Threshold (5 page)

Chance takes a bite of her cheddar cheese and mustard and tomato sandwich, chews slowly as she stares at the lamp, at the books, all these things that are hers now. Her study because her grandparents are dead and that’s what the will said, her house, her half acre perched on the side of Red Mountain. “So you’ll always have a place to live,” her grandfather had written, words put down on paper in life and sent back to her from a dead man. Chance takes a sip of root beer, the aluminum can sweatslicked with condensation, corn syrup and sassafras to wash away the sharp tastes of cheddar and mustard.

Another bite of her sandwich, and
I’m an orphan again,
she thinks, if you can even be an orphan when you’re twenty-three years old; something worse, perhaps, when you’re twenty-three, something there isn’t a specific word for, so there can’t be a specific solution, either. She glances up at a tall curio cabinet, shadowy things inside, only a little light from the lamp getting in there, and she wouldn’t know what any of it was if she hadn’t spent so much of her life hiding in this room. The lumpy, indistinct silhouettes that she knows are diamond-blade sliced and handpolished chunks of Ordovician algae, Devonian corals, Paleozoic treasures salvaged off this very mountain or from quarries and road cuts as far away as Georgia and Tennessee. Treasures from lost and ancient seas that Joe and Esther Matthews taught her how to read as plainly as the books on the library’s shelves, taught her how to understand, when anyone else might only see a rock—perhaps a pretty or unusual rock if they bothered to look closely enough, but still just a rock. That cabinet is locked, and Chance wonders if she can remember where her grandfather kept the key.

She puts the uneaten half of her sandwich down on the rug, no one left to yell at her about the crumbs now, anyway; she takes another sip of her root beer and lies down, stares up at the ceiling for a moment before she closes her eyes, then stares at the nothing behind her eyelids, tasting the pastysharp ghost of her cold supper and wishing that she could stop thinking about Elise. That she could stop thinking about the dreams of her, the loss of her, and feeling guilty because she’s hardly even
cried
for her grandfather, Elise still too fresh to grieve for anyone else, any
thing
else; surely only so much hurt she can feel, can be expected to feel. And then the sudden, uninvited image of a train derailing and everything spilled out along the tracks, broken bodies in tangled, smoking wreckage, and that’s exactly what it feels like, to be here, alive and alone and no idea how she will be able to stand waking up tomorrow.

“Stop it,” Chance says out loud, angryraw, scornful voice that she hardly recognizes. “Jesus, just fucking
stop
it,” but she’s crying again, and her eyes burn, and she’s so goddamn sick of the sound, the smell and saltbland flavor of her own useless tears. She covers her face with one arm, hiding from no one but herself, making a little more dark, and in a few minutes she’s asleep again.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

T
HE albino girl is reading
National Geographic,
alert pink eyes scanning the bright and sparsely worded pages—Ethiopia, Taiwan, Cro-Magnon cave paintings in France. She’s been coming here for almost two weeks now, only a few blocks from the shelter, and the librarians usually leave her alone, as long as she doesn’t fall asleep, as long as she doesn’t forget where she is and start singing or whistling or put her feet up on the tables. They stare at her, when they think she isn’t looking, scorncold faces for her dirtywhite hair and ragged clothes, the old women in their cat’s-eye spectacles and the young gay men in their cheap suits meant to look expensive. But the teenagers are worse: black kids hiding from the projects one block east, all snickers and pointing fingers, mean whispers, hey freak, hey, white girl, how’d you even
get
so white? and she’d rather have the librarians’ sidewise glances and dirty looks, thank you very much.

Dancy Flammarion turns another page, and there’s a big photograph of some place very, very far away, brooding, bruisedark clouds and foamwhite waves crashing down on a rocky beach, jagged rocks farther out to sea, and a few gray gulls wheeling against the stormy sky—Ireland, Oregon, Wales—someplace she’s never been and will likely never go, so it’s all the same. At least she has the pictures. At least someone bothers to take pictures of faraway places so she can know that this isn’t the entire world, the summerparched streets of Birmingham, Alabama, the swamps and pine thickets of Okaloosa County, Florida, the wild and worn-out places in between—what she’s been
given
of the world. And she might have been given less, she knows that, might have spent her life like her grandmother, like her mother, never going far enough from home to know that there were places without alligators and Spanish bayonets.

And then the sudden certainty that someone’s watching her, that someone is very close, and she looks up, and it’s one of the gay boys, blond hair and a sprinkle of freckles across the bridge of his nose, nervous hands playing with themselves. Nervous boy standing at her table so she has to look away from the stormshadowcool beach on the magazine page, squints up at him even though the fluorescents make her eyes hurt, make her wish she hadn’t lost her sunglasses. The nervous gay boy looks like he wants to say something, but he’s just standing there, staring at her.

“Is there something you wanted to say?” Dancy asks him, voice low so no one can shush her for talking in the library. And he looks over his shoulder, guiltyquick peek back towards the stingy corral of desks, and Dancy figures he’s afraid he’ll get in trouble for whatever it is he’s about to do, maybe just for talking to her, and for the moment that’s more interesting than the magazine.

“Did I do anything wrong?”

“Oh, no,” he says, reaching into a pocket and out comes a fancy leather wallet, leather the color of chocolate milk, and “I just, well,” and he’s opened the wallet, is fumbling around inside, and she can see the ones and tens and twenty-dollar bills tucked in there, can see the credit cards, and maybe this is her lucky day. Maybe McDonald’s or Taco Bell tonight instead of the shit they’ve been feeding her at the shelter. “I thought you might need some help, that’s all,” he says. “I thought maybe I might be able to help,” and no money from the wallet, just a card, and she takes it anyway; plain white card with plain black letters that read LOVING SHEPERD CRISIS LINE, 24 HRS. A DAY, a phone number, service of the Samford Univ. Baptist Student Union, and a cross stamped in the upper left-hand corner.

“I’m Catholic,” she says to the librarian, and he frowns, briefest frown, and then the nervous concern returns, and Dancy is handing the card back to him. “And that’s not how you spell
shepherd,
” she says. “It has another
h
in it.” Long moment then of her holding the card out to him, roles reversed now, and at first she thinks he won’t take it, never mind the reason, but maybe he thinks he’ll catch something from her, girl germs, cooties, some terrible skin disease. He looks confused and offended and unsure, and she’s already thinking she should have just taken his damn card, yes, thank you so much, and left it lying there on the table for some other bum who gives a shit. But too late now, and he does take it back, plucks it from her fingers, but it doesn’t go back into his wallet.

“I was only trying to help,” he says, curt, sounding more sorry for himself than her and Dancy looks back down at the
National Geographic,
takes her eyes off him, and so perhaps he’ll go away and leave her alone.

“Thank you,” she says and listens to his footsteps, loafers soft against the carpet, hesitant steps back to his desk, and a few minutes later, when Dancy looks up from an article on jade, she catches him watching her, smiles, and the librarian looks hastily down at the orderly stack of papers on his desk.

Two weeks now since the bus ride, most of a night on the bus from Waycross, Greyhound winding north on dark roads, back roads where buses still stop in the middle of the night to take on passengers, and Dancy tried to sleep most of the way. Something comforting in the smell of diesel and the constant rumblehum of tires against the road. A whole seat to herself when people got a good look at her, so she could stretch out and use the old duffel bag with her clothes and books and fifteen dollars hidden in a sock at the bottom for a pillow. Her grandfather’s duffel, Grandpa Flammarion who came back from Germany without his left leg, and she would close her eyes and listen to the engine purr like a huge kitten, purr like a clockwork lion to lull her to sleep. But the dreams always too close, the dreams and the things she was running from, running towards, fear for what she’d done and what was left to do, and finally Dancy gave up and stared out at the nightshrouded fields and woods and towns rushing past outside, squinting whenever the bus pulled into a gas station or bus stop and took on another passenger or two. She still had her sunglasses then and would slip them on against the occasional pools of sodium-arc glare, oases of light in the long dark Southern night as the bus moved north, Georgia finally exchanged for Alabama, swamps and pine barrens for black-belt prairies, and then, near dawn, the easy, rolling foothills of the Appalachians, and Dancy stared amazed at land the weight of the sky had not long ago crushed almost as flat as the sea.

Once or twice she noticed police cars behind the bus, following or just stuck back there on narrow state or county roads, and her heart raced, sick feeling deep in her stomach that she might have come as far as she was going to, that someone had found out after all, and they would drag her back to Waycross or Savannah or maybe all the way back to Florida, stick her in a jail or somewhere worse. And Dancy scooted down in her seat, making herself small, until the highway patrol or sheriff passed them and once again there was only tomorrow and yesterday to be afraid of.

Just past Sylacauga, and a man had sat down next to her, big yellow teeth smiling at her, teeth that seemed to glow, and for a second she thought maybe he was one of Them and They were smarter than she’d thought, sneakier than she dared to think, that maybe one of Them had been on the bus the whole time, all the way from Waycross, just biding its time, giving her enough rope, and, “Hey there,” the man with big teeth said. “Where you goin’?”

No answer at first, don’t talk to strangers, Dancy, her mother’s voice, grandmother’s voice, don’t
ever
talk to strangers, and the man grinned wider, showing about a thousand more teeth. “Oh, come on,” he said, and it was a wonder anyone could talk around all those teeth, a wonder anyone had room for a tongue in a mouth like that. “You can talk to me. I don’t bite.”

“What’s it to you where I’m going?” she asked him, and the man shrugged and shook his head, hair shaved close to the skin and ears too big for his skull. “It ain’t nothin’,” he said and shrugged. “I’m just tryin’ to make polite conversation, that’s all. Thought maybe you got a long ride ahead of you, and it might help to talk some.”

“Memphis,” she lied. “I’m going to visit my Uncle Stewart in Memphis. My Uncle Stewart sells Elvis T-shirts at Graceland,” all that spilling out of her, all-at-once deception before she could even be sure any of it made sense.

“Really?” the man replied, one eyebrow up, surprise or suspicion, and Dancy couldn’t tell which. “Graceland. Now that’s someplace to be goin’, ain’t it?”

“I guess so,” and she looked back at the window, and maybe a police car wouldn’t be such a bad thing to see, maybe a police car would scare the man with yellow teeth away.

“That’s the Home of the Blues,” the man said. “Memphis, I mean. W. C. Handy and Beale Street. What about you, Dancy? You listen to the blues?”

And her heart jumping, skipping a beat, because she knew she hadn’t told the man her name, knew that he hadn’t even asked so how could she have told him. She kept her eyes on the window, her reflection superimposed on the night, ghost of herself trapped there in the glass, trapped between him and the night outside, and “No,” she said, whispered, and it might be an answer or a wish.

“Well, you better start, if you’re gonna be stayin’ in Memphis. They take that shit pretty damn serious up there.”

And then the bus was turning, air-brake growl and hiss past a Denny’s and a service station and a green road sign that read CHILDERSBURG.

“Well, this is where I get off,” the man said, and he leaned forward on the seat, spit chewing tobacco on the floor. “But you take care of yourself, way up there in Memphis. Awful big city for a little girl like you.”

The bus pulled to a stop again beneath blinding bus-station lights and Dancy looked away from the window, automatic flinch, the light like needles in her eyes, and he was already gone. Just a shallow depression in the seat where he’d been, seat cushion rising slow like dough, filling in any sign he’d ever been there, and her heart so loud everyone in the bus could probably hear it.
Whoosh
and
thunk
as the bus doors opened wide, and she thought she glimpsed the man getting off, his silhouette indistinct against the windshield before he was gone down the stairwell and out into the garish light, bright, bright lights to shield something dark from her weak eyes.