Walk Me Home (31 page)

A second or two later, Carly hears a deep, rumbly snore coming from the front of the car.

“He never really woke up,” Davis says. “He’s nice when he’s awake. But he sleeps like rocks. So he’ll say stuff like that, but he’s really asleep the whole time. He’s real nice and polite when he’s awake. So, where are you headed?”

“You seen my backpack?” Carly asks. It’s not what she meant to say. It’s just what comes out.

“Yeah, it’s right here.”

She hears it sliding across the wood floor, feels it bump her hand. She pulls it in close. Sets her head down on it.

“California,” she says, failing to enunciate the word clearly.

“Oh,” Davis says. “We’re going to Lake Havasu. Supposed to be real nice there. We might even stay for a while. All summer. If it works out, I might do a semester of school there in the fall.”

Carly tries to say something in return, but the words don’t quite form. She’s so spent she feels almost drunk, and the words are just a slur, whatever they were about to be.

A minute later she’s asleep.

It’s still dark when she wakes. She sits up. Davis’s dad is still snoring.

The door on the other side of the car has been slid partway open, and Davis is sitting on the edge of the car, swinging his legs and watching Arizona roll by. The sky shows just a hint of dawn off to the left. Carly can almost see the shapes of things.

From the silhouette of him, Carly thinks Davis is a couple of years younger than she is. Older than Jen but younger than Carly.

The wind coming in feels bracing and cool. That classic cold desert night. But…clearer. Or something. Like they’re somewhere else entirely. This is not Wakapi land. She can feel that.

She thinks again about Jen and what will happen to her when they find out Carly is gone. She calms her gut by convincing herself that even if Jen gets put in a home while she’s gone, Teddy can get her back again. There are more nagging fears, but she squashes them as hard as she can.

She levers to her feet, nearly falling to the floor again when her arms fail to hold her. She teeters carefully over to the partly open door and sits cross-legged on the floor, safely back from the edge.

She knows exactly why she does this. It’s because she remembers that feeling, standing under the stars last night. That complete aloneness. And she wants not to be alone. If only for a short time.

“Hi,” she says.

“Oh. Hi.”

He seems surprised that she’s awake.

“I think you saved my life back there.”

“Maybe. Or you might’ve grabbed on by yourself.”

“I don’t think so. I think I was falling. Anyway, I meant to say thanks. You know. At the time. But it was weird. I was just so used up from all that. It was like I didn’t have the strength. But anyway, thanks.”

“You did.”

“I did what?”

“Say thanks.”

“Oh. Did I? I don’t remember that.”

“I think so. Anyway, you’re welcome. No problem.”

They sit quietly for a time. Carly is unsure of what else to say. If anything. She thinks about Jen again, and whether she’s in trouble where Carly left her. It strikes her suddenly that Jen is the one who should have the feather necklace to protect her. Not that Carly really believes it will. But still.

She takes it out from under her shirt and examines it in the dim light, to see if she damaged it. The shaft of the feather is a little crooked, but she straightens it out as best she can.

“Pretty,” Davis says. “Looks Native American.”

“It is.”

“Genuine?”

“Yeah.”

“Navajo? Zuni?”

“Wakapi.”

Carly expects him to say he never heard of such a thing.

Instead he says, “Oh! That’s so rare. Did you really meet a Wakapi? That’s amazing. They’re almost gone.”

“You’ve heard of them.”

“Yeah, I did a report on Native American culture for school. About how important it is to keep it going. Like, the Wakapi are a perfect example. They teach their kids this oral history, but then if the kids leave the reservation, maybe they don’t teach it to
their
kids. And then what if it just stops? Can you imagine what a loss that would be?”

“I guess. Yeah.”

“You
guess
? It’s a whole
culture
. But it’s not just the kids leaving the reservations, it’s us and the way we tried to erase their culture, taking kids from their parents and putting them in boarding
schools and changing their names and not letting them speak their language. I have an apple. You want half?”

Carly is surprised by the sudden shift in conversational direction. She was just getting interested in the culture issue. Was Delores teaching Jen the Wakapi oral history? Can Jen pass it on to her kids, even though they’re not Wakapi? Or maybe Jen would say they can be if she wants them to be.

“Um. Sure. If you think that’s fair. I mean…it’s your apple. If you want it all.”

“I don’t mind.”

Carly moves a little closer to watch. Davis opens what looks like a small penknife and cuts the apple into two equal halves. He seems to be working very hard to make them exactly even. In fact, he ends up bringing the knife up through the stem and slicing it vertically in two.

“Here,” he says, extending the gift in her direction.

“Thanks. That’s really nice.”

She takes it from him and takes a bite. It tastes like a Red Delicious. But more to the point, it tastes like the best bite of apple Carly has ever held in her mouth. Ever crunched into with her teeth. And she knows why, too. Because she wasn’t supposed to be alive to taste it.

She looks out at the dawn, and it’s a more beautiful dawn than she ever knew existed. And for the same reason.

It strikes her that this feeling will wear off in time, and she hates knowing that. She wants to hold it. Frame it. Bronze it. Title it “This Is How It Feels to Be in Your Life.” But she’s been in her life all along. She just didn’t see that as anything worth noting.

She takes another bite.

Then she leans back a little and reaches into her pocket for one of her many quarters. Sets it on the floor between her sore hip and Davis.

“Here,” she says.

He looks closely to see what it is. Picks it up and holds it. “You don’t have to pay me for that apple. I gave it to you. For free.”

“I know. I wasn’t. Really. I wasn’t trying to pay you. I just wanted to give you something. Because you gave me something. But I don’t really have anything else but that.”

“Oh,” Davis says. “OK. Thanks.”

He slips it into the breast pocket of his denim jacket.

“Kind of stupid,” she says. “A quarter isn’t much.”

“Well. It’s a lot to you, I bet. You probably don’t have much.”

That’s so true that Carly doesn’t even want to comment on how true it is. So she says nothing at all.

They sit quietly for a time, finishing the apple and watching the world go by in the dark. The sky is taking on a coppery glow off to the east, and Carly can see the lights of some kind of civilization. Like they’re getting close to a town. She pulls her jacket tighter around herself with one arm.

“I’m practically biting right into the core,” Carly says. “Because I don’t want to waste any.”

“I eat the core,” Davis says.

“Really?”

“I eat everything but the stem. The seeds are sort of chewy, but it’s not bad.”

Carly pulls out the severed stem and pops the rest into her mouth. The texture of the core is hard to bite down on, but it still tastes like apple. They launch the stem halves out into the world at the exact same moment, then laugh at how perfectly accidentally timed that was.

“Any idea where this train goes?” she asks him.

“My dad and I are jumping off as soon we see the Colorado River. That’s the state line, you know. Arizona turns into California
right at the Colorado River. Right in the middle of the river. I don’t know where the train goes after that. On into California, I guess. My dad would know. We’re going to go see Lake Havasu.”

“Why by freight train?”

“We go most everywhere by freight train. Or we hitchhike. One or the other.”

“Always? All your life?”

“Not always. Just the last couple years. Since my dad lost his job. Since we lost the house. Well, not the whole time since he lost his job. Just since we lost the house. He lost his job, and then for a few months he was trying to get another one, but nobody was hiring in his field. And then he decided if we couldn’t have a house, we should at least see the world. He said he could stand to raise me poor, but not on a street corner or in some shelter. He said at least we could be free and have some real experiences.”

“You like it? Traveling around all the time?”

“It’s OK. We’ve seen some really nice places. It’s just different than having a house. Not as good in some ways. But it’s OK, I guess.”

“What did your dad used to do?”

“Engineer.”

“Train?”

“Aerospace.”

“Oh.”

“How ’bout you?”

“Oh. Yeah. Me.”

Carly takes a minute to decide what to tell him. She starts at the beginning, when they had to leave Teddy. Then the story gets more and more detailed. And by the time she’s told him everything, the sun is up over the mountains, pouring onto their faces.

Davis has shaggy hair and bad skin, but his brown eyes are big and nice.

“I hope you find him,” he says.

“Me, too.”

“You think he did what they say he did?”

Carly opens her mouth to answer and is struck by a complete thought. If he did, that explains everything. Jen’s incomprehensible behavior is completely understandable. If he did.

“Maybe,” she says.

She’s a little stunned to hear herself say it. It’s almost as though her opinion on the subject has changed retroactively. Without bothering to notify her.

Then again, that would mean Teddy really did. And that’s equally incomprehensible. That requires every bit as much explaining.

“Will you stay with him if he did?”

“Oh, no. I don’t think I could do that.”

“What would you do then?”

“No idea.”

They stare out into the dawn in silence for a few minutes. It’s not an uncomfortable silence. Just a moment when nothing needs saying.

Then Carly says, “I don’t even know why I told you all that.”

“I do. It’s because you’ll never see me again. Strangers tell me and my dad stuff all the time. Big stuff. Stuff they don’t even tell their own families. It’s easier with a stranger. They don’t even know who you are, so what could it hurt?”

“I think I’m going to try to sleep some more,” she says. She’s feeling a little off-balance now, and that’s part of why she says it. But she’s also just really tired. She’s probably had two or three hours sleep in the last two days. “Maybe when I wake up, we’ll be in California.”

“Maybe. If you wake up and we’re gone, you’re over the state line.”

“Nice meeting you, if that happens. But it’ll be nice to be back in California.”

But not as nice as it would have been a few minutes ago. Before she figured out that Jen was probably telling the truth.

Carly dozes for a minute or an hour. It’s hard to tell.

Then she sits up, nursing an uncomfortable feeling. A lot of what she’s stored lately is working its way loose. That can’t be good.

Davis is still sitting in the open door of the boxcar, watching the morning go by. Or waiting for the river. Or both.

It’s warmer now. She struggles to her feet. Her whole body is sore, either from impact or overexertion. In some areas, both. She feels as though she was hit by a speeding car in her sleep.

Davis looks partway over his shoulder as she sits down next to him.

“As long as I’m never going to see you again,” she says, “there’s something else.”

Then she stops a minute. Wondering what the something is. She’s literally about to tell Davis something she hasn’t shared with herself yet.

“OK,” he says.

“I have to think how to say it.” She knows a little about what it is. Because she knows how it feels. But training a collection of words to contain it might prove tricky. “I think however I say it, it’s going to come out wrong.”

“Just say it however you can.”

“Why did he pick
her
?”

“You mean…not somebody else’s sister?”

“I mean not me.”

In the silence that follows, Carly has a chance to experience just how wrong that really sounds.

Davis says, “You didn’t want him to…”

“No! Of course not. I didn’t mean that at all. If he did that, which I’m not sure now if he did, he shouldn’t have picked anybody.
I mean, anybody young. But he picked her. Why her and not me? Oh, crap. That’s not what I mean. What do I mean?”

“Maybe you just wanted him to like you best? Even though…probably you wanted him to like you in a better way than that.”

“Maybe. It sure sounds better than what I said. I bet you think I’m the sickest person on the planet.”

“No. I don’t. Really. You should see some of the stuff people have told us.”

“Don’t tell anybody.”

“I won’t.”

“I’d deny it.”

“Who would I tell? I don’t even know who you are. That was the whole point, remember?”

Then, as Carly is settling back into that more comfortable reality, Davis shouts out suddenly. Loudly.

“There it is! Dad! There it is!”

“Hmm?” his father mumbles.

“The Colorado River! I can see it! Dad! Get up! We have to jump off in a minute.”

And Carly already misses Davis. And maybe even Davis’s father. Even though they’re still on the train.

Silently, and as bravely as possible, she adjusts back to that place of being alone. Her consolation prize is knowing that’s the California state line she can see from here.

Davis’s father leans over her. He’s a big man. Tall. Heavily built.

“The train’ll probably stop in Needles,” he tells her. “There’s a train yard there. If the train stops in the yard, jump off. Fast. Security man’ll go all down the train opening the doors of the boxcars. You don’t want to get caught in here. Look out both doors. See which side he’s on. Jump out the other side. Head for the main drag.”