Leaving Time(116)

The superstition worked, I guess, because we’ve never had a fire in this house. But that dusty old ladder is still underneath my bedroom window, having served as a shelf for my books, a rack for my shoes, a table for my knapsack—but never as a means of escape. Until now.

This time, though, I leave a note for my grandmother. I will stop, I promise. But you have to give me one last chance to say good-bye. I promise I’ll be back in time for dinner tomorrow.

I open the window and hook the ladder into place. It doesn’t seem sturdy enough to hold my weight, and I think about how ridiculous it would be if you were trying to survive a house fire but wound up killing yourself instead in a fall.

The ladder gets me only to the sloped roof over the garage, which really isn’t a help at all. But by now I’m quite the escape artist, so I inch myself over the edge and hook my fingers into the rain gutter. From there, it’s only a drop of about five feet to the ground.

My bike is where I left it, balanced against the front porch railing. I hop on and start pedaling.

Riding is different, in the middle of the night. I move like the wind; I feel invisible. The streets are damp because it’s been raining, and the pavement shines everywhere but the trail left by my bike tires. The zooming taillights of cars remind me of sparklers I used to play with on the Fourth of July: how the glow hung in the darkness, how you could wave your arms and paint an alphabet of light. I navigate by feel, because I can’t read the signs, and before I know it, I’m in downtown Boone at the bar beneath Serenity’s apartment.

It’s hopping. Instead of a token few drunks, there are girls squeezed into Spandex dresses, hanging on the biceps of bikers; there are skinny dudes leaning against the brick wall to have a smoke between shots. The noise from the jukebox spills into the street, and I hear someone urging Chug! Chug! Chug! “Hey, baby,” a guy slurs. “Can I buy you a drink?”

“I’m thirteen,” I say.

“I’m Raoul.”

I duck my head and push past him, dragging my bike into the entryway to Serenity’s house. I lug it up the stairs and into her foyer again, careful not to upset the table this time. But before I can knock on the door softly—I mean, it’s 2:00 A.M.—it opens.

“You couldn’t sleep, either, sugar?” Serenity says.

“How did you know I was here?”

“You don’t exactly float up the stairs like a fairy when you’re dragging that damn thing around.” She falls back so that I can step into her apartment. It looks the way I remember it from the first time I came here. When I still believed that finding my mother was what I wanted most in the world.

“I’m surprised your grandmother let you come here this late,” Serenity says.

“I didn’t give her a choice.” I sink down on the couch, and she sits beside me. “This so sucks,” I say.

She doesn’t pretend to misunderstand me. “Well, don’t jump to conclusions just yet. Virgil says—”

“Fuck Virgil,” I interrupt. “Whatever Virgil says won’t bring her back to life. Do the math. If you tell your husband you’re pregnant with another guy’s kid, he isn’t going to throw you a baby shower.”

I’ve tried, believe me, but I can’t summon up hate for my father—only pity, really, a dull ache. If my dad was the one who killed my mom, I don’t think he’ll wind up going to trial. He’s institutionalized already; no prison is going to be more punishing than the confines of his own mind. It just means exactly what my grandmother said—she’s the only family I really have left.

I know it’s my fault. I know I’m the one who asked Serenity to help me find my mother; who got Virgil on board. This is what curiosity gets you. You might live on top of the biggest toxic waste dump on the planet, but if you never dig, then all you ever know is that your grass is green and your garden is lush.

“People don’t realize how hard it is,” she says. “When my clients used to come to me, asking to talk to Uncle Sol or their beloved grandma, all they were focusing on was the hello, the chance to say what they didn’t say when the person was alive. But when you open a door, you have to close it behind you. You might say hello, but you also wind up saying good-bye.”

I face her. “I wasn’t asleep. When you and Virgil were talking, in the car? I heard everything you said.”

Serenity freezes. “Well, then,” she says. “I guess you know I’m a fraud.”

“You aren’t, though. You found that necklace. And the wallet.”

She shakes her head. “I just happened to be in the right place at the right time.”

I think about this for a moment. “But isn’t that what being psychic is?”

I can tell that she never thought about it that way. One man’s coincidence is another’s connection. Does it matter if it’s gut feeling, like Virgil says, or psychic intuition, if you still get what you’re searching for?

She pulls a blanket up from the floor to cover her feet, and casts it wide so it will cover me, too. “Maybe,” she concedes. “Still, it’s nothing like what it used to be. Other people’s thoughts—they just were suddenly there in my head. Sometimes the connection was crystal clear, and sometimes it was like being on a cell phone in the mountains, where you only catch every third word. But it was more than stumbling over something shiny in the grass.”