“I think I might’ve hurt my old boss, Wendy Lee,” I said. “Not like those guys in the parking lot. I mean, not on purpose or anything. On accident. But the police might not see it that way.”
“You think you hurt her, but you’re not sure?”
“Yeah. That’s what I was doing just now. Trying to find news about her in the paper. When it happened, I got so scared I just ran off. That’s pretty much when you found me.”
“Huh,” James said. “Why don’t you call her?”
“Call her!”
“Sure.” He jutted his chin toward the hotel phone on the nightstand in between us. It had about a million buttons. “That’s a phone, right?” Anyone else I would’ve considered this a figure of speech. But with James, I couldn’t be sure he actually did know for sure that was a phone. “Just pick it up and give her a call. See if she answers.”
He took his hands out from behind his head and rested them on his bare stomach. I didn’t know Wendy Lee’s number at home, but of course in the morning I could just call the bakery. No one up there knew my voice so well that I couldn’t disguise it a little. If I asked for Wendy Lee, they were sure to let me know something about what’d happened to her.
I stood up and crossed over to the window, feeling James’s eyes on my every move. I pushed the heavy, green curtains aside and looked down at the pool. It had to be close to midnight, and not a soul was down there. The clerk who’d been at the desk looked about fourteen years old. Probably he’d just sit in the office reading comic books, not paying much attention unless someone wanted to check in, which at this hour seemed unlikely. Altoona seemed to me a whole lot sleepier even than Jackson.
“You know,” James said from the bed, “I think I’m finally getting used to this climate.”
“That’s because you got the temperature in here at about a hundred and ten degrees,” I said. “I think I might go down for a swim.”
“Want me to come with you?”
“No,” I said. I let the curtain fall shut. “It’s only about eighty-five degrees down there. You’d probably freeze to death.”
Nobody was at the pool. There were orange halogen lights all around it, kind of half-lit. I’d been living so carefully, keeping myself so much under wraps. Now I felt reckless. Reckless enough, anyway, to shimmy out of my leather pants, and the sweater I’d put back on for the elevator ride. It didn’t seem to me there were many people staying at this hotel; I couldn’t see any lights on in the rooms, except for one on the third floor where James must still be lying on the bed, flicking through the channels. In my tank top and panties, I dove right into the deep end.
That water felt so good on my skin, clean and cool and crisp. And familiar, like a hug from an old friend. So what if I was on the run? I was traveling! I was in a northern state. And I was swimming. Maybe life didn’t have to be so lonesome and pleasureless after all.
I lay back into a dead man’s float and stared up at the stars. They twinkled back at me. Where you been so long, Anna Marie? they seemed to ask. I smiled.
My eyes wandered back to the hotel, back to that one lit-up window. And I saw a figure standing there, all bundled up in his white robe, looking down at me. He lifted his hand and waved.
Making the barest little splash, I moved out of my float and treaded water. This was the closest I’d felt in ages to that girl I’d left behind in Caldecott. I stared back up at James, those cat eyes of mine adjusting to the dark and distance with no trouble at all.
The cotton tank clung to my skin. It felt itchy. It was getting in the way. So I pulled it up over my head and tossed it aside. It floated on the surface of the water for a moment, then started heading down to the bottom as it got more and more waterlogged. Myself, I let my arms fall out by my sides, and leaned my head back, returning to my dead man’s float. I could feel my breasts, bobbing just a little bit out of the water. Better than that I could feel James, standing up there in the window, looking down at me.
When I got back upstairs, the room was dark. James lay in bed asleep—or at least pretending to be asleep. His breathing sounded a mite too shallow to be convincing. I tiptoed into the bathroom, quiet as I could.
With the door clicked shut behind me, I peeled off my wet clothes and hung them over the shower door to dry. Then I toweled myself off. James had left one of his many layers, a white T-shirt, hanging on the towel rack. I pulled it down and brought it to my face. Breathed in. It was nice to smell him up close like this, not from across a room or the seat of a car. He had a good scent, nicely spicy, like ginger and jasmine mixed together with baby shampoo, and just enough sweat to make that manly. I pulled the T-shirt over my head, brushed my teeth, and headed on out to bed.
I really can’t begin to tell you how much I wanted to crawl under the covers with James. At the same time it felt so much better than anything had in a long time, sleeping in a room with somebody else breathing, wearing somebody else’s clothes. It felt so personal. My throat filled up with a kind of sadness. I hadn’t realized just how lonesome I was.
Bam! Crackle!
Even in the dark room, with my eyes shut, I could see the blinding white light that suddenly surrounded us. The crackling kept going, softer now, like something electric had shorted out, or else lightning had struck right in the middle of the room.
James was on his feet before I could open my eyes. By the time I sat up he was already gathering his things, throwing them into his little leather satchel.
“We have to go,” he said. “Now.”
Even a curious person like myself could see this was no time for questions. Obedient as I’d never been in my life, I threw on all my clothes, including gloves underneath one of my new sweaters, and shoved everything into my duffel bag.
“No,” James said, when I started to head toward the elevator. And it was a good thing I’d taken the time to gear up, because in his frenzy, he reached out and grabbed my arm. He had big, powerful hands, and his fingers closed full around my upper arm. He looked down at the contact for a moment, taking it in, and I could tell he thought maybe I’d been lying to him.
“Not that enclosed space,” he said. “We’ll take the stairs.”
He let go of my arm and we ran down the hall in the other direction, down the stairs, and out into the hotel parking lot. James got into the driver’s seat and turned on the ignition. The car made a terrible, whining, downright pathetic sound. And then it just sputtered and died. I looked up through the windshield at the window of our room. Neither of us had turned on the light, but something in there was crackling and flickering, like fireworks being set off indoors.
I unzipped my duffel bag and pulled out the screwdriver I’d packed when I left my apartment in Jackson. “Not to worry,” I told James, holding it up in the dark car. “I’ve got it covered.”
Before, in my mind, I’d been headed toward Maine. That was a place I’d always wanted to see. I’d never seen a lighthouse or the ocean, or eaten a lobster. And I’d always heard how cold it was, so maybe even in the summer I wouldn’t be broiling to death wearing all these clothes. But I figured the best thing to do when someone’s chasing you is to change up your direction, so I headed west on 80. Maybe I could shift back a little later and head northeast again.
My heart was beating fierce and fast, and James had turned this shade of white that reminded me of the waxy magnolias that grew all around Caldecott. We’d taken the first car we saw, a little blue Scion that was hardly bigger than a golf cart. Bucket seats, which I guess were safer, but seemed kind of lonesome after that ratty old bench seat in the Camaro.
“It’s OK,” James said. “We got away in time. The tracking might not even register. Having you there probably confused it.”
“Tracking?” I said. “Is that what that was?” The word shouldn’t have comforted me, but it did. It sounded technical, like an electronic device, and not so supernatural as how the eruption of light had felt.
“Yes,” he said. “The people I’m running fro
m. They’re pretty… sophisticated.”
I nodded and kept my hands square on the wheel. Clearly James wasn’t telling me everything, but I didn’t mind so much as you might think. The whole thing was coming together in my mind, and starting to make some kind of sense. Another girl might not have jumped to the same conclusion so easily. But after all I’d been through, it didn’t seem like much of a leap.
“James.” I said it pretty careful, because if I was wrong he might get offended. But I had this strong feeling I wasn’t wrong at all. “You’re from a different planet. Aren’t you?”
He sat quiet for a full minute. Finally, he nodded. “Yes, Anna Marie,” he said. “Yes I am.”
When I was about ten years old, the preacher at Aunt Carrie’s church, Reverend Otis P. Johnson, made plans to wallpaper his front hall. He lived in a big old house on Main Street, just a few doors down from his church, and that hall went all the way down from the front door, past a living room on one side and a sitting room on the other (don’t ask me the difference), past a powder room and on down to a great big kitchen. In other words, there was a whole lot of wall. Before they started into pasting on the new, stripy wallpaper, he invited all the kids in the congregation to come over and draw on what it would cover up.
Aunt Carrie was real conflicted. On the one hand, drawing on walls was the sort of habit she’d worked hard on ridding me of, and I had the welts to prove it. On the other hand, it was an invitation to Reverend Johnson’s own home. We folks living on the outskirts hardly ever got invited to the homes in town, especially not the preacher’s. So in the end Aunt Carrie couldn’t resist letting me go, knowing all the while she’d be setting in the kitchen, drinking coffee and eating baked goods with Mrs. Johnson and her friends. So Aunt Carrie loaded up a basket with fruit from her own garden, and even bought me a brand-new box of sixteen Crayola crayons. I remember that last part very well on account of in the past I’d only ever had the box of eight classic colors. This box had burnt sienna, plus a particular shade of red called razzmatazz.
While the other kids drew pictures of dogs and horses and dinosaurs, I set to drawing a great big razzmatazz spaceship. Underneath it I drew lots of green grass, and some black-eyed Susans. Two people stood on the grass—a lady with marigold hair and a man with burnt sienna hair—kind of bathed in a classic yellow light that was shooting out from the ship. And off away from the light there was a little girl with the same burnt sienna hair as the man.
“What’s happening in your picture, Anna Marie?”
I turned from my work to look at the very serious, very chubby face of Lula Johnson, the preacher’s daughter. She would’ve been about four years old at the time.
“It’s my mama and daddy,” I told Lula. “You see? It’s their last day on Planet Earth. This spaceship’s come to take them to the Far Banks.”
Lula opened her mouth to ask what the Far Banks were, but before she got a chance—let alone before I got to answer—Aunt Carrie came flying out of the kitchen like an angry crow. She grabbed my wrist and dragged me right out of the house. I guess we were about halfway home before she realized that by doing so, leaving her half-eaten pickled peaches and her cold cup of coffee behind, she’d brought a lot more attention to my drawing than if she’d just ignored it.
“What comes into your head, Anna Marie?” she said. My butt was already stinging just looking at the way her knuckles had turned white on the steering wheel.
“I dunno,” I said, slumping in the seat. No way on God’s green earth would I let her know I was scared of her. Even when I was ten I knew it was unfair, and mean, to get angry at a kid for thinking on how her parents left the world.
“Was it Uncle Gillis told you about the Far Banks?” she said.
Uncle Gillis had come to visit a few weeks before. He was my daddy’s older brother. He told me that back at the commune, my parents got it in their heads to go to this other realm, a mystical place called the Far Banks. That’s how they disappeared. Trying to get there.
Without waiting on an answer from me, Aunt Carrie muttered, more to herself than me, “Gillis had no business to do that.”
“But Aunt Carrie,” I said. “It’s my own mama and daddy. Why can’t I know what happened to my own mama and daddy?”
“They were foolish and godless and that got them into a whole mess of trouble,” Aunt Carrie said. “That’s all you need to know.”
After another minute she added, “I can tell you one thing. They didn’t go anywhere in a spaceship.” Her voice had got kind of dreamy, a little bit softer than usual, and I could tell this was a good time to keep asking questions.
“Well how did they go?” I pressed her.
“I don’t know how to explain it. They just… went.”
“Disappeared right into thin air?” By now we’d pulled into our own driveway. Aunt Carrie shoved the car back into park like she’d remembered she was mad.
“People don’t disappear into thin air, Anna Marie,” she said. She didn’t look at me, just sat there frowning through the windshield. A mess of Canada geese had landed on the pond. I waited for her to tell me to go on into the house and get the belt. But she didn’t. She just sighed and told me to go to my room. I hightailed it in there before she could change her mind, then lay on my bed, staring at the ceiling, trying to think on how two grown people could just vanish into another realm.
No, I decided. They must all have it wrong. It must’ve been a spaceship that came to fetch them away.
So you see it wasn’t only on account of my affliction that I could make that leap, to James being from another planet. Long before that kiss with Cody, I had it in me to believe that life wasn’t just what you could see with your eyes. Other things went on. Things you couldn’t make sense of with logic or even religion. Not just magic things, but unexpected and unexplained.
When James and I had driven on through the darkness, past morning into midday, he started to relax a bit. Before that I’d felt so bad for him that I’d even cranked the heat myself—I had to struggle out of my jacket and sweater as I drove to be able to stand it.
By noon he said, “If they haven’t found us now, I think we can comfortably assume they lost track. It took them weeks to find me. So even if they cut their time in half, we’ve got a little room to breathe.”
“But James,” I said. “Who’s they, anyhow? And what happens if they find you? Us.”
“It’s a long story,” James said.
I threw my hand out to point at the highway, stretching on endlessly into the day. “Sugar,” I said, “we got nothing but time.”
“Let’s eat first,” James said. He pointed to a GAS-FOOD-LODGING sign up ahead on the right, and I eased the little car over into the exit lane.
By now we’d reached a town called La Porte, Indiana. I drove the little Scion all the way to the end of a road where there was a sports bar on a lake. Now, I’ve seen plenty of lakes in Caldecott County, and the bayou, too. But this lake looked more to me like I’d imagined the ocean. It went on and on so far you couldn’t see the end of it. James and I sat by a big window, looking out at the water, and ordered a couple plates of chicken wings.
“Well,” I said. “I guess I don’t need to ask what the temperature’s like where you come from.” James sat across from me, all bundled up and shivering a little, while I was sweltering in my sweater and jacket. You never did know when a friendly waitress might want to pat you on the back, so I had to keep covered up no matter what.
James laughed a little, but he looked tired and worried. We hadn’t got a chance to sleep at the hotel, but the adrenaline of escaping and discovering my companion was an extraterrestrial being had perked me up quite a bit. I decided I’d save questions about why he was on the run for later and stick to more general topics. Maybe it would make him feel comforted, talking about his home.
“How’d you know to bring warm clothes?” I said.
“I didn’t,” he said. He didn’t go into more of an explanation, so
I figured he must have stolen them. Judging from that long leather jacket, he’d stolen them from a very nice place. But before I could ask anything more, he said, “The thing is, I can’t talk about it too much. Up till now they were tracking me through the universe. Now they’ve got it narrowed down to one particular place. Things like key words, pertaining to my situation, can help them zero in.”
Something in my stomach bottomed out. For a moment I felt almost as scared as I had when Cody’d hit the ground under the tupelo tree. It must have shown on my face because James said, “Look, it sounds a lot easier, but they still have to travel back and forth to get the right bearings. It takes time. If we keep moving, we should be able to stay ahead of them.”
“What will they do if they find you?”
Something kind of funny came over James’s face. It might have been fear. But it might have been something else. You know the look a man can get when you ask him a question he doesn’t want to answer?
“Let’s not worry about that right now,” he said. “Let’s just concentrate on staying a few steps ahead of them. And the best way to do that is not talk about it.”
“What if we write it?” I said. “I can write questions on a piece of paper and you can write the answers.”
His eyes got the tiniest bit narrow, then flickered away from me, in a way that made me think his answer might or might not have been the truth. “Language is language,” he said. “I’m telling you, the less we say about it—by any means—the safer we’ll be.”
“But how can they even understand?” I said. “You say language is language. You speak and read English so perfect. That can’t be the same language as on your planet.”
James reached into his pocket and pulled out what looked like a tiny red marble. He put it on the table between us, and when I looked closer I saw it wasn’t a marble at all, but a little dot of energy, shot through with shades of yellow and orange, spinning away. “It’s a translator,” James said. “Carry it with you and any language sorts itself out in your brain, written or spoken.”
Rogue Touch Page 6
