You Are My Only (5 page)

“Gardeners,” Arlen says, guessing my question. “They start early.”

“What time do you suppose it is?”

“Easing up on six, I'd wager.”

I think of Peter at home, alone in our bed, or up on his feet. I think of what he will say when he sees me, what he must feel inside, if it's like what I feel inside. I guess I've always been afraid of Peter. From our first night alone, I have been, and now I know I cannot face him.

“How are you at holding on?” Arlen asks.

“Good enough,” I say, “till yesterday.” I sob and I can't help it.

“How are you at waiting?”

“Why are you asking?”

“I have a bike,” he says. “A real sore loser of a bike, but it's something. You could ride the handlebars. It would be faster.”

“You would do that, Arlen? Go home and then come back and get me?”

“I wouldn't leave you here,” he says, “if that's what you're asking.”

“Oh, hon, sweetie, you came,” Miss Cloris says, and when she lets me in to the front sitting room, it's as if I'm walking into Easter, all purple and green with a long white leather couch stuck up against one wall that turns and keeps going against the next wall, like an eggshell that's cracked. There are books on the floor and books on the sills, a cat lying low on a long, low table. I hear Harvey's nails clicking against the floor. When I turn, he leaps and pushes at my shoulders. His raw, wet tongue scrapes my skin.

“You behave, you bad old pup,” Miss Cloris says, grabbing the dog by his collar and dragging him up the wall of steps, then past the eggshell couch, and shutting a door behind her. She returns, her toes pointing to either side as she walks. When she stands, she hardly comes up to my chin. “Puppy love,” she says, scatting the dog hair off her shirt and fixing her hair bow. Now she takes me on a tour—past the kitchen, which is black, white, and yellow, past the bathroom, which is orange and red, and to the end of the house, which is sky blue and the color of new French fries. The sofas in this room are half the size of any sofa my mother has ever pulled in from the street—more like chairs wide enough to fit two people—and in one of those chairs sits the skinny one and Joey.

“Hey,” he says when he sees me.

“Hey.” I feel myself going hot, my heart going to flutters.

“Sophie Marks,” Miss Cloris says, “meet my friend Miss Helen. Found Sophie in her window and invited her in. Claims she's not an interrupter.”

“That so?” Joey says, and I feel myself going hotter as Joey looks me up and down with that crooked smile on his face and Miss Helen stares at me with eyes so blue I think they're green. Beside the stuffy chair, her wheelchair leans. Beyond the chair and Miss Helen, through a window screen, sits a strange silver thing, like a house on wheels that got stuck on the side of a road. It's shiny as the bottom of a new pan. It has white twinkle lights hung around its rim. The lights are on, though it's the middle of daytime. It looks rooted, like a tree.

“For when we take our cross-country,” Miss Cloris says when she sees what I am staring at, and I nod, not knowing what she means. I look back into the room, where the blue-sky walls are stenciled over with French fry–colored words.

“Our favorite authors,” Miss Cloris explains, as if she's following every movement of my eyes. “Their very best words. We paint them here so we don't forget them.”

“You know Willa?” Miss Helen asks me. Her voice is small, almost a whisper.

“She will soon,” Miss Cloris says.

“I Know Kipling,” I say. “I know Alcott.”

“Well,” Miss Helen says, “that's a good-enough start.” Miss Cloris excuses herself and walks funny-toed to the kitchen. She returns with a tray of lemonades. “The party begins,” she says, giving one tall glass to each of us, and now she tells Joey to read from where he stopped off. She squats into the second stuffy chair, pulling me down with her. Her end of the cushion sinks fast; mine goes higher. Joey takes a swallow of his lemonade, then smashes his cap down harder and rubs an itch off his nose, his lips twisted up in a funny smile. Harvey whines from his locked room upstairs. Everything else is silent.

“ ‘Every conical hill was spotted with smaller cones of juniper, a uniform yellowish green, as the hills were a uniform red,' ” Joey reads. “ ‘The hills thrust out of the ground so thickly that they seemed to be pushing each other, elbowing each other aside, tipping each other over.' ”

“We're in New Mexico,” Miss Helen whispers. “1851.”

“Death Comes for the Archbishop,”
Miss Cloris says, trying to whisper, too, but it comes out strange. “Cather's masterwork.”

I look from one to the other. They both blink. Sit there as if they're expecting something smart to come from me, but I don't know Cather and I've never been to New Mexico and this is 2004, and besides, I have sworn up and down that I am not an interrupter.

“We like going on adventures,” Miss Helen finally says. “Cather takes us along.”

“By way of Joey, our reader,” Miss Cloris says.

“Should I keep going, then?” Joey asks, and Miss Helen and Miss Cloris nod, like they're the same person with the same mind, except they couldn't be more different. Miss Cloris's hair is as puffed up wild as the bow that's stuck inside. Miss Helen's is long and white and soft. I look from one to the other, and Joey reads, and I'm not really listening at first. I'm thinking how strange it is to be sitting here, in another's house, and how the clock is ticking, and how the essay waits, and how my mother will kill me if she finds out, and how sweet and chill is this lemonade.
She will kill me
.
But then,
I think,
I can always outrun my mother
.

“ ‘Under his buckskin riding-coat he wore a black vest and the cravat and collar of a churchman,' ” Joey reads. “ ‘A young priest, at his devotions; and a priest in a thousand, one knew at a glance. His bowed head was not that of an ordinary man,—it was built for the seat of a fine intelligence.'”

“One of literature's finest creations,” Miss Cloris sighs, and just now, from down the hall, slinks the cat with its thick, silver-gray hair and its eyes blue-green as Miss Helen's. Quiet, the big cat leaps and settles into the space between Miss Cloris and me, and Miss Cloris fits her hand to the cat's head without saying a word. The cat's heart hums, but the cat doesn't speak. Joey reads on, and that's all there is, except for my own heart, still beating.

He comes not by the rails, but by the road—up the rubble of the nursery's drive, unsteady on the turf. His gray hair is blowsy in the breeze. Streamers ripple from his handlebar's cuffs. It's a girl's bike he has, with the fattest rubber wheels. Its seat is long and sparkly. The man at the nursery turns when Arlen rides by. He slips the cigarette out from between his lips and blows a smoke puff to the sky.

The ground rattles beneath my feet. “Train coming,” Arlen says. He skids to a stop and dismounts, knocks the kickstand down. He walks the little distance through the forest of tall grass and reaches for my hands, and right when he does, a train roars by, just as he promised.

“Where are we going?” he asks, watching the train disappear.

“Straight to the big station,” I tell him.

“That's the plan?”

I nod. “That's the plan, Arlen. Our first stop.”

“You won't go home?” he asks again.

“No, I won't,” I say.

He looks at me for a while without speaking. “We're talking about some distance.”

The smoker keeps his eyes on us. Arlen gives me a tug, and I'm up. The slightest pressure and my ankle flashes fire. It's hurting worse than it did in the night, but I don't say it, because Arlen is feeling bad enough. I hop-walk to the bike with Arlen's help, then he turns me around and lifts me up. Fits me onto the bike's handlebar. Shows me where to wrap my fists. He steadies me; he steadies the bike.

“Back roads or direct roads?” Arlen asks when I'm fit, fixed and sure, into the handlebar's curve. The kickstand is up; Arlen's behind me.

“Fast as we can get there,” I say.

“You don't mind us getting seen?”

“We've already been seen.” I nod across the distance to the gardener standing there. He blows another smoke puff high and salutes me, like a veteran.

“You're sure?”

“I am.”

I feel Arlen putting everything he has against me—digging down into the pedals with his feet, steering the front wheel straight as he can steer it across the nursery driveway's rubble. I squeeze so hard with my fists that my elbows hurt. I shift this way and that to keep my balance. Neither of us talk—not Arlen, not me—because going forward is taking everything we've got. Finally we make it out onto the street. Arlen stops the forward motion, stands behind me, panting.

“We've got the toughest part out of the way,” he says between hard, hoarse breaths.

“Arlen,” I say, “it just occurred to me. Today's a workday and you're missing work. I'm going to get you in trouble.”

“Taken care of that,” he says, still barely breathing.

“Already?”

“I left a note for my supervisor. Family emergency, I told him.”

I feel my face flushing pink and red. “You're a sweet man, Arlen,” I tell him.

“Something I've been meaning to ask you,” he says.

“Emmy,” I say. “My name. That what you wanted?”

“I suppose.”

I wish I could turn and see him, but that would throw our balance. I wish I could touch my hand to his in a way that would let him know I am grateful.

“Ready?” he asks after saying nothing for a spell, and I feel the bike budge and shift, cut and weave, until at last we find ourselves gliding smoothly. Arlen keeps to the sidewalk wherever he can. On the roads, he pedals straight down the margins. It's still early enough that the traffic is light, and only three cars so far have honked at us crazy.

“You're good at this,” I tell him.

“Holding on is its own talent,” he says.

It's miles to the big station; I know as much. We've maybe gone one mile, and this is not your simple and easy. I try not to think of the hurricane eyes inside of Peter, the hurricane wrath. If I find Baby, Peter will forgive me. If I find Baby, finding Baby will be all that matters.

“You okay up there?” Arlen calls to me.

“Just fine,” I call back. The sun has come up like a squint on the horizon. Most everything we travel by is pink. The glass in the shops. The windshields on cars. The glint flecks in the sidewalks and on the streets. I haven't seen a cop drive by. I've seen no posters on the trees. No one and nothing but me and Arlen searching for Baby. We take a ninety-degree angle hard and wobble our way back to a glide. My elbows hurt more than my fingers.

“How about you? You okay?” I call over my shoulder.

“Time is of the essence,” Arlen says.

There's breeze in my hair, in my heart.
Baby,
I think,
I'm coming for you
, because this is the logic best as I can calculate: whoever took her will disappear as quick as the first train out will take them. They wouldn't leave last night, when the police and their big-nosed dogs were hunting. But they'd leave right now, under dawn's smoky cover, when the police are still stirring into coffee.

“Arlen,” I say, “you are my hero.”

“Least I could do,” he says, puffing.