“Good night, love,” he said.
The thought of Joe being put back in prison stuck in Val’s mind as she listened to him snore. Willfully distracting herself from this sadness, she watched the two boys play-fighting on the gravel, and Rosa acting as referee.
“Don’t hurt each other,” she said.
“We won’t,” Sunny said, “we’re good boys.”
“Oh, sure you are.” She winked at Rosa. “Like Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.”
Bobby stopped. He scampered into the mobile library, reemerging with a smile on his face and a book in his hand. Its hardback cover was well worn, the spine cracked and feeble. Perhaps a thousand pairs of eyes had read it.
“Here,” he said, pressing it into Val’s hands. It was an old copy of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain.
“You want me to read it to you again?” she asked.
Bobby was speechless. How could she not see the answer in the pages, right there on her lap? They must have read it together three times or more. He leafed through the pages for her, eventually finding the right one. The warm gold of aged paper bounced off her skin.
“Look,” he said. Val did. Tom and Huck had run off to play pirates on an island in the Mississippi. Bobby imagined the vast channel of water rushing by, play-fighting in the foam smashed against the rocks on the shore.
“Huh?” she said, “you want us to become pirates? In a mobile library on the seven seas?”
Rosa laughed.
“No,” Bobby said. “Why are they free to go and do whatever they want?”
“Why?” Val said.
“Because the townsfolk think they have drowned in the river.”
She pictured the mobile library by the ocean, on a clifftop. Its doors were open, swinging gently in the breeze. On the beach, four pairs of shoes were half buried by sand. The police would wait for the water to give up its secret, but the tide would break its promise. They would wonder how Joseph Sebastian Wiles had met Valerie, Rosa and Bobby. They would wonder what had caused them to walk into the sea with their pockets full of rocks. Somewhere else entirely, they would be together, with a dog and a macaw that knew them all to be alive and well.
Val saw that it was a preposterous plan. They might as well jump in the Mississippi for real. But isn’t that life? Its currents drag you this way and that. Sometimes you’re washed up, sometimes smashed against the rocks, no matter how hard you kick. What the past few months had taught her was that it wasn’t the swimming, but who you clung to on the way that was important. That was what was with you in the end. She had to cling.
Tomorrow, once he had rested, she would tell Joe and they would make a plan. But for now she was content to have Rosa and Bobby by her side, where both of them should always be.
• • •
An electric blue flash briefly changed the sky’s black complexion. Bobby assumed it was distant lightning and listened out for the clap of thunder. It didn’t come. Whatever it had been, it riled Bert, who began running around the clearing between the garages, barking at the clouds. Perturbed by this sudden rodeo, Captain dismounted from the dog and flew into the back of the mobile library, dazzling Sunny with her plumage. They waited, but the night returned to deadened form.
“What was that?” Bobby asked. Sunny shrugged. They walked together to the back wall, from where they had a decent view of the road that, within ten miles, spread out into many smaller lanes, which, like the tributaries of a river, eventually led to the ocean. But for the occasional window lit by the glow of late-night television, there was no sign of life. Bobby scanned the darkest alleyways, just to be sure. Everything was as it should be, in a suburban street when the moon is up.
Sunny led Bobby along a thin pathway at the side of the garages that had been overrun by nettles. Four side steps with his back to the pebble-dashed wall. Eighteen long strides around the brambles. A five-second scurry to the gate. There, crouched behind a fence post, they had a view of the street’s far end, where the cars turned off the road into the garage lot. Joe had been hard at work earlier building a crude blockade out of bricks and logs, and the fruits of his labor impressed them. Though it was not especially sturdy, no ordinary vehicle would have been able to pass through it. Again, the view was clear.
“Wait,” Bobby said, “up there.” He pointed at the house next door to Sunny’s, to the first-floor bathroom’s window.
“That’s Mr. Munro’s house,” Sunny said. “He’s just a lonely old guy, sits up there watching the comings and goings all day.”
“But it’s gone midnight.”
“So?”
“He’s still there.” To Sunny’s surprise he found that Bobby was right. There, in the blackness, he could just make out the familiar shape of Mr. Munro’s bald head, occasionally catching the glint of the stars.
“How did you see that?” Sunny said, but Bobby was busy following Mr. Munro’s sight line down the road. Though he had to climb through another crowd of nettles to do it, a raised red rash rolling down his arm, he was eventually able to see exactly what Mr. Munro was watching. A police car, parked in wait. A second arrived. Then a third. Soon, there were seven lined up at the end of the street. By then, Bobby and Sunny were running toward Val and Rosa, who had been preparing for bed and were justly alarmed by the speed of their approach.
“They’re here,” Bobby said. Val leapt up.
“We have to go,” she said.
“Should we wake Joe?”
“No,” she said, sealing the back of the mobile library from the outside, then hurrying Rosa and Bert into the cab, “there isn’t time.”
The engine roared into action, seeming to have understood the urgency with which she had twisted the key in the ignition. She turned to find Bobby standing with Sunny beside the truck.
“Come with us,” Bobby said.
“No,” Sunny said, “I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m the Robot now.”
They embraced, wetness sticking their cheeks together. Sunny felt them on his face this time, he was sure of it. Bobby’s tears, where nothing had been felt in so long. The mobile library began to move, its great mechanical wings taking shape.
• • •
On hearing the mobile library’s engine, several officers rushed toward Joe’s blockade, hoying the bricks and wood into the trees on either side. With many hands it was done quickly, and the route was clear enough for the squad cars to pass through. They came at speed and in convoy. Entering the court between the garages, they found what they had been searching for. The mobile library, now painted white, its full-beam headlamps filling the space with blinding light.
Val revved the engine and the vibrations traveled up through the windscreens of the police cars, rattling steering wheels and stinging the hands that held them. Its rear tires kicked up great plumes of dust. Gravel rained down onto the metal bonnets of the squad cars with deafening force. They were trapped, or so it seemed, until the mobile library shunted forward, into the wall in front of it. The brickwork began to crack, then topple as the truck pushed onward. The mobile library edged over its ruins, crushing bricks that exploded in clouds of red powder, before continuing down the incline and onto the road unimpeded. Behind it, destruction, and an entire police response unit outdone.
There, where the dust had just started to settle—a thick blanket of dirt and grit the sterile gray of bone—on the ground, was the body of a boy.
CHAPTER TWENTY
THE CHASE
A young officer leapt out of the nearest squad car and rushed to the boy’s side. She hadn’t seen a dead body before, but had been warned that when she did it could appear almost serene, more as if it were sleeping. Serenity described him perfectly. Though no older than twelve or thirteen (it was difficult to judge beneath all that dust), the boy looked as though he was clasped in the grip of a pleasant dream.
“Is it Bobby Nusku?” said the radio clipped to her breast pocket.
“I think so, si
r, it’s difficult to tell,” said the rookie.
“Well, is he dead?”
“Yes, I think he is.”
She slid her arms beneath the boy’s body. Cradling his head in one hand, and with her other under his knees, she started to lift.
“No,” Sunny said, opening his eyes, moist wells in the desert of his dry, dirty face. “You’ll need to drive over me.” The rookie screamed and dropped the boy.
She ran back to the car, still screaming, and slammed the door behind her.
Another, more experienced, officer found that he couldn’t lift Sunny either. When he tried the boy stiffened his arms and swung them around in the air, catching him flush on his left eye socket, where a bruise immediately blushed.
“I’m a robot! Drive over me,” he yelled, “drive over me!” The officer tried again. The metal plate in Sunny’s arm caught him sharply on the bridge of his nose. Blood stained the collar of his crisp white shirt. “I am a robot! I am a robot!” Swallowed by the commotion was another order through the radio receivers, this time in crackled unison.
“Just move him!” And they did, after almost five minutes of trying, two torn police jacket lapels and a badly cut constable’s chin. It took one officer holding each limb, and another at the head, to carry Sunny to the garage doors, where he was arrested. By the time his protest was over, the mobile library had a lengthy head start on the cars that sped off in pursuit.
Bobby Nusku was right, Sunny thought, barely capable of containing his glee. Stories did happen to people like him.
• • •
“We must get to the coast,” Val said, “all we have to do is get to the coast.”
“To the seaside?” Rosa asked.
“Exactly, to the side of the sea.”
The mobile library seemed easier to drive than it had before. It was an extension of her, its wheels her feet, its windows her eyes. The books in the back were things she had done, places she had been to, people she had met. The same could be said for all of them. The library had imbued them with its gift. Words. Microscopic traces of human experience that would be forever carried in their blood. Every decision would be made with the hindsight of a thousand characters whose lives were contained within its walls. Every problem they would face had been solved in countless next chapters already. Love, loss, life, death, these mighty winds that test us, had been weathered on the pages so that they would not be faced alone again.
“We had an adventure, didn’t we?” Bobby said. Despite the speed with which they hit the corners of the lanes, and how the truck’s enormous body smashed overhanging branches from the trees, Val was able to look over at the boy beside her in the cab. Bobby Nusku, who had changed her life.
“It isn’t over yet,” she said.
The white paint had now been all but flayed completely from the mobile library’s livery to reveal its flecked green underlayer, and so, from a distance, speeding through the patchwork countryside, it did indeed look like a mirage moving on the breeze.
Rosa wound down the window and let the fast air whip her hair into a nest of snakes. Bobby held her by the waist so that she could lean out further still, combing the leaves with her fingertips when the mobile library pulled close enough to touch the trees.
Val floored the accelerator, vying to beat the sunrise to the horizon. Disappearing would be easier by night. Disappearing is what night is for. The mobile library vibrated more violently than ever. Parts of its underside shook themselves free, clanking as they hit the road and spun off into the past, as if it were alive and shedding, preparing for the end.
As the roads narrowed, the mobile library was forced to slow. The sea came into view before them just as the first police siren appeared in the rearview mirror. Above, a helicopter was chopping up the sky. They were too late.
“We didn’t make it,” Val said. Bobby kissed the soft skin where her neck became her collarbone, then picked the bubble of a tear from her cheek and let it search his hand like a tiny spider.
“We did,” he said.
The police convoy gained on the mobile library, but the roads were too slim for them to overtake it. Val slowed the pace and led them through the sleepy clifftop village, a funereal procession toward the sea at dawn.
• • •
Detective Jimmy Samas, thanks to some uncharacteristically assertive radio instruction, was able to muscle his car through to the front of the pack behind the mobile library. As the mobile library’s front tires came to a stop on the very edge of the clifftop—the slightest tickle of the accelerator could have sent it plunging over—he called a halt to the slow, surreal pursuit. Now just a few hundred feet of grass separated the police, with him at the front, from the people for whom he’d searched for months. Any closer and he worried that the woman might be spooked by their presence. With a three-hundred-foot drop just below them he didn’t want to provoke any rash decisions. Clearly she’d be sensitive, sleep-deprived, a real test for the negotiation training he had recently passed with flying colors. He needed to talk to her, to look her in the eye. The helicopter now buzzing overhead reported a woman and two children in the cab, but no sign of a man. The detective instructed it to stand down. The noise from its propeller was disconcerting. Who knew how it might frighten the children. After it had flown on, and the sirens on the police cars muted, the morning, now beginning, sounded just like any other, when it was anything but.
“Keep your weapons trained on the back of the truck,” he said into his radio, “do not aim them at the cab. The danger here is Joseph Sebastian Wiles.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
THE END
Lips, sticky, not how his mother kissed. He only considered the difference in their ages whenever he tasted her makeup.
“Are we in trouble?” Bobby asked.
“No,” Val said, “not anymore.”
• • •
Val watched in the wing mirror as Rosa and Bobby walked past the young-looking detective toward the ice cream van. Behind them was Bert, his bottom swinging to and fro. She swallowed, the salty sea air forming a film in the back of her throat. Bobby had told her that his mother had planned to escape by the sea. She felt honored by the prospect of fulfilling this promise for the son they had come to share.
The detective approached, hands stuffed deep inside his pockets. He nervously ran through various ways of introducing himself as he neared the door, which seemed odd. He knew the woman better than he knew anyone, despite their never having met.
“Hello,” he said through the open door, “my name is Jimmy Samas.”
“Hello, Jimmy,” she said, “I’m Val.”
“Oh,” Detective Samas said, smiling, “I already knew that.”
She remained behind the steering wheel, but turned her legs and faced him as he stood on the ground looking up. Early sunrays hit his eyes through the windscreen, and he shielded them with a trembling hand. He noted two things, the first more important than the second. She was calm, and she was far more beautiful in the flesh.
“An awful lot of people have been looking for you, Ms. Reed,” he said.
“Please, call me Val.”
“You’re quite elusive for a lady in a giant truck.”
“But that’s all over now, isn’t it?”
“Yes, I guess it is.” He noticed that she was whispering, and presumed this was so that Joseph Sebastian Wiles in the back of the truck would not be able to hear.
“I’d like to do this calmly and at your pace, Val, if I may. Rosa and Bobby are safe with my colleagues now, so I guess that’s a very good start.”
Val looked up the hill, past the police line to the ice cream van, where the two of them were holding hands and deciding which lolly to eat.
“Okay.”
“Good.” The detective motioned toward the back of the mobile library. “Val,” he said quietly, “is there anybody in there?”
“Uh-huh,” Val said.
“Would you care to tell me who that person is?”
/>
“That person is somebody I believe you may know to be Joseph Sebastian Wiles.”
The detective muttered something Val couldn’t hear into his radio transmitter. Back at the police line, with their target confirmed, the gathered officers trained their arms even more keenly on the back of the mobile library. Below, the waves broke with a crash that briefly distracted them both.
“I’d like to come down from here,” Val said.
“Then you may.” He held his hands out toward her, shaking and actually shaped as if clutching an olive branch.
“But first I should explain,” she said, “I need you to understand that we only intended to go for a day, not more.”
“I understand.”
“Bobby Nusku came to me. He was covered in bruises. Have you been to his home, Detective?”
Jimmy Samas thought of the size of Bobby’s father’s hands, the ugly missing digit.
“Yes,” he said, “I have.”
“Then you will have met his father. I wanted to take Bobby away, to somewhere safe, away from him. The mobile library was the only vehicle I had access to.”
“That stands to reason. But may I ask . . . why would you not come directly to the police?” Val flicked a strand of hair from her eyes.
“Because I had made a complaint to the police just a month or so before. About an attack on my daughter?” The detective guiltily remembered it now, he had seen it written in her records. “And nothing happened. I considered Bobby’s life to be in danger. I wanted to do something that would draw your attention to just how serious a matter it was.”
While she spoke the detective reevaluated the risks. The clifftop had induced vertigo in him, a spinning sickness he’d not experienced before, which made the grass around his feet seem farther away every time he glanced down at it. He wanted this to be over, but he wasn’t willing to let Val know as much. “We drove to some woods. We were going to camp there, just for a night.”
“And . . .”
“That’s where we found a man hiding. That man was Joseph Sebastian Wiles.”
Mobile Library Page 20
