The Book of Lost Friends(27)

Leaning in, I go for eye contact. “What’s your name? Do you live around here?”

He nods.

“Are you lost?”

He shakes his head.

“Do you need help?”

Another nonverbal no.

“All right then, I want you to look at me now.” He flutters a glance up, then away again. I do the teacher thing with two fingers to my eyeballs, then pointed toward his. We’re locked in. “You know how to get home from here?”

His gaze holds fast to mine, his head moving uncertainly up and down. He’s like a stray kitten in a corner, trying to figure out what he has to do to get away from me.

“Is it very far?”

He points vaguely toward the ramshackle cluster of houses on the other side of the field. “I want you to get on your bike and go right there. And stay there, because there’s a storm coming, and I don’t want you to get hit by lightning or anything like that, okay?”

He visibly deflates, displeased. He had other plans. I shudder to think of what they were.

“I’m a teacher and kids have to do what teachers say, right?” No answer. “What’s your name?”

“Tobiashh.”

“Tobias? Well, that’s a great name. Good to make your acquaintance, Tobias.” I offer a hand, and he’s willing to shake, but he giggles and quickly withdraws, tucking the arm behind his back. “Tobias, you are a very brave, and might I add incredibly handsome, little Spider-Man, and I would hate to see you drowned in a rainstorm, or eaten by an alligator.” His eyebrows rise, then fall, rise again, then sort of bounce around his little forehead. “And thank you for saving me from the alligator, but I don’t want you to ever, ever, ever do that with any alligator, ever again, anywhere. Are we clear on that?”

He pulls his bottom lip between his eye teeth—the middle ones are missing—then he licks a smear of dirt or barbecue sauce.

“Promise me now. And remember, superheroes always keep their promises. Spider-Man, especially. Spider-Man never breaks a promise. And not to a teacher, for sure.”

He likes this superhero thing. The rounded shoulders straighten. He nods. “?’Kay.”

“All right. You go on home. Remember, you promised.”

Turning the bike toward town, he drapes one knee clumsily over the too-high bar and looks back at me. “What your name?”

“Miss Silva.”

He grins, and I wish for a second that I had an elementary teaching certificate.

“Miss Seeba,” he says. In a flash, he is gone, the bike wiggling its way down the levee until it’s moving fast enough to draw a straight path.

I do a quick alligator check before turning and striding off in the direction from whence I came. No more daydreaming for me. Out here, paying attention is a matter of survival.

Even though I’m watchful on my way back, I almost miss the path to the judge’s old house a second time. A row of wildly overgrown crape myrtles shields the property from the lane. Thick with sucker shoots, marauding grapevine, and copious amounts of what looks like poison ivy, it’s almost indistinguishable from the natural landscape, save for the empty hulls of the summer’s blooms protruding like burned-out Christmas lights.

Between the roots, moss grows in a jigsaw puzzle of green, rectangular shapes. I scrape one with my shoe and uncover the paving stone of a long-ago footpath or driveway. Broken myrtle branches testify to the fact that someone has created a narrow passage through the bowed trunks.

My mind zips back to a six-month stint of living in Mississippi with my mom and her boyfriend at the time, who didn’t much care for kids. As an escape, my stuffed animals and I made a secret fort among the crape myrtles of a beautiful, flower-laden estate nearby. Slipping through the gap now feels completely natural, but the garden on the other side, while unkempt, is on a much more epic scale.

Yawning live oaks, tumbledown benches, stately pecan trees, and the remains of winding brick walls provide unorthodox trellises for enormous runs of old-fashioned climbing roses. Here and there, mildew-speckled marble pillars lift their crowns above the sea of greenery, standing like dispossessed royalty, frozen in time. No one has tended this place for a very long while, yet it is beautiful even now, peaceful, despite the wind kicking up.

A ghostly white hand reaches toward my foot as I turn a corner, and I do an involuntary cat-leap before realizing the severed limb belongs to a toppled one-armed cherub. It lounges nearby on a hammock of tangled trumpet vines, its stone eyes fixed toward heaven with eternal longing. I’m momentarily tempted to rescue it, and then I remember Councilman Walker’s story about moving Miss Retta’s garden saint to the flower bed at my house. The cherub is undoubtedly more than I can lift. Maybe he’s comfortable there, I think. It’s a pretty nice view.

I follow the path over an arched brick bridge, where rainbow-colored fish dart about the shallows below. I’m careful, working my way through the knee-high overgrowth on the other side. Alligators, for one thing. And poison ivy.

The house comes into view around the last bend. I pass a crumbling gateway, and I’m in a yard that’s freshly mown, the grass thick and lush and waterlogged from the recent rain. The rumbling sky reminds me that there’s more moisture on the way and I’d better not dally. If I had my druthers, I’d stand here and take it all in awhile, soaking up ambiance.