The Light Pirate(48)
Inside, they drip on the linoleum just after the automatic doors and look out over the empty aisles. It feels like the store is all theirs. Phyllis takes a cart and they begin to roam, rolling past shelves picked clean. The store has been so combed over it takes real work to find the things they’re looking for. Wanda stands on the end of the cart while Phyllis steers, her arms bent back to grip the edge like the figurehead of a ship braced across the bow.
They’re plundering what remains of the Bic lighters—Phyllis sweeps all six five-packs into the cart—when a man and two children appear at the end of the aisle. Wanda looks up and sees two sets of identical blue eyes, pale as stovetop flames. The twins. Corey leers at her. But what can he do here under the fluorescent lights, Phyllis barely two feet away? He can’t hurt her, surely he can’t, but she’s scared anyway. “Hurry up,” their father barks, already in the next aisle. It sounds like an order. Brie pulls Corey on, averting her eyes from Wanda. “Come on,” she mutters to him. He resists for just a second, then follows. Wanda steps down off the cart. Being here no longer feels fun.
“Can we go?” she asks. Phyllis hasn’t gotten everything on her list yet, but she reads Wanda’s face and leads her to the checkout line without asking why.
Driving home, Phyllis asks, “Do you wanna tell me what that was about?”
“Those kids,” she mumbles, before there’s time to pretend. It feels good to tell Phyllis the truth. Corey isn’t quite so terrifying here in the car.
“Kids can be cruel,” Phyllis says after a moment. She looks at Wanda out of the corner of her eye. “What did they do to you?”
Wanda tells her. She’s never said any of it out loud before. She tells her everything, about breaking Kirby’s rules, riding to the Edge, about the four of them finding her, what they did, what they said, and finally, she tells Phyllis about that strange feeling that came over her when she was underwater, so vivid she’ll never forget it. “I was so scared,” she finishes. “And then after, I didn’t know how to tell it.”
She isn’t sure what’s happening when Phyllis pulls the car over onto the shoulder and puts it in park. Turning to Wanda, she brushes a frizz of damp hair away from her eyes and lets her hand linger on the side of Wanda’s face.
“Thank you for telling me,” she says. “I bet that was hard to talk about.” She doesn’t say anything else, just goes on looking at Wanda, stroking her cheek with her thumb, waiting, as if she knows something Wanda doesn’t. And she does. Wanda begins to sob into the space that Phyllis has made for her, inside the cool cocoon of the car, the humid jungle beating down on them, comforting in its tenacity. She sobs so hard it feels like her ribs are cracking. Phyllis gathers her up, as if she’s known all along that something needed to come out, and she squeezes her tight and she says, “That’s good. That’s a good cry.”
After Wanda is done, they start driving again, the rain still coming down as hard as ever, sluicing across the windshield in waves. “I’m gonna miss you,” Phyllis says. “You’re my favorite, you know.”
When she gets home, she tells Kirby she doesn’t want to go. He sits down with her at the kitchen table and explains that without any work, he can’t stay in Rudder. He says he thought she understood. And she did. She does. She just…doesn’t want to leave Phyllis all alone here. She doesn’t want to leave this house. She doesn’t want to leave the land Phyllis has taught her to see and love and tend.
“Phyllis will be all right,” Kirby says.
“I don’t want to go,” she insists again.
“Me neither,” Kirby replies with a sigh. “But we can’t stay. We just can’t.”
“Why? Phyllis isn’t going.”
“That’s true. But Phyllis is…well, a survivalist.” Wanda wants to know what that means exactly. Why can’t they be survivalists, too? “It means she’s been getting ready for years, prepping,” Kirby tells her. “Preparing.”
“We’re not ready?”
Kirby shakes his head. “We are not.” He looks so sad that Wanda, even in her fury at being forced to leave, reaches out to hug him. “I’m sorry,” he says, his voice catching. “I should have done it different.”
Chapter 45
Late at night, when the rain has stopped and both his children are sleeping, Kirby looks at the emails on his phone that have trickled in these past few weeks: a half dozen job offers stare back at him, in a half dozen places. Unanswered. They’ll keep. He puts down his phone and goes out onto the porch to be in the dark for a while.
The water drips off the gutters and makes soft kissing noises against the wet earth. He will choose a new job, find a new home for himself and Wanda, a place Lucas can visit. He will pack up this life and move to another—just not yet. It’s hard leaving this place, and Wanda isn’t making it any easier. He never imagined that he’d move. Flip is here, running through the yard, playing board games in the living room, standing on a chair to peek into a bird’s nest under the porch’s eaves. And Frida is here, reaching for Kirby in their bed after an argument, standing barefoot in the kitchen, asking him what he thinks the baby will be like. Who she’ll become. They’re all still here. Even a younger Lucas, still twelve, bratty and hardworking and eager for love. How can he leave them behind? How can he leave the memory of that morning, covering the windows in the dark, the boys handing up the wood, Frida sleeping naked in the heat, just a few inches away on the other side of the wall? Is it possible he can take these ghosts with him? That morning is something he must keep, however sharp or bitter it feels to carry. He must keep it at all costs.