The Prayer Box, page 19
Tears flooded the spaces where anger had been. “Okay, baby,” I whispered, grabbing a handful of silverware and bringing it back to the table, then leaning over J.T. to press a kiss into his hair.
“It looks good,” he whispered, afraid to trouble the waters too much. “I like pancakes. A lot. Even better than doughnuts. A lot better.”
Laughter pushed in over the tears. J.T. and I talked about Zago Wars and science class while we ate pancakes, undercooked hash browns, and perfect beignets. Afterward, we cleaned up and washed the dishes together. The only thing missing was Zoey.
There was a show about sea turtles on one of the cable channels. We watched it together, J.T.’s sharp shoulder blades pressing into me as I rested my chin on his head and strummed his hair. He mentioned that Mr. Chastain had brochures for turtle camp in his classroom. I didn’t say no when he asked if he could go.
“We’ll see. I hope so,” I said instead. I was starting to see a future here . . . if I could get some money together . . . maybe buy some used tools of my own. . . .
The evening was dimming outside when headlights pressed through the windows. I stood, and J.T. fell limp against the sofa. I hadn’t realized he was asleep.
A truck was turning in to the parking pad in front of the cottage when I opened the door. In the glare of the headlights, it was impossible to tell for sure, but it didn’t look like Rowdy’s Jeep. I shielded my eyes as the passenger door opened and Zoey slid out. Arms hugged tight, head tucked forward, she walked toward the house, underdressed for the cool evening air in shorts, sandals, and a T-shirt.
“Zoey, where were you?” I squinted toward the vehicle again. Something about it seemed familiar, but in the dark it was hard to tell. “Whose truck is that?”
“I went out w-walking.” Her teeth chattered over the words.
“Walking?” The pickup driver cut the headlights, and the area in front of the house fell into the darkness. “For three hours?”
“I walked down to the p-p-pier.” She stopped beside me, her body folding in on itself, her voice thick with tears.
“That’s miles from here.”
“I wanted to s-see if Rowdy was there . . . with . . . with somebody else. I wanted to check, okay?” A violent shudder shook her body, and her teeth rattled so hard that I winced. It was cool out here, but not that cold.
“Oh, Zoey,” I soothed. It was the kind of stupid thing I would’ve done—go running around town, checking up on some guy who, in the end, would turn out to not be worth the effort. “Zoey . . .” I reached out to lay a hand on her hair. She pulled away, the porch light sliding over fresh red welts dotting her skin. “You’re eaten up with mosquito bites.”
“I’m okay.” She started up the steps, then paused and turned. “Thanks for the ride, Mr. Chastain.”
“Sure. No problem.” I recognized the voice, and now I knew why the truck was familiar. It was Paul’s. He turned off the engine and got out as Zoey crossed the porch. “Next time, either don’t go so far or start out earlier. You shouldn’t be out walking by yourself at dark.”
“Okay,” Zoey muttered, then went into the house.
I walked down the porch steps as Paul came up the path.
“Sounds like there’s trouble in paradise,” he said, his tone offering a listening ear. “She didn’t tell me much, but you work around kids awhile, you learn to read between the lines. I found her walking along the side of the highway, about two miles down.”
I sank onto the porch step without asking if he wanted to stay and talk. “I don’t know what she was thinking. She was upset when she came home, but I had no idea she’d . . . do anything like that. Lately, I don’t know what’s in her mind from one minute to the next, and it doesn’t matter what I say to her, it’s the wrong thing. It’s like . . . she’s not even the same person she was a couple months ago.”
“Welcome to the teenage years.” Paul’s comment was light but sympathetic. He took a seat next to me on the step. “They are their own creatures. You have to think of it like Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Eventually the real Zoey will defeat the invaders—you just have to keep yourself from killing the host organism while you’re waiting.”
His geeky scientific explanation pulled a miserable smile from me. “But she’s not like that. She’s always been . . . perfect. And to be honest, she hasn’t had the perfect mom. But she’s always kept it together. She’s never done anything like this.” She couldn’t have afforded to, I knew. If she’d let things fall apart, there would have been no one to pick up the pieces. Even before Trammel, I was always shuffling the kids here and there so I could ride in some horse event, make my name in the business, make a living, chase after some guy I thought would love me, love us, fill the gaps in our lives. All things considered, Zoey had done an amazing job of growing up . . . until now.
Paul shoulder-bumped me, a friendly, familiar gesture that felt strangely comforting. “Like I said, body snatchers.”
A breeze swirled across the porch, fanning the crape myrtles and chasing off the mosquitoes. It looked like the storm might blow over again. “I just . . . I worry that this last move . . . maybe it’s too much for her, you know? We didn’t come here under the best of circumstances.” Loose strands of hair teased my lips, and I gathered them with my fingers, holding a ponytail and resting my head against my wrist. I knew I was telling him more than I should. “I’m sorry. You really don’t need to hear all of that. Anyway, thanks for bringing her home.” Letting go of my hair, I shifted toward my feet.
“I don’t mind.” Paul didn’t move, just stayed where he was, his elbows comfortably balanced on his knees. “It’s my grandmother’s domino night at the church. I usually just go fish or whatever until it’s time to pick her up. She can’t drive anymore, but you wheel her up to the table and she can play a mean game of chicken foot or forty-two. It’s cutthroat stuff. If she loses, she’s mad for days, and I’ll hear all about who she suspected of cheating on the draw. I figure it’s good for her. It takes her mind off missing Grandpa.” He chuckled, and the sweetness of that picture slipped over me—Paul driving his grandmother to the church and wheeling her up to the domino table.
I found myself wanting to etch out more scenes, fill in the colors and the shapes of Paul Chastain. “It’s good that you’re there for her. It must help a lot.”
“Well, there’s only so much you can do for someone in that situation.” He paused to rub crusts of dirt off his fingers. “A lot of it, you just have to work through on your own—figure out what life’s going to look like after you lose someone. Find a new normal. It’s hard after you’ve been together a long time.”
“That sounds like experience talking.” I was probing, but I felt the need to understand. When you’re caught up in your own issues, you forget that other people’s lives turn blind corners too, and they figure out how to move past it. Paul seemed so upbeat all the time. How did he manage that?
“My wife died three years ago after a lot of years and a lot of doctors—myeloid leukemia. She’d had it when she was a kid and again in medical school, so we always knew it was a possibility.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.” A cold lump traveled through my chest and rested somewhere in my stomach. I threaded my arms around it, trying to soothe the feeling away. “I didn’t mean to bring up something so . . . painful.”
Paul glanced sideways, his lips curving into a patient smile, barely readable in the dim porch light. “I wouldn’t have said anything if it were a problem to talk about. We crammed a lot into the eight years we had. We didn’t come up with a cure for cancer, but we saw a lot of places, looked at a lot of alternative therapies. That’s one of the things I learned from Julia—the most important thing, I think. You can’t run from your past. You have to take it for what it is and realize that it’s part of you. The disease was part of who she was, but she wasn’t going to let it control her. She made it the thing that reminded us we didn’t have time to waste. Some of the best things in your life come out of the worst. It’ll be that way for Zoey, too. Just give her time. She’s a smart young lady. She’s just trying to figure out who to be.”
“I hope so. I’m worried that she’ll do something like this while I’m gone to work.” My mind was spinning ahead. “I can’t watch her 24-7.”
“So you found a job. J.T. mentioned that you’d been looking for one.” I gave him a surprised look, and he added, “Well, it was in reference to turtle camp. He saw the brochure in class, and he was talking about whether or not you’d still be here during nesting season. He said it hinged on finding employment.”
“I’m working down in Hatteras Village right now, doing water-damage repair and drywall at Sandy’s Seashell Shop. I just sort of . . . stumbled into it, actually. Right place. Right time. I’ve had some experience with that kind of thing.”
“I know the Seashell Shop crowd. They’re good people.” Paul didn’t seem at all surprised that I was doing drywall work, nor did he question whether I could actually handle the job. “And if you’re open to doing light carpentry and whatnot, I know quite a few older folks who could use some help with that sort of thing. For some of them, it’s as simple as replacing lightbulbs or climbing a ladder to take down window screens or fixing storm damage on hurricane shutters and brackets. Actually, the neighbor who’s got my tall ladder right now shouldn’t be climbing it, if you want to know the truth. Anyway, if you’re interested, let me know. I’ll spread your name around.”
“Thanks,” I said, and I had that feeling again. The feeling that, against the odds, all of this might work out after all.
Overhead, the clouds parted, this storm moving on like the last one. Paul pointed toward the blanket of night sky in the gap. “North Star,” he said quietly, and I tried to follow the trajectory of his finger.
“Which one?” I thought of the compass rose in the Hatteras library and my desperate wish that I could finally find true north in life.
“Right there.” He leaned closer to me, baby-fine razor stubble ruffling my hair. “In the summertime, you can just find the Big Dipper and go straight up from the side of the bowl, but in the wintertime, it’s down too low—behind the trees. This time of the year, you need to look for Cassiopeia. See the sort of sideways W right there?” He traced it with his finger, and I followed along.
“Oh, okay. Yes, I see it.”
“Now track from the middle of the W. Down this way, see?” His hand moved, his arm brushing my shoulder. “And there’s Polaris, the North Star. It always sits over the North Pole. That’s why sailors used it to navigate. The rest of the constellations around it—the Big Dipper, Cassiopeia—they’re transpolar. They move around as the months of the year change, but the North Star never moves. It’s constant.”
I saw it then. The North Star. True north. Not so impossible to find, once someone showed you where to look.
CHAPTER 17
THE FLASH OF LIGHT WOKE ME. I dragged my head off the pillow, groaning. After three days of working in Iola’s house and going to the Seashell Shop, every muscle in my body ached. Over-the-counter ibuprofen was no match for it, but strangely enough, the pain felt good. It was evidence of something. A life. A completely new, wide-awake life.
Thunder rattled the cottage, and I sat upright, blinking the room into focus. In the glow from the hallway night-light, the furniture took on strange shapes. I watched the reflections in the arched dresser mirror as water dripped from the tin roof, playing a soft melody in the overgrown gardens.
It was a good thing that Paul had come by to do the mowing last evening and cleaned the gutters while he was here. He’d brought crawfish, held it forward in a bucket when he’d knocked on the door, then smiled at me and lifted an eyebrow. “I haven’t got time to cook this stuff tonight if I’m gonna get the mowing done before the storms come in.”
“Been seining again?” I teased, smoothing a hand over the hair flying out of my ponytail. I was a mess, sawdust all over me and bits of insulation in my hair from my slowly progressing wall rebuild at Sandy’s. Paul didn’t seem to notice.
“Well, actually these came from the fish market. I brought Mrs. Meeks some plants for her water garden, and she wouldn’t let me out the door until I took something with me.”
J.T. jumped up from the sofa, leaving his homework behind to see what was in the bucket. He’d been spending a lot of time in the living room the last couple days. Since Zoey’s crazy walk to the pier, she’d taken over J.T.’s room and his video game—a distraction, I guessed. She was heartbroken that Rowdy seemed to have dumped her completely, which meant that her new crowd of school friends had ditched her too.
J.T. peeked into the bucket. “Whoa, awesome! Are those for us?”
“Yeah, if you can talk your mama into getting out a boiling pot, there’s some good eatin’ in here.” Paul set it on the ground so J.T. could investigate further. “J.T., you think you can run over to Bink’s and pick up the stuff for a crawfish boil if I give you some money? Just ask Geneva what you need. She’ll help you out.” Paul glanced at me then. “That is, if you guys haven’t eaten yet?”
A few minutes later, J.T. was bolting through the yard with twenty dollars to buy the necessities. I didn’t argue. The longer we were here, the more relaxed I felt about it. I’d even let J.T. go to the church ice cream party with kids his age. Fairhope was starting to feel like home now. Our old lives seemed a million miles away.
I was glad that Paul had come by with the crawfish. Zoey had even emerged from the bedroom for a little while. It was a nice evening, just peaceful. I’d gone to bed feeling good about things, hoping the storms would pass over again.
Now the thunder and lightning outside proved that they hadn’t. The rain thickened to a downpour, quickening my thoughts and stealing them away from the crawfish boil and the memory of Paul’s lawn mower whirling through the yard. A waterfall was rushing off the eaves between my bedroom and the front porch.
The clock on the nightstand read 1 a.m. How long had it been raining? How much water? I’d gone to bed early, taking a shower and falling onto the mattress just after Paul left at nine.
The buckets in Iola’s house. What if they had filled up, spilled over?
My body creaked and groaned in harmony with the cottage floorboards as I stood and moved to the window. A flash of lightning illuminated the towering white house next door, the blowing trees, the water running off the turret roof in a sheet, shimmering and strangely beautiful, diaphanous like the veil tumbling from the conical hat of a fairy-tale princess. If only a knight in shining armor would ride in on a white horse and empty the drip buckets. I really didn’t want to go over there in the dark, in the rain, with lightning streaking and the smell of the sea close in the air, but there was no prince to rescue the bucket-emptying handywoman. No suave Rhett Butler to kiss me on the forehead and say, Return to bed, Scarlett, dah-ling. That storm is no place for a lady.
The cold crept up my legs, and I shivered as I slipped on sweats, tennis shoes, and the one jacket I’d brought from Texas, then grabbed J.T.’s mini lantern from the kitchen table, along with the keys. I didn’t have an umbrella, but thanks to Brother Guilbeau, there were plenty of trash bags, so I ripped a peephole in one and pulled it over my head. The picture was funny even at one in the morning, if you didn’t think about the possibility of being struck by lightning or flattened by a falling tree branch and later found dead, looking like a giant, armless SpongeBob SquarePants.
The rain soaked me from the knees down on the trip through the grass, and water ran in rivers from my new Halloween costume as I dashed onto the porch and skinned off the bag, tucking it behind a rocking chair. Kicking off my soggy shoes and socks, I hunched against the blowing mist, grumbling at the old lock’s stubbornness and the dim light of the mini lantern.
When I finally turned the knob, the door blew open, dragging me with it. I stumbled over the threshold and landed on Iola’s welcome mat, the lantern skittering across the floor and blinking out. Behind me, the wind snatched the trash bag, filled it, and animated it so that it sailed into the hallway on its own power. The door rebounded from the wall and smacked my arm before I crawled out of the way, gasping and shuddering, staring in morbid fascination as the bag floated in the dim light from the lamp in the front room. The white plastic apparition seemed to hover for a moment between the hallways and the grand staircase before the front door finally swung shut on its own. Lightning flashed outside, the double-globe lamp in the front room flickered and died, and I scrambled to my feet. Darkness enveloped me, and in spite of all the time I’d spent here, I didn’t feel welcome now. The house that had seemed such a comfort by day was anything but at night.
“Please, please, please come back on.” The power on the island wasn’t the most reliable right now. The infrastructure wasn’t back up to par. “Any chance you’ve got some flashlights, like, right around here . . . ummm . . . Iola?”
A low growl answered from somewhere downstairs, and my stomach fell through the floor. “Kitty?” I whispered into the inky blackness. “It’s just me. Here, kitty, kitty, kitty . . .”
The cat replied with a mew, friendlier this time, almost desperate. I caught a breath. “Do you know where your mommy keeps the flashlights?”
Something tickled my ankle, and I squealed. My voice echoed up the stairway, darting randomly through the darkness on bat wings. The cat had never come that close to me before. Out of reflex, I held my arms out and felt the air around me . . . just to make sure it wasn’t something . . . bigger.
The lamp blinked on. “Oh, thank you,” I murmured. “Thank-you-thank-you-thank-you-thank-you.”
The cat was less than a foot away, looking up at me. I watched his pupils contract in the flood of light. I could have touched him. The bitten-off ear twitched as thunder rumbled. Then he mewed, his amber eyes beseeching, the ear lowering and his head ducking into his body.
