The Key to the Golden Firebird (21 page)

Palmer didn't mind being talked about as if she wasn't there this time. She could see that May
got it
. She was saying exactly what Palmer was thinking. There was an energy in the room that she hadn't experienced in a long time. Something good was happening.

May started going through her purse, making sure she had
everything she thought she needed. Brooks sat staring at the wall.

“Besides,” May mumbled, “today's already completely screwed up. Why stop now?”

“Come on,” Palmer said, leaning down and looking Brooks in the eye. “You know you have to. Think about it.”

“How's Mom going to feel when she finds out the ashes are all gone?”

“She had them in a shoe box,” May said. “It doesn't sound like she had too much of a plan for them anyway.”

May seemed as determined as Palmer now, and one good thing about May was that she was hard to argue with. She was always the voice of reason, and if she was going, then the plan had to be a solid one. Plus with her red hair knotted back, her neat tank top and khaki shorts, her purse resting in the crook of her elbow, and her keys dangling off her finger—May looked mature. Brooks would have to buckle. She wouldn't be able to live with herself if she was too scared to do something May was willing to do.

“Onetime offer,” Palmer said. “Come now or miss out.”

Palmer could almost hear Brooks's brain whizzing. Her eyes flashed back and forth, as if an argument were going on inside her head. Finally Brooks looked down at the little paper hat she had made, looked at her sisters, then slowly rose from her seat.

“We better be back in time,” she said.

“Trust me,” Palmer replied.

 

One hundred miles is a long trip when you're going at a good pace—it was an agonizing trip at fifty miles per hour, especially
for Brooks, who only slowed down to that speed to go through school zones and drive-through windows. It had been even longer since she'd been in a car with no air conditioning and no decent stereo, and the open windows meant that she was bathed in that heady fuel perfume that bellowed out of the Firebird's tailpipe.

She struggled with the map in her lap, refolding it until she had a manageable-size rectangle. They were passing through Wilmington, Delaware. She located the city along I-95 and worked out the distances. At the rate May was going, they had at least another two hours of highway driving ahead of them.

“May,” Brooks ventured, “can you try to go just a little faster?”

“I could.” May nodded. “But I'm not going to.”

“Look, if you drive a little faster, we could get there and back by the time Mom gets off. She'll never know.”

“We're going to need gas soon,” May replied. “You pump it.”

“Why aren't you listening to me?”

“Because,” May said, ignoring the other drivers who were so tired of following her that they'd begun to weave around her, “I am trying not to panic. You do not want to see me panic. If I were you, I'd do everything I could to keep me from panicking.”

“Can we at least put the top down?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“It makes my hair fly into my eyes. Then I can't see. Then we crash.”

“I like the top down,” Palmer chimed in from the back.

“That's nice,” May said. “When you drive, you can feel free to take the top down. But I have to drive, so it stays up.”

“God, you sound like Mom.” Brooks groaned.

“I could probably drive,” Palmer mumbled. “Better than you, anyway.”

Brooks felt them lose some speed. May dropped down to forty-five miles an hour.

“You have to do at least fifty, May,” she said. “You can get in trouble for going too slow, too.”

“New rule!” May called out. “Everyone shuts up until we get through Delaware, or I slow down to forty.”

Palmer banged the back of her head against the seat back a few times but said nothing.

“I think…,” Brooks began.

May decelerated again. Brooks shook the map at her.

“I think,” she began again, “that we should stop for gas just below Wilmington.”

May gradually took the car back up to fifty miles an hour. It rumbled contentedly as she stepped on the gas.

 

The sun was just going down as the Golden Firebird slipped into the tunnel that led under Baltimore Harbor. Palmer went on the lookout for signs, which May carefully followed to the huge complex of old redbrick warehouses and the banner-lined road in front of them. May turned into the first parking lot she saw, which was, of course, practically miles away. She had to let Brooks slide over and actually put the car into the tiny space that was available.

Camden Yards had always reminded May of Disneyland. It was very clean, with lots of flowers and trees, and the old brick buildings that surrounded it had large, distressed signs painted
on them, carefully faded, with sort of an Old West feel. Even the stadium was made of red brick. She'd never approached it before with any kind of criminal intent. Its cheery wholesomeness made her feel guilty.

The game had already started. The music was flowing up and into the night air. Palmer gazed up into the glow of the high-intensity lights that illuminated the field and grinned.

“We only need the nine-dollar tickets,” Palmer explained as she ran through the front plaza to the ticket booth. “Then we can just go down to the good seats. No one will stop us.”

Tickets in hand, they stepped onto the concourse that ran the circumference of the stadium, a wide ring of concrete lined with concessions and souvenirs. Hot dogs and sodas and ice cream were all a crucial part of the game experience normally, but not tonight. Tonight it appeared to be all about running. Palmer cut ahead and slipped through one of the passages that led down to the seats along the field. May and Brooks had to hurry to catch up with her. There were no seats available, so Palmer squatted on the last step. From there, they were almost perfectly level with the field. It definitely seemed like a place where they shouldn't be waiting around.

“If anyone says anything to you,” Palmer counseled her sisters, “say we're waiting for our parents. Say that we got separated, and this is the only place they know to look for us.”

Brooks nodded at the wisdom of this.

“Bottom of the eighth,” Palmer noted. “That's good.”

May silently agreed with this sentiment. She was nervous to
the point of nausea. Brooks was trying to look determined, but May could tell she wasn't doing much better.

“They're going to win,” Palmer said, pointing at the scoreboard.

She was right. The ninth inning moved fast, and the crowd exploded when the Orioles won. The music pumped, the screens flashed, popcorn flew in the air—and the three Gold sisters were considerably jostled as the stands started emptying out. They grabbed three vacated seats.

“We have to do it soon,” Palmer said, raising her sun-bleached brows and looking over the field. She turned back to look down at May's flip-flops.

“Those are going to be a problem,” she said.

“My feet?”

“Your shoes. Take them off.”

May hadn't thought about the footwear issue. But she wasn't about to run barefoot across the field, so she left them on.

“All right,” Palmer said, dipping her hand into her bag, “let's get ready.”

She fiddled around inside the bag for a moment. May could see that she must have been going into the canister. A moment later she produced three small plastic zipper-locked sandwich bags, each full of a grayish substance that looked like coarse sand. Each bag held an amount about the size of May's fist. As Palmer passed the bags out, a man bumped into May and she nearly dropped hers.

None of this was real to May. Not the music pumping overhead, or the heavy breeze, or the residual smell of popcorn and beer.

“We go all over at once,” Palmer said, eyeing the short divider that separated the stands and the field. It was only about three feet high. “Even you can jump this, May.”

May looked up sourly.

“Have your bags ready,” Palmer continued, “but be careful when you run with them. Run straight out to the pitcher's mound and open them up. Don't stop, no matter what happens. Then head straight for the wall over there, to the left of the Orioles' dugout. Go up the nearest steps and out into the concourse. If we get separated, we'll meet by the car. Ready?”

“What?” May asked, looking around in a panic and grabbing at her things. “No. No, I'm not.”

“Then get ready. You should have put your purse in the trunk or something.”

“Why didn't you tell me all of this earlier?”

Brooks straightened up and flexed her knees a few times.

“On my mark,” Palmer said quietly. “One…”

“What if I fall?” May whispered. “I fall, like, at home. Just walking around.”

“Two…”

“Don't fall,” Brooks advised.

“Thanks a lot.”

“Three!”

In various stages of readiness, the Gold sisters went over the wall.

It was a funny thing to be on an actual baseball field. It seemed much smaller than May had imagined it would be. And even though she'd seen the pitcher's mound before, in her mind it had been just a small pile of dirt. In reality the mound was
crop-circle huge and rose up almost a foot at the center. Brooks and Palmer had gotten there within moments and were stopped, bags ready. As she approached them, Brooks grabbed her arm and the three pulled close together, leaning their heads in, creating a small sanctuary.

“Now!” Palmer said.

It only took a moment and it must have been invisible to anyone outside of their huddle, this trickle of dirt over a larger pile of dirt. A chalky cloud came up around their ankles. The pitcher's mound itself was kind of reddish, so the ashes stood out as three distinct piles. Palmer started mixing them in with her foot. Brooks and May automatically followed suit.

It was a strange feeling for May, grinding at the dirt. Not only was she literally burying her dad at a baseball stadium, she was doing it with a four-dollar pair of novelty flip-flops. She threw herself into the task, shaking out the very last bits in her bag and toeing them hard into the ground. She was so intent that she tried to brush Brooks off when she grabbed her arm and started pulling her. In that moment she understood what was happening. She felt his presence surround her. Her father. Then she realized that Brooks was trying to move her away from the three security guards who were quickly approaching them, speaking into walkie-talkies pinned to their shoulders.

“Oh, shit…,” was all May managed to say before she got the message to her legs that they should start doing their very best to propel her off the field.

Brooks and Palmer sprinted across the diamond at Camden Yards as if it was something they did every other day or so—even
strides, backs straight, heads high, side by side. They turned to look for May occasionally and shouted back encouragement.

“Go, May!”

“May,
run
!”

“I…am…running!”

Thwack, thwack, thwack, thwack.

“No, RUN!”

“Oh…my…God!”

Thwack, thwack, thwack, thwack.

May's feet were striking the ground so hard that her head shuddered. The toggles of the flip-flops ripped into the skin between her toes. This was why Palmer had told her to take them off. There was probably no historical precedent for
anyone
running from the cops in flip-flops. She was in the vanguard of a whole new breed of idiot criminal.

Thwack, thwack, thwack, thwack.

The guards were catching up to her. Yelling for her to stop. As she struggled to force more air down her raw, windburned throat, she saw her impending arrest in an oxygen-deprived flash—the handcuffing, the fingerprints, the mug shot, the one phone call, the bitter and cold plastic foam cup of coffee, the good cop and the bad cop circling her (“Come on, what were you doing on the baseball field? We've been waiting long enough.” “Aw, leave the kid alone, Joe. She'll tell us when she's ready…won't you, May?”).

She thought about just stopping. Giving in to the creeping inertia that was weighing on her limbs. Giving in to the strain of holding on to her flip-flops with clenched toes. Giving herself up so that Brooks and Palmer could get away. She could
take the rap. It would be the perfect movie ending—the others running away, only to turn back…. “Where's May?” And there May would be, standing in a pool of searchlight, surrounded by a throng of police, with a beatific smile on her face. They would know that she had sacrificed herself for them. A loving look would pass between them as May was dragged away to the sound of wailing sirens….

But then she remembered—
she had the car key.

This jolted May. Car.
Get to the car. Don't trip out of the flip-flops and die. Keep going.
She put her head forward and pushed harder. Her calves were burning, and the cutting sensation between her toes was almost unbearable. Left of the dugout…left of the dugout…Palmer and Brooks were at least leading her there; she realized too late that she hadn't been paying attention to which of the dugouts was the Orioles'. Then Palm and Brooks suddenly veered sharply to the opposite side—guards had appeared at their planned point of exit. May followed, not quite as sharply but with a wide turn to keep the flip-flops from flying off sideways.

A light, scattered clapping and cheering came from the remaining crowd left in the stands. May was almost tempted to swivel her head around to see if she had made a second appearance on the Jumbotron, but she couldn't take the time. Her focus was steady on her sisters, who had by now made it to the wall, where a few people were cheerfully helping them over. They glanced back at her, then disappeared into the crowd. Now May was alone, and some other guards were closing in on the point where they had just exited, trying to meet May.