A Life of Bright Ideas (21 page)

Winnalee’s nostrils worked like fish gills as her eyes gathered tears. “I told you I wasn’t the same person, but you wouldn’t listen!” Winnalee set her glass on the floor and dropped her forehead into her cupped hands.

My head was pounding, and I felt like I might throw up again when Winnalee started sobbing. “Don’t hate me, please?” she begged.

I sighed. “I don’t hate you, Winnalee. You’re my best friend. But I’m … I’m just so disappointed in you. I always wanted to be just like you. A snowflake.”

Winnalee continued to cry, and I started, too. “I don’t even know why I do those things,” she said. “I just don’t want to feel bad, and those things make the bad shit go away. But then afterwards, I feel worse.”

“Then stop doing them!” I said.

Winnalee looked up at me, torment twisting her features. “Don’t make me leave. Please.”

The anger and disappointment seeped out of me, and I went and squeezed into the chair beside her. I wrapped my arms around her. “I’d never ask you to leave.”

“I told you I’d changed, Button. I warned you. But please don’t stop being my best friend. No matter how disappointed you get in me. Please don’t stop being my best friend.”

“I won’t,” I told her, and she melted against me like snow that had turned to rain.

When I was kid, I once sat on the cement casing of the basement window so I could overhear Ma having it out with Aunt Verdella. But I didn’t do the same when Winnalee went inside to talk to Aunt Verdella, three days after. Instead I sat at the picnic table and strained to hear Boohoo’s occasional excited shouts floating from the backyard, where he and Uncle Rudy were scouting for new sprouts in the garden.

I felt sorry for Winnalee, who, as she headed for the front door, turned and said, “You want to ask me that question about my most embarrassing moment now? I think I have an answer.”

I chewed my cheek and chipped frayed barn-red paint off the table with my fingernail as I waited.

.   .   .

When Winnalee finally came out, she was carrying a plate of watermelon wedges. She sat down on the front steps and set the plate down between her bare feet. She crouched forward, her face disappearing behind her hair. I got up and went to sit beside her on the cool cement. “You okay?” I asked, trying to get a peek at her face. She sniffled and wiped her cheek with the back of her hand, and nodded.

“Aunt Verdella is the best person in the whole world,” she said. She shoved her hair over one shoulder, exposing a grouping of fading hickeys on her neck.

“I know she is,” I said.

Winnalee sniffled. “I wish she had raised me.”

I shooed a fly away from the watermelon, which was glistening wet, and red like spilled blood.

The screen door in the back squealed and Boohoo’s voice sounded through the windows. “You have to wash first, Boohoo,” Aunt Verdella called. And then “I cut the last of the watermelon, honey. The girls have it outside. I’ll bet there’s a piece left for you.”

Winnalee looked over at me and smiled sadly. Her eyelids were swollen and looked sore. I took her hand. “I’m proud of you for talking to her, Winnalee. That took courage,” I said, and fresh tears bubbled from her eyes.

The door burst open, the edge whacking me between the shoulder blades. Boohoo shimmied himself between us. “Can I have some?”

I handed him a slice, then grabbed one for Winnalee and me. “Spit out the seeds, Boohoo,” I reminded him.

“Yeah,” Winnalee said. “Or else you’ll grow a watermelon in your belly.”

Boohoo leapt off the steps and pulled out the front of his
shirt. “Look at me. I got a watermelon growing in my belly. And now my belly’s fat like the Bishop lady’s.” He shook his hips and laughed, then squirmed back between us. I spit out a seed and Boohoo watched it arc and drop. He took a bite. “Watch mine,” he said, and he spit a seed. “Mine went farther than yours, Evy.”

“Bet I can whip you both,” Winnalee said. She spit, and we soon had a game going: longest spit out of three tries wins.

I guess I must have heard the motor, but with the relief that came after Winnalee’s talk with Aunt Verdella, it was easy to dive into the challenge of our silly seed-spitting game, and I, like Boohoo, like Winnalee, didn’t pay the approaching car any mind. That is, until it pulled into the drive.

“No way, Boohoo!” Winnalee shouted, getting up and going to the edge of the half-moon patch of bald ground to stand beside Boohoo, facing the steps. She pointed at a seed lying in the dirt. “This is mine. Yours is way back there.” Boohoo protested, and their arms playfully wrestled as they bickered about whose seed was whose.

The car pulled in—a Ford Galaxie, dusty white, with a dent in its front fender. I expected to see some old codger looking for Uncle Rudy sitting behind the wheel, but instead, it was a woman. She wore dark sunglasses, and her hair was gleaming like a pot of melted pennies. The chunk of watermelon in my mouth suddenly felt as dry as old toast. I stood up, my heart pounding. Boohoo and Winnalee were still arguing.

“Winnalee,” I whispered.

Winnalee, still bent over, stopped chattering and turned her head toward the drive when I said it again. “Jesus Christ,” she muttered.

The car door squealed as it opened, and Freeda stepped out. She was dressed in a pair of white shorts, her sleeveless blouse tied at her waist as it had been the day I first laid eyes on
her. She was tanned, and shorter than I remembered, and her hair wasn’t long anymore. It was parted on the side, the bangs falling down over the side of her face to the bottom of her ear. The crown was ratted high and formed a bubbled arch down to the nape of her neck.

“Who’s that?” Boohoo asked.

I kept my voice low and even. “Go get Aunt Verdella. Now.”

Freeda stood looking at us for a moment, her car door hanging open, her hand on her hip. She pulled off her sunglasses and poked them into her fiery hair. Her eyes narrowed to two black-lined slits.

“Winnalee,” she said. “You forgot one of your little mementos from Woodstock, so I thought I’d bring it by.” Freeda ducked into the backseat. Winnalee straightened and went stiff as a colored pencil. I glanced at the door, hoping for Aunt Verdella to appear, then turned back to Freeda. Just as she was lifting a tiny baby out of the car.

Fear looked foreign on Winnalee’s face, but there it was, freezing her eyes so they couldn’t blink, and stretching her neck taut so she couldn’t speak.

The front door opened and Aunt Verdella stepped out. I took one look at her face—joyful, flooded with relief and love—and knew, just as Winnalee had to know, that it was no coincidence that Freeda was here. I stared at the baby girl, dressed in a pink sundress and a white bonnet that was too big for her head, and grappled to make sense of it all.

That’s when Winnalee bolted, the half-eaten slice of watermelon spinning from her hand like a loose wheel as she raced toward home. “Winnalee! Goddamn it, you get your ass back here! You hear me?” Freeda screamed.

But Winnalee didn’t stop. She jumped in her van and rammed it into reverse. Backing out with such force that she couldn’t spin the steering wheel quickly enough, and the rear end dipped into the ditch. “Oh dear, I knew she’d be upset!” Aunt Verdella said as the back tires of Winnalee’s van kicked up grass.

Who knew which direction Winnalee intended to go—probably west, toward town. The Purple Haze maybe, or maybe straight out of Dauber—but when she jerked the van into first gear, her wheels ended up pointing her south, proving that escape doesn’t care which way it goes, as long as it’s someplace else.

I didn’t think. I just reacted. Running across the yard as fast as I could to get to my Rambler and go after Winnalee, Aunt Verdella fretting behind me to not speed and to find her.

Winnalee’s van, cumbersome as it was, sped down the dirt road, the colors of peace and love lost in a swirl of dirt. I tried to keep up with her, but the only thing that could race at that speed was my thoughts. A memento from Woodstock? A baby? Winnalee had
a baby
? How could she not have told me? I racked my brain, searching for any clues that I’d missed. The small pouch below her navel? Her withdrawing before and during Marls’s baby shower? Her insisting that she had changed? None of these, even added together, were enough to make me suspect she had a kid.
Why hadn’t she told me? And how could she have left it?

As Winnalee’s van neared the end of Peters Road, I begged her to slow down, then held my breath, fearful that she’d miss the turn and smash into the woods. One of her taillights lit and she made a precarious wide turn down Marsh Road.

I didn’t need to think long or hard about where Winnalee was headed then. She was headed for the one place she might believe could take her back to the magical land of fairies and
make-believe. The place where things like reality and responsibility didn’t exist: Dauber Falls.

In the summer in 1961, Winnalee was convinced that we’d find fairies at the falls, after reading a book called
The Coming of Fairies
, which claimed that two girls had found them down near a beck. We spent our summer making plans to sneak off to find them. And the day that Hannah showed up and Winnalee learned the truth, she’d run off to the falls herself. I’d followed, and when I couldn’t find her, I hid from Fossard’s ghost in an old bomb shelter, quaking under a cot until I was found.

Dauber Falls might have held the power to soothe and comfort Winnalee, but I’d been terrified of the old Fossard homestead you had to cross in order to get to the water, ever since I was a child. Mainly because of Tommy, who pulled out the ghost story of Hiram Fossard, the humpbacked grave digger who’d lived there, whenever he wanted to antagonize me. Fossard had carved a bomb shelter into the hill near his home because he believed the Russians were going to nuke us. But Fossard was equally afraid of going underground, and one day, when his fears proved too much for him, he went berserk and shot his dog, his wife, and then hung himself. When Winnalee and I were nine, Tommy told us that folks claimed Fossard’s ghost—still afraid of going into the ground—walked the property at night, his shovel scraping behind him. When I was a kid, I used to duck on the rare occasions we passed the Fossard place, the hair on my arms standing on end, my teeth gnawing at my cheek. Granted, maybe the story of Fossard’s ghost was nothing but a scary story to tell around the campfire, but just being on his property made it feel real and gave me the heebie-jeebies all over again.

I reached the dead-end sign and slipped down the driveway that once took Fossard to and from the cemetery (about the only place he ever went). I leaned close to the windshield
and focused on the two ruts that provided local fishermen or partying teens with the shortest route to the water, and tried hard not to look at the old house slumped to my right, with its peeled paint and busted windows. Or toward the patch of red pine to my left where the bomb shelter sat. I tried to keep my mind on Winnalee as my Rambler rattled over the ruts, but with the tall blades of grass scraping the bottom of my car like a shovel over dirt, it wasn’t easy.

Near the end of the drive, there was a gap in the woods where a pickup or two could wait in the shade for its owner. Winnalee’s van was parked there, under a canopy of leafy limbs. I butted the Rambler up close to her vehicle and got out, pressing the door shut behind me. I hurried to reach the clearing (as if ghosts were more likely to linger in the shade). Once in the open, the sun turned the skittering insects into metal-shiny streaks, and I felt safer as I headed toward the sound of rushing water.

I spotted Winnalee at the water’s edge, sitting on a gray boulder, her back rounded, the wind ruffling her hair. Below her, water foamed like root beer as it whooshed over boulders deposited like stepping-stones. I didn’t call out to Winnalee, but pecked my way down the steep bank, careful to not lose my footing on the coating of loose rocks.

She must have sensed me behind her, because she drew her legs up and bowed her head against her knees.

“Winnalee?” I said, speaking only as loud as the rushing water dictated I needed to.

She didn’t say anything, but the tightening of her back told me she’d heard me.

I took a few careful steps forward and sat down on the boulder beside her. Her hip was soft against mine.

“You must think I’m terrible,” she finally said. “Sleeping with Brody, getting high, … cuttin’ out on my kid.”

“I don’t think you’re terrible,” I said, hoping I was telling the truth.

“I’m not like Freeda, though.” She turned her face toward mine and her eyes were wet and pleading. “I love my kid, Button. That’s why I came. To find you guys and see if you’d raise her.”

Wind swirled into my mouth, drying my tongue.

Fresh tears, clear as rain, glossed Winnalee’s eyelashes. “It’s true,” she said. “You’ve gotta believe me. I’m not like Freeda, but I’m no better for a kid than she was for me. I know that. Look at how messed-up I am, Button. You saw what happened when you left Boohoo alone with me. Shit, I’d be cussin’ at her in no time, and draggin’ her ass all over the country. She’d grow up just like I did, and she’d turn out just like me, not making a damn thing out of herself. I don’t want that for her, Button. Not for
my
kid. So I thought maybe Aunt Verdella could raise her. Teach her how to be more like you.”

I put my arm around Winnalee and she leaned into me. “I swear, I was only coming here to ask, then I was going to go back to get her. But when I got here and learned about your ma, and saw that Aunt Verdella had all she could do to keep up with Boohoo, I didn’t know what to do. So I just smoked up, screwed, and danced … you know?”