’t help trying to think of ways to go home.” I was no longer picturing myself returning to the airport. It was home that drew me now. Raleigh. Adam. My house. My bed. My garden. My dog. My life. “I was thinking about…this is not something you would have to do…but if you could just tell me how I could do it, then—”
“Do what?” He fiddled with the knob on the front of the smoker.
“Build a raft.” I blurted it out.
He looked at me incredulously, mouth open, eyes wide, before bursting into laughter. I felt relieved. I hadn’t been sure how he’d react, and derisive laughter was better than anger.
“What are you now,” he asked. “Huck Finn?” He put one foot up on the picnic table bench and leaned forward, arms on his knee. “Listen to me, Miss Maya, we might be able to build a raft, but even I wouldn’t take a raft out on that ol’ creek the way it’s acting right now. You ain’t got no idea what you’re talkin’ about.”
I shut my eyes, pressing my hand to my forehead in frustration. “What about a sign?” I looked at him again. “A sign I could put on the bank somewhere where a boat might see it. Simmee said boats wouldn’t go by that area between Last Run and the mainland, but—”
“And she’s right. You should listen to her.” He sounded annoyed with me now. He lowered his foot from the bench and peered inside the smoker again.
“I’m just trying to think outside the box,” I said.
He wiped the sweat from his grimy forehead with the rag he wore tucked into his waistband. “You know,” he said, looking at me, “I like you. I’m glad I found you before the river got to you, ’cause you’re a good lady, and I bet you’re a real fine doctor. I know you’re smart and all, but you don’t know nothin’ about living here.” He folded his arms across his chest, the rag dangling from his fingers. “Don’t you think I’d get you outta here if I could?” he asked. “Think about it. You’re eatin’ our food, using up our coal and kerosene and water, an’ makin’ more work for Simmee at a time when she don’t need no more work. If there was a way to get you outta here, I’d do it. Believe me.”
I leaned away from him on the stoop, suddenly very uncomfortable. He’d said he liked me, but the tone of his words told me something entirely different. I did believe him, though. I was in their way, and he wanted me gone. I was mortified by the thought that I might be making more work for Simmee. Was I? I thought of how I lolled around the house with my leg up most of the day, as if I were on vacation at a bed-and-breakfast.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I know it must be hard having an extra person around, especially with the power being out.”
He brushed away the comment. “We’re all stuck here together,” he said, turning back to the smoker again. “You just gotta tough it out like the rest of us.”
Behind me, the screen door opened and Simmee walked onto the stoop, a plastic bucket in her hand. I stood up, a little shaky from the conversation with Tully.
“I swear, I got to pee every two seconds,” Simmee said.
“Normal,” I said. “Are you sure you’re up to this?”
“Berry pickin’?” She made a face that said you are such a wimp. “Not exactly climbin’ Mount Everest, now, is it?”
“No.” I smiled. Mount Everest. Every once in a while, she said something that reminded me she had gone to school. She had learned things. Retained things. What more could she have learned if she’d been given the chance?
We picked blackberries and blueberries. Simmee found the bushes with the ease of someone who knew the woods the way I knew my kitchen in Raleigh. We had the bucket filled in no time at all, our fingers stained purple. Then Simmee led me along a narrow path that seemed to go on forever. Finally, I saw the glimmer of water through the brush and soon we’d come to the bank itself. In front of us were two splintery steps leading down to a floating wooden dock. In spite of her girth, Simmee trotted down the steps and onto the dock, then turned to look up at me.
“C’mon,” she said. “Let’s put our feet in the water.”
I held my arms out at my sides for balance as I stepped onto the dock. It rocked beneath my feet, and I stepped gingerly to the edge, where Simmee was already taking off her shoes. My mind was suddenly racing. Couldn’t this dock serve as a raft? It was huge and would probably be cumbersome, but if the creek ever calmed down…I looked at the trees on the mainland. I imagined getting to them and then, somehow, finding my way to civilization.
“Could this dock…could someone use a pole to move the dock across the creek to the mainland?” I pointed to the opposite side of the water.
Simmee laughed. “Well, first of all, you’d get halfway across and get stuck on treetops or rocks or whatnot. And second of all, I hate to tell you this, Miss Maya, but that ain’t the mainland. It’s just another island.”
“It is?” I stared at the thicket of trees and brush across the water from us.
“Yes, ma’am.”
I slumped down on the dock.
“You need to just accept it,” Simmee said.
“You’re right,” I said with a sigh. I took off my borrowed shoes
and examined the stitches on my shin. Carefully, I lowered my feet over the edge of the dock, relaxing when I saw that the water wouldn’t reach the healing wound on my leg. “You are absolutely right.”
Simmee wiggled her feet in the water. “Heaven,” she said. “Ain’t it?” She popped a blackberry into her mouth, then pushed the bucket an inch in my direction. I ate one. It was the sweetest blackberry I’d ever tasted.
“And here’s another thing.” Simmee pointed behind us. “Them two steps we just come down?” she said. “Well, there’s actually twenty of ’em.”
I turned to look behind us and suddenly understood what she was saying. The water had risen so high that it had covered eighteen of those twenty steps. The dock we sat on was usually many feet—many yards—lower than it was now.
“Unreal,” I said. I looked across the water at the thick wall of trees. “Is this where Larry will come?”
“Probly not.” She ate another berry. “There’s another dock closer to Lady Alice’s house.”
Maybe I could find that dock and camp out on it, waiting for Larry. I brushed the thought from my mind. Just accept it.
“But this here dock is closest to our house,” Simmee said. “This is where we kept our johnboat. You know what a johnboat is?”
I shook my head. “Just a little boat?” I guessed. That’s what I’d pictured when Tully had mentioned his boat.
“It has a flat bottom and motor at the back, and you got to pull the rope to get it started and steer with the tiller.”
“Oh.” I nodded. I’d never heard the term johnboat until Tully’d mentioned it the other day, but I’d actually piloted just such a boat as a teenager during a two-week stay at a camp in the mountains. At the time, I’d thought of the camp as a pity camp, since it was for kids in foster care. Even though I lived with Rebecca, someone, maybe one of my teachers, had enrolled me in the camp. It wasn’t long after my parents’ murder, and I’d been too emotionally wounded to connect with the other kids, but now I remembered the boat. I’d loved it. I’d take it out alone on the lake. I couldn’t yet drive and had no way of escaping the world I’d come to hate and fear. The boat had given me respite. “I know exactly what you mean,” I said. “I went to this camp on a lake once, and they had boats just like that. I’d go all over the place in that boat.”
“Really?” Simmee sounded downright shocked that I knew how to do anything other than be a doctor. “You could start it and steer it and everythin’?”
“Really.” I shrugged. “It was a long time ago, but I remember how much fun it was.”
“Well, we don’t…didn’t use our boat much for fun,” she said. “Tully used it for fishin’, of course, and I’d use it to go to Ruskin. That’s the nearest town. Here’s how I go.” She pointed directly ahead of us, where the water disappeared around a bend in the trees. “I just keep going that way for a while. Then I come to this kind of fork place. Not sure how it looks right now, with the water so high, but you can probly still tell it’s a fork. There’s a bunch of old pine trees without no tops. They just stick up straight there, so you can’t miss it really. Then I take the left fork. You always want to just keep goin’ left, even when you come to this…sort of shed you can see on the right. It looks like you should go right there, but you don’t. Probly now you can only see the top of the shed, ’cause sometimes the water come up close to it even after a little storm, but—” She stopped speaking abruptly. “Are you listenin’ to me?” she asked. “It’s rude not to listen.”
I wasn’t listening. I was still back at that camp. God, I’d been an unhappy kid. Grieving, lonely and filled with unbearable regret. I’d destroyed my mother’s life. My father’s. My sister’s.
“So, were you listenin’?” Simmee asked again.
“Sort of,” I said, pulling myself back to the present. “You were telling me how you go to Ruskin.”
“Mostly you just keep stayin’ left. If you kept on goin’ that way, you’d end up in Fayetteville, eventually.” She lifted her feet from the water, then slowly eased herself down until she was lying flat on the dock.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
“Lie down and look up,” she said.
I checked the dock for bugs, then lay down. Above us, the trees formed a lacy canopy.
“Pretty, ain’t it?” Simmee asked.
“It is,” I agreed.
Neither of us spoke for a moment. Then Simmee drew in a breath.
“I like having you around, Miss Maya,” she said.
Guilt nipped at me. I so desperately wanted to leave. To return to my own life. My real life. But Simmee’s words gave me some comfort. Maybe Tully was wrong. Yes, I’d made more work for Simmee, but I was giving her something in return. Friendship.
“I’m glad I’ve gotten to know you,” I said honestly. “You’re a wonderful young woman.”
Simmee held out her hand. “Give me your hand,” she said.
I felt a sudden awkwardness. Were we going to lie there on the dock holding hands? But I offered her my hand anyway. If that’s what she wanted, I would do it.
She took my hand in both of hers, shifting a little on the dock until a circle of sunlight pooled on my fingers. Then she turned my hand so she could see my palm.
“I can read palms,” she said. “Gran taught me.”
I laughed, half relieved, half disconcerted. “I don’t believe in palm reading,” I said.
“It’s not like tarrit.” She sounded reassuring.
I considered pulling my hand away, but thought better of it. “Don’t tell me anything bad that can happen,” I said. “Don’t tell me how long I’ll live or anything like that.”
“I thought you don’t believe in palm reading,” she teased, and I laughed again.
“I just…that predicting the future kind of thing gives me the creeps.”
“Palm readin’ don’t have nothin’ to do with predictin’,” Simmee said. “It’s about what’s already happened.” She traced a line on my palm. “See here? This says you been in a helicopter crash.”
I smiled. “Charlatan,” I said.
“What?”
“Fake, it means. I called you a fake.” I turned my head toward her and caught her smile.
“You got a double lifeline,” she said.
“What’s that mean?”
“It’s good. They call it a sister line. It means you got someone in your life watchin’ out for you. Like a guardian angel.”
“My sister.” My eyes instantly filled. Surely by now, Rebecca thought I was dead.
“She’s a doctor, like you. Right?”
“Yes.” My voice was thick.
“Rebecca,” she said.
“Yes.”
“She older? Like somebody who looked out for you?”
“Exactly.” Rebecca had put her own life on hold for me. I would never have survived my adolescence without her.
Simmee studied my palm, but I had the feeling it was no longer the network of lines she was seeing. Her mind seemed far away.
“I lost everybody,” she said sadly.
“Your mother and your grandmother,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”
“My mama died havin’ me,” she said.
“Simmee!” I sat up abruptly, pulling my hand away. “I didn’t know that!” I suddenly understood the bits and pieces of anxiety I’d picked up from her surrounding the birth of her baby: Lady Alice had delivered Simmee, and Simmee’s mother had died during that birth. In a few weeks, Lady Alice would deliver her own child. No wonder she was afraid.
Simmee tried to sit up, and I had to help her. Her body seemed too cumbersome for her to manage. She took my hand back, holding it palm side up in her lap, not reacting in the slightest to my words. “That’s why my gran brung me up my whole life,” she said. “She was sick a while before she passed, but Tully was here by then, livin’ in the tent between our house and Lady Alice’s. Gran loved him. She said he was my guardian angel, even though I ain’t got no doub
le lifeline. Gran said she felt like it was okay for her to pass then, knowin’ I had Tully with me.” She fell silent for a moment as though lost in a memory, then looked down at my palm again. Squinting, she moved my hand a little away from her until it rested beneath another puddle of sunlight. She touched a spot on my lifeline, then shook her head.
“What?” I asked, in spite of myself.
“Just this little square,” she said. “Don’t fit. I’m probly lookin’ at it wrong.” She touched another line. “Anyway, I can see where you miscarried them babies.” She touched the line, counting. “Four of them, right?”
I pulled my hand away. “No,” I said, shaken. “Three.”
“I must’ve mistook one of them little lines, then,” Simmee said, but she looked hard into my eyes and I wondered if she saw them there, the four children I had lost.
31
Rebecca
THE WALK BETWEEN THE SCHOOL AND THE TRAILER WAS SHORT, but very, very dark. Rebecca and Adam aimed the beams of their flashlights on the sidewalk ahead of them, not wanting to miss the steps to the parking lot.
She was not herself today. She was not herself lately at all, and she wasn’t crazy about the brittle, addle-brained, lily-livered woman she felt herself turning into. It didn’t matter that she had a good excuse—a missing sister. Even her patients were getting to her, and she’d nearly always been able to keep the personal Rebecca and the professional Rebecca separate. Today, though, she’d had to work hard to prevent one from tainting the other. First, there was the asthmatic boy, Tristan. Then two little kids with broken arms. A frightened old man whose wife had disappeared in the move from the airport. And worst of all, a woman who delivered a stillborn infant on the floor of one of the abandoned classrooms. She hadn’t let Adam take care of that poor woman; she’d done her best to keep him from even learning about her. He didn’t talk about the recent loss of his own baby, but she knew it had to be tearing at him, so as soon as one of the volunteers gave her the news about the woman and her baby, Rebecca swept into that classroom and did what needed to be done. It had taken a toll on her, though. The woman. The beautiful, still infant. Afterward, she went out to the track to clear her mind. She’d considered running through the parking lot and the streets instead of the track, not tempting the threesome on the bleachers again, but she pulled herself together. She wasn’t going to let the ghosts of the past get to her in that way, and she was relieved that, this time, they left her alone.