The Higher Power of Lucky (10 page)
But now she knew that wasn’t the right order of things. Over and over at the anonymous meetings she’d heard people tell how their situation had gotten worse and worse and worse until they’d hit rock bottom. Only after they’d hit rock bottom did they get control of their lives. And
then
they found their Higher Power.
Another part of finding your Higher Power was to do a fearless and searching moral inventory of yourself. But Lucky was too
mad
for a fearless and searching moral inventory. She was too
hopeless
. She’d do it later. Right now she had proof that Brigitte was going back to France.
That put Lucky at rock bottom.
The anonymous people struggled with the next step after rock bottom, the getting-control-of-your-
life step. Lucky pounded the Formica table with both fists, which made HMS Beagle leap to her feet and look at Lucky worriedly. It’s almost
impossible
to get control of your life when you’re only ten. It’s other people, adults, who have control of your life, because they can abandon you.
They can die, like Lucky’s mother.
They can decide they don’t even
want
you, like Lucky’s father.
And they can return to France as suddenly and easily as they left it, like Brigitte. And even if you carry a survival kit around with you at all times, it won’t guarantee you’ll survive. No kit in the world can protect you from all the possible bad things.
“But don’t give up hope,” Lucky said to HMS Beagle in a calming voice, because she didn’t want her dog to worry. HMS Beagle looked a little reassured and she sat, but she still watched Lucky to see what was going to happen.
“I have an idea,” Lucky told her slowly, thinking her thoughts from the bottom of her deep, rock-bottom pit. “I have an idea of something we can do to take control of our lives. It’s kind of scary. We can run away.” Lucky peered intently at HMS Beagle to see if she was willing.
HMS Beagle was.
Bisous
Because Brigitte and her mother were always sending each other
bisous
, which means kisses, when they talked on the phone, Lucky figured that French people kiss more than regular people.
One thing Brigitte always did before Lucky went to bed was she came into Lucky’s canned-ham trailer and sat on the narrow bed along the wall, and Lucky sat on her lap the same way you would sit on a chair. Brigitte hugged her strongly from behind and put her cheek against Lucky’s cheek, and when she talked her chin poked Lucky’s shoulder.
Even though it was babyish to sit on anyone’s lap, Lucky was okay with being wrapped privately in Brigitte’s arms. She liked having her face beside Brigitte’s and smelling the clean-hair smell of her. At those times, she knew there were parts to the job of Guardian that Brigitte liked a lot, and hugging Lucky was one of them, and that made Lucky’s heart fill up with molecules of hope and pump them all through her veins.
So that night, after Brigitte came home with her good-as-new parsley grinder, Lucky brushed her teeth, put on her short summer nightie, and waited. But Brigitte did not come. Lucky went into the kitchen trailer.
Brigitte sat cross-legged at the Formica table, one hand under her chin, the other clicking the mouse. A booklet was propped up next to the laptop. Lucky stuck her head into the tiny freezer, which contained two miniature ice cube trays, a Tupperware bowl full of more ice cubes, and a small plate of frozen grapes. She said, “I’m ready for bed now.”
Without turning her head, Brigitte said, “Lucky, please close the door of the freezer. I am following my lesson.”
“What lesson?” asked Lucky, thinking how odd it was to study after you finished school. Her report on The Life Cycle of the Ant was finished and ready to be turned in tomorrow, although the glued ants on the last page would not get a smiley face from Ms. McBeam for neatness. She grabbed an ice cube from the Tupperware bowl, took a deep breath of cold air, and closed the freezer.
“Lucky,
ma puce
,” said Brigitte, peering at the screen, then at the booklet. “You must allow me to finish this without an interruption.”
“Why do you call me your flea, anyway?” Lucky said, rubbing the ice cube over her forehead and cheeks. “Is it because I bite you and suck your blood, or what?”
“Oh, la-la, la-LA, la-LA, la-LA!”
When Brigitte was a little bit upset, like the time Lucky accidentally squeezed most of the French mustard out of the tube, she clicked her tongue and said,
“Oh, la-la.”
When she was frustrated, like the time Lucky spilled dry Jell-O on the floor and a trillion ants came inside during the night, Brigitte said,
“Oh, la-la, la-LA, la-LA!”
And when she was pretty mad, like when the monthly check came late, Brigitte said,
“Oh, la-la, la-LA, la-LA, la-LA!”
Lucky continued, even though the four
la-LA
s made her nervous. “Is it because I bother you and make you itch? Do I give you bumps on your skin?” Rubbing the back of her neck with ice, Lucky moved toward Brigitte.
Brigitte slammed closed the lid of her computer with one hand and stood up, blocking Lucky’s view of the booklet. “Lucky, I cannot think when you talk so much
bêtises
…silly stuff.” Brigitte yanked a ragged wire-mesh fly-swatter from a peg and slapped it hard against the table edge. A fly took off from the spot and circled overhead. Brigitte tried to swat it in flight. “That stupid fly,” she said. “She always escapes!” She clapped the swatter back on its wall hook.
Thinking that a real mother would never be so mean and that a real mother would share all her secrets, especially the secret of her mysterious lessons and the secret of her passport, Lucky took the flyswatter, waited until the fly landed, tapped it lightly, and scooped it up, fluttering. She opened the screen door and shook the fly off into the hot night.
Hooking the swatter back on its peg, Lucky said in a dignified voice, “I’m going to bed now. And by the way, a fly is ‘it,’ not ‘she.’”
“Pfff,”
said Brigitte, and shrugged, turning back to her laptop. “Lucky, I cannot stop following this lesson right now. Go to bed. I check you later.
Bisous
.”
“Pfff
,” said Lucky, and got a look at the booklet over Brigitte’s shoulder. The top part was in French, so Lucky skipped down, where underneath were the words:
Certified Course in Restaurant Management and Administration with Diploma from the Culinary Institute of France in Paris
That was how Lucky learned for sure why Brigitte was planning to return home. She was getting an online diploma from some French school in running a restaurant. This explained all those times Brigitte talked about how much she wished she had a job. All along Brigitte had been telling Lucky that what she really wanted was to go back to France and run a restaurant.
Lucky sat on her bed thinking this over. Some tears came out of her eyes, and she wished Brigitte would come—not so she could sit on her lap and let herself be hugged, but so that Brigitte could see what a sad and abandoned child she was, an orphan whose Guardian was too busy for hugging. As soon as she began imagining the shocked and concerned look on Brigitte’s face if Brigitte were to see her crying, Lucky cried some more. HMS Beagle, who slept on the round rug beside the bed, came to lay her head on Lucky’s pillow.
“Poor, poor HMS Beagle,” Lucky whispered. “When Brigitte goes back to France you will have to go live with Short Sammy, or with Miles and his grandma. I doubt the orphanage in L.A. will admit dogs.”
Sadly, lonesomely, she got into her hot bed, kicking the sheet away.
Lucky lay on her back, her pillow feeling as hot as if it had been baked in the oven. She decided to run away very soon. If she ran away, Brigitte would have to call the police, and the police would call her father and tell him he had better have a talk with Brigitte about doing her Guardian job a little better than
that
. Lucky liked the idea that by running away she could make people do things they wouldn’t do otherwise.
Brigitte was entirely wrong as a choice for a Guardian, Lucky decided. Even though she had come to California right after Lucky’s mom died to take care of Lucky, she was just too French and too unmotherly. She should have had lessons or some kind of manual on how to do the job. If they had online courses in how to manage restaurants, they should at least have courses on how to be a good Guardian or even how to be a good actual birth mom, which was a more important job than restauranting. Lucky thought that writing this manual would be a good project for her once she was grown up.
The manual would be called,
Certificated Course in How to Raise a Girl
for Guardians and Actual Mothers
with Diploma
When she ran away, everyone would be worried and sad, and Miles would miss her horribly. The thought of how much Miles would miss her made Lucky cry again. And Lincoln! Probably Lincoln would be so sad his brain would quit sending knot-tying secretions. Tears ran down the sides of her face and into her ears, which felt strange. She needed to blow her nose but sniffed hard instead. The mucus she swallowed tasted like the biggest sadness in the world. Even the crickets outside sounded mournful.
Drying her face with the sheet, Lucky turned on her side and flipped the soggy pillow over. Running away takes very good planning. She already had her survival kit. She thought of a few more items to take that most people wouldn’t consider necessary for survival. They were not things you can eat or drink or use for protection or to get rescued or to keep from being bored. They were things that Lucky’s heart needed in order to stay brave and not falter.
She would run away to the old miners’ dugout caves and stay about a week, then she would see what next. If the rescuers and the police still hadn’t found her, maybe she would sneak back into the town on a Saturday morning and hide under the porch of Dot’s Baubles ’n’ Beauty Salon at the back of Dot’s house to find out what people were saying about her disappearance while they got their hair done.
Lucky arranged some permed curls over her ear to keep bugs from crawling in, and she was almost asleep when she heard Brigitte tiptoe to her open doorway.
“Are you asleep, Lucky?” she whispered.
Lucky pretended to be sleeping. She’d given Brigitte a chance to talk, but Brigitte had had more important things to do. Now it was too late. Lucky breathed deeply and slowly, in and out, and waited for Brigitte to tiptoe away, but she must have stayed there in the doorway for a long time. Lucky had not heard the sound of her leaving when she finally did fall asleep for real.
Lucky didn’t realize that she would get Three Signs telling her that it was the exact perfect day to run away. Her running-away idea was even more definite Monday morning, and it was very thorough, rather than being just a whim where you could make mistakes or do something tragical. She had told HMS Beagle that they would probably take off as soon as she got home from school.
She had to jog uphill, her survival kit slapping her back, to meet the school bus in time. She saw Lincoln waiting in the very back of the bus and Miles skipping—he had just learned to skip—down from his house. At the wheel, her elbow sticking out the window, Sandi, the bus driver, glowered at Lucky. She looked at her watch and shook her head. The exhaust from the bus drowned out the fresh smell of the new morning.
“Hurry
up
, Miles,” Lucky yelled as she waited by the front door of the bus, panting. “He’s coming,” she called up to Sandi, who shook her head again.
“We got fifty miles to cover before the bell rings,” Sandi said, as she always did, “and I’m not waiting.”
“He’s only five,” said Lucky.
Sandi flipped on her turn signal and checked the side view mirrors.
“Here he is,” Lucky said, and grabbed Miles’s plastic sack so he could climb up the two deep steps quickly.
“Don’t help me, Lucky,” he said. “I can climb up by myself.”
“Let’s
go
,” said Sandi.
“Did you see me skip?” Miles asked Sandi. “I skipped all the way down the hill.”
“Rear of the bus,” said Sandi, who didn’t want kids sitting close enough to talk to her.
Lucky followed Miles past sixty empty seats, to the last long bench, where Lincoln was knotting a piece of yellow twine.
“Did you see me skip?” Miles asked Lincoln.
“No,” said Lincoln, frowning at his knot.
Lucky looked out the rear window. HMS Beagle stood watching the bus, then turned and trotted toward home. She would be waiting when the bus arrived back at four fifteen, as she did every day.
