“I don’t know,” Jay said, adding his reply.
Astrid looked out the window again. “I’ve been dying for something from a Buncha Burger.”
“They have those where you’re from?” Mari asked.
Astrid nodded at the fields and the bluing northern sky above them.
“Where are you from?” Mari asked, making the next logical inquiry.
“Mars, most people in this pisshole state would say.”
“I take it you’re not planning to settle down here,” Jay said, and a too-brief little girl smile flashed out at the prairie.
“You have a pretty smile,” Mari told her, and Astrid looked away from the scenery to her.
“Really?”
Mari nodded. “You have straight teeth. I had to wear braces.” And she flashed the smile that had cost her parents thousands.
“My mom had really nice teeth,” Astrid said. “She died a few years ago. Breast cancer.”
“I’m sorry,” Mari told her.
“That’s okay. I remember her smile.”
“That’s where you got it from, I’ll bet,” Mari said, feeling the exchange fix between them. Maybe not forming any sort of bond, because why would that be necessary, but take on a more pleasant tone. A more real tone, with less suspicion and none of the teenage aloofness she could remember dishing in her own wild years.
“Your name’s different, too,” Astrid said.
“Jay?” Jay responded from the front seat. “Yeah, I know. My parents stole it from the alphabet.”
Astrid smiled again, putting her hand to her mouth to staunch a giggle. Her left hand, and then Mari could see what Jay had seen—that the girl’s left thumb ended in a nub at the lowest joint, a thin scar tracing over the termination point.
“It’s no big deal,” Astrid said. She had caught Mari staring at her hand. “One opposable thumb is all you need. I just use the left hand for scratching.”
Jay smiled in the rearview. “You’re quick.”
“All us vampires are,” she said, and fell into a fit of adolescent giggles.
When the fit had run its course, Mari asked, “How’d you lose your thumb?”
“How’d you get your name?” Astrid parried.
“Misspelled at the hospital,” Mari told her, drawing a shocked look from Jay, to which she said, “You’d better make sure you don’t drive us into a ditch.”
“Misspelled on your birth certificate?” Astrid asked, and Mari nodded with a big tight-lipped grin.
“My parents say ‘y’, the nurse put ‘i’, and, well, they kind of liked it.”
Astrid nodded, smiling. “That’s cool.”
“So...”
She held up her hand less its useless opposable thumb. “Bus crash.”
“Bus crash?” Mari parroted.
Astrid nodded and looked back out the window. “Just one of those things, you know.”
“Bad?” Mari asked.
“I was the only one that lived,” Astrid replied, and the car jerked almost to the shoulder as Jay looked back at her. “Yo, the road’s up there, Jay.”
He turned back to the front, but not before exchanging a wondrous glance with Mari.
“You were the only one that lived?” Mari checked, and Astrid nodded.
“We had a competition out of state,” she began. “A cheerleading competition. Yeah, I know, ‘you were a cheerleader?’ A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away I was. So we were on our way back home, and the driver lost control people were saying later, and the bus went off the road and into a dry quarry.”
Mari glanced away from Astrid for just a second, spying the box, her mind working, trying to recall. “Where was this, Astrid?”
“Pittsburgh. Go Steelers.” She thrust a thumbless fist in the air and said, “I still got it.”
“A long time ago?” Mari asked, mining for information without being obvious. To her left, Jay’s fingers were working hard on the wheel. This was just too weird.
“One year and one month ago last Monday,” Astrid said. “You know, the papers called me the miracle girl. Said it was a miracle because I only lost my thumb.” She snorted disapprovingly. “A miracle would have been if all my friends had lived. I was just lucky.”
Mari glanced sideways at Jay, and saw his face go ashen at Astrid’s comments.
“Anyway, after that my grandma was like a total psycho. I was living with her after my mom died, and after the bus crash she was freaking, thinking that I was going to die every second. She wouldn’t let me do anything, and when I got my navel pierced she threatened to send me to a convent, and like I’m not even Catholic...hello?”
Mari’s eyes were wide, drinking up the tale, pieces of which sounded familiar. She wondered if Jay could recall this tragedy, and what this was doing to him, and she reached to his arm and put her hand there, squeezing his bicep easily as he drove.
“So I split. I stayed with some friends, and then one of them put some moves on me, and I like told him I don’t put out for low life wannabe jocks, and from there I just kind of moved around. And I’m still moving around, just trying to get out of Kansas now.”
“Sounds rough,” Mari commented.
“Life on the road, Mari. Just life on the road.”
How true, Mari knew. And how sad this girl had to know this so young. But how young was ‘this young’? “How old are you, Astrid?”
“Almost sixteen,” she answered, with an honesty that troubled her an instant later. “You’re not going to narc on me, are you? Send me back?”
Mari shook her head. “Is Astrid your real name?”
“It is now,” she said, offering no more than that. She looked past Mari to a clump of buildings astride the road up ahead. “Is there anyway we could stop soon? I gotta pee.”
“Sure,” Jay said, nodding without looking into the rearview. “Anything you want Astrid.”
* * *
While Astrid donned her sullen teenage persona and strolled into the McDonalds to take care of business, Mari went quickly through the box of letters and the notes she’d taken at the library and arranged them on her lap. When she’d found what she was looking for she turned to Jay, but he was just staring out the windshield. “Jay?”
He looked to her. “Saving one life doesn’t sound so noble anymore.”
She took his chin in hand and made him face her. “She’s alive, I’m alive, and neither of those things would be the case if it weren’t for you. Okay?” But it still didn’t seem okay. “So what that your not the kind of miracle worker that little girl would wish for? She is wishing, Jay. That is what matters.” She took her notes in hand and held them out. “And so is this.”
He saw two letters atop the sheaf of lined yellow pages. One had to relate to Astrid’s special event. “I remember what happened to her, Mari. That bus groaning as it went over the lip of the quarry hole and flipped over and over before it hit bottom. These jagged rocks were slashing through the metal skin like knives, shredding everything. I was cut, my legs, my face, my chest. I was laid open like a fish and watched the blood pour out of me like the water at Niagara Falls.”
“But she only lost a thumb,” Mari reminded him.
“And all her friends,” Jay reminded her.
“All right, all right. Will you feel sorry for yourself later, please? She’ll be back out soon, and I don’t think she needs to hear about all of this.”
“Okay,” Jay agreed. This wasn’t about him. It was about them, and some as-yet unknown thing ‘out there’—wherever that would end up being. “You’re right. Go ahead.”
“Okay, try and follow this,” Mari began, showing Jay her notes. “This is the event that she survived. The date matches, and the description, and her age at the time would be right. The papers only had her name listed as K.S. Libby. Nothing on what that meant. So this girl in the car has to be her—another person you saved, Jay.”
“Should I say spooky again?” he asked, but Mari only stared at him. “Okay. I’m
listening.”
“You saw her thumb? She has a scar. And I don’t mean ‘the wound’. I mean a mark of what happened to her. Of what she survived.” Mari touched her left sleeve. “A mark like I have.”
“So?”
Mari showed Jay another letter, a very recent one concerning the tower collapse at the fair in Junction City, Kansas. “I don’t know why this didn’t connect. All I can think is that this letter was one of the first I looked into at the library because it was one of the first ones I read, so there were a lot after it. More than a hundred. And it kind of got buried in my head.”
“What got buried?”
“The name of the man who survived when the tower fell.” She pointed to her notes now. “His name was VanDerPool, Jay. Gary VanDerPool, thirty eight, of Gretna, Kansas.”
“Gus’s brother?”
Mari nodded emphatically, that energy driving her again. “The one he was going to help with his crop. It said in the news reports that...” She read from her notes. “...that ‘Gary VanDerPool is expected to recover fully, though his right eye could not be saved’. His right eye, Jay. His mark.”
Jay took the sheet of notes and flipped through them, page after page after page, the record of the lives he had saved, of the lives that had been...marked? “Mari, what are you saying this means?”
“Jay, we’ve now crossed paths with two people who are connected to what you’ve done—one directly, Astrid, and one indirectly, Gus VanDerPool. Gus fixed my car, the car that is carrying us to Amarillo, and Astrid...”
“What about her?”
“Well...I don’t know about her yet, but there can’t be any other explanation, Jay. The people you saved are somehow influencing this journey.”
“Gus and Astrid are two people, Mari.”
“Two that we know of, Jay. That gas station attendant back in Topeka, he had a limp.”
“He sold us gas, Mari. Just gas.”
“But he was there. He sold us gas right then. I’m not saying for sure he was a survivor, but if he was it would make sense. Keeping us moving. On time, or whatever sort of schedule we’re destined to be on. Just like with Gus...” Her eyes gleamed. “Like with Gus and that minute.”
“What minute?”
“That minute after midnight,” she told him, the totality of it coming to her just then, from that place in her gut that had steered her to Plainview. Weird. It was so completely weird, all of this. Weird and wonderful because man! didn’t it have to mean something purely good now! “Think about it—if we’d left a minute earlier, right at the stroke of midnight, we would have broken down a minute earlier. A minute in my car on the interstate is more than half a mile. We would have broken down before where Gus got on the interstate. He never would have seen us, or helped us. We might still be sitting there.”
Jay absorbed that for a moment, the grand smallness of it, so vast in scope yet so personal in execution, and when it sank in he nodded to Mari. Mari—the other half of the equation. Seeing things that he didn’t. Or couldn’t. Maybe even wouldn’t. Maybe because after so many years at the mercy of the coins and what they foretold, this journey required someone who could keep him going, make him look past that mystical script that was reworked every time heads or tails came up. Maybe she had not only gotten his attention, maybe she was going to keep said attention focused as well.
The realization made him feel weak, and tired.
“For every thing there is a reason, Jay,” Mari reminded him. It was what he needed to hear right then. And it was the last they could speak of secret matters, as Astrid aka K.S. Libby was coming out of the McDonalds with a drink carrier and a brown sack in hand.
Mari gathered the letters and her notes and pushed them back into the box.
“Hey, I got some coffee and hash browns,” Astrid said pleasantly as she climbed in the back, just a kid talking again. “My treat. For the ride.”
She passed out the coffees and food, and closed the door. “All in.”
Jay sipped his coffee, taking just a tiny bit of the steaming liquid, and put it between his legs so he could drive.
Mari reached over and took it carefully into her own hands. Jay looked at her, his cheeks flushing red.
“I’m not getting fresh,” Mari assured him. “You just don’t catch the news, do you?”
“Burn your thingy right off,” Astrid said from the back seat, and giggled with her mouth full of hashbrowns.
“Hot,” Mari told him. “I’ll hold, you drive.”
“Can I handle my hashbrowns, do you think?” he asked Mari, and she pushed the golden brown potato patty into his mouth like a cigar.
Astrid ate up the show from the back seat, and Jay took them back toward the interstate.
Thirty Nine
The End Of One Line
For almost a hundred miles after their potty and food stop at Mickey Dees, Astrid detailed for Mari and Jay the wonders of Buncha Burger, reciting the whole menu as she remembered it from her home town location, down to how many packets of sauce you got with the chicken strips—not that she hardly ever ordered those, being a burger kind of person, if they knew what she meant. For so long did she dwell on the Mega Buncha Meal—which was three all beef patties on four buns, with pickles, onions, mustard, ketchup, and three strips of fried zucchini—that Jay suggested that maybe her calling in life was to open a franchise.
A franchise for very disturbed customers, she added, and they all laughed at a that.
After that Mari had asked if she wanted to go as far as they were, Amarillo, and Astrid said sure, that there was a good a chance as any that there was a Buncha Burger there, to which Mari told her flat out that she had Buncha Burger on the brain. A few more laughs, and then it quieted. Astrid dozed off, and Mari offered to switch, but Jay said he was doing fine, that driving was keeping his mind right, and his thoughts off of his keg, which was throbbing again even after two pills that day. He wasn’t groggy, she thought, but made him promise that if he started feeling that way he would give up the wheel. He agreed, and they drove on.
They drove through the plains and the gently hilled lands of western Kansas, prairie that looked like a golden flag unfurling as the wind danced across it, south on State Route 27, across small streams where the afternoon sun fired sparkles on pure waters. They saw deer vaulting barbed wire fences and prancing for distant trees, and coyotes dash across the roadway ahead, and they passed coyotes who had tried but not made it in time. There were hawks in the sky and wisps of clouds far above, and there were green tractors that seemed to be floating in vast seas of growth. It was good country. Country that looked good, felt good.
“Jay?” Mari said as they neared the border with Oklahoma.
“What?” His eyes were ahead now. Just ahead, not taking in the scenery.
“You look sad. Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” he told her, maybe lying, maybe not. ‘Not’, he figured, if remembering good things that made one sad really caused no irreparable harm. He thought not. “Just thinking back a long, long time.”
She smiled, and left it at that, and the car was a sweet silent ride until near seven in the evening when they neared Amarillo.
* * *
“Astrid, wake up, honey,” Mari said, reaching back to pat their young companion on the leg. “We’re just about there.”
“Interstate Forty is just three miles ahead,” Jay said. They were on the 287, which right there was a combination with the 87, and their time on it was draining away fast. Signs for I 40 and the civic center were passing, as were long streams of cars zipping by what their drivers must have thought was the slowest damn thing ever on the highway.
In the back Astrid stirred, but didn’t come out of sleep, so Mari tapped her again, causing the young girl to swat at the annoying hand. “All right already. I’m awake. I’m awake.”
“Should I just get off by I Forty?” Jay asked.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” she said, and looked into the back seat t
o see Astrid finally sitting up, her dark-rimmed eyes drooped halfway shut still. “Morning, honey.”
“Morning?” Astrid asked, then sleep fell away enough that she got the humor. “I feel like I’ve been sleeping all day.”
“Half the day,” Mari informed her, and pointed to the sun setting low out the right side windows. “It’s after seven.”
Astrid held the palm of her thumbless hand to her mouth and breathed against it. Her face soured. “Do you have any gum?”
Mari did, and dredged it from her purse. She passed Astrid the whole pack. “Here. Keep it. I’ve got another in here somewhere.”
The girl peeled the shiny wrappers from two pieces and pushed them into her mouth, chewing down on them hard and fast, wanting results right then, thank you very much, then she took her bag from the pile of clothes and blankets and put it on her lap, shoving the gum inside and making sure she hadn’t left anything on the seat or the floor.
“I’m going to get off up here,” Jay said. Plains Boulevard, it was, and though still a ways from the junction with Interstate Forty, he did a bit of quick mental math with the odometer’s present and previous readings and figured that they were pretty darn close, within a mile maybe. And once off 287, it would be about on the money.
“You can just let me off at a store or a gas station,” Astrid said from the back seat, seeming antsy, Mari thought. But then again, thirteen hours in a small, slow car with two people twice your age might tend to drive a young girl half way insane.
“Sure thing, honey,” Mari said, liking the feel of saying that word again, if only to a sweet girl she had known for a very short time. Honey. Honey. Honey. It hurt a bit to say it, but not in a bad way. Never in a bad way. Not then, not now.
Jay took the rumbling car off the highway and turned right toward a brightly lit row of buildings along Plains Boulevard. Their windows were down and the coming night was warm, but not as warm as the days before in Missouri, and Astrid pointed out at a cluster of shops just past a gas station on the left. Jay slid over two lanes and into the turn pocket, pulled a tight one, and stopped in the parking lot right outside a taco stand.
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