Beautiful Creatures(54)

Pulling me away from the tree, away from her. I felt her wrist sliding through my fingers.

I couldn’t hold on any longer.

I woke up coughing. I could still feel the windburn on my skin. As if my near-death experience at Ravenwood wasn’t enough, now the dreams were back. It was too much for one night, even for me. My bedroom door was wide open, which was weird, considering I had been locking my door at night lately.

The last thing I needed was Amma planting some crazy voodoo charm on me in my sleep. I was sure I’d closed it.

I stared up at my ceiling. Sleep was not in my future. I sighed and felt around under the bed. I flipped on the old storm lamp next to my bed and pulled the bookmark out from where I’d left off in Snow Crash when I heard something. Footsteps? It was coming from the kitchen, faint, but I still heard it.

Maybe my dad was taking a break from writing. Maybe this would give us a chance to talk. Maybe.

But when I reached the bottom of the stairs, I knew it wasn’t him. The door to his study was shut and light was coming from the crack under the door. It had to be Amma. Just as I ducked under the kitchen doorway, I saw her scampering down the hall toward her room, to the extent that Amma could scamper.

I heard the screen door in the back of the house squeak shut. Someone was coming or going. After everything that had happened tonight, it was an important distinction.

I walked around to the front of the house. There was an old, beat-up pickup truck, a fifties Studebaker, idling by the curb. Amma was leaning in the window talking to the driver. She handed the driver her bag and climbed into the truck. Where was she going in the middle of the night?

I had to follow her. And following the woman who may as well have been my mother when she got into a car at night, with a strange man driving a junker, was a hard thing to do if you didn’t have a car. I had no choice. I had to take the Volvo. It was the car my mom had been driving when she had the accident; that was the first thing I thought every time I saw it.

I slid behind the wheel. It smelled of old paper and Windex, just like it always had.

Driving without the headlights on was trickier than I’d thought it would be, but I could tell the pickup was heading toward Wader’s Creek. Amma must have been going home. The truck turned off Route 9, toward the back country. When it finally slowed down and pulled off to the side of the road, I cut the engine and guided the Volvo onto the shoulder.

Amma opened the door and the interior light went on. I squinted in the darkness. I recognized the driver; it was Carlton Eaton, the postmaster. Why would Amma ask Carlton Eaton for a ride in the middle of the night? I’d never even seen them speak to each other before.

Amma said something to Carlton and shut the door. The truck pulled back onto the road without her. I got out of the car and followed her. Amma was a creature of habit. If something had gotten her so worked up that she was creeping out to the swamp in the middle of the night, I could guess it involved more than one of her usual clients.

She disappeared into the brush, along a gravel path someone had gone to a great deal of trouble to make. She walked along the path in the dark, the gravel crunching under her feet. I walked in the grass beside the path to avoid that same crunching sound, which would’ve given me away for sure. I told myself it was because I wanted to see why Amma was sneaking home in the middle of the night, but mostly I was scared she would catch me following her.

It was easy to see how Wader’s Creek got its name; you actually had to wade through black water ponds to get there, at least the way Amma was taking us. If there hadn’t been a full moon, I’d have broken my neck trying to follow her through the maze of moss-covered oaks and scrub brush. We were close to the water. I could feel the swamp in the air, hot and sticky like a second skin.

The edge of the swamp was lined with flat wooden platforms made from cypress logs tied together with rope, poor man’s ferries. They were lined up along the bank like taxis waiting to carry people across the water. I could see Amma in the moonlight, balanced expertly atop one of the platforms, pushing out from the bank with a long stick she used like an oar to skate it across to the other side.

I hadn’t been to Amma’s house in years, but I would’ve remembered this. We must have come another way back then, but it was impossible to tell in the dark. The one thing I could see was how rotted the logs on the platforms were; each one looked as unstable as the next. So I just picked one.

Maneuvering the platform was a lot harder than Amma made it look. Every few minutes, there was a splash, when a gator’s tail hit the water as it slid into the swamp. I was glad I hadn’t considered wading across.

I pushed into the floor of the swamp with my own long stick one last time, and the edge of the platform hit the bank. When I stepped onto the sand, I could see Amma’s house, small and modest, with a single light in the window. The window frames were painted the same shade of haint blue as the ones at Wate’s Landing. The house was made of cypress, like it was part of the swamp itself.

There was something else, something in the air. Strong and overpowering, like the lemons and rosemary. And just as unlikely, for two reasons. Confederate jasmine doesn’t flower in the fall, only in the spring, and it doesn’t grow in the swamp. Yet, there it was. The smell was unmistakable. There was something impossible about it, like everything else about this night.

I watched the house. Nothing. Maybe she had just decided to go home. Maybe my dad knew she was leaving, and I was wandering around in the middle of the night, risking being eaten by gators for nothing.