by Louise Hawes
They followed the little trail that twisted around palms and large, spiked clusters of pampas grass. Feena’s ankles were itching and probably bleeding. But she kept lunging ahead, afraid she’d lose her way completely if Raylene got too far ahead.
“Toffee needs something to eat, a place to sleep. And we got to figure a way to take care of her … him during the day.”
“We”? What had Feena missed? When had Christy become a group project? “Wait a minute. I have to—”
“Hurry up, can’t you?” Raylene was charging, surefooted, along the path as if she knew every inch of it. “Maybe you can stay out all night, but my mother’s radar kicks in and the sirens start blasting at nine o’clock. Sharp.” She turned and stopped in front of a smaller path, a muddy little hint of a trail.
“What?” Feena was glad to slow down, to adjust the backpack that had been slamming against her right shoulder blade. She couldn’t see the moon now, had no idea where they were.
“My mother,” Raylene explained. “She does this terminator thing if I’m not home on time. First, she worries. Then she goes ballistic.”
Mother! Feena had forgotten all about Lenore. Had she fallen asleep in front of the TV? What if Feena wasn’t there when she woke up?
Raylene turned, took something out of her pocket. “Here,” she said, handing Feena a cell phone. “Call home.”
“Home?” Feena shifted Christy’s weight against her hip, following Raylene to a clearing in the woods, a place the lush undergrowth seemed to have fallen back. Had someone been lighting campfires here? Is that why nothing grew in the dusty circle around them? Feena studied the lit face of the other girl’s phone, as if it were the map of a place she’d never been.
“Yeah.” Raylene took the phone back, set it to call, and returned it to Feena. “You’re spending the night with me.”
“I am?”
“No, course not. But that’s what you tell your mother, see?”
“I can’t.” Christy was heavier than Feena could remember him being. She unloaded him, standing him on his feet beside her. “She won’t believe me.”
Christy held up his hands, not to be picked up again, but to twirl, like a dizzy top, around and around the little clearing. Free of tangles and creepers, he spun drunkenly from Feena to Raylene and back again.
“What do you mean, she won’t believe you?” Raylene sighed, arms folded in that familiar warrior stance of hers.
Feena waited for the right words, watching Christy and then the small, fierce cloud of insects that circled the bright face of the phone. “She won’t believe me because I never have friends over,” she explained. “And no one here has ever asked me to spend the night.”
Another sigh. Different, gentler. Raylene let Christy run at full tilt into her arms. “Well, now they have,” she said.
eleven
Lenore sounded hoarse, foggy with sleep when she answered the phone. Feena had to say it twice, “I’m going to spend the night at a friend’s, Mom.” No fancy add-ons. You don’t get caught if you keep it simple.
Feena could hear the baby and Raylene behind her. “Want mik,” Christy was saying. “Want mik, peese.” Milk was the word he used for anything to eat and drink. It had been hours, Feena realized, since they’d done either.
“What do you mean? What friend?”
“She, uh, goes to my school.” Simple isn’t the same as stupid, stupid. “She’s a sophomore.” Older is good. Older is more responsible.
“Today was laundry day.” Lenore sounded whiny, disappointed. “I saved your stuff. I’m not doing your dirty clothes, Feen.”
Raylene was walking the baby farther and farther away as his protests got louder. But Feena could still hear him. Not crying so much as indignant. “Mik, more mik!”
“No. Sure, Mom,” Feena said into the receiver. “I’ll do the laundry. Don’t worry.”
“You better. And Feen?”
Feena waited. What if Lenore asked for her friend’s name? What if she wanted a phone number?
“Have a good time, okay?”
Feena hung up, relieved and guilty. As she followed Raylene and Christy back into the woods, as the underbrush grew heavy again and closed in around them, she wondered whether there was enough leftover Chinese. She knew how tired her mother got after work, how she hated going out again.
“This is it.” Raylene pulled up short in front of her, pointing through the brush. They walked toward the gleam of water, and there, mired in a shallow stream, was the most dilapidated boat Feena had ever seen.
It looked like a shrimp boat, though how a shrimp boat had ended up in a marshy Florida swamp, she could never have explained. When they cleared the woods completely and the moon shone on the old hull, stranded like a beached fish half in and half out of the water, all Feena knew was that it was perfect.
“I come here sometimes,” Raylene told her while Feena and Christy studied the rotting deck, the tiny cabin clinging to one end as if it might slip any minute into the sludge.
“Boat,” Christy announced a bit uncertainly, leaning toward the apparition.
“Yes,” Feena agreed. “A bed boat. Let’s go see.”
The planks on what was left of the deck swayed like a tree house in the wind when they stepped on board. Across the narrow strip of swamp, some night bird whooped with a deep, doglike cry. Raylene led the way to the cabin, pushed open one of its shuttered doors. Feena noticed a weather-beaten sign on the other. CAPTAIN’S QUARTERS, it said in letters the weak moon turned the blue of a well-loved baby blanket. NO LANDLUBBERS ALLOWED. Had this wreck, she wondered, once been someone’s idea of a pleasure boat?
Inside, though, was a different story. Raylene had outfitted her reading nook with pillows and a quilt on the built-in bunk. Under the porthole window were a pile of paperbacks and a glass oil lamp. In shelves along the wall behind the dining bench were water and juice bottles, a portable radio, and boxes of cookies and crackers. The place was clean, cozy, and the most romantic hideout imaginable. Even the musky smell from the marsh and the boat’s mildewed wood seemed exotic.
“Oh,” Feena said, stepping into the center of the small room and whirling in happy circles like a dervish. “Oh, my gosh.”
“You should be safe here,” Raylene told her. “Nobody knows about this place.” She hoisted Christy toward the low ceiling so he could touch the ancient lantern that swung from its center. Someone had placed a fat candle there, and someone had burned it countless times. Great folds of green wax had melted around its edges and dripped through the grill.
After she’d put the baby on the bed, Raylene took a pack of matches from the table and lit the candle. A delicious amber light bounced into the corners of the room and along the dark timbers of the ceiling. “I got to go,” she said. “I’ll be back in the morning, though, in time for you to get to school.”
“School?” The halls of Washanee seemed a thousand miles away. At the thought of going back there, Feena blinked, like some cave bat used to the dark.
“Course. You keep cutting, they’re bound to figure something’s up. They’ll send someone to your house.”
“What about you?” Feena asked.
“I’m okay. Besides, we’ll take turns. One day on; one day off. Got it?”
“Got it.”
But Feena didn’t really get it. Not right away. Even after Raylene had rubbed Vaseline on Christy’s burns, then changed him; even after she’d showed them where she kept cups and plastic forks and knives; even after she’d kissed the baby, waved goodbye, and was long gone, down some trail Feena could only guess at, it hardly seemed real.
Safe. Could it really happen? If she didn’t think about tomorrow, if she let herself relax into Raylene’s take-charge confidence, Feena felt it could. Once she and Christy had eaten, Feena snuggled next to him under the quilt in the sea bunk, whispering like a counselor to a brand-new camper after lights out. “Isn’t this great, Chris? Won’t we have fun here?”
It took two st
ories this time—one about Lady Macbeth and one about a band of gypsy moths (Feena was inspired by the fuzzy dive-bombers that kept throwing themselves against the lantern)—before Christy’s eyes shut and his breathing deepened beside her.
It took much longer, though, for Feena to fall asleep. Exhausted as she was, she lay wakeful and dizzy with gratitude, feeling the warmth of Christy’s body curled next to hers, staring at the shadows that splashed across the ceiling as the boat rocked in the wind. She thought about Raylene, pictured her tucked away here afternoons, singing in that sweet moany voice she’d overheard. She imagined her reading, devouring romantic moments just the way Feena herself did when she hid out with her books.
And then she remembered the twins. She could still see Raylene’s dark head buried in Christopher’s curls. “Some folks would do anything to have a baby.”
The stranded boat bobbed underneath her. Fingers of wind poked in through the timbers and stroked her forehead. And still Feena couldn’t sleep. Stealthily, deftly, she slipped out from under the comforter and dug in her pack. She pulled out Raylene’s book and, sitting at the table under the lamp, began it once more:
So Janie waited a bloom time, and a green time and an orange time. But when the pollen again gilded the sun and sifted down on the world she began to stand around the gate and expect things… She often spoke to falling seeds and said, “Ah hope you fall on soft ground,” because she had heard seeds saying that to each other as they passed.
Hours later, when Feena had finished and finally looked up, surfacing slowly from Janie Woods’s life, returning to the lapping of the waves and the moist creakiness of the boat, she felt as if she’d brought a little bit of Janie’s courage with her. Through hurricanes and rabies, through death and disease, this new heroine had saved a place inside herself, a place the world could never touch.
Finally, after she’d slipped back into bed beside Christy, Feena drifted off. In her dream, she heard deep laughter, saw Janie Woods, her dusky face lovely and proud as Raylene’s. Janie stood on the deck of the marooned shrimp boat, which, preposterously, was sailing out from the swamp toward the ocean. Next to her, Feena dreamed a less graceful, a paler figure. Hidden by a flapping bonnet and a gray dress that flared like a bell to her feet, Jane Eyre took Janie’s hand, and together they turned toward the sky, swollen with clouds as black as bruises. Undaunted, the two of them watched the lightning blanch the night, and fearless, they threw back their heads and laughed for pure joy as the boat pulled away from shore.
“You glued to this bed?”
Feena opened her eyes. The face looking down on them was not laughing. “If you don’t shake your sorry booty,” Raylene told her, “a truant officer’s going to be knocking on your mom’s door before you’re in your shoes.” She held out her arms to Christopher, who, yawning, held his out, too, and was lifted out of bed.
“What time is it?” Feena realized she’d forgotten to set the radio’s alarm. “Am I late?”
Raylene and Christy adjourned to the table. Raylene poured cereal into a bowl. “Not if you hustle,” she said, yawning herself. “What you want to do today, Toffee?” she asked the baby, who clearly didn’t want to do anything but eat. “Wait up. There’s no milk on that yet.”
“I don’t have any clothes,” Feena announced, struggling out of the bunk.
Raylene stared at her. “Looks to me like you’re wearing some,” she said, turning back to Christy.
“This is the same stuff I wore yesterday,” Feena complained. She examined her slept-in shirt, then glanced longingly at Raylene’s pink sundress and matching sandals. When her eyes met the other girl’s, she turned away, busied herself with the blanket and sheets.
“What?” Raylene asked, not unpleasantly. “You expecting to switch clothes?” She laughed. “You think that shirt would work for me?”
“Huh?” Feena, fumbling for her socks and sneaks, didn’t even look up.
“Yeah.” Raylene reached across Christopher for the backpack she’d brought, undid the strap. “Just what I need. Some Yankee T-shirt talking Yankee trash. ‘Ski Storrs.’ What is that?”
Feena laughed, looked up. “It’s a town in Connecticut. If it doesn’t snow, they make it with machines.”
Raylene handed Feena a neatly folded skirt and sleeveless shirt. “Here.”
“What’s this?”
“Go on.” She pushed the pile of clothes into Feena’s arms. “I figured you didn’t bring any.”
Thankful, embarrassed, Feena avoided looking at Raylene while she dressed. She managed the zipping and buttoning quickly, anxious to keep her thick waist and pasty flesh under wraps. But Raylene and the baby didn’t even notice; they were too absorbed in crackling and popping. Christopher was already on his second bowl of cereal when Feena picked up her own backpack.
“Better take that lunch ticket I left by the door.” Raylene still hadn’t looked up, was bent over her own bowl. “It’s the last day of the week, so you might as well use it. Toffee and me, we’re going to find us some real food today.”
Feena was astounded and grateful. As usual, Raylene had thought of everything. “That’s so nice,” she said. “You didn’t have to…”
But Raylene put her hand up, looked at her from under thick brows. “You keep talking, you’ll be late.” She wiped off the baby’s milk mustache with a practiced, perfectly timed pass in between spoonfuls. “And if you’re late, you have to stay after. I got to be at work at three-thirty. Hear?”
Feena stopped stammering, chastened. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll come right back.” A bit more stammering. A kiss for Christy, and she was gone, blinking in the sun on deck, then setting off down a tiny footpath Raylene promised would bring her to the parking lot behind the grandstand that lined one side of Washanee’s soccer field.
twelve
Through the day that followed, Feena was half in, half out—listening as an eager substitute teacher tried desperately to make English matter to a roomful of nail biters, doodlers, and semiprofessional nappers; wondering, at the same time, where Raylene had taken Christopher. Were they at the library, using the new card Feena had left them? Or had Raylene opted for the playground and sandbox?
At lunch, she was grateful all over again for the lunch ticket Raylene had handed her. She was ravenous and completely unfazed by finding no one to sit next to. She took her egg salad sandwich, potato chips, and orange cupcake to one of the weathered benches in a palm-shaded spot just outside the cafeteria’s back entrance. Beside the bench was a huge bougainvillea bush, threatening to bring down the trellis to which it clung. Under the long, bloody fingers of blooms was a granite stone with a carved plaque. GRADUATES’ GARDEN, CLASS OF ’95.
A pair of white butterflies, like willful petals, chased each other across Feena’s field of vision. A boy she didn’t know, big-boned, with a face the color of boiled ham, came and sat on a bench across from her. They wrinkled their sandwich papers, popped their soda cans, then chewed in silence.
Occasionally, Feena noticed the boy glance in her direction, his eyes sliding away from hers if she looked up to catch him. As if the whole thing were an accident and he’d only intended to study the brick wall of the cafeteria or the crusty bark of the palm tree next to her.
It was probably the clothes, Feena reasoned, Raylene’s lime and grape skirt, the green shirt that was a little too tight. She shifted on the bench, trying to cover her muddy sneaks with the long, elegant folds of the skirt. How she wished she had the sense, the nerve, to choose colors like that!
She fidgeted and fussed with her sandwich, trying to eat slowly. It was almost a relief when another girl came out of the cafeteria and walked over to the boy. She kissed him on one ham-cheek, sat down beside him, then smiled at Feena.
Feena’s mini fantasy dissolved, and her whole body relaxed. She was no longer on display, and she dug into her sandwich, taking huge, greedy bites, yielding to the hunger it seemed she’d stored up for days.
In defiance of th
e happy couple across from her, she finished her first lunch and went back for a second, returning to the bench to chomp fast and furiously and to consider what a rich, confusing mess she’d made of her life.
Why was she sitting here, worrying about going to jail instead of what color lip-gloss went with her shoes? And why, in the name of cheerleaders and prom queens everywhere, had she taken it upon herself to right the world’s wrongs? Why was she the only girl at Washanee who was praying for school to be over so she could race off and change diapers?
Well, not the only one, she realized. While Feena was eating for both of them at school, Raylene was probably trying to coax Christy out of the sandbox. Or back to the boat. Babysitting and hiding out couldn’t be Raylene’s top choices for things to do on your day off, but, hard as it was to believe, she was now a bona fide partner in Feena’s crime.
“Here you are. I checked every single table inside.” Nella Beaufort looked nervously at the golden couple on the other bench, then asked Feena, “Where have you been, anyway?”
Feena was relieved when the lovebirds looked up and noticed she had a friend, even if it was only Nella. Nella, who sat next to Feena three times a week for History 1, who avoided all primary colors in favor of gray shorts and black tees, and was, if possible, even more distracted and lonely than Feena herself.
“I’m on my second sandwich and my third bag of chips.” Feena moved over, and Nella slipped onto the bench beside her.
“So?”
“So, I just didn’t feel like binging in public, that’s all.” The solicitous worry on Nella’s face somehow annoyed Feena.
“No,” Nella explained. “I mean, where were you yesterday? Why weren’t you here for the New Deal test?” She peered at Feena from under the layer of thick bangs that nearly hid her eyes. “Were you sick?”
Feena shook her head, popped another chip into her mouth. “Not really,” she said. “I had to help my mom with some stuff, that’s all.” It didn’t matter too much what alibi she used, since, like Feena, Nella didn’t know many people to pass it on to.
