Walk Me Home (35 page)

At least it’s the final stretch. At long last.

A wind comes up. It’s a wind unlike any Carly can remember. At least, from such an exposed position as outdoors, facing right into its wrath. It feels like a miniature hurricane.

Carly finds herself leaning forward to push harder against it. She needs to, just to keep moving. She might actually move backward if she stopped pushing so hard.

The fog is even more dense now, making her feel as though the world has disappeared, leaving nothing but a windy, white outer space. The wind is whipping fog mist into her face. Her face is wet. Her hair is wet. Her jacket is soaking through. Gradually, but it’s wetting her to the skin. She can feel water dripping off the feather and down her belly.

It’s cold. Really cold.

Her eyelashes are thick with moisture, and it hurts when the wind whips droplets into her eyes. It’s getting harder to keep them open.

Carly reaches an abutment for an overpass and stands behind the concrete structure for a minute or two, blinking and catching her breath. It takes so much energy to walk into the wind, she feels as if she’s climbing a mountain. She wants to stay here, hide here, and be safe from the fury. But she’s probably only thirteen or fourteen miles from Trinidad.

She didn’t come all this way to let a big wind stop her. She didn’t come all this way to let anything stop her.

She thinks about Jen. Wonders if she’s fast asleep in the trailer, or even in the old woman’s house. If she’s sleeping with a smile on her face. Or if she’s not there anymore at all. That reminds Carly that she’d better hurry.

She steps back into the wind and whipping fog drizzle and walks more miles in that misery. She could be anywhere for all she knows. She could be nowhere.

She can’t even prove for a fact that this is planet Earth.

In time, the road angles steeply uphill. A long, relentless, painful grade with nothing but redwood forest on either side. But at least she can see something besides a white curtain. She can barely make out trees. But they look more like the ghosts of trees in all that fog.

Still she plows on, sheer stubbornness replacing her normal energy. Nothing can hold her back. And yet it seems as though the whole world is conspiring to try. It’s holding her back with all the force it can possibly muster.

As if somehow dreaming on her feet, she sees Alvin’s face very clearly and suddenly in her mind. And he speaks to her. Or, at least, her mind speaks to her. In Alvin’s voice.

“Face it, Carly girl. You lost that tailwind.”

“That was bullshit,” she says. Out loud. The wind snatching her words away. “That was stupid to act like I can know right from wrong by how long it takes to get to it.”

“But you liked that theory fine,” he says, “when it was going your way.”

That knocks Carly fully back into the moment.

She rests again behind the abutment of another overpass. Shivering and cold and holding back tears of frustration. She pulls the remnants of Lois’s bag lunch out of her backpack and eats the other half of her chicken salad sandwich.

Then she steps out into the wind and fog and keeps walking.

Something dawns on her suddenly. It’s just a feeling. She never really matches it with words. But…all the grown-ups who acted like she shouldn’t be out in the world on her own…that she was too young…that she was too small and the world was too big. All of a sudden it feels like they were right.

The wind has mostly died when she sees the exit for Trinidad. The fog is just as thick, though, so she’s nearly on top of the sign by the
time she sees it. Her whole body is shaking from exertion. But it really doesn’t matter now.

Dawn is somewhere nearby. It’s hard to track it through so much fog. But it’s definitely getting lighter.

She walks down the shoulder of the exit and follows a sign toward Trinidad State Beach. Somewhere in the back of her head she knows she saw a sign that told the population of Trinidad, and it was only 311. But she can’t remember how long ago she saw that or where.

How hard can it be to find a person among 311?

She walks down a curvy little street, through a town that feels too small to be real. The blank whiteness that masks each building until she’s nearly right on top of it only adds to that otherworldly feeling.

She passes the Trinidad Trailer Court, where huge American flags blow in the wind. Please don’t let Teddy live in the trailer court, she thinks. She wants to see him in a big house looking out over the ocean. But then she remembers he’s not even working.

What if he left town to find a job?

She presses her mind back to the moment. She can’t afford panic now. She’s…well, she’s here. But where is here? How does it help her to be here? When does she get to stop? What’s she supposed to do next?

She comes around a curve in the road and passes an elementary school. It has a play yard, and Carly stops a minute and looks across the parking lot and through the fence. Pictures Jen playing in that yard. All by herself. Too clearly, really. Almost as clearly as she pictured Alvin on the highway. As though she’s lost some grasp of what’s still real.

She turns her face away again. Passes a tiny library that seems also to be the police station. Out front are statues of a mermaid and a dolphin surfing on individual metal waves, side by side.

She passes a bright red volunteer fire station. Really bright.

What she does not pass are people. It’s early, and the town is deserted. Like a ghost town or a movie set. Just buildings and Carly and fog.

It’s getting light fast now, and she looks up to the end of the street and sees what looks like the top of a lighthouse. A white lighthouse with a red roof.

She stops cold and listens, realizing she can hear the ocean. It’s not crashing, exactly. It sounds more as if it’s breathing. Drawing in and out.

She breaks into a run.

At the end of the street, she stands at the top of the stairs that lead down to the lighthouse.

The ocean is stretched out beneath her. Maybe 150 feet below this sudden cliff. A sleepy bay. Dozens of boats float down there, anchored in the fog. Rocks jut up out of the water, like rough pyramids. Some the size of a bus. Some the size of a house. Some the size of an apartment house. There’s a dull, distant bell clanging. It seems to ring in time with the swell.

Carly pulls in a sharp breath, then presses her eyes shut.

Please, she says in her own mind. Please let it still be there when I open my eyes. She can’t help feeling it’s too breathtaking to be real. And yet she can’t believe that her imagination could have created it, either.

She opens her eyes. It’s all still there.

She sits on a bench for a while, watching the scene grow lighter. The bench is wet and cold. But so is she, so it doesn’t seem to matter.

It’s morning. She’s walked all night, and she needs to sleep.

She thinks about getting a room with her eighty dollars. But maybe she should save that for more of an emergency. Anyway, first she wants to walk down the path, through the manicured little park surrounding the lighthouse. See what more there is to see.

She finds a long, steep stairway down to the beach. It’s made with pieces of railroad ties and lined with green berry vines and trees. She takes it almost all the way to the bottom.

Before the last set of steps down to the beach, she stops. She can hear seagulls crying, that same bell clanging somewhere, the breath of the bay. She can see some kind of dock or pier far off to her right, but she can’t see it well in all this fog. She could step down onto the beach, but then what? You can walk to one end, then you can walk to the other. But when you’ve spent the night walking sixteen miles in a small hurricane, taking a walk on the beach doesn’t sound all that appealing. She just wants to sleep somewhere. Where she’ll be left alone. Where she won’t be seen.

She looks to her right, and without even thinking it out, dives into the berry vines and heavy understory. Tiny thorns scratch her hands and face, snag her hair, grab on to her jacket. But she just moves them aside as best she can and keeps going. The thorns just mean no one else will be brave enough to tramp into the same spot.

She curls up in the damp foliage and rests her head on her backpack, listening to the gulls and the breathing of the swell.

A couple of minutes later, she’s fast asleep.

When she wakes, the fog is gone. The sky is blue. She can see snatches of it through the trees and berry vines. She looks west at the sunlight glinting off the ocean in a long, sparkly band. The sun’s already on a pretty good slant. Which means she slept most of the day.

She claws her way back to the stairs, scratching herself up further on the thorns.

As she emerges from the foliage, she startles a young mother with a little boy. The woman draws in a sharp breath and yanks the child closer to her side. Then she hurries herself and the boy up the stairs double-time, glancing over her shoulder at Carly. Twice.

Carly can’t help but feel offended. At first she assumes she just startled the woman by appearing suddenly and unexpectedly, and that was understandable. But everything after that seems like overkill.

She eases her way up a few stairs.

The woman with the little boy needn’t have worried. The sixteen miles Carly walked, uphill and against the wind, has taken a toll. Her muscles have stiffened now and feel barely usable. It’s not so bad where the railroad ties are set close together, creating short risers. But now and then there’s a big step up. Carly can’t make those big steps without easing her leg up with the help of both hands. She also can’t do it without letting out a little whimper of pain each time.

When she gets back up to the tiny park around the lighthouse, she isn’t sure what to do next. She figures she should go into a few businesses and ask about Teddy. Find someone who knows him. But—after that experience with the mother on the stairs—she decides she’d better find a public restroom and get a good look at herself first.

It’s pretty shocking.

Carly stands in the gas station bathroom, leaning on the sink. Just staring at her own reflection in the mirror.

Her chin is a mass of blackened scabs. Her sunburn blisters have left a line of scars across her forehead and nose. She knew that. But then there are the scratches. They didn’t seem like much at the time. But she has maybe thirty scratches on her face, and they’re red with blood. And, even worse, they’ve become swollen. And her hair looks almost like dreadlocks, it’s so tangled.

She reaches up and pulls a few stray bits of berry vine out of her hair.

Then she decides staring won’t help.

She washes her hands and face. She pulls the hairbrush out of her pack and works the tangles out as best she can. It pulls, and she loses a lot of hair. But it has to be done. She looks in the mirror again. It’s not much progress. But there’s nothing more she can do. The rest is not immediately fixable.

“You know Teddy Thackett?” she asks the clerk.

She’s at the check-out station in the only market in town—at least, the only one she’s seen so far—holding a small bottle of orange juice.

The young woman tips her head, like a dog hearing a noise it can’t understand.

“Teddy Thackett. No, can’t say as I do. He supposed to live here?”

“Yeah, he lives here. He has a friend named Linda.”

“Linda Litnipski?”

“I…I don’t know her last name.”

“I know Linda Litnipski. But I didn’t think she was seeing anybody.” She cranes her neck to yell to a guy in the produce aisle. “Hey, Kurt. Is Linda Litnipski seeing somebody these days?”

“I heard she was, yeah. Somebody told me a month or two ago she had a new boyfriend. But I haven’t met him.”

“Was his name Teddy?”

“I never knew his name.”

“Sorry, kid,” the clerk says. “Say, how’d your face get so scratched up? Are you OK?”

Carly doesn’t answer. Just slides the bottle of orange juice closer to the woman, who takes the hint and rings it up. Carly pays her in quarters. It feels good to get rid of some of those quarters. They feel like lead weights in her pockets.

On her way out the door, she feels a hand slap down on her shoulder. She spins defensively.

It’s the guy from produce.

“If you’re looking for Linda and her boyfriend, go by the Whale Tail Lounge tonight.”

“How do you know they’ll be there tonight?”

“Well…Linda’s there every other night of her life. Can’t see why tonight would be any different.”

Carly walks to the Whale Tail Lounge. Even though it isn’t nearly night. It’s out on Patrick’s Point Road, a long paved road lined with giant redwood trees. She can hear the ocean breathing off to her left.

First it seems there’s nothing out on this road at all except trees. But now and then she passes hidden driveways, usually with closed gates. And there are RV parks here and there, and cottages and inns. They surprise her a little every time. Because her eyes keep convincing her there’s nothing here but forest.

She walks nearly a mile before realizing it’s a long walk to this place. She wishes she’d waited in town until it was later. They probably won’t even let her in, if it’s a bar. She’ll have to walk all the way back to town to get something to eat. Then she’ll have to walk back to the Whale Tail again tonight. But she has no idea what hour constitutes “tonight.” She doesn’t even know what time it is.

In another half a mile, she finds it. The Whale Tail Cottages, with the Whale Tail Lounge attached.

She looks at the menu posted in the window and realizes two things: That she’s very hungry. And that it’s a restaurant that serves drinks, not just a bar. So she can probably go in.

Actually, three things.

She looks at the prices and realizes she can’t justify eating here.

She walks all the way back to town.

“Is it always this windy around here?” she asks her waiter.

He’s about twenty, with a face so gentle she wants to sink into his eyes and never come out into the world again.

“Does this seem windy to you?”

“No, not now. I meant last night. Well, this morning, early.”