Chapter 32
Lucas watches his father pace, the veins pulsing in Kirby’s forehead like a subterranean river system. Wanda wasn’t here when they got home and neither was her bike. The quiet panic of these two men continues to mount with every second she does not appear: Kirby’s face reddening, shade by shade; Lucas’s fingernails floating up to his mouth, his teeth gnawing closer and closer to the quick.
“I’ll go,” Kirby says. “You wait here. Maybe she’s…” Neither one of them wants him to finish his sentence.
“Try the creek first. She always wants to go looking for crawdads.”
“Right, right.” Kirby palms his keys. “The creek.” Lucas watches as all kinds of horrors flicker behind Kirby’s eyes. These two are skilled at imagining the worst. It’s muscle memory. There is no comfort found in the usual reservoirs of hope: what are the odds, it’s probably nothing, pray for the best. None at all.
“Are you sure I shouldn’t look, too?” Lucas asks. “On the road. Or on the other side of the nature reserve.” Confronted with the idea of waiting here in the empty house, he can feel his intestines twist.
“No,” Kirby says. “Stay here. She could come back. I need you to call me if she comes back.” Lucas nods and resigns himself to following Kirby’s instructions. He’s been following Kirby’s instructions faithfully for many years now. Whatever part of him wanted to rebel died with his little brother. Now he does what is asked of him.
But in the end, Kirby’s instructions are moot because at that moment Wanda rides into the driveway. Lucas sees her first, through the kitchen window, over Kirby’s shoulder. Water drips from her clothes and her hair is matted, its volume diminished. He runs outside and Kirby follows. “Are you okay?” they both shout at the same time. She climbs off her bike and lets it fall on the ground, kickstand forgotten.
“Where have you been?” Kirby demands. Lucas watches her face carefully, trying to figure out an expression lingering there that he doesn’t recognize. She looks different somehow. Older. “Why are you wet?” Kirby continues, not quite yelling, not quite speaking. A crack in his voice forms, then deepens, a chasm of helplessness revealed. “Was I not clear that you do not leave this property?” Wanda hesitates. “Where were you?” Kirby is almost begging now. Lucas tries to catch her eye, but she’s staring at the ground, toeing the still-spinning wheel of her fallen bicycle.
“The Edge,” she finally says. “I’m sorry, I rode my bike to the Edge.”
“To the Edge.” Kirby is aghast. He says it again, as if he can’t quite believe it. “To the Edge.”
“We’re just glad you’re safe,” Lucas says, and opens his arms to her, but no one is listening to him and she doesn’t come to him like she usually would. He doesn’t share Kirby’s shock—of course she would venture out. She’s curious. Restless. Lucas remembers feeling all of that. What surprises him is this extra layer she’s brought home with her, clinging to her. Another skin. Invisible but tangible. He can’t describe it, but it’s there. Something new.
“The Edge.” Kirby is still wrapping his head around it. “And you…what, went swimming?” All three of them contemplate the pool of seawater at her feet. Her T-shirt is just beginning to dry, stiff waves of pale crusted salt against the dark blue cotton, but her ratty slip-ons still excrete water as she shifts her weight from one leg to the other.
“I…”
“Spit it out, Wanda.”
“I…yeah, I went swimming. It was hot.” She finally looks up, and in her gaze Lucas sees the lie as clearly as if she’s admitted it out loud. The truth it hides is harder to discern.
Lucas watches Kirby unpack grinders from a paper bag for dinner. They’ve sent Wanda to wash herself off with wet wipes in the bathroom—this is no time to be wasting bottled water. The kitchen door is open again and that same citronella candle flickers. The same mosquitoes buzz. But tonight, Lucas has plans; he’s almost forgotten about them. He remembers when Kirby sets only two sandwiches on paper plates and then crumples up the bag they came in. He should go, he realizes, if he wants to be on time.
“She can’t stay here by herself anymore,” Kirby says. He notices Lucas searching his pockets. “Car keys?” he says. Lucas nods. “Take the pickup.”
“Thanks.” Kirby throws him his keys, overhand, and Lucas catches them neatly. He looks at them, a mess of silver and bronze. So many. Unlabeled. He doesn’t have the slightest idea what most of them open. The weight of his father’s responsibilities tangled together in his hand. “Don’t you think…that’s a little punitive, though?”
“Punitive?”
“It means—”
“I know what it fucking means. Shouldn’t it be? You saw her. The Edge, Lucas. She could have drowned. Or, or, I don’t know. Anything could have happened.”
“I guess, yeah.”
“Swimming. Jesus. Maybe Phyllis would do it. Would watch her, I mean, in the afternoons. She’s retired now, I think. And it looks like that daycare isn’t opening up again anytime soon. Doesn’t hurt to ask, I guess. Might as well.” Kirby abruptly gets up and goes into his bedroom to make the call.
It does hurt to ask, Lucas knows. Asking doesn’t come easily to his father. And Phyllis in particular—her presence down the road is fraught for so many reasons. He stands there, feeling the heaviness of Kirby’s keys in his palm, running his thumb over the jagged edges of them, and listens to the low murmur of Kirby’s voice. He knows why his father is afraid. Isn’t he afraid, too? It’s an all-the-time kind of fear, a rushing wind that’s been inside his eardrums for years. They focus their fears on Wanda, on the safety of her tiny body, on the formation of her budding personhood, but it’s so much bigger than that. How to quantify fear of the sky? Of the ocean? Of the ground they walk on? Sometimes he thinks this is what loving Florida means—being afraid of it.
He looks at his watch: already late. He says goodbye to Wanda through the bathroom door. “I’m heading out, okay?”
“To see Gillian?”
“Yup.”
“Okay.” Something about her voice makes him pause, but without seeing her face, he isn’t sure. He puts his palm flat against the door, as if that might tell him something.
“You’re all right, though?”
“I’m fine,” she says. Lucas accepts this, for now.
Getting into Kirby’s truck, he wonders again what it is she won’t say. There’s something. But as he pulls out of the driveway, his mind moves on. Someone waits for him nearby, and the thought of a certain girl, a woman really, just sitting, checking her watch, drinking her drink, has consumed him by the time he passes their mailbox.
Driving through Rudder, Lucas notices the toll that time has taken. It has become so familiar, so commonplace, that most days he doesn’t even see the vacant storefronts and the abandoned homes. Cracked pavement. Craters so big he drives into the oncoming lane to avoid them; traffic so sparse the swerving doesn’t matter. But tonight he sees it all, imagining it through Gillian’s eyes. And he remembers how it used to be. Kirby bought that house with Frida when Lucas was eleven, and back then Rudder was a mystery to him. Now he knows all its secrets. Or most.