Hit the Ground Running Read online

  They wolfed down their breakfasts. Dee got the two-egg special for the price ($3.25) and the protein. Eddie immediately tore the bacon smile off his Kiddie Waffle-D-Light and rolled its two strawberry eyes to the side, hacking into the plain waffle with exaggerated dignity.

  A missing child stared up at Dee from Eddie’s milk carton. If you have any information as to the whereabouts of this child… Dee looked at the two pictures: on the left, the image of the child when she went missing (four years old, innocent, big school-picture smile, dimple in her pudgy left cheek, tiny baby teeth); on the right, an artist’s reconstruction of what she might look like today, as a still-missing, less-happy twelve-year-old. Dee wondered what the whole story was, then got scared and stopped wondering. She looked away, hoping that the girl was safe.

  Did they do that for missing fathers too? Dee imagined her dad’s face on the side of a milk carton. If you have any information about this hopeless, clueless man, please contact his wandering children…

  “C’mon, Eddie. We should get going. Got to get some gas.”

  Dee filled the tank, leaning on the pump, anxiously imagining money clicking rhythmically out of her stash.

  She sniffed an acrid burning smell and prayed it wasn’t their car. It had been making a distinct, unusual sound ever since the Grand Canyon. An intermittent grrrrgrrrgrrr sound, like the grinding of automotive teeth.

  Dee saw a pay phone and scrabbled in the bottom of her backpack, where she’d dumped a jam jar full of coins.

  “Okay, Eddie, you can run from here to that post thing and back,” she said, pointing to a scrubby field off to the right. “But you gotta stay where I can see you, okay?”

  “Time me,” he shouted, taking off in a boots-clattering run.

  “You’re the one with the watch, Eddie.” She plugged quarters into the phone and tried to avoid touching the dirty walls of the booth. It smelled of urine, despite the prominent Restrooms sign ten feet away. Were these things just made smelling of pee? Because they always did. She was mentally preparing a message for Auntie Pat’s answering machine when a voice answered, slurred with sleep. “Rolling Wood Greengardens…”

  “Auntie Pat?” Dee asked automatically, stupidly, because she knew it wasn’t her.

  “What? No, no, it’s Jake.”

  “Oh, sorry, Jake. Did I wake you up? I woke you up. It’s Dee.”

  “No, no. S’okay. I’m up.”

  “Pat and Norm still not back?” Is every frigging adult I know out in the frigging wilderness?

  “Nah. Tried to call them”—he stifled a yawn—“yesterday, but they must still be out on the boat. Not much reception out there. The one time of the year they don’t mind not being contacted.”

  A big truck roared out of the gas station, and Jake asked, “Where the hell are you calling from, an airport runway?”

  “Just on the road. Interstate.” She smiled through the grubby glass, watching Eddie pull at some twisted steel rods protruding from a cement block. Then she blurted, “I’m kind of worried about our car. Do you know what a sort of grrrrgrrrgrrr sound means?”

  “No clue. Sorry. Not much of a car guy. Probably not good though. You should get somebody to look at it. You know. Car-repair place.”

  Only problem is, Jake, those places charge money. What I wanted you to say was, “It’s probably nothing. Better just drive the hell out of it until you get here. It should last for another three days or so.”

  “Yeah. Anyway, I better go here. Last quarter. Sorry for waking you up.”

  “No problem. Gotta feed the cat anyway, or he starts pissing on the rug. Can you believe that? Just because he’s mad for some reason. He’s got the run of the place, I pet him when he seems to want it, but still with the pissing. Any suggestions for getting that smell out of a couch?”

  “Hmmm, hose the thing down? Let the cushions dry in the sun? I don’t know.”

  “Good idea.” He sounded relieved. “To be honest, I don’t even feel like touching the thing.”

  Dee laughed. “Good luck with that.” She glanced across the field where Eddie was. Where Eddie should have been.

  He wasn’t there.

  Dee’s mouth went dry.

  “Jake, I gotta go find my brother.”

  “Okay, see you—” Dee slammed the phone down.

  She ran out to the field, scanning left and right. No Eddie. Eddie wasn’t there.

  Oh my god, it was that truck that pulled out when I was on the phone with Jake. That truck took Eddie! She stood frozen, terrified. No, it couldn’t be. I saw him. He was right there a second ago, a minute ago. How long ago? He has to be here somewhere.

  “Eddie!” she called in a husky, croaking sob. Not loud enough.

  “EDDIE!” she screamed. Way too loud. Eddie’s head popped up from behind the concrete stump with its Medusa head of warped steel rods at the same time as the waitress and one of the customers ran out of the diner, their eyes wide and alarmed.

  “I’m here, Dee. Just here. There’s a huge bug on the side of this thing…”

  “Sorry,” Dee apologized to the diner people, “thought I lost him.” She smiled at them tightly. “Slight overreaction maybe.” Move along, folks, hysterical girl’s under control. They smiled sympathetically, turning back to the restaurant.

  Dee rounded on Eddie. The sick relief she’d felt when she saw him was ebbing away, swamped by a white-hot fury. You little brat, you stupid little brat…you and your stupid, stupid frigging bugs…

  Eddie saw her face.

  “I was right here, Dee,” he said, crossing his arms. “I didn’t go anywhere. I didn’t.”

  Dee wanted to shake him or grab his arm hard and haul him into the car. Exactly the sort of things she hated to see parents doing to their kids in parks or grocery stores. A father hauling a yelling toddler off by one arm, yanking her along, her feet scrabbling at the ground. A mother’s angry face pushed close to her little son’s, snarling out some warning or ultimatum. She and Eddie were not like that; their family was not like that.

  Dee closed her eyes and took a deep breath.

  He’s right. It’s not his fault. He stayed where I told him to. He doesn’t know why I’m so tense and tightly wound and paranoid right now.

  “Sorry, Eddie. I couldn’t see you. I thought you got lost.” Actually, I thought you got taken.

  They turned and started walking toward the car. Eddie gestured to the empty field and the gas station.

  “How could I even get lost, Dee? Where would I get lost?”

  “Nowhere. Forget it. I was just being a panic-face. I did actually say ‘stay where I can see you’ though,” she pointed out.

  “I just bent down for a minute. It was a very interesting bug. A beetle with a huge—”

  “Later, Eddie. In the car. Now.”

  Dee drove, wondering what their lives would be like if they ever got to Auntie Pat’s. Rolling Wood had probably changed and grown, but she’d gone to school there for five and a bit years, so Eddie would for sure have somewhere to go in September. And I’ll be the weird kid who nobody knows who parachutes in for twelfth grade. They’ll point to me in the yearbook years later and say, “Who’s that?” But secretly she hoped it could be a new beginning, one where she wasn’t already pegged as the quiet, boring, awkward girl who tagged along after Theresa. Does Jake still go to high school? she wondered.

  She hoped Eddie got a teacher who understood him. Just a few weeks before school had ended this past June, Eddie had brought home a note from the school counselor, asking Eddie’s parent/guardian to contact him to arrange a meeting about Eddie’s “worrisome lack of progress.”

  “What crap,” her dad had said, crumpling the note. “Anybody who’s spent ten minutes with Eddie could figure out he’s a smart kid. Really smart.”

  “Well, maybe it’s not just about him being smart,” Dee said. “Maybe it’s sort of…social or something. Friends.”

  “Eddie’s got lots of friends,” her father said. Nam
e two, Dad. Name even one. “Anyway, that counselor’s a joke. He’s totally clueless. I wish he would just leave Eddie alone.” He’d chucked the note behind the fans.

  When Dad left for an auction outside of Phoenix that week, Dee went to see the counselor. She thought somebody should.

  He was a heavy man named Mr. Werner, wearing what he probably thought was a fun tie. A conversation opener with yellow rubber ducks on a blue background.

  He was clearly taken aback by Dee’s visit but tried to mask it by excessive casualness. He gestured her to a seat.

  “Mr. Werner…” she began.

  “Oh, Greg, please,” he interrupted with a small smile, sitting back, hands linked over his paunch.

  “Uh, okay, Greg. Well, my father’s away at the moment, so I’ve come in his place. I’m Dee, Eddie Donnelley’s sister. We got your note.” Dee looked him straight in the eye. And I’m not saying a word about being sixteen.

  “Well, uh, Dee, very nice to meet you. And might I say that it was very mature of you to come in loco parentis, as it were.” He looked down at the sheet of paper he’d isolated on his messy desk. Dee could see it was a test, Eddie’s test. It was covered in red marks—long, angry red marks.

  “Now,” began Greg, leaning back, eyes raised to the ceiling, “when I look at a test result like this, only one of many, many samples of Eddie’s work that Mrs. Bonner has forwarded to me, I think to myself, I think, Greg, what is causing this child to behave in this way?”

  Dee waited. And how does Greg answer himself? she wanted to ask.

  “Because this child is clearly calling out for help. Shouting, in point of fact,” he continued.

  Dee cleared her throat. “Could I please see that test?”

  It was a math test. Basic second-grade addition and subtraction. Dee ran through it, her heart sinking. It was Eddie the idiot-child on paper. For 9-3, he’d answered S. For 2+3, he’d written tar, though there was an initial squiggle that might have been an s. On several of the answer lines he’d written the word blank. He had ended the test with a flourish. On the bonus question, 20+5+5, he’d written 230-200 (Ask the Apes in Africa!).

  Ask the Apes in Africa? God dammit, Eddie. Dee looked up to find Greg watching her.

  “Okay, I see what you mean,” she said, sliding the sheet back to him. “He’s actually right on the bonus question, though, other than the apes-in-Africa bit, but it’s marked wrong.” A big ugly red X. Mrs. Bonner’s patience was thin at the best of times. She and Eddie did not get along.

  “Yes, well, not quite the form Mrs. Bonner was looking for, I’m sure. I myself don’t find her the most patient of individuals,” he confided. “My professional opinion,” he continued, smoothing his duck tie and leaning forward, “is that Eddie should be assessed first thing when school starts up again. I suspect perhaps a borderline learning disability might be holding him back.”

  Dee stared at him. He really was clued out—her dad was actually right on this one. Eddie would have a field day with this guy.

  “Go for it, Greg,” she said.

  She’d confronted Eddie that afternoon after school. They were at the highway gas-station store, Dee stacking magazines, Eddie playing with her calculator.

  “Apes in Africa? Ask the Apes in Africa. That’s what you wrote for the answer of a math question, Eddie. A math question. Jeez. You know how that looks? Makes you look like a total idiot. And you’re not.”

  Eddie, his mouth full of chocolate, said, “Was the answer thirty?”

  Dee straightened. “Yeah, it should have been. Actually, you sort of got it right by saying something like 330-300. Just write the answer next time, okay? Don’t be cute.”

  He shrugged. “Okay. Apes in Africa sometimes travel in groups of up to thirty, just so you know.”

  She slapped down the pile of magazines she’d been holding.

  “So what about S as an answer? Or tar, Eddie? TAR?? Any code breaker for those?”

  “Hmmm, usually S is six, but I don’t remember tar. Oh, star! Five points on a star, so five.” Eddie stooped down to start stacking.

  Dee stared at the back of his head. “How about the blanks, Eddie? The places you wrote blank?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, just bored, I guess. Thinking of something else. School is so boring.”

  “Yeah, well, Mr. Werner’s going to have you in for an assessment,” Dee warned, “so try to act normal, please. Just normal, okay?”

  Eddie looked up. “Greg? Oh, good. I hope he wears the gorilla tie.”

  Neither of them really noticed Utah. People on vacation notice scenery. Sixteen-year-olds who are clenching the wheel, listening intently to the increasingly scary sounds their car is making, don’t marvel at mountains. Eddie, torqued up on junk food, was sick of reading and desperate to run around. He rocked in his seat, looking out the window, reading out the signs. Whenever a huge truck flashed past, he would excitedly mime at the driver to honk, using the pulling-on-an-invisible-chain sign. The good-natured ones obliged. The crabbier ones honked at Dee for reasons that had nothing to do with Eddie’s back-window gymnastics.

  “Eddie, I need less honking, not more,” Dee said.

  They had been down to one lane for miles, striped orange-and-white construction pylons blocking off the left lane, and there was a line of impatient traffic right behind them, just waiting to floor it when the construction zone ended. Dee was trying simultaneously to avoid hitting the pylons on the left and the rumble strips of the shoulder on the right. When the car veered slightly, the strips made an unnerving, loud vrrrrip, vrrrrip sound. It was like trying to thread an endless needle at fifty-five miles per hour.

  Eddie had been silent for the last ten minutes, only because he was making pinhole patterns on the vinyl seat with a safety pin he had found.

  “Can I poke a few holes in the seat with this?” he had asked, holding it up to show her in the rearview mirror.

  “Sure, whatever.”

  “Twenty-seven holes for a fish,” he announced. “Thirty-three for my initials, E dot J dot D.”

  He was at fifty-two holes and counting for an octopus.

  “Getting pretty holey back here. It’s okay, though, right?”

  Eddie, if it keeps you quiet and happy, I would just suggest more intricate, time-wasting patterns. Scenery. An aquarium. Frigging Disneyland. She wouldn’t have cared if he slashed up the whole backseat. She glanced over her shoulder at his bent head. I am going to be one slack-ass mother someday.

  Dee recalled the map in her head. The I-15 would lead them north into Idaho, an odd, irregularly shaped state. They would pass through the rectangular boxy bit in the south of the state, then head into Montana. Then, please, God, into Canada. No glitches, no arrests at the border, no breakdowns (automotive or otherwise), just smooth, smooth sailing up to their home and native land. The true north, strong and free.

  Their country, even though it didn’t feel like it.

  But they had the passports to prove it.

  IDAHO

  FRIDAY

  “No beehives. Not one,” Eddie said, looking over his shoulder as they neared the Idaho border.

  “Anyway,” Dee said, “you got your salt.” Eddie smiled as he picked up and tilted a baby-food jar he had in his lap. The crumbly white sludge inside lurched from side to side. Somehow neither of them had made the connection that Salt Lake City was a city by a really salty lake. It had been just a name, like Great Falls or Red Deer. They’d been amazed to see actual salt lying in shallow drifts like snow by the side of the highway.

  Dee had pulled over onto the shoulder of the highway, and Eddie had quickly dumped out a jar of his precious Arizona gravel and filled it up with Utah salt. Interesting salt. Salt you don’t see every day, lying by the side of the road like that. They only glimpsed the lake between houses and hills as they sped by. Eddie would have liked to have stopped at the lake, but Dee needed to get them into Idaho.

  You don’t know it, but we’re on a tight schedule, buddy
—a state a day.

  Even with construction and Eddie’s salt collecting slowing them down, their early-morning wake-up call had them crossing into Idaho in the late afternoon.

  “Welcome to Idaho. The Gem State,” read Eddie. “Wow. Gems.” He straightened up and looked out the window as if expecting to see gems lying in mounds like the salt. But Idaho looked very similar to Utah.

  “Mmm. Piles and piles of them just scattered around, I bet,” said Dee.

  She jumped as another car honked and screamed past her. That makes three angry honkers in the last hour. I think I’m officially a menace on the roads. She tried to increase her speed, but the car’s growling worsened.

  “I have to get out of this car,” Eddie said in a loud voice, squirming in his seat and tossing his head from side to side.

  “I know, I know.” Dee was barely listening to him.

  “I really need to, Dee. I’m…” He strained hard against his seat belt, his face reddening and his eyes bugging out. “But we just keep driving and driving! We don’t do anything fun or have lunch or even walk around like when we go on road trips with Dad.”

  “Yeah, but I haven’t dragged you through some barn full of horse-smelling junk,” Dee pointed out.

  “I’d love to be in a barn right now! I need to get out… of…this…seat belt.”

  “Look, stop it, Eddie!” Dee snapped. “We’re on a highway here. Not a spot for freaking out. Hey, if you had to pick a perfect spot for freaking out, where would it be?”

  Eddie, his seat belt clutched in both hands, paused. “You mean on this earth?”

  “Uh, sure, okay. On this earth.”

  “Because it’s not obvious. Space would be a good place for freaking out because you’d just float.”

  “Good point.” Dee could hear the engine making a high-pitched whine.

  “So here on Earth…well, somewhere soft…” Eddie looked out the window and began listing soft places. “Beds, pillows, marshmallows…”

  The engine was definitely screaming, drowning out Eddie’s list.

  We need to stop. We need to get out of this damn car and let it rest or recharge or whatever. We need to find a town big enough that we won’t be noticed, but not so huge that we’ll never find our way back to the I-15.