Turn Signal (16 page)

She said the Lord had told her to come. She said not even her parents knew she was coming to America until she showed up. Brother Aaron had not come with her but blessed her visit, she informed her son, who never asked who the hell Brother Aaron was.

“I've come here,” she told him, “to baptize you. Only the chosen few will see heaven, Brady, and because you're mine, I've been told you can be among the saved.”

She went on to inform him that the chosen few had gotten the word: The world was going to end on September 27. So, there wasn't much time.

“We'll need some candles and some water,” she said. “And we have to find a bird somewhere, maybe we can buy one in a pet store.”

He knew she wasn't quite right. In the picture, she had been a little overweight. Now, she was shrunken. Her short frame couldn't have carried more than 90 pounds. Her collarbone stuck out. Even her feet looked emaciated. And her eyes, so bright in his picture, were dark holes, as if she were looking out from twin caves. But she had come for him.

“Come on,” she told him, holding her finger to her lips. “We'll go find a bird.”

They walked quietly back out. When Ellen asked through the door who was there, Brady said a friend, that they were going to town, and she told him to be back by supper.

Outside, Carly told him she was Sister Carlotta now, that she was a deaconness in the One Church, that she lived far away in England. They got into the little rental car and went off in search of a bird.

Brady suggested the Kmart, which seemed to sell everything. On the way there, she would take her eyes off the road for disturbingly long periods, looking at him. She told him she was having trouble getting adjusted to driving again, and especially on the right side of the road. Twice, she ran off the pavement onto the narrow shoulder.

They sat in the parking lot, with the air-conditioning failing against the heat rising up from the melting asphalt. Brady turned to her.

“Mom …” It was a hard word to say. He hadn't said it often.

“Sister Carlotta,” she corrected him.

“What are you going to do? I mean, after you baptize me or whatever, am I, do you want me to go back with you … or what?” He realized he was holding his breath.

“Back with me?” She stared at him, her hand on the door handle. “Back to London? Oh, no, dear. I don't think we could do that. Brother Aaron might not approve. And the children barely have enough room to sleep in as it is. But we'll all be together soon.”

Brady let out his breath and tried not to cry.

“Then what do you want? What are you here for?” He sat on his hands so he wouldn't hit her.

“Why,” she said, her eyes wide at his obtuseness, “why, to save your soul, of course. To save your immortal soul.”

He couldn't believe it. He had trained himself not to expect much, and he already knew he'd been tricked.

“Save my soul?” he said, his hands raised now and balled into fists, his eyes wet. “Save me, goddammit! Save me!”

He tried to grab her across the seat, but she was amazingly quick and darted out the door before he could get a good grip.

She hopped across the parking lot, her bare feet burning on the asphalt.

Brady knew how to drive. His father let him practice with the old Opal, in the back yard and in parking lots like this one. He started the car and began chasing his mother, who was trying, leaping as if she were playing hopscotch, to reach a small shady spot at the edge of the lot, where a stunted row of Bradford pears separated the store from the highway.

She hopped and jumped for 50 feet before she reached the cool grass, and one last turn put a large green light pole between her and Brady. When he zagged to follow her, he hit it head-on. The pole, when it fell, completed the job of totaling the little rental car.

The deputy who arrived first estimated that Brady was going between 30 and 35 miles an hour as he tried to run over Carly. Brady had to be cut away from the wreck. He told his father later that he could hear his leg snap, just above the ankle.

By the time Brady had made the deputy understand that the woman driving the car, his mother, was lying on the grass, Carly had slipped away to a phone booth a block away, her feet wrapped in a scarf and an empty grocery bag she found lying beside her.

Her father came down and retrieved her. He took her to an emergency room outside Richmond, and by the time Jack had the time to go looking for her, she was on her way back to Dulles Airport with her feet in bandages. From there, she would catch her flight to London, leaving her parents to clean up the mess. She had been in Virginia less than 24 hours.

Brady never told his father everything. He couldn't bear it. He said his mother had gone inside to get something, and she'd left the keys in the car. He was just practicing in the parking lot, and he hit the wrong pedal. And then she “just freaked” and disappeared.

Jack hadn't talked much with Carly's parents since she left, just a couple of times on the phone long-distance. He always figured they blamed him, and he blamed them a little, too. He assumed that she told them things she didn't tell him, information he might have used to try to keep her from going.

Jack knew, the way Jim Hamner offered right away to square things with the rental car company, that there was more to the story, but Brady kept it to himself.

The boy took great satisfaction, though, when he awoke the morning of September 28 to find the sun still shining, the sky still blue, the birds still singing in the trees.

When he had time to think it over, after his leg had healed and the hurt had been worn down to hard calluses, he felt a little better about his mother. He was not, despite what Gina sometimes thought, a mean person. He could only muster so much hate for the former Carly Stone, a woman who thought the world was going to end on September 27, 1989, and would cross an ocean to save her son's mortal soul.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Until he met the old man, he never really gave the concept of fate much thought. Sure, when he considers it now, he realizes that his parents always said, “It's God's will,” when someone with a family and a mortgage fell over dead or a house burned down with innocent children inside. But it seems to him now as if this was just a way of explaining the unthinkable, a ruse to keep people from losing their minds.

And it was tempting the Fates to exult too much in good fortune, as if you actually had earned and deserved it. Everyone knew that.

The idea of fate as a one-way, no-exit road down which a life must travel, though, was something new. He'd heard, as a boy, of a young man “getting the call” to become a minister. In other, more worldly pursuits, though, you made your own way, determined your own destiny.

These days, though, Jack Stone is a true believer.

He doesn't really care that the bank has refused to allow him any kind of bridge loan, with his unpublished novel as collateral. They said they wanted something a little more substantial.

Home equity loans also seem to be out of the question, with the current, abused status of the Stones' credit cards. He sent the Octagon Group most of the mortgage payment for November, and he's written them again, telling them that, after Christmas, he'll have the rest. The insurance money from his mother's house should be coming in the new year. He'd hoped to use that for Shannon's college fund, which is there in name only these days, but he'll do what he has to do.

Soon, it won't be a problem anyhow.

Good as his word, he is finished. He has put the final touches on the rewrite. He's ready to send it back to Gerald Prince, ready to follow fate where he knows it will lead him. He's sure that, among other things, Gerald Prince's publishing company will advance him whatever he needs.

Jack Stone believes.

He doesn't realize Gina is home until she speaks to him from the spiral staircase, only her head visible.

“Are you up here in the dark?” She seems tentative.

It is dark, or almost.

“Shortest day of the year,” he says, and laughs.

He doesn't know how long he's been sitting there, his world illuminated by one desk lamp. He started printing chapters sometime after noon, and now the whole manuscript sits before him, clean and white and perfectly rectangular.

“Done,” he says. “Merry Christmas.”

She isn't smiling. She comes up and sits across the desk from him, the computer humming away between them.

“Jack,” she says, “we have to talk. I got a call today from somebody at Octagon. They said we're two months past due. You told me you paid the mortgage last month.”

He hadn't wanted to worry her unnecessarily.

“I paid most of it,” he says. “I'll pay this month's, too. I'll pay it out of the advance.”

“But, honey,” she says, and the way she says “honey” sounds much like it would if she were explaining the true nature of Santa Claus to a six-year-old. “They aren't going to wait. Banks don't wait. They'll take our house.”

“We'll be OK.”

She gets up and walks back and forth for a few seconds. She is a silhouette, the light in the outer room behind her.

“You promised me,” she says finally. “You promised me that we would not lose this house.

“I've done all the Christmas shopping. I've been making excuses, every kind of excuse you can imagine. ‘He's trying to wrap it up before Christmas.' ‘He'll come to your next game, I'm sure.' ‘He's got a lot on his mind.' ‘The check is in the mail.'

“I don't mind doing all that. I would mind, though, doing it for nothing.”

He feels a calm that her rising anger can't dent, and that seems to make her angrier.

“Where are you? Hello?” she says, stepping forward out of the darkness. “The lights are on, but I don't think anybody's home. What's going to happen to us?”

“Good things.”

“When? How? You haven't worked in six weeks. We don't have two hundred dollars in the bank. I'm buying Christmas presents out of my Christmas bonus, which was one damn week's salary. I'm too far along, Jack, too far along to lose all this now.”

He wishes she had more faith, but he knows she'll look back some day soon and laugh about all this, or maybe kiss him, tears in her eyes, apologizing for ever doubting him.

He tells her, for what must be the hundredth time, not to worry, and that he will be down soon.

“I'm ready to let you read it,” he tells her as she descends the spiral staircase. She does not reply.

He knows that the house means a lot to her.

It if had been up to him, they never would have moved. He had not lived anywhere but the farmhouse since he returned after his father's death. It had been home through the coming and going of Carly, through the bachelor days on the road, through 13 mostly happy years with Gina. All his memories of Brady and Shannon were tied to the place.

The one constant had been his mother. Even when Gina was lobbying for a home of their own, and she lobbied for five years before he gave in, Ellen never seemed to be part of the reason. Gina had never been that close to her own mother, and while Ellen did not become that most elusive of things, “the mother she never had,” the two were friends. The only friction they had, really, was over Brady.

Jack had expanded the back of the house in 1994 so that their bedroom had a walk-in closet, his-and-her baths and a Jacuzzi. Brady and Shannon's rooms were closer to the front of the house, where Ellen slept, and there seemed to be space enough for everyone. Brady's ultimately failed attempt at living elsewhere brought them a combination of peace and anxiety.

Jack knew something had to be done, eventually, but the older his mother got, the harder it seemed to leave. He had watched her hair turn lighter over the years, the reddish-blonde fading to a kind of blonde-gray, then mostly gray. They had taken care of each other in bad times, and she had filled in the missing pieces for him, especially when it came to Brady.

Finally, Ellen settled matters for him.

One Tuesday in the early days of 1997, when he'd gotten up late after rolling in from California the evening before, she fixed him pancakes and sausage for breakfast, and when he was finishing his second stack, she sat down across from him at the old kitchen table that still had his initials carved underneath from 35 years earlier.

“It think it's time for you all to get your own place,” she told him.

He wondered if Gina had been talking to her. But his wife had never, to his knowledge, filibustered for her own place within earshot of Ellen.

His mother had told him, more than once, that it would be OK if they moved, but she had never really insisted, and Jack always thought she was just being polite.

Now, though, she was giving him an ultimatum.

She told him that she wanted them out of there in six months. That would give them time to find a good place.

“I know you're bound to have some money saved,” she told him, smiling a little. “You've been freeloading off me all these years. You ought to have a fortune.”

Jack and Gina paid the taxes and most of the other bills, but still it had been a bargain.

“And Shannon ought to be where she's got some friends her own age to play with,” Ellen added.

He kissed her on the forehead as he left the table and told her he'd think about it.

“No thinking to it,” she said to his back. “Do like that shoe ad says: Just do it.”

He realized just how tied he was to the house, and to the three-generational mosaic of his family in a place where you could see life rise and recede. It was a refuge for someone who spent half his nights sleeping in the back of a truck cab or in some nameless motel. The die was cast, though. The three women of his life were united against him. It was time to go.

Maybe, he thought, his mother would like some peace and quiet, but he doubted it. She seemed happy enough for Brady to move back in, almost before they'd finished unpacking.