“You’re going to help your mom,” Walt whispers. It’s not a question. He’s floating about ten feet away, looking right at me through the dusky light—it’s not creepy or anything, just intense. Ricky used to do the same thing.
“How do you know that, Walt?”
He dips his head under the water, leaving me in complete suspense. After resurfacing, he wipes his eyes and smiles at me. “I heard you. While you were asleep. Under the bridge.”
Great.
“What else did I say?”
“Something something fireworks,” he says softly. “Then other somethings. I don’t know. I have firework thoughts, too.”
Now it’s my turn to go under. Dipping my choppy hair back, I push my sopping bangs out of my eyes and turn my head from Walt. So the kid heard my Big Things after all.
“I understand,” he whispers. “Your mom needs you. And you need her.”
There are times when talking just pushes out the tears. So I float in silence, watching the final touches of this perfect moonrise, and in a moment of heavenly revelation, it occurs to me that detours are not without purpose. They provide safe passage to a destination, avoiding pitfalls in the process. Floating in this lake with Walt is most certainly a detour. And maybe I’ll never know the pitfalls I’ve avoided, but I can say this with certainty: a sincere soul is damn near impossible to find, and if Walt is my detour, I’ll take it. In fact, I wouldn’t be one bit surprised to hear him use the word pizzazz in a sentence.
I close my good eye and see myself as I might look from above, as I might look to a mosquito hovering over a hot lake. I see Mim: her face, pallid and feeble; her skin, pale and glistening; her bones, brittle and twiggy; an army of trees surrounding her. She floats next to a boy she met only hours ago, missing her mother, missing her old life, missing the way things used to be. Now she is crying because even after all that laughter, she can’t shake that feeling, one of the worst in the world . . .
I am tired of being alone.
“You need help?” Walt’s quiet voice brings me back to the now, the real, the detour.
I, Mary Iris Malone, smile at the bright new moon. Wiping away my tears, I wonder if things are finally changing. “Yeah, Walt. I might.”
18
Caleb
WHEN IT COMES to my war paint, my circle of trust is sparse. Nonexistent, really. There is no circle. Up until the bus accident, it had been a complete secret. And maybe it still is. Between the weight of imminent death, followed by the rush of having succeeded where others had failed—and there really is no kind of success like survival—it’s possible the passengers had issues more pressing than that of Mim Malone walking among the wreckage, wearing lipstick on her face like Athena, goddess of war. I sure hope so. Because the idea of Poncho Man witnessing that side of me is enough to make me rip my bangs out by the root.
“Who are we fighting?”
“No one, Walt. Hold still.”
In the light of a crackling campfire, I cup Walt’s face in my hands and induct him into my über-exclusive club. Though without the lipstick (which must be in that blue tent of his), I’m forced to use mud. Luckily, there’s no shortage.
“There,” I say, topping off his two-sided arrow with a dot in the middle. “Done.”
He smiles, laughs, and does a little jig around the campfire. “You want me to do you now, Mim?”
“No thanks, buddy. I can manage.”
I dip my finger in the soft mud and with the precision of a surgeon, apply the makeshift war paint. It’s my first time without a mirror, but as it turns out, I have superior muscle memory. Once done, I grab another tin of ham and sprawl in front of the fire, feeling more Mim than ever before. The two of us sit with mud-painted faces, eating like the King and Queen of I-don’t-know-what . . . Hamelot, I suppose. Walt belches, then covers his mouth and laughs uncontrollably, and I’m wondering who I need to see about protecting that laugh as the Eighth Wonder of the World. Its echo finally subsides as he pulls out his Rubik’s Cube.
“I like our mosquito makeup,” he says softly.
I imagine the state of Mississippi crumbling, then sinking into the Gulf, just like in my dream, leaving naught but an army of vengeful mosquitos. “What?”
Happily working on his cube, Walt points to his face and says, “It’s a mosquito.”
And he’s right. These lines I’ve spent hours perfecting—vertically from forehead to chin, the two-sided arrows on either cheek, then, a horizontal one just above the eyebrows—could easily be the outline of a mosquito. An anemic stick figure mosquito, but a mosquito nonetheless.
“Do you like the ham?” he asks between clicks.
Still processing the fact that I’ve been drawing a mosquito this whole time, I don’t answer.
“I bought it with my father-money,” he says.
“Your what?” I ask in a fog.
“My father-money. He gave it to me before sending me to Charlotte. It’s in a secret hiding spot, with my shiny things.”
I don’t know which part of his story to WTF.
Wait. Yes I do.
“Walt—your father sent you to Charlotte?”
Head down, he works silently on his Rubik’s Cube. In no time flat, the red cubes are aligned.
“Walt, where’s your dad?”
He looks up at the sky for a moment, lost in thought.
“Walt?”
“Chicago,” he says, turning back to his cube. The green ones are lined up. “Hey, hey, green are good.”