The Moon Sisters (25 page)

“You want me to bring you to them or not?” he asked—a choice that was no choice at all.

“Of course I do.”

“Then stop pummeling me with questions I’m not about to answer and let’s go.”

I wish you a night

full of leg cramps and flea bites,

you pushy old man.

And so we went, marching through the woods with a single spotlight beam to guide us, which isn’t anything I’d recommend if you’re not the one carrying the flashlight, even if it is Quality. I cursed Hobbs when I tripped over something that felt like a vine; it didn’t matter that he wasn’t around to hear me.

“Doesn’t take much to get on your bad side, does it?” Red Grass said.

“Oh, right, because stealing my sister away from me twice isn’t reason enough to be pissed at Hobbs. I’m just a hotheaded, overreacting—”

“I told you already, you can’t always trust your eyes.”

“No? Well, I can’t replace the ones I have.” To our left, something scurried in the brush. With my free hand, I found the knife in my pocket and held tight.

“That’s where you’re wrong. You can replace them, in a fashion. See that there?” He stopped so fast that I nearly ran into him.

“What?”

He flashed his light into the brush.

“Bushes?” I asked, not bothering to hide my annoyance.

“There are berries on them bushes,” he said, and I honed in on them, red and round.

“I don’t think now’s the time for berry picking.”

“You can’t eat them, girly,” he said. “Those are smilax berries. Horrid things to eat, nothing at all to smile about—unless you’re a deer or bird or what have you. Seems one thing, is another—you get me?”

“Smilax berries?” I brushed a hand across my cheek. “Smilax berries are real?”

“Of course they’re real. Open your eyes.”

I’d assumed that my mother had invented smilax. Certainly, I’d never heard of it outside of her story. In her story, a particular patch of berries marked a gateway of sorts—a keyhole into the land of the will-o’-the-wisps. The land of hope.

“Wait,” I said, shifting Olivia’s bag to my other hand when Red Grass continued on the path. “Hold up, old man.”

“Hmmph?”

He turned the light on me, and enough of it bled over so that I could see the fruit again. I pushed a branch out of the way, stepped far enough into a thicket that I could reach the bush, then plucked off a berry with my free hand. Rolled it—chill and firm—between my fingers. Real.

“I’m not going to eat it. Never mind,” I said, when he wanted to know why I’d taken one. “I didn’t harangue you over your devices, did I?”

“As a matter of fact, you did.”

He shined the light in my eyes, and I slammed my lids shut, raised my arm to block my face. “Watch where you’re pointing that thing!”

“You’re a negative Nellie, is what you are,” he said. “You don’t do something with all that anger it’ll eat you up, and don’t think I don’t know what I’m talking about. You didn’t see me after that fire killed my boy, after the cops said they couldn’t find the one who set it. I let anger take me like slack action. You know what that is?”

“No, and I don’t care.”

“Slack action,” he said, ignoring me, “is the give between cars and can bring a hell ton of trouble when a train’s in crisis.
Give
means no real support, no way to stop one car from crashing into its neighbor. That was how I lived for a while, crashing around, every part of me off the rails. It’s not the way, I’m telling you. But when you push away from that anger, stretch yourself like train cars set to rights, you can see things you might not notice otherwise.”

“I’m not going to see anything at all unless you get that damned light out of my face.” He didn’t respond. I moved my arm, saw the light had moved to target my midriff.

“You have to fling all that anger away,” he said.

“Fling?”

“Fling it away.” Red Grass jerked his hand to the right, and the flashlight he’d been holding somersaulted through the air and landed beside a tree. “I’m just saying.”

And, for the first time since the disaster began, I smiled.

I pushed Red Grass a few times more about Hobbs, about why he was following him, about what he knew. He gave little, next to nothing.

“Sometimes,” he said, “you just have to follow your gut, even if you don’t understand it all the way through. That’s why I’m doing it, and that’s all you need to know, young thing miss.”

“Stretching with those nicknames, Red.”

“Young missy,” he grumbled.

My thoughts jumped to the job at the funeral home—how I’d wanted it, taken it even though it didn’t make much sense to my family or even to me, how I felt almost desperate to start work. When would I begin? Was it in three days now, or four? I’d lost my sense of time.

“Well, shiiit,” Red Grass said, and stopped just ahead of me.

“They must’ve hitched a ride.”

“What?” I skirted around him to peer down at the tracking device in his hands, though I had no idea what I was looking at. “How can you tell?”

“Because here’s where we are”—he pointed at a red light—“and here’s where they are”—and another—“and there ain’t no way they walked to where they are now in the time they’ve had. Good news is—”

“There’s good news?”

“Good news is the dot’s not moving anymore. They’re somewhere, at least for now, and three or so miles out. We’ll be able to walk it in an hour or so. But, oh, shiiit,” he said again. “This is bad.”

“Why? What?” How could things become worse?

“Can’t track a car by foot,” he said. “Not even Aragorn could’ve tracked a damned car driving on a damned road at night in the rain.”

“Rain?”

The sky rumbled with thunder.

“Perfect.”

“You aren’t a talent at noticing things around you, are you?” he said, then barreled on before I could voice offense. “And this is the opposite of perfect. Hobbs is gonna know something’s wrong. He’s gonna know I’ve been tracking him, and not without technology.”

“So what?” I said. “We have to keep going. We can’t give up now.”

“What a leaker you are. I didn’t say anything about giving up, did I? But we find them the way I say we find them, because this ain’t your neck on the line.”

“It’s my sister on the line.”

“Just hush. Let me think a minute.” He pulled off his bulky pack and sat right there on the ground.

Sat, while time ticked on. While the sky lit with the storm and the beam from his jostled flashlight.

“We need to keep moving,” I said when my patience wore out. “We need to do something, right now.”

“All right,” he said, sliding me a complicated look. “But you’ve got to say and do what I tell you to, you got me?”

“Why should I—”

“Because you want her back, that’s why. I have an idea—a crazy fool’s idea.” His face was half in shadow, the dark dancing over his stubbled chin, and I wondered if I should be afraid.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

A Hollow Heart

   OLIVIA   

M
ama wasn’t the best cook in the world, but she sure did try. One of my earliest memories was of her taking me and Jazz to a big store in Kennaton to look for “kitchen gear,” as she called it, when I was about four or so. Mama still had her license at that point, and drove a small orange car that was nearly as loud as the biscuit bus. She’d been working in Honeybee Hill, which was a bigger town than Tramp but not as far off as Kennaton, in a plant shop called Begonia’s, and had saved up some of her money. It was a good job for her to have at the time, because there was a room in the back that the owner let us sit in for play during Mama’s shift.

We’re going to buy some kitchen knives today
, she told us, as we arrived at the store.
Your father deserves a proper dinner now and then, and I’ll have better luck at that if I have a proper set of knives
.

It was my first time in Kennaton. Later, I’d be big enough to see out the windows and realize how different that city was from Tramp, but even then walking into the store felt like entering another world altogether. Four floors of stuff in one building—two of them just for clothes, and appliances and kitchen gear on a floor of their own. We walked past mannequins garbed in swingy dresses, jackets with ties,
and polka-dot bikinis. And when we stepped inside an elevator and started to rise, the lavender- and yellow-circle shapes I’d seen from the music all around us began to spin like a tunnel, a pastel tornado I felt in the pit of my stomach.

The appliances and kitchen-gadgets floor seemed boring, filled with tall things I couldn’t see well, even though my interest spiked when Mama stopped to open a refrigerator door or admire the stoves—but only because I wanted to crawl inside. (
Another few years at the flower shop, and we’ll buy a whole new kitchen
, she said.) Ladles, whisks, funnels, toasters, kettles, cutting boards, gravy boats, blenders, and coffeemakers; there were rows and rows of kitchen things. To combat my boredom, I picked a red colander off a reachable shelf and stuck it on my head. Playing with kitchen stuff was one of my favorite things to do at home—taking pots and pans and plastic bowls out of the two low cupboards, pretending to make sauce with a wooden spoon. But at the store I wasn’t able to play. Mama took the bowl off my head, asked Jazz to take me out of the gadgets section for a while until she’d finished looking for her knives. If we were quiet and polite, we might play a game of hide-and-seek, she suggested.

In those days, Jazz took the job of big sister to heart, and so she laced her fingers with mine and we walked back the way we’d come. But I wasn’t good at playing hide-and-seek with my sister. She found me every time. I was halfway inside a refrigerator, with one leg left to pull in behind me, when a woman with a badge opened the door all the way and scowled.

I couldn’t do things like that, she told me, just before Jazz grabbed my hand and walked me to the end of the row, where we leaned against a washing machine. She wore a printed dress with multicolored stripes that my mother had made. The stripes didn’t line up well, and one of the black buttons hung by a thread. I reached for the thread, but Jazz said I couldn’t play with her dress, either.

There was too much I couldn’t do. I couldn’t wear the colander and I couldn’t hide in the refrigerator and I couldn’t touch a black shiny button that didn’t want to be on that dress anyhow. But I
could win at hide-and-seek; I was determined. So the next time Jazz started to count to twenty, I went to the elevator and waited. And when an older couple stepped into it once the doors opened, I followed. They didn’t bother looking at me, didn’t even seem to notice, which made me glad. I had a big smile on my face as I watched the lavender and yellow circles turn into a tornado from the music again, and we went down and down, and then the doors opened.

I stepped out onto a clothing floor, which was good, because I wanted to see the polka-dot bathing suits again. But all I could see were jeans and T-shirts and shoes and purses. I was polite, just how Mama would want me to be, for the first five minutes or so of looking, and then I got worried, because it occurred to me that Mama wouldn’t think I was polite at all for getting on the elevator and leaving my sister alone with the refrigerators. I ran back the way I’d come, tried to find the elevator again using the music as a guide, but the music was everywhere and I couldn’t see it clearly anymore. After a few futile minutes, I started to cry. People stared at me. I didn’t like that, so I found a shelf full of scarves and squatted beside it, making myself as small as possible. I might not have been able to label it
regret
back then, but I remember this: My heart felt hollow. I missed my family.

A man with a shaggy voice found me—
You lost, little one?
—and offered his hand, which I took even though Mama said never to go off with strangers, because I didn’t know what else to do. He led me to a service counter, where they stopped the music to announce that I’d been found and let Mama know where she could pick me up.

I thought she’d be mad, but when she came with Jazz she knelt right down and hugged me, her body shaking like she was real cold. I remember wanting to curl up inside Mama, crawl right into the gap between her buttons and burrow under her shirt. My heart felt normal again, not hollow, as we all said sorry to one another for our part in what had gone wrong.