I run until my brain switches itself off.
Until Mackey puts a hand on my shoulder and tells me it’s time to go home.
But no matter how fast I go, I can’t catch up to Elora.
Or my mother.
Sometimes, when Honey isn’t watching, I stop in the kitchen and study that photo on the wall. I try to imagine what kind of deep power the young woman with one hummingbird hair clip might have possessed. I close my eyes and reach for her, but my mother has never seemed so far away.
By the middle of July, I’ve pretty much given up on ever finishing The Tempest. But I’m still holding out hope that, somehow, I’ll figure out what happened to Elora. Because if I leave here not knowing anything more than I know now, I figure I might as well be dead myself.
The temperature has become truly suffocating. The bayou loves the heat, though. Honey’s roses wither. But the wild things thrive. Cattails and rousseau cane grow tall and thick along the edges of the boardwalk. Someone cuts them down when they threaten to take over. But they come right back. Taller. And thicker. Vines rise out of the muck to twist around the pilings, reaching up to tug at the white-painted planks that blister and peel in the unforgiving sun. Mold and rot creep in around the edges. And the smell of decay is overwhelming. By midday the air is so thick that it’s like trying to breathe wet cotton. We stay inside during the worst of it, but even on high, the AC can’t keep up. It makes us all slow and cranky. And I find myself watching the clock each day, counting the hours until the sun goes down and I can escape to join Zale back at Li’l Pass. Because when I’m with him, at least I feel like I can breathe a little easier.
We meet up most every evening when the frogs start to sing and the light begins to change. The two of us sit back there on the rusted-out trailer and talk until it gets too dark to see each other any more.
Mostly we talk about Elora. I tell him how the two of us used to share dreams sometimes. How we’d go to bed curled up together under Honey’s quilts, and then both wake up at the exact same moment, having dreamed the exact same thing.
Zale tells me how no one had ever listened to him the way Elora did, without judgment or expectations. How he’d started to feel like a ghost, but the way Elora saw him – heard him – made him feel real again.
And it feels so good just to be able to breathe Elora’s name out loud to someone. It feels like keeping her alive, maybe. In some small way.
“What if I never find out the truth?” I ask Zale one night. “Elora was everything to me. How do I go on living just the same? Like nothing ever happened?”
With summer more than halfway over, the thought of ever caring about trips to the mall or scheduling college visits . . . or even running track again . . . seems impossible.
Zale takes my hand, and electricity sparks between our fingers. He spins Elora’s ring three times. Like making a wish.
“You don’t go on living just the same,” he tells me. “You have to go on living in a completely different way.”
And that’s the first thing that’s made sense to me in a really long time.
We talk a lot about his daddy, too, and Zale always gets quiet when we come to the morning his mama pulled him from the flames and ran with him through the bayou. Her hand clamped tight over his mouth.
The same morning folks pulled Ember and Orli from the drowning pool.
“All those memories are filled with smoke,” he tells me. “But my daddy wasn’t a murderer. That’s a thing I can say for certain.”
So I try to let my old fear go. To think of Dempsey Fontenot as something other than a killer. To picture him the way Zale paints him in the stories he tells. But it’s hard, because it’s a really strange thing to find out the monster under your bed was never really a monster at all.
And at first, it seems like we need each other, Zale and me, so we can help solve each other’s mysteries. But somewhere during those long, hot weeks, something changes. And we start talking about so many other things.
Because maybe we just need each other.
He tells me more about growing up in Florida. How his mama taught him the names of all the wetland plants, which ones you can eat and which ones are good for healing. And I tell him about why I love to run. How it makes me feel. The freedom I find in it.
And it feels so good to talk to someone. Really talk to someone.
About things that don’t hurt.
And about things that do.
Night after night, we sit out there until the sky goes inky and the owls start to call and I know I’m late for supper. And then some.