Ashes to Asheville

by Sarah Dooley

  I knew she would say that, but it still makes me groan. Taking all the time Adam needs means derailing our own trip even further. But I’ve been through what Adam’s going through, and I can’t seem to say a word. Can’t seem to stop wishing I could trade places with him and be back where he is now. Maybe then I could find the right words at the end. Maybe then I could say good-bye properly.

  That was supposed to be what the memorial was for—to say good-bye, in case you hadn’t already. But at the memorial, the lights were too dim and the flowers smelled too strong and the picture of Mama Lacy didn’t even look like her, really. And there we all were, clumped together, none of us sure what to say. We were a bunch of strangers who were supposed to be family. I remember recognizing maybe half of the relatives gathered. I remember Mrs. Madison in her ridiculous hat, and I elbowed Zany but neither of us laughed.

  It was supposed to be the final good-bye, but good-byes should be said with hugs and see you laters, not awkward silences among strangers and a smiling, still photo at the front of the room. Family drifted into groups, then away toward the doors. Nothing felt final.

  I’ve been waiting ever since for another chance, but it hasn’t come yet.

  chapter

  12

  “Let me show you what you do to get your mind off things,” Zany says, and she reaches across me to open the passenger door. “Move, Light Bulb!” Without waiting for me to do it, she slides across me, stepping on my toes and shoving Haberdashery more firmly down into my lap. He lets out a low growl and I rub behind his ears to quiet him. Zany runs around the front of the truck, flashing in and out of the headlights. Adam’s pulled over to find his lighter, which fell off the seat and under the gas pedal, and he doesn’t protest when Zany nudges him over into the middle spot and slides in behind the wheel.

  Adam takes up a different amount of space than my sister, and he’s a different shape and temperature. I squeeze myself against the door as tight as I can, but there’s no avoiding touching him.

  “Am I squashing you?” he asks when I keep fidgeting. I shake my head wordlessly. I feel my cheeks getting pink. I’m not used to sitting so close to a boy, especially one who was recently kissing my sister.

  Zany’s loving the truck. She revs it more than necessary and goes a little faster than the speed limit says. I’m startled when she swings us into a department store, both because we don’t have any extra money and because I can’t imagine what she needs to buy at this hour. It’s one of those huge twenty-four-hour stores with a grocery section and a restaurant and a bank inside. There are hardly any cars in the parking lot.

  Zany parks near the doors and tugs at Adam till he follows her. They walk hand in hand, and I sulk a few paces behind, jealous. I haven’t had my sister to myself for six months and I want her attention. But she’s distracted by this sad thief we’ve found, who’s stuck six months behind us in the process of something awful.

  We make it three steps into the store before a cashier says, “Young lady!”

  My heart thumps up into my throat. Oh no, I think, she’s recognized us from the news! I immediately start looking around for police officers, or at least security guards. But all the cashier says is, “You can’t be in here without shoes.”

  “Oh.” I glance down, heart hammering. I’m so used to parading around in one soaking-wet sock, I’d forgotten it isn’t normal.

  “Way to act natural, walking around without shoes,” Zany says. “Geez, wait here.” She darts away. I see her going through the checkout a minute later, and she comes back with a pair of yellow canvas sneakers with an orange clearance sticker on them. I don’t want to take off Mama Lacy’s sock, so I wear one shoe with a sock and one shoe without.

  Zany grabs a cart and I realize why we’re here. She does this every time she gets stressed. It’s the most ridiculous way of letting off steam I’ve ever witnessed, but for some reason, being a jerk always makes Zany feel better. She leads us from aisle to aisle, piling the weirdest things into the cart. Cushioned insoles. Feminine hygiene products. Cat litter. Chocolate bars.

  “Come on, Adam, help me!” she says, and insists that he choose something silly off the shelves to add to the cart. “Pick something crazy that nobody in their right mind would buy.” She seems to approve when he chooses a giant jar of olives.

  “Are you going to play, Fella?” Zany asks over her shoulder. I shake my head and slump along after her, still pouting. My sneakers are squeaking and my left one, the one with no sock, keeps slipping around out of place.

  We make it to the electronics section with Zany shrieking, “Headphones! Twelve pairs of headphones, and nothing to plug them into!” Adam’s not exactly smiling yet, but his face has softened and I think I see his eyes get brighter. It’s hard not to laugh at how amused my sister is by her goofy additions to the shopping cart. Even I’m starting to smile—until my gaze lands on the digital camera section and I feel all of a sudden like I’ve lost something. I check both robe pockets and my sock before I realize what it is.

  “Mama Lacy’s camera!” My wail is a little loud for the middle of the night in a nearly empty store. I see a stock guy glance at us and I lower my voice. “I forgot it!”

  “What?” Zany’s distracted, trying to decide between earbuds and noise-canceling.

  “I left—I left Mama Lacy’s camera in Mama Shannon’s car.”

  Now I’ve got my sister’s full attention. She shakes her head once. “No, you didn’t. It’s in my purse,” she says, not looking at all certain. She feels for her purse, but she’s left it in the truck. I see her hand lift to her hair. I know she’s remembering, like I’m remembering, how she brushed her hair as soon as we got in the truck with Adam, how her purse was light and empty and she didn’t have to dig under anything as cumbersome as a camera to get at her hairbrush. I watch her face fall. “Fella—”

  “It’s not my fault!” I interrupt. “You’re the one that went back for the camera in the first place. You should have remembered it!”

  “I was a little busy stealing our dead mother’s ashes back from a thief!” She pats Adam’s elbow as she says this, as if to show there are no hard feelings.

  “Well, I was trying to rescue my grandmother’s poodle from certain death! Which I wouldn’t have had to do anyway if you’d let me take him back when he first got out and followed us! You blame me for everything!”

  She begins chucking packages of earbuds into the cart with alarming force. “We’re not playing the blame game, Fella. I just don’t understand why you can’t ever think about things. It’s not like we didn’t stop at home to get the camera. It’s not like we didn’t tiptoe through the house. And then you got it out of my purse, and you didn’t put it back, and now it doesn’t even matter that we stopped. We still won’t have pictures of Asheville for Mama Lacy.”

  “I don’t know why you want pictures of that anyway. It’s creepy.”

  Adam’s backing away from us as our voices rise. “It’s not creepy. She was a photographer! She loved pictures! She took pictures when we stopped at gas stations! She took pictures of sunrises and sunsets and all the moon phases! She took pictures of the first rain of spring and the first snow of winter and the first orange leaf of fall and she even took pictures of breakfast if it looked pretty! And she always, always, always took pictures on birthdays!”

  “So?”

  “So why wouldn’t she want one final birthday picture?”

  “Because it’s creepy!” I say again, but really I’m thinking, Because it’s sad! And then I process her meaning and a frown creases my forehead. “What do you mean, birthday picture?”

  “You didn’t even remember that her birthday’s tomorrow—Today?” Zany sighs and shakes her head. “Why do you think we’re doing this, anyway? I’m trying to give her a birthday present.”

  “I haven’t been keeping track of the calendar,” I murmur, but she’s right.
I ought to have remembered that it’s Mama Lacy’s birthday. “We haven’t made a cake,” I say, and then realize how stupid this sounds.

  Zany doesn’t answer. She’s gone back to slamming items into the cart. Once she starts holding a grudge, she’ll never stop. Filling up the shopping cart is no longer fun for her. Adam, on the other hand, is really getting into this. By the time he tops off the cart with a fifty-pound bag of deer corn from the hunting section, he’s laughing out loud. I trail along behind them, thinking of how we’d always made a cake on Mama Lacy’s birthday—pie on Mama Shannon’s and cookies on mine and cake for Mama Lacy and Zany—and how I can’t believe I would have missed her birthday if Zany hadn’t told me.

  “What’s the point of this?” Adam asks as his giggles finally fade. He seems to have noticed that Zany’s no longer laughing, and he’s heaving to push the overloaded buggy.

  “That,” Zany says, pointing to his face. The deep lines around his mouth are gone and he’s got the ghost of a smile on his lips.

  He smiles wider. Whispers barely loud enough for me to overhear, “I’m ready now.”

  She nods, keeping her sad gaze hidden behind a fake smile that doesn’t reach her eyes. “Good.” We leave the cart in the hunting aisle and return to the car without buying anything.

  chapter

  13

  I see the brick hospital looming and my stomach feels knotted up. Zany’s at the wheel and the truck jerks and swerves more than when Adam’s driving, but that’s not what’s making me nervous. I don’t know what we’re going to do once we get there. Whether we’re supposed to wait for Adam. Whether we’ll be able to find another ride. It’s after two in the morning and I’m absolutely not going to trust any more strangers on the road to take me where I’m going.

  Unless, of course, Zany tells me to.

  I don’t have to know Adam well to recognize the look on his face. Mama Shannon wore that same look the whole last year of Mama Lacy’s life. Our final coffee chat was three days before we lost Mama Lacy. She was at the hospital, which had happened before, but this time we knew she probably wasn’t coming home. Mama Shannon was up even earlier than usual, slumped at the table, halfway through a pot of coffee before I found her in the kitchen. It was still dark outside.

  “Can’t sleep?” she asked, and when I shook my head, she said, “Me either. It’s too quiet without Lace.” The corners of her eyes pinched tight and she looked up at me. She wasn’t wearing her glasses and I could see the redness, the folds of skin beneath her eyes turning into old-person wrinkles even though she wasn’t that old. There weren’t any tear tracks on her cheeks, but I remember thinking she was crying anyway, right there in front of me, in her own way.

  “Mama,” I said, and that was all I had to say. She opened her arms and I walked into them.

  I’ve been dreaming scary things since Mama Lacy died. Sad things. Like how I found her hair in the shower drain. Like how Mama Shannon cried and cried at the memorial till Granny Culvert had to give her medicine to make her calm down.

  If I was going to be stolen away by a grandmother, I wish it had been Granny Culvert, who’d chased her dreams, and a fella, off to Texas last time Mama Lacy was well. Granny Culvert, with her tangled braids and her rolled-up blue jeans, would have been comfortable to live with. But I was no blood relation to Granny Culvert and anyways she wouldn’t have gotten custody. The stuffy judge responsible for deciding my future would never have handed me to a crazy old lady with purple hair who smoked Cuban cigars. No, it was Mrs. Madison, in her silk blouse with its high-button collar, who fussed at the judge until he agreed to take me away from Mama Shannon.

  I don’t want to be mad at Mama Shannon, but I am. She’s my mother. Not legally—the law doesn’t let two moms adopt each other’s kids or get married or do any of the other things my mothers wanted to do—but she’s still my mother. She should have been able to stop Mrs. Madison from taking me away. She’d been so upset over Mama Lacy, so sad and tired and unable to get out of bed in the mornings, that even the judge could see how my clothes were dirty in court and how Mama Shannon had no energy and barely any voice.

  Oh, she asked for me. Begged the judge not to take me. But her fingers kept picking at each other till they bled, and under the fluorescent lights of the courthouse, you could really see the saggy tear bags under her eyes. If I were the judge, I might not have let her keep me, either.

  Still, I can’t help thinking if I’d done better in court, if I’d remembered to wash my face and if I’d hung up my clothes so the wrinkles fell out, maybe the judge would have given me to Mama Shannon for keeps. But he didn’t and now I’m not hers anymore.

  Zany tosses her cigarette out my window. I watch it whip by in the wind and scatter sparks on the pavement behind us in the dark. My eyes are feeling heavy, and everything is slow, like the scary part in a movie, inching by, with dark music playing. Only the thing that’s playing now is the country station and Adam’s soft voice is singing along.

  He turns off the radio as Zany hits the emergency flashers and parks in the fire lane.

  “Think they’ll let you in?” she asks.

  He doesn’t look at her. “They told me they would.” From the way his voice sounds, I don’t think that’s a good thing. They don’t usually let people visit other people in the hospital at this hour. Not unless there’s a reason to hurry.

  “Hop out,” Zany says. Her voice is low. “I’ll park the truck.”

  “Thanks.” He doesn’t sound like he’s even paying attention. I think about how all the things that happened as Mama Lacy passed blur together when I try to remember them, and I wonder what Adam will remember about us, whether he’ll ever think about two girls who ought to have had a laugh track policing his car-burglaring, or whether we’ll be lost in the haze of the worst night he’s had to face.

  He walks away without looking back, and Zany watches the door until he’s been out of sight for almost a minute.

  Then she pulls the truck around the emergency loop and drives toward the parking garage.

  Past the parking garage.

  Toward the EXIT sign and the road beyond.

  “Zany!”

  “Shh.”

  “Zany! What are you—”

  “Be quiet.”

  “But you’re—”

  “Oh my god.” She pulls over to the shoulder and whips around to look at me, foot jammed on the brake. “I know. Okay? You don’t have to freak out and tell me I’m stealing a car, because I know I’m stealing a car, and I know all the reasons it’s a bad idea, and I know I’m going to go to jail. Okay? Wow. Just stop talking. Stop. Talking.”

  “It’s not a car. It’s a truck.” In case they put you in jail longer for a truck than they would for a car. I don’t know. Don’t figure Zany does, either. She’s got her eyes closed and she’s blowing out a long breath through her lips. When she opens her eyes, her whole face has turned pink.

  “Stop. Talking.”

  “But we just stopped Adam from stealing money. Now we’re going to steal a whole truck?”

  “We’re not stealing the truck. We’re borrowing the truck.”

  “But you just said—”

  “Oh my god! Ophelia. You have to stop talking, or so help me, I will leave you here. I will put you out by the side of the road and I will drive away.”

  “You wouldn’t really.”

  “You want to find out? Jesus.” She throws in a couple of swearwords as she lifts her foot off the brake and eases us back into traffic.

  There’s a world of room in the front seat of the truck without Adam, and I turn my back against the door and pull my feet up on the seat. I’m facing Zany in case she decides to talk to me, but I won’t start talking to her first. She’s so worked up, I can see her mouth moving in the semidarkness, whispering to herself. I wonder whether she’s planning the route or rehearsing what t
o say to Mama Shannon when she finds out about all this.

  I lay my head back against the window and try to nap, but now that we’ve scooted farther apart and I’m not squished up against Zany, I’m cold. I don’t dare mention it, because Zany doesn’t have any sleeves on at all, thanks to me, and at least I’ve got my robe. I’ve also got Haberdashery snuggled up warm against my thigh.

  The billboards next to the interstate catch my eye. They advertise fun things like amusement parks and petting zoos, historical monuments and shopping centers. I remember stopping along the way with our mothers, back when we were traveling the other direction. I remember Mama Lacy buying me a stuffed pony I’ve still got, only it’s back at Mrs. Madison’s.

  “Something pretty for my pretty,” she’d said. I only felt pretty when Mama Lacy said it.

  I remember petting a llama with Mama Shannon, and letting a Ferris wheel swoop me and Zany up into the clouds. Mama Lacy made me feel pretty, but Mama Shannon made me feel like an adventurer.

  We don’t stop at any of the billboard places now. The brass container in my hand is feeling heavier with every mile. I close my eyes and let the signs pass without looking at them.

  chapter

  14

  It’s easy to dream about driving back from Asheville. I was sleepy then, too, passing miles in a car with a heater that couldn’t keep up. It was December, almost Christmas, and we’d been looking forward to New Year’s fireworks over the courthouse. We’d been looking forward to a lot of things we were never going to have.

  It started well before that, back when I was six. Mama Lacy came home from the doctor, and for a week or two, all our mothers could do was whisper-worry, and whisper-fight, and whisper-worry some more. These were the parents who had laughed us through the chicken pox and fevers and the flu. I had never heard them whisper-worry or whisper-fight before.