The Light Pirate(51)
Chapter 46
Lucas is ready to leave by the beginning of August. Wanda mopes in the background as he packs his car, flitting around the yard with the black kitten fastened to her shoulder, pretending not to care. He can feel her gaze every time he comes outside with another load, staring down from the live oaks that edge the yard or peeking through the slats of the porch. By now, the kitten’s eyes are open and they track his movements as well. Two pairs of eyes, asking him not to go.
Their pleas are impossible to ignore. Even as he’s filling his car and emptying his room, he wonders if he should stay. A few more days. A week. Another month. Until Kirby finds a new job. Until Wanda’s eleventh birthday. The bargaining goes on. Eventually, Kirby makes it easy: he tells his son he accepted a job offer with a contractor based in Northern California, and all the tightly wound uncertainty about when he might see them again unspools. They’ll be close. He finishes packing up the car. It’s done. It’s decided. He’s ready.
He leaves the next morning. He hugs Kirby, then Wanda. Steam rises from the wet earth as the sun warms last night’s rain. The driveway, a mud pit now, sucks at their shoes when they’re still and spatters on their ankles when they move. The kitten, clawing up and down Wanda’s torso like it’s the trunk of a tree, stops moving long enough for Lucas to rub its tiny forehead with one finger. “Bye, little guy,” he says, and it hisses at him.
“It’s a she,” Wanda says. “Her name is Blackbeard.”
“Blackbeard,” Lucas repeats. He tries for another pat and the kitten swipes at him, needlelike claws extended. He snatches his hand away, a little too slow. “Bloodthirsty, huh.”
“No,” Wanda says, exasperated. “She’s a wild animal.”
He examines the scratch—a thin red line, about the depth of a paper cut—and shrugs. He’s willing to cede the point. Kirby tells him to drive safe, and all three of them assure one another that they’ll be together again soon. Looking back at them in his rearview mirror just before he turns onto the road, Lucas believes that it’s true.
Chapter 47
“Where will you go?” Phyllis asks. The porch light glows between them, a cloud of gnats clustering around it. Kirby waits while Wanda gathers her things inside. Conversation has never come easily between him and Phyllis, but he’ll miss her. And Wanda will be bereft without her. He tries not to think about that now.
“Mendocino,” he replies. “Next week.”
“That soon,” she says, and Kirby understands this to mean that she’ll miss them also.
“It’s time.”
“I know.” She pats his arm and gives him a smile. “It’s good. You’ll be happy there. The redwoods. They’ll suit you.”
Driving home in the dark, Wanda and Blackbeard beside him, he can hear the swish of water against his tires. In the driveway, it crests his boots. Wanda splashes up the steps in front of him, the kitten clinging to her shirt, her feet wet and wrinkled and bare. “The whole yard is a puddle,” she announces from the top step, fiddling with the door. It sticks to the frame when it’s particularly humid, which is to say, always. He reaches over her to give it a thump with his fist on the top left corner. It gives, and she stumbles inside.
“One big puddle,” he agrees. Kirby looks out at the yard from the top step and watches the water glisten, the stars reflecting off the surface like a second sky, then Wanda flicks the kitchen light on and he goes in without noticing that the sky is in fact dark and overcast, that the water does not reflect light but rather is the source of it.
The next day, when Wanda asks if she can go to Phyllis’s again, he knows he should say yes. There’s plenty for him to do here. It’s time to pack, time to choose what stays and what goes. He’s even beginning to look forward to it. He imagines them arriving on the doorstep of a house that means nothing, surrounded by trees so tall he has to lean back to see the tops. A house that is fresh, scraped clean of memories. It feels good to imagine them in a house like that. Hard, but good. It’s time to set all of that in motion.
Instead, he says no. It’s selfish, but he can’t bear to be alone today, the rain already slapping against the windows. He wants her near. Searching for a reason, a thing for them to do together, he says, “We could go to the movies. A matinee.” He can’t recall the last time he took her to the movie theater. She looks at him, dubious.
“A movie?”
“Yeah, a movie. Popcorn, candy. It’ll be fun.”
“I don’t think those are open anymore,” she says.
“Of course they are.”
In fact, many are closed. But Kirby is too attached to the idea to give up, and so he keeps calling and calling until he finds one an hour west that is playing one matinee today. It’s rated R, but he’s too delighted to care much about whether it’s appropriate for Wanda. “You’ll cover your eyes during the grown-up parts,” he tells her.
At the theater, the same man sells them their tickets and their snacks. He raises an eyebrow at Wanda but doesn’t say anything. Inside, they are the only ones. As it happens, the film is full of sex and gore and it’s well over two hours long. During a tense moment, Wanda drops half a box of Skittles on the floor, a cascade that rattles down the aisles, but there is no one to be bothered. She falls asleep somewhere close to the end. Afterward, they play the claw game in the empty lobby. Kirby supplies quarter after quarter as she fails to grasp hold of the plush pink elephant tucked among the plastic eggs filled with action figures.