The Key to the Golden Firebird

by Maureen Johnson

  Palmer locked herself in her room the minute she arrived home. It was stuffy and overly sunny. At least the scary, closed-in feeling was going away fairly quickly this time, probably because it was daytime and people were around.

  She didn’t want to think about the pitch. She couldn’t think about the pitch. Not yet. Her brain was already too loud and crowded with stuff. Until she solved the problem of the urn, nothing was going to be right again. It sat there on her bed, gleaming in the sunlight that came through the blinds. She dropped down on the bed and stared at it.

  “What do you want?” she asked it, hoping that by asking the question aloud, she would get some kind of magical inspiration. But the urn just slipped a bit to the right. Palmer straightened it, then lay back and stared at the ceiling.

  Her life was over. She was so out of the camp. And if they kicked her out of softball, Palmer would die.

  No. She could fix it. She could explain to them.

  The attacks were coming in the day now. Now she really was a crazy person.

  She would fix that too.

  The urn…She just had to figure out what to do with the urn.

  She just had to calm down.

  She closed her eyes and tried to imagine the happiest place she could. Camden Yards. Definitely. Cheese dog in one hand. First inning. They hadn’t taken their trip to Camden Yards this year. She had missed it.

  Yesssssss…

  The idea came as a sudden rush. Every detail was there, as if her brain had already written the plan and she had stumbled upon it. First she had to see if it was possible. She had a season schedule card pinned to her corkboard. She checked. The timing was perfect.

  She looked at the urn. This was going to be hard, but she had to do it.

  When Palmer crept downstairs a half hour later, Brooks and May were sitting at the kitchen table, holding conference over an assortment of dry crumbs, self-stick notes, and random pens. Brooks was methodically sticking and unsticking a Post-it to her forehead. May was chewing on a mechanical pencil with her back teeth, like a dog trying to tear the knobby end from a rawhide bone.

  Palmer stood right outside the doorway and listened.

  “It was an accident,” May was saying. “Accidents happen. And those helmets are really strong. Aren’t they? I mean, they look strong, and they have that flap over the ear.”

  “The girl’s probably all right,” Brooks said, putting one of the Post-it notes over her eye. “That’s not it.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “It wasn’t an accident.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “She was head-hunting,” Brooks said simply.

  “She was what?”

  “She aimed for the girl’s head to knock her away from the plate. It’s a really illegal move, but it happens.”

  “You’re saying Palmer hit her on purpose?” May asked.

  “I don’t know. I saw her face. Something was wrong. Maybe the sun got in her eyes or something….” Brooks pulled off her Post-it eye patch and started nervously folding it into the shape of a small hat.

  “This is pretty bad, isn’t it?” May said.

  “It could be.”

  Palmer couldn’t listen anymore. It was time to act. She strode into the kitchen, causing her sisters to lurch in alarm. Without giving them a chance to say anything, she gingerly removed the urn from the bag and set it on the table between them.

  “I found it in Mom’s closet,” she said. “It was in a box. A shoe box.”

  May and Brooks said nothing. It was clear that they immediately knew what the thing was, and it seemed to affect them in the same way that it did Palmer. They flinched away from it, yet they had to look at it. Palmer took advantage of their silence to keep talking.

  “I just figured it out,” she said. “We didn’t go to Camden Yards this year. So we have to take him. There’s a home game tonight. It starts in an hour. We have to leave soon.”

  This concept didn’t seem to click in May and Brooks’s minds as quickly as it had in hers, because they looked up at her as if she’d just sprouted wings and a beak. Then they exchanged a long, puzzled look.

  “You want to go to Camden Yards?” Brooks asked. “Now?”

  “Right.”

  “And take that?” Brooks pointed to the urn but didn’t look at it.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And do what?”

  “Take him to the pitcher’s mound,” Palmer said. “It’ll be easy. We just—”

  “Are you nuts? You just nailed some girl in the head with a ball, Palm. And now you want us to drive to Camden Yards to go to the pitcher’s mound? What the hell is the matter with you?”

  Palmer had been expecting an objection from May, but not from Brooks. And she didn’t like being called nuts, either.

  “Where do you think he’d like to be?” Palmer snapped. “In the closet or there?”

  “I don’t know,” Brooks said, “but he probably wouldn’t want us to be in jail.”

  “We won’t go to jail. They’re not going to arrest three girls.”

  “Wanna bet?”

  “There are buses to Baltimore from the city,” Palmer snapped. “I know how to get to the bus station. I know which train to take. If you guys don’t come with me, I’ll go on my own.”

  She would, too, even though the bus station bit was a lie. She knew it was somewhere downtown, and people got downtown by train. She could walk to the train station and ask someone there. It wouldn’t be hard.

  Brooks exhaled loudly and picked at a scar in the wood. Palmer gingerly lifted the canister back up and put it back into her bag. May still hadn’t spoken. She was watching Palmer as she worked. Palmer reached into the front pocket of her bag and shoved a pile of cash into May’s hand. May looked at the cash in surprise, then counted it.

  “Where the hell did you get that from?” Brooks asked, gazing down at the money in amazement.

  “I saved it.”

  Brooks, who never saved, just stared in awe.

  “Eighty-five bucks,” May said, holding up a crisp, unused twenty.

  “We have money. You can drive.” Palmer nodded to May on that one. “We have the Firebird. It’ll take two or two and a half hours to get there. Same to get back. We’ll probably be down there for two hours, depending on how the game goes. Mom’s asleep now, so she won’t notice that we’ve even been back from my game. She’ll be at work until seven in the morning.”

  Nothing else was said for the next few minutes.

  “So, we’re talking about eight or nine hours?” May finally asked.

  “You’re not really thinking about doing this.” Brooks shook her head at May. “You’re going to drive all the way to Baltimore? You?”

  “I’m thinking about it,” May said thoughtfully. “Yeah.”

  “Oh my God.” Brooks put her head down on the table.

  “What about this pitcher’s mound thing?” May asked.

  “Easy. Trust me. I’ve got it all figured out.”

  “If it’s so important, why don’t we just wait?” Brooks asked desperately, pulling her head up. “We’ll do it later.”

  “No, we won’t,” May said, rising. “That’s the point. We have to do it today.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we won’t do it on some other day, when we’ve had time to think about it,” May answered. “I won’t, anyway. And she means it. She’ll do it by herself. So it’s better to just go.”

  Palmer didn’t mind being talked about as if she wasn’t there this time. She could see that May got it. She was saying exactly what Palmer was thinking. There was an energy in the room that she hadn’t experienced in a long time. Something good was happening.

  May started going through her purse, making sure she had everything she thought she needed. Brooks sat staring at the wall.

  “Besides,” May mumbled, “today’s already completely screwed up. Why stop now?”

  “Come on,” Palmer said, leaning down an
d looking Brooks in the eye. “You know you have to. Think about it.”

  “How’s Mom going to feel when she finds out the ashes are all gone?”

  “She had them in a shoe box,” May said. “It doesn’t sound like she had too much of a plan for them anyway.”

  May seemed as determined as Palmer now, and one good thing about May was that she was hard to argue with. She was always the voice of reason, and if she was going, then the plan had to be a solid one. Plus with her red hair knotted back, her neat tank top and khaki shorts, her purse resting in the crook of her elbow, and her keys dangling off her finger—May looked mature. Brooks would have to buckle. She wouldn’t be able to live with herself if she was too scared to do something May was willing to do.

  “Onetime offer,” Palmer said. “Come now or miss out.”

  Palmer could almost hear Brooks’s brain whizzing. Her eyes flashed back and forth, as if an argument were going on inside her head. Finally Brooks looked down at the little paper hat she had made, looked at her sisters, then slowly rose from her seat.

  “We better be back in time,” she said.

  “Trust me,” Palmer replied.

  One hundred miles is a long trip when you’re going at a good pace—it was an agonizing trip at fifty miles per hour, especially for Brooks, who only slowed down to that speed to go through school zones and drive-through windows. It had been even longer since she’d been in a car with no air conditioning and no decent stereo, and the open windows meant that she was bathed in that heady fuel perfume that bellowed out of the Firebird’s tailpipe.

  She struggled with the map in her lap, refolding it until she had a manageable-size rectangle. They were passing through Wilmington, Delaware. She located the city along I-95 and worked out the distances. At the rate May was going, they had at least another two hours of highway driving ahead of them.

  “May,” Brooks ventured, “can you try to go just a little faster?”

  “I could.” May nodded. “But I’m not going to.”

  “Look, if you drive a little faster, we could get there and back by the time Mom gets off. She’ll never know.”

  “We’re going to need gas soon,” May replied. “You pump it.”

  “Why aren’t you listening to me?”

  “Because,” May said, ignoring the other drivers who were so tired of following her that they’d begun to weave around her, “I am trying not to panic. You do not want to see me panic. If I were you, I’d do everything I could to keep me from panicking.”

  “Can we at least put the top down?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “It makes my hair fly into my eyes. Then I can’t see. Then we crash.”

  “I like the top down,” Palmer chimed in from the back.

  “That’s nice,” May said. “When you drive, you can feel free to take the top down. But I have to drive, so it stays up.”

  “God, you sound like Mom.” Brooks groaned.

  “I could probably drive,” Palmer mumbled. “Better than you, anyway.”

  Brooks felt them lose some speed. May dropped down to forty-five miles an hour.

  “You have to do at least fifty, May,” she said. “You can get in trouble for going too slow, too.”

  “New rule!” May called out. “Everyone shuts up until we get through Delaware, or I slow down to forty.”

  Palmer banged the back of her head against the seat back a few times but said nothing.

  “I think…,” Brooks began.

  May decelerated again. Brooks shook the map at her.

  “I think,” she began again, “that we should stop for gas just below Wilmington.”

  May gradually took the car back up to fifty miles an hour. It rumbled contentedly as she stepped on the gas.

  The sun was just going down as the Golden Firebird slipped into the tunnel that led under Baltimore Harbor. Palmer went on the lookout for signs, which May carefully followed to the huge complex of old redbrick warehouses and the banner-lined road in front of them. May turned into the first parking lot she saw, which was, of course, practically miles away. She had to let Brooks slide over and actually put the car into the tiny space that was available.

  Camden Yards had always reminded May of Disneyland. It was very clean, with lots of flowers and trees, and the old brick buildings that surrounded it had large, distressed signs painted on them, carefully faded, with sort of an Old West feel. Even the stadium was made of red brick. She’d never approached it before with any kind of criminal intent. Its cheery wholesomeness made her feel guilty.

  The game had already started. The music was flowing up and into the night air. Palmer gazed up into the glow of the high-intensity lights that illuminated the field and grinned.

  “We only need the nine-dollar tickets,” Palmer explained as she ran through the front plaza to the ticket booth. “Then we can just go down to the good seats. No one will stop us.”

  Tickets in hand, they stepped onto the concourse that ran the circumference of the stadium, a wide ring of concrete lined with concessions and souvenirs. Hot dogs and sodas and ice cream were all a crucial part of the game experience normally, but not tonight. Tonight it appeared to be all about running. Palmer cut ahead and slipped through one of the passages that led down to the seats along the field. May and Brooks had to hurry to catch up with her. There were no seats available, so Palmer squatted on the last step. From there, they were almost perfectly level with the field. It definitely seemed like a place where they shouldn’t be waiting around.

  “If anyone says anything to you,” Palmer counseled her sisters, “say we’re waiting for our parents. Say that we got separated, and this is the only place they know to look for us.”

  Brooks nodded at the wisdom of this.

  “Bottom of the eighth,” Palmer noted. “That’s good.”

  May silently agreed with this sentiment. She was nervous to the point of nausea. Brooks was trying to look determined, but May could tell she wasn’t doing much better.

  “They’re going to win,” Palmer said, pointing at the scoreboard.

  She was right. The ninth inning moved fast, and the crowd exploded when the Orioles won. The music pumped, the screens flashed, popcorn flew in the air—and the three Gold sisters were considerably jostled as the stands started emptying out. They grabbed three vacated seats.

  “We have to do it soon,” Palmer said, raising her sun-bleached brows and looking over the field. She turned back to look down at May’s flip-flops.

  “Those are going to be a problem,” she said.

  “My feet?”

  “Your shoes. Take them off.”

  May hadn’t thought about the footwear issue. But she wasn’t about to run barefoot across the field, so she left them on.

  “All right,” Palmer said, dipping her hand into her bag, “let’s get ready.”

  She fiddled around inside the bag for a moment. May could see that she must have been going into the canister. A moment later she produced three small plastic zipper-locked sandwich bags, each full of a grayish substance that looked like coarse sand. Each bag held an amount about the size of May’s fist. As Palmer passed the bags out, a man bumped into May and she nearly dropped hers.

  None of this was real to May. Not the music pumping overhead, or the heavy breeze, or the residual smell of popcorn and beer.

  “We go all over at once,” Palmer said, eyeing the short divider that separated the stands and the field. It was only about three feet high. “Even you can jump this, May.”

  May looked up sourly.

  “Have your bags ready,” Palmer continued, “but be careful when you run with them. Run straight out to the pitcher’s mound and open them up. Don’t stop, no matter what happens. Then head straight for the wall over there, to the left of the Orioles’ dugout. Go up the nearest steps and out into the concourse. If we get separated, we’ll meet by the car. Ready?”

  “What?” May asked, looking around in a panic and grabbing a
t her things. “No. No, I’m not.”

  “Then get ready. You should have put your purse in the trunk or something.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me all of this earlier?”

  Brooks straightened up and flexed her knees a few times.

  “On my mark,” Palmer said quietly. “One…”

  “What if I fall?” May whispered. “I fall, like, at home. Just walking around.”

  “Two…”

  “Don’t fall,” Brooks advised.

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “Three!”

  In various stages of readiness, the Gold sisters went over the wall.

  It was a funny thing to be on an actual baseball field. It seemed much smaller than May had imagined it would be. And even though she’d seen the pitcher’s mound before, in her mind it had been just a small pile of dirt. In reality the mound was crop-circle huge and rose up almost a foot at the center. Brooks and Palmer had gotten there within moments and were stopped, bags ready. As she approached them, Brooks grabbed her arm and the three pulled close together, leaning their heads in, creating a small sanctuary.

  “Now!” Palmer said.

  It only took a moment and it must have been invisible to anyone outside of their huddle, this trickle of dirt over a larger pile of dirt. A chalky cloud came up around their ankles. The pitcher’s mound itself was kind of reddish, so the ashes stood out as three distinct piles. Palmer started mixing them in with her foot. Brooks and May automatically followed suit.

  It was a strange feeling for May, grinding at the dirt. Not only was she literally burying her dad at a baseball stadium, she was doing it with a four-dollar pair of novelty flip-flops. She threw herself into the task, shaking out the very last bits in her bag and toeing them hard into the ground. She was so intent that she tried to brush Brooks off when she grabbed her arm and started pulling her. In that moment she understood what was happening. She felt his presence surround her. Her father. Then she realized that Brooks was trying to move her away from the three security guards who were quickly approaching them, speaking into walkie-talkies pinned to their shoulders.

  “Oh, shit…,” was all May managed to say before she got the message to her legs that they should start doing their very best to propel her off the field.