One afternoon, when the thunderheads have begun rumbling but the rain has yet to break, Brenda comes to say goodbye. It’s July by then, the heat creeping above one hundred during the day and dropping only slightly at night. She pulls up in her little Nissan pickup, sky blue with a silver stripe down the side, a black tonneau cover over everything she could fit in the bed, and honks to let them know she’s here. The Lowes spill out the kitchen door, all three of them.
“I wanted to come by before I leave,” she says.
“When will you go?” Lucas asks.
“Tomorrow. Early.” She leans against the Nissan. Sweat darkens the edges of her tank top and she’s taken her braids out, letting her hair float in a black cloud beneath her ball cap. She looks different to Lucas, like the weight of Rudder has begun to slough off her shoulders. “Gonna get a real early start, before the sun comes up,” she says. They stand, awkward, shifting from one foot to the other as they discuss routes and traffic and how many days it’ll take to get to Wyoming. The thunder comes closer. Brenda congratulates Lucas again on UC Berkeley.
“You deserve it,” she says. Lucas isn’t sure this is true, but he tries to accept the compliment gracefully. She slaps Kirby on the back. “These two,” she says, gesturing at Lucas and Wanda, “you did good, old man, with these two. Real special kids.”
“They are, aren’t they,” Kirby replies, and he sounds far away, as if he is someplace else, in the future maybe, watching them make their way in a world that extends beyond this town. Lucas asks Brenda about her new job, something near Laramie. It’s transmission only, she tells him, no more residential bullshit, just middle-of-nowhere type jobs. Lucas wonders if she and Kirby will realize how good they would have been together after it’s too late. Or maybe they’ll never figure it out. Maybe this is part of what makes them perfect for each other.
After a while, there’s nothing left to talk about. When they start to say their goodbyes, Brenda gives them each an unprecedented hug. Kirby kisses her on the cheek. Lucas thanks her for the recommendation letter and she pretends it was nothing, even though he knows she worked hard on it. Wanda won’t let go when it’s her turn. “Will I ever see you again?” she whispers into Brenda’s neck. Lucas’s heart breaks for all of them. Wanda especially.
“Of course you will,” Brenda says quickly and nuzzles the side of her head, awkward and tender.
But she won’t.
Chapter 44
Wanda’s time is her own now that school is out. Kirby doesn’t make her go to Phyllis’s anymore; she goes because she wants to. Sometimes she stays home if it seems like Lucas will pay attention to her, but this happens less and less—by now, he is occupied with preparations for his new life in California. It’s become clear that they have all arrived at an ending of sorts. That things will never again be as they were. There’s talk she doesn’t completely understand—about the municipality, about taxes, about federal money and county money—but she understands enough to know that everything is changing. The house, usually so empty during the day, is full of men behaving strangely.
On a particular afternoon, while Lucas is busy packing in their room and Kirby is pacing, looking for a project, Wanda rides her bike to Phyllis’s in the downpour. When she gets there, soaked, Phyllis dries her off and then they go out again, in the car this time, to a Target in the next town over. Driving through the rain, which smears the landscape across the windows in a rich green blur, they go slowly. The roads are almost empty. The air-conditioning is a little too cold against Wanda’s damp clothes, but it’s nice being too cold. It’s rare. When they get there, the parking lot is scattered with only a few cars.
Inside, they drip on the linoleum just after the automatic doors and look out over the empty aisles. It feels like the store is all theirs. Phyllis takes a cart and they begin to roam, rolling past shelves picked clean. The store has been so combed over it takes real work to find the things they’re looking for. Wanda stands on the end of the cart while Phyllis steers, her arms bent back to grip the edge like the figurehead of a ship braced across the bow.
They’re plundering what remains of the Bic lighters—Phyllis sweeps all six five-packs into the cart—when a man and two children appear at the end of the aisle. Wanda looks up and sees two sets of identical blue eyes, pale as stovetop flames. The twins. Corey leers at her. But what can he do here under the fluorescent lights, Phyllis barely two feet away? He can’t hurt her, surely he can’t, but she’s scared anyway. “Hurry up,” their father barks, already in the next aisle. It sounds like an order. Brie pulls Corey on, averting her eyes from Wanda. “Come on,” she mutters to him. He resists for just a second, then follows. Wanda steps down off the cart. Being here no longer feels fun.
“Can we go?” she asks. Phyllis hasn’t gotten everything on her list yet, but she reads Wanda’s face and leads her to the checkout line without asking why.
Driving home, Phyllis asks, “Do you wanna tell me what that was about?”
“Those kids,” she mumbles, before there’s time to pretend. It feels good to tell Phyllis the truth. Corey isn’t quite so terrifying here in the car.
“Kids can be cruel,” Phyllis says after a moment. She looks at Wanda out of the corner of her eye. “What did they do to you?”
Wanda tells her. She’s never said any of it out loud before. She tells her everything, about breaking Kirby’s rules, riding to the Edge, about the four of them finding her, what they did, what they said, and finally, she tells Phyllis about that strange feeling that came over her when she was underwater, so vivid she’ll never forget it. “I was so scared,” she finishes. “And then after, I didn’t know how to tell it.”
She isn’t sure what’s happening when Phyllis pulls the car over onto the shoulder and puts it in park. Turning to Wanda, she brushes a frizz of damp hair away from her eyes and lets her hand linger on the side of Wanda’s face.
“Thank you for telling me,” she says. “I bet that was hard to talk about.” She doesn’t say anything else, just goes on looking at Wanda, stroking her cheek with her thumb, waiting, as if she knows something Wanda doesn’t. And she does. Wanda begins to sob into the space that Phyllis has made for her, inside the cool cocoon of the car, the humid jungle beating down on them, comforting in its tenacity. She sobs so hard it feels like her ribs are cracking. Phyllis gathers her up, as if she’s known all along that something needed to come out, and she squeezes her tight and she says, “That’s good. That’s a good cry.”
After Wanda is done, they start driving again, the rain still coming down as hard as ever, sluicing across the windshield in waves. “I’m gonna miss you,” Phyllis says. “You’re my favorite, you know.”
When she gets home, she tells Kirby she doesn’t want to go. He sits down with her at the kitchen table and explains that without any work, he can’t stay in Rudder. He says he thought she understood. And she did. She does. She just…doesn’t want to leave Phyllis all alone here. She doesn’t want to leave this house. She doesn’t want to leave the land Phyllis has taught her to see and love and tend.