Lark and Termite (27 page)

Now I see Elise coming out of the restaurant and I wonder if everything I’m planning is a dream, like this music. If I’m in a panic I can’t feel, and I’m not thinking straight. Then Elise looks up and sees me through the window, and she waves at me. A little wave, like, It’s all right now, come along. Just like that, I know we’re going.

I
won’t ask you why,” I tell Charlie.

“The ‘why’ was you,” he says. “I knew the minute I saw you. All the regret began to end. For Noreen as well. And then, you are who you are. It might not have turned out that way, but it did.”

“I’m sorry about Gladdy”

“There were things in her life she couldn’t see, things she wasted. I tried to take care of her, without doing the same.”

Once I would have told him he was wrong, but now I’m glad they kept their secrets, glad there’s no gravestone or public knowledge of what happened to my mother, what she did or where she is. Not here, anyway, or where we’re going. I put my hand on Charlie’s.

“Things caught up with me,” he says. He looks white in the face. The restaurant is empty except for us. He’s so alone here without Nonie. He takes my fingers into his big palm and holds them. “I don’t want you to worry about Noreen. Elise told you. She saw what happened, and Noreen will be cleared.”

“You can all stop telling me not to worry. I’m not a child. We don’t know what’s going to happen, or how long it will take.”

Termite is sitting in his wheelchair, pulled up to our table, like the three of us are a meeting Nonie and the sheriff have missed. Charlie looks at him, and nods.

It’s all laid out like a hand of cards someone’s holding and hasn’t played yet. I smooth Termite’s hair back from his face. “With all that’s happened, Social Services will put Termite in one of the ‘care situations’ they’ve mentioned before. I need to leave now, while they’re occupied with the mud and the mess. We can go to Florida, to Gladdy’s house. No one will know us there. No one will be looking for us. I’ll tell people we’re going to stay with my mother. That she’s contacted me. But I won’t say where, and you won’t either.”

Charlie gets up and goes to the safe. It’s under the counter, behind a shallow false shelf he calls his security system. I hear him dial the combination, open the heavy door of the deep box. “The house in Coral Gables is yours, Lark. I put it in your name years ago, after your mother died.” He sits down with us and gives me an envelope. “This is a copy of the deed. It’s down on paper, held for you with Noreen as trustee until you’re eighteen, in case I kicked off while you were growing up. It was always yours, not Gladdy’s, not mine. I mortgaged the restaurant to buy it for your mother, but it’s paid off now, free and clear. She’d made the down payment just before Termite was born, but his father wasn’t coming back from Korea, and Noreen and I wanted to help her.”

“We’re leaving tonight,” I tell him, “Termite and me.”

“How?”

“We have transportation to Miami,” I tell him, “and then we’ll take a cab.”

He looks doubtful, starts to speak.

“I won’t tell you more,” I say. “You’ll have to trust me. We’ll talk about it another time.”

“I don’t want you going alone,” Charlie tells me.

“I’m not going alone.”

He wants to ask, but he doesn’t. “This is the address.” He’s writing it down.

“Beach Road,” I say. “I know the address.”

“There’s a phone,” he says, “and a used car Gladdy bought. The bills are paid through the restaurant, but she has a checking account in a bank there. After I get things settled, I’ll put it in your name. But take this.” He gives me some folded bills and the keys, on a key chain that’s a plastic daisy. “Gladdy’s keys, to the car and the house.”

A car, I think. Solly can teach me to drive. On a sand road by the beach.

“You call us as soon as you arrive,” Charlie says.

“I will,” I tell him, “but not from the house.”

We both stand, and he embraces me in his big arms. He has, lots of times, but it feels different now. I turn Termite’s chair to go, and then I remember. “Charlie,” I tell him, “I’ll want you to send me my mother’s things. And mine, and Termite’s, whatever’s in the attic at Nonie’s. It’s going to be Lola’s house again, and ours.”

•  •  •

I
hear someone at the kitchen door. Solly, I think. But I look through the glass and it’s Nick. I almost don’t let him in, but I open the door. “You out of work early, Nick?”

“Night shift tonight,” he says. “On my way. I’ve come from seeing Noreen.”

“She told me to stay away. Charlie says—”

“Charlie,” Nick says. “If it weren’t for Charlie, Noreen wouldn’t be in the county facility. I’d like to strangle him. Playing the big cheese. He should have taken his own mother home in the storm.”

I could say Charlie is sorry now, sorry he didn’t. But I don’t. “Elise says Nonie will be cleared.”

“Maybe,” Nick says. “And how long that takes depends on how aggressive they want to be.”

At least Nick will tell me the truth. I’m moving back just enough to let him into the kitchen. I don’t want him coming into the living room and seeing that I’m packed to leave.

“I’ve talked to a lawyer,” he says.

“I’m glad, Nick, but I hope she won’t need one.” I move as though to walk outside with him, but he takes my arm, touches my shoulder. He turns me, lightly, almost like we’re dancing, so that I’m standing against the wall in the empty kitchen, and he’s very near me.

“I should get back to Termite,” I say.

“This isn’t for him to hear,” Nick says softly. His hand is warm and cushioned and I remember how strong his arms are. How I used to fall asleep on his chest. “Listen to me, Lark. It’s only a matter of time until they take him, and not much time. Fighting it could take weeks, and you have no home, nowhere to live. Staying with Termite at Elise’s won’t satisfy them, and you can’t live with Charlie, it doesn’t look right. He’s too involved.”

I want to tell him everything, that I’m leaving and taking Termite, but I can’t speak with his hands on me.

“If you were married,” he says, “to someone with a home to offer you, someone older, with a good job, and a family to support and help you, the county wouldn’t pursue it. They’d let you be. You’re like a sister to my boys, you grew up with them. I’ve always loved you, Lark—”

I draw in my breath, turn, and he turns with me.

“Yes, like that,” he says, “for years now, for too long.”

I can’t breathe, or move, with his mouth so close to my eyes. I feel the heat of him near me, how practiced his body is, how powerful.

“I wouldn’t have said anything, maybe ever, but everything’s changed now. In this state, you can marry at sixteen with parental consent.”

“You asked Noreen if—”

“I’m not asking Noreen,” he says. “I’m asking you.” He touches his hands to my face, moves them, touching me, until he’s laced his fingers lightly behind my head, but he doesn’t pull me toward him. He’s waiting for me to move, or even let him know I want to. Anything, a breath, a look. “I don’t want you to pick the wrong person, or series of people. You can’t. There’s too much at stake. And I—” He stops speaking, tense, trembling. His dark eyes are wet, like he’s holding something heavy, straining not to move.

I feel that syrupy pain coming up in me like tears I want to jam down. I want to put my fingers into the dark thick hair of Nick’s chest and pull hard, hear the sound he’d make, see his eyes.

“You feel this,” he says, almost like he’s surprised. Then he steps away from me.

I don’t let myself move after him. He stands across the little room from me, by the kitchen window, looking at me, and looking. This is how people get caught. Past his shoulder, I see that it’s dusk.

“You shouldn’t stay here tonight,” he says.

“Termite wants to.”

He shakes his head. “Keep the doors locked. This part of town is deserted. I’ll check on you as I come home. I don’t know where Solly is, but I can send Zeke over to stay with you.”

“It’s OK, Nick. We’re fine.” I open the kitchen door, and he walks past me, into the yard. All the dark, wet warmth spills out with him.

He turns to me, halfway to his car, his eyes lit and full. “You’re my girl. I’m going to take care of you, both of you.” I watch him drive away. The wrapper, that thud. He would have left his car at the plant, to save it from the water. Nick is gone. He did that just right, I think, so that it could go either way. I feel warm with relief, almost faint, as though I could lie on the floor and sleep, but it’s getting late. There’s not much time.

I hear Termite in the quiet, letting me know.
We’re fine. We’re fine. We’re fine.

Y
ou have to ride in this,” I say to him. “Again. You have to.”

I fasten the strap snug across him and pull down the metal footrests for his feet. He didn’t want to move from his soft chair, and he doesn’t want to leave it. I’ll ask Charlie to send it to us somehow, bring it to us in a truck. The day has cooled off some. I pull on an old sweater of Nonie’s because Termite will miss her and like the smell of it, then I tie the wagon onto Stamble’s wheelchair by a length of rope. I pile in the duffel bag of clothes, the sleeping bags, jugs of water Solly filled, a laundry bag of food. If I stand just behind Termite’s chair, pushing and walking, the line of the rope pulls taut beside my hip and the wagon stays in line pretty well. It’s not downhill to the rail yard, it’s nearly uphill, a long gradual slant. Good thing you’re a strong girl, Nonie would say. Just at dark we get going. It’s hard through the alley, but the street moving out of the dank flood zone gets easier. The broken pavement that leads to the rail yard is a hard surface, and we don’t make much of a sound. His chair is near silent on those wheels and we’ve got Stamble to thank, in his nowhere, wherever he came from, wherever he went. The chair looks almost new, and I’ve got Termite’s blanket in the pack slung over the back, his pillow, the moon pitcher, the deed Charlie gave me, the money, and the keys. In the duffel, folded in with our clothes, I brought the flag and the gun, and my mother’s metal box.

All the rest is gone, gone from us, the alley and the house, and the town and the stores and the flood. Flood Relief will buy the house and tear it down. Nonie should come south, see what’s left where it’s never winter. Charlie can open a diner where the ocean is a flood that stays in place. The river will follow us to it, branching and turning, visible awhile, dipping away beside the tracks, retreating into woods, crossing along and under us while the train roars over it. We have to get to the rail yard in time. Find a Chessie car. To make it happen I think of the cat’s face on the steel sides of the boxcars, that silhouette shape as big as we are, and I say to myself, I can manage, I can manage, in case no one is there, no one but us.

I must have said it out loud, because Termite says it too. Low, careful tones.
Manage, manage.
“Shhh,” I tell him, then he’s quiet, and I am. It won’t do, talking to myself, it won’t do in job interviews or offices, in a town where there are flowers all winter.

Closer to the yard, I can see the stray dogs loping between ruined houses, over the mud that’s dried on the drowned grass. A door lies twisted off its hinges, flat as a raft across a sodden shoe. All the Polish kids are gone, the houses empty. Flood Relief is maybe a chance to do better. But Nonie said most of them will move into subsidized housing on the other side of town, no more floods, no high water, just brick apartment buildings with concrete courtyards. She says Nick will keep his house, clean the mud off the porch and kitchen linoleum, renovate with Relief funding. Zeke and Solly carried nearly everything, even the rugs, upstairs. Finally, Nick told her, a reason for sons, and if Joey had been there he’d have held back the water itself.

The water’s nearly gone now, but the mark and smell of it are everywhere. The rail yard is higher than the alley houses or the river, and the steel of the tracks glows ahead of us in faint lines. No one sees us but the dogs, and they gather a house lot away, six or seven of them, furtive for now, separate from one another, like they’re seeing us off. They’ve got to be hungry. Nothing here anymore, no trash cans to turn over, no scraps. By the time we get to the yard, they’ve come together behind us. They’re pretty far back and they’ve slowed, catching some instinct drift, sizing us up. I move a little faster, but not too fast. I could back them off with a few well-aimed stones if I turned around and yelled, but I can’t yell. It seems there’s no one but there’s always someone, and no one can hear or see or find a sign of us. I’ll have to find an open car, lift everything up quickly.

The yard looks almost normal except that the ditch along the edge is full of floodwater and wider, like a little canal. The chute from the tipple’s been gone for years. The double ramp up to it, the platforms they loaded from, are still there, running alongside the tracks like a roller-coaster structure no one ever finished. Tracks for the coal carts still gleam along the slant on top. They ran up a few carts at a time, emptied them into the tipple so they could load the long flatbed cars that ran north to Cleveland, east to Pittsburgh, south to Memphis, and everywhere. The lower platform’s for freight, with a broad dock behind. They moved boxcars opposite to unload. Once a wide steel ramp slid across right into the cars. There was noise and motion. Men walked back and forth, heaving, hauling, but there’s no freight now, and the boxcars sided here are empty. Some go by with their big doors flung open. The engines that push and pull them don’t even have engineers. They run on switches, shunted and slammed from empty yard to yard until they’re run down south and loaded. Winfield is just a siding, not even that, now the tracks from the northeast are torn up. No reason to fix them. The trains will stop altogether. These cars will move on schedule to be switched off down south, all the way south. We’ve got fifteen minutes.

There are three Chessie cars and I stop at the one with open doors. It looks clean, where I can see. Moonlight slants in at the back, like it’s falling through a window. There must be slats on one side, ventilation for moving livestock. In the days we’ll have to be careful, but there’ll be air and a way to see out. “This one’s ours, Termite.”