Getting Somewhere (35 page)

She is surprised by how easily the driving comes back to her, how competent and even powerful she feels behind the wheel, the low hum and steady progress a kind of soothing comfort. She meets only a couple of cars, the few that race up behind her simply pulling around since Cassie is barely moving by their standards at what seems to her a very reasonable fifty miles per hour. The trip takes less time than she expected, and when she crosses the river bridge just yards from the turnoff for the dam, she immediately grips the steering wheel with both hands and slows to a crawl, the front tires bumping off the road into the deep dip of the long lane leading back to the power plant.

Cassie thinks that in the wan light of the rising moon, everything looks much like it must have fifty or more years ago. She has brought a flashlight, but she doesn't turn it on right away, can see well enough to follow the leveed land with the river on one side and the canal on the other. As she approaches, Cassie can hear the fall of water echoing off the concrete and brick of the power plant, begins to make out the high windows of the building, arranged in an arching pattern. She sees that they are all broken out on the levee side and that tall grass has grown up around the foundation, giving the crumbling brick wall the eerie appearance of an oversize graveyard monument. There is no door on any of the three sides she can see, and she stands helplessly for a moment, then retraces the perimeter of the building without finding an entrance. Finally, she moves carefully toward the edge of the spillway and shines her light on what appears to be a concrete abutment. There, across a narrow plank bridge, angling over the corner of the spillway, leans a bicycle beside a narrow door.

Cassie struggles to turn the flashlight back off and, in her nervousness, nearly drops it into the rushing water below, finally deciding to leave it on. She takes a deep breath and watches her feet as she inches her way across the plank, pushes open the door, and bends to enter. At first she sees nothing, is scanning the beam of her light around the large empty space when it lands on a dark mound in the corner, a mound that is now stirring in response to the squeaking of the hinges, is sitting up and shielding her eyes from the light, and Cassie nearly drops the flashlight again as she rushes across the expanse of concrete to get to Jenna's side.

C
ASSIE'S ARMS ARE
around Jenna almost before she has a chance to recognize who has come in the door. After a long moment in which the collar of Jenna's T-shirt becomes damp with Cassie's tears, Jenna gently disengages herself and pats the blanket beside her, carefully makes a show of spreading it out to make a place for Cassie to sit. Cassie drops to her knees, now feeling a little shy, worried that Jenna will not want her here, will have wished not to be found.

Cassie lays the flashlight unobtrusively at her side but leaves it on, the fading yellow light throwing shadowed ghosts against the wall and exaggerating the darkness around them as if they are huddled around a campfire. She had been bursting to tell Jenna all the news, to relieve her from any burden of guilt she might be carrying, but finds that she is suddenly tongue-tied by what may be her complete misjudgment of the situation, a failure to recognize, once again, the complexities of the world everyone but her seems to live in.

Jenna is the first to speak. “How did you find me?”

She doesn't sound upset, but Cassie is a little disconcerted by the question, has a sense of how odd it must seem to Jenna to have Cassie show up here.

“The book. I found your book. I'm sorry if . . . maybe I shouldn't have come.”

Cassie is startled by the sound of her own voice echoing through the hollow space, thinks the words sound small and empty and weak, like she is asking Jenna for her comfort when it should be the other way around.

Then it occurs to Cassie to ask, “How did
you
find it?”

Jenna reaches behind her and lays a folded piece of paper between them. Cassie opens it and strains to make out the crudely drawn map, immediately recognizes the farm in the bottom corner, marked with an X, a dark line crossed by other dark lines angling across the page, ending with an X at the top, the building where they now sit. “I copied it out of the plat book,” Jenna says as she leans forward to peer at the paper.

For some reason, the sound of pride in Jenna's voice makes Cassie extremely irritated, and she curbs the impulse to crumple the paper into a ball and throw it into Jenna's lap. This is not at all how she expected to feel, Jenna transformed in her mind from helpless victim to . . . what? Cassie is suddenly too uncomfortable with the thought to let it develop any further. She struggles to concentrate on what has brought her here, the story she believes will explain and even correct whatever has sent Jenna away, the hope that a new, shared story will restore something she cannot stand to lose.

“They came.”

Jenna nods and Cassie waits. She wants Jenna to ask, doesn't know what she will do if she doesn't. She needs Jenna to hear what happened today, even if she doesn't want to. Maybe she doesn't even care, has already moved beyond the farm, but Cassie suspects that Jenna has no reason to trust in anything but the worst, maybe even imagines that she is somehow to blame, and Cassie can't let her go on believing that. She has never thought she would be able to do anything for Jenna, to offer her anything equal to the friendship that Jenna represents to her, but this is probably as close as she will ever be able to get.

Cassie is ready to burst when Jenna finally lifts her head, asks, “What happened?”

Cassie covers each detail like a travel brochure, bringing Jenna carefully and methodically back to the farm, to the events of the day. Cassie tells her that it was Lauren who filed the complaint, that she accused Grace of sexual harassment, but the social worker people know now that she just made it up to get herself out, that the interviews have probably cleared the program from any wrongdoing, at least as far as they can tell, as long as the attorney still doesn't want to pursue official charges. She doesn't say, not yet, because she doesn't know how, that Jenna will not be allowed to stay. Jenna listens carefully, though at the mention of Lauren's accusation against Grace, she tightens her jaw and closes her eyes.

When Cassie is done and they are enveloped in silence, Jenna lifts her face again to Cassie and says, simply, “It was my fault.”

Cassie knits her brow, looks confused as if she must have heard wrong. “How could it be your fault?”

“I mailed the letter.”

“I don't understand.”

“Lauren talked me into mailing the letter to her parents. I didn't know what was in it. I should have told Ellie. But I just stuck it in the mailbox with the rest of the stuff in there. I should have said something, told someone about it, but I didn't.”

Cassie is watching Jenna carefully, unsure how to respond. The truth. “I knew about it, too.”

“What?”

Cassie shrugs. “I saw her steal stuff from Ellie's room. And I overheard your conversation with Lauren. I heard her ask you to mail her letter.” Cassie looks down, notices the drying mud still clinging to the sides of her shoes. “We
all
knew something and
none
of us did anything about it.”

Jenna doesn't say anything, though her expression looks confused, and Cassie wonders if she is replaying that conversation in her head, remembers what Lauren had said about their friendship. Cassie leans forward urgently. “Jenna, you can't blame yourself for that. She would have found a way no matter what. You were just, I don't know, a tool. She uses everybody that way.”

“Well, I should have known better. I knew she had it in for Grace.”

Cassie notices that the irritation is starting to return. “Not just Grace. Ellie even more. But everybody. If we could predict what people like Lauren were going to do, we'd be just like her. We ignored her hate and her accusations because we thought they were wrong and didn't want to give them any attention. She tried to make us hate everything, too, but it didn't work because we're not like her.”

“It worked on Grace.”

Cassie is glad Jenna can't see her face flushing or hear the thoughts echoing in her head, her frustration at Grace for running away just like a, well, just like a scared teenager. Cassie realizes she is almost angrier at Grace than at Lauren, is certain they wouldn't be here right now if Grace had found the strength to stick around.

Suddenly, Cassie knows that Jenna needs to come back with her, no matter what will happen to her when she does. She hadn't planned it that way, hadn't even thought that far when she made up her mind to find Jenna. But now she knows. There are people she can trust, people who love her, and Cassie now realizes that helping Jenna understand that is why she had to come.

Cassie scoots a little closer to Jenna and lays her hand gently on her arm. She waits for her to flinch, and when she doesn't, Cassie grips a little harder, speaks her words as if they have the full weight of her body behind them.

“None of this is your fault, Jenna. Not Lauren and not Grace, and it wouldn't have been no matter what had happened with the program. It's all . . . much bigger than that.”

Jenna is looking at Cassie with a mixture of curiosity and surprise. As Cassie fights to maintain her resolve, her eye catches the paper still folded in her lap. She picks it up and opens it, lays it flat against her thigh.

“This”—and she holds the map out to Jenna—“is just a tiny piece of it.”

Jenna looks confused, doesn't take the paper. Cassie struggles to find the right words.

“Jenna, it's like your map only goes one way. It's, I don't know, too easy.”

Cassie looks up into the expanse of empty space above them and presses her lips together, tries to hear her own thoughts above the roaring in her head.

“Do you remember what Ellie said about choices?” She doesn't wait for an answer. “She said they have to be based on information and power. If you're blaming anyone, including yourself, you're just giving up the power, saying the decisions belong to somebody else. And, well, they don't. And other people's decisions don't belong to you either, whether you like them or not. And not having information—well, it's like this.” She holds the map out again. “It's like using a single line and a couple of
X
s to represent the whole thing when it's so much more complicated than that. I'm sorry. I know that's really mean, but this map wouldn't tell you anything unless you already knew where you were going, what you were going to do. There's nothing new here, no different roads or intersections or rivers or lakes or hills or valleys or any of the stuff that's really out there, and leaving those things out doesn't give you enough credit, it doesn't include everything you are that's not just this same path, the one you always take.”

Cassie feels a growing terror creeping up her spine, but she can't stop and Jenna appears to be listening. “It's much harder, much more complicated, to draw the whole map, to include everything but, if we don't, we're never going to be . . . all of ourselves. We'll just be a dot on someone else's map and it will never be ours.”

Cassie's legs are getting cramped and stiff and she wants to stretch them out, change position, but doesn't want to lose the moment, the little crack in time that has put her and Jenna here above the river, like a crevice just large enough to slip a prayer or a blessing into.

Jenna has now taken the map and is smoothing it gently on her lap. Her head is bent, as if studying the marks there with great concentration, and the sound of a tear hitting the paper reverberates around them.

When Cassie lifts her head, Jenna is watching her, says, “Do you hate me?”

“Why would I hate you?”

“Because I messed everything up. I was so . . . mad . . . mad at Grace, but also thinking that we were the reason, that us being there is what chased her off her own farm and that she'd gotten in trouble because of us, because of me. That I left without telling you, ran away because it felt so much like all those other times when everything fell apart, and I didn't know I'd ruined it until it was too late. That I was wrong about . . . everything.”

Cassie isn't sure why she feels a smile creeping onto her face, turns away for fear of Jenna thinking she is laughing at her. “And do you hate me because I thought the best thing for my baby was to give her away, and then I got more information and changed my mind? Do you usually hate people when they learn something and then try to figure out how to use it?”

Jenna smiles. “No, of course not.”

“Neither do I.”

The flashlight dies completely on the way back to the truck so they are slow making their way down the levee trail, bumping hips and elbows, unwilling to step any farther apart, the sound of falling water receding into the background and the infinite stars smeared against the ebony bowl far above.