The Key to the Golden Firebird (22 page)

So she zigzagged in another direction, this time cutting
across the alternating light and dark strips of grass to the wide dirt section between second and third base.

This had to be something out of a dream. It had to be.

May called up whatever reserves of power she had left in her body. She called up strength from the ground. She put it in her thighs. She put it in her calves. She was the greatest living example of what people mean when they say that someone “runs like a girl,” but at least she was going faster now. She was getting off this field.

Thwackthwackthwackthwack…

The rail was in sight. The rail was closer. The rail was about ten more steps away, six more steps, three more steps…. She could almost touch the rail…. Her throat was so scorched with air that it no longer mattered how much it hurt. One more step…

A man lent her a hand to help her over and started laughing and asking her what she was doing, but she couldn't speak. She started right up the cement staircase, bobbing, weaving, and pushing her way through the crowd. She passed through the huge archway and found herself back in the main indoor concourse. It was all concrete and echoes in here, and the thwacking seemed painfully loud.

“Why…are…these…places…all…named…the…same…?” she said, wheeling past the identical carts and shops. She ran past the pennant banners, the Russell Street exit…no longer even sure if anyone was after her. Maybe she should slow down, start walking? That way she would blend in.

No. Keep running.

Finally she saw the exit and tore off through it and kept
right on going, across the plaza, into the complex of parking lots, across a street. She looked for whatever signs or landmarks she could remember but found none. It was all just parking lot.

Then she saw Palm bouncing up and down in the distance, waving her in.

She didn't even care that Palm and Brooks doubled over with frantic laughter as they watched her run her strange, head-down, flat-footed run in their direction.

“The key!” Palmer was screaming. “The key!”

“I…know!”

Thwack, thwack…

“Get the key!”

“I…
know
!”

May's hand was already scouring the bottom of her bag, trying to hook a finger onto the all-important key. She found everything else. Wallet. Altoids. Millions and millions of Presto Espresso napkins, which went flying out and left a trail.

Bingo. Key.

“I got it!” she screamed, skidding up to the car. One of the shoes flew underneath, but she didn't try to retrieve it. (So they'd have Cinderella evidence as well. If they wanted to scour the East Coast trying to find the coffee-drinking girl with only one dazzling and patriotic flip-flop, that was their business.) The adrenaline was causing her entire body to shake, so it was hard for her to coordinate her movements and get the key into the lock.

“May!”

“Shut up!”

She managed to control her hands just enough to unlock the driver's side door. She jumped in and unlocked the other
side. Ignition. Where was the ignition? The key banged fruitlessly into the dashboard. Palm let out a high-pitched squeal that did little to calm May's nerves. Brooks reached over, grabbed her hand, and directed it firmly toward the ignition. The key slid into the slot, and the car roared to life.

“Drive!” Palm yelled.

Shift? Shift. Come on, May. Grab the shift.
Her confidence growing, May threw the car into reverse and backed the Golden Firebird out of its parking space.
Shift again, May. Move it to
D.
Hit the gas. Go.

The Golden Firebird pulled off into the balmy Baltimore night, leaving behind a star-spangled flip-flop, a fistful of crumpled napkins, and the contents of the bronze urn.

Hysterical laughter filled the car. None of them could stop. It wasn't necessarily a funny kind of laughter—it was a crazy, relieved kind of laughter. Palmer was flat on her stomach in the backseat. Brooks was doubled over, her head resting on the dashboard. May was hugging the wheel, barely able to breathe or see through her watery eyes. They were stuck in creeping traffic anyway, in a long line of cars trying to get back on I-95.

“I can't,” May said between heaves. “I can't drive.”

“Take the shoulder,” Brooks said.

Normally May would never have taken a piece of advice like this, but all rules of her life were temporarily suspended. She steered the massive Firebird onto the shoulder of the road, then drove along slowly until she came to a small local road. She turned down this and kept going until she found a gas station with a convenience store attached.

Brooks filled the tank while May and Palmer went into the
store. May, ignoring the sign on the store entrance, kicked off her remaining flip-flop, put it in the trash, and walked in barefoot. They roamed the aisles, laughing and picking up a strange assortment of items: chips, Swedish fish, chocolate bars, minidough-nuts. When they dumped their selections on the counter, the clerk looked at them suspiciously.

“All of this food is for her,” Palmer said straight-faced, pointing her thumb at May.

“I get hungry,” May said.

“You're missing your shoes there,” the man said, looking down at May's feet.

“Oh, right,” May replied, as if just noticing this herself. “I ate them.”

Once outside, they sat on the ground next to the Firebird and passed the bag around. They ate in silence for a moment, basking in sugar, fat, and impending doom.

“Do you think they know how to toe print?” May asked, looking down at the two raw and slightly bloody spots where the flip-flop toggles had cut into her skin.

“No.” Brooks shook her head. “Probably not.”

“Good.” May stretched out her toes, and the stinging sensation from the broken skin shot up both her legs. She kept doing it anyway, trying to create as wide a space between the toes as she could. The pain almost fascinated her.

“They could check your shoes for DNA,” Palmer said, shoving an entire peanut butter cup into her mouth.

“I'll tell them you made me do it.”

Palmer shrugged and chewed.

“We should take the top down,” Brooks said.

“Fine,” May consented, still absorbed in her toe stretching. “Go ahead.”

Brooks climbed into the front seat and flipped the switches on either side where the convertible top met the windshield. Palmer got up to help Brooks lower the top into the well. It was slightly stiff, but it came down without too much hassle.

“There,” Brooks said as the interior of the Firebird was once again exposed to the open air. “That's more like it.”

“So,” May said, fishing around in one of the bags and pulling out a potato chip, “do we ever tell Mom we did this?”

Palmer was opening her mouth to reply, but Brooks beat her to it.

“No,” she said.

“Don't you think she's going to notice?” May asked.

“Not if we just put the urn back,” Brooks replied.

“Isn't it going to be a little light?”

“You think she takes it down and weighs it?”

“Do you know that she doesn't?”

“So we fill it with flour or something.”

“She'll be able to tell the difference.”

“You think she opens it up and looks at it?” Brooks said.

“Stop,” Palmer said, coming over to stand in front of them. “You're ruining it. We did it, so just…stop.”

May and Brooks fell silent. It wasn't an angry silence, either. For one of the only times in her life, May felt like she and her sisters were truly together, on the same page. But this time they had accomplished something enormous.

“You're right,” she said. “We did it.”

 

Brooks was sunk down completely in the backseat of the Firebird, submerged in a universe of vinyl, protected from the wind and bathing in the warm breezes. This was something that she had missed for a long time. Time moved differently here. Perspective changed. Even though she couldn't see where the car was going, she could watch herself moving quickly toward the moon. Billboards looked thin and straight, like redwoods. They seemed to be keeping time with a plane that flew overhead, probably in the direction of Philadelphia International.

Palmer was glorying in the front seat, hanging her arm over the side of the car. She took her ticket from her pocket and did as her father always used to do—she shoved it under the raised lock on the glove compartment. She examined the sight with satisfaction for a few minutes; then she watched May drive. May had gotten more relaxed. The road was fairly empty, and the route was straight and well lit. They were actually doing sixty.

“So, what did you do to Pete?” she asked.

“I don't want to talk about it,” May said, tucking a stray piece of hair behind her ear.

“Why not?”

“Because.”

“Those are the things that always come back and bite you in the ass,” Palmer counseled.

May threw her a puzzled look.

“What things?”

“The things you try to avoid. You can never really avoid them.”

Palmer was scary sometimes. May often suspected that she might have her own talk show someday.

“So what happened?” Palmer pushed again.

“We had a fight. Sort of.”

“He tried to kiss her and she ripped into him.”

“Thanks, Brooks,” May said into the rearview mirror.

“De nada.”

“Why?” Palmer asked.

“I don't know,” May answered honestly.

“But he likes you. And you like him.”

“I don't—”

“Yes, you do. Why do you keep saying that you don't?”

“Good question,” came a voice from the back. “Especially since you made out with him all night before we left for the shore.”

“What did you say to him?” Palmer asked.

“It doesn't matter,” May said.

They drove the next five miles in silence.

“I screwed it up,” May finally said. “I screwed it up really badly.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“I don't know,” May said, tentatively pushing harder on the accelerator. “I guess I'll figure something out.”

 

Right before midnight the Firebird stopped just short of the driveway. The minivan was parked in front of the house. All three Gold sisters gazed at it in horror.

“Why is that here?” Brooks whispered, leaning forward.

“I don't know,” May said, eyes wide. “Maybe she switched shifts.”

“We can tell her we just ran out to the store,” Palmer said. “We've got stuff.”

“For six hours?” Brooks said.

“Okay,” May said, “it's not so bad. Well, it might be for you, Brooks….”

May heard a
thunk
as Brooks fell back hard against her seat in despair.

“We just need to have one consistent story. Where could we have been for that amount of time?”

“The mall?” Palmer suggested.

“The mall closes at ten.”

“Okay,” Palmer said, “we went to the mall, then to a movie.”

After agreeing on the details, May pulled the Firebird into the garage. Their arrival was painfully loud, with the garage door squealing as it was opened and the coughing and growling of the Firebird engine echoing through the room. Immediately the door to the kitchen flew open. Their mother stood on the threshold. Her chest was actually heaving, like a volcano in those final, huff-and-puff seconds before an eruption.

“Oh,” Palmer said. “Hi.”

“Where have you been?”

The question echoed through the calm night air. It shook the garage. It vibrated between the houses. It caused a neighbor's dog to start barking. A car alarm also started going off somewhere in the distance, but that was probably unconnected.

“The mall?” May offered. “And then to a movie?”

“I got a call from the league. You hurt someone today, Palmer? Then you left?”

“That was an accident,” Brooks said. “Bad pitch.”

Normally Palmer would have jumped at Brooks's throat for
a remark like that, but she just sat now, staring dumbly at the dashboard.

“You have your license for half a day, May, and you do this? You take Brooks out? You keep Palmer out until midnight when she's hurt someone?”

May could tell that the fight from earlier hadn't been forgotten. She sighed and looked up at the steel garage door tracks in the ceiling.

“Just get inside,” her mother said, disgusted. “All of you. And go right to bed. I don't even want to discuss this tonight. I'm—”

She stopped suddenly, her eyes frozen on a spot along the dashboard. May knew in that instant what she had seen, but it was too late to do anything about it.

Her mother reached into the car and plucked Palmer's ticket from under the glove compartment lock.

May was lying in bed, unwilling or unable to get out, even though it was after noon and a sweet breeze was coming in through her screened window. It seemed to be trying to reach her through the sheet she had over her head, to tell her that a perfect summer day was waiting outside. But May wasn't interested. She liked it where she was, under this soft, cool canopy dotted with the undersides of little orange flowers. If she could have, she would have stayed there all day. The adrenaline of last night had worn off, and there was too much ugly stuff outside that she had to face now. But she had to get ready for work, so she reluctantly rolled out of bed and went downstairs.

May's first surprise of the day was that her mother wasn't drinking coffee at the kitchen table when she got down there—but Mrs. Camp was. She rubbed her eyes. Yes. Definitely Mrs. Camp. Her long, pale orange hair, now streaked with a few gray wisps. Her freckled skin.

“Oh, hi, May,” Mrs. Camp said, pretending not to notice that May was standing in the doorway wearing only a T-shirt and her underwear. “Your mom asked me to…stay.”

“To stay?” May repeated, pulling down hard on the hem of the shirt and trying not to move too much.

“To keep you guys company today,” Mrs. Camp said, smiling apologetically.

“Keep us company?”

“I brought some cinnamon rolls,” Mrs. Camp said, pushing a large white bakery box in May's direction. “And I hit a huge sale on paper towels, so I brought some of those over.”

May glanced over and saw a massive fifteen-pack of paper towels sitting on the floor by the stove.

“I'm just going to…put on some other things,” May said. “Be right back.”

May ran up the stairs and to her room, shutting the door tightly behind her. First, they had, in essence, a babysitter. This meant they were under house arrest. Second, their guard was Pete's mom, which definitely put a little salt in the wound. It was entirely possible that Mrs. Camp knew what May had done yesterday—and there was so much to know: she'd fought with her mother, spat on Mrs. Camp's son's declarations of love, driven to Baltimore…and that was just the public domain stuff. Wait till everyone found out about the criminal trespassing and the going into a convenience store with no shoes on.

But then again, she'd brought cinnamon rolls. Who brought cinnamon rolls for heartless juvenile delinquents, anyway?

After putting on a pair of pajama bottoms and pulling back her hair, May ventured back downstairs. Mrs. Camp was busy doing the crossword now, but she looked up on May's approach.

“Am I the first one up?” May asked, looking around. “It's almost twelve-thirty.”

“Actually, yes.” Mrs. Camp smiled. “You all must be tired.”

Cowards,
May thought. And they didn't even have half of May's problems.

“So,” Mrs. Camp said, detaching a cinnamon roll from the
gooey mass for May, “I heard you passed your driver's exam.”

“Kind of.” She smiled, automatically looking over to the key rack on the wall. The key to the Golden Firebird was no longer hanging there. Mrs. Camp followed May's gaze.

“Your mom told me to tell you to take your bike to work,” she said. “It's such a nice day out. It'll be a nice ride.”

Okay. She knew that they were in trouble, but she gave no sign of knowing about what May had done to her son. Mrs. Camp chatted about a trip to North Carolina they were planning on taking, about her yoga class…. May stuffed down a cinnamon bun. An hour went by, and Palm and Brooks still hadn't shown their faces.

“I should get showered,” May said. “I have to be at work soon.”

“Go ahead,” Mrs. Camp said, pulling a romance novel from her bag. “I've got lots to read. You can tell Palmer and Brooks to come down anytime they like.”

“I'll tell them,” May said. “I don't know what's wrong with them.”

“Pete was sick this morning too.” Mrs. Camp nodded.

May stiffened.

“Really?”

“He came in yesterday afternoon, after he stopped by here,” she went on. “He just didn't look well. He went up to his room. I didn't see him this morning either. Maybe something's going around.”

“Maybe.” May backed out of the room. “I'll see if they're up….”

 

When May cautiously pushed open the door to Presto Espresso that afternoon, she was immediately bathed in an icy gale from the air-conditioning vent above the door. Everything seemed off. The milk stand had been rearranged, and there were at least ten customers sitting at various tables. Nell was behind the counter, humming to herself and filling oversized coffee filters.

“Okay,” May said to herself, and shivered. “This is creepy.”

Nell glanced up from her filters and coolly examined May's sunburned figure.

“Who are all of these people?” May asked, walking behind the counter and punching in on the cash register.

“Some church group,” Nell said. “Can you go and refill all the coffee bins?”

Refilling the coffee bins was a heavy, tedious job that involved pulling out twenty-pound bags of coffee beans from the back room and topping off an entire wall's worth of plastic bins. It required using the ladder, lifting, and repacking—and it was something that May and Nell never, ever did. There was a crazy guy named Craig who worked about once a week who seemed to live to do this job.

It took May an hour to finish. When she was done, Nell asked her to dust the wall of expensive, oversized mugs that they never sold, empty and clean the pastry case, and open a new shipment of supplies and stock the metal shelves in the storage room. These were the jobs they always did on a very occasional basis and never all at once.

So she knows,
May thought as she cut open a cardboard box full of cans of sweetened condensed milk.
And this is how she's going to get back at me.

At first that felt fine to May. She thought it would make her miserable day go by a little faster. Unfortunately, she also had time to think about Pete, and she replayed their final conversation in her head nonstop as she stocked shelves in the gray, windowless storage room with the fluorescent lights.

When May came out of the storeroom, it was almost seven-thirty. Nell went off on her half-hour break to go to the little health food shop up the road to get her dinner. May leaned against the counter and tried to relax. She could see the vivid sunset, an explosive orange and red and purple filling the sky.

It was altogether too much like the flowers Pete had brought her yesterday.

Pete—he was in her head. Every part of her brain that held a piece of information about him was firing simultaneously. She could smell his skin and his shirt. She could feel the weight of his arm over her shoulders. She could hear him laughing at one of his own jokes….

She couldn't lose it—not here, with Nell. She had to keep a brave face.

Nell came back in a few minutes later with a tin container of adzuki beans, seaweed, and brown rice and set herself up at one of the tables with her food and her cell phone. May listened to her chomping away and cheerfully talking to one of her friends for the next twenty minutes about some amazing deal she'd found on a flight to Budapest. May made up little jobs for herself to keep her focus off Nell. She cleaned between the keys on the cash register with a coffee stirrer wrapped in a napkin. She scraped the buildup off the milk-foaming attachment on the cappuccino machine.

When Nell had finished her call and food, she stacked everything up and quietly came behind the counter and glanced over at May.

“Ann found out about what you did with your schedule,” she said as she threw away her dish.

May's head jerked in Nell's direction at the sound of Presto's owner's name.

“She said you can finish your shift today,” Nell went on breezily.

Finish your shift today….
May ran the words through her mind, trying to pull meaning from them.

“Are you saying I'm fired?” she managed to ask.

“Pretty much.”

“How did she find out?”

“I told her,” Nell said plainly.

“Why did you tell her?” May asked. “You've swapped shifts dozens of times.”

“Pete told me what you did,” Nell said. “He told me what happened.”

“So you got me
fired
?”

“Right.”

May felt slightly faint. She suddenly had a flash of how she wanted it all to end. She would dramatically take off her apron and hat, throw them on the counter, and walk to the door. At the last second she would turn and say, “I think what happened was that he realized how annoying you are, like how you never stop talking about yourself. I think that may have had a lot to do with it.” Then she would open the door and step out. Before she was all the way gone, she would add over her shoulder, “But I'm just guessing.”

The fact was, though, it didn't really matter anymore that Nell was irritating or even that she had just deliberately caused May to lose her job. May had disrupted something personal in Nell's life. Nell could have really liked Pete, and May had ruined that for her. The score seemed even.

But May did take off her apron and hat.

“I'd like to go now,” she said.

“Fine.” Nell shrugged. “You have to punch out and sign a form for your uniform.”

May entered her employee code for the last time, then verified that she was returning one apron, one name pin, and one hat in good (as opposed to excellent) condition. Then she picked up her bag and headed for the door. At the last moment the guilt really started to kick in. She stopped and turned back to Nell, who had taken out a backpacker's guide to Eastern Europe and started to read.

“I'm sorry,” May said. “I didn't mean for it to happen.”

“Whatever, Ape.”

“I just wanted you to know that it wasn't intentional.”

“Fine.”

There was nothing more May could say, so she opened the door.

“See you later, Ape,” Nell said, turning back to her book.

“Later,” May replied as she left Presto Espresso for the last time.

 

May coasted along her street. Even though the sun had just gone down, it was easily ninety-five degrees. Despite the heat, she wasn't ready to go home yet. She skidded to a halt at the
mailbox at the end of her street to cool down and watched two little kids getting dragged along by a very eager Dalmatian.

The lightning bugs were already out in full force, looking like strings of insane, moving Christmas lights. May clasped one of the bugs in her hands, like she used to do when she was little and she and Brooks used to compete to see how many they could catch in a night. The bug wandered around her palm, not particularly concerned for its own welfare. When she opened her hand and let the bug go, it didn't seem to want to leave her. She had to blow on it to get it moving. Finally it took off from her palm and lingered around her head, flashing its little yellow taillight.

She turned her bike and rode around the corner and up the slight hill to Pete's house. The Camps' rancher sat in the middle of a fairly wild yard, with lots of trees. She stopped by the edge of the driveway, near the thick wall of shrubs that marked the edge of the property.

She could do something, or she could spend the next days, weeks, or months of her grounding picking lint out of the carpet and wondering.

Her hair was probably wild, and she was definitely sticky and rumpled. She knew she probably had perspiration marks under her arms, so she took care to keep them pinned to her sides.

She knocked at the Camps' door. There was a frantic barking from deep inside the house. A thumping as someone came down the steps. And then Pete was in front of her. His skin looked very tan against the white T-shirt he was wearing. He seemed tired.

“Can I talk to you for a second?” she asked.

“What are you doing here?”

“Look,” she said, “this is your chance. If you want an explanation, you have to get it now. Or if you want to yell at me. Whatever.”

It took him a minute to think this one over. He opened the door and came outside.

“So talk,” he said.

“Do you guys still have the glider?” May asked.

“Yeah. Out back.”

“Can we go sit on it?”

Pete looked at her in disbelief, then leaned his head back to stare at the sky.

“For privacy,” she said. “So we don't have to stand in the middle of the lawn.”

They made their way through the rakes, shovels, bikes, and spare pieces of wood that filled the narrow passageway that separated the garage from the house. The Camp yard was overgrown, with a slightly unstable picnic bench off to one side and a brick barbecue against the back fence. The honeysuckle bushes that they used to feast on as kids were still flourishing. The people next door were cooking dinner, and the air was hot and smelled of hamburger.

“God,” May said, taking a deep breath, “we haven't taken out the grill in forever.”

Pete knocked some spiderwebs and leaves from the glider with his shoe, then pointed at it. May sat down. Pete sat on top of the picnic bench a few feet away and fixed her with a steady glare.

She had no idea where to begin, but she had to say something.

“I don't know why I said all those things, but I'm sorry,” she said. “I was insane.”

Pete said nothing to this general apology. His expression remained frozen. A cloud of gnats descended on May's head. She waved them away, but not before getting a few up her nose. She had to snort them out. Even though she tried to do this in a very low-key way, it still wasn't exactly attractive.

She decided to try again.

“Look, I know how I've been. I was just afraid all of a sudden, and I started saying whatever I could. I know that makes me seem really weird and unstable….”

She could have bitten off her tongue. Now it sounded like she was talking about Jenna again.