Waiting for Christopher (12 page)

“My dad?” Raylene’s voice got harder fast, took on an edge. “You mean Mister Postcard? Who knows?” She sighed and looked, finally, straight at Feena. “He moved in and out of our lives so much, I changed shoe sizes between visits. I don’t think he even knew Mama was pregnant.

“And guess what?” A half laugh caught low in her throat. “Turns out, it wasn’t just one. The doctor said it was twins. Girls, twin girls. Isn’t that something? We only picked out one name, Mama and me. And all along, I had two baby sisters waiting to get born.”

“Raylene…” Feena wanted to hug her. To pull her close like she did Christy and hold her tight. “I’m so sorry.”

“Bad part was, Mama couldn’t talk about it after. She didn’t even want to name the other baby. I begged and begged, but she told me it didn’t matter, anyhow.

“I named her, though.” The softer, younger voice had crept back; Feena leaned in to hear. “And then I wrote a letter to each of those babies. On account of I wanted to say goodbye.”

“Bye.” Christy left his digging to scrooch closer to Raylene. “Bye, Ween,” he told her, waving cheerfully.

“I made a funeral.” Raylene put her arm around the baby, handed him the coconut piece he’d dropped. “I buried that glamour-doll lamp along with the letters. Dug a hole in the woods, back behind our house.” Christy had begun a new project now, digging in the triangle of ground between his legs. Raylene took her arm from around him, wiped at her eyes. “I guess it was pretty dumb. I mean, there was no coffin and no bodies. And that hole I dug? It was so small, I had to take the shade off to fit the lamp in.

“I didn’t care, though.” She kept brushing at her eyes—first one, then the other. “I wanted my sisters to have names. Names and something pretty all their own.”

Maybe it was the tears. Or the way Raylene looked down now, away from Feena. But suddenly it was easy. To reach out without thinking. To put her arms around her, to rock her like an infant. “Oh, Ray.” Feena was startled by the way the nickname spilled out. “Ray.”

For a second, a shiver of sweetness, they stayed like that. Feena inhaled a light rosy scent that could have been perfume or just Raylene. And for an instant, the other girl’s whole body relaxed, as if she were going to fall asleep in Feena’s arms.

Then it was over. Christy was tugging on Feena’s sleeve and Raylene was on her feet, dusting off her skirt. “Come on,” she said briskly. “We got to get going.” She tied her smock around her waist, picked up her book, and began walking in the same direction she’d been headed before.

“Where?” Feena got to her feet, too, then picked up Christy. There was a lot she wanted to ask. Had Raylene’s mother had other children? Where was Raylene’s dad now? But there was no time. All she could do was dash after the flapping red smock ahead of her, hoping to keep up with it in the dark.

They followed the little trail that twisted around palms and large, spiked clusters of pampas grass. Feena’s ankles were itching and probably bleeding. But she kept lunging ahead, afraid she’d lose her way completely if Raylene got too far ahead.

“Toffee needs something to eat, a place to sleep. And we got to figure a way to take care of her … him during the day.”

“We”? What had Feena missed? When had Christy become a group project?
“Wait a minute. I have to—”

“Hurry up, can’t you?” Raylene was charging, surefooted, along the path as if she knew every inch of it. “Maybe
you
can stay out all night, but my mother’s radar kicks in and the sirens start blasting at nine o’clock. Sharp.” She turned and stopped in front of a smaller path, a muddy little hint of a trail.

“What?” Feena was glad to slow down, to adjust the backpack that had been slamming against her right shoulder blade. She couldn’t see the moon now, had no idea where they were.

“My mother,” Raylene explained. “She does this terminator thing if I’m not home on time. First, she worries. Then she goes ballistic.”

Mother! Feena had forgotten all about Lenore. Had she fallen asleep in front of the TV? What if Feena wasn’t there when she woke up?

Raylene turned, took something out of her pocket. “Here,” she said, handing Feena a cell phone. “Call home.”

“Home?” Feena shifted Christy’s weight against her hip, following Raylene to a clearing in the woods, a place the lush undergrowth seemed to have fallen back. Had someone been lighting campfires here? Is that why nothing grew in the dusty circle around them? Feena studied the lit face of the other girl’s phone, as if it were the map of a place she’d never been.

“Yeah.” Raylene took the phone back, set it to call, and returned it to Feena. “You’re spending the night with me.”

“I am?”

“No, course not. But that’s what you tell your mother, see?”

“I can’t.” Christy was heavier than Feena could remember him being. She unloaded him, standing him on his feet beside her. “She won’t believe me.”

Christy held up his hands, not to be picked up again, but to twirl, like a dizzy top, around and around the little clearing. Free of tangles and creepers, he spun drunkenly from Feena to Raylene and back again.

“What do you mean, she won’t believe you?” Raylene sighed, arms folded in that familiar warrior stance of hers.

Feena waited for the right words, watching Christy and then the small, fierce cloud of insects that circled the bright face of the phone. “She won’t believe me because I never have friends over,” she explained. “And no one here has ever asked me to spend the night.”

Another sigh. Different, gentler. Raylene let Christy run at full tilt into her arms. “Well, now they have,” she said.

L
enore sounded hoarse, foggy with sleep when she answered the phone. Feena had to say it twice, “I’m going to spend the night at a friend’s, Mom.”
No fancy add-ons. You don’t get caught if you keep it simple
.

Feena could hear the baby and Raylene behind her. “Want mik,” Christy was saying. “Want mik, peese.”
Milk
was the word he used for anything to eat and drink. It had been hours, Feena realized, since they’d done either.

“What do you mean? What friend?”

“She, uh, goes to my school.”
Simple isn’t the same as stupid, stupid
. “She’s a sophomore.”
Older is good. Older is more responsible
.

“Today was laundry day.” Lenore sounded whiny, disappointed. “I saved your stuff. I’m not doing your dirty clothes, Feen.”

Raylene was walking the baby farther and farther away as his protests got louder. But Feena could still hear him. Not crying so much as indignant. “Mik, more mik!”

“No. Sure, Mom,” Feena said into the receiver. “I’ll do the laundry. Don’t worry.”

“You better. And Feen?”

Feena waited. What if Lenore asked for her friend’s name? What if she wanted a phone number?

“Have a good time, okay?”

Feena hung up, relieved and guilty. As she followed Raylene and Christy back into the woods, as the underbrush grew heavy again and closed in around them, she wondered whether there was enough leftover Chinese. She knew how tired her mother got after work, how she hated going out again.

“This is it.” Raylene pulled up short in front of her, pointing through the brush. They walked toward the gleam of water, and there, mired in a shallow stream, was the most dilapidated boat Feena had ever seen.

It looked like a shrimp boat, though how a shrimp boat had ended up in a marshy Florida swamp, she could never have explained. When they cleared the woods completely and the moon shone on the old hull, stranded like a beached fish half in and half out of the water, all Feena knew was that it was perfect.

“I come here sometimes,” Raylene told her while Feena and Christy studied the rotting deck, the tiny cabin clinging to one end as if it might slip any minute into the sludge.

“Boat,” Christy announced a bit uncertainly, leaning toward the apparition.

“Yes,” Feena agreed. “A bed boat. Let’s go see.”

The planks on what was left of the deck swayed like a tree house in the wind when they stepped on board. Across the narrow strip of swamp, some night bird whooped with a deep, doglike cry. Raylene led the way to the cabin, pushed open one of its shuttered doors. Feena noticed a weather-beaten sign on the other.
CAPTAIN’S
QUARTERS
, it said in letters the weak moon turned the blue of a well-loved baby blanket.
NO LANDLUBBERS ALLOWED
. Had this wreck, she wondered, once been someone’s idea of a pleasure boat?

Inside, though, was a different story. Raylene had outfitted her reading nook with pillows and a quilt on the built-in bunk. Under the porthole window were a pile of paperbacks and a glass oil lamp. In shelves along the wall behind the dining bench were water and juice bottles, a portable radio, and boxes of cookies and crackers. The place was clean, cozy, and the most romantic hideout imaginable. Even the musky smell from the marsh and the boat’s mildewed wood seemed exotic.

“Oh,” Feena said, stepping into the center of the small room and whirling in happy circles like a dervish. “Oh, my gosh.”

“You should be safe here,” Raylene told her. “Nobody knows about this place.” She hoisted Christy toward the low ceiling so he could touch the ancient lantern that swung from its center. Someone had placed a fat candle there, and someone had burned it countless times. Great folds of green wax had melted around its edges and dripped through the grill.

After she’d put the baby on the bed, Raylene took a pack of matches from the table and lit the candle. A delicious amber light bounced into the corners of the room and along the dark timbers of the ceiling. “I got to go,” she said. “I’ll be back in the morning, though, in time for you to get to school.”

“School?” The halls of Washanee seemed a thousand miles away. At the thought of going back there, Feena blinked, like some cave bat used to the dark.

“Course. You keep cutting, they’re bound to figure something’s up. They’ll send someone to your house.”

“What about you?” Feena asked.

“I’m okay. Besides, we’ll take turns. One day on; one day off. Got it?”

“Got it.”

But Feena didn’t really get it. Not right away. Even after Raylene had rubbed Vaseline on Christy’s burns, then changed him; even after she’d showed them where she kept cups and plastic forks and knives; even after she’d kissed the baby, waved goodbye, and was long gone, down some trail Feena could only guess at, it hardly seemed real.

Safe
. Could it really happen? If she didn’t think about tomorrow, if she let herself relax into Raylene’s take-charge confidence, Feena felt it could. Once she and Christy had eaten, Feena snuggled next to him under the quilt in the sea bunk, whispering like a counselor to a brand-new camper after lights out. “Isn’t this great, Chris? Won’t we have fun here?”

It took two stories this time—one about Lady Macbeth and one about a band of gypsy moths (Feena was inspired by the fuzzy dive-bombers that kept throwing themselves against the lantern)—before Christy’s eyes shut and his breathing deepened beside her.

It took much longer, though, for Feena to fall asleep. Exhausted as she was, she lay wakeful and dizzy with gratitude, feeling the warmth of Christy’s body curled next to hers, staring at the shadows that splashed across the ceiling as the boat rocked in the wind. She thought about Raylene, pictured her tucked away here afternoons, singing in that sweet moany voice she’d overheard. She imagined her reading, devouring romantic moments just the way Feena herself did when she hid out with her books.

And then she remembered the twins. She could still see Raylene’s dark head buried in Christopher’s curls. “Some folks would do anything to have a baby.”

The stranded boat bobbed underneath her. Fingers of wind poked in through the timbers and stroked her forehead. And still Feena couldn’t sleep. Stealthily, deftly, she slipped out from under the comforter and dug in her pack. She pulled out Raylene’s book and, sitting at the table under the lamp, began it once more:

Hours later, when Feena had finished and finally looked up, surfacing slowly from Janie Woods’s life, returning to the lapping of the waves and the moist creakiness of the boat, she felt as if she’d brought a little bit of Janie’s courage with her. Through hurricanes and rabies, through death and disease, this new heroine had saved a place inside herself, a place the world could never touch.

Finally, after she’d slipped back into bed beside Christy, Feena drifted off. In her dream, she heard deep laughter, saw Janie Woods, her dusky face lovely and proud as Raylene’s. Janie stood on the deck of the marooned shrimp boat, which, preposterously, was sailing out from the swamp toward the ocean. Next to her, Feena dreamed a less graceful, a paler figure. Hidden by a flapping bonnet and a gray dress that flared like a bell to her feet, Jane Eyre took Janie’s hand, and together they turned toward the sky, swollen with clouds as black as bruises. Undaunted, the two of them watched the lightning blanch the night, and fearless, they threw back their heads and laughed for pure joy as the boat pulled away from shore.