“He must have realized we were gone minutes after we were out of there. He knows these mountains. He knows where we’re headed, ’cause we don’t have choices. He should have tried to cut us off by now. So maybe he’s ahead of us, lying in wait.”
“Count on it.”
“Okay, so we’ll stay sharp.”
Ophelia was so tired she might have fallen asleep while leaning against a tree, if there hadn’t been a bear. She didn’t feel sharp, but she would be sharp, because otherwise she would be dead.
Or one thing worse: By some ironic twist of fate, they would blunder into Optime, and he would kill Colson, but she would escape. Then it would be like Octavia all over again, Ophelia alive when she should be dead with Colson, and she would spend the rest of her life waiting to understand why she’d been spared, a pretender to life who had somehow cheated to stay in the world.
73
Like a miscreated child of the storm, offspring of thunder and lightning, born into the world by cataclysm, he moved through the screaming tempest.
Jimmy didn’t want much. A little peace. A place to belong and someone to smile nice at him and mean it. He scared people when he smiled, so a lot of the time he smiled in a way they couldn’t see.
Mostly the days were big and bright and far off to every side, and the nights were bigger and emptier and dark. Sometimes he felt small and weightless, like he would come loose and float into the bright or into the dark, until he was far away from everyone he ever knew, in a place he’d never seen, where he’d never belong again.
Being lonely was bad. Lonely hurt. He was always lonely more than he wasn’t. When you couldn’t talk, people didn’t talk to you, didn’t know you liked to listen, so they left you in a long lonely quiet unless it was your father who talked until he was gone to God.
The storm was full of noise, everything shaking, everything moving, so he thought this shouldn’t be lonely weather, but it was. All the noise and shaking and moving didn’t mean anything. It was very lonely weather.
He stayed with the white lines, the broken and the not broken. Nothing else for him but the lines. The weather tried to blow him away, wash him away, scream him away into the big dark loneliness. Sometimes he forgot the lines, lost them, then remembered and found them again. He was wet, cold, tired, afraid. If he listened to the weather, he would be carried away and gone forever, so he didn’t listen. Instead he talked so all he heard was himself. He said, “Jimmy needs a friend, needs a friend, needs a friend. She was Jimmy’s friend once.”
After a while, he heard himself talking out loud and stopped in the road. He thought the Thing moved inside him, he was scared, but the Thing wasn’t there. He was empty of the Thing. It wasn’t using him to talk. He was talking on his own, but he stopped, afraid.
Jimmy never knew why the Thing could move into him and use him to talk but then he couldn’t talk on his own. The Thing showed him how but he couldn’t make it happen. It was too hard remembering words when he needed them. And he couldn’t make the sounds of them or put them in lines like the lines on the road so maybe they would say what he wanted to say. The Thing used him for years when the girl was little, used him today, too, and he knew how he was used, but still no words came when he wanted.
Until now.
All the fear and loneliness, being used again by the Thing after so many years and years, being made to be mean to the girl when he didn’t want to be mean, Father gone to God and Jimmy with nowhere to belong—it was like all of that broke something in him, broke something that needed to be broke, and the words poured out.
“Jimmy,” he said. “Friend. Jimmy needs.”
The words didn’t come as smooth as before. He had to strain for them. He was afraid there were only a few words in him and they were already gone and soon there wouldn’t be any more.
The sky fell, and the wind blew, and the rain rushed, and the trees shook, and maybe Jimmy needed to be moving, too, for the words to come. He was moving when they first came, so he started moving again, and the words didn’t come, didn’t come, and then they did, not because he was moving, but because he stopped trying so hard to say them. “Help. Help me. Help, please. Please help Jimmy.”
He didn’t know who was listening, if anyone was. Maybe his hurt-and-gone-away father. But it felt right to say what he said, and it felt right to say “Thank you” to someone, whoever.
So then he came to the end of the lines where one road crossed another road, and at first he was lost, but then he found the lines on the new road, and he was on the right path again.