“A-plus.”
They keep walking, playing I Spy and calling out for the lost chicken, until gradually it begins to seem like maybe there is no chicken here for them to find. That maybe Bluebell has left them for good. Wanda doesn’t want it to be true, so they keep looking.
They do find her, eventually. Wanda sees the puff of feathers first. “There!” she squeals, darting forward. “Chick chick chick!” Phyllis reaches out and catches her by the collar of her T-shirt before she can get too far.
“Easy does it,” she says. “I don’t think our girl is—I don’t think she’s still with us.” Phyllis’s eye has already caught the pink stains, the eerie motionlessness beneath the fluttering feathers. Wanda understands and begins to cry, unable to stop herself. She would like to take this brutality in stride, to show Phyllis that she isn’t afraid of blood, but she can’t. This chicken has a name. Wanda has eaten her eggs, chased her through the woods, held her. There is a necessary tension between knowing how nature works in theory and witnessing it. Phyllis pulls her close, not wanting her to see more than she already has. “It’s okay, she had a good life.”
“How do you know?” Wanda presses her snotty face into Phyllis’s chest, unbothered by the wet spots she’ll leave behind.
“I guess I don’t. But I like to think she did. She was free to roam and she had a safe place to sleep. That’s all most of us can ask for.” They walk back, arms bound together. There is no more I Spy, no more mushroom gathering. By the time they get to the house, Wanda has worked through her tears. When Kirby comes to collect her, he asks what they did today and Wanda’s face is grave. “We lost a chicken,” she says. “But she had a good life.”
Chapter 37
Lucas waits until everyone else has gone to bed to work on his college applications in the living room. It’s late and he’s having a hard time keeping his eyes open. The sofa cushions sink to accommodate him and he has to keep reminding his body that there is still more to do today. The TV is on low, but he isn’t watching it. The ambient sound is soothing—it’s a rerun of an old half-hour comedy show that aired when he was little. The studio audience’s laughter swells and recedes, washing over him like a benevolent tide.
He tells himself these applications aren’t a secret, but they are. The idea of being accepted seems far-fetched, and this way, when the rejection letters start arriving in the mailbox, he won’t have to admit it to anyone. So he keeps his efforts to himself. Still, there are things he needs—supplementary materials—and the task of hunting those down, asking for them, is excruciating. When he asked Brenda for a letter of recommendation she just stared at him.
“A what?” she said.
“Look, I can’t ask my dad. I’m lucky if I can find even one high school teacher who remembers me. And I need two letters.”
“I’d help, except I don’t write letters. You’re better off asking someone else.”
She agreed in the end. He wore her down. That’s the trick with Brenda—perseverance. Next, Lucas tracked down his old guidance counselor and he agreed to write one as well, without nearly as much wheedling. Asking people to write letters seemed like the hard part until he sat down to write the essay. His first sentence stares back at him.
You might not know what a lineman is, but you’d be lost without them.
It’s all he has. He wanted to write about storm duty, about climbing poles and digging ditches and clearing roads and replacing insulators. About trees snapped in half like twigs and houses with their roofs torn off and blacktop roads peeled back to dirt. But now—it feels wrong and he can’t figure out why. He intends to study civil engineering, so it makes sense to write about the job he has now. It’s a practical topic choice, but it has the right amount of emotion, too. When he was little, all he ever wanted was to be a lineman on Kirby’s crew. Isn’t this the kind of thing admission boards want to hear? Unsure, he chews on his already-shredded fingernails and stares into the blue light of his laptop.
The idea of college seemed ridiculous to him when he was in high school and everyone else was filling out their applications. College was what people with too much time and too much money did. A rite of passage for a different kind of person. But the longer he stays in Rudder, the more he understands that it is the people with college degrees, the ones who work at city hall, who run for public office, who look at blueprints and make decisions about how much money to spend and where—these are the people that are killing his town. Other towns, too. Entire counties. Sprawling cities. States. Countries.
Maybe that’s what he’s trying to write about. The ideas that underlie the physicality of his labor. The plans that went awry. The ways in which these people have failed him and everyone else who lives here with their shortsightedness. He thinks of Gillian, of her exhaustion with the news. He’s exhausted also, but he can’t look away. It’s here, unfolding in front of him. On his doorstep. Every day, he and Kirby and Brenda drive out and they fix one problem at a time. It used to make him feel useful. But lately—the rate of destruction is too brisk. The problems too large. Yes, this is why he’s applying. This is the point he’s trying to make. He deletes his first sentence and starts again.
I live in a dying town called Rudder, in a dying state called Florida. Most of the people who leave this place want to escape it. I want to save it.
That’s not bad, he thinks, rereading it. Maybe it’s too dramatic, but then again—what is the mood of this place if not that of a sodden drama? The storms that batter them are pure exhibitionism. The fleeing populations. The Intracoastal Waterway swelling to meet the ever-advancing ocean on that skinny spit of land they still call Beachside, even though the name refers to a rind of pure white sand that is gone. Two water bodies rushing to touch in the middle. Sometimes melodrama is just the truth. He keeps going.
A few paragraphs later, there is a rustling in the doorway. Lucas looks up and sees Wanda, sleepy, holding a stuffed penguin coming apart at the seams by its flipper, her hair standing up in thick snarls. He tries not to be annoyed. Fails.
“What are you doing?” she asks.
“I’m…What are you doing? You should be asleep. I’m just writing emails.”
“To who?”
“To none of your business. Go to bed.”
Wanda lingers, looking at him with those brown eyes that are too old for her face. The penguin grazes the floor. She’s wearing one of Kirby’s old T-shirts, the neck so big on her tiny frame it’s slipping off one shoulder, the sleeves drooping down past her elbows. Lucas looks at the blinking cursor, and back to Wanda, who hasn’t moved.
“Did you have a bad dream?”
She nods.
“Do you wanna tell me about it?”
She nods again. He closes the laptop with a sigh and pats the cushion next to him; she comes and sits. “I was drowning,” she whispers.
“That sounds scary.”
“It was.”
In the end, Lucas carries Wanda back to the room they share. He hoists her up onto the top bunk easily, but groans to make it clear that she is heavier than the last time he did this, to suggest that one day soon he won’t be able to do these things for her anymore. He’s spent ten years trying to atone. He desperately wants to be the kind of big brother that Flip should have had. It’s part of why he’s still here: in this room, a grown man sharing a bunk bed with a child. Is it enough? Will it ever be? He tucks her in and turns to go back to the living room, thinking maybe he can write another page tonight.