Nate reached the light switch before Peter’s slithering hand reached him. It still was Peter, eyeless, rotten, worms pouring out of his mouth.
“It will kill you all.”
“Nate!”
—
Nate opened his eyes back to the ugly motel. Andy banged the wall between their rooms once more.
“Nate? Are you okay?” she said.
Nate sat up on his bed, clothes soaked in sweat.
“Yeah,” he said to the wall. “Bad dream. No problem.”
It took him another minute to notice he was back in the left bed.
Lying fully dressed on the right one, Peter crossed his legs and fixed his perfect hair.
“Yup. All together then. This is going to be great.”
PART TWO
RELAPSE
They bought a new car radio with a tape player and no CD tray the next morning in an unmanned hardware store in Winter River, Connecticut. The next day they had the oil replaced in a gas station near Brahams, West Virginia. They had a flat tire that afternoon, so on the morrow they bought a new spare at a retail shop outside Dark Falls, Illinois. On the fourth evening, the front brake cylinder broke in the middle of the interstate, almost causing them to sodomize a VW Camper, and Andy had to persuade a gang of road racers to take the Chevy into their garage for new hydraulics twenty miles north of Raccoon City. By that time, the question of whether the car that would eventually reach Oregon would be the same that left the East Coast was beginning to acquire philosophical relevance.
—
On the fifth morning, Kerri emerged from a motel room late in the morning, about 9:30, to find Andy in stained overalls and a breathing mask, removing strips of two-inch vinyl tape from the car. Two fresh racing stripes in metallic black flowed down the hood of the fish-eyed Chevrolet Vega, glittering under the blazing morning sun like diamond dust.
“The racers let me borrow their paint gun,” Andy explained, removing her mask. “Like it?”
“Yeah. I mean…I think it likes it,” she replied.
“You said it would look more like a sports car.”
“I know. I was kinda joking, but…whatever. It looks good.”
The two-door station wagon sat like any other twelve-year-old while two of grandma’s lady friends complimented his haircut.
The restaurant door banged shut behind Nate and Tim walking out into the dusty parking lot. Tim hurried to kiss Kerri good morning while Nate offered a tray of coffee cups to Andy first.
“Buy you lunch if you drive my turn.” A hand fended the front-charging sunlight off his reddened eyes.
“Okay,” Andy agreed.
Nate distributed breakfast and crawled onto the backseat.
“You had a rough night again?” Kerri asked him, but he had slammed the door behind him already. Tim studied the fresh, sweetly intoxicating paint on the hood.
“Do you think he’s gonna be all right?”
“He’s rationing the drugs he bought in Lexington. They ought to last him for a couple weeks,” Andy guessed. She then read Kerri. “What about you, did you sleep well?”
“Not bad,” she said, thinking of it for the first time. She was wearing yesterday’s shirt under her violet T-shirt from two days ago, Andy recalled. “Pretty well, actually. I don’t know. Maybe it’s helping. Not being alone.”
Andy nodded, began putting away the paint gun.
“How about you?” Kerri followed up. “You never talk about how you coped. Don’t you have nightmares? Did you used to think of us at nights?”
Andy tossed a can of spray paint into the box and paused to examine the question. Kerri stood by, gold-haloed.
“Yeah. Quite often,” Andy answered.
—
During that day they crossed another three state lines: Colorado, Wyoming, and Idaho. By late evening, Tim was riding shotgun, leaning out the window and panting at the wind, his head about to be turned completely inside out. Every now and then he popped in to spit the dead insects and then stuck his head back out for another five minutes. Kerri and Nate were playing Scattergories in the backseat. The radio blasted “Funky Cold Medina,” the remixed version. Andy was driving and nodding to the beat.
Her Coca-Cola watch on the dashboard beep-beeped.
ANDY: Time’s up.
KERRI: (Lightspeed scribbling.) Waitwaitwaitwait done! Okay, people you’ve been compared to: Vanessa Paradis.
NATE: Poe. Because of the gloom.
KERRI: Cartoons you like: Pink Panther, double score!
NATE: Pole Position, double score too.
KERRI: Fuck. Places you’ve been to: prison.
NATE: Uh, Portland? As in, where we used to live?
KERRI: Okay, should’ve thought of that. Places you dream about going: Port-au-Prince.
NATE: Pluto. Port-au-Prince, not Paris?
KERRI: Port-au-Prince scores double, loser. Things you’re very good at: psychology.
NATE: Prince of Persia, double score.
KERRI: Damn. Things in this car: a penguin!
NATE: Nothing.
PETER: (Offended.) Thanks a fucking bunch.
Kerri raised her arms in the greatest V sign the car roof allowed. “I win!”
“I’m cold; close the window, will you?” Nate asked.
Kerri scurried to the front seat, pulled the dog inside, and cranked the window up. Tim snorted smugly and moved on to explore the carpet for leftover Cheetos.
Andy groaned at the third full motel they drove by.
“Can’t find a place for the night.”
“I heard it’s ‘teen detectives going back to confront their ghosts’ season,” Kerri said.
“I’ll take their ghosts over ours any day of the week,” Nate added.
Kerri checked the map. “We’ve driven a lot today; we could be there in another…eight hours? We’d get to Blyton Hills by three a.m.”
“I’d rather stop and continue in the morning,” Andy said. “I want us to see Blyton Hills in the light of day.”
Kerri lingered on that answer for a moment, then chuckled. “You want us? Why?”
“So we all realize there’s nothing to be scared of. I don’t know. It’ll change our perspective.”
“Okay.” She polled the backseat. “Nate?”
“Okay by me. Tim?”
Tim coughed up Kerri’s winning Scattergories sheet and tail-nodded.
—
They stopped for a late dinner, then continued driving into the dusk past another three neon NO VACANCY signs.
Night closed in on them. For a while they stayed on I-84, flowing along with other blurry sets of white and red lights, carrying other silent wraithlike people in their tiny warm sepia-lit cubicles pretending to have their own places to go and lives to live, and Andy gazed at them while Kerri drove and silently challenged them to have a better story to tell.
Later on, even these extras became sparse. At that point Kerri left the interstate for a state route, then moved onto an empty single-lane road, and finally swerved into the first dirt track, rolled a few yards off-road, and pulled over. They would sleep in the car. Nate had long ago called dibs on the backseat. Tim lay curled up in the minimal footspace there. Kerri keyed off the engine and dialed mute the radio.
“Last night on the road,” she said, pushing her seat back. “We should do this again in better circumstances, huh?”
Something about the beige upholstery inside the car made it look like a very small and cozy hobbit living room. Kerri shifted over to face Andy, smiled good night, and closed her eyes.
Andy stargazed at her skin for a couple minutes and then switched the roof light off and followed suit.
She actually enjoyed sleeping like that—she often preferred her car to beds. In motels or cities there are always faraway noises and blinking lights beyond one’s eyelids, distracting the conscience, but inside a car in the middle of nowhere there is nothing to hold on to, nothing to see or hear. Which means, in a way, being able to s
ee and hear everything. During her nights alone on the road she liked to sink into that void. She could dive in the all-enveloping silence and swim toward any signal-emitting system she wanted. She could navigate toward a highway, or a small town, or a big city. She could zoom across state lines toward the lights, fly over the red-and-white traffic and through concrete and neon signs until she spotted Kerri in a crowded club, and watch her for a while before whispering into her ear to call it a night.
Though she didn’t need to do that tonight. Kerri slept right by her side, sharing that metal eggshell with her, her curly contour clearly defined against the driver’s side window. Andy could close her eyes and easily tune her mind to the breathing of Kerri’s hair, the warmth of Kerri’s blood, all inches close. Tonight she was physically sitting right where she wanted to be on Earth, next to the source of the signal she always longed for.
The rest didn’t matter. Not Nate, not Tim, nothing else in the sleepscape. She could hear the grumblings of the mountains and valleys, and the legions of trees crowding the Pacific Northwest. She could perceive the gentle snoring of a wooden church and the window blinds of the restaurant in Blyton Hills, the roads north under the starry night, and the aloofness of firs. She could feel the icy quietness of the moonlit mirror that was Sleepy Lake. She could eavesdrop on the whispering conspiracy of trees on the solitary island, and the neutral, unassuming walls of the haunted house. She could peek through the battered windows and spy between the dusty floorboards. She could sink into the basement and even see the dungeon where she and Kerri locked themselves up. She could near the walls and still hear the things outside. Their squelching footsteps, the sandpaper breathing. Their needle fingernails tapping the bricks, scratching the glass, smelling the warmth of Kerri and Andy sleeping inside the car.
Andy opened her eyes and the creature banged the windshield and screamed.
—
She jolted awake and the seat belt around her arm prevented her from crashing her fist through the windshield just as the creature flew away in terror. Probably an owl. Andy had to cover her mouth with both hands to exhale the adrenaline without waking up everyone in the car.
She checked on Nate enjoying the whole of the backseat, Tim on the floor, and Kerri, still asleep like a beautiful charm, her power to repel bad dreams yet unchallenged. It had been the owl’s fault. Anyone would have jumped because of that owl, she rationalized. Almost anyone would have tried to one-punch it dead through a car glass.
After a while she considered it safe to sneak out without disturbing anyone. She miscalculated, though: as soon as the door latch clacked open, Tim scurried out from under the seat and ran into the wild.
Andy left him to reconnoiter the area and stayed close to the car. Condensation had fogged up the windows and locked the landscape out of sight from inside the car, but Andy was glad to notice the outside world had not deserted them. It was a busy night; not clear, but shared by enough clouds and stars and a half-crescent moon to keep owls and cicadas and rodents entertained and the scene as alive and thrilling as a never-sleeping metropolis. The dirt track they’d been driving on veered a few meters shy of the top of a hill, and Andy found the top and the opposite slope sparkling with early flowers in the blue night.
She sat down, feeling the damp dirt under her jeans, and thought.
Tim came back from reconnaissance some minutes later and sat down comfortably close to her. He seemed to scan the horizon with a seed of astronomer’s curiosity.
“Tomorrow, Tim, we’ll be in Blyton Hills. You know what that is?”
She scratched his head, their eyes locked and perfectly level, and Tim listened closely.
“You’ve never been there, but your great-grandfather Sean had. It’s the best place in the world,” she told him. “A very little town in a valley filled with summerhouses, not like those shitty plastic suburbs, but with cute gardens and really old trees, where not yuppies, nor rednecks, but real nice people live. And all around it, in every direction, under the green mantle of woods, miles and miles of…adventure.”
Her sight, and Tim’s, had strayed into the stars.
“Mountains to climb, and creeks to cross, and treasures in every spot. Swamps where you can build rafts, and caves to take shelter in when it rains, and old mills and barns where hand-wringing bad guys think of their evil plots, and lakes with monsters, and haunted houses where pirates used to live.”
She paused. Tim nose-prodded her like she was a music box that had stopped playing.
“It’s actually a little scary,” she warned him. “We’re going to need you at your best, soldier. We rely on you.”
Tim held her stare.
“But if it ever gets too bad, you don’t worry. Because Kerri has this place in Blyton Hills, her bedroom in Aunt Margo’s house, and it’s the safest place on earth. Like a sanctuary where we heal our wounds, lay out our strategies, and laugh away fear. And nothing can happen there; no monsters, bullies, or harm can reach you, because it’s the place where Kerri lives. It’s where she sleeps and reads and it’s the core of Blyton Hills’ warmth, the source from where everything soft and sweet and orange sprays onto the world. And that’s where we’re going. You’ll see. It’s going to be fine.”
“What is?”
Kerri wandered by, hands deep in her pockets, a trail of steam and a flame of hair carrying her words away.
“Hey.”
Tim rose to greet her, his tail causing cyclones as near as California. Kerri stroked his snout.
“Am I interrupting a moment? I can leave.”
“No, stay. We’re done.”
“Can’t sleep?”
“I needed to stretch my legs,” Andy said. “But no, not really.”
Kerri lotused down by her side, careful not to squash any dandelion. The nightscape teemed with guessable constellations.
Andy stayed silent, but the train of her thoughts had derailed already.
KERRI: (Amused.) Scattergories?
ANDY: No. Please, no, I suck at that.
KERRI: Oh, come on. Okay—word bluff! It’s like a simplified version.
ANDY: (Embarrassed.) No! I’m so bad with words!
KERRI: Come on, it’s not about words. You play the other guy’s mind.
ANDY: I’m no challenge.
KERRI: Just let me explain how you play it.
ANDY: Okay, go.
KERRI: Normally we’d use paper and pencil, but you and I can play on an honor code. You think of a word. And you just say one letter in it. Any letter, got it? Then I think of a word that has that letter, and I say another letter in it. Follow me?
ANDY: Uh-huh.
KERRI: Now, your word needs to have both letters in it. So if it doesn’t, you must think of a new one. And then you say a third letter. And I think of a word with all three and say a fourth letter.
ANDY: Uh-huh.
KERRI: And that’s it. All you can do is keep adding letters, even if you can’t think of a word anymore. Or you can call my bluff, and if I can’t produce a word, you win. Or you can guess the word I’m thinking, and if I can’t produce a different one, you win. Get it?
ANDY: Okay, so I either bluff, call your bluff, or read your mind.
KERRI: Exactly. Wanna try?
ANDY: Okay.
KERRI: Okay, I think of a word and say a letter. X.
ANDY: Oh, come on! X?
KERRI: It doesn’t mean it begins with X; it just has an X in it.
ANDY: Right. Okay. Uh…E.
KERRI: F.
ANDY: X and F in the same word?
KERRI: Yup. And E.
ANDY: (Thinks lengthily.) Okay, D.
KERRI: T.
ANDY: No way. There’s no such word.
KERRI: (Smiling proudly.) “Exfoliated.”
ANDY: Oh, come on!
KERRI: What? It was easy. I was thinking “exfoliate”; you gave me D; it was easy to adapt.
ANDY: But you’re a biologist and I don’t even know what that means!
ANDY: Oh. (Confused.) I thought it was something in cosmetics.
KERRI: Yeah, that too, but you don’t use makeup and you like nature, so stick with the bit that concerns you. Try again?
ANDY: Okay. You start.
KERRI: All right. V.
ANDY: V. (Thinks.) Can I say V again?
KERRI: Two Vs?
ANDY: Uh-huh.
KERRI: Okay, we’re playing high stakes. (Thinks, front teeth biting her lower lip in a frozen labiodental fricative.) Oh, right…Gotcha. L.
ANDY: A.
KERRI: You’re thinking “valve”!
ANDY: No. “Vulva.”
KERRI: (Dropping backward onto the grass). Aw, fuck! You sly, sly dog.
Andy repressed a smug grin, making sure to capture the moment for later wallowing.
Kerri sat up again when Tim tried to lick her face. “Well played. See, it wasn’t difficult.”
Andy looked down, hiding her smile.
“I’m glad we’re doing this,” Kerri commented. She waited for visual contact. “What moved you? Why come fetch us now?”
Andy plucked a blade of grass, indulged her fingers to play with it.
“I’ve been thinking about it since Peter died. But I needed to talk to Wickley first. Or maybe I didn’t; he only said what I expected to hear.”
“I wish you’d come for us long ago,” Kerri said. “We had to do this.”
—
Inside the car, Nate slept despite Peter clambering over him, spying through the window.
“Check it out. The girls are just sitting there, having a laugh. What do you think is going on?”
Nate rolled around, burying his face in the fake leather upholstery.
“I’ll tell you what I think is going on,” Peter responded rhetorically. “I’m picking up some strong signals here, Nate. Just look at them. The smiles. The body language. That shared intimacy. It doesn’t take a detective; you just need to have been around, know the female mind, know the game. Now I realize, it’s been going on all week! Even in this car! (Accusing, at the empty front seats.) Haven’t you noticed? The jokes, the chemistry in the air…You can almost breathe the hormones! (Gloating.) I’m telling you, Nate, this smells like something I am pretty familiar with.”
Meddling Kids Page 8
